 
# Halloween In The Dark

### Featuring "Obsession", "Vows" and "Forever"

## Reanna Pryce

#### In The Dark
© 2019 Reanna Pryce

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

* * *

Cover by **The Impress Service**.

### Contents

Obsession

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Vows

Chapter 1

Forever

Chapter 1

About the Author

Thanks For Reading!

Lines

Excerpt (Chapter One)

Also by Reanna Pryce

# Obsession

> Riley, it seems, requires a little more persuasion to become the man he's supposed to be, the man Harrison imagined through the wall.

# One

Harrison supposes, technically, there probably _are_ places where silence is unending, cavernous, enough to drive a man to madness. He's heard of the anechoic chamber at a lab out in Minneapolis. Apparently, it can induce feelings of psychosis in forty-five minutes. Turns out the human psyche isn't equipped to deal with an entire absence of sound.

So, Harrison knows his apartment isn't _really_ silent. Saying so would be entirely for effect, a falsehood spun from pretense. There's the tap of his keyboard for one thing, the hum of the air-conditioning, the sugar-spun fragility of the TV in the unit above. But it's still a lot quieter than Harrison's used to, the shudder of mid-week Dynasty reruns blasting from apartment 12b to 12a stilled entirely.

It took Harrison longer than it should, really, to go and lodge a concern with the super. He supposes, grinding the pad of his thumb into his eye socket until his vision peppers purple and glittered with gold, that in the death throes of his marriage, it was hard to think about much else. But grudge matches with Ashleigh filled the apartment with noise, with the slam of doors and the scrape of a fucked-beyond-repair relationship bloodying both of their vocal cords. It was only when she left, cute little convertible packed with cute little Louis Vuitton luggage, that he really noticed the silence.

Turns out, the poor old asshole was dead. Just... checked out right in the middle of cooking his TV dinner. Massive heart attack, do not pass go, do not collect two-hundred dollars. Harrison supposes there are worse ways to go but now, _now_ , with the party wall robbed of noise, he's beginning to appreciate how much he likes hearing other people.

The opening bars of The Imperial March buzz from Harrison's phone. He pauses, fingers above his laptop keys and considers it in the manner of a man that's never seen a phone before. It takes ten seconds, maybe fifteen, for him to blink back into the room, to remember where he is. It's Eddie which means he's probably contractually obliged to answer.

Pick up or let it ring out? He's running out of seconds to make a decision, snarled up in the uncertainty, hands somewhere between the keyboard and no man's land that stretches across three feet of thrift store, mid-century teak.

He sighs. "Yeah?"

"Hey man, what's up?" Eddie's many things; colleague, friend, moral guidance. "How's the script coming along?"

Harrison knows what he means. Eddie knows that Harrison knows what he means. But this is Los Angeles, the city of angels and illusions. Harrison smiles. His teeth feel weird in the center of it.

"Oh, great," he says brightly. "I'll fire over next week's to Gervase by Tuesday."

He's talking about Sketches. It started out as a stupid idea in a coffee shop in Chicago. One of those pretentious, indie places, over a communist print shop where Wicker Park bleeds into Bucktown. A couple of liberal arts students kicking ideas around over caffeine because all the clubs played shitty music and no one trusted them not to get into fights. Something dark, they'd decided, Harrison, Eddie, Gervase and Jesse, the four of them snickering over half-baked jokes scrawled onto folded napkins. Something that makes people laugh but they never admit it.

The first season, the first goddamn _episode_ , took seventy _thousand_ FCC complaints.

Six months later, they took their first Emmy.

No one admits to watching Sketches, but the viewing figures sure as shit prove someone is doing it. A whole _bunch_ of someones, furtive fingers surfing right to HBO, Sunday nights at ten.

But that's not what Eddie means. "That's not what I mean," he says, just for clarification. "I was talking about the side project."

Yeah. The glamour project. The thing Harrison announced after too many beers and maybe something more in a bar down in West Hollywood. _I'll write a movie_ , he announced, like it was as simple as that. Three minute comedy sketches? He can write those while he's sleeping (and does, waking up confused with a notebook full of scritch-scratch scrawl by the bed and no memory of when he did it). Movies aren't so straightforward.

"It's going great," he nods even though Eddie can't see him, "a couple more months, I want this tighter than a nun's pussy. Then we'll float it for option, yeah?"

"You thought about directors?" Eddie asks, just like Harrison knew he would. "Maybe some up-and-comers—"

"Fuck _that_ ," says Harrison, affronted on behalf of the script he hasn't actually written yet. "Someone established. Someone _good_."

"First time script from a guy who writes the most controversial TV show in recent memory?" Eddie teases, a thread of amusement running through his Midwest cadence. "Sure, no big deal. Fuckin' _Spielberg_ is gonna want in on the ground floor with this."

"You're an asshole," Harrison accuses him. Beyond the drywall, beyond cheap paint and a corkboard spiked with scraps of paper scarred with half-formed fragments of potential conversations, Harrison hears a voice.

Eddie says something back, the pause means it was probably witty and cutting and any other time Harrison would be scrabbling to jot it down. But right now, he stares warily at the wall between his apartment and an empty unit. It's silent again. He holds his breath until it burns and waits...

"Set it down over there." He bolts upright, desk chair shoved away on squeaking wheels as he struggles to get his ear to the wall. The voice is young, male, melodic.

Harrison pulls himself from the wall reluctantly, a magnet drawn to the polarity of the next unit, of the voice beyond. The quivering shake of a compass point twisting, bouncing, settling. He presses his phone to his ear briefly. "I gotta go."

"Dude, aren't you—"

"Later." He hangs up, tosses his phone onto the bed and listens at the wall once more.

There's the scrape of a bed frame on the other side. Harrison knows the layout of this building, knows the way his own bedroom backs on to the master of apartment 12a. They share a party wall along the bedroom, bathroom and a ten foot section of the living room but nothing else. Back-to-back units with no shared hallways, no shared elevators. The titillation of character-building entirely blind makes Harrison's tongue tingle.

Someone thumps onto the mattress, inches from Harrison's hip. Is it strange to bring the bed in first? Harrison can't decide.

"Shit," says the man from beyond the wall, close enough that it sounds like he's saying it directly to Harrison, and not to whoever is crashing around in there with him. "I swear to God, I am _never_ moving again!"

"So, _he_ says, 'Yeah, buddy? You think I asked for a fucking twelve-inch _pianist_?'"

The burst of laughter that echoes around the bar is gratifying even if Harrison's convinced it's entirely fake. That joke was old when he heard it in high school, there's no way these guys haven't heard it before. They're getting the stink eye from the bartender; he's been looking at them funny since they walked in but he won't turn them away when they're tossing fifties around like Jordan fucking Belfort.

They've wound up some place he barely recognizes. They tend to stick to the Viper Room but tonight there's some bullshit indie band playing with a cap on the numbers and a security guard they don't know on the door. So, they're tossing back expensive whisky in Bar Marmont and acting like they belong here. Eddie's wearing flip flops. There's no fucking way they should've made it through the doors. He tips a silent toast to Travis and Vicky; the recognisable faces of talent in the nondescript backwash of writing and production crew.

"Did – did you say you got started on the script?" Jesse slurs unsteadily, spinning on his barstool. He's going to crash and cave his skull in on the floor. Harrison will probably laugh.

"Totally," this is not a lie: twenty pages (12-point courier font, fifty-five lines per page) currently sitting pretty in his MacBook, "do – do you think the world's ready for like, a _gay_ love story?"

"You know they're ready for whatever the fuck the studios give them," Gervase opines, the only one holding onto a thin thread of class with his glass of merlot. "They'll watch Trump finger bang Dubya for two hours if Fox pays Rex fucking Reed enough to say it's cinematic."

Harrison nods and tosses back another mouthful of whatever microbrewed craft ale they gave him when he asked for a beer. He'd prefer Miller Lite if he's being totally honest, but this really isn't that kind of establishment.

In honesty, the motivation for Harrison's whole script flows directly through a couple inches of stale air separating two thin sheets of drywall and a couple of wall prints straight from Ikea. (So-called "real art" is nothing more than pretentious bullshit, Harrison thinks, forty-dollar canvases from Swedish home-furnishing megastores are not.)

The neighbor he hasn't seen – and probably never will; no shared hallways, elevators or entrances to the building providing a buffer of anonymity – is proving precisely the kind of inspiration Harrison needs. He's so _normal_. He wakes late, spends the morning watching TV and doing his vacuuming at a reasonable hour. He goes out around seven in the evening and gets back around two in the morning. Harrison figures he's probably tending bar someplace.

On the other hand, Harrison knows exactly how much the rent is for a one-bedroom unit in the building. He's not sure a bartender could afford it.

"A love story, though?" Travis phrases it as a question, slurring on too much malt liquor and not enough cheese fries lining his stomach from their trip to Mel's before they ventured out this way. "When the fuck did you start writing _romance_?" He says _romance_ with the same inflection most people might say _hardcore fisting videos_.

Harrison smiles. "I'm a romantic motherfucker."

He isn't – he knows this – and there's a whole list of bullet points in the email inbox of a matrimonial attorney somewhere in the Financial District that proves his inadequacy as a domestic partner. California is a no-fault divorce state, but a good story won't hurt her alimony case.

"Are you going to share the premise with the rest of the class?" Eddie asks, hauling Harrison back into the room with the crunch of ice fished from his mineral water sharp between his teeth. There's a guy on the other side of the bar smiling at Harrison like he knows him. Harrison raises his whisky glass and winks. "Or do we have to guess?"

Last night, he heard 12b getting fucked. Over an hour of soft, wet moans and faked bitchy reticence. The other guy sounded older, monied and totally into giving the faceless man a good time. Harrison's still not sure how he feels about it. He knows he beat the sour taste of his jealousy into his cock and his keyboard, alternating getting himself off with pouring rage into his screenplay. He wrote about asshole, self-centered game-players who don't know what's best for them. It's _that_ sort of love story.

"Fuck you, you can pay twenty bucks at ArcLight to see for yourself." Everyone guffaws, someone punches his shoulder. He thinks it's Jesse and is immediately proved right when Jesse pitches straight off that barstool and lands on the floor at Eddie's flip flops.

The guy is pretty; strawberry blonde hair styled so his bangs fall softly to the right. There's a nice line to his jaw, great cheekbones, and the most incredible, deliciously thick lower lip Harrison's ever seen. Harrison leans across the bar, instructs the bartender to take over some fruity, faggy cocktail. He hands over a ten; the bartender keeps his palm outstretched until Harrison adds another. Fuck, getting laid in Hollywood is expensive.

"Fucking _ArcLight_ ," Eddie scoffs derisively. "Piece of shit place doesn't even take black AMEX. You know what the chick at the concession stand said to me? I told her I could buy a goddamn _house_ with that card. 'Can't buy popcorn, though,' she says. Fuck my _life_ , man."

Harrison isn't listening.

The guy takes the drink with a nod. Then he turns, grins filthily, enticingly and entirely invitingly across the bar at Harrison. He's dressed well, seems to be alone. Is that weird? Harrison's not sure, watching the way the cuff of his beautifully tailored blazer rides up and reveals an expensive-looking watch as he plucks the dumb little maraschino cherry from the electric-blue drink. Eyebrows raised, he trails it slowly along the curve of that thick, soft lower lip. In his pants, Harrison's cock gives a tiny twitch of approval.

Masturbating to the sound of his neighbor getting fucked twelve ways from Sunday may have taken the edge off, but if there's the possibility of getting his dick sucked, Harrison is _in_.

He stands and mutters a half-assed excuse to his friends and coworkers as he moves down the bar. Not too close, he doesn't want to look _desperate_ or anything. He pauses to examine the wine list, caught in the no man's land between his friends and the glow of the beautiful man faking like he's taken more than half a sip of the electric lemonade Harrison bought for him.

He's at Harrison's elbow in a moment, leaning in to take a look over his shoulder. "If you're into champagne, the Dom Pérignon is sublime," he says with enough casual indifference to mask the way his fingertips trail lightly over the curve of Harrison's ass. "Or, if you're like your buddy over there and red's more your scene, the Margaux is _exquisite_."

His pronunciation is flawless. It has not escaped Harrison's notice that neither of those recommendations will leave him with any change from five-hundred dollars. This one is definitely educated, probably well-travelled to boot. It's not that Harrison requires scintillating conversation from a one night stand, but still. It's good to know he's attracting the high-class ones.

Harrison tries to sound classier than he is. "You have expensive taste." He fails.

He smiles, dripping with intent. "I'm worth it."

Harrison's halfway through his second glass of Margaux ( _fantastic_ , if anyone's asking) before he asks for the guy's name.

"Riley," he says, toying with the stem of his wine glass. He has beautiful hands; expressive fingers with firmly masculine knuckles and neat, manicured nails. Unless Harrison is very much mistaken, he's taken maybe two sips of the wine he called _exquisite_. "What can I call _you_?"

This strikes Harrison as an unusual way to phrase that particular question. But the lush, pink flush of that sinful lower lip lowers his inhibitions faster than the alcohol replacing his brain cells. "Harrison. You can call me Harrison."

"Harrison," he rolls it over his tongue. Then, Riley kisses him.

Bodies pressed flush in the booth they found off to one side of the bar, his tongue presses into Harrison's mouth. Harrison's never been kissed quite like this before; Riley's fingers curled around his neck, his thumb pushed up to the place his pulse hums under his skin. Riley tastes of breath mints and warm lips, no hint of red velvet decadence or sharp-blue curacao, the scent of his cologne spiced on the air between them. Harrison's heart picks up, fires sparks through his bloodstream as he leans into it. His tongue finds the ridged hardness of Riley's teeth, tastes the way they flow into the roof of his mouth.

Teeth find his tongue, nipping sharp until he withdraws, until Riley can shove him up against the upholstery and learn the way his heart beats in his throat with the curve of his lips. Harrison hauls him back by the lapels, kisses him breathless. A hand finds the shape of his cock under the table, discreet. Harrison considers the possibility of a spontaneous cardiac arrest in the middle of West Hollywood. He's pretty sure Jesse could have three sketches based on it by Monday.

When he pulls back, Riley's mouth is swollen, pink and damp around the lips. Harrison traces them with the pad of his thumb, guts tightening, tingling down into his groin as Riley sucks slowly at the tip.

Harrison smiles and knows it's wolfish, knows there's nothing from the way his eyes crease to the way his canines will catch the soft gold of the lamplight puddling around them that doesn't exude a sense of predatory hunger. "You want to get out of here?"

Riley nods, so wonderfully wicked in the way his brows arch delicately. "Where's your car?"

"Uh, at home?" Harrison is drinking his own bodyweight in expensive red. If he were a little less buzzed — or even a little less achingly _hard_ — he might think that's an odd question. But he's half-cut and full-horny so instead, he shrugs. "I was gonna order an Uber but we could grab a cab. If you can't wait."

There's something odd in Riley's smile but Harrison's almost too wasted to notice. _Definitely_ too wasted to care. "Oh, okay. Sounds good."

The cab ride breaks everything up. It's bizarre; the sensation of stepping into an elevator with a stranger. Except instead of muzak and swirling carpet there's Turkish pop radio and Riley. And a hand on Harrison's cock.

Harrison may die here.

They pull up outside of his apartment building. This is momentarily unsettling as Harrison doesn't actually recall telling either Riley or the cab driver his address. There again, Harrison's just sunk the best part of a five-hundred dollar bottle of wine and god knows how many beers beforehand. There's every possibility he handed over his address, driver's licence and social security number somewhere around the time Riley slipped a hand into his shorts and started surreptitiously tugging tingles through his pubic hair.

There's an expectant silence. The cab driver is looking at Harrison in the rear view mirror. Riley is looking at Harrison from across the back seat. Apparently, tonight is going to be the most expensive lay of his life including his fucking wedding night and God knows he dropped the equivalent of a mortgage back in Wilmette on that. He extracts his wallet and hands the driver whatever bills he finds inside.

On the sidewalk, he turns for the door to his block but Riley tugs him away. "Hey, this way, come on."

The part of Harrison's brain that deals with objecting to pretty-mouthed dudes shut down right around the time all oxygenated blood made its way from his brain to his dick. Harrison's sensibility requires one of those traffic warning signs: Route Ahead Closed — Normal Service Will Resume With the Passing of a Half-Decent Orgasm. They ride the elevator to the third floor shoved up against the wall together. Harrison's got his tongue down Riley's throat and his hand down the front of his pants, tugging at a cock that's still mostly soft.

"You're so fucking drunk," Riley giggles. Harrison could point out that he's not the one struggling to get it up. Instead, he squeezes a little too hard and lets himself enjoy the way Riley yelps. "Hey, not so rough, okay? We're here to have a good time, right?"

"Sorry," Harrison says, doesn't mean it.

The elevator pings before they can say anything else and they stumbletrip their way down a parallel hallway to the one Harrison knows. Block A has red carpeting, Block B is blue but most everything else is the same. The same white doors with the same silver numbers dead center above peepholes. Riley leads him down this twilight zone version of his own apartment building and comes to a halt outside a door.

"Keys, keys, keys," he mutters, patting down pockets.

Harrison hardly hears him. This is because Harrison has been punched in the stomach by two numbers and a single letter glittering like an accusation on the door in front of them.

12b.

"You live here?" he asks stupidly. His lungs don't seem to work right, shutting down around the way his breath stutters.

It can't possibly be true. There's no way at all that kismet is hung in such a way to bring him into 12b's apartment, into his _bed_. There are no Gods or higher powers or cosmic, oogly boogly _bullshit_ working together to ensure that Harrison's going to hear those same soft, wet moans from the correct side of the wall. He shoves his hands into his pockets and pinches hard into the meat of his thigh.

Dorothy, wake up.

Riley's mouth is thick-pink and swollen up a little from the pressure of Harrison's. He touches Harrison's cheek as he finds his keys and slips them into the lock with a smirk. "I sure hope so."

The door swings open. Harrison steps into the twisted reality of his own private movie set.

He wants it to be underwhelming; stacks of dirty laundry and mismatched Goodwill furniture. Instead, it's perfect in every unimaginable detail. Riley belongs in this apartment, in every framed poster on the walls, in the expensive sound system hiding in the shadows by the windows that look out over the hills. Harrison wants to revel in it, to pick up items like exhibits in a museum and see if he can absorb some of that _goodness_ that vibes from Riley by osmosis.

"Can I get you a drink?" Riley asks, rubbing a hand over the crotch of his pants.

Harrison shakes his head and forgets how to not be an idiot. "No — no, thank you."

Riley hustles him towards the bedroom, crowding and pushing him, herding him like he's an idiot. The hardwood feels off under his feet, a treadmill rolling away from him as the alcohol surges through whatever's left of his bloodstream and leaves him lightheaded and dizzy.

He's not thinking about sucking dick when he folds to his knees by the bed, he's concentrating super hard on not passing out, actually. But then, Riley's cock is _right there_ , the soft bulge of it obvious through his pants. It's been a while since Harrison's sucked a guy off but he's pretty sure it's like riding a bike; you never really forget once you're back in the saddle.

Someone — Riley presumably — has knocked on a lamp. He scrabbles for Riley's belt buckle, tugging, yanking, pulling until it clatters free. Riley wears expensive underwear, smells of warm, clean cock and fabric softener. Harrison mouths him through the cotton until he's hard, his mouth wet and dirty and Riley's pants pooled around his ankles. The world lurches, a tilt-o-whirl spinning him dizzy. If Harrison tips over, he's not sure he's going to be able to get back up.

"Can I?" he asks, remembering distantly that it's polite to ask before exposing a dude's dick to circulated air. "Suck your dick?"

Riley nods. "Go ahead."

What Harrison lacks in finesse, he decides to make up for in enthusiasm. Riley's cock is thick, hard and flushed, the tip faintly slick and shining in the low light leaking through half-closed drapes. For a second, Harrison almost loses his nerve, nearly climbs to his feet and tells Riley he'll see him some other time but fake it til you make it got him this far. He opens his mouth wide and stuffs Riley's cock inside like he's starving for it.

He wants it to be erotic but instead it's awkward. His knees are snagged in the tangle of Riley's pants and every time he tries to give him the old 'fuck me' smolder, Riley's untucked dress shirt sticks to the sweat-slick stretch of Harrison's forehead. It's easier when he gets him on the bed, when he can lay down between Riley's spread legs and get his mouth over the warm, waxed skin of his balls. He licks, sucks, pops them into his mouth like fucking hard cEddie, jerking him off with slow, smooth strokes. This is a quality blowjob, top shelf stuff, Harrison would lose his shit to be on the receiving end of something like this, he's sure. Above him, Riley barely reacts.

Harrison pulls off with a wet sound, questioning. "Uh — you okay up there?"

"I guess," Riley shrugs with a tiny, delicate yawn. He waves his hand dismissively. "It's fine, keep going, I'm pretty sure you'll get better at it."

There's literally no way Harrison heard that right. "Uh — _excuse_ me?"

Riley sighs, bored. "No, it's probably my fault, I just assumed you'd know how to suck dick."

Red, ugly heat coils through Harrison's guts. He bites his lip because he's sure that, if he doesn't, he's going to sink his teeth into the smooth pale of Riley's thigh until that bastard apologizes. This is _not_ the way this is supposed to happen. This isn't the character he's created on his MacBook. Riley isn't doing this _right_ and that leaves Harrison impotently, echoingly furious.

"What the _fuck_ ," he hisses, crawling up the bed, "do you mean by _that_?"

He has Riley pinned under him, knees and elbows bracketing hips and ribs as he spits venom down at him. Riley cowers back, wriggling on his ass to get away. Harrison shoves down, presses him into the mattress. He's naked, pinned to the bed that backs onto Harrison's bedroom under the weight of soccer player muscle and a half-decent suit. He's vulnerable and he knows it and fuck — _fuck_ — if that doesn't send blood surging sweet to Harrison's prick.

"I — I thought you liked —" he stammers, uncertain for a nervous flutter of a heartbeat then he's back, smiling gently and relaxing into the grip Harrison has on his wrists. "Hey, come on, what's the matter, baby? You don't like it like that? That's fine, sweetie. We can do whatever you want, how do you want this, hmm?"

That, Harrison concedes, is more like it. The cutesy, lovey-dovey shit is little much, though. Idly, Harrison wonders if he's going to acquire himself a stalker. He can totally deal with that. He mouths his way along Riley's collar bone, shrugging out of his shirt as he licks over the pink pebble tightness of his nipples. Riley's chest is as smooth as his balls and Harrison is throbbing for him, aching against the zipper of his dress pants.

"'M sorry," he mumbles, biting down over the crest of a rib. Riley jumps, moans, arches his hips and spreads his legs, precisely the reaction Harrison imagined he'd have when he listened to him through the wall. "You want me to leave?"

He _knows_ Riley won't say yes, it still warms him through with satisfaction when he grins, teeth catching the lamplight as his fingers play through Harrison's hair. "You can stay. Tell me what you want..."

What Harrison wants is for Riley to fuck him, to bend him in half and tear him apart with the thick, pink curve of his cock. He wants to come all over the expensive-looking sheets, so full his stomach hurts with it, with Riley's hands around his throat until his vision blurs white at the edges.

No one tells the truth any more, not in Hollywood anyway, so instead he shrugs. "You should ride me."

And Riley, he grins a little wider and says, "I can do that."

It's been too long since Harrison last got laid; conjugal rights exchanged for sleeping on the couch, sprinkled with pity fucks on both sides when it all got too much. As he struggles out of pants and shoes, a tangled mess of linen and leather that hobbles him against the mattress, he wonders if he'll even be able to last. Riley sucks him off as he takes Harrison's shorts down, groaning adoration into the brackish curl of Harrison's pubic hair like he's taking the sacrament. His dick twitches against Riley's mouth and he bites his lip, swears he can hold it together at least until he's inside of him.

He sits against the headboard, stroking his cock as Riley straddles his thighs. Harrison kisses him as Riley fumbles, blind, in a dresser drawer and pulls out lube and a strip of condoms. Carnal confetti littering the comforter. Legs spread, Riley slicks his fingers and opens himself up, makes it showy and loud. For a stupid second Harrison worries the neighbors might hear.

Harrison hasn't been with another man in forever, hasn't fucked someone's ass in so long that the heavy heat of Riley's prick, his balls, feel foreign against Harrison's stomach. He can hear the slick-slide of Riley's fingers, burning with the need to flip him over and watch.

The slippery hand on his cock makes him cry out, an embarrassing teenage sound torn from the depths of his chest. God, but that hand feels good, the thumb sweeping over the ridged crown and mapping the thick, dark vein mapping the underside on each downstroke. Riley rolls a condom down Harrison's cock with one hand — Harrison was kind of hoping to fuck him raw, this is disappointing — cupping his jaw with the other and kissing him as he lines up. Maybe a different Harrison would understand the intent in Riley's smile, in the way he holds Harrison's face in both hands and licks along his bottom lip, half dare, half promise. Harrison gave up trying to figure other people out a while ago.

The thought is lost, a flutter of dry leaves whisked on brisk fall air, carried away down a street Harrison doesn't care to chase them as Riley slowly, slowly, _slowly_ sinks down onto his cock. Heat. Bright and burning; brilliant yellows, glittering golds and rich, dark reds. Like blood, like the thick, oxygenated slick of it that pumps resolutely away from Harrison's brain and floods his groin with sensation. Harrison bites his fingernails into the pale line of Riley's hips and assures himself he won't blow right of the gate.

Riley pauses, breathes wet and messy against Harrison's ear. "Fuck, you — you feel so fucking _good_ ," he clenches tight, Harrison groans, "yeah, you like that, don't you? You want me to fuck you? Want me to do the hard work for you?"

It's slow to start, the long, drawn out pull of Riley's slick, tight insides almost unbearable. Harrison bites into the damp, salt-stained sinew where his pale throat curves into his collar bone until Riley yelps and pushes him back. "Easy baby," he whispers, petting Harrison's hair as he starts to rock against Harrison's hips, "no marks, there's my good boy."

Harrison likes the praise but not as much as he likes the weight of Riley's ass in his hands, the way he can hold him open and feel the slippery, wrapped length of his cock sliding deep into that wanting hole. Riley whines into his mouth, sucks bruises to his lips as he rolls his hips like low tide. He clenches tight around Harrison's prick, steals any objections or pleas to slow down from his lungs and replaces them with gutted grunts and desperate moans. Harrison has never really liked the sound of his own voice, either in a room or in his own head, but he finds he likes it a whole lot better when it's underscored by the slick sound of Riley's cock sliding through his fist.

Because he has something to prove, Harrison pushes him back, hears his cock slide free from the tightness of Riley's hole, and flips him over. Riley presents himself, ass in the air and face pressed to the mattress as Harrison holds him open once more and, breathing as thick and wet, watches the way his blood-dark cock slides inside.

"Oh God," Riley whines, neck craned to look back over his shoulder. "You like to watch, don't you? That gets you off, doesn't it? Fuck, you're so naughty..."

It doesn't take long like this, one hand on Riley's cock, stroking him off with the rhythm of their hips, the other pressed to the small of his back, fingertips bruising into the dimples there. Riley comes with a gasp like he's shocked Harrison can do this to him, like Harrison is impeccable, perfect, the fucking best he's ever had, his orgasm wet and messy over Harrison's hand.

"Fuck!" he cries out, broken. "Fuck, Harrison! Oh God, _yes_!"

Exquisite, bone-deep sensation shudders down Harrison's thighs and back again. Electric heat in the base of his spine as Riley's body clenches tight around him, contracting desperately with his orgasm as Harrison pushes home, deeptightperfect, and comes with a groan. It's good, _great_ , the pulsing wetness of it filling the condom as he thrusts weak bolts of desire into the softening depths of Riley's willing body.

Finally, he collapses, cock pulling free as he rolls to the sheets and takes a moment to count the swirling fleur de lis on the drapes. They're still open. Anyone in West Hollywood could've glanced up and seen them. Harrison surges with the hope that someone did.

Riley wriggles into Harrison's personal space, fucked out and smiling. His hair is a mess of rose-gold around the pink flush of his cheekbones. He looks good for someone that just took a dick up the ass. Chin cupped in one hand, he traces the loop of thorns across Harrison's collar bone and whispers, "Good?"

Harrison shrugs, downplays it because he doesn't want to come on too strong. "I've had worse."

The condom feels uncomfortable, twisted against his softening cock as he reaches down to take it off. Riley beats him to it, pulling it free and inspecting it carefully as he knots it off and tosses it into the trash can by the bed. Harrison slings an arm over his waist and tucks the pillow a little more firmly under his cheek. The sheets smell like Riley, his cologne and skin and laundry detergent caught in the fibers. He doesn't realize his eyes have closed until Riley nudges him gently.

"Hey, come on, wake up."

Harrison cracks an eye open enough to scowl. "Why?"

"Well," Riley draws it out, sounds coy and pretty as he rolls onto his belly and shows the pale curve of his ass. "You didn't book me for an overnight and I need my beauty sleep. Maybe next time—"

"Book you?" Harrison interrupts quickly, sleepy, post-orgasm haze giving way to hidden-camera panic. "I — I didn't _book_ you, what the fuck?"

"Yes. You did." Riley is on his feet before Harrison can relocate his center of gravity, snatching at carefully placed sweatpants by the bed and yanking a Bowie shirt over his head as he thumbs through his phone. Harrison is naked and vulnerable and does _not_ fucking like it. "Come on, babe. Don't make it weird."

Harrison has that sharp, itching heat in his belly, that peculiar sensation of a joke he's not part of. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"This isn't fucking funny, man," Riley snaps; Harrison agrees entirely, "I — you don't get to _do_ this, you booked me, you pay up and—"

"Is this some kind of fucking _joke_ ," Harrison snarls, that same hot fury clawing through his viscera and turning his vision dark at the edges. "What, you're a fucking _whore_ and now your pimp's gonna threaten me? I'll go to the fucking cops, dickhead, this is entrapment! Fucking try me, bro, I—"

Harrison's self-righteous indignation is interrupted by Riley's raucous burst of laughter from the doorway. Harrison pauses, confused and waiting for the punchline, waiting for some dude with a gun to appear and march him to the nearest ATM, for Riley to pull out his LAPD badge and arrest Harrison for solicitation. Instead, Riley scruffs a hand through his bedhead and gestures weakly to his phone.

"Dark hair, stubble, 5'11", wearing a gray suit," he giggles; Harrison still doesn't get the joke. " _Early fucking fifties_. Shit. Fucking — _shit_ , dude. I'm _so_ sorry! I — you sound just like my client but I didn't read the bit about his age. Damn. _Fuck_ , you got one hell of a freebie. Hey, no hard feelings though? Like, no pun intended."

Harrison's head is spinning and the world no longer makes sense. "You — you're a hooker?"

"Escort," Riley corrects him absently, like he does that a lot, still scrolling through his phone and tapping at the screen. "Seriously man, sorry about this. But, like, it was fun, right?"

Harrison nods; it was and he doesn't know what else to do. He reaches for his pants and pulls them back on, pretends his hands aren't shaking as he fumbles with his belt. Riley looks away politely, radiating the desire to get Harrison out of his apartment as quickly as possible. Probably so he can replace him with someone that'll pay him for his services. Harrison's guts cramp with jealous dislike.

Shoes on and tie rolled up in his pocket, Harrison heads for the door. He has to say _something_ , this is the guy beyond the wall, _his_ Riley before he even knew he _was_ Riley. He leans against the doorpost.

"Was it — good? For you?" he asks cautiously.

Riley shifts his weight from one foot to the other, Harrison won't be able to tell if he's lying anyway. "Oh, yeah. Super good. _Amazing_."

"We could," Harrison begins carefully, scratching at the scruff of stubble on his jaw and making eye contact only with the whorls and knots of the hardwood floor, "maybe do it again sometime? If you wanted to?"

"I can get you a business card," Riley offers. "You'd need to sign up to the agency. I don't work Mondays or Tuesdays and I get pretty busy around weekends but..."

