Amadi:dude
Simon:For five hundred dollars, you can get your own pair. Look on eBay.
Because he’s full of good will or something equally foreign, he does a quick search and pastes the eBay link into the chat.
Chapter Twelve
Charlie opens the door before Simon’s even finished swiping his key card. He’s wearing sweatpants and no shirt. His hair is wet like he just got out of the shower.
Charlie steps aside to let him in but then stops him with a hand on Simon’s shoulder. He’s staring at Simon so intently that Simon wants to look away. “What did he say to you?”
Simon takes this to mean that Charlie knows where Simon was.
“That’s from talking to Jamie,” Simon explains, waving a hand at his red eyes. “I told him I’m leaving the show.”
Something complicated happens on Charlie’s face, and Simon realizes too late that he just confirmed that he’s leaving the show, not merely thinking about it. He’s ready for an argument—about Dave, about Simon leaving the show, about Simon monopolizing the bathroom counter, about anything, because that would be normal. But Charlie doesn’t look upset. Slowly, he lifts a hand to touch Simon’s face.
“Everything go okay with Jamie?” Charlie’s hand is big and warm and shocking.
“Yeah, very.”
Charlie’s thumb strokes Simon’s cheekbone in a way that makes Simon’s brain white out. He was so ready for Charlie to be annoyed,and this is so plainly the opposite of annoyance, that Simon is flooded with relief. Only when the relief hits him does he realize how very badly he didn’t want Charlie to be upset with him.
Simon’s spent seven years accepting Charlie’s annoyance, Charlie’s dislike, as the baseline standard state of affairs between them. At some point in the last day—maybe before that, maybe a while before—Simon started wanting something else, and now he has it in the form of Charlie’s hand on his face.
“So. Dave called.” Charlie’s voice isn’t any louder than it needs to be, with Simon just a few inches away. “Heapologized. What did you say to him? Were knives involved? What did youdo?”
Simon swallows. There is no way to tone down what he said to Dave. No way to make it sound like anything other than what it was.
“I told him he was lucky to have you and should stop being an entire bag of dicks about it.” He swallows again, makes himself blink, tries to focus on something other than the blue of Charlie’s eyes. “And he basically told me that he’s trying to forcibly stop you from worrying about him because you’ve exceeded your lifetime quota of worrying about people. He is, obviously, a moron. But I don’t think he’s actively trying to hurt you.”
Charlie’s other hand settles on Simon’s face, and Simon thinks he might die. There’s no way he’s breathing right now.
“Thanks,” Charlie says, almost a whisper.
“It’s nothing,” Simon says. Or tries to say. He’s a little distracted by the half step forward Charlie just took. The edge of Simon’s cardigan is touching Charlie’s bare chest.
Simon could move away if he wanted to, but he can’t imagine wanting to, not when Charlie’s leaning in, not when Charlie hesitates just a fraction of a second, his lips millimeters from Simon’s.They’re so close, breathing the same air, the space between them warm and heavy with anticipation.
When Charlie’s lips brush against his, Simon makes a sound. Not from surprise—he knew what Charlie was doing—but because he doesn’t expect it to feel so immediately good. Kissing feels good; this is not news, even to Simon, to whom first kisses primarily feel anxious, like impromptu performances you can’t rehearse for.
Kissing Charlie feels like he’s finally let go of something heavy. Like he’s filling his lungs after holding his breath. Charlie’s lips are warm and a little chapped, and his beard is much softer than Simon thought it would be, and his hands are cupping Simon’s face, and Simon’s been waiting for this.
There’s nowhere for Simon to put his own hands other than the naked skin of Charlie’s back, so that’s what he does, and now Charlie makes a sound, groaning against Simon’s mouth.
Simon pulls back, just enough to talk. “Are you kissing me because I was rude to an old man? Is that what does it for you?” There’s probably a less unhinged way to ask if Charlie’s doing this out of something as unsexy as gratitude, but Simon’s nowhere close to hinged at the moment.
He’s near enough to feel Charlie smile. “Simon, I’m kissing you because I ran out of reasons not to.”
That’s insulting, Simon’s sure of it, and later on, when his brain is back online, maybe he’ll figure out why. For now, he presses in for another kiss.
When Simon’s thought about how Charlie might kiss—in real life, not on camera—and Simon’s maybe thought about this a nonzero number of times, he figured Charlie would be all in, right from the beginning. Teeth. A well-placed thigh. Definitely some groping.
But this—Charlie’s hands cradling his jaw, Charlie’s lips barely tasting him—is not that, not at all, and the gulf between expectations and reality is making Simon feel off-balance. Dizzy.
One of Charlie’s hands disappears from Simon’s face, and Simon doesn’t like that, not at all. But then that hand lands on Simon’s hip, and he’s being steered backward until he hits the door. And that’s—that’s perfect, because it turns out that what Simon wants more than anything is to have the door behind him and the solid bulk of Charlie in front of him.
“Why do you taste like beer?” Charlie murmurs. “I’ve never seen you drink beer.”
