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“Valentino socks?” Ian says, voice all hectic and high, thin mouth turned to a taunt. They do make, penny for penny, the same floor scraping wage.
Sam hunches over his steno notepad, a neat go die in his slitty stare.
“Dream shopping again, demon slayer?” Ian says, heading off to snort Splenda or whatever.
Sam has a cautious eye is all. Can’t help that he’s a noticer.
That he picks up on, yes, embryonic things, that he’s hyper-aware of the brim and the garnish and of the echoes of shadows, the moments before motion becomes movement.
A fruitish chemical scent of $39 hair gel or the shine of luxury on a cuff link made to look like a 45 caliber bullet casing. When the prim, pressed hem of a pant leg gets disturbed in the morning elevator rush and flirts above an ankle, almost thrilling, a bold VLTN logoed on the side of a sock, Italian cotton.
Not shopping, no. Dream big or don’t bother dreaming at all.
Sam Wesson also has a curious heart.
~
He browses Gentleman’s Gazette on his lunch hour sometimes.
It’s excessively visual and makes the back of his neck prickle pink, his ribs feel mildly tight with a yearn. Paul kind of still thinks it’s a more modern porn site and it doesn’t help shit that one time he caught Sam scrambling to x out of the tab as he walked up. But it’s not. It’s. It’s just a menswear blog.
This week’s topic is Incorporating Polka Dots Into Your Wardrobe.
It does get Sam kind of hot, though.
~
dark grey 3 piece tweed suit is what he takes note of on Wednesday, along with slim fit and soy peanut butter bar; it was poking out of the flapover briefcase pocket, glossy crinkly wrapper right there in plainest view.
On Thursday it’s baby blue gingham button down/butter gold tie/navy blazer — Ted Baker??
He’s starting to get a knack for this, he thinks. And lets three inbound calls slip past him while he’s zoned out on proprietary, inappropriate sentiments.
~
Casual Friday almost defleshes him.
Sam was never going to be braced enough for a subtly striped shirt under an easy, hunter green cardigan with the sleeves bunched to just below elbows. Camel brown cap-toe shoes. A boyish, product-free side part in the hair.
“Hey, if you’re not eating that then I’m just gonna—”
Sam’s leftover pasta salad is sitting half digested in Ian’s skinnyfat paunch long before he flickers back in. He was at most going to push his veggies around the bowl anyway, disinterested, troublingly preoccupied.
“Dude, what's with you lately,” Ian laughs, leaning back in a break room seat, “first it’s slasher flick dreams and visions of old gods, now you’re—”
“He’s wearing glasses,” Sam’s disembodied voice says, to himself, for himself.
“What? Who’s wea—” The legs of Ian’s chair pound back down to the ground. His eyeline is on the same path as Sam’s now, blinking at what’s there on the other side of the glass, talking friendly to the girl with the angled black bob from Accounts Payable. “Mr. Smith?” A muscle in Sam’s thigh spasms in reaction. “Mr. Smith, our boss’s boss’s boss?”
~
Sam so certainly doesn’t need it pointed out that his good cords came from the Sears clearance rack, marked down twice and on their final red tag.
But Ian’s a pal like that.
“We’re talking putting a Ferrari 612 in the same garage as a Ford Pinto here, friend. It’s a no.”
Sam does get that. Sam’s gotten it since he walked into the lobby on his first morning and got lovespelled by a face like a Bouguereau painting that was on its way up to the six-figure floors. Knockout pretty and at a premium price.
It doesn’t, though, put an end to his headtrips and on Monday he writes: oxidized silver dart tie clip
~
“He looked sort of— wrung this morning, didn’t he? Ish?” It’s only Tuesday.
And it isn’t just the soft silk gather of creases Mr. Smith has by the shine of his eyes when he’s politely amused that Sam notices. It’s his sulks and his sighs, and the little dents he gets where a smile line would be, when he’s ruminative.
Some days he gets off on the wrong floor. Has to hustle back in, apologize like anyone who’s near him minds, white knuckle his windsor knot, adjusting.
“Are we seriously still doing this?” Ian’s moved to the cubicle next door recently and he’s wearing his headset around his neck, milking company dime. “You’re entertaining your billion dollar fantasy and expecting me to take part in this sick self-abuse?” His Left 4 Dead 2 shirt has a splatty stain on it. “What size anal plug do you think he’s sitting on up there today?”
“Dude! Don’t—”
“Pfffftt,” Ian says, pumping his chair handle, whooshing up and down, “someone like that? You know he’s gotta have a locked up collection in his desk drawers. Uncramp your face, Sam.”