There's a sour taste at the back of Harrison's tongue, bile climbing into his throat. He shakes his head. "No. I meant, like — for real. Dinner and a movie, that sort of thing."

He won't tell Riley the truth; that their lives are separated only by a party wall. That's _his_ secret tucked safe and warm beneath his ribs. Riley chews his lip and blushes, a pretty flush that stains his cheekbones as he gestures awkwardly to his record player.

"I'm — I don't think that's a good idea," Harrison's heart plummets somewhere around his knees and freezes, not beating, "I — my job, you know? Dating is kind of — kind of awkward. You seem great! Seriously, really nice but, like, you know? No — no offence."

Riley, it seems, requires a little more persuasion to become the man he's supposed to be, the man Harrison imagined through the wall. The man Harrison has created in his MacBook. Harrison smiles, dangerous, teeth catching on his lip.

"None taken," he shrugs, opening the door. "I'll get going, then."

"You can call a cab," Riley offers awkwardly, clearly relieved that Harrison is taking this so well. He has _no_ idea. "You could, like — wait here? If you wanted," it's obvious, even to Harrison, that Riley wants this not at all, "Or downstairs. There's a lobby, it's pretty nice, not shady or anything."

Harrison grins, wolfish. "Don't you worry about that. My apartment isn't far at all."

# Two

Harrison, presented with the opportunity to think and reflect, has decided this:

Riley has no idea at all about what is best for him. This is because Riley has not had the fortuitousness to read Harrison's screenplay. If Riley _had_ read the screenplay, he would know that, as the love interest to Harrison's romantic hero, his life will be greatly improved by the presence of Harrison in it. It's not Riley's _fault_ per se, but still, he needs to understand that Harrison knows precisely what is best for them.

Harrison has decided to keep his cards close to his chest, to allow their second meeting to come about organically. Well, _mostly_ organically, even the most ardent love stories require a push now and then. Where would Romeo and Juliet be without Mercutio? Or, like, Bender and Claire without Principal Vernon and the Breakfast Club? So, Harrison is waiting, listening, preparing himself for the perfect opportunity to launch the great romance of the twenty-first century.

Jesse calls him a couple times wanting to go over ideas for the next season of Sketches. Harrison deflects him with empty promises of lunch meetings at Jesse's favourite Latin restaurant out in Santa Monica. There's a few texts from Eddie, an email from Gervase. Harrison is building a fortress in the shape of the screenplay taking form in his hard drive, tossing out ravens in the guise of late-night instant messages from his iPhone to theirs.

He hears a lot through the wall over the course of the next week and a half. Some of it is adorable — Riley starts rewatching Game of Thrones from the first season, Harrison downloads it to his TiVo immediately so that they can watch it together. It matters not that Riley has no idea Harrison is watching at the same time, _Harrison_ knows. Other things are less endearing — Riley brings home seven different men over the course of ten nights. Harrison has never met any of them but he despises each one. He sneaks down into the parking garage when by Guy Number Four and scrapes his house keys along the driver's door of the Mercedes parked in the guest spot next to 12b's BMW. A scrawled, messy IV that no doubt means nothing to that douchebag. He'll add another each time.

(He hopes that, one day, someone will make the link. That they'll look at their car door and know how many came before them. He doubts that anyone else possesses the strength of intellect to know a roman numeral when they see one.)

So Harrison listens and Harrison waits and, twelve days after the pinnacle of Harrison's existence so far — experienced on high thread count sheets in the bedroom of someone he can't think of as a stranger — Harrison is presented with his second stroke of unimaginable luck.

"Yeah, no way, totally," Riley's voice holds that peculiar inflection that suggests he's on the phone, stilted half-sounds of conversation breaks that Harrison isn't privy to, "yeah, I heard about that... On the roof, Saturday... Well, _yeah_ , I'm pretty sure most people will be in costume it's... Don't be a _dick_ , it's Halloween! Throw on a fucking — a Walmart mask, call it quits... I don't know, I haven't—"

He moves away from the wall, into the kitchen, maybe. It doesn't matter; Harrison is already turning the drawer under his coffee table upside down and inside out in an attempt to find something that jumped from inconsequential to imperatively important. He finds it, heart thud-thumping somewhere between panic and relief, stuck between a takeout menu and a flyer for domestic services.

Does Riley have flyers, Harrison wonders; that gorgeous cock, those eyes, a phone number, services rendered with a neat little price list? He swallows down bitter bile and concentrates on smoothing out the page in front of him: a Halloween party for the residents of the apartment building and their guests, up on the roof terrace at nine on Saturday. There's no way Riley could've been talking about anything else. Harrison smiles and finds it feels a little more natural than it once did.

Riley is clearly a positive influence on him.

The problem most people run into when they choose their Halloween costume, is that they overlook the little details. They don't think about the practicalities of wearing a bulky costume, of drinking bottles of cheap beer around cheaper fangs picked up from the local party supplies store. They don't think about the minutiae that makes a costume jump from laughable to laudable.

Harrison isn't most people.

He wears a polyurethane mac over his favourite suit, fake blood splashed across the chest, and carries the most realistic novelty ax he could find on Amazon. He adds a little hair from his hairbrush to the thick clog of red corn syrup smeared across the blade. Those are the details everyone notices.

"Who the hell are you?" someone — some _idiot_ — asks by the cooler, handing over a bottle of Sam Adams with a raised eyebrow as Harrison tosses his thirty-dollar cover into the tin on the table. "Some kind of psycho?"

"You like Huey Lewis and the News?" Harrison asks rhetorically. The guy shrugs; he doesn't get it. What kind of philistine hasn't seen American Psycho?

He sees Riley before Riley sees him, the flash of a dark mask over his eyes, his hat tipped low. He has his back to Harrison, chatting animatedly to a dude with a riot of thick, dark curls and dark eyes. He doesn't look like any of the guys Harrison has heard through the wall; all older, all sounding like they have wives waiting patiently for them to get back from late night business meetings. This guy is young, eagerly hanging on to every word that Riley says with the kind of wide, bright smile that sets Harrison's teeth on edge. Harrison has no idea who this guy is but he already knows he dislikes him.

The element of surprise works in his favour as he sidles up behind him, a chilled beer in his hand as a peace offering. "Puss in Boots, right? The Shrek version?"

"For the final time, I'm fucking—" rather than clarify what, exactly, he is, Riley does a remarkable impression of touching a live wire and choking to death on his tongue, "— _Harrison_? What the fuck are _you_ doing here?"

Harrison shrugs and offers him the beer, smile wide and scented with malt and peppermint gum. "I live here." There's literally no way that this information will fail to thrill Riley. For some reason, Riley resolutely refuses to look thrilled. "I — 12a?"

Riley appears to be performing frantic mental arithmetic, his eyes darting from left to right as his lips twitch. "Uh — the apartment that backs on to mine? I — that's _you_?"

"Do the two of you, like, _know_ each other?" Curls asks dubiously, half a protective step towards Riley. "Do you want me to...?"

Harrison has no idea whatsoever what he might have done wrong, or what this asshole intends to do about it but he's big — bigger than Harrison — and solid with it. Before Harrison can find out, Riley laughs awkwardly and waves a hand. "Nah, Harrison is just — we met before, right? This is Ray, " he claps Curls on the shoulder then says precisely what Harrison wants to hear, "Could I, uh, talk to you for a second? Alone?"

The rooftop terrace is a disconcerting combination of too small and too crowded, the number of places they can go is limited. Riley settles for a couple of potted ferns just to the left of the giant chess set. He leans against the wall and tucks his cape back with his elbow, his eyes narrow behind the mask and under the hat.

"Listen," he says, then pauses. Harrison cocks his head and hopes his expression conveys exactly how carefully he's listening. "Listen," Riley repeats; Harrison wonders if he's not listening hard enough and leans a little closer for good measure. Riley, irritatingly, leans back. "Why didn't you tell me we lived in the same building?"

The answer to this is simple. Harrison wonders if maybe Riley isn't an intelligent as he initially thought. "When should I have mentioned it? When you were balancing on my balls or when you asked me to pay you for it?"

The twelve inches or so of dry California air between them crackle. Riley looks torn between laughing and socking Harrison in the jaw.

"No one knows," he mutters to the 101 below them. "Look, man. I'm new here and I'd really like to keep my private life private."

Harrison, an asshole, can't resist pushing a little further. "Knows about what?"

There's a real possibility that Riley is about to attempt to shove him over the side of the roof. Harrison holds his breath and resolves to drag him down, too. Instead, Riley sighs and rubs his thumb along the flushed-up curve of his lower lip.

"Could you not be an asshole about it?" he asks. Rather than push him further, Harrison shrugs. "I'm not going to stand here and apologize to you about my job, okay? All I'm asking for is a little — discretion."

A fine line rests between an asshole who is loveable and one who is simply a dick, Harrison suspects he may be straying far too close to the latter and pulls it back with a smile.

"You're Zorro, right?" he murmurs, charming. He gently grasps the clasp of Riley's cloak between his fingers, lets them trail along the underside of Riley's jaw. He's almost certain he's not imagining the reluctant smile that tugs at the corners of Riley's lips. "Hot."

A blaze of heat follows the line of Riley's fingertip as he smudges it along the shoulder of Harrison's mac. "And I suppose you're here to return some video tapes, Mister Bateman?"

"You get it?" they're leaning a little closer now, elbows propped on the wall, Los Angeles vibrating through the soles of Harrison's shoes, rolling endlessly out to the Pacific, "I was starting to think I was a little weird..."

That's not exactly up for negotiation. When he was a kid, Harrison's mom used to declare that he marched to the beat of his own drum. He realizes now, as an adult, that it meant she didn't understand him. No one else has really managed it since but that's their loss, not his.

"Come on, Ray's by himself, we should go hang out, get to know our neighbors."

None of that matters, Ray least of all, the only consideration Harrison can spare is for the way Riley looks when he smiles, the way it crinkles into the corners of his eyes, the way he snags the pink plumpness of his lower lip between his teeth. There's a possibility that Harrison may do something unsettling if he doesn't get Riley into his bed, if he isn't presented with the opportunity to learn the way his pale skin looks next to Harrison's bedsheets.

So, Harrison is charming. Erudite and amusing, he tells television production anecdotes and awards ceremony behind-the-scenes tabloid fodder stories until Riley and Ray are helpless with laughter. In honesty, he wishes Ray would take the hint and fuck off but, generally speaking, voicing that kind of thing doesn't seem to make him many new friends. He bites his lip and waits for Ray to find an elsewhere to be, a someone else to speak to. It doesn't happen.

Not that Harrison is in a position to judge, exactly. This building has been his home for the past four years, ever since he upped and left the duplex in Glendale where he started his married life. Forty-eight months and he's barely on nodding terms with any of the people sharing jokes over badly-cooked burgers and beer bought in bulk from Costco. Apparently Ray lives right above him and they've never exchanged so much as a hello in the elevator.

"Hey," says Riley, when Harrison points this out, a frown creasing his brow (Harrison can only see this because Riley abandoned his hat right around the time Harrison shrugged out of his mac, his hair is a mess, Harrison wants to sink his hands into it and haul that lush-lipped mouth down over his cock), "did you guys hear anything about cars getting scratched up down in the parking garage?"

Immediately, Harrison resolves to keep his damn mouth shut. He shakes his head and shrugs, busying his hands with turning his beer bottle over and over. "I didn't notice anything," and, because he needs that warm glow of satisfaction that comes from knowing he made an impact, he adds, "did, uh — did something happen?"

"Nothing," Riley shrugs at his shoes. "It doesn't matter, just kids fucking around."

"We should speak to the building committee," Ray opines drunkenly over his concoction of bacardi and apple juice. Harrison's too old to drink shit mixed by a bunch of kids barely out of college; he should've brought up a half-decent scotch. "Maybe we could get some security cameras down there?"

What the hell is this guy's problem? It's not like _his_ car was damaged. Harrison shrugs, an elegant self-portrait of ennui. "It'll damage property prices if it looks like the building has an issue with property damage. Some of us _bought_ our apartments."

"Maybe..." Riley's voice slips away, carried off on the breeze and out to the hills. "Weird, though."

It gives Harrison a glow of satisfaction to know that Riley's thinking about something _he_ did. _That's_ possession; the shuddering delight of knowing that he owns a small corner of real estate in Riley's thoughts. It's the kind of lazy, unbidden supposition that might surface in the middle of Ralphs while he's doing something entirely banal like weighing up the relative merits of Cheerios versus Cinnamon Toast Crunch or debating bagels over bialy. If Harrison has learnt one thing over the course of his time roaming the surface of this lonely blue orb spinning through space, it's this: thoughts are thoughts be they negative or positive.

It's nice to get attention.

"You want to dance?" Riley asks and Harrison's about to determine the many ways he can ruin Ray's life before he realizes the question is directed at _him_. "Yeah, you. Come on, dipshit, dance with me."

Whoever's manning the docking station is playing Kesha and Riley's clearly sunk enough dubiously mixed cocktails that his breath smells of the middle-ground between rum and reckless decisions. Harrison grabs him by the hips and sways to the beat.

"I've been thinking," says Harrison , but casually, like this is shiny-new and just occurring to him, rather than being the focus of every waking thought — and most sleeping ones — since Riley leaned over the wine list at Bar Marmont, "about you and me."

Against Harrison's neck, Riley's mouth moves. It slides with slow intent over his pulse point, tracing shadows and adjusting, rewiring, every single nerve ending from his throat to his heart to the pulsing tingle of his groin lit up and burning. "Mmhmm?" he says — moans — breathing damp and sweet against Harrison's suddenly too-tight skin. His tongue darts out, kittenish, catches the stubbled edge of Harrison's evening beard growth. "And?"

"I mean," and here Harrison pauses, fingers drifting through the coppery-blond at the nape of Riley's neck, tips testing the ridged notch where his skull meets his spine, "I'd really like the chance..."

And Riley, he looks up, eyes endless and lips sticky-sweet with fruit juice and spirits from the optics set up on the table. His eyes are glitter and gold and Harrison's almost sure he's wasted. This feels significant given the way he avoided booze when he was working, the way he barely mouthed at expensive margaux. Perhaps this is the first step on the yellow brick road.

They're kissing before Harrison truly comprehends what's happening. His mouth — and cock — grab the baton long before his brain has caught up. It's deep, open-mouthed, the slick wetness of Riley's tongue sweeping against the roof of his mouth as his hand grasps along Harrison's jaw and hauls him greedy close. Harrison chokes, or something close to it, stuttering on the desperate groan pushing over his lips. Funny, he barely noticed Riley maneuvering them over behind the potted ferns until now, his back to brickwork that's clinging to the warmth of the sun that dipped below the horizon three hours ago. He digs his fingers into Riley's belt and bites a prayer into his lower lip.

Harrison's never been one for exhibitionism, more of a voyeur, but the plant is just about thick enough to hide them and he's just about drunk enough to convince himself he doesn't care. He thrusts his half-hard dick against Riley's hip bone and grunts curses into the sticky-wet depths of him, lost in the dark way his mouth bleeds into his lungs.

"You should come home with me," he opines between kisses slicked to Riley's throat, to his jaw and across the sensitive shell of his ear. Riley shivers under his hands, under his mouth, desperate and squirming and, unless Harrison's very much mistaken, throbbing hard. "Or we could head inside, anywhere, God I want..." he trails off; there's no way to articulate what it is he wants. "Please."

"I shouldn't be doing this," Riley whispers, his hand shaping Harrison's cock through his pants, searing impossible heat through the tingling tangle of nerves where Harrison's sure he once had skin. "I should—"

Harrison takes the words, steals them, swallows them in the way he wants to swallow Riley's dick. He pulls him impossibly closer with a large hand cupped to the back of Riley's skull, kisses him breathless and woozy. Riley sways from toes to heels and back again, leans into Harrison like he needs him to retain verticality.

In the not-quite-darkness, Harrison whispers, "Come back to my place."

"I want," says Riley, then says it again, "I want. I _want_."

Want, take, have. That's what Harrison wants to say. Instead he grabs Riley's hand, tugs him through the bodies swaying on the dancefloor. It doesn't escape Harrison's notice that Riley doesn't spare a glance across the roof terrace at Ray, Harrison considers raising his middle finger at that crestfallen face in triumph. The iPod has switched to something slow now, hands roaming, heads on shoulders, they avoid couples like cataclysmic planet collisions, spinning their own map through stardust and down into the darkened hallway by the elevator. Harrison is halfway to his knees before Riley stops him.

"You _want_ ," Harrison reminds him, twisting against the hold Riley has on his hair.

It transpires that Riley isn't as drunk as either of them imagined. He leans back, counting cracks in the ceiling as his adam's apple bobs furiously in his throat. "Not tonight."

Harrison's smile is fixed, rictus, molded into the stretch of sinew under his cheeks as he asks, voice flat. "Then _which_ night?"

"Don't be like that," says Riley, his mouth soft against Harrison's for a moment. "Take me out, someplace nice, _convince me_ that this isn't a shitty idea. Then, maybe." He bites into the soft, sensitive underside of Harrison's jaw in time with a slow squeeze of his cock. Harrison hasn't come in his pants since he was thirteen but right now, it's a close-run thing.

"Tomorrow?" he asks, and Riley nods. Harrison's dick is so hard, burning heat through the crotch of his pants and branding into Riley's thigh through two pairs of pants. "Shit, what am I gonna do with this, exactly?"

Riley's laugh is soft, musical. "I'm sure it was covered in health class."

Instead of replying, Harrison shoves him into the elevator and leans up against the door close button until his mouth is wet, red and swollen-tender from the weight of Riley's lips.

They part at Harrison's floor; Riley will ride down to the ground floor and circle around to his own side of the building. Harrison will listen to him through the wall. In the dimness of the hallway, Harrison's mouth moves without his instruction or consent. "I could walk you home."

"Don't Pretty Woman me," Riley says, stepping back against the wall of the elevator, "I can get to my apartment without your help. Hey," he softens, tilts his head like he can sense the irritation drenching through Harrison's blood, "I'll knock on the wall, huh? Let you know I'm safe?"

He's teasing. Harrison might care when he thinks back on it but doesn't right now.

"Goodnight," Harrison murmurs.

Riley's clutching his hat, his mask, hair mussed as he grins filthily. Before the doors can slide closed, he quirks up the hem of his untucked shirt, slips it casually up against his chest. Cream pale skin and Harrison's cotton-dry mouth, the wet, pink tip of Riley's cock above the top of his belt. He rubs his thumb against it, pulls up slow enough that viscous pearl precome stretches sticky from the head of his dick.

"Sweet dreams," he says, and the doors slide shut.

In the low twilight glow of the hallway light, Harrison gapes, open-mouthed, at the elevator door.

If religion has any basis in reality Harrison, by rights, should go blind for what he does behind the closed door of his apartment.

_Someplace nice._

That's what Riley said in the cavern of an elevator car scented with lemon Lysol and desperate carnality. Harrison's not sure what _nice_ means, so he figures it's probably synonymous with _expensive,_ books a table at Taix on Sunset Boulevard and hopes for the best.

Riley shows up twenty minutes late and wearing deliciously expensive cologne under his beautifully tailored gray three piece suit. No tie, top button popped.

Meanwhile, Harrison is trying to figure out his best side in the mirror-dark reflection of the restaurant window, turning his head this way and that. He looks good, he knows that, but it means he jumps, startled, when reflected-Riley appears like a ghost over reflected-Harrison's shoulder, the place settings rattling over his knees. Riley laughs and drops a kiss to his forehead, sweet, unimaginably tender.

"Hey," he drops into the seat opposite Harrison, illuminated by the candles between them and mood-lighting dim enough to encourage intimacy. "Did you order yet?"

He doesn't apologize for being late despite Harrison leaving an entirely appropriate pause for him to do so. "No," he laughs with a steel-sharp edge to it. "I was waiting for you. For twenty minutes."

Riley smiles but still doesn't apologize, leafing through the menu, fingertips grazing the heavyweight paper.

"Have you been here before?" he asks lightly, tapping the tabletop with his knuckles.

"I brought my ex-wife here for our first anniversary," across the table, Riley's eyebrows rise but he doesn't look up, "she didn't like it."

"What a _fantastic_ recommendation," Riley shrugs out of his jacket and hands it to the maître d' with a bright smile, "was it cited in the divorce?"

Riley is, almost definitely, making fun of him. If this is lighthearted, coupley affection dressed up in teasing, Harrison will take it. If he's being laughed at, he absolutely will not.

"It's not finalized yet," Harrison shrugs and swigs a mouthful of water, "I'll keep you posted."

"I'm dating a married man," Rileys teeth are dangerous points of light in the darkness of his smile, "How avant-garde."

Harrison is saved from the possibility of pointing out the foibles in Riley's own dubiously aligned moral compass by the arrival of the waiter.

"Are you ready to order, gentlemen?" his accent is heavy, European.

The menu is entirely in French but Harrison has had the better part of a half hour to approximate his responses. He has no idea what he's ordering but there's literally _no way_ he's going to admit that. He smiles, confident, and prepares to bluff his way through this. "Yeah, I'll have, uh, the scallops," both Riley the waiter wince, Harrison feels every blood cell in his body relocate to his face, fury ricocheting after it, "uh, maybe the — the—"

"Oui, merci," Riley doesn't look up, "Mon ami ici a jamais vraiment essayé la nourriture française, avant qu'ainsi je veuille commencer par quelque chose assez, ah, universelle," his accent is flawless, like someone swept him up from the fashionable Montmartre district and dropped him into Traix accidentally, "Des escargots sur la coquille à commencer, je pense. Le chateaubriand, deux, plus près de rare que le milieu et, pour boire, que recommanderiez-vous, s'il vous plaît?"

"La Petite Serah est magnifique."

Riley shakes his head and rolls his eyes, "Nous aurons le sauvignon, le quatre vingt dix sept. Je vais le goûter en premier, merci."

"Un excellent choix, monsieur," and he gathers up their menus and leaves.

Napkin fisted until his knuckles ache, Harrison bites his humiliation into his cheek and breathes deeply through his nose. For some reason, Riley is still refusing to do this right, in the way Harrison imagined, in the way Harrison _typed_. His tone is far from airy as he snarls across the crisp, white tablecloth. "Well, now I look like a dumbass."

"Aw, sweetie," Riley's voice is soothing; Harrison doesn't want to be soothed by him, "don't be like that. I spent a year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris," he pronounces is _pah-ree_ , like a douchebag, Harrison resolves to fuck the smug out of him once he gets him home, "I picked up a little of the lingo while I was out there."

"You're fluent," Harrison accuses sullenly. "You're trying to make me look stupid."

Riley is saved from further confrontation by the arrival of the sommelier, a bottle of red balanced in the crook of his arm. They fuss over it like a newborn, sniffing, tasting, spitting (God, he looks good as he does that), discussing finer details in a language Harrison doesn't understand.

"Hey, buddy," he interrupts them in his thickest Hank America drawl, "we're in fucking _America_ right now. You wanna speak English?"

"Of course," the sommelier ducks his head in frosty apology, pouring and leaving them in awkward silence.

"So," Harrison can conjure conversation from nothing, it's his special talent, weaving words into something everyone else finds enjoyable, "where did you go to school over here?"

"Julliard." Of course. Why did Harrison even ask? "Classical composition. You?"

"DePaul," Harrison counters; it's not as good as Northwestern and Harrison knows that Riley knows it. "Political Science. My dad wanted me to be a lawyer so I became a comedy writer to spite him. I'm good at that, probably better at it than I am at writing. I find spite motivates a lot of things."

"Aren't writers supposed to be amazing at reading people?" Riley asks, pointing at Harrison with his butter knife. "Go ahead, do me."

Harrison hates this kind of game but smiles anyway, chin propped on his hand and elbow wedged obnoxiously on the table. This is easy, though, reciting the details of the Riley in his screenplay. "Middle class, youngest child. You were spoilt. Good upbringing but daddy didn't pay you enough attention. Divorced parents, maybe? School was a scholarship thing which you're proud of, but you're still kind of pissed that mommy and daddy couldn't pay for it. How am I doing so far?"

Riley pushes his fingers through his hair — elegant, pale, those beautifully buffed nails catching the light — and bites into the lushness of his lower lip. Separated by three feet of linen and a stretch of silverware, Harrison grins, wide and easy.

"Not bad," Riley murmurs, the hint of a flush creeping across his cheeks. "You think I'm a snob."

Yes, that's _exactly_ what Harrison thinks. "No, I think you appreciate quality," he pauses, smiles a little wider, "which is why you're here with me."

The starter arrives — snails, Harrison blanches but braces manfully and reminds himself that sixty-seven million French people can't be wrong. They eat and they talk, flirtation rising with the volume of blood eagerly preparing to reroute to Harrison's dick at a moment's notice. After steak and over muscat, Riley takes Harrison's hand and touches each knuckle in turn.

"Why do you do it?" Harrison asks; Riley raises his eyebrows questioningly. "You know, escorting."

Silence stretches between them. Riley doesn't speak and neither does Harrison, nothing but the low murmur of conversation and the clink of silver on tableware echoing on around them. Finally, Riley shrugs, takes a sip of his wine and considers Harrison keenly over the table.

"I do it because I like it," he begins carefully. Harrison can think of no possible way that can be true. In a pack of tarot cards, Harrison is The Rescuer, an impossibility if Riley has no desire to be saved. "I left college with a great degree, I had options. I could've gone into the New York Philharmonic, I had the offer, or I could've stayed on as a professor."

He takes a breath and Harrison prompts, "Why didn't you?"

"When I lived in Paris," and this time he pronounces it properly, by which Harrison means he pronounces it like an _American_ , "I met this guy, an attorney or banker or something. Awful old bastard but richer than anyone has any right to be. He used to watch me play piano at this jazz bar in Haut Marais and, one night, he offered me two-thousand euro to go to dinner with him," Riley pauses and pulls a face that's probably supposed to indicate self-deprecation but Harrison wills himself to believe is disgust, "We had a passably good night and I went back to a hotel with him. He didn't even want to touch me, just wanted to watch me get myself off. Easiest cash I ever made."

This isn't the tragic backstory Harrison was hoping for. "Go on..."

"Not much else to tell," Riley grins brightly. "Got back home, did some research. The agency I work for is _super_ exclusive. They charge twenty-thousand to add a new client to the books, no internet advertising, it's all word of mouth. It's as exclusive as this sort of thing can get, so it rules out the douchebags. I'm _not_ cheap. That night at the bar should've earned me three thousand dollars, and that's after the agency take their cut, after I've paid taxes—"

"Taxes?" Harrison cuts in, confused.

"Yes, _taxes_ ," Riley drawls lazily. "I'm a fully licensed escort, free to work in the state of California. Paying for company isn't a crime, Harrison, _that's_ what I tell the IRS I'm paid for. And the happy ending? I consider that a nice little freebie for my favorites."

"You didn't even know me," Harrison points out, the dark, wet depths of his guts twisting bitter and ugly at the thought of all of those men — those unworthy, filthy _men_ — laying hands against the peach-soft pale of Riley's skin.

Riley hides his smile in another sip of muscat. "I _knew_ you'd be one of my favorites."

Something has been troubling Harrison since the night they met, a niggling pebble poking sharp into the arch of his foot, a prodprodprod of irritation that won't recede until he asks. He steels himself with another couple inches of muscat sloshed into his glass, takes a deep breath and speaks quietly. "So, when you said I didn't — that I couldn't give head, you meant...?"

"That's just my thing," Riley's eyes are very blue and very earnest, his lips much closer as he leans in like he can prove his point with proximity, "I'm, well, I guess you'd call it a pillow prince, that's my USP. The guys that choose me want someone to give them a hard time, someone they can try to impress." The last of the wine is tipped into Riley's glass. "Middle-aged married men who want a nice kid they can spoil."

"So, you just lay back and wait to be serviced?" Harrison asks, caught between intrigue and disappointment, the dull, dark bruises he wants to imagine wound around his throat in the shape of Riley's pianist hands fading to nothing. But, still, the thought of him laid out, hard and lazy, and waiting to be ridden through the mattress is not without appeal.

Riley toys with his wine glass, his lips quirked at the corners as he assures Harrison from the far side of guttering candlelight, "Don't ever assume that my work persona is in any way who I _actually_ am."

Those two inches of ambergris, perfumed heavy with sugar sweet grapes slide elegantly down his throat. Harrison nods to the maître d' for the check. There's a low, hard knot of tension right above his groin, the pulsing throb of need aching through his veins as he watches Riley watch him slide his black AMEX across the table.

"Shall we take a cab?" he asks, their jackets back on and a hand in the small of Riley's back.

Riley shakes his head and murmurs something about already ordering an Uber, a silver Prius rolling up to the curb beside them. They fall onto the backseat in a tangle of hands and eager mouths; Harrison would spare a thought for the driver, studiously ignoring them as he talks in high-volume Spanish into his bluetooth headset, but he can't pretend to care. Harrison doesn't know Spanish but suspects he doesn't need to be fluent to grasp the basics of what's being said about them up front. His hand finds the shape of Riley's cock and squeezes carefully, testing the beautifully thick length of it against his palm.

"He's gonna be pissed," Riley mumbles into his mouth; Riley who, presumably, has sucked dick in the back of town cars across this and innumerable other cities.

Harrison shrugs, disinterested in the social comfort of an Uber driver he's literally never going to see again, "Then tip him."

Somehow, Harrison finds himself on the sidewalk outside the art deco splendour of their apartment building, Riley's eyes are intent, his hand moreso, stroking under the untucked hem of Harrison's shirt. Harrison used to fuck around with a guy in college who was, in many ways, a lot like Riley; short and blond and small enough that Harrison could hold him against the wall with one hand. At his belt, those fingers go rogue and find the darkened spot where flat, shaved stomach becomes pubic hair. Harrison momentarily forgets how to breathe but remembers how to write the next scene of his screenplay.

"Are you coming up?" he asks, inclining his head towards Block A.

Because Harrison has written this, because he's crafted it and worked it into exactly what he wants it to be, he barely waits for an answer, catching Riley's hand before it can dip down into his pants and find the thick-veined heat of his cock. But, because he wants to ruin everything, Riley resists.

"I don't fuck on the first date," Riley says, smiling. Harrison will knock that stupid fucking grin off his face, he swears he will.

Instead, he says this: "Are you serious right now? You're a fucking—"

"Gentleman," Riley interrupts sharply. Harrison bites his lip until the skin gives and tears and his tongue floods coppery with blood. "If you want a second date, you really shouldn't go slinging names around, okay?"

Aware that the ice he's treading is treacherously thin, Harrison sighs. "Tease. I was going to say tease."

"Sure you were." They both watch the Los Angeles traffic roaring by on Franklin, underscored by the dull, endless throb of the 101 behind them. When Harrison first moved to the City of Angels, he imagined he'd never get used to the traffic. Now he can't sleep without it.

"Well," says Harrison, when it becomes apparent that Riley's temper tantrum is going to eclipse a wonderful evening, "goodnight, I guess."

He's halfway to the door when Riley grabs him by the collar of his suit jacket and hauls him close enough to steal the air from his lungs. At this distance, his eyes struggle to focus, sweeping in on the lush, pink softness of Riley's lips, Riley's tongue, Riley's _mouth._ In that space, that shivering exchange of molecules hung between them, Riley's breath fogging against his lips, he waits.

"You should take a shower when you get inside," Riley murmurs. Then he lets go, steps away and walks away around the building and out of sight.

Harrison nearly breaks his neck racing up the stairs, throwing off his suit as he hurries to the bathroom. He pauses by his desk, thinks, considers violations of privacy and the acts of honorable men. Then he grabs his dictaphone anyway and stashes it in the shower, against the wall. He's pretty sure it's waterproof.

His dick is hard in his hand, smooth, his thumb curling sweet around the flushed, dark head as he strokes himself off under the spray. God, but he wants Riley, on his knees, soft, wet mouth sucking him, fingers deep inside the hot, tight secrecy of his body, the places no one's been in years. The slick, wet noise of his hand on his cock almost drowns the tight, soft moan from the other side of the wall.

Harrison freezes. It's a reverse electric shock, sensation starting out at the tingling tips of his slightly numb fingers, gathering in, gaining force and finding polarity until it thunderbolts and coils at the very epicenter, the pulsing throb directly behind his cock.

Harrison leans into the tiles like he can slide through them via the process of osmosis if he just tries hard enough, like he can leach into the warmth of Riley's body and find his soft, hidden places if only he presses in the right way.

"Oh God, Harrison," Riley's voice says, disembodied and far away. Any sense of self control abandons its post, Harrison is deserted, an empty shell with a fat, red cock in his hand. "I'm so fucking hard for you right now, so — so _thick_ and — God. I want you to do _everything_ I tell you, you got that...?"

Harrison's soul leaves his body entirely.

"Anything," he informs the tile closest to his lips, "anything at all, anything you want."

Half an hour later, Harrison sits at his MacBook entirely naked and half-hard once more, the fingers of his right hand rattling furiously against the keys whilst his left plays gently with his cock. On the desk next to him, the dictaphone plays on.

Harrison won't feel guilty; these words belong to him now, gifted to him through the wall.

Riley's voice shudders desperate, broken with recent orgasm and the unquenched need to feel Harrison inside of him, committed to immortality on Harrison's hard drive in 12 point courier font.

"Fuck, babe. I — Jesus Christ, you're amazing. I've never been with someone like you"

# Three

"And what do you think it would take to make you feel more satisfied?"

Harrison has been slowly dying, atrophying in the chair across from his therapist for the past forty-five minutes.

It's not that he's bad at his job, exactly, it's that Harrison is far smarter than this douchebag can ever hope to be. It's a little like being psychoanalyzed by a particularly guileless twelve-year-old. Occasionally, Harrison wonders why he comes back week after week, but it was one of the things the marriage counsellor suggested way back when he and Ash thought they might have a chance at working out their differences. Before Harrison realized that the main difference was that he was right and she was unerringly, unendingly wrong on any and all counts.

(Harrison fucked the marriage counsellor. It was easy enough; nothing more than getting her on side, showing her that he was the rational one and Ashleigh was the exact opposite. Charming, gentle, crying now and again. Then his looks did the rest and she was bent over the desk, taking his dick ten minutes before she told Ashleigh that she really needed to try and see things from Harrison's point of view.)

Therapy is bullshit, that much is obvious, but the plus side is that Dr. Trohman has no option whatsoever but to sit and listen to Harrison discuss himself for sixty minutes per week. Honestly, Harrison is aware that he's a fascinating subject, he knows his mind doesn't work in quite the same way as everyone else's, that he's superior, smarter, better. Unfortunately, outside the four walls of this office, it's difficult to find anyone who really wants to discuss that.

Right now, though, Harrison has an elsewhere to be. The clock is ticking on with alarming speed towards Riley's regular Wednesday-at-six. Harrison thinks he's a lawyer, something like that anyway. The point is, it's now almost five and LA traffic is ridiculous, he could have left twenty minutes ago and still not make it home on time.

"Harrison?" Dr. Trohman asks over wire-framed glasses. They look expensive, designer.

Harrison can't remember the question he was asked. "I, uh... Sorry, what?"

"You talk a lot about how you feel unsatisfied," Dr. Trohman – David, he keeps insisting Harrison should call him _David_ – taps his pen thoughtfully against the notepad balanced on his knee. Mont Blanc and Moleskine. There are a lot of messed up assholes paying this guy too much. "How do you think you could resolve that?"

The question startles him. Isn't it obvious? If everyone around him were a little less stupid, more challenging, fit to parry back his intellect, then maybe Harrison would feel more satisfied. But, that's not the thing a therapist wants to hear, so instead, Harrison changes the subject entirely to something he finds far more enjoyable to discuss. "I met someone."

David's eyes jolt from his notepad to Harrison. "Excuse me?"

"I said, I met someone," Harrison repeats, examining his fingernails. "He's nice. Works in entertainment, went to Julliard, lived in Paris for a while." David is watching him, mistrustful. "Smart, funny, handsome. Has a _huge_ cock."

"I'm not sure that's appropriate," David has heard the literal ins and outs of Harrison's sex life with his ex-wife, Harrison's not sure this is the point he should come over all coy. "How do you think he'd feel if he knew you were discussing him like that?"

_Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn._

Harrison snorts. "I think it's a little too late for you to suddenly decide I'm going too far. Don't you want to ask me about him?"

"I'm not here to listen to a character outline of your latest sexual partner," David's the kind of therapist who wears skinny jeans to the office, sleeves rolled up to show his tattoos, Harrison liked that about him to start but now he thinks he finds it irritating, "but I'm not sure you're in a place where you should be starting a new relationship. You haven't – the issues from your marriage are still very much on the table, there's a lot you can work on before—"

"I'm not a predator," says Harrison; something inside of him uncoils, dangerous, and flexes in response. "I'm not a psycho and I can date who I want. The marriage counsellor told you Ashleigh was the problem, not me."

"I have — concerns," David taps his thumb against his lower lip, "Not necessarily about _you_ directly, but I think there are things you need to address. I'm thinking about referring you for cognitive therapy, maybe you could put a pin in dating until you start. Maybe after a few sessions you could reevaluate this whole thing and—"

There are many things, Harrison realizes (abject and out of body) that he would rather do than listen to David Marcus Trohman PhD extrapolate further on the shortcomings of Harrison's ability to handle a romantic relationship. He shrugs into his jacket and gives David the smile that got the marriage counsellor onto his cock.

"Well, David," he pauses in the doorway, "I think we're done here, thanks. It's been great, I've really learnt a lot but I don't think I'll be coming back."

David doesn't move from his leather armchair, eyebrows raised as he watches Harrison leave. He can kiss goodbye to the two-hundred dollars a week that slides from Harrison's account to his via the medium of American Express.

For some reason, David almost looks relieved.

Riley is playing hard to get.

Since he makes a living selling his ass to the highest bidder, it strikes Harrison as more than a little unfair that _he's_ expected to behave like a high school junior at his first dance for nothing more than heated makeout sessions and mutual masturbation in conjoined shower stalls. It seems to have escaped Riley that Harrison works from home, that he spends his days in his bedroom, working on a screenplay instead of his TV show, listening to Riley make his way through half of the closeted sexagenarians in the greater Los Angeles area.

Harrison is at X on car doors now. There have been _far_ more than ten incidents played in pornographic detail through the drywall but Harrison is a careful monster. He creeps to the parking garage each time, checking licence plates, makes and model numbers. Some come more than once. One filthy, desperate, _pathetic_ asshole has visited Riley _four_ times in the past two weeks. Harrison may upgrade to slashing his tires.

Or maybe his brake cables.

The world will hate what these men make Riley do, Harrison has already made that decision. He pours his vitriol, his spite and his fury, into the screenplay, determined that one day Riley will watch his love letter and he'll understand. Harrison is an archangel, his words a flaming sword, protecting Riley from his own bad decisions and the unworthy men that benefit from them.

On the desk, Harrison's phone vibrates, shuddering friction between the handset and the rubberized casing. Convinced that Riley — talking softly to someone on the far side of the wall — will hear it, that he'll sense it as deep in his chest as an earthquake, Harrison snatches it up and staggers back from the wall. He hurries into his living room where he answers without checking the caller ID. " _What_ , godammit?"

"Harrison?" It's Gervase, sounding far away, the echo of a voice from the bottom of a lake. Harrison inhabits his skin slowly, slipping back from Riley's room and receding into his own body. It feels off for a second, too tight, too small, his shoulders rolling instinctively against the restriction. He must make a noise of assent, although he doesn't remember it, because Gervase carries on quietly. "Are you — listen, man. Are you okay?"

Harrison is struggling with the way the universe works right now. He's a sun orbiting a planet, caught in the wrong way around gravitational pull of Riley, of the wall, of the noises he can absorb if he presses his ear to paint and plaster. He also knows that this isn't the kind of reassurance Gervase wants to hear.

"I'm fine," he breezes, flipping through the channels until he finds a Sketches rerun. It's the skit with the dead grandpa; he _loves_ this one. "Did you call for a reason, or...?"

"Well, it's just," Gervase sounds concerned. Something Harrison finds wholly unnecessary, "we haven't seen you at the studio or the office in, like, two weeks. And you haven't turned in any scripts. I mean, I know this whole thing with Ash came out of nowhere," that remains Harrison's party line; that she upped and left him without forewarning, that he came home and found the apartment and checking account empty, "but you need to — do you need some time off? Something official? Maybe you could drop in next season and—"

"Are you trying to get rid of me?" Harrison asks conversationally. "Do I need to lawyer up? You do remember that my _father_ was the one that drew up our contracts, right?"

"No! No way, man!" Harrison is not stupid enough to fall for the attempt to soothe him. "We're just — we're worried."

This is bullshit, or at least, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. No one is worried about Harrison; they're worried about viewing figures, about the scripts losing direction, about the show taking a nosedive in this, the final season guaranteed by their HBO contract. Harrison has always been the strongest writer, they're nothing without him. What they can see — Gervase, Jesse, Eddie — is their cash cow drying up, the lucrative five-season deal that they've talked about burning up like Fourth of July fireworks in front of them.

"Don't be," against the bedroom wall, the rhythmic thump-thud-bump of the headboard starts up, Riley moans, operatic and pretty, Harrison wonders if he realizes just how thin the walls are, "I have to go."

"Harrison, wait—"

Harrison doesn't wait, thumbing over the end call button and resuming his penance against the bedroom wall. He counts Hail Marys for Riley in low, steady moans, his rosary replaced with the way his fingertips smooth over the keys of his MacBook. The guy is quick, shooting off with a groan that sounds like he's choking within the flash of seven numbers on Harrison's bedside clock. Three grand for seven minutes of penetration; does he think it's worth it?

Does Riley?

This is easier if Harrison imagines his life is a screenplay, a novel, a storyboard laid out for the delectation of TV executives who don't get the narrative but pretend they do so that they sound smart. His ears ring with canned laughter and the glow of the APPLAUSE NOW sign as Riley says something that makes the guy laugh. It's a _nice_ laugh; affectionate, sweet. That, Harrison decides, makes it worse. He can picture the way he'll cup Riley's jaw, how he might smooth his hand through the fuck-trashed mess of copper-gold hair and drop a kiss onto the pale, smooth stretch of Riley's forehead. How he'll presume that he's bought access to Riley's heart and not his ass.

All men are basic; a collection of needs and desires grouped under skin, sinew, bone and blood. Harrison could end those desires as easily as sliding under his expensive car and slashing his expensive brake cables. A few things pulled loose. After all, only a handful of mechanical parts stand between whoever-he-is making his way home safely to his wife or careering across the I-5 and into the back of a semi truck. Yes, Harrison is a careful monster; some gloves and no closed circuit television downstairs in the parking garage. No one would know, no one could prove a thing; just another rich asshole smeared across the windshield of his ostentatious Bentley. Maybe the wife will feel relieved right around the time she gets to pick up the life insurance check. Maybe there's a kid or two — college age; a pre-med daughter or a pre-law son (Harrison isn't projecting) — who won't notice the loss. Riley's left three grand a week down and a little closer to needing Harrison for something more than dinner dates.

The apartment through the wall falls silent; the mirror-image, the looking glass world that shimmers beyond Harrison's fingertips. If Harrison strains his hearing, goes up onto the tips of his toes like it can drive him closer, he imagines he can hear Riley padding around his bedroom on bare feet. Collecting a towel, fresh boxers, moving to the bathroom.

Harrison moves too, stands against his own black and white tiles and listens until the spray starts up. Can Riley stand it, the smell of a stranger's hands, of their mouth, their _cock_ lingering against his skin? Does it make him itch with ill-content until he can swill it away, watch it swirl down the drain, kisses and come washed away with the suds. Beyond the wall, Riley begins to sing, something low and slow. Harrison wants him like this, wants to claim him like unexplored territory, to stake him out as a personal possession.

The shower shuts off. Riley's humming now, muffled, around a mouthful of toothbrush and paste, watching himself in the mirror over the sink, no doubt. The bathroom falls silent and Harrison trails him along the wall, back into the bedroom where dresser drawers open, hangers rattle and then—

In his pocket, Harrison's phone buzzes.

_You home? Can I come over? x_

He almost shouts his response. It stutters on the tip of his tongue, knife blades of evidence of men that listen through walls. But Harrison is _careful_. So, instead, he moves his thumb over the keys and watches the way the words form on the screen. _Give me 20 mins, picking up groceries. Want anything?_

Harrison smiles; a clever monster, too. He sits on his couch, still and silent, and waits until it's appropriate to slam his front door loudly, to crash through his kitchen and make a show of closing cabinets and the refrigerator. Until he can call cheerily through the bedroom wall, "Hey, babe! Come right on over!"

Beyond the wall, Riley shouts back, "Coming!"

When Riley finds him, not bothering to wait after he raps his knuckles against the front door, he's pouring wine in the kitchen.

"It's like living in an episode of Friends," Riley jokes, announcing his arrival against the mirror-shine stretch of Harrison's marble countertop. "Living across the hall would be way more convenient, though."

It absolutely would not, but Harrison's not about to say that out loud. Instead, he smiles and presses a glass of Californian rosé into Riley's hand; he read somewhere that it's becoming fashionable to drink rosé and Gervase recommended this particular vineyard after his honeymoon spent touring wine country. Sometimes, Harrison feels both spectacularly _old_ and spectacularly _boring_.

Riley looks a special kind of delicious; shower-fresh and dressed in tight, gray jeans and a flannel shirt, soft around the collar from wash and wear. Harrison's never seen him in anything but his Halloween costume and suits; Versace, Hugo Boss, birthday, all the same. He likes this look on him, the way his hair falls over his brow and onto the frames of the glasses Harrison didn't know he needed. They add a charming vulnerability to him as he lowers himself onto the couch and tucks his feet up under his ass, the wine glass cradled in both hands.

"You have a pool table," Riley observes with a nod. "Cool."

Harrison runs his hand along the felt. He bought it before Ash left; he imagined it might bring him some happiness to see it in the center of the room, the first strike for bachelorhood and freedom. It seems dumb now. He should've bought the home theater system instead. Consumerism makes him feel good, the knowledge he can slap his credit card onto the counter in Bang & Olufsen like he's swinging his dick. He should probably talk to someone about that. Unfortunately, he no longer has a therapist.

"Good day?" asks Harrison, the sound of the headboard still echoing in his ears. Less than an hour ago, Riley was being fucked, facedown, for cash. His stomach turns; he considers throwing up.

"Great," Riley beams at him, every tooth on display then hidden as he takes a sip. "You?"

"Went into the office," Harrison lies smoothly, his conversation with Gervase already consigned to a box in his psyche that he labels Things That Don't Matter. "Worked on some stuff for the next season, bought some groceries and now here I am. Talking to you. Which is, not gonna lie, basically the best part of my day so far." Because he's masochistic, Harrison can't resist continuing. "Have you been — working today?"

And Riley lies as easily as Harrison. "No, quiet day. Ran a few errands, you know?"

Harrison doesn't like this game when Riley doesn't play fairly. He raises an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Really," Riley smiles without guilt, traces his fingertips along the ridge and bump of the buttons on Harrison's TV remote, "Day off."

It's interesting that Riley will lie to him. He senses little point in laboring the issue, their relationship is too new, too delicate, to force his views too firmly at this stage. But he files it away, keeps that someplace safe for a later date. He smiles warmly and tosses a take out menu into Riley's lap. "Pick something, I'm starving."

As they wait for their food to arrive — Harrison will pay — he wonders if this counts as a date. If it does, this is number four. A late-night movie screening of some big-budget action thriller he didn't really want to see and a walk along the pier in Santa Monica, sharing churros and feigning fear on the rollercoaster were two and three respectively. Harrison has paid for everything so far, he has a thing for princesses and the drive to show he can provide for Riley, that he can _rescue_ him, lingers in every ATM withdrawal.

They talk over pad thai, sharing easy conversation on trivial topics as their chopsticks rattle against cardboard cartons. Harrison supposes this is the part he's supposed to find enjoyable, hearing Riley talk about his childhood dog and the things he did in high school. Instead, Harrison is analysing, weighing each syllable against the one that came before it to calculate if Riley's tone is changing, if he's growing bored or restless. If Harrison isn't enough.

Instead, Riley leans back into the couch cushions and watches the way twilight steals the gray from the city beyond the window and washes it yellow and gold. Harrison's always felt more at home in Los Angeles at night, he wonders if Riley does too. "You okay?" he asks, as Riley fidgets, shifts and runs his thumb along the waistband of his jeans. "Can I—"

"Shh." Riley cuts him off gently, thumbing open the button of his jeans. Harrison's heart flops; drops through an elevator shaft from the top floor down into the basement. Slowly, Riley eases down his zipper and beckons Harrison closer with his free hand. "Come here."

He's butterfly beautiful laid out on the couch; Harrison would dearly love to keep it for himself, to pin his wings to heavyweight pages and ground him. This isn't a pretty thing that Harrison wants to share, this is his, his property, his Riley-through-the-wall. He walks on his knees across the rug over hardwood and leans in close, sharing air that tastes of MSG, rosé and cologne. As Harrison brings up a hand and touches the smooth-shaved warmth of his cheek, he wonders how many men Riley actually _enjoys_ fucking.

There's tight, rigid heat under Harrison's palm as he cups Riley's crotch through his jeans. That insistent kind of hardness, the promise of thickness, fullness, lush-tipped stickiness sliding slick down Harrison's throat and staining his lips, tongue, teeth. Riley groans into Harrison's jaw, vibrating through his throat and down into his lungs, his heart, through the fucked mess of his groin and filling the tingling pulse of his own straining erection. Harrison's pulse shudders, an odometer bouncing desperately in the shivering chamber of his ribs.

"You're fucking _perfect_ ," he whispers, licking into the taste of Riley's mouth.

Riley laughs, confident. "Say that again when I've fucked you. For now, I want you to blow me."

Harrison likes the destination but not the route, he shakes his head, grins and pulls the thick, pink length of Riley's cock from his pants. Like the rest of him, it's beautiful; smooth and warm, veined velvet twitching against Harrison's palm as he raises an eyebrow, reminding Harrison that he's used to this, he won't come undone and beg. Not yet, anyway. "Do you think about me sucking your dick?" Harrison asks instead, his thumb sliding around the thick, dark crown of it. "When you're with them? Does it help you get off?"

There's a hitch in Riley's breathing, a shiver of uncertainty as he rubs his fingertips against the smooth, pale skin of his stomach. "My career isn't available for discussion."

"Your thoughts about me aren't private," Harrison points out, mouthing at the base of his cock. He tastes as good as last time; clean and warm and fresh with lemongrass sweetness. He pulls off. "Intellectual property rights, if you're thinking about me, I have a right to know."

Of course, he has no intention of sharing _his_ thoughts about Riley.

"Do I need to call Chris Pratt every time I get off thinking about him?" Riley outlines the swollen flush of Harrison's lips with the sticky tip of his prick. "Hey, I once jerked off watching that Travie guy you have in your show. Please, pass on my apologies, would you? Tell him I couldn't help it, he's just so — so _big_ ," and he bites his lip, strokes himself slowly, his thick, pink cock curving up out of his pants, obscene and delicious, "Does that go all the way down, do you know? God, I — _fuck_!"

Harrison hits his gag reflex before he stops, choking, spluttering ugly coughs around the swollen heat of Riley's dick. The important thing isn't that he does this perfectly, it's that Riley shuts his fucking mouth before Harrison finds a way to shut it for him. Reckless hands rake through his hair, squeezing, pulling down to the roots as he finds a sloppy rhythm. He buries his jealousy in the way he sucks, vicious and possessive, the way he rubs his own hard cock against the couch. It's angular, modern, no snug crevice to slide the fumbling hardness of it but he does what he can without dropping eye contact. Riley will acknowledge who's doing this to him.

"Nice," Riley pants, a man doing a broken impression of someone who's in control. But Harrison hears it; the breathy whine to it, the way his contracting throat forces half a beat of yearning past his lips. "How about we move this to the bedroom?"

In honesty, Harrison will do this anywhere; Riley can fuck him on the couch, against the refrigerator, over the hood of his car down in the parking garage. He's caught in a vacuum created by the need of his own cock, absorbing breathable air and turning it stale, poisonous with the vicious need to possess Riley entirely.

"You can fuck me," he says breathlessly, tripping on desperation as Riley stands, hauls him up and shoves him back into the bedroom. "Anything you want."

There's a difference between wanting and needing and Harrison's not sure which side Riley is on. Of course, Riley doesn't have the advantage of a month spent speculating, listening, considering (or maybe he does, maybe Harrison's interest is echoed and Riley spends his free time leaning into the wall, imagining the way Harrison shapes under his comforter at night). Either way, this, he believes, is where he can tip the balance in his favor. He falls back onto the mattress, breath knocked from his lungs, panting short and burning around parted lips as Riley shoulders out of his shirt.

So, Riley is barefoot and bare-chested, dressed in nothing but painted on jeans and a sharp, knowing smirk. His cock is still thick, still hard, still dripping as he wrangles Harrison, inelegant, out of his too-big t-shirt and too-loose sweatpants. Naked, Harrison is splayed on the mattress with Riley between his thighs. Riley slides his palm, fingers spread, up from the curve of Harrison's ass, his hand molten and encompassing the sway of Harrison's erection as his smile curves dangerous, higher on one side. Harrison whines — whines! — hates himself for the vulnerability of it, then decides that can wait as Riley closes his hand and strokes. Harrison comes undone for a moment, a shifting second when his guard drops, legs spread and back arched against his once-marital bed.

"Gorgeous," Riley says, hauling Harrison by the hips, pulling him flush to the curve of his cock. He's searing hot, burning straight through his jeans, through Harrison's skin, down into the gut-sharp nerves of his thighs, ass, balls. "You want me to fuck you? Hmm?"

There's a world between what Harrison wants to say and what he does say. What he _wants_ to do is hiss accusations, to ask Riley if the men ever pay for Riley to fuck them, if he wouldn't prefer being ass up and pliant. But Harrison smiles, touches a hand to Riley's wrist and whispers. "Please. I — it's been a while. Take it slow, okay?"

"Like high school," Riley whispers softly, stealing any possible reply from Harrison's lips with the press of his fingers into Harrison's mouth. Harrison sucks, eager, too much spit, nipping teeth at the tips. "Remember that? On the couch in your mom's basement, biting whatever you could reach — the cushions, his hand, your wrist — so you wouldn't cry out? Feeling so good, so _full_ , __ you ache with it. When your hands and your dick don't know what to do but you figure it out, don't you? Yeah, you figure it out. Did you fuck like that, Harrisonr? Did you fuck other boys like me?"

He nods, stuttering staccato movement as Riley pulls his fingers free and works his way out of his jeans. It's elegant, polished, he doesn't stagger against the mattress as he works his feet free and kneels, sweat-damp and glorious, between Harrison's thighs. Even their dicks look good together, dark and pale, thick and hard and ripe with blood and desperation. Every part of Harrison is swollen, sticky, lush, low-hanging fruit desperate for the dig of Riley's fingertips into juice-full flesh.

Riley finds the lube without asking where Harrison keeps it, skimming through the night stand and fishing out the neat little pump bottle and a green-foil Trojan. See, Harrison noticed Riley's racing colors that first night, lingered in the drug store by the sexual health shelf until he found the right ones. For a moment, Harrison wonders if Riley might pause, if he might fumble in his pocket and produce his own protection. That's what whores are _supposed_ to do and Harrison has a lecture about trust and understanding the difference between client and boyfriend already figured out. Riley doesn't say a word. He slicks his fingers, pushes Harrison's thighs apart, and rests against the bold and reckless tightness of Harrison's hole.

"That's it," he murmurs, hot palm sliding the length of Harrison calf as he circles, circles, _circles_ and...

He pushes inside. A single finger sliding slippery into the desperate depths of Harrison's body. Harrison cries out, convulses, grips the need for more, deeper, faster into the sheets at his hips and waits for Riley to find the hot, white brilliance, the event horizon catastrophe, of his prostate. Oh, but Riley is a devilish tease, taunting close like he can't quite find it, the pad of his thumb catching the ridged stretch of Harrison's perineum. Harrison won't beg, he's not a client, he's not paying Riley for the service of making him come. He'll get there himself if he has to, fucking down onto a single, elegant finger with his hand around his cock.

"You want another?" Riley asks, casually conversational, like they're meeting in the aisles of Trader David's over cantaloupe and zucchini. Harrison groans, nods, pushes his hands up and under his pillow as Riley opens him up, a conductor, a maestro, creating a symphony with the way Harrison's moans mingle with his thundering heartbeat.

He growls, furious with want, "Enough. Fuck me."

He wants the burn of it, wants to feel like he's teetering at the edge of falling apart, of being ripped down his seams as Riley smooths down the rubber and lines up. He feels slick, cool lube over hot skin, foreign and unfamiliar as the tip of Riley's erection nudges to heat and tightness. Riley lowers to him by degrees, the smooth press of his forehead, the touch of his mouth as he kisses slow, sweet, tender and, carefully, he pushes inside.

Harrison fights the urge to push back, the feeling too strange, too sharp, every nerve screaming bright with heat and rerouting, rewiring, shooting fizz-tingle shockwaves from his groin to the base of his skull. Harrison sees stars, tastes them, carbon and copper on the tip of his tongue as Riley pushes, presses, consumes every bare inch of Harrison's body, his mind, and replaces it with pressure and fucked-hard fullness.

There are fingers twisted, twined around him, one hand fisted into his hair, the other around his cock as Riley draws breath, closes his eyes and, dewed brilliant with sweat, begins to move. Slowly. So slowly. The first thrust is torture, withdraw and impale as he pulls Harrison apart. He's good. Fuck, but he's so fucking _good_. Harrison kisses him with intent to bruise, to stain his mouth with blood and the tingling imprint of Harrison's lips. He wants the next man he sees, the next client, to know the shape of Harrison's body against him, to smell, see, taste him. To suck Riley's cock and know where it's been.

He shudders at that, clenches, the smooth, dark walls of him closing around Riley. Above him, Riley shivers, rolls his hips as he thrusts and, on each smooth, deep stroke into him, he finds that spot. It builds, the faintest tingle at the back of Harrison's tongue, the way his toes curl against the covers and his mouth floods wet and messy. Riley thrusts deeper, harder, the soft-swollen head of him staging an assault on Harrison's orgasm, dragging, urging, roughly demanding as he grinds to the silk-hot completion of it, that desperate thrum of need buried deep inside.

Riley pulls out. Empty, aching sore, Harrison stares at him and waits for an explanation.

"Roll over," Riley groans, hands on Harrison's hips. His nails are sharper than they seem, carving ten thin, red hollows into the copper-gold skin. Harrison wonders if he'll bleed out from them or go blind from the physical weight of his lust-thick cock first. Before he can speculate, Riley turns him around, eases him back, lowering Harrison down over his knees, pulling him down onto his cock and pushing the smooth planes of his chest to the sharp-supple length of Harrison's back. He slides in easily this time, Harrison is stretched-smooth and accommodating, slick-slippery with lube, as he slides down onto the thick, raw length of Riley's prick.

"Fuck yeah," Riley pants into his throat, holding Harrison steady as he fucks up into him. "God, you feel _so_ — _so_ fucking _good_."

The pressure is low in his belly, the heat of Riley around him, behind him, shoved deep and merciless inside of him. Harrison groans, impatiently craving the blood-hot perfection of finality as Riley fucks him, ruts him, turns him inside out. The bedsprings match his pulse, creaking operatically beneath them as Riley hisses filth into his ear.

_I can't believe this idiot is fucking me_ , Harrison thinks, and then promptly comes, arcing thick and white across his stomach, dripping hot against his own thighs. The world around them is a hum of static, caught in the cataclysm of it. Open-mouthed and hungry, Riley fucks him harder, faster, drives the final throbbing ache of it from the tip of Harrison's fucked-raw cock with a cry. Spine straight, he squeezes his fist around the length of Harrison's shiver-sensitive dick and then he slumps, spent, mouthing breathless groans into the hot, wet skin of Harrison's throat

They stay like that, on their knees and wound together, an impossible beat of syncopated hearts. Harrison wonders if he can remain like this, if nothing can change until they die, rot, conjoined skeletons for future generations to find and speculate their story.

Maybe someone will write a screenplay about them.

"Stay over," he whispers as Riley slips his softening cock free. The emptiness is troubling, Harrison is craving something more.

If Riley stays, if he spends the night in Harrison's bed, then it's barely a stretch of the imagination to invite him to stay for breakfast. After that, dinner sort of makes sense and then it's inevitability, the familiarity of stopping over, of leaving clothes, razor, toothbrush. This is what Harrison always does, his game is smooth, polished and practiced.

Against the sheets, pale and porcelain-perfect, Riley smiles. "I'd love to."

Harrison has been staring at the bedroom wall for over an hour. He has a half-formed plan, the ghost of an idea lingering somewhere in his darker places. There's a screwdriver in his hand, twisting between his palms to the rhythm of the headboard that rocked in Riley's apartment an hour earlier, the sound that taunts him, that proves time and again that Riley's isn't doing this _right_.

He's poured his fury into his MacBook, every vicious, bitter thought burning bile at the back of his tongue committed to the page and waiting for retribution delivered in a movie theater months from now. Once Riley sees it, he'll understand, he'll know that Harrison is doing all of this for them. For now, though, he needs relief.

It would be easy enough, he thinks, to scrape a hole through the drywall, to continue that through to the other side and open the forbidden realm of Riley's apartment to his consideration. Riley has to know he can hear him, that every moan, groan and desperate plea rings through his ears like the kickback of gunfire. Harrison is constructed of base desires, just like those men in their Mercedes and Jaguars and goddamn _Bentleys_. He suspects those desires can be sated, his thirst for it slaked, if he can watch. He wants to see the way Riley's face contorts for them, the way he bites his lip. There is a language — _their_ language — that Harrison understands. He's... curious. To see if Riley speaks it with other people. With _unworthy_ people.

A few inches of drywall. He can scrape through in a few minutes, he's sure of it. Somewhere close to the headboard, somewhere Riley won't notice. He has those Ikea prints on the wall, easy enough to reposition one, to block the way the light will stream through and give him away. A couple minutes, a swirl of dust motes on circulated air and Harrison obtains relief and lends Riley safety in observation. After all, it's only a matter of time until Riley meets a monster.

He drives the head of the screwdriver into the thick flesh of his palm, feels it burn and ache with the threat of broken skin. His lip is caught between his teeth as he stands, as he approaches the wall and smooths his hand across it. There's a smudge of blood left against the paintwork, turns out he broke the skin after all. He digs the tip of the screwdriver into the wall, watches the way the paint curls up against the invasion, the scar he leaves behind on the unmarred surface of it.

Just a couple of sheets of drywall.

He lowers his hand, lets the screwdriver fall, rattle against the hardwood. 8a, their bedroom directly beneath his, will be unimpressed. He doesn't care.

One day, Riley will meet a monster. Some twisted fuck who wants to hurt him, to destroy him, to tear him limb from limb and leave him bloodied and bruised. Harrison needs to do _something_ to prevent that. He kicks at the screwdriver in wordless irritation.

This isn't the way Harrison is going to save him.

# Four

It's been two months since they started dating; Harrison's not sure this is progressing fast enough.

(Ashleigh moved in after six whirlwind weeks. Married him four months later. An overnight bag that became a suitcase that became a U-Haul, her ridiculous little dog pissing all over his collection of rare sneakers and his checking account peppered with joint grocery store bills and payments to her hairdresser. He remembers liking that time, when she wanted to impress him. The rare beat between getting to know you sex and get the fuck out of my house fighting. Back before she tried to pretend she had a life outside of Harrison's orbit.)