The mini paperclip Sam’s been dismembering for the last eight minutes is sitting a rounded out square next to his mousepad, now, and he says, “That’s really not. It isn’t—” Breath bulled out through his nose.
“Does it vibrate or is it jeweled?”
“Stressed?” Sam stresses. That’s all he wants to know, that’s—
“Fine. You’re so fucking soggy sometimes. Big, big yawn.”
Ian squeegees a finger over buck teeth, relents, “the guy’s a walking Zoloft ad, man. Adler breathing down his neck? Prob’ly doing fat bumps off his name plate just to be semi-functional. Bet he’s wiggin’ out most days, yeah.”
Oh. That’s—bleak, Sam thinks, and watches Ian answer the next lit up call. He doesn’t want that for Mr. Smith.
Sam doesn’t actually know Mr. Smith, but it sounds like an unkind life. And he’s too beautiful to be dead by 30.
~
His little list by week’s end has dwindled.
He’s got a few cursory memos, unfinished thoughts of argyle print! or lopsided pocket handkerchief, halfhearted pigeonholing for the sake of ritual.
There’s a jagged spike in confused consumers and Sam gets slammed on back to back to back calls that keep his mind from speeding down the dead end it wants badly to crash itself on.
A standout spot exists on Mr. Smith’s bottom lip, the reckless little freckle that made Sam’s chest pang for the rest of the flat afternoon, when he noticed it.
He hopes Sales & Marketing isn’t being brutalized black and blue as well.
Sam doodles a junky looking heart on his scrap paper, then quickly blots it over with white-out before it’s crumpled and kicked under his cardboard desk.
~
Between 5:01 and 5:04 the elevator stops each evening on Sam’s floor and the mouth of it flanks open, waits for him to step on, excuse me, oh, sorry, sorry, let me just, continues on its otherwise reticent descent, halcyon time of every day.
It’s a wormhole of last week, week prior, tomorrow, yesterday, today, right now. Mr. Smith is always there and Mr. Smith never speaks a single thing.
If Sam can expect anything, he can expect the bustle and buzz when they reach ground floor to dismantle his daydreams into fine dust, ten bodies, thirty bodies, an entire people between them, Mr. Smith with the remote-key to his car in a fist, gone like the asphalt mirages when the day’s sun has died.
Affection makes Sam weird. He hasn’t been on any roadtrips in—years, probably.
But what Sam doesn’t expect is what happens on this day: Paul is wedged in behind him, counting things off on his fingers, only absently there; he’s close to the days of sangrias and siestas and halfway checked out. Three women titter quietly, excitedly, one holding tupperware, the other a bottle of fizz, the third a card and a pen, collecting signatures. Someone in the swarm has overspritzed their cologne. Another floor dings by.
And seven from the bottom, it opens. A chunk of Sandover’s best file out like fire ants.
“Um,” Sam says, watching, getting civilly elbowed and wristed out of the way.
“Clara got a lateral promotion to another division,” Paul says mechanically, scooting around Sam, “so she’s going away. They’re serving cake,” then he’s gone and everyone’s gone and the doors are shut and Sam is alone, but not quite.
“Oh,” he says, but just in the clutching back of his throat. He doesn’t let it come out.
Polished oxblood brogues and a dark chambray suit stand not beside him but near him. Near enough that if Mr. Smith angled his babysmooth jaw and looked, he might see the wet nervousness in the front dip of Sam’s neck.
All before he notices the peek of woven-dot suspenders sitting so prissily beneath the jacket when Mr. Smith shifts to the side.
Sam is either going to get a swelling headrush or an unbelievable erection and they’ve only been in isolation for one floor.
And in the gap between 6 and 5, Mr. Smith rotates his (new—Sam notices, mind indexing) two-tone slim leather briefcase, nickel hardware, likely artisan crafted, from his right to his left. It’s a restless movement.
Still, the satchel must weigh as much as it cost because it tries to tumble out of his grip and on snap reflex, Sam, absorbed wholly by a soft-focus love, leans over to help. It should be nothing, is nothing, but—
Sam knows what stiff mistrust looks like.
The way it sits in the pinch of a facial muscle or rounds out a heavy breathing belly.
“Right,” Sam’s voice works out for him, pulling away just after 4, looking staunchly at the buttons, “Didn’t want it to fall. You, sorry.”
Mr. Smith hasn’t unlocked his lips but some sort of queasy’s settled over his magazine-ad features.