Unofficially, there are testaments to Riley's existence scattered throughout apartment 12a; a half-read David Foster Wallace novel on the coffee table, a couple of records propped by Harrison's turntable, the evidence of an expensive wine habit left in half-bottle carafes in Harrison's refrigerator. Of course, the book is pretentious, vainglorious _bullshit_ dressed up in big words; the vinyl is vintage, original pressings that Riley insists play better than high quality, digital remasters; the wine tastes like piss but costs a couple hundred bucks a throw. So, it's not like Riley isn't _present_ , as such. But everything is transient, nothing that can't be cleared away in three minutes and a single packing box. He'll feel a lot better once he's got this into the open.

"So," he begins carefully; Riley raises an eyebrow but doesn't look up. "Things are going — _well_ , don't you think?" Riley makes a huffed, non-committal sound, the sound of someone trying to ignore Harrison's speculation. Irritated, Harrison presses his fingertip into Riley's cheek and jiggles. "Hey, I said, I think things are going well. With us. Did you hear me?"

Riley rolls his eyes and pulls off Harrison's cock, the rude, red length of it thick and wet with spit between them as he pushes to his elbows and snaps, annoyed, "Right now? You had to ask me this _right now_?"

It's obvious – to Harrison at least, even if Riley lacks the insight – that this is the sort of thing that should be discussed when the moment arises. Harrison's read that sex brings a couple closer together, there's literally never going to be a better time to discuss this. He taps the tip of his cock against the pouting flush of Riley's lower lip just for the way it springs lush against his skin. The smile scarring the corners of his lips is wide, every tooth on show as he pushes his fingers through the sweaty tangle of Riley's hair. They're Sunday morning lazy, stretched out on the pale gray cotton of Harrison's bed sheets, newspapers and breakfast courtesy of kitchen 24 abandoned on the nightstand.

"Well?" he prompts, as Riley attempts to duck back down, to suck at the head of his cock. His dick twitches an objection as he holds him back by the hair, as he tilts his face up so their eyes meet. Riley has such pretty eyes. "It's been, what? A couple months?" Harrison has learnt to feign casual disinterest in the details, even when he knows them explicitly. "Do you think this is going somewhere?"

With a sigh, Riley shifts. He crawls up, biting kisses to Harrison's hips, across his stomach and chest, butterfly breaths against his throat until he's sat between Harrison's legs, those thick, pale thighs hooked over Harrison's. He cups Harrison's face in his hands, smooths his thumbs along the crest of Harrison's cheekbones and taps a kiss to the tip of his nose.

"I think we're having fun together," Riley says carefully. "You're having fun, right?"

The problem with being the smartest person in the room at any given moment is that it's so desperately _dull_ watching people attempt to hide their emotions behind platitudes. Harrison is being given the brush off; gentle, caring, but blown off nonetheless. There's a hard spike of dislike in his gut that he hides behind a smile – one of those big, bright, _natural_ ones he practices in the mirror – and a touch of his hand to Riley's cheek. " _Totally_. But, like, you see this working out, right? I mean, we're not just treading water here? Look, I'm not, you know, a psycho or anything, but I like you."

Close up camera two; this is the part where the hero looks sincere, lets his gaze filter up from under his lashes. This is where the romantic interest takes the hero's hand, leans in close and whispers that of course he feels it too.

Resolutely insisting on going off script, Riley chews his lip and stares determinedly over Harrison's shoulder. "I mean, it's only been a few weeks, I – isn't this enough for now?" Harrison is only aware that his fingernails are breaking skin when Riley yelps and shifts back. "Seriously! No marks, okay? It's not exactly great for business if I look like I've been fucked by every trucker from Concord to San Diego."

_Business_.

"Sorry." (He's not sorry, but he _is_ good at faking it. It leaves a sour taste at the back of Harrison's tongue, bitter with fury as he leans in, holds Riley steady and bites a kiss to the corner of his mouth.) "I forgot." (He didn't; he glows with the thrill of it every time he manages to leave a mark behind; the press of his fingernails, the bruise of his mouth, the swollen, tender flush he can leave on Riley's lips with the thick heat of his cock.) "But I hate that you care what they think of you. Like you're their property or something."

"It's my job."

"So that means I have to _like_ it?" Harrison surges forward, tips Riley back against the mattress and follows him. What he likes about Riley, he decides, is that he never knows which incarnation he's going to get. Will it be the innocent, wide-eyed pretty boy who eyes Harrison's cock like he doesn't think he'll be able to take it? Or the bitchy loudmouth who tells Harrison he's doing everything wrong? This morning, as Riley sighs beneath him and kisses him sweet and tender, it seems he's got the lover. He likes this one; this one is a definite favorite. Convinced that this is as good a time as any, he makes his pitch. "Listen, I've been thinking..."

"Uh oh," Riley laughs, fingertips shaping the long planes of muscle that stretch the length of Harrison's spine.

"Shut up, seriously," Harrison breathes in the smell of him, the scent of expensive cologne, body wash, shaving soap, "I think you should let me take care of you."

Harrison has done his research in form of illegally downloaded movies centered largely around prostitution, consumed through his headphones when everything is silent in Riley's apartment. He watches them instead of working, in between snatched soundbites scrawled into his screenplay. Harrison hasn't written a Sketches script in _weeks_. There are unanswered voicemails mounting on his cell phone, red-button phone calls dropped like they'll believe he has no signal. Harrison works only on his screenplay, devoting hours to how it hangs together, to ironing out dialogue and directions so that no director can misinterpret his ballad. But Riley doesn't know that. He waits, impatient, for Riley to do the right thing and express a little gratitude.

Instead, Riley kisses him, sweet and slow. His lips work from Harrison's mouth to his jaw to the salt-velvet tag of his earlobe where he whispers, breathy-soft, "I don't _need_ a big, strong man to ride to my tower and rescue me."

The tip of Harrison's tongue burns with the accusation that he hasn't actually been invited to Riley's _tower_ since the night he was mistaken for a client. It leaves him sick with fury that those men — those other _pitiful_ men — are granted the liberty of seeing the shape of Riley's life whilst Harrison — his _boyfriend_ — is kept at arm's length. He keeps smiling, shaping the edges of it like clay until it feels right in the impossible anger charring him black from the inside.

"I know," he murmurs, soft and soothing, nipping along Riley's collar bone. He grinds down, rubs the full, hard weight of his cock against Riley's and feels him arch up, opening himself. "But think about it; I do alright, you know? I can take care of us, both of us. You could quit work, find another job, a _real_ one."

"I _like_ my job." Riley rolls them over, straddles Harrison's hips and conjures lube and a condom from the nightstand like a high-end magician. A slick of lube, cool and smooth, drips over the head of Harrison's cock, then the condom; Harrison lies back, cock hard and aching and watches Riley's performance. "I make six figures a year, I have an investment portfolio that makes me more declarable income than most people make from their jobs. How do you propose I keep that up without my main source of income?"

"I _propose_ you move in with me," Harrison says softly, rubbing the pad of his thumb against the swollen tenderness of Riley's balls. He looks up, smiles, holds it in place even as Riley frowns.

"You barely know me," he counters, braced on his knees over the lust-thick fury of Harrison's cock. It twitches in the frame of Riley's thighs, bouncing, heat-seeking and desperate. Riley has no fucking idea what he's talking about. Harrison _knows_ him, knows everything about him from the TV shows he likes to the weekly Tuesday phone calls to his mom to the way he moans when a stranger fucks him from behind. "There's — that's insane."

"I know I'm into you," Harrison offers, drawing him down before he can ruin this any further. The thick, rigid cap of his cock barely breaches the soft-swollen tightness of Riley's hole. Above him, Riley throws back his head, exposes the long, elegant line of his throat and the delicate throb of his carotid artery. Harrison eases him down a little further, feels the first tightglorious inch of him, then another, then another. He pauses, Riley halfway-impaled on the length of his dick as he rises onto his elbows and licks endemic heat into the rose-bloom pinch of Riley's nipples. Soft against smooth skin, he murmurs, "I know we're good together. Why wait?"

Riley takes the last of Harrison's cock for himself, sinks down slowly and begins to move, rolling his hips like the pull-release of low tide. Harrison moans into his mouth, tangles his fingers in the coppery fall of Riley's hair and holds him close.

"You need to slow down," Riley informs him, demonstrating with the speed of his thrusts. There's something truly pornographic about the way he bites his lip, dirtier than the way his body shapes, hot, tight, smooth, around the ache-stiff length of Harrison's dick. "You need—"

Harrison steals further objection with the taste of his tongue against Riley's mouth. He holds him steady, both hands on his ass, pries him open and ruts up into him, deep enough to convince himself he can feel Riley's pulse through the wound-raw tip of his cock. Above him, balanced on his knees and tugging frantic at the blood-dark strain of his own prick, Riley whimpers. His balls feel heavy, tight and drawn, against the tattoo etched indelible between Harrison's hip bones.

"You're fucking gorgeous," Harrison tells him. This he can say with sincerity, addressed to the delicate way Riley's collar bone stands against his endless paleness, the arch of his cheekbones, the lush pink rawness of his bitten-sore lower lip. Funny, Harrison thinks, that these things are nothing more than an attractively arranged selection of muscles and sinew stretched over bones.

Riley smiles, squeezes tight around the steel tightness of Harrison between his ass cheeks. "I know."

They don't speak again, not until Riley shudders above him, until he streaks the gym-hard gold of Harrison's chest with bittersalt luster. Harrison shoves him back, sucks the taste from the tip of Riley's cock as he slumps against the mattress. On his knees, he tugs away the condom and, whilst Riley's sucks desperate, improbable heat into the stiff, dark points of Harrison's nipples, he strokes himself off until he comes — thick, sudden, sharp — against the waxed-smooth silk of Riley's stomach.

There's no point in fucking a whore if he doesn't get to treat him like one.

The need gives way to stuttered breathing, lungs raking sore at the dust motes tossed up from the mattress, dancing through the streak of sunlight bursting golden through the blinds. Riley kisses Harrison's shoulder, soft and wet and open-mouthed, the threat of teeth at the edges; Harrison smooths his hand through Riley's hair and tries again, lust-drunk. "Move in with me."

Riley shakes his head and smiles. "You're insane. Cute. But insane."

"So, that's a no?" The hole-in-the-wall seems viable now, a chance to assess the Riley he doesn't get to see. He needs to get into that apartment, that's the key to getting into Riley's head.

"Oh, absolutely," Riley assures him casually, hands tucked behind his head. His underarm hair is waxed away too, the hollow there smooth and damp. Harrison licks into it, tastes the salt-sweet of Riley's sweat and wonders about the complexity of pheromones.

"I'll keep asking," Harrison promises. The dopamine is kicking in, he feels sleepy-soft and blurred through his center.

Riley laughs. "Maybe one day I'll say yes."

Despite Harrison's insomniac scheming, the opportunity to get into 12b once more presents itself in the mundane facets of everyday life, rather than the convoluted and laborious schemes considered over middle-of-the-night slasher movie marathons.

Riley is eating yoghurt mixed into granola, leafing through the LA Times, Harrison is faking like he's marking up a script, scraping the tip of a fluorescent marker across the page every couple seconds. This particular script is two seasons out of date. The episode has been filmed, aired and attracted a flurry of FCC complaints. Harrison supposes this is what novelists mean when they refer to silence as _companionable_. He drags the nib of his marker a little harder over the paper for the way it swishes, the way it carves through the endless, echoing absence of conversation.

"So, everything okay?" Harrison asks, his voice slicing through the silence with a conversation starter he doesn't really give much of a shit about. Still, everyone likes to think someone is interested in them.

"Define _okay_ ," Riley says slowly, takes a sip of coffee and then taps his fingertip against his newspaper. "Did you know the mayor has mishandled six point three _million_ dollars in campaign funds and got caught fucking, like, _four_ different call girls?"

" _You're_ going to get all high and mighty about call girls?"

"Not at all," Riley shrugs laconically and licks his thumb, turns the page carefully, "Everyone's just trying to scrape a living, you know? I'm just saying, you get the level of service you pay for. Speaking of, I really need to talk to the super about getting cameras down in the parking garage, I'm paying three grand a month to live here, this isn't the sort of bullshit I should have to deal with."

Harrison resolves to damage a few other cars. It wouldn't do to make it seem obvious. He'll keep the numerals for Riley's guests, though, let them figure it out.

"Have you thought maybe it's a client?" Harrison suggests, super casual, thumbing through his phone without looking up. Riley's raised eyebrow is palpable; is this guy seriously oblivious enough to imagine that johns don't get clingy sometimes? "I mean, you're cute, you know? You're nice to them _and_ you suck their dicks. Maybe someone got attached."

"I—" Riley pauses and glances out of the window, likes he's imagining he'll see one of his clients out there right now, dressed in Harrison's Halloween costume. "Do you honestly think someone would _do_ that?"

"Why don't you go to the police?"

It's an entirely empty query, the very last thing Harrison wants is a bored detective dusting for prints, suspecting the boyfriend. Still, he knows what the answer will be, he needs Riley to say it out loud, to let the reality of it sink through his bones via his vocal cords. Across the counter, Riley swallows heavily.

"Why do you think?"

The silence that falls is anxious — Harrison revels in it, flexing his shoulders and looking up with a smile, "I'm right through the wall, babe. You know you're safe with me around."

Riley pushes away his breakfast. "Hey, uh, speaking of? I have, like, an appointment tomorrow," the way he emphasises _appointment_ suggests an outcall, summoned to a hotel some place downtown to fuck a visiting stranger, a businessman most likely, on impersonal sheets in strange surroundings, "but the super was gonna swing by at about two. I don't — I mean, say no if it's not convenient, but — could you maybe wait in my apartment and let him in?"

The strength of will required not to snap his head up is measurable on the Fujita scale. Slow, casually, Harrison glances up from his phone with a shrug. "Sure, I guess. What's he checking?"

"Okay," Riley bites his lip, furrows his brow, "this is going to sound kind of, I dunno, gross? But, I think there might be mice. In my bedroom wall. It gets so bad sometimes, I swear I — have you heard them?" he implores, Harrison's pulse picks up; thick, glorious and rich with triumph. "Just like — scuffling?"

"You're going crazy, babe," Harrison rolls his eyes fondly. Riley shrugs doubtfully. A man who doesn't trust his own mind has no choice but to allow those close to him to reassure him of reality. "I never hear a thing."

"Yeah," Harrison nods in the direction of the bedroom, like the superintendent needs a map to find his way around one of forty-eight identical units stacked on top of one another. Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. "He says he can hear something in the wall but, like, I have the unit out back and I don't hear anything."

The guy — Eddie, according to his name badge — wears an expression that suggests this is the most exciting thing to happen to him since the great toilet clog of '96. He strokes his moustache, a magnificent specimen that somehow manages to be both too thick and too thin in all of the least aesthetic places, and adjusts the tool belt around his paunch. It's not that Harrison's ever really thought about how a stereotypical apartment maintenance tech might look, but he's pretty sure Eddie ticks every single box.

"You noticed any mouse shit?" he asks conversationally, scraping heavy work boots across Riley's hardwood, standing back to assess the bedroom wall like it might have all the answers. Harrison is immensely glad he thought better of making that peephole. "Any piss or, I dunno, they chewed anything?"

Against the couch, Harrison shrugs. There's an indent of his body pressed into the leather, somewhere Riley might sit later and leaf through one of those pretentious coffee table books he has on art and photography and music of the mid twentieth century. "No idea, man."

In the bedroom, Eddie smears himself against the wall. He seems like he might leave it greasy-slick and sticky. He clicks his tongue, attempting to summon non-existent vermin like a particularly lack-luster Pied Piper. His brows draw low, a hand held up to silence an already silent Harrison. Fuck, Harrison hates the service industry and everyone employed within it.

"I can't hear anything," he says eventually, but slowly, like he's trying to figure out the missing piece of a two piece puzzle. "You want to take a listen? Maybe you can coax 'em out?"

"Do I look like the fucking mouse whisperer?"

"Hey," Eddie straightens up, demonstrates he possesses a solid six inches on Harrison and a good sixty pounds. He taps his badge. "You show a little respect, yeah? What does this say to you?"

It _says_ 'Eddie - Hollywood Tower Maintenance' but Harrison suspects he's supposed to think outside of the box. "No high school diploma and a domineering wife?" he guesses idly.

The way Eddie scowls suggests Harrison is right on at least one of those points.

"You know what?" Eddie approaches; Harrison suspects if he weren't wearing the name of his employer all over his shirt like a billboard, he may take a fist to the stomach.

He grins, taunting. "No idea."

"Fuck you," Eddie is cramming his flashlight back into his belt, furious, humiliated, exactly the way Harrison wants him to be, "I don't need to stand around and take this from some fucking faggot," Harrison clutches his heart, feigning unimaginable hurt, "tell your _boyfriend_ to figure it out for himself and call Zenith. Oh, and you tell him, he gets one more noise violation and he's out on his ass. Maybe fuck him a little more quietly."

And now it's Harrison's turn to fire with fury because, he knows, those noise violations from 12b have nothing to do with _him_ and everything to do with faceless, nameless specters who touch what isn't theirs. He slams the door on Eddie's heels and takes a moment to look around the apartment. He wants to slam holes in every condom in Riley's nightstand, to tear the art from the walls and leave the apartment wrecked and ruined. He breathes hard through his nose and counts cars on the freeway until his heart rate slows. Riley said he'd be back by three-thirty. Harrison needs to work fast.

First, the package dropped into his mailbox by the wonderful folks at Amazon. Prime is a worthy monthly investment for access to Lucifer and American Gods; next day delivery is just a bonus.

On Riley's coffee table, he tips them from the logoed box. They scatter across the glass, ten of them, each one no bigger than the nail on Harrison's little finger. High definition, WiFi enabled, motion sensitive with _sound_ ; Harrison had, honestly, no idea that surveillance cameras could be quite so small, quite so _discreet._

He installs them quickly, five around the bedroom, three in the living room, one in the bathroom and one in the hallway. They link to his phone quickly, portable evidence recorded in real time.

Google says it takes eight minutes to walk from the apartment building to the nearest KeyMe kiosk in a 7/Eleven down on Cahuenga. It turns out it's more like six when Harrison really goes for it, devouring the sidewalk with purpose as he ducks past the Capitol Records building and notes another construction lot scarring the skyline up ahead.

The store is deserted. Casually, Harrison picks up a quarter of vodka and a pack of chips then stands at the kiosk and, carefully, feeds in the key Riley handed to him on his way out of the door. These things are amazing, Harrison decides, when the machine asks for his fingerprint and assures him it can reproduce a copy of the key anytime, should he need it. A penny change from three bucks and he has guaranteed access to apartment 12b for as long as the 7/Eleven is open. The future is now and it's fucking incredible.

"Have a nice day," the cashier calls to his back.

He shoves the little brass key down into his pants pocket and smiles. "Oh, I already am."

The glitter shine is rubbed from the surface of his bonhomie as he approaches the underpass of the 101, the traffic roaring endless over his head and his phone vibrating down in his pocket. He hauls it out, anticipating Riley but finding Jesse. Against all better judgement, he thumbs the green button and raises the handset to his ear. "What?"

"Don't fucking _what_ me, asshole," Jesse snaps. It seems he's the bad cop to Gervase's good cop, Harrison wonders which role this leaves for Eddie. "Where the fuck have you been? I've been half a second away from calling the cops to do a goddamn wellness check."

"Here I am," Harrison extends his free arm, even though Jesse can't see him. He's not above throwing a temper tantrum right here in the Franklin Avenue gridlock. "Panic over! What the fuck do you want?"

"Oh, hey, so do you remember that fucking _job_ you have? You know the one, you show up at the office and type up the funnies into the special computer box? We give the funnies to the people who pretend to be someone else and then an exec in an office downtown writes us a fucking _paycheck_ and then we pay our mortgages and, you know, _eat_? You remember that? Work?"

Harrison's pretty sure he's not paid to deal with this shit and expresses as much, "Is this part of my job description now? Take bullshit from you when I'm trying to work? Oh, I'm sorry, I must've missed that clause in the fucking contract I won us last time that says I'm not allowed to work from home."

"Are you?" Jesse prompts aggressively. "Working from home? Because you haven't turned in a script in close to a month and a half. We start filming in _two months_ , Harrison. This is the last contracted season and we've got enough FCC complaints to mean we need to watch our asses—"

"That's what we _do_ , asshole!" Harrison shouts into the handset, pulling it in front of his face like his ire can be transmitted without FaceTime, like he can throw the palpable weight of his fury across soundwaves and phone lines. "We generate complaints! That's why everyone watches us!"

"So give me something to generate a complaint!" If they were in the office right now — the bright space filled with action figures, ergonomic bean bag chairs and vending machines that spit out cEddie rather than coffee — they'd no doubt be trading punches by now. "What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking psycho? You pick that guy up in the bar and then you go M-I-fucking-A? I'm starting to think you've got him buried under the fucking floorboards, mamahuevo!" Harrison doesn't speak Spanish, but he suspects that wasn't complimentary.

"Go fuck yourself," it irritates him immensely that his reply lacks insight, witticism or any below-the-belt personalism that might linger, sore and stinging, hours after the conversation ends.

"Be in the office tomorrow," Jesse says, more threat than invitation. "Or I swear to God, we're gonna have to rethink this whole thing without you."

Before Harrison can conjure something cutting, the line goes dead, Jesse's fury lost to the roar of traffic that's always caught in rush hour. Harrison considers tossing his phone under the wheels of the nearest car, thinks better of it and sinks it down into his back pocket. He has ten minutes until Riley gets back, he needs to hurry up.

Twenty minutes later he's laid on the couch, hand behind his head and one tucked down the front of his pants as he watches South Park. He hates this show, but fakes like he's engrossed as Riley drops his messenger bag and kicks off his shoes.

"Hey," he greets him, breathless and flushed, "I've had a shitty day, wanna let me blow you in the shower and make it a little better?"

"Aww, honey. Office politics getting you down?"

Harrison holds his breath as they trip to the bathroom, shedding clothes like old skin until they're bare and burning, doused in shower spray and slick-mouth fire. On the countertop, his phone glows, a notification informing him that camera six is live. It stares down at them, impassive, barely noticeable against the cornicing. Riley sinks to his knees and licks impossible heat along the nerve-bright length of Harrison's aching cock. Harrison's world narrows to sensation sparking along his spine, to slick velvet suction around his cock and fingers at the tight breach of his hole.

The camera records it all, Harrison's evidence of carnal devotion downloading via his phone to his hard drive. Riley, it seems, doesn't suspect a thing.

Harrison was a chemical plant in his teens. An unending rattle of pills and talking therapy, antipsychotics that didn't work because he _isn't_ psychotic. Observing Riley, knowing that Riley remains blissfully unaware that he is observed, feels a little like shedding that skin. Harrison has never fully understood his purpose, his place in the cosmic balance of things; he is above the common man but has no outlet for his superiority. Watching the way his laptop screen stutters into life as a new notification of movement in the apartment beyond the wall feeds through the Wi-Fi, he thinks he may have discovered that purpose.

Between trips to the gym on the ground floor and runs to the grocery store, Harrison conducts his life around Riley's schedule. He knows the minutiae, he watches it, Riley on the couch with Ray watching American Horror Story. Ray wants to touch him, Harrison can tell, he's just too much of a pussy to reach out a hand and brush it through the coppery hair at the nape of Riley's neck. Of course, if he _did_ , Harrison would have to break every one of his fingers. He watches Riley shower, watches him eat cereal from the box while he watches the news.

He watches him fuck his clients.

They're not faceless now and they're absolutely not without names. Harrison recognizes them; a senator, a district attorney, a couple of prominent city officials, some higher up in the Los Angeles Police Department with the kind of recognizable face that appears in photo-friendly soundbites after local crime tragedies. Riley has an influential consumer base — prominent men, _powerful_ men, the kind of men who absolutely would not want the world to know their taste for pretty little lush-lipped twinks with eager mouths and peach-soft asses.

They leave with whispered promises, with piles of cash left on the nightstand and that thrilling promise: ' _threw in a little extra allowance money for you, sweetie_ '. Riley is many things by these men; infantilized, patronized, colonized for the way they can come down his throat or deep into the slick, tight depths of his body. He's also coddled, overpaid, pampered and rewarded. And now, Harrison understands Riley's reticence, sees the filthy way Riley has exchanged sensibility and self-respect for a stack of bills and a clutch of fancy gifts.

(Harrison is almost certain a client was responsible for that sleek little BMW down in the parking garage. He considers scratching it up to prove a point, to give whichever asshole it was something else to pay for when Riley pouts prettily about the unfairness of it.)

So, Harrison makes notes of names and employers. He records dates and times and takes screenshots of the comings and goings in the hallway, of the come and heat in the bedroom. Sometimes, he touches himself while he watches, not because he gets off on watching Riley take a stranger's cock, but because Riley _doesn't know_ he's watching. He comes silently, biting into the flesh of his palm or the sharp angles under warm skin of his wrist. Beyond the wall, Riley's head bobs or his ass shifts and Harrison imagines he can feel it, even if he doesn't know what _it_ is.

Occasionally, when Riley goes out on an outcall or wanders the aisles of Whole Foods, Harrison slips to apartment block B. On quiet feet, he hurries to 12b, slides open the door and slips inside. Once there, he makes minor changes, shifts a lamp, adjusts the comforter, leaves behind the unsettled atmosphere of air that shouldn't have been disturbed. Nothing is obvious, nothing too blatant, but slowly, slowly, _slowly_ , Riley seems to become aware of it.

He brings it up one night as they lie on the couch in Harrison's apartment, caught somewhere between making out and watching American Idol. Riley pulls back, bites his lip and rolls to his side. "I — hey, if I tell you something, do you promise to tell me if you think I'm going crazy?"

Harrison, an expert on incorrect accusations of craziness, raises his eyebrows. "Sure."

"Okay, so, you remember you said that maybe a client was getting a little — clingy?" Riley pauses, Harrison nods. "Well, right, this is where it starts to sound insane, I — I think someone is going into my apartment when I'm not there."

"You're right," Harrison laughs, he's rehearsed this part time and again, he knows his script, "that _does_ sound insane. How would someone _do_ that?"

"I'm not sure," Riley shrugs and presses a little closer to Harrison's chest, accepting the way Harrison soothes a hand along his spine, the way he presses his fingers down under the waistband of Riley's jeans. "But, like, let's say I was working with the kind of guys who _could_ get access to my apartment. I — don't you think that's weird? It's just, you know, dumb little things. I thought maybe someone had gone through my underwear drawer a couple days ago and the time before _that_ it sort of looked like someone messed up the bed but — you don't believe me?"

Harrison shuffles up onto his elbows a little, cocks his head and paints himself dark with a frown of deep, sincere consideration. He is a wonderful portrait of contemplation as he celebrates the success of his master plan, his lip caught between his teeth thoughtfully.

"You — do _you_ think someone would do that?" he asks slowly, like he can't imagine the fairy tale monster lurking in the shadows capable of that level of depravity. Really, Riley should consider himself lucky; imagine if someone _genuinely_ dangerous had the same idea. It's only a matter of time. "You don't think that sounds a little far-fetched?"

Harrison wants Riley to believe it. The best way to make that happen is to cast doubt on the validity of his fear.

"You think I'm crazy," Riley says, his voice tangled in his throat. Harrison keeps his expression soft with a mask of concern, if Riley wants to interpret that as fear for his safety or for his mental stability, well, that's not Harrison's call. "You think I'm being dumb."

"I don't think you're being dumb. I think you're stressed out and tired and that's making you paranoid. Dealing with these men and their... _issues_ , can't be easy."

"It makes sense when it happens," Riley mutters, flushing up with fury as his fists clench. "But then I say it out loud and — and I just sound fucking stupid. A couple of out of place throw pillows and a drawer I probably left open myself. I sound insane."

"Hey, hey, shh," Harrison soothes, contrite and coaxing, as though Riley is a particularly nervous animal. "I believe you. Look, feel free to say no, I'm not putting any pressure on you _at all_ but, you know, why don't you stay here for a few days? Maybe you'll feel a little safer?"

The glance Riley casts around the room is glorious, the fear of shadows gathering in the corners, the blood-bright panic. That's all Harrison's, he owns every twitch at the corner of Riley's lips, every nightmare creeping insidious from under his bed, his boogie monsters crawling from the closet. And all Harrison had to do was shift around a lamp and mess up some boxer briefs. The power crawls the length of his spine, shudders down into his fingertips and has him drawing Riley close for a kiss that tastes of Chinese take out and carefully constructed anxiety.

"You don't mind?" he asks against Harrison's lips, the curve of them lush and damp. Harrison nips into the thickness of the lower one with his teeth, rolls his hips and brings the stirring throb of his erection to the seam of Riley's sweats.

He shakes his head. "Whatever makes you feel safe."

"Thanks. I — I really owe you. You're the best."

# Five

Of course, it escalates.

The escalation itself isn't a surprise for Harrison; this is how it works. He loves too completely, feels things far too deeply. He has this whole thing figured out and stored in the MacBook and Riley is still — resolutely, stubbornly, idiotically — refusing to play along.

For the avoidance of any doubt, Harrison would like the record to show that by this point (three months into their relationship, Christmas a distant memory of the exchange of gifts and blowjobs) he imagined Riley would be a little more entrenched in his life. Instead, he hovers on the peripheries, staying with Harrison because he's scared of his own shadow, not because he _wants_ to be there. In honesty, Harrison is starting to feel a little used.

If Riley had the physiological capability to bear children, Harrison would be tampering with his birth control. There's nothing like a surprise pregnancy to usher a relationship along and he knows of websites with dummy copies of most major brands of mono and triphasic pill. Sadly, this isn't an option with Riley, with his thick, hard cock and waxed-smooth balls. Harrison needs to think outside of the box.

"Are you working today?" he asks Riley.

Riley enters stage left, dressed in Harrison's sweatpants, his Bowie shirt, he is agitated, fearful as he leans up against Harrison's desk. "Yeah. I — I have a four o'clock."

Yesterday, Harrison waited until Riley was occupied with a client — face down, some well-dressed dude with his mouth pressed into Riley's ass — and sprayed the words _fucking whore_ across the driver's side of Riley's car in paint so red it smeared and dripped like blood. He has plans to do the same to his front door, he just needs to figure out how to do it without getting caught.

"A regular?" Harrison asks, his sympathetic smile painted on like stage makeup. What he manages to infer is 'a potential stalker', he thrills with unimaginable power at the thought.

Riley's nod is watery, weak with the threat of tears. The pulse of power is thrilling. "Yeah. He's always been nice, you know? I don't think it's him, he's not like that, but..."

"Babe, it could be _anyone_. Psychos don't take out billboards. But, like, I'm right through the wall, you know? You yell or scream and I can be there in five minutes, tops. I mean, I get that a lot could happen in five minutes, and he'd probably make it out of the building before I got downstairs but — hey, don't cry, come on."

"I liked my job, I — I'm supposed to make people _happy_ ," Riley mumbles, thick and wetmessy and sniffed into the cup of his palms. This is probably not the time to point out that the level of naivety required to twist 'orgasm' into 'happiness' is off the chart of any and all measurable scales. "Why would one of them _do_ this?"

"Because they're bad people," Harrison says as he pulls Riley to him. For a second, he's slack, warm in Harrison's arms as he presses his nose to the crook of Harrison's neck. "Because they don't think of you as a real person. You're a couple of holes to them, somewhere warm to come, they don't—"

"Fuck you," Riley snaps, and shoves Harrison away. This is unnecessary. Harrison is already making plans involving the spraypaint and the hallway outside of Riley's door. "I'm _not_ some cheap whore."

He slams out of the apartment and Harrison doesn't stop him. He's getting used to Riley refusing to do as he should, but it doesn't mean he likes it.

Proving he's a whore, though in no way a cheap one, Riley greets his client as Harrison's watch ticks to four. The guy accepts the offer of a drink, kisses Riley on the couch, pulls him into his lap and buries his hands in Riley's hair. The sound quality of the cameras is exquisite; even the sound of a zipper is picked up, rasping through the speakers as Riley lowers himself to his knees.

Harrison watches without moving, through expensive wireless headphones, no more than ten feet from Riley's bed. He watches them move through the apartment, casting aside clothes until Riley is naked, pale and pretty, his cock thick and hard. Finally, they collapse to the bed.

Harrison tugs down his zipper and takes his own jealous half-hardness into his hand. He stops paying attention to his watch.

Beyond the window, the light shifts, a gold-soft glow to the room as Harrison watches the laptop screen. Daylight fading, afternoon bleeding away into evening as he rubs his thumb against the plastic casing. He's watched Riley come twice, watched the way he twisted against his sheets as the guy with the expensive, steel-gray haircut and Rolex at his wrist ate his ass until he was weak and breathless. See, Riley pretends he's not into this and Harrison _hates_ being lied to.

Right now, he's on his back, thick, pale thighs wrapped around the guy's waist, fingers twisted into the sheets. He's soft though, his dick pink and flushed against his thigh, his toes curling with every deep, hard thrust he takes. The headboard knocks against the wall; Harrison's having a hard time imagining it's not malicious. There's an air of finality, of significant things shifting as the client finishes, blows his weak, past-his-prime load across Riley's chest and kisses him full and thick on the mouth.

Rage boils in Harrison's blood, twists his atoms into something ugly, jealous. The way Riley is stroking his hair, the way he smiles and playfully wriggles his hips. If Harrison were to commit murder, this tape would be his evidence of provocation and he knows — deeply and unshakably — that no judge or jury in the land would convict him.

He climbs to his feet as Riley's unworthy client shrugs back into his suit, pulling his jeans over his half-hard, slick-sticky cock and tugging on his sneakers before he can really overthink it. Envy is such an _ugly_ emotion, but Riley seems unwilling to respond to anything but extremes. Doesn't he _understand_? Can't he comprehend how dangerous this is? There is, literally, a madman amongst his clientele (for a moment, a shuddered and uncertain second, Harrison forgets that the madman is _him_ ) and he won't accept the help that Harrison is — selflessly — trying to offer him.

There's little dignity in Harrison's jealousy, but less in Riley's ignorance, stupidity and sheer bullheadedness. That's what Harrison decides as he hurries down the stairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator, and heads down into the parking garage. The space is quiet, still. The eerie half-sense of lives continuing just out of reach as Harrison waits, stupidly, fingertips tapping against the cool, gray breezeblocks right by the guest spot of 12b.

It takes around five minutes for him to appear. This is, perhaps, the time a less passionate man might use to calm down, to slink away and allow things to continue unchecked. But Harrison feels things deeply, so he stays, his fury climbing with the numbers on his phone screen. The elevator door slides open, a hurried half conversation pouring into a cell phone balanced between the guy's ear and his shoulder, his eyes trained on his Audi as he takes measured, privileged steps across the echoing parking lot. He walks like a man who fears nothing, who's used to the world paving the way for his progress. Confident, wealthy, self-assured.

"I'll be home real soon, yes. Another meeting, I know, I know. I'll probably be out of town but — look, why don't I tell you when I get home? I'm leaving the office right now," fuck but he lies so easily, the woman — and it will be a woman — he swore to love entirely oblivious about the whereabouts of her husband's cock mere minutes previously, "I'll see you soon, honey. Love you, too."

In the shadows, Harrison waits. The flexing roar under his skin crescendos, the measured press of his pulse from his chest to his fingertips, hands in the pockets of his jacket as he stays entirely still. The guy is checking his phone, pausing to scroll through emails or texts, frowning for a moment as he points his key fob in the vague direction of his car. At Harrison's side, the locks of the Audi clunk, the lights flashing. Business Suit takes four steps forward and reaches for the door handle.

"Hey," Harrison says, pushing off from the wall.

" _Jesus_!" Business Suit jumps, fear of black men in dark jackets appearing at the driver's door of his car dancing in every word he doesn't say. "I — I didn't see you."

"Does your wife know where you've been?" Harrison asks, in lieu of pleasantries. Business Suit stares at him, calculating him, running up a price tag in his head, no doubt. "Does she know you've been fucking a whore? A whore with a _cock_? See, most wives would overlook you fucking your secretary, right? That's par for the overpriced golf course, but you — you're not like your business buddies, are you?"

"Step away from my car."

"Of course, _sir_ ," and Harrison moves closer, scrapes his keys deliberately along the ink-black exclusivity of that expensive German paint job. The metal scars through underneath, Business Suit is squeaking something about calling the police. "Will you?" Harrison asks, gouging his key a little harder, paint and steel curling up like cresting waves. "Go ahead, call them. Explain why you were here."

"I was visiting a friend," he says, lips tight, face pale.

Harrison snorts. "A friend who's thirty years younger than you? A friend who looks like _that_ with a valid license to work as an escort in the state of California?"

"Is this — are you _blackmailing_ me?" he asks, eyes narrowed. "You're his fucking _pimp_ or—"

The rest of the sentence remains unspoken, stolen by the way his ribs shape to the side of his car with a winded groan. Harrison holds him there, hands fisted into the lapels of his jacket, strains up to bring their faces close. "Oh, I'm worse than that. I'm his boyfriend. Stay the fuck away from him."

"That's up to Riley," his fingers are fumbling uselessly at the door handle, sliding slippery against his sweaty palm; it's pointless, it's held closed by their combined body weight, "you don't get to decide if—"

"Stay the fuck away from him," Harrison repeats, dark with menace. "And this won't have to escalate."

He leaves him panting, trembling, like Riley did to him but so much worse, and heads for the stairwell without looking back.

"I'm losing clients," Riley murmurs. "I guess they heard about the vandalism."

It has nothing to do with their cars; men will overlook many things for tight heat around their cocks. They're more concerned about the shadow monster, the lurking frightener in darkened parking lots who whispers promises of repercussions to come. It's too easy, scaring them away. Threatening their family life and the illusion of solid, all-American stability that they depend on in their jobs. The American dream never looked so good as it does on a man who's dick is still slippery with lube his wife doesn't know about.

"You know the offer still stands to move in with me," Harrison says, straining against the way Riley has him tied to the bed frame. If this is an unusual time to have this conversation, Riley's face doesn't show it. He's getting used to it now, the expectation that physical nakedness exacerbates his emotional vulnerability, that these times are for sharing secrets.

Riley cocks his head and jerks his hips, the lust-thick swell of his cock throbbing raw inside of Harrison. He reaches up, pale hands closing around Harrison's throat, exactly how he likes, his vision spotting at the edges as Riley whispers. "Maybe you're right." He presses down harder against Harrison's windpipe.

Harrison comes, glorious heat and cramped-gut desperate.

Harrison focuses single-mindedly on rendering Riley compliant, defenceless, _dependent_. Parking lot warnings drift to waiting in the elevator, in turn _that_ becomes standing on the doorstep of exclusive homes in places like Malibu, Trousdale and Beverly Hills. Systematically, Harrison destroys Riley's client base, dismantles his livelihood with threats of exposure, of photographs and headlines and emails landing on the desks of Fortune 500 CEOs.

Right now, Harrison is lurking in the shadows by the mock-Spanish splendour of a villa in Sherman Oaks. It's completely ridiculous that city officials — in this case, the city attorney, Robert Lyne — list their addresses in the public domain. A few clicks and keystrokes and Harrison was armed with all the information he needed to stage a late-night warning. Against the curb, his Range Rover looks entirely at home, no raised eyebrows or rabble-roused neighborhood watch patrols appearing to flush him out of hiding.

The car draws onto the drive a little after eight; a hundred grand of shiny German engineering in discreet dark gray. The man that steps from the car is thin, weasel-sharp with slicked back hair and the confident air of someone who has no idea what's coming. Harrison waits until his key is in the door before he steps from the shadows.

"Hey."

The way Robert skitters sideways, hurling himself against the stucco like he's expecting Harrison to pull a gun is equal parts hilarious and gratifying. The last time Riley saw this guy, he was coming across Riley's face, smearing it with the pad of his thumb as Riley moaned like he was eager for it. But Harrison is a reasonable man, he's willing to keep his dislike under control.

"Who — who are you? What are you doing here? This is a private neighborhood, you can't just—"

"I'm here to talk to you about Riley," Harrison says, voice level. Robert flinches visibly. "What's wrong, Robert — hey, I can call you _Bob_ , right? I mean, you fucked my boyfriend, after all."

"I — I never. I — I'm a married man."

"Me too! Hey, that's awesome, right? Sanctity of marriage, what a fucking _trip_ , am I right? Anyway, the thing is, _Bob_ , I'm here to tell you to stay away from Riley. Permanently. Think you can do that for me?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Across four feet of red-tiled porch, Robert — _Bob_ — considers him with sour dislike. Harrison shouldn't have shown up in jeans, he should have made an effort. He smiles but suspects it doesn't reach his eyes as he leans against the wall, firmly between Bob and his front door. There are lights on in the house and another car on the driveway. Harrison's smile widens.

"Is your wife home?" he asks sweetly; Bob flinches. "Oh boy, we should get her out here for this, don't you think? I mean, it's only right that she knows where you've been shoving your dick."

"Stay the hell away from my family," Bob snarls, a sudden spitfire of fury, like he's just realised he has a six inch height advantage without acknowledging the fact that Harrison could probably bench press him with one hand. "I can make assholes like you disappear—"

Harrison clucks his tongue and wags his finger, a disapproving mother scolding a truculent child. "Now, now, _Bob_. Don't go making silly threats. I'm being reasonable, just stay away from Riley and I won't have to let the lovely Mrs Lyne know why her husband's always in a meeting on Thursday afternoons. Doesn't that sound good?"

"I don't know anyone named Riley."

Harrison rolls his eyes. "Cute. To specify," and here Harrison raises his voice a little, the threat of a screaming crescendo in cookie-cutter suburbia, "I mean the _rent boy_ you've been fucking. Blond, about so high, _massive_ dick, does that sound familiar, Bob? Do you know who I'm talking about now?"

"Shut up!" Bob hisses, puce with rage and, probably, an impending heart attack. "Just shut your fucking mouth. Do you want money? Is that it? I — I'll go to the police."

God, they always threaten him with the police. "Look buddy, I'll tell you what I told the others — and there's a _lot_ of _others_ — do you really want to stand there, in front of the cops, and tell them your hooker's boyfriend is threatening you?"

Sensibly, Bob doesn't answer.

"I'm just saying. Stay away from Riley and I stay away from you and your gorgeous wife. Janice, isn't it? Oh, and how's Tommy doing at Stanford? Man, I would _hate_ to have to pay him a visit and find out if he knows—"

"Enough! That's — that's enough," Bob is gray, sweating, Harrison is humming with the pulse-bright power of it, "Stay away from me."

"And you'll stay away from Riley?"

"Whatever the hell he's called, yes, I'll stay away."

"You're one of the smart ones, no backbone at all," Harrison claps him on the shoulder and relishes in the way Bob shrinks back away from him, "I like you. I ever need a lawyer, you'll be the last one I call."

He drives back to West Hollywood with the radio cranked loud and the windows rolled down, the Los Angeles cloud of gasoline fumes consuming him like party pills.

When he get back Harrison finds the apartment shrouded in silence. The TV is on, but muted, Riley cast in shadow and light that flickers along the planes of his cheekbones, the elegant sweep of his nose. He's collapsed, a man in ruin, his shoulders hunched and his hands clasped loosely between his knees. He's never looked better.

In the doorway, Harrison waits for him to look up. He doesn't. "Why'd you do it?"

It's an open question, Harrison isn't a fan of those. The marriage counsellor said they weren't a useful tool for effective communication, that questions should be specific and requests well-phrased. Ashleigh used a lot of open questions. Ashleigh used _that_ particular open question more than once.

"I don't know what you mean," he says, instead of answering. If there is one thing a man with the vastness of Harrison's intellect at his disposal knows, it's that he should only admit to precisely as much as Riley can prove. He drops his car keys into the bowl on the counter, goes to the fridge. "I feel like Jamaican food for dinner. You want a beer?"

"No, I don't want a fucking _beer_ ," Riley hisses, meeting Harrison's eyes. He's angry, which is understandable, he's angry because he doesn't understand that this is for the best. Harrison has spent four months shifting the boundaries of Riley's reality, drawing him into the lovesong of his script. He's provided the lyrics, he needs Riley to pitch him the melody.

He shrugs against the countertop and raises his eyebrows. "Is something wrong, babe?"

"I know what you've done, I just want an explanation. You've ruined my fucking _life_ , Harrison! I — the agency called me, they told me my _pimp_ has been showing up at clients houses. My fucking _pimp_!"

That is unfair.

"I never told anyone that I'm your pimp," Harrison feels it's important that Riley understands the reasoning behind his actions, that if Riley realizes all of this is his own fault for refusing the follow the script, they can start over and make this good, "I specifically told them I'm _not_ your pimp, I'm your boyfriend. All I'm doing is looking out for you, don't you get it? Whoever's doing this shit to your apartment, to your car, _they're_ the sick fuck, not me."

When Riley took an expensive overnight with a high-ranking police officer two days ago, the first thing that greeted them in the hallway the next morning was the word _pigfucker_. Harrison watched their reactions on the hallway camera, he's taken screenshots of the twisted pale of Riley's horrified face, his hand clasped to his mouth like he needs it to hold the fear inside. The Deputy Chief of Police will be in the market for another warm hole for his cock.

"I don't need you to take care of me," Riley says to a spot on the wall over Harrison's shoulder, "I'm not a child and I didn't ask for you to protect me. I can take care of this myself."

Harrison pops the tab on his beer and lets his lips curl into a smirk. "No, you're totally right, you're handling this just fine. Hey, that graffitti outside your front door is looking _great_." Riley is doing a fantastic impersonation of a spoilt little boy, lower lip trembling, scowling fierce. Harrison will not negotiate with emotional terrorists. "And when was the last time you slept in your own apartment? You know, by yourself, not when you're getting dicked by—"

" _Why don't you fucking understand_?" Riley roars to his feet, pacing around the coffee table, expressive hands a blur. That under-the-skin sensation pours through Harrison, the flex and push of the darkness that simmers beneath the surface pressing at skin and sinew. He's too large for the physical vessel that holds him, too much for Riley to handle. He flexes his fingers against the countertop until his knuckles glow bone-bright beneath the skin. "I'm not your fucking _project_ , I'm not — I don't rely on you for any of this, I didn't _ask_ you to scare anyone off and — and I'm going to lose my fucking _career_ over this! Do you know how hard I've worked at this? How long it takes to build up a reputation like mine? I'm supposed to be fucking _discreet_ and you're out there, _threatening_ my clients? You're a fucking _psycho_ —"

In movies, the sound of knuckles to flesh is always exaggerated; a sharp crack of bone against skin as heads snap back. In reality, it's dull, barely a wet thump as Riley jerks away, hands thrown up to protect himself. Funny, Harrison doesn't remember crossing the room but here he is, fist pulled back to take a second shot — if he needs to — the other tight in the chest of Riley's polo shirt.

He doesn't need to take a second swing, doesn't tighten the cotton until Riley chokes on the disgusting, ungrateful _lies_ pouring from him like stagnant overflow. He doesn't need to, because Riley falls still and silent, blinking at him from wide, terrified eyes, the right one swollen sore already. This is the kind of bullshit Ashleigh used to say about him, even though the counsellor told her she was wrong.

When he speaks, it's slow, calm. His grip on the shirt tightens. "I am _not_ a fucking psycho. I'm your _boyfriend_ and I'm concerned about you."

Slowly, his fingers unwind from Riley's shirt. Slowly, Riley steps away, reaches for the bag dropped at the side of the couch. He backs across the living room, his eyes never leaving Harrison in the semi-gloom blue light of the muted TV. At the doorway, he pauses — halfway to slamming the door — and hisses venom that slides, the blotch-blue spread of bruising, under Harrison's ribs and into the gore-red cavity of his chest.

"You're _not_ my fucking boyfriend, douchebag. Stay the fuck away from me."

It's unfair. It always is. No one _ever_ understands that everything Harrison does is with their best interests at heart.

# Six

Riley doesn't come back.

When Ashleigh left, Harrison didn't miss her. He disliked the way she thought she knew best, that she could walk away from him when that wasn't part of his plan. But the thing he felt most viscerally was relief. He's not sure he actively misses _Riley_ , but he hates the way the bedsheets shape cold on one side, the spot on the couch where he'd curl with his feet tucked under him left empty. Harrison shreds each page of the pretentious novel, tips the expensive wine down the sink, feeds the vinyl one by one down the garbage chute.

It doesn't make him feel any closer to absolution.

The problem with Riley is that he is, quite simply, entirely ungrateful for everything Harrison's done for him. Each selfless act of heroic altruism is kicked back, every offer, attempt and gentle encouragement towards betterment has been twisted, turned and shoved between Harrison's shoulder blades. Riley is the scorpion riding on the back of the frog, orchestrating his own end with the pitiless drive of his sting because – as he sees it – it's in his nature.

But Harrison won't let them sink. He's got this grand plan, this master manipulation lined up in his back pocket. Riley will understand when it all falls into place and in the meantime, Harrison can watch every move he makes in glorious high-definition.

He buys another laptop, links it up so he can watch Riley as he works. It's almost like they're sitting together, watching the same TV shows, listening to the same music, companionable silence stretching between them as Harrison works. Sometimes, Harrison will whisper a witty observation to the screen. Occasionally, Riley smiles, like he can hear him.

It's going well, the screenplay wrapping up as Harrison moves into the final act. He has a finale sketched out, the big ending, he smiles whenever he thinks about it.

Of course, it fucks up with a phone call.

"Harrison," Eddie says, halfway between cautious and resigned, "you good?"

"Mmhmm, pretty good, yeah." Harrison isn't really listening, watching Riley with a new client; he's younger, rougher, Harrison's pretty sure Riley isn't making close to as much as he was a few weeks ago. He's getting desperate, taking on clients from outside of the agency. It really is only a matter of time until he meets someone dangerous. "What's up?"

"Listen," Eddie mutters; Harrison hums softly to demonstrate he's doing just that. "I – I really didn't want to do this over the phone but, like, you're not responding to meeting requests or – or _anything_."

"Oh shit! The fucking scripts, am I right? Damn, I'll get those – get them right to you," Harrison trails off, watches the way Riley slides to his knees and tugs down the kind of jeans Harrison has in his own closet. The guy has a tiny cock but acts like it's huge, pressing Riley down onto him with a sharp jerk of his hips.

"We're kind of past that point," Eddie says, something in his tone has changed, some dark inflection that catches the flammable edge of Harrison's attention. Under his skin, he stretches, flexing dark against the inevitable confrontation. "Harrison, I – we're terminating your contract."

" _Excuse_ me?" There's no possible way that Harrison heard that correctly, no universe in which he, Harrison Hughes, is fired from the show he brought into being. "That almost sounds like you're firing me but, like, you wouldn't do that, would you?"

"You haven't turned in a script in _four months_! I've tried, I really have, I've called meetings, sent you emails, left you voicemails but—"

"You know I'll sue you, don't you?" Harrison asks, eyes still fixed on Riley. His gut twists with furious jealousy. "You know I'll take this as far as I need to until you're fucking _nothing_."

"You can't sue us," Eddie sighs, he sounds done. "You haven't delivered a single script on the new season—"

Irritated, Harrison waves a hand. "I'll get one to you by the end of the week."

"We already started _filming_! Look man, I'm sorry, I really am, and if you want to lawyer up then go right ahead. But you won't win. Maybe when everything calms down we can go for a drink or something. I'm worried about you. Are you—"

Harrison hangs up before he can say anymore. He watches Riley in silence for a second then pushes to his feet, walks into the hallway and down to the elevator. He rides to the parking garage and finds the four-year-old Volkswagen parked in 12b's guest spot.

He puts his fist through the driver's window and imagines how well the dudebro in Riley's bed might take it.

There's a special kind of silence in the limerence between late and early, even in Los Angeles. The light strips away to shades of amethyst tinged with gold from the streetlights as it slants through the blinds in Harrison's bedroom, the traffic as close to calm as it gets. Riley's bedroom is dark, silent, the shape of him outlined like a death mask under his Egyptian cotton sheets.

In his bedroom, at his desk, Harrison works under the synthetic glow of his lamp. Ten cameras at unprofessional angles; it's not a glamor shoot but it's enough to put together a masterpiece. Harrison has selected his cast with care; the city attorney, the Deputy Chief of Police and the junior Senator. He trims his narrative, shows Riley's best side and divides hours of footage down into three neat files saved to his desktop.

He watches each one from beginning to end; thirty-minute showpieces set to music that isn't soft enough to drown out voices, to hide the way these men moan for a whore. Harrison considers his options on Google, selecting only the most prolific amateur sites and contemplating for a moment how unfair it is that Riley never shared his last name.

He loads the files, watches the intermittent hell of the rolling blue bar and then, finger poised, considers the sum total of his actions so far. This is his death blow. This is the thing that will drive Riley back through the wall and into his arms.

He hits upload. He waits a minute then carefully copies and pastes each link into an email, an address tapped into the send bar, then pauses, phone raised to his ear.

The voice that answers is drowsy, unamused. "Harrison? The fuck are you doing, man? It's three in the fucking morning."

They say the news never sleeps, but apparently the people that write it _do_. Mikey is an old college friend, brother of Gervase, the one that got a real fucking job and went into journalism. He's something relatively high-up, news editor or copy editor or something that isn't quite editor-in-chief of the digital branch of ABC News.

"Michael," he greets him softly, eyes on the wall that separates him from Riley's living room. "How's it going?"

"It's still three in the fucking morning, dipshit. I have a six-month-old, what do you _want_?"

"How's work?" Harrison asks, conversational and bright. He can hear the way Mikey grits his teeth. "Life? The wife?"

"Seriously, asshole," Mikey cuts him off, Harrison's finger hovers over the send button. "What?"

"I hear you're chasing the deputy editor role at the website," Harrison says softly; Mikey's shift to interested is palpable, the scent of blood in the water. Harrison can imagine the way he rolls to his stomach and reaches for those blocky, designer glasses.

"And?" Mikey almost makes it sound like he doesn't care.

"I'm about to send you something that's gonna make those assholes CNN wish they'd snapped you up years ago," Harrison can taste the victory at the back of his tongue, his fingers tingling with anticipation.

"Oh?" Mikey prompts, careful, like Harrison is a wild animal that might spook if he speaks too loudly. "What's that?"

"Get to your laptop and stay on the line while you watch it."

Fifteen minutes later, Mikey breathes deeply down the line. "Holy shit. How much do you want for it?"

In the darkness, Harrison smiles at Riley through the screen. "Nothing. Just make sure it runs tomorrow."

Harrison shapes himself around his laptop for the rest of the night. He hits refresh like it's his new religion, sculpting prayer in the shape and sound of the homepage and pop-up ads for Taco Bell. It hits at five — Mikey must have worked through — a devastating headline and carefully cropped screenshots that skate just the right side of public decency. There's a link, for anyone that wants to view the damnation of the keepers of the country's safety and democracy at their very worst, balls-deep in a call boy in an unnamed apartment building somewhere in West Hollywood.

The TV stations pick it up within the hour, pundits and talking heads called in to discuss the morality of those who swear to serve their nation whilst pounding the ass of an anonymous dude for cash. It's not clear if it's the sex, the cost or the gender of the hooker that concerns America the most. Harrison revels in it over his morning coffee.

_Known only as 'Riley'_ , that's how they refer to him, his face unpixelated at Harrison's insistence. Harrison is caught between pride and fixation, an ear to the wall and his eye on his laptop for the moment Riley turns on the news.

When it happens, it is entirely, hopelessly glorious. Riley wakes late, as usual, reaches for his phone and struggles up against the pillows. One arm tucked behind his head and beautiful paleness on display, he scruffs his fingers through his hair and frowns down at the screen. He pauses, hauls himself upright and swings his legs over the mattress. He stares down at his phone in palpable disbelief.

"What the _fuck_?" For once, Harrison doesn't need the camera to hear it echoing, rife with sceptical fury, through plasterboard and paint.

He scrambles for his television, flicking through the news channels and considering the line of his own spine, his head tossed back as he rides the Deputy Chief of Police through the mattress. The impeccable round of his ass is blurred. His face is not. He repeats, hysterical, " _What the fuck_?"

His phone vibrates — the during-the-night-silence lifted — and he raises it to his ear. Harrison shuffles forward in his seat and listens, half a conversation booming through his speakers and through the wall.

"Bob? What the fuck is going on? I — I didn't... No! No, it's not like that! I don't even — I would _never_ record them! Why would I _do_ that? What can I — but, it wasn't _me_! I've had this — someone's been showing up in my apartment when I'm not around, and — they must've — I _didn't_ — no, wait, don't — you can't just — I've been on the books for _five years_ , man! Bob — Bob, _wait_ , I — _please_!"

Riley stills, staring at the screen. Harrison has a camera directly above the television and one at the wall near the bedroom door, this means he can watch Riley's face, trace it with artistic care for the precise second his world falls apart around him. It's exquisite. It's _magnificent_. In his pants, Harrison's cock stirs. Ten feet away but in another universe entirely, Riley, slow-motion smooth, buries his face in his hands and staggers back to the couch.

In his own apartment, on his own couch, Harrison smiles. He is in control. He's basically God; omniscient, omnipresent.

Vengeful.

He crosses the living room, brushes his lips against the party wall and takes a breath. "Riley?"

The MacBook screen shows him that Riley isn't moving, frozen entirely, cocooned in the knowledge that there's no possible escape from Harrison. He blinks slowly, descending back into the room as the news hums on from the television. He's wearing his glasses but nothing else, slightly askew on the bridge of his nose, endless pale curled in on himself against the couch cushions.

"Riley, are you listening to me? I saw the news."

There's a gorgeous haze on his movements as he shakes his head, forgetting that Harrison can't see him — even though Harrison can — his lip bitten hard between his teeth.

"You did this, didn't you?" he asks softly, the thought erupting, each piece of the puzzle of the past few months sliding neatly into place. God, Harrison thought he'd never figure it out, he's despised him for his gullible stupidity whilst exploiting it for every advantage its offered him. " _You_ fucking _did_ this, _didn't you_?"

"What you need to understand," Harrison says, his voice low, his inflection calm and collected, it is very important that Riley understands the motivation behind what may seem to him, a lesser man, like madness, "is that this is for the best. For us. We can move forward now."

Riley has his phone in his hand, pacing his bedroom as he stares down at the screen. Animal fear crawls through each flex of his shoulders, his thighs, his eyes darting frantically around the room. He reaches up, brushes his fingertips against the wall and comes away with something caught in his hand.

Camera four.

He stares down at it. His disbelief is palpable, the revelation that Harrison is the one in control shuddering through him like aftershocks. A slow smile curls its curdled way across Harrison's lips; _finally_.

"Riley, are you listening to me?"

"You – you planted these," he whispers, his Scooby Doo moment – it _wasn't_ a ghoul or a spook or a monster, it was old man Jenkins! – skittering across the elegant lines of his mouth, his eyes springing wide, caught in beautiful hi-resolution and tucked neatly into Harrison's hard drive. "You told me you cared about me and then you fucking _spied_ on me? You're _insane_!"

Harrison is tired of the things he hasn't been allowed to say, the carefully contrived veneer of keeping his distance. He's owned every movement Riley makes from the moment he steps over the threshold of his apartment, until the second he leaves it. And yes, it's irritating that Riley is less than thrilled with this revelation that, as expected, he's going to pretend this is something other than a delicately executed attempt to keep him safe from the real villains in this love story. But Harrison's close to certain he can talk him around.

The pretty ones are never that bright.

"Baby," he begins – it's important to keep Riley on side, to make him feel protected, "you know I only did this because there was no other way to keep you safe. You thought someone was going into your place, I just thought—"

"That was you," Riley is frozen, still naked, glasses balanced adorably on the bridge of his nose. Harrison pauses; he didn't imagine Riley would figure it out quite so quickly. "You did that, didn't you? You – when I had you come over to let the super inside! You fucking _asshole_! I'm going to the police, you're a fucking _nutjob_!"

Okay, Harrison is going to back right up and knock a couple of perceived IQ points back off his pretty little whore. He rolls his eyes and smiles indulgently. "The police? Do you _really_ think the LAPD are going to come riding to your rescue when you outed their Deputy Chief? Oh, he had his dick all the way up inside you, that was a good one, watching you fucking squirm for him. Did he feel good, Riley?"

This is the moment, the electric, golden soap bubble moment, where Riley bends or breaks. Where he succumbs entirely to what Harrison wants him to be or kicks back. Harrison's not sure which way he wants it to go; compliance is such a desirable trait in a partner but a fight is always fun, too. Riley demonstrates his intentions in a gesture of explosive, irrevocable fury, the tiny camera placed on the dresser, a bottle of expensive cologne snatched and slammed, a temporary battering ram, into plastic and microchips.

On Harrison's laptop, camera four shudders out of service.

"Sick motherfucker," Riley screams through the wall, lips flecked wet with spit, "you fucking psychopathic piece of goddamn _shit_!"

He grabs his phone, examines the screen for a moment and then takes off around the bedroom, snatching at the cameras as he finds them, referring to the footage for angles, positions, potential hiding places. On the laptop, cameras flash out of service as Riley howls his rage through the wall. In the center of his living room, Harrison watches, waits, tense through every muscle until his jaw aches and his fingers cramp. His guts are burnt up, roiling with fury as Riley picks through the apartment and locates each possible point of unknown voyeurism.

Finally, breathless and furious, Riley's voice shudders through the drywall, his mouth clearly very close. "You're a fucking sociopath. I want you to stay the fuck away from me. For real this time."

"Sweetheart," Harrison says, teeth gritted, rage flaring through his vascular system, each artery, vein and capillary flooded black and ugly, "I did this for you. For _us_. I know you don't understand right now, you're not smart enough to figure it out but—"

" _Stay the fuck away from me you fucking psycho_!"

He punctuates the last of his childish temper tantrum with his knuckles cracking against the plaster. On the wall, Harrison's Ikea prints shudder, shake, one falls to the floor. Apartment 12b falls silent; entirely, totally, absolutely. Harrison reviews his belief that there is no such thing as a complete absence of sound.

The sum of Harrison's universe is decreasing. He's robbed of his career, his boyfriend, his cameras, it seems that his specified circle of interests decreasing rapidly. The world is so very unfair to men like Harrison.

The screenplay comes together beautifully without Riley providing constant distraction through the wall.

Harrison gives up on sleep unless his body screams for it, barely eats, doesn't watch TV or speak to his friends — not that he has _friends_ to speak to, rather a collection of carefully grouped, backstabbing assholes. Instead, he devotes himself to the shape of his keyboard under his fingers, half an ear on the wall for the sound of Riley on the other side. Riley remains resolutely silent.

It draws to a close on an unremarkable Wednesday afternoon, the freeway roaring by beyond his window, the low-hum sounds of apartment living creaking on around him. He sits back and rolls the knot of agonized tension from between his shoulder blades. He pops each knuckle on his right hand, then gets to work on the left.

_The End._

His love story is complete, his magnum opus, the sum total of everything Harrison is and all he imagines he can be is stacked in front of him in a carefully constructed Pages document. All he needs is the correct conductor, the magnificence of a mind that appreciates his artistic vision sufficiently to hinge the whole symphony together. Every interaction is scored, each moment of soaring bliss and the depth of each time Riley didn't understand laid out and ready for cinematic recreation.

There's literally no way Riley can fail to understand this.

He gets to work on promotion. He may have found himself confined to weeknight television, but that doesn't mean he hasn't made connections. The name Harrison Hughes means something, of course it does, the wittiest mind in the sharpest writing team in Hollywood. It's a goddamn miracle that none of the powerhouse production companies have been in touch with him yet, it's not like his removal from the team has gone unnoticed in the press. Harrison assumes they're giving him time to cool off, to find himself and recenter his creative vision. As if Harrison is the kind of man to rest on his heels and wait for the world to find him.

Each producer he chooses is hand-picked, selected like the summer-hang of ripe fruit, chosen on a roster of movies that cover the kind of love song Harrison wants to sing to Riley through movie theaters both national and international. There's no way something like this won't be nominated for an Academy Award, it needs the right name behind it from the start. He lines them up, a dozen emails sent without the script attached. Harrison isn't an idiot and he won't be signing a release; his script is his, intellectual property laws will not allow some hack to steal away with his sonnet and reproduce it in some trashy, made-for-television Hallmark holiday special.

Harrison closes his laptop and brushes his fingers against the wall. If he rests his ear to the paint and closes his eyes, he can almost imagine he can hear Riley humming in the shower.

The silence is broken at three in the morning, Riley's speakers shoved against the bedroom wall and cranked to full volume, blasting Norwegian battle metal through the drywall until Harrison is demented with the ringing clang of dissonant electric guitars and warring drums.

Robbed of the first real sleep he's enjoyed since Riley smashed the cameras, Harrison stares out of the window and wonders if it was Riley or Ray that came up with this idea. He figures Riley can't keep this up for long.

Riley does it every night. Waiting desperately for a response to his emails, Harrison starts to wonder if Riley possibly has one of those personality disorders David used to talk about. He wonders if he ought to text him the therapist's number. It couldn't hurt to have him work out his issues before he gets over his temper tantrum and comes back.

The reply comes in a week after Harrison sent out the emails, an innocuous reply from a bland-looking email address. Harrison assumes it's an assistant and immediately deducts percentile points of the shared profit from a producer who doesn't have the good sense to contact him directly.

It's to the point, a missive arranging a meeting through the shared catalog of their Google calendars, instruction to meet at some fashionable little coffee shop out in Malibu and to bring the script along with him. Whoever said that the only way to generate interest in a project was to give the whole thing away in a neat little PDF document clearly didn't have the wit, talent or common sense granted to Harrison. He's kept his idea safe, stored neatly in his hard drive and nowhere else; no one will take this from him without his express consent and a large check.

They want to meet immediately, the director, leaving Harrison with very little choice but to shove his laptop into his messenger bag, to shrug on a shirt he's sure is clean enough and race down the stairs and behind the wheel of his Range Rover. The paintwork on Riley's BMW is pristine once more, repaired and repainted, a little dusty from lack of use.

Maybe they'll move, when all of this is fixed up. Maybe Harrison will find them a place out towards the ocean where he can go running along the beach and Riley can watch him from the floor-to-ceiling windows in one of those beautiful, beach-side condos out in Malibu. They can adopt: kids and dogs, both are good for the image. Honestly, he has no idea why Riley is resisting this.

He finds the coffee shop easily enough: vegan, fair trade, ethically elitist in all the ways Eddie loves and Harrison can't stand. They sit towards the back; a short, fat dude dressed in greasy sweat and too-thick glasses, his pretty little redheaded assistant at his side. She's Harrison's type; pale, beautiful, delicately petite. The way she looks at him lets him know he could take her back to his place and have Riley spend a couple of hours listening in on what he's missing out on.

"I'm Mark," the guy introduces himself; Harrison gives him his most professional smile but sneaks the chick a wink; he'll bet the contents of his checking account that she's fucking the boss and figures it can't harm to show her the kind of dick she _could_ be riding. "This is—"

"Harrison," he offers his hand and shakes Mark's, notes the grip is wet, warm, weak; he doesn't need to be introduced to the assistant. "Nice to meet you. I'm just _super_ excited to work with you on this, your studio is one of the first ones I contacted." It's not, but the lie won't hurt, Mark smiles wide and bright. "I think you're really gonna love it."

"Actually," Red interrupts, smiling that tight, polite smile that Ashleigh used to give him when he said the wrong thing in front of her parents, "I'm Hayley, _I'm_ the producer. Mark here is my production assistant."

For a second, Harrison is immensely grateful that he didn't hold up a hand to stop her talking from the start. Still, he _likes_ a woman who thinks she's in charge, it's so much more rewarding when they submit to him so he turns the charm up a couple of notches and offers to get her another coffee.

"No thank you," she shakes her head, her lip curled into a smile. "Okay, you brought the screenplay along with you?"

"I sure did," Harrison says slowly, indulgently, pulling his MacBook from his bag and firing it into life. He pauses, the document open but pivoted protectively towards him as he glances up, gives her the doe eyes and smiles. "You're not going to rip me off, are you? Because I have, like, a whole bunch of lawyers. Everything on here is subject to copyright."

"Mr Hughes," she laughs, tinkling and pretty, and touches the back of his hand. "I can assure you that nothing you show me today will leave this cafe. Mark here is going to read over it while you and I have a talk through the finer details."

"But he's only an assistant." Harrison's smile hasn't slipped but his tolerance for the situation might be starting to nosedive. He's not here to be pushed around by a couple of timewasters.

"He's got a real eye for detail," Hayley assures him. Because Harrison hasn't slept properly in over a week, because he's exhausted and strung out and not thinking straight, he pushes the laptop towards Mark. He hesitates, half a heartbeat, hand still curled around he case. "Don't you want to tell me your pitch?" He let's go, Mark takes the laptop and Harrison turn his attention back to Hayley.

"Okay," he begins, pauses for dramatic effect and leans a little closer. Hayley mirrors him, her forearms braced to the table and he wonders precisely how easy it would be to talk this pretty little thing into bed. She's embarrassingly eager. "Let me tell you my love story..."

In honesty, Harrison's been imagining something a little more climactic than twenty minutes in an independent coffee shop in Malibu. He was expecting a little more than the opportunity to outline his story whilst Hayley nods enthusiastically and drops in witty observations at all the right moments while Mark frowns, silent, fingers skating the keys as he navigates through the screenplay.

Harrison supposes it doesn't really matter when the end result is exactly what he expects.

"This all sounds _great_ ," says Hayley, swinging her bag onto her shoulder as Mark tap-tap-taps a final time and clicks the laptop closed. "Honestly, we're really excited about this, and we want you to be completely involved. Total creative freedom. I need to speak to a few higher-ups," she rolls her eyes, invoking visions of dusty old men in need of persuasion to take on this, the greatest tale brought to the silver screen in decades, "but honestly, expect more contact in the next couple of weeks. I'm thinking Zac Efron, Bradley Cooper, big, _big_ things, you know? Ciao, babe!"

They leave, air kisses drenched in expensive perfume, hurrying out of the coffee shop and into the car parked right outside. It's big, black, expensive. Breathless with anticipation and vindicated entirely, Harrison pulls his laptop to his chest and considers calling Riley. Instead, he finishes his coffee and fires a text to Eddie.

_Go fuck yourself, asshole, and your shitty show. Some of us are going places._

It takes maybe an hour for him to arrive back at the apartment, for him to settle himself at his desk with a beer and the self-congratulatory opportunity to read back through the screenplay. He waits, watching the screen, for his usual screensaver to flare into life. But instead of Riley smiling from the screen, he's greeted with a high-defintion, deeply impersonal shot of the Himalayas. Mark, he decides irritably, is a fucking idiot, clicking on shit he doesn't understand.

There's no password though, no link to his profile. Only the home screen with the factory-setting apps staring back at him.

Deep in the recesses of Harrison's mind, something cold and panicked begins to stir.

He scrambles for his documents folder and finds it entirely empty. Fury burning bright in his gut, he clicks through icon after icon, searching hidden folders, deleted items, everything empty, new, factory reset and ready for action. That bastard, that utter fucking _asshole_ , has completely wiped everything, every page, every word, every keystroke. Gone.

This has to be okay, Harrison scrolls through his phone and searches frantically for a way to pull the information back from the electronic ether. There's nothing. From his desk, a portable USB drive smirks up at him in outright, hostile accusation. Harrison didn't save a backup copy, didn't think he needed to, didn't think it was sensible to have multiple copies lying around where anyone could find them.

Rage coils through him, snaking through that hidden monster lurking just beneath his surface. He screams, animal-sound torn bright and burning from the back of his throat as he snatches his phone, draws it back and hurls it to splinter, to crack and smash and scar holes in the wall between his apartment and Riley's. He has no doubt whatsoever that the producer will steal his story, that he'll be left with nothing to prove he ever existed in the creative process, his life's work snatched and torn away from him.

It's not fair.

On the screen in front of him, something catches his eye. A tiny icon tucked away beneath the factory presets and Safari browser window. _Obsess Over You.mov._

Listen, Harrison is not an idiot. He's an educated man, well-versed in scams and viruses and malicious bastards tearing away months of work he can never recapture. He's bold with white-hot fury, though, his nails sinking into his palms, hands shaking and, viciously, he stabs at the icon with his mouse and watches the software open.

On the screen, Riley grins at him once again. But this time, it's not the slutty smile from his bedsheets but the wicked-sharp quirk of a smirk, his eyes glowing devilish through the screen of his iPhone.

"Hey, asshole," he greets him, in the background, Harrison can see movement, can see multiple someones moving boxes and furniture around an apartment that's mostly empty. He has this horrible, gut-snarled feeling that there's a joke he's not part of. "As you can see, I'm just in the process of moving out, didn't want you around while I did it so I came up with a little activity to keep you out of my hair. Like a fucking _child_ , Harrison, because that's what you are — nothing but a spoilt little boy demanding his toys. I'm not your fucking toy."

In his bedroom, Harrison snarls. On the screen, Riley continues, entirely oblivious. "So, I spoke to your wife. God, she's _great_ , she's funny, she's smart, super goddamn pretty, you really fucked up there, buddy. She told me _all_ about you; bugging her phone? Seriously? Isolating her from her friends and family, bullying her, intimidating her, screwing with her birth control. _Fucking your marriage counsellor_. You know what she said to me? _At least he never hit me_. That's the bar for you, isn't it Harrison? That's the low fucking level you somehow managed to slither over for the course of your marriage." He pauses, scratches his jaw and calls out an instruction to someone shifting his couch. His eyes slide back to the screen, to Harrison. "Did you really think you'd get away with writing about me? That I wouldn't find out? Bitch _please_ , you think I'd fuck the Chief of Police, the fucking _senator_ , all those CEOs and not have a couple directors on my books when I live in Los Angeles? The only thing I regret is not having a camera in your place to see what you look like right now. Honestly, though? I'm just glad I never have to see you or think about you ever again. I hope Ashleigh takes you for every penny you have left. I _win_ , douchebag. Oh, and Harrison?" He pauses, smiles wide, sends a wink into the camera. "Go fuck yourself."

The screen dims to dark.

In his bedroom, frozen, Harrison considers his options. This isn't easy when his mind is racing, whirring, attempting to process the glaring reality of it. Riley fucked him over, set the meeting up himself and snatched away Harrison's love song. These are not the actions of someone who appreciates the efforts that Harrison has gone to. Ungrateful, conniving, backstabbing little whore.

Harrison is forced to face the very real possibility that Riley has removed himself entirely from Harrison's frame of reference. He has nothing to go on but a first name and a generic Midwest accent, a series of previous-life anecdotes that mean he has the wealth, resources and capacity to relocate himself just about anywhere in the United States or Europe.

Alone in an apartment with a mortgage that makes him wince, no job, no screenplay and nowhere to turn but the realistic possibility of his mom's basement back in Chicago, Harrison puts his fist through the screen of his MacBook.

Life — he swears — will _never_ treat him fairly.

Riley loves New York. He's missed it intensely, surprised by the ferocity of joy blooming bright beneath his lungs as he walks through Central Park. He hums Nat King Cole to himself as he walks, thumbing through his phone and confirming his afternoon appointment with a high-flying attorney from one of the cities big-name firms. It's taken a while, but he thinks his reputation might be close to salvaged.

The city stretches under early summer sunlight, filtering through the trees as he makes his way towards home; a converted brownstone on a quiet, tree-lined street in one of the more exclusive parts of Manhattan. It's the kind of place no one notices a changing roster of expensive cars at the curb outside of his building. After last time — and he tries very hard not to think about it — he enjoys the anonymity. Everyone in Los Angeles has a story, no one in New York wants to pry.

He kicks off his shoes, drops his keys onto the countertop and collapses on his couch, content for now to enjoy the silence and a good book. There's close to two hours until his client arrives and Riley isn't expecting visitors, his thumb making his place in the latest Neil Gaiman as he considers the way the light plays across the ceiling through the window.

Riley is happy now. Wary, sure. Less naive, less hopelessly trusting but in this, his anonymous sanctuary three thousand miles from a sociopath in West Hollywood, his life is precisely how he wants it to be. He's been thinking about the future, considering a segue from sex work to something more orthodox. Maybe he could take up some of those promising offers that rolled in before he made the move to Paris. It's something he'll think about another day.

On the wall, his intercom buzzes.

Funny. He's not expecting any visitors.

* * *

On the wall, his intercom buzzes and, irritated, Riley rolls to his feet. "Yeah?"

"Delivery for Riley Eldridge," the disembodied voice crackles through the speaker.

He unlocks the front door with a tap of his index finger. "Bring it up."

Riley is thinking very little as he waits by the front door, idly considering if he needs to book in for a wax this week or if he can push it back a few days, contemplating the wisdom of middle-of-the-night record-buying binges on obscure British websites. The delivery dude knocks at the door and, without hesitation, Riley pulls it open.

His heart, too big for his chest, for the shrunken waste of his suddenly useless lungs, attempts to stop and accelerate in the same stuttered second. His vision pricks sharp, washes white with panic and then floods back into terrifying technicolor. There's a real possibility he may throw up as he attempts to wrestle the door closed.

There's a foot jammed there. A shoulder. Someone seeping through the door, insidious.

"Hey, babe. What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?"

_The End_

# Vows

> Kyle insists that this time, he _won't_ fall asleep. _If I don't fall asleep, you can't leave_.
> 
> * * *
> 
> But he always does. And Ben always can.

Kyle is angry.

It didn't start that way. At seven he was hopeful, waiting with eager anticipation for the front door to click and familiar footsteps to echo down the hallway. Though with the time that stretches interminably between the instances he gets to hear them, he swears that they grow less familiar each time. Anyway, that was at seven, a full bowl of Halloween candy by the door and kids laughing on the street outside.

By eight he was verging on pissed off, had turned to the whisky in the cabinet that he knows he shouldn't drink quite so much of and yet... What, exactly, is the point in _not_ drinking it? Just a few measures, it couldn't harm, could it? It didn't inhibit his ability to hand out candy - the good stuff, peanut butter pumpkins, full size candy bars, the things Ben always made him buy - it just lent a small amount of purpose to the time between doorbell rings.

Nine saw him shift to worried, to pacing the room and pausing to flick the occasional hopeful glance out of the living room window. He knew he wouldn't see him, he never did, that motherfucker is _stealthy_ and the first he'd ever know of his arrival would be that click and the familiar-not-familiar footfalls.

By ten worry had given way to hopeless tears and yet more whisky. He wasn't coming. Not this time, and then what? If he didn't come - how could Kyle know if he'd ever show up again? This is their "thing", their process, the silly little dance that they do with one another and Ben isn't following the rules.

Eleven sees the anger flare as bright and burning as the whisky. Eleven sees him throwing things, smashing the Jameson bottle against the wall with a scream of rage and fury.

Every. Fucking. _Time._

It's like Ben doesn't realize - doesn't _care_ \- that these _dalliances_ keep Kyle going, keep him placing one foot in front of the other even on the days when it seems impossible, when it seems like just staying in bed is the best possible option because _existing_ is just too raw.

But now, it's close to midnight, the minute hand dragging closer second by second and the furious rage has ebbed away leaving nothing but searing, painful anger, hard and sharp at the edges, carving a hole in Kyle's chest. He's not coming. He slams back the whisky like it's to blame and begins to haul himself to his feet.

_Click._

He pauses, half in, half out of the armchair. It's not a particularly dignified position, he realizes that, but he waits, head cocked and ears trained on the hallway.

_Thump, thump, thump._

"Hey, baby," Ben greets him from the doorway, lounging against the frame with the same sad smile painted on his face that he wears every fucking time.

"Don't you _baby_ me," Kyle snarls. He considers grabbing the tumbler from the coffee table and hurling it at Ben's stupid fucking head but - _calm down, Kyle_ \- manages to pull it back to an ugly sneer and an expansive, but mostly incredibly drunk, hand gesture as he slumps back down into the chair. "Finally decided to show up, huh?"

"You know I get here when I can," Ben sighs, running a hand through his thick, dark hair. He's impossibly beautiful in the tight black jeans and leather jacket he always wears, dark eyes desperate above that thick, soft quirk of a mouth. Kyle snorts, hard and mirthless at the back of his throat, an ugly, bitter burst of noise that makes Ben wince away from him, cutting accusation sharp on his tongue. "You've been drinking."

_"You've been drinking,"_ Kyle mimics unkindly with a roll of his eyes. Eyes that flick down to Ben's left hand with a stab of pain that never seems to lessen, no matter how many times he sees it. "And _you're_ not wearing your wedding ring."

"We're not married anymore," Ben shrugs and Kyle sees - though he pretends not to - the flash of hurt in amber eyes, the way Ben's shoulders sag just a little. The first time Ben showed up he wasn't wearing it and it sliced through Kyle like burning blades, his own ring tucked snugly on the third finger of his left hand because, goddammit, he still felt married. He still _feels_ married.

"Yeah, well," Kyle feels the fury drain out of him, only hollow, aching sadness left behind as he wipes a hand over his eyes. "That wasn't exactly my choice, was it?"

"No," Ben shakes his head with the kind of melancholy smile that punches Kyle directly in the stomach. "I guess it wasn't. I'm sorry."

"For which part?" Kyle hauls himself to his feet and heads to the kitchen, senses Ben moving behind him to follow. "Being late? Or leaving me?"

There's a long silence between them. Kyle braces his hands against the back of one of the stools that surround the island and stares out of the window. It's black as pitch out in the backyard and he can't see anything but the kitchen they chose together reflected back at him, his own haunted eyes and Ben's face, tight with pain, behind him. He won't speak first, he _always_ speaks first and it's... It's not fucking _fair._

"Both," Ben offers, stepping close behind Kyle. He doesn't touch him but the suggestion of a presence is there, the warmth of his body heat and the low, electric hum that human bodies seem to radiate to one another when they're pressed in close proximity. Kyle closes his eyes and fights the urge to lean back, to sag into him like some pathetically grateful kid, desperate for contact. Even though he absolutely _is_ both pathetically grateful and desperate for contact. Ben continues, his voice low and soft, "I saw the pumpkins outside - very cute - did many kids show up?"

"Yeah," Kyle sighs, raking his hands through his hair. It looks a fucking mess, his reflection tells him that, his face ghost pale and his hair standing in ridiculous tufts and peaks. "It was fun. You remember Carla and Maria across the street? They adopted, they've got these two-year-old twins and they're just... Oh man, they're fucking adorable, I swear to God. They had little matching pumpkin outfits and..."

He can't continue, the tears are burning the back of his throat but he won't cry. He won't shed a single tear in front of that asshole. He won't cry for the things he and Ben didn't do, the kids that didn't happen, the house that rings with emptiness except on the nights - just like tonight - when Ben decides to grace him with his presence. He should move on, their marriage has been over for years now, he should find someone new and stop letting Ben _do_ this to him, time after pathetic time.

"I'm sorry," Ben repeats, hand warm against Kyle's hip. "I wish I'd seen them."

"Right," Kyle nods, businesslike, sniffing back his tears and gesturing in the vague direction of the oven. "I made dinner but that was five hours ago. It's ruined now." He lets it hang unspoken that he's not just talking about the seafood linguine, the delicate scallops and carefully made cream sauce, sitting dried out and inedible - just an ugly husk. Relatable.

"We could still eat it, I'm sure it's fine... Ben trails off as he crosses to open the door, stooping to peer inside. He gusts a sigh at the sight, "Oh. Well... We could order in? Pizza?"

"It's too late, Ben," Kyle shrugs and - again - he's not simply talking about food. "Could we just... Get on with what you came here for?"

"I came here to see you," Ben won't look at him, he closes the oven door but continues to stare down at the stove, shoulders tense. "Why do you do this every time? Do you want it to stop?"

That pulls Kyle up short, his breath catching solid at the back of his throat. Stop? No, he absolutely doesn't want it to stop, he can't bear the thought of it ending. He shakes his head like a desperate plea but Ben's not facing him, can't see, needs to hear, "No... I'm... I don't think I'm ready for that. Please, Ben."

The last two words are a whispered prayer though he's not sure if Ben's an angel here to comfort him or a demon sent to torment him. He decides it probably doesn't matter as he steps in behind him and finally - with a shudder of visceral relief - he presses their bodies together, the lines of Ben's back fitting like puzzle pieces against the angles of his chest. His arms are tight around Ben's lean waist, lips against the back of his neck and nose tucked just behind his ear, the satin soft skin that feels like velvet and smells like home. "Please," he repeats like whispered secrets. "Just... come to bed?"

The first time Ben showed up at the door they barely made it out of the hallway. His cock stirs at the memory of warm hands against his hips and a hot mouth around his dick, sucking him like the world would tip off its axis if he stopped. They fell asleep tangled on the couch together, the familiar press of Ben's weight against his chest like an anchor. But he woke alone. The same as he's woken alone every time since. The next time Ben shows up he always apologizes, it's never _his_ fault, but the end result is the same - a cold bed and a sore back are the only things Kyle gets to take away with him until the next time.

But now he knows, now he's aware of the rules - even if he doesn't accept them - he makes damn sure he takes his time. Taking his time involves the California queen bed they bought together and high thread count sheets. It's showering together afterwards and collapsing back into bed for another round, insisting into a neck that's slick with sweat and thrums with vibrant heat that this time, he _won't_ fall asleep. _If I don't fall asleep, you can't leave_.

But he always does. And Ben always can.

The walk to the bedroom feels like an eternity, fingers laced as he pulls Ben along. He's gripping Ben's left hand in his right and it shouldn't hurt as much as it does not to feel that smooth, platinum band against fingers. He takes comfort in the warm solidity of the fingers wound through his, the thud-thump of Ben's boots against the stairs and the soft, even puffs of his breath against the back of Kyle's neck. His willpower crumbles halfway up the stairs and he presses Ben back to the wall, tongue tracing lips as tears track salt against his cheeks. He shouldn't cry, he _swore_ he wouldn't cry this time.

"I fucked someone else, you know," he pants, clawing red tracks onto Ben's back under his shirt. He wants to hurt him. Wants to leave marks and scars with sharp words and blunt fingernails, wants to carve a masterpiece of misery right there onto inked skin in sweeps of crimson pain. "After the last time?"

"Right," Ben nods, a staccato movement of his head as he drags Kyle closer. Why doesn't he care? Why won't he _care?_ Kyle burns with the injustice of it. "That's good."

"Yeah, he was," he taunts him, hates that Ben doesn't react beyond a nip of his teeth, sharp and bright against Kyle's lower lip. "He was _so_ good, _so_ _fucking_ _big_..."

"I'm glad," Ben's warm and solid in front of him, his breath a heated suggestion against Kyle's throat. He slides a hand into the hair at the nape of Ben's neck, pulls him in until he's sucking gently at _that_ spot on his throat, the one that makes shocks pulse on blood cells straight to his cock. He pulls off to lick at Kyle's ear, the whisper of breath enough to make him shudder against the rapidly cooling slick of saliva left behind. "I want you to move on. Will you see him again?"

See him again? Kyle wants to laugh. A regrettable Tinder hookup borne from a moment of searing loneliness. He cried though he tried to hide it by burying his face in the pillow – _Ben's_ fucking pillow, thought it hasn't smelled of him for years – but there was only so long the guy was going to believe it was tremors of ecstasy. He'd left, the idea of fucking a crying man who called him _Ben_ more than once clearly too weird to be paid off with something as basic as a lackluster orgasm. But, he can't tell Ben that so instead he shrugs, casual and devil-may-care, delivering his _fuck you_ in a low voice that he pretends doesn't waver with tears, "I don't know. Maybe I will. I deserve to, I deserve someone who's _here."_

"You do," Ben agrees sadly as he pulls back to look at Kyle from hollow eyes, to graze the back of his knuckles lightly over the curve of Kyle's cheek. That's not the response Kyle wants, it's not the fire and passion and swearing to stay that he craves, it's weak and pathetic and kicks the can down the road for Kyle to deal with – alone – once again. "I just want you to be happy, baby."

_"Baby,"_ he repeats with what he wants to be a sneer, but somehow turns into a sob. He was never one for stupid pet names, hated _Ky_ and _Lilo_ and all of the other more generic things lovers are supposed to adore – sweetheart and darling and sugar. _Kyle_ was fine, he always insisted, just _Kyle._ But when they were alone _baby_ was okay. _Baby_ was morning sex under crisp, white sheets when they could take their time and luxuriate in one another. It was giggling, drunk sex after a night at the bar when Kyle couldn't seem to locate Ben's ass with both hands and a dick that wouldn't stay hard. It was watching Star Wars for the three hundredth time while the rain lashed against the living room window until _watching Star Wars_ turned into searching hands and wet, red mouths on wet, red dicks. Baby _was_ them, but Kyle's not sure it is any more.

He's yanking at Ben's zipper, fingers scraping against the metal teeth until he's sure they'll bleed but he can't seem to coordinate his movements. An action once so well known it was practically muscle memory is foreign, alien, clumsy and disjointed because _when was the last time?_ Ben thinks he's stupid, thinks he doesn't realize the visits are getting further apart, that he's withdrawing his contact like heroin, trying to wean Kyle off him because he knows he's addicted. He can't bear to hear the truth so he never asks, tries to revel in the moment whilst half watching the clock; how many hours this time? How many precious minutes? How many hallowed goddamn _seconds_ will Ben afford him before he leaves him alone once more?

"Shh," Ben soothes the sobs Kyle didn't even realize were choking him, eases his hand back gently from his crotch and gathers him close, strokes his hair and rocks him slowly. "We don't have to do this. If it's too much we – I can..."

"No," Kyle can't bear to hear him threaten to leave, wipes at his eyes and furiously sniffs back the tears. Ben smells exactly how he always does; clean laundry and Calvin Klein, faint sweat and warm leather. "I want this. I – I fucking _need_ this, Ben."

Ben nods like he understands, the depth of the sadness in amber eyes so overwhelming it threatens to drown them both, to sweep them away until there's nothing left. Would the tide drag them together? Leave them marooned some quiet place for just them? Or would it scatter them, throw them to different corners and leave them, leave _Kyle_ , desperate and yearning and _needing_. Would it really be any different to how it is now? He sinks his fingers into dark hair, drags Ben closer because he needs contact, needs lips and teeth, spit and tongues, all of the things that ground him in this moment and make it real. Ben _gives_ because that's what Ben does, he's the same as he always was, he's grand gestures and boomboxes held aloft on quiet suburban streets, he's a walking John Hughes movie - _pretty in punk, the breakhearts club._

They stumble, trip and stagger their way up the last few steps to the hallway, toes snagging on one another, catching each lurch the other makes and righting them against bannister, wall or door. The bedroom is dark but for the moonlight streaming through the window like a suggestion of silver that lends an ethereal glow to skin and teeth and eyes. Ben once told him he suited sunlight as they ate breakfast in the backyard of their friend's house, their skin dappled with golden light. It was _Before_ , so much as Kyle divides his life into two neat segments of _Before He Knew Ben Loved Him Back_ and _After,_ so he'd just blushed and told Ben to fuck off. But if that was true, if Kyle truly does suit sunlight, then Ben - always his opposite, forever his complement - suits moonlight. He's velvet shadows and dark corners, glances under lashes, touches under tables and whispering in ears and right now, in soft silver light, he glows.

They hit the bed in a tangle of half-discarded shirts, hit the mattress with gasps like wishes, colliding bodies like planets thrown wildly out of orbit and it takes a second, a pulse or two of frantic hearts and gasping lungs for everything to fall back in sync. Kyle's on his back, fingers laced and locked with Ben's and hands pinned to the comforter above his head, lean thighs bracketing his hips and a mouth that tastes of want and just a hint of whisky pressed flush to his. Ben pulls back and Kyle tries to follow, craning his neck until it aches, until he's begging with a glance for more, please more, please _something_ , please...

"What do you want, baby?" Ben's voice is a whisper, his cock, hard and straining the front of his jeans, the debauched promise of fulfilment.

Kyle thinks. He considers and he ponders and - okay, yeah - he grinds his hips up, rutting against Ben's crotch with melodious moans and sinful sighs. _What_ does he _want?_ He wants Ben back, wants a wedding ring back on his finger and a husband back in his bed and not just for these fleeting moments of self-flagellation like a fuck can make up for being alone. But that's not what Ben means, he means in this moment, right at this moment in time with his dick hard and throbbing and his skin a tingling expanse of raw nerve endings. _What does he want?_

_"Everything,"_ he breathes, back arched and hips a messy suggestion of contact and need as he thrusts up with more desperation than finesse. He means it, he wants it all, wants lips and tongues, fingers, hands, wants to suck and be sucked, wants Ben inside of him just about as much as he craves being inside of Ben. He wants every sigh and each cry, each feathered touch and each nail sunk into soft flesh until skin breaks like promises. Like vows. _Their_ vows, the ones that meant nothing to Ben but everything to Kyle. Ben nods. Ben smiles like this is normal, like everything's okay. Ben slowly unbuttons Kyle's shirt and takes a tight, pink nipple into his warm, wet mouth and revels in the gasp that tumbles from Kyle's lips. "Do you remember that night at the bar?

Amber eyes flick up with interest as a soft tongue circles, as the sharp pleasure-pain of bright teeth sinking into tender flesh sparks like electricity. He means Halloween, of course, a show in the London Dungeon amongst the props and set dressings. Ben nods again, blows a cool breath over heated skin and whispers softly, eyes alight with the memory of it, "When you sucked my dick in the bathroom? Best blowjob I've ever had," he pauses, head cocked, mouth a crooked slash of a grin, "it's those fucking _lips_..."

Kyle's done with talking, doesn't want to recount memories of holidays past that haunt him like ghosts, he just wants warmth, skin and lips and a hard cock. He guides Ben's mouth lower, aches a little more with each tasting lick, each bitten kiss, the way Ben's hand is so deft and sure on his zipper like he's still well-practiced when Kyle... Isn't. Kyle's fumbled and awkward, knees that don't know where to go and hands that catch on buttons and zippers. But somehow it works, clothes are lost to the floor and the bed and... the fucking light fitting for all Kyle gives a shit right now. They're gone and they're naked and Ben is so fucking _warm_ , a canvas of tattooed artwork across his arms and torso that Kyle could trace if he went blind laid out for his delectation.

He _devours_ Ben. Each swirl and line of ink is traced by tongue and questing fingertips. Every line of hard muscle is kissed and bitten and stroked until Kyle is straddling Ben's thigh, panting and flushed sweaty, hard cock rutting desperately against hard hip, slick tip tender and leaking. "I'm going," he begins, pausing to suck a bright mark to Ben's throat, lips trailing to the satin shell of his ear and words groaned like they hurt, "to suck you 'til you realize what you've lost."

Ben – eyes closed, lip bitten, hands already fisted in Kyle's hair – doesn't reply, the arch of his hips response enough for Kyle as he slides off the bed, slides to his knees, slides between Ben's thighs and finally, _finally_ , slides his mouth over the straining blood-dark heat of Ben's cock. He groans like a prayer while Ben cries out like a song and it's perfect, the taste of bitter salt and Ben's skin so heartbreakingly familiar, the swell of his cock against the curve of Kyle's tongue so well-known, and yet it grows more foreign each time.

He needs more, presses Ben's legs up so his soles are flat to the mattress, a whisper of _good boy_ as Ben arches his hips and shows Kyle that delicate pucker that he yearns for. He explores like he's never been there before, lips and tongue first in teasing kisses and soft, wet licks until the air rings with pleas and sugar-sweet declarations. More now, broad strokes of his tongue, gentle circles of the pointed tip against the delicate rim of Ben's hole until he begs, until he pleads and moans and it's _Kyle, fuck yes, Kyle_ and nothing else. He adds a finger, then two, pressing in until he finds that spot that makes Ben's legs jerk and hips twitch, tongue working around them tasting the heat and musk that is Ben, the taste that's all him. Ben's thrusting weakly into his fist, frowning like it's taking everything he has not to blow his load in gossamer ribbons across his stomach or into Kyle's hair.

Kyle watches and tastes and dies inside because this can never be enough, always on countdown, always waiting for dawn to bring loneliness and heartbreak like every other dawn since Ben left him. He fucks his fingers into him a little harder, drives his tongue a touch faster, anything to draw out those desperate moans, those noises that are just for him, the ones he's sure Ben's never made with anyone else.

"Stop," Ben whispers, shuffling up and away from him, pressing back like he'll no doubt do in a few hours, sliding out and away from Kyle's body to steal away with the moonlight. Kyle's cheeks are wet with tears and he swipes at them quickly, determined Ben won't see him cry, he won't give him the satisfaction. "C'mon, baby, let me take care of you..."

It's tempting - impossibly so - to just give in. He's done it before, just laid back and let Ben suck him, lick him, bite bruises like brands to his skin and fuck him with fingers that know him and a cock that never seems to forget exactly what he loves. But it's not worth it, the passivity of it makes him even more emotional, it brings the tears and the clinging and the begging and tonight Kyle wants none of that. Tonight, Kyle wants ownership, wants to send Ben away knowing he can't escape Kyle, that they're bound by more than a couple of bands of gold and a few cheap words. So he shakes his head as Ben frowns in the diamond flame of the moonlight, he pushes to his feet and takes a moment to just _admire._

Ben's pale in the glittering light, stripped of color and brightness and turned to monochrome, to grey skin and black ink that swirls and loops and curves and Kyle could trace each one blindfold, could mark each line with a fingertip, tongue, lips so burnt are they into his memory. And Ben's smiling, sad and soft, as he slides closer, as he sits on the edge of the mattress and grasps the smooth solidity of Kyle's hips, as his thumbs stretch and reach and trace over coarse, gold hair turned silver in the light like reverse alchemy. His cock is straining, a heavy ache that throbs with blood and need and though he doesn't _want_ to hand over even a modicum of control to Ben, it's too easy to slide his fingers into coarse black hair. It's too simple to guide a willing mouth to his prick, to feel the suggestion of warm breath replaced by the reality of warmer lips, a wet tongue, the slick of soft, tender, hidden places caressing him like a prayer

He groans Ben's name mingled with declarations and adulation and sweet, soaring song. He could die like this, could draw his last breath content with Ben's mouth working his cock, a clever hand cupping his balls, stroking and teasing as eyes that glow copper-gold fix on those that glitter back like riptide at midnight.

"Fuck," he whispers, as he strokes a stubbled cheek, as a willing mouth takes him just a little deeper. "You're beautiful. I've missed you."

There's a nod and a squeeze of the flesh of his ass, eyes that say it all whilst saying nothing at all. Kyle still _needs_ and Kyle still _wants_ and Kyle still _knows_. So, he eases Ben back with a gasp bitten off like it hurts, pushes him onto his back with a hiss and a snarl, "Enough, you're not in control anymore."

Ben doesn't argue, just raises his arms, crossing his wrists above his head on the mattress and spreading his legs, knees raised, the perfect image of supplication. There are long, lean planes of muscle, honeyed skin wound thick with dark tattoos. He bites a bruise to Ben's groin, just so he has an excuse to press his nose close and heave in the scent, the pheromones and skin, the sweat and soap, _Ben_ , intoxicating, heavenly _Ben_. Ben's humming his approval like a chorus, Kyle's layering his desperation underneath it like a curse.

There's a fumble for lube in the nightstand, a slick and a stroke for his cock and two fingers for Ben, stretching and opening as he gasps and sighs and arches, as his skin stretches and pulls taut over ribs and hipbones. His cock is blood-dark and hot, his hole spread out around Kyle's fingers and if it isn't the prettiest sight... He's pleading, eyes and lips begging for relief, for the release only Kyle can provide, he babbles declarations, that it's only Kyle, only ever Kyle.

He doesn't mean it because he doesn't stay.

Kyle kneels on the mattress between spread thighs that strain upward as Ben tilts his hips to provide that perfect angle, to facilitate that slow slick of skin against skin that will bring relief. Kyle wants to resist, wants to shove him away and tell him he can't do this anymore, that the brief moments of escape aren't enough to make up for the ever-present crush of all-consuming loneliness that weights his heart like something solid, that drags at his lungs like drowning in air. But Kyle is _weak._

With a noise that could be a groan or could be a stifled sob, he grabs angular hips, he grabs and he lifts and he hauls until Ben is braced onto his thighs, until the head of his cock, blunt and thick, is pressed to the tight pucker of Ben's hole. He pauses, lets heat radiate from body to body, lets Ben meet his eyes and lets Ben whisper softly into the silence, "Please..."

Kyle nods, quick-sharp jerks that burn his neck as his slick sliding hand holds steady and he thrusts forward. Each inch is exquisite, each fuck of his hips enough to elicit gasping little mewls from Ben. Someone is crying out like they're in a beautiful kind of agony – Kyle realizes, face wet with tears, that it's him and bites his tongue until all he can taste is salted copper.

He watches Ben as he buries himself inside of him, he watches the way his jaw falls slack for a moment, the way his eyes flutter closed and his lips purse. He watches the way black hair slicks with sweat and sticks to his brow, the way the muscles in his thighs cord and elongate. He _watches_ like he'll never see again because, at this point, who really knows when or if he ever will. He touches tattoos and tiny scars, freckles and moles that are all his, each brush of fingertips to heated skin a decadent luxury, each moaning gasp, each breathy sigh just for him, gathered and hoarded like riches.

He starts to thrust, deep-slow-hard, each roll of his hips met with a press back like the tide. There are heels in the small of his back as Ben hauls him closer on each drive in; in charge even when he's pretending he's not. Breathtaking, beautiful, perfectly imperfect Ben. Ben who murmurs the sweetest obscenities, the _harder_ and _deeper_ and _not enough_ and _want it all_. Ben who arches and cries out as Kyle obliges with hammering hips and a stiff cock that buries deep inside with each hard thrust. Every word is Kyle's, every gasp and groan, each bead of sweat and slick of precome, all of it is _Kyle's._

At least for tonight.

He collapses over Ben, feels hands in his hair and lips at his neck, teeth that sink into soft flesh and flash bright sparks of pleasure-pain. He captures Ben's mouth with his own, punishing kisses that demand and conquer, tongues, lips and teeth that lick and suck and bite at one another until he's sore and aching. He keeps his thrusts short and deep, keeps his eyes open when every instinct wants to let them fall closed. He forces them wide and he watches Ben, drinks in each feature, each expression, the way his lips twist and his eyelids flutter feather soft, webbed by veins.

Ben grinds against him, rubbing the hard length of his dick against the softness of Kyle's stomach, each thrust a yelping moan, a biting kiss, a mark sucked to Kyle's neck as he fucks his hips against Ben's harder and faster. There's desperation there now, the aching need to come because it's been so long, _too fucking long,_ since he felt the tight heat of another body around his cock. An eternity since it was Ben. But he won't let go first, bracing up on a forearm hooked under Ben's shoulder, wrapping his free hand around the solid, needing _heat_ of Ben's cock.

The cries intensify, the air alight with _fuck yes_ and _more, fuck more_ and _Kyle, yes, KYLE_ and it's satisfying, oh so satisfying, to hear his name like glory hallelujah, like a choir, thrumming through the room around them with the sweat and Kyle's tears. Ben's hands are curled around his neck, buried in his hair and dragging him closer like aching need and he's so close. He's so fucking close. He thinks he says it out loud, breathes it into the ear by his lips, knows Ben's hips arch like he said something irresistible but he's not sure, can't be sure.

Ben tenses, tight and burning bright beneath him and Kyle slams into him as he watches him come undone with greedy, overwhelming need. Each contortion of pouting lips - Kyle's. Each guttural groan of nonsensical syllables that falls from pouted lips - Kyle's. Each slick slide of bitter salt that ribbons from Ben's cock to pool between them caught in hair and slicked to skin - Kyle's, Kyle's, _Kyle's._

The possession, that knowledge of ownership, is overwhelming, it scorches Kyle from the inside out, burning heat that ripples through him like waves until he's crying out, the world expanding exponentially then retracting so fast his head rushes with it. There's everything contained in the four walls surrounding them whilst simultaneously being nothing but Ben, the very world itself reduced to the tight heat sheathing his body, the teeth sinking into his shoulder, the nails blood bright against his back. His heart thumps and slams against his ribs like pounding fists and that beat, that never-ending loop of thudding noise that shudders through his chest and snakes down into his groin.

He screams his release laced with Ben's name, hips a messy, stuttering slide as the air leaves his lungs, leaves the room and he's rocking and clinging and coming thick and hard. Ben grips into him, breathes life into him from warm lips and fingers tangled in hair and honey gold thighs that grasp at cream pale hips like pure, unadulterated greed. Kyle collapses as the bright, burning pleasure subsides and leaves nothing but choking emptiness and bitter tears that fall onto Ben's neck like heated accusation.

Ben cradles him close, his body in the bracket of sinewy hips as tawny arms snake around him and hold him close, rock him gently as he murmurs unending platitudes and empty apologies into his ear. Tonight, he promises himself, promises Ben, tonight he'll stay, still be there in the morning to clear away the pumpkins and the lanterns and the stupid fake cobwebs Kyle strung - alone - across the porch. Ben kisses his cheeks, his jaw, the tip of his nose and his lips and swears he wishes he could, that he wants to stay but he can't, _he can't._

But the flood of bitter tears aren't enough to drown him, aren't enough to sweep him away to some place it doesn't hurt any more. No, instead they dry to tracks of salt that tighten his skin and make his eyes sore and heavy and exhaustion seeps down into his bones. Ben pulls him close and murmurs reassurance, urges him to rest as he curls around him and strokes his hair, kisses every inch of skin he can reach.

"When will you be back?" Kyle murmurs into silver light and ink black hair. Ben tenses against him for a moment, hand drifting up and down the valley of Kyle's spine.

"When would you like?" he asks, soft with invitation.

"Tomorrow?" Kyle suggests, more hopeful than he has any right to be, more agonized than he should be by this point. "Always."

"You know I can't," Ben sighs. "Maybe your birthday..."

"But that's _six months,"_ Kyle explodes, panic bright in his chest, painful and burning as he digs his fingers into Ben's arm like he can force him to stay.

"You'll barely notice," Ben presses a kiss to his lips. "You should get some sleep."

"No," but Kyle can already feel the pull of it dragging him under, a heavy weight that pulls and tugs and proves so hard to resist. "If I don't sleep, you can't leave..."

"Right," Ben agrees with a smile, pulling Kyle fractionally closer, lips grazing his temple. "I love you, baby."

"I hate you," Kyle whispers like a curse, relenting after a beat. "I fucking love you. So fucking much. Please, just... Stay?"

Ben just smiles, sad and slow. Kyle isn't sure when he falls asleep but knows it must happen as he lies there staring at Ben, committing each feature to memory all over again.

He wakes sharply to the burst of the phone on his nightstand, fumbling for it in the dark as the glowing numbers of his alarm clock inform him that it's five in the morning. The screen glows with his best friend's name, the one who introduced them, and the groan from behind him reverberates softly around the room. Marcus in New York never did seem to grasp that Kyle in Los Angeles is three hours behind. Arms slide around his waist in the dark, a little less firm than they were the night before, as he raises the phone to his ear.

"`Lo?" He mumbles, soft with sleep, barely raising his head from the pillow.

"Hey, man, just me," Marcus greets him with a kind of sad caution that, for a moment, Kyle doesn't understand. "Just calling to see how you're doing."

"It's five in the morning," Kyle admonishes sleepily, winds his fingers with the ones at his stomach.

"Oh, shit. Sorry," Marcus pauses but only for a beat. "I just... It's the anniversary, right? I just... I was thinking about you. Both of you."

Kyle frowns in confusion - it's not his and Ben's once-upon-a-wedding-anniversary for another four months. He's too tired for it to make sense, just wants to sink into the warm arms wound around him and sleep.

"No," he begins as lips brush his neck feather soft - too soft - then decides he doesn't have the energy to argue. "I'm tired, dude. Can I call you back later?

"Yeah, of course," the concern in Marcus's voice makes Kyle's chest ache as the light from his phone illuminates the nightstand and the things he doesn't want to see. "I'll call you in a couple hours. Sleep well."

"Bye," Kyle hangs up and quickly drops his gaze to the comforter. Ben presses closer but already feels further away, his voice a strange, thrumming echo when he speaks.

"Who was that?"

"Just Marcus," Kyle whispers, gripping the arms around him desperately as his eyes flicker to the nightstand once again. To the wedding photo in its heavy frame, he and Ben smiling and bright with anticipation of the life that stretched out ahead of them. To the velvet box in front of it that – Kyle knows – contains two platinum bands. The box Kyle hasn't opened in years. _Until death us do part_. "Just go back to sleep and... I'll see you in the morning, yeah? I love you."

"Love you too," Ben mumbles, soft with sleep.

Kyle closes his eyes and prays he can make it true, prays that in the daylight Ben will be there and real and solid. Prays that it's not a scoop of ashes in a plain, simple urn and a closet full of clothes he still can't bring himself to throw away. Kyle prays even though he knows it's futile. Six months. That's not so bad. Better than never.

And when friends ask him why he doesn't go to where they scattered Ben's ashes, he knows he'll just smile and tell them Ben isn't there. Who knows where Ben goes between visits but for now, right now, he knows where he is and that seems to be enough as he closes his eyes and sinks back into sleep.

"Don't leave me."

"I never do."

_The End_

# Forever

> Shane whispers names like daydreams, a litany of every moniker Luca's ever given him over the centuries and he wonders, fingers pressing brands into the plush of Shane's hips, just how much the young man remembers.

It's a fogged-breath cool October night in Boston, fallen leaves shuffling lazily against the sidewalk. It's a night for beasts and boys and silent steps.

He doesn't really think much about daylight anymore. Not beyond knowing he needs to avoid it, his yearning for lizard scale heat giving way to the kind of muscle-memory shivers that jolt him to the furthest corner of his room as dawn breaks. But he knows that nightfall is sacred, that the velvet dark curtain of it that falls around him like a comfortable old coat provides easy reassurance as he pads on rubber-soled sneakers, half a block behind (Behind what? His prey? Something more?). So much stealthier than leather-heeled boots and the _taptaptap_ of them on cobblestone.

The scent of _him_ is thick and heady. It replaces the vein-bright hum of under-the-skin _knowing_ that rocketed through him the moment he set foot in the suburb three weeks ago.

He knew he'd see him again soon.

He's young this time, not yet twenty, the smell of teenage sweat and cheap body spray mingled sharp with top notes of desperate hormones. Youth was convenient once, in the days when kids went missing all the time, when he found him hunkered in a trench on a battlefield in France with his helmet askew and his rifle clutched in shivering hands. Easy enough to make him disappear, another missing boy without a body – another missing Shane – for a mother to weep over. He doesn't speak much to other predators, but they all agree that war is rich pickings for little effort.

It's not as straightforward now. There are missing person reports and witness statements, posters around city blocks and televised pleas for the lost boys to come home. There are bones found months later, bleached bright in the sun or dirtied dark in the earth. It doesn't matter to him, he's always long gone. He flinches with the knowledge of _someday_ , though, the burning brightness of dawn in a cell, bones to ash and centuries of... whatever this is, exchanged for one flame-bright moment of sunlight.

So far, it hasn't happened. So far, Luca has slipped away with the shadows and left nothing but pale lifelessness in his wake. This time and every time that's fallen before it, every time that will come again, it's always the same.

It began in Växjö, by the lake. A boy that wandered from the rest, alone and in the dark. A boy named Sjeng who bared his throat and faced death bravely. They never face it bravely, there's always pleading, begging, pitiful _whining_. Luca had heard enough of it in the centuries that came before Sjeng, would hear it again in years to come. But the boy didn't beg, he didn't cry or plead, he offered his throat with nothing more than the faintest hum of a tremor as lakeshore eyes burnt defiantly into Luca's.

The kid ahead coughs, and casts a glance back over his shoulder, casually checking for cars as he kicks an empty soda can along the sidewalk ahead of him. It clatters fit to wake the dead - if they weren't already awake and hunting - rattling like bones against asphalt and concrete. Luca fiddles with the way his hood lies over his bangs, casually careless, and listens to the way the kid's pulse throbs in his veins.

He's been watching him for days now, lurking in shadows that pool in dark places, learning his habits, his routines. He knows which bus he takes to work at some record store two suburbs over. He knows which night he has band practice in some kid named Tyler's garage. He knows what time he walks home, music loud and self-awareness low, scuffed boots thudding a rhythm into the sidewalk.

Three summers from the first night, from the smell of sweat and blood-under-skin, Sjeng begged.

They always beg in the end but this one begged for death-but-not-finished, for the eternal twilight that held Luca for centuries before he was born and would cling to him for many more centuries to come. He nodded – though his un-beating heart had twisted with something uncharacteristically like regret – kissed warm lips breathless, tasted vibrant, salt-tang skin under his tongue. Then he sunk his teeth into the soft vein that pulsed rich beneath his pale skin.

Luca had drained the humanity from Sjeng over their time together, it seemed only fitting that he should drain everything else, too.

He's unsure, this one, Luca can sense it. There's some jangling sense of nervousness that pricks sweat under his arms and down his back even though it's cold out. He shuffles a hand in his pocket and, for a moment, bathes his face in blue light as he checks his cell phone before plunging back into orange-gold shadows cast from beacon-bright street lights.

Luca watches him cross the street ahead of him, watches him sink his hands a little further into his pockets. Luca can see him shivering, even at a distance. It's a little too cool for a hoodie, not quite cool enough for a jacket. He's around the corner and out of sight in a heartbeat but Luca can feel him, feel the pulse of blood, rich in his veins, the shuddered rise and fall of his breathing. He can hear the tinny rattle of music that pounds from the headphones with a bass line that matches his heartbeat. Eitan always did love to sing.

Or was that Etienne? His head is a whirl of names – Johan, Sean, Shaun, Giovanni, Sion – dozens of men over dozens of decades, he's found them all. He's stumbled across them even when he wasn't looking but now, oh now, he gets that empty-vein itch when it's time and always knows just where to go, just where to look.

He rounds the corner and for a moment he falters, eyes roving quick-sharp along the fringe of trees cast in silvered moonlight shadows. He knows the kid lives on the other side of the park, but he always walks around, skirting the fence and following the road until it links up to the block where his house sits, neat and middle class and innocuous. But the sidewalk is empty and the trees beckon with mischievous promise to conceal bad deeds committed by terrible men.

Or the things that look like men.

Luca tucks his hands down into the pockets of his coat and examines the toes of his shoes for the briefest moment. The park? It's as good a place as any and he crosses the street, leisurely and casual. If anyone sees him, if they see the local news in the morning, if they make the link...

No, best not to draw attention to himself, best to let the shadows swallow him down as he moves through the gates and breathes deeply.

There's a tingle in his jaw, the tell-tale flood of spit that coats his tongue and he swallows sharply, eyes roving for movement. He can't see him, the path ahead deserted and lost to puddled darkness. Luca's pupils blow, blazing the tree line for movement, nose carefully working the air for the scent of sweat and skin. There's a creak of rubber on metal to his left, soft enough that most of the citizens of Boston roaming the streets at this hour wouldn't have noticed it. To Luca's it's cacophonous, symphony-loud and booming, grating on his bristle-bright nerve endings and grinding against his ear drums. He hurries to follow it.

The last one – picked up at a bar in Los Angeles – was delicious. Early thirties and with a wedding band wrapped around his finger, he didn't bother with a defensible argument when Luca suggested they get out of there and find someplace a little quieter. He introduced himself on his knees, Luca's cock, dark with someone else's blood, nudged to his lips as he whispered _I'm Shaun, by the way._ He died hours later, his last word a whisper of a plea but not for mercy. No, he begged for the almost-death that Luca can't decide is a plague or a beautiful, brilliant blessing. He liked Shaun with his soft mouth and eager grin. Pity, really.

The kid is sat on the swing set, the only actor on a full moon stage, fingers curled around chain linked steel as he watches Luca approach from under the fortress of his oversized hood and trashed bangs. Luca can't see his eyes, just shadow that paints him skull-like and ghostly. Not that Luca fears anything that walks in the shadows but he – whoever he is this time – doesn't flinch, heel planted firm as he rocks slowly back and forth and Luca approaches. He moves to the merry-go-round, far enough that he doesn't seem like a threat, close enough that he could cover the distance in three long strides. The kid's jaw works slowly.

"Why are you following me?" he asks quietly – his pulse quickens but it's not panic – breath sharp with the smell of peppermint and Mr Pibb.

"Who says I'm following _you?"_ Luca asks, fiddling with a buckle on his coat, eyes on his fingers until he glances up, disinterested. "What's so special about you, hm?"

"You tell me," Shane leans his head back, hood slipping down and revealing glittered-gold hair and the plush of a plump lower lip curved into a smirk. "Shane," Luca quirks an eyebrow in question, elbows braced back to the cold kiss of the metal frame behind him, "my name. It's Shane."

Of course it is. Luca can feel the smile tugging the corners of his mouth, tinged with moonlight and terrible decisions. Shane's, not his. Boys that stray from the path are low-hanging fruit, ripe and lush and ready for the sink of Luca's fingers into tender flesh.

"Luca," he offers with a quirk of an eyebrow, Shane looks like he already knew that, something secretive flirting at the petal-plush edges of his smile. Luca sends himself spinning, the toe of his Converse propelling him in a lazy circle, vision swimming with the vista of Shane, jungle gym, sandpit, slide, Shane. He judders to a halt with a scrape of his shoe against the rubberized safety flooring and watches the way Shane's pulse flutters under the butter-soft skin of his throat. "You're out late."

"So are you, asshole," Shane says. Luca can hear the way his lips move against his teeth, the way his breath hitches just a little as he tucks his hands back into his pockets and stares at Luca with defiance flaring flame-bright in his eyes. "What are you _doing_ here?"

They're both surprised at that, Luca can feel his eyes widen as Shane fidgets, withdraws a hand to snake his thumbnail between the snag of his teeth, worrying it compulsively as he stares at something far away. Luca's stomach is hollow – he hasn't eaten in days, famine before feast – his tongue playing over his lips as he watches Shane flush pink with embarrassment and sweet, heated blood. He always did look good with that rose-bloom blush cresting his cheeks, with fire in his eyes and stuttered nonsense on his tongue.

Seamus was the same, flushed pink with ale and arousal, his crown of wheat-gold hair fanned to the tavern wall behind him as Luca licked his way over the exquisite length of a cock he already knew each inch of. Pale fingers clutched with bone-sharp vigour into Luca's hair as he thrust down the cool-wet-slick of his throat. If he thought it was strange that Luca wasn't warm then he didn't say so. He didn't say much, not even as Luca tore into the silk-soft vein in his thigh, not as his blood rushed hot and thick and sticky down Luca's throat.

Luca laced the man's breeches back up afterwards before he left him in the alley, glassy-eyed and lifeless. It seemed a shame to imagine anyone laughing at him.

"I like being out at night," he shrugs as he moves to the swing next to Shane, straddling it so the rubber digs into his thighs through the cover of his skinny jeans. Shane's jeans are ripped over the knees, the ridges and lines of his kneecaps visible through the skin, the visual reminder that beneath it all, under the attitudes and the ineptitude and the sheer fucking human _brilliance_ of them, all men are made of the same bone and sinew. "It's... quiet."

It isn't, not really, he can hear the rustle of the breeze through blades of grass, the infinitesimal squeak of the swing chains, the rush of blood in Shane's veins and the sound of his own pointless parody of respiration. But the answer seems to satisfy Shane who cocks his head to consider the stars, cheek pressed to the cool links of the chain in his fist.

"So," Shane rolls his gum from one side of his mouth to the other, stretching it taut over his tongue and sucking sharply, the gum popping whip-crack sharp. "Are you gonna tell me why you were following me?"

"It's..." Luca trails off for a moment and considers his answer, honey-hazed gaze pinned on the trees over Shane's left shoulder as the moon smirks down at them. "Complicated," he finishes after a beat, pushing the blunt press of his teeth into the chilled push of his lip as he flicks his eyes to Shane.

The kid stares right back at him. There's no fear in the summer sky depth of his eyes as he nods and shrugs, as his breath ruffles warm and sweet over his lips. Luca likes watching them breathe, loves to feel it bead dewdrops against his skin as they pant and gasp. He bites into the flesh of his cheek as he watches the stutter of Shane's skin at his throat, right in the hollow where it dips to his collarbone. His teeth ache a little more.

"I figured you'd show up soon," Shane mutters, gaze averted to consider the toes of his beat-up boots. There's a noise at the back of Luca's throat that sounds like a question, a sharp new focus to his eyes that could be an accusation as Shane stammers and rushes to explain. "Like... I've seen you around. You know? Following me. Figured you'd come talk to me sooner or later."

Shane's lying, that's not what he meant and they both know it. There's something off about the whole situation, some shifting sense of uncertainty under Luca's feet like he's in the wrong room of an unfamiliar house and searching for anchor points of familiarity in strange wallpaper and not-quite-right furniture. They rock on their swings for a moment and if Shane has noticed the fact that Luca's breath - cold, like the rest of him - isn't fogging, then he's too polite to mention it.

"I'm sorry I kept you waiting," Luca offers with a shrug. He's not really sorry - he isn't _really_ sorry for much - but he likes this one, he reminds him of Sjeng. Well, they _all_ remind him of Sjeng, but there's something in the challenge of his eyes, the defiant tilt of his chin. He's already half-convinced that he'll keep this one around for a while. He's growing tired of one night stands.

"Hey," Shane looks at him after a pause, heel grinding half circles into the wood chips at his feet. Luca smiles - tooth bright and brilliant - from the cowl-like shroud of his hood. The hood Shane points to with a lazy finger. "Take that thing off. Let me take a look at the dude that _hasn't_ been following my ass for three weeks."

"No," Luca shakes his head slowly. His jaw is throbbing with the effort of keeping his fangs at bay, the physical ache that would beat with his pulse if he had one. "So, do you want to get out of here? I have a place nearby..."

It's not a lie and the house is nice. Tucked away quietly down a tree-lined driveway a couple of blocks over with fancy cars out back. It's a shame that he has to be quite so... forceful in his possession of property these days. He has a couple more days at best before someone comes looking for the owners. Shane - the ungrateful little shit - just laughs, rich and sweet and aimed at Luca as he smirks mockingly.

"Are you... _hitting_ on me?" Shane's grin is smeared across his face like last night's eyeliner. Luca slips off the swing and moves to stand behind him, a soft shove to the small of his back – he's warm, _so_ warm, even through the hoodie – that stutters him forward as he lifts his feet obediently. When he swings back, thumps to Luca's chest, he catches hold of him by the hips, pins him there for just a moment and brings the soft frigidity of his lips to graze the salt-bright blaze of the skin of Shane's ear.

"Would that be a problem?" he whispers as Shane shudders against him, just for a moment, a stroke of the second hand and he's pushing him away once more. But he can hear the high-tide roar of Shane's pulse, sense the way blood pools in more _interesting_ places as the burnt sharpness of pheromones stickies the air between them.

"I dunno, man," Shane feigns casual as he swings slowly back and forth. He's a shitty actor. "You're not really my type. I'm pretty sure I'm into pussy and you've got that whole... prince of darkness, edgelord vibe going on. No offence, but I'm not really into Hot Topic goths."

This time, when Luca snags him by the hips he makes sure to press his fingertips into the soft give of plush, warm flesh. He sinks his nails in through cotton and cold autumn air and feels the jolt and shift of every atom of Shane's being under his hands. He drops his head, nose finding the glutinous throb of Shane's pulse – warm, vibrant, _alive_ – catching the copper-sweet hum of it with a breath drawn sharp and raw. Saliva blooms, slick and cloying at the back of his mouth as he parts his lips and, groan torn greedy from his throat, he swipes a broad lick over the glowing promise of a blood-rich vein.

Shane stiffens, drawn bow tight, then sags, a marionette with strings sharply sliced as his head rolls to the side, as the invitation falls from wordless lips. Luca watches them move without framing a sound, watches the way Shane sinks his teeth into the flushed swell of the lower one. He slides a hand to the front of Shane's jeans, to feel the aching throb of his swollen cock through cotton and denim as Shane hisses approval in arched-high hips.

Luca's jaw is agonizing, crimson streaks of poker-hot pain bolting through his skull.

"Seems to me," he murmurs, fingers finding the familiar curve of Shane's prick, mapping the way it swells beneath his jeans. "That I might be just your type after all."

"Oh God," Shane whispers, knuckles twisted to ivory against the swing chains.

"Not quite," Luca's laughter laps like dark water around the edges, caught and tangled like lakeshore reeds as he steps back, as he lets the shadows take him. As he lets his fangs dig sharp into the plump edge of his lower lip.

He doesn't look back as he takes off across the park, as his hands sink with clenched-tight fists into the depths of his pockets, black nails biting crescents into his palms like the mocking curve of the moon that sneers down from above. It flirts behind clouds, hiding eyes and timeless smiles behind thinly veiled grey gossamer, as though the very stars stand in judgement. Let them stare. Let them judge. Luca is not in the mood to deny himself.

Shane saunters after him.

Luca slows his pace like he's casual about it, feet scuffing asphalt as Shane picks up his speed like he doesn't care until they're in step and mirrored. Shane hands are tucked in his pockets, shoulders hunched and hood drawn back up once more. They don't speak as they walk but by the time they're at the mouth of the driveway Luca is half feral with the smell of him, clinging to the last ragged edge of his sanity with fingertips that skitter against the worn-smooth surface of it, sweat-slick and slippery.

"Nice place," Shane observes, lips quirked lush and shining. "Funny, I thought some fancy lawyer dude lived here..."

"He did." Luca shrugs as they slip through the front door. He leaves the lights off, he hasn't really cleaned up much since he arrived and there's no need for Shane to see the... mess. "Now I do."

"Right," Shane nods, pupils blown wide open. He's still not afraid – Luca has no idea how human senses work, he doesn't remember the two decades or so of soft weakness before this, can he smell the scent of metallic death that hangs in the air? If he can, he doesn't react, pulse increasing but not from panic as Luca closes in, as he touches a hand to the vibrant warmth of that pale cheek.

Shane doesn't flinch. Even men have cold hands on fall nights.

"Can I kiss you?" Luca whispers, unsure about the formality but trying it out anyway.

"Sure," Shane murmurs, hopelessly hesitant as he twists his hands for a second.

Luca pulls him in, touches his lips to the sun-scorch heat of Shane's mouth, tastes sugar-candy sweetness that cloys his lips. Shane is only cast in uncertainty for a moment, a couple of pumps of his heart then he's groaning, fists caught in the cotton of Luca's hood, tongue licking against the roof of his mouth. It tickles, sunburst bright sensation – or what Luca imagines it might be like to feel sunlight dapple his skin – drawing each damp, heated exhale let loose from Shane's lungs into his own. His teeth catch as Shane pulls back, snagging into the swollen ripeness of his lip, a fleck of honeyed copper spotting Luca's tongue.

Shane gasps, high and sharp as grasping lungs heave in greedy gulps of oxygen, eyes wide as his fingertips graze the bloodied skin.

"Show me," he mumbles, around the press of his fingers, tongue flicking temptingly to gather up the ruby shine that drowns out every other sight-smell-taste in the room. Luca is frozen, head dropped and hands fisted into Shane's hair as he holds him warily at arm's length and tries to remember all of the reasons he shouldn't just tear his throat out. "Come on... show me."

Luca shakes his head, slow and fuzzy with burning indecision, teeth tingling. He doesn't know how he looks when he's like this, the mirror in the hall shows nothing but a boy, wide-eyed and gasping and splayed to the wall. Dammit, he should have covered that up. No, he doesn't know what men see when they look at him like this, but he knows they always run and tonight he has no desire to give chase.

"I – I remember," Shane whispers around the spit-thick roll of his tongue, stained pink and tempting. "I remember you and... I don't know!" he slams his fist to the wall behind him, lips pushed flush to a pensive pout. "I thought it was fucking... nightmares or something when I was a kid but... but... I _felt_ you. I _know_ you. Just... show me. Please? Show me I'm not fucking insane."

There's something earnest and sincere caught in the frame of Shane's eyes. They're not emotions Luca can recall feeling for himself but he knows men, he knows their language and the things they can say without breathing a word and Shane means every copper-glazed one that he utters. If Luca had a heartbeat it would pulse in time with the bass-heavy throb of Shane's iPod. If he could breathe, he would be panting, raking desperate lungfuls of air as he stares at the kid in front of him.

Of course, if either of those things were the case, he'd have been dead and gone and faded to dust centuries ago, so it's something of a moot point.

There's no fear etched on Shane's face as Luca reaches to lower his hood, nothing but barely concealed excitement that crackles between them as he bounces on the toes of his worn-out Converse and scrambles to help. He pauses as the hood pools at Luca's shoulders, as he turns so his features catch the weak wash of moonlight through the windows, head cocked in consideration. His thumb is unbearably hot, scorching a brand into Luca's skin as Shane trails along the crest of his cheekbone. Shane's lips move silently, questions framed that he must know Luca can't answer, thumb winding maddeningly to trace the curve of Luca's lip, a gasp hissed between clenched teeth as Luca opens his mouth, lets the callous-rough skin snag on the piercing sharpness of his teeth.

"You're not afraid?" Luca asks, grinning devilishly in the dark.

"No," Shane breathes, all awed adoration and golden glances. "You're... fucking _beautiful."_

They take the stairs with a reckless disregard for the fact that Shane manages to be both brittle and soft in all of the wrong places, that their staggered missteps and groping hands could send him plummeting over the handrail to crash to the hardwood below. He doesn't _care_ because there's a searing hand in his jeans, working along the hard length of his cock with distractingly precise strokes.

"'You're cold," Shane shivers slightly, warm fingers dancing through the dark curls that frame Luca's prick.

"I'll warm up," Luca grins, noose-tight possession fiercely brilliant in his gut as he ruts into Shane's grasp.

It's a stutter of staggered steps down the hallway to the bedroom – the room with the windows painted black to ward off the dawn – a breathless grunt from Shane as he tumbles to the mattress and hauls Luca down with him. Clothes are pulled away, torn and ripped and thrown to the ground until he has him, ethereal and marble pale in the glitter-gold lamplight, gift wrapped in nothing but a pair of close-fitting shorts.

Shane is whispering names like daydreams, a litany of every moniker Luca's ever given him over the centuries and he wonders, fingers pressing brands into the plush of Shane's hips, just how much he remembers. How much is true memory, how much is twisted nightmare, macabre fantasy twisted from half-recalled visions and glorified almost-memories. Luca wonders if he should be more concerned that this is the first time Shane has remembered the times that came before. He decides it doesn't matter, the outcome will be the same.

Head ducked but eyes raised, he licks over the damp patch that forms the apex of the tented push of Shane's shorts, the _x_ that marks the spot of the blood-gorged crown of his cock. Salted bitter sucked through cotton, drawn with greedy lips to stain the curling flicker of his tongue as his fingernails bite blunt crescents into the searing heat of Shane's thighs. Shane shivers above him, all arched hips and pleading moans, fingers tangling in the fall of Luca's hair as he strains and begs and gasps each plea.

"Eager," Luca observes with a smirk tossed like a casual accusation between them. Shane glares from under the frame of lashes that sparkle gold in the lamplight, from beneath bangs already curling against his brow with the sheen of sweat that paints him sparkling.

"Dude eager to get his dick sucked," he quips with a quirk of a sneer. "Hold the front fucking page."

He flutters in closed-eye bliss as Luca eases down his shorts, as he tosses them off to the side somewhere and slides his tongue against the drag of hair over skin. Shane shivers, the shudder vibrating him hot and vibrant under the press of Luca's palms.

"You want me to suck your dick?" Luca queries, pausing to press his fangs into the plush give of Shane's inner thigh, just hard enough for the threat of broken skin and blood. He shoots a lazy grin like friendly fire into the blaze of Shane's eyes as he presses fractionally harder and floods his mouth with the hint of copper-salt sweetness. Shane hisses.

"A little less toothy, maybe," he mutters. "No one likes teeth."

"Oh," Luca whispers, grazing the razor-sharp promise of them along the line of Shane's groin, the prickle of goosebumps staining pale skin. "You'll grow to love it, I'm sure."

Now where did that come from? Luca knows how this works, that Shane has witnessed his last sunset, that he's crossed the threshold willingly and won't scuff his battered boots over it again. He lowers his ear to Shane's femoral artery and hears the pulse and push of rich crimson rushing beneath satin skin as he pushes pursed-pout kisses to the heated flush of Shane's leaking cock. He loves the smell of him like this, the pre-come sharpness and teenage sweat all tangled in hair and skin and vibrant _aliveness._ It would be so easy to bare his teeth and take a taste, to rip through butter soft skin and candy flesh as his mouth stains like ruby red fistfights.

He could drain him in under a minute. He knows Shane wouldn't put up a fight.

"Cold," Shane gasps like he's drowning as Luca flips to his knees and takes him in with a growl. "Fuck, you're... you're really cold..."

He thinks – but doesn't say – that Shane wouldn't notice it if Luca were to chill him just the same, if their cold skin were to press together it would feel normal. Like coming home. Shane's dick feels like it's burning, flame-bright and scorching the press of his lips and tongue as he sucks him harder, swallows him deeper. Shane cries out, torn rough from his throat as he twists his fingers into the sheets until they're pale-knuckled and trembling with cramp. He fucks his way down Luca's throat with greedy thrusts and needy groans, pulsing richly thick with blood beneath skin that would break with the slightest pressure of Luca's fangs.

He pulls off when it gets too much, when the urge to sink his teeth into blood-gorged veins makes his very throat itch with need. Full lips flushed and skin prickled sharp with sensitivity, Shane whimpers into the pillow as his cock twitches, split slick and shining and dark with need. With blood, bright and vibrant.

Luca moves, graceful and precise, knees spread as he looms at the head of the bed. Shane rolls to his side, tongue dabbing glitter-shine to the plump, ripe line of his lower lip as he reaches to touch the aching strain of Luca's cock. He blinks up, all innocence and desire hidden behind a demure smile as his fingers burn a brand flesh-deep into the curve of his prick.

"I've never done this before," Shane lies like he knows it's what Luca wants to hear. "You're my first."

"I'll take it slow," Luca replies with just the same level of insincerity. Shane's leans in, tongue first, pressed to catch cool pearls gathered at the head of Luca's prick. Luca hisses through clenched teeth, head thrown back as his nails rake against Shane's scalp and liquid heat pools out from the pulled-taut thrust of his cock. Shane grins, cocky and confident as he flips his tongue under the flared crown of it, circling the pointed tip to catch blazing nerve endings with shudder-shock precision. Luca tightens his hands in spun gold strands and growls out a warning. "Shane..."

"Am I doing this all wrong?" Shane blinks up innocently, lips pursed as he licks softly at the tender tip like he's eating pussy, sensation crawling up Luca's spine as he snarls. Shane flutters his lashes and smirks his bad decisions as he continues. "I told you, I've never done this before... with a guy, anyway..."

Luca keeps that hand fisted tight in Shane's hair and draws him down, inch by eager hot-blood inch over the length of his cock. Shane takes him all, sucks him with an eager moan as his eyelids flutter. Lips stretched around the root of Luca's dick, flushed pink and pretty and slicked damp.

"You're such a good boy," he murmurs, fingers curled along Shane's jaw as he guides him up to the head, shivers senseless at the way that warm, pink tongue curls around him for a moment before sliding him back down. "Look at you, taking my cock like that, like it's all you want to do, so good for me... Do you want my cock, Shane?"

Shane hums an affirmative and curls his fingers around the leaking length of his own blood-dark prick, thumbing through the slick mess at the tip. Luca thinks this could be the most beautiful he's ever seen him, spinning pearlescent streaks across the sweat-damp of his palm and blinking desire from eyes dewed with diamonds. This Shane and not the ones before, this one, with his sharp tongue and knowing eyes and mind that remembers each touch that came before. Each bite. Each tear of bone into flesh and still came back, still walked without fear into a beginning he knew was an ending from the moment he strolled into the park.

Luca blinks away dizziness and forces his mind blank, makes himself think of nothing but the rolling motion of Shane's tongue around his cock, the blunted brilliance of nails sinking sharp into the round of his ass. He thinks of nothing but the way Shane's mouth strokes desperation into his rocking hips. If Luca may permit himself a moment – one amongst the decades turned centuries turned millennia that have fallen before – of self-indulgent imagining, he imagines that this could be it. Just... _this._ An eternity of _this._

Fingers knotted to the nape of Shane's neck he pulls him off, hauls him up to his knees and holds him lover-close. He tucks his nose to the hollow of Shane's throat and smells him, lust and skin and vibrantly pulsing heat that flickers beneath his lips. Shane throws back his head, throat a long line of pale temptation. Luca can _hear_ the throb of his pulse.

"I'm going to fuck you," he mutters and it's thick around his fangs, caught on the blood-drunk slur of clumsy lips and a tripping tongue. This seemed easy as he followed behind him - turned dizzy with the knowledge that he was near - it seemed as though it would be like the times that fell before. But Shane blinks from his daze, eyes sharp and smirk knowing as he curls a hand to Luca's cheek, as he bites briefly at his lower lip before whispering softly.

"Lukas."

The pronunciation is exquisite, fingers trailed the length of Luca's spine and twisting shocks through his nervous system. It encompasses any number of lifetimes and innumerable bad decisions that Luca wants to amend.

No.

Luca doesn't _care._

He finds himself - unwillingly - wondering about this Shane, about the parents that may mourn him, the friend in the band with a guitar left unplayed. He. Doesn't. Fucking. Care. But he still takes a moment to stroke the pad of his thumb over the crest of Shane's cheekbone, to press it between the lush dampness of his lips and whisper with something that spills close to tenderness.

"Sjeng."

Shane turns, the not-quite-man of him betrayed by the sinful roll of his hips, the way he braces to the headboard and spreads his legs, on display all pink and tight and indescribably lovely. He's caught in profile as he glances back over his shoulder (freckled with sun spots doomed to fade in darkness for there won't be another summer's kiss to them - Luca pretends not to notice how beautiful they are) and smirks his youthful arrogance.

"There's lube," he shifts and stirs up the stench of sex from between his legs. Luca hisses a desperate breath he doesn't need and sinks his fingers into the pillowed round of Shane's ass. "In my hoodie."

He's sun-bright and shining, glowing gold in the lamplight and Luca wonders – too much self-indulgence beating in his veins where there should be blood – how he'd suit moonlight. He suited it well enough on a suburban swing set robed in grunge and teenage attitude. But that was a borrowed costume, set dressing make believe and not the same as donning the robes for real. How might he look cast eternally in new-penny glitter and ivory-shine wickedness? He breaks his train of thought to grab at the abandoned hoodie and doesn't stop to question why he moves the clothes away, why he makes sure they won't be stained and ruined by what's to come.

What difference does it make? It's not as though he'll need them again...

"Is it your first time doing this, too?" he whispers into Shane's ear as two fingers slicked slippery and crossed like a good luck charm breach tight resistance. If Shane tastes the need the hangs between them as Luca's teeth find the velvet tag of his earlobe, he doesn't show it.

"Yeah," he breathes, rocking further-deeper-harder onto the invasion of flesh and bone into his body as more beautiful lies dance on his tongue. "You're the first."

Another finger, another artwork of toothmarks pressed to the salt-satin of Shane's throat. Hard enough to bruise, to score their presence like blood bloomed on linen but not enough to break skin. Not yet. Shane fucks back onto his fingers, riding his hand with melodious little moans that pitch up and up to choral cries as Luca crooks his fingers and feels the graze of their pads to Shane's prostate.

"That's it," he murmurs, cool lips catching warm sweat and the sticky catch of curling hair. "That's the spot, isn't it baby?"

He slicks his cock as Shane babbles blasphemous declarations to the wallpaper in front of him, palm sliding against nerve-raw skin that throbs with need.

"Fuck me," Shane says. He isn't begging, it's a demand, a furious command caught in the smoked drift of his voice from the fucked-raw grasp of his throat. "I'm ready, just... fuck me."

Luca eases his fingers free, a moment taken to admire the pale curve of Shane's ass framing the soft pink pucker of his hole. He lines up, cock shivered sharp with static-shock shudders that crackle over his skin. He presses forward just enough, just enough to begin to spread Shane open for him, to feel his lust-thick cock push just inside, enveloping the bruise-bright tip in blazing heat. He sinks his teeth into his lip so hard he's sure he'll bite through, borrowed blood welling on his tongue and lacing the bouquet of sex, sweat and lube with saccharine copper.

Shane hums in front of him, thighs stretched over Luca's, hand curled around the lust-slick curve of his pretty pink prick as he strokes himself. Luca times his thrust in with the slow downstroke of Shane's palm, the way he drags the skin taut and leaves himself flushed and weeping salt pearl shine. Shane groans, a thrum of his chest that vibrates straight to Luca's cock as he seats himself inside indescribable heat. He hooks his chin to the pale line of Shane's shoulder and wraps an arm in hungry possession around his waist.

"Is that good?" Luca rolls his hips, a testing little thrust rewarded with the tight clench of Shane around him.

"Fuck me," Shane is clenched teeth sharpness, issuing orders with eyes squeezed closed. "Come on, Luca. This is what you wanted, what you always want, do it..."

Luca runs a fingertip around the fuck-stretched rim of Shane's hole, his chuckle dark and chasing shivers along the length of Shane's spine, "You want my cock?" he growls like midnight footsteps. "You take it yourself."

Shane whines and flexes the bone-bold glow of his knuckles against the headboard, head rolled forward as he braces on his knees for just a moment, a slow withdrawal along the hard length of Luca's cock. He rolls his hips on the head, teasing with tightness as he breathes deep and, with a throaty little grunt, he slides back, burying Luca inside him once more, shoving himself open for him. They cry out together as he does it again; slow upstroke, downstroke delivered like a blow and then he nods but not to Luca, bites his lip once more and starts to thrust.

And it's not enough, the press and thrust of his cock into Shane's body as they move together, as they roll like storm waves, salt-capped and desperately dark beneath the surface. It doesn't soothe that under-the-skin itch that crawls through his veins, it doesn't ease the darkness of his thoughts. He grasps Shane's stiff prick, flicks his thumb over the ridged cap and slides along the slit. He swallows each moan with greed as Shane kisses him with sloppy need over his shoulder. He licks over freckles and bites at sun spots until Shane is trembling against him.

"Tell me what you want," he demands as his fangs itch, as his gums throb and his tongue tingles with the flood of anticipation.

"Do it," Shane hisses, he doesn't say what _it_ is but it's not like Luca doesn't know. He tweaks the tight peak of a stiff, pink nipple and nips another bruise to Shane's pulse point.

He fucks into him harder, the flush of his cock snagging sharp on the fraying edges of Shane's impending undoing. Shane coils tight around him, spring-sharp and waiting-needing-wanting. He tugs and strokes the burning length of Shane's prick until he's crying out with burnt raw lungs, hoarse and wanting and thoroughly, _beautifully_ fucked.

When Shane comes undone, it's like a hurricane.

It's the force of the wind stealing air from Luca's lungs that he never knew he needed, it's a pound in his chest that feels like the echo of things that once were there, it's a hot wet slick over his hand that's gossamer pearl rather than crimson gore. Shane sings for him, a throbbing well of stuttered moans that fall from fuck-flushed lips as he jerks and shudders and... and... bares his throat...

Luca's tearing into the vein before he can think, teeth sliding through butter-soft skin and flooding his mouth with metallic crimson that sticks to his lips, his tongue, coating his mouth and his throat and his gullet as he sucks and gorges and Shane shudders shockwaves around his cock. Luca comes, thick and endless into the depths of Shane's body, liquid need of lust replacing the flood that pours from the jagged wound at Shane's throat. Luca comes and drinks and feels the world explode to so much dust around him as he watches a masterpiece of glittered gold paint the back of his eyelids.

He drinks until Shane begins to shake, shock setting in as his eyes glass with incomprehension. He drinks more until Shane is limp and slack in his arms and his pulse is barely enough to well rubies at the place Luca has ripped him open. He drinks until he stops, cock slipping from tight heat as he flips Shane to his back beneath him and – before he can overthink it – he tears into his own wrist.

He hauls Shane's head into his lap, wound pressed to pale lips. It takes a moment, a slow trickle of borrowed blood over the limp lounge of Shane's tongue. He wonders for a panicked second if he went too far, if he did it again but Shane lunges, grabs at his hand and hauls him closer, sucking greedy mouthfuls down his throat. He drinks until his pulse weakens, until his breathing falters and flutters and his eyes blink closed.

He dies in Luca's arms with lips dyed crimson.

Luca hauls him under the blankets to keep him warm for as long as possible and retreats to spend the night at the hallway window, watching the stars fade as the sky shifts black to blue to smudged and smoky purple streaked with orange and blood red.

He wonders if he should feel regret that Shane will never see the sun rise again. He decides not to think about it as he retreats to the safety of painted black windows and the residual warmth still clinging to Shane's body as he slides beneath the covers next to him.

He wakes to a choking gasp next to him, to the flounder and kick of a man drowning in air as Shane thrashes against the mattress with wide eyes. Luca can't hear a heartbeat as he pins him still and whispers soothing nonsense into his ear, as tenderness wells in his chest.

Luca can see the glitter-gleam threat of those fangs, though.

Shane fights against him, snaps his freshly-minted teeth in Luca's direction as he growls and snarls and fights for breath he doesn't need. They all do this, when they wake, panicked by that human need to breathe. They lose the habit so quickly, though most agree it's a good way to break up the silence.

"Shane, shh, it's me," he soothes, hand soft to Shane's cheek. He no longer feels hot, no longer burns into the chill of Luca's skin as he blinks and breathes and calms beneath him. "It's just me."

"Am I...?" he begins, wide-eyed with confusion. "Did you...?"

"Yes," Luca whispers, guiding Shane's calloused fingertips to test the sharp snag of his fangs. Shane pauses, head cocked, and traces them with the tip of his tongue. "Are you okay?"

Shane seems to consider this question for a moment, pale skin gleaming. Luca understands now why Shane called him beautiful, why this glow of ethereal vitality and the predator-like perfection of the ivory daggers in his smile held such appeal. Shane was beautiful before, now he's something else entirely.

"Thirsty," he snarls after a moment. "So fucking thirsty."

"Okay," Luca grins, shoving his shirt into his hands. "Get dressed."

Shane doesn't argue and Luca doesn't say any more, sliding on second-skin jeans and the cloak of his coat. Shane tugs on his jeans and throws on his shirt, pale skin concealed as he shrugs on his hoodie and reaches for his shoes. He checks his phone and looks up, eyes gleaming devilish in the gloom as he smiles, tooth-bright and robed in something dark as he raises it to his ear.

"Hey, mom," he begins with a grin that Luca's sure would send the very stars into hiding. "I'm heading over for dinner. I'll be bringing a friend..."

_The End_

# About the Author

When I'm not reading or writing steamy romantic fiction, you can find me bouncing between swimming, boy scouts and book club. I'm living my very own happily ever after in the north-east of England with my husband, two (mostly) adorable boys and a collection of pets I did not ask for.

I've been a writer of romantic fiction for fifteen years, and my goal is to write strong, compelling characters who stay with you long after you turn the last page. From the glamour of the music industry to at-home single dads, no plot goes unexplored once my muse takes hold ;)

For more books and updates:

www.reannapryce.com

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# Thanks For Reading!

Thank you so much for spending time with me in my little fantasy world! If you enjoyed **Halloween In The Dark** , please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Reviews are vital for new indie authors and it would mean a lot to me! In the next section I have also included the first chapter of **Lines** , first in my **Record Label Love** series. For more information, giveaways and upcoming releases, please register for my mailing list. Thanks again!

# Lines

**_Record Label Love Book One_**

**Lines**

* * *

Jaxon James is a solo artist, towering at the height of his career. He's got it all and then some; a sprawling house in the Hollywood Hills, sold out arena shows – and a bit of an addictive personality.

* * *

Elliot Warren is an actor, teetering on the brink of obscurity. He hit his peak in the early noughties and now struggles by on the notoriety of being the most quoted cast member of the country's most laughed at soap opera. Unlike Jaxon, his image is squeaky-clean, and his career depends on keeping it that way.

* * *

Jaxon has nothing to offer but notoriety. Elliot has nothing to offer but stability. With La-La Land providing their set and a supporting cast of neuroses, addictions and egos, will they get their Hollywood ending?

**Available Now**

**Chapter One**

* * *

Los Angeles is at its worst in the places it should shine.

Glitter and makeup slicked away by chemically-induced sweat as all the pretty people grind together. They fake like they don't need the carefully sourced pharmaceuticals (legal and... not so legal). Everything they need to keep those smiles city-wide and those egos pulsing star-high. Elliot could trace his way with snow white powder along the whole walk of fame and still not create a line long enough to match what's snorted through rolled up fifties in the bathroom of the club.

All of those expensive septums taking a hell of a hit. He almost wants to smile at the thought.

It's not that Elliot doesn't like fun things. He likes them as much as the next guy, he has a perfectly adequate tolerance for Things That are Fun.

The issue — the real crux of Elliot's problem — is that standing against the wall of a nightclub somewhere in Hollywood with an overpriced beer (though the water is even more expensive, go figure) isn't his idea of _fun._ It's actually more like his idea of how to induce sweaty palms and soaring levels of crippling social anxiety.

For someone who makes a living in front of the camera, he really dislikes human interaction.

There's a pulse of electricity in his spine as he notices someone out on the dance floor. A shiver of the could-have-been as he takes in peroxide blond, flushed cheeks and blood-bitten lips all set around eyes that don't look like they're in the same room as the rest of him. Some out-of-his-mind little starlet bumping and grinding the high out on the dance floor. Sometimes, Elliot is handed painful reminders of how distinctly _not_ Hollywood he is.

"Dude!" Reese – best friend, confidante, poor handler of alcohol – slurs into his ear, malt on his breath and thickening his tongue as something impossibly cold tips into the small of his back. Reese's beer all over his shirt. Fantastic. "You having a good time?"

Elliot is still staring at the guy on the dance floor. Reese nudges him again and sends another waterfall of chilled pale ale down the back of his jeans. He's growing less amused by the second.

"Yeah," he lies around an enthusiastic nod, his own beer bottle inclined towards the achingly fashionable DJ who looks, at a conservative estimate, roughly twelve years old. "They're really good! Really..." he struggles for a moment to find the right word — cool? Is it cool to say _cool_ anymore? — before stuttering, "really — dope?"

"You should be networking," Reese looks maybe three beers past wasted; eyes shot red, lips shining damp and smiling. "Mason says — he says there's—" Reese hiccups, shakes his head, carries on "—networkers. You should — should hit them up. You know?"

"Yeah, maybe," Elliot nods. Reese's trying his best, he knows that, but he's not in the mood for a lesson in how to get noticed. "Just going to the bathroom, yeah?"

There was a time when the name Elliot Warren meant something, a time when agents actually cared enough to seek him out at parties. Another pretty young thing fresh from RADA in London, flying out on the last of his student loan to try his luck in La-La Land. Everyone told him he'd make it, they tossed around promises like 'the next Tom Hardy' and 'Exeter's answer to Leo DiCaprio'.

But, the fact is, promoters, networkers and the other glamorous movers and shakers don't want to talk to him. He's done, wasting out his washed-up career in soap operas and wondering if the next big bill is going to drive him to contact those porn directors who hand him their cards these days.

In the haven of white tiles, white lights and gleaming white marble, he considers himself in the mirror. Still handsome, he decides, even at thirty-one with his thick, dark hair, caramel skin and soulful eyes, copper and amber. Still sufficiently youthful and _definitely_ still available for roles aged twenty to thirty-five, although he did the right thing getting rid of the flat ironed bangs a year or two ago. His agent said it would draw in work, open his resume to things that went beyond emo college kid.

It's been six months since he last heard from her. He should hit her up sometime and have her confirm that he's off the books.

The door behind him crashes inward and Elliot jolts, spasming pulse, wide eyes, open mouth. The mirror tells him this looks hilarious as he pivots with arms spread, barely in time to catch whoever the fuck it is in the split second before they crash, brow first, into the edge of the sink. The newcomer blinks up at Elliot and grants him approximately three ticks of the second hand of his watch to take in bloodshot eyes and skin painted clammy with sweat, the briefest moment to open his mouth and say, "Holy shit, are you o—"

Whoever he is, he opens his own pretty, lush-lipped mouth and paints the tiles, the sink, the bottom of the mirror, Elliot's shoes and the cuffs of his jeans with lurid, sour-smelling vomit.

"—kay?" Elliot finishes softly, framed with a sigh and the pinch of his fingers to the sudden, throbbing pain behind the bridge of his nose. Every time. Every fucking time. The guy giggles and slurs something that could be an apology but probably isn't. "Are you fucking kidding me right now? My _shoes_."

Recrimination is entirely pointless when the dude passes out cold. Elliot shuffles him back to the wall, slides him down it and considers his options. The most sensible route available to him by far is leaving him — in the recovery position, obviously — on the bathroom floor for someone else to deal with. But Elliot is neither sensible nor callous enough to abandon someone that he's honestly starting to worry might be dead.

(He checks his pulse. He's fine.)

So, if Elliot is not that man and this is not that night, he resigns himself to his fate, hunkered down on his heels but safely out of the blast zone as he lightly pats the guy's cheek. He stirs, swatting irritably at Elliot's hand as he huffs out a curse. He's a pretty little thing; pale as cream with high cheekbones, thick, dark lashes and a mass of artfully swept, platinum blond hair. Elliot touches his cheek, finds it smooth and soft under his fingertips.

"Alright, mate?" he tries, the dude hums a little, chin dropped down to his chest. "Can you hear me? Are you okay? Like, are you here with someone or can I — I dunno, call someone for you?"

"Charlie." The name slurs from his lips on a hiccup.

Elliot has no idea if that's his name, the name of a friend or a demand for more of what he's clearly spent the better — or worse — part of the evening shoving up his nose.

"Your name is Charlie?" Elliot sits back on his heels a little, head cocked, and looks Charlie over. He's the out of his mind dude from the dancefloor, bleach blond hair slicking to his forehead, white shirt washed sheer with sweat. Elliot almost recognizes him, some nagging recollection stirring in the dark recesses that still compel him to thumb through National Enquirer when he's at the dentist's office. He doesn't look like a Charlie.

"Charlie," Charlie repeats, a little more confidently this time, eyes still closed. "Charlie."

He belches, wet and sour-smelling, chased by a giggle as he mumbles something senseless to himself.

Elliot sighs once more and stoops, hauling Charlie's arm around his shoulder and heaving him upright. Charlie slips a little, wet lips grazing against Elliot's neck as he hums into his throat, some senseless, half-hazed babble of silly syllables. Elliot grimaces. Charlie nuzzles against him with a happy little sigh.

"Smell nice," he mumbles, breath drenched in champagne.

"And _you_ smell like shit," Elliot informs him helpfully. He's not kidding, the booze kicking off Charlie is enough to haze the air around him, soured with bile and dance-drench sweat. "Let's go."

"Right." Charlie doesn't move, ass pushed to brace against the wall, neck slack and cheek to Elliot's shoulder. Elliot didn't intend to spend his night babysitting. This is almost exactly why he tells everyone that he hates clubs.

"Okay, Charlie? Hey, stay with me mate, you listening?" Elliot enunciates each word with exaggerated care as he pushes his hip into Charlie's, settling the deadweight of him as he silently thanks any deity listening that this kid is quite as tiny as he is. "Let's get you some air, shall we?"

Charlie slips his arm around Elliot's waist and his hand into the back of Elliot's jeans, fingers sliding slippery against the crack of Elliot's ass.

It's not as helpful as Charlie possibly imagines it is.

Elliot manages to organize them roughly two steps back into the main body of the club when the world around him seems to shift, explode and go completely, unequivocally batshit insane.

Dark suits, dark glasses, dark earpieces and two enormous guys with shaved heads that wrestle Charlie out of his grasp. Elliot is tackled, rammed to the wall in the least fun way imaginable, as they pat him down, check him over and turn to suit number three with a nod, Charlie propped up between them.

"Charlie!" Charlie exclaims, rallying a little as Elliot nurses his elbow — sore from where it met the wall in amongst all of the shoving — and glares at them all resentfully. "Where you been?"

Elliot blinks, confused.

"Is he with you?" Charlie — actual Charlie, Elliot realizes — asks, inclining his head back towards Elliot as he steadies whoever the fuck Elliot hauled out of the bathroom with a practiced hand fisted tight into the shirt at the small of his back. "Jaxon? I said, is he with you?"

"No, I'm not," Elliot shakes his head vehemently, "I just..."

He trails off. No one is listening to him.

The guy — Jaxon, apparently — slurs a string of nonsense around booze-deadened lips, fingers stroking hot and clammy against Elliot's cheek. Jaxon nods, slow and dazed and slack-mouthed-smiling and, before Elliot can object, he's hustled along next to Jaxon, caught in a solid wall of muscle and well-tailored Hugo Boss formal wear.

A more assertive man might object. Elliot, however, is not an assertive man. Instead, he trips along politely, rushed off his feet as they're bundled out of the club, through the side entrance and into a waiting car. Elliot doesn't catch the brand name in the blinding pop of flashbulbs and calls of _'Jaxon! Over here!'_ but whatever it is, it's sleek, dark and upholstered in butter-soft Italian leather and, almost certainly, worth more than the contents of Elliot's house. Elliot needs to clear up this tiny little misunderstanding.

"Listen," he manages to squeak.

They don't listen.

The door closes behind him with an expensive thud. Jaxon immediately starts to mouth at Elliot's throat, humming something slurred about tattoos. Elliot, well, he doesn't exactly shove him away because the dude sitting opposite him — Charlie — looks like he could crush his skull in one hand, but he _does_ try to subtly edge towards the door.

Someone once told Elliot that assertiveness would blossom with maturity. They probably told him this while he was passed out drunk on his bathroom floor and they probably meant he'd learn to _just say no._ No one told him he'd still be lurching along from one disaster to another in his thirties. Elliot feels many things in this particular moment — confusion, irritation, rabbit-eyed _fear_ — but one thing he does _not_ feel is _assertive._

Elliot has that disturbing sense of déjà vu, that nagging familiarity in bloodshot blues and soft, pink lips. Jaxon. Jaxon James. Elliot's almost certain he has this guy's first two albums on his iPod. He doesn't know if he's starstruck or incredibly uncomfortable as Jaxon tries to kiss him, misses, and smears his lips against the headrest instead. This is probably what they mean when they talk about never meeting your idols.

Jaxon giggles. Charlie doesn't react. Elliot suspects he sees this a lot.

"Don't worry," Jaxon slurs, all flushed with drunken sincerity as he brushes a hand over Elliot's belt buckle. Elliot would throw himself from the car but they're on the freeway now and travelling at close to sixty. "I almost never puke once I'm actually getting fucked."

Elliot tries the door handle.

It's locked.

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