His skin is almost the color of his eyes.
Maybe owed to yet another boy from IT bubbling drool out the side of his wet mouth at the thought of getting in the pants of that. Whatever it is—it slimes Sam to the bone.
“No, I. I’m sorry,” Mr. Smith says, a harsh whisper around 3.
Sam doesn’t look at him, because his pulse is pinging like crazy and his internal system is set on react, and Mr. Smith is talking to him and Sam can’t talk back and he thinks about how his bus is uniformly late to the curb, and maybe he’ll watch the Amityville Horror when he gets home if it’s still rerunning tonight, safe thoughts, black and white thoughts, nothing striped or printed or tailored or tied.
Mr. Smith might be talking about senior investment strategies now or collapsing oil prices, or maybe he’s saying a curt, steel-toothed thanks, or, more likely, clamping down on any further communication.
Sam wouldn’t know. Floor 2 and Sam’s dreamed up a wall between them.
The collar of his yellow polo is crumply and the tone of it looks stale and jaundiced in this light. They’re just strangers. It’s fine, he thinks, as the box jolts to its final grounding, dings like a happy microwave.
“G1, Lobby,” the genial, automatized voice informs and he’s out in a hurry at the first cleft of opening, not running but running on empty.
Mr. Smith might be saying hey wait, hey. Mr. Smith might not be verbal at all.
~
“Okay but what the fuck. What in the fuck. The firstborn fuck.”
Sam drums over the bridge of his nose, squeezes at a nerve there. “You said that part already,” he says, and drags down to where it slopes to a point. His ex-girlfriend said he had a ‘cute sniffer’.
He thinks it was his ex-girlfriend. Or his mom. He isn’t sure of much these days.
Ian is built on wild gesticulations and bulging sockets this morning.
Why didn’t you. And how could you just. I mean, Sam. Sam, I am. Sam, my man. "You couldn’t’ve pulled the emergency lever and, I dunno, gently fucked him blind while you waited for rescue?”
“That wasn’t going to happen.” Only TV shows and skin vids work that way.
“There’s no D in TRY!”
That doesn’t make sense and Sam doesn’t say. He drops his neck-up headache into his hands.
“Alright, start to finish,” Ian says, huddling close. “One more time. I need to re-analyze,” which makes Sam lift into a little smile at least.
~
It was an amplified feeling: a singular, panoptic point, and Sam tries to explain that—“There was just this, pull. Or something.”—but can’t quite.
“Like a lodestone!”
With a handful of minutes left on their ten, Sam’s no closer to figuring it out himself, why it felt like that, why everything hurt, why the world both spun and ceased with Mr. Smith, so Sam says, “uh, maybe. I almost couldn’t breathe?”
“It’ll do you like that.” Ian nods thoughtfully, “and then it’s like being awake during an autopsy. All the good, bad for you shit. Getting your soupy giblets rearranged, things pulled out for fun. But oh man, that first phase. When it’s all carnival teddy bears and condom after condom. Yeah, that,” Ian sighs, going spacey. “Savor it.”
“Savor what.” Nah. No.
“Oh yeah, you’re in it,” Ian says, Dorito dust in his wispy goatee, “and he’ll get there. Know how I know?”
Lost in laughably large new thoughts, Sam blinks.
“’cause I was just wadding your panties when I said you were a Pinto, y’know? You, my robust little wizard, are a Gallardo. Drive fast and free,” Ian says. He crams a thing of pink wedge erasers into his cargos.
~
Sam, despite his whole wheat and cans of spinach looks, very much believes in lucky black cats, the astrologer’s theory on reincarnation, and maybe even fate-evoking voodoo dolls if he gives it enough brainwork.
Also werewolves. Sam Wesson absolutely believes in werewolves.
The idea of love at first sight, though, that’s kid shit. And something he can’t even entertain.
~
A grandfatherish caller mentions six times his favorite pea croquette dish, and he’s also having trouble with the ‘salmon colored knob’ on his early model printer. Isn’t sure what an IP address is; Sam’s been cueing him through it.
Sam doesn’t mind calls like this. Especially when they get it figured out and he gets an earnest “Thank you, Dan. I wrote down everything you said,” at the end. He can be Dan. Dan says you’re welcome, sir, call back anytime.
Dan has a ha ha ha laugh.
Lunch isn’t for another hour plus and the ringing phones have a sideways melody.
~
“Speak of a darling devil and she doth appear.” Ian backhands Sam’s shoulder. “Holy shit. Someone must be in trou-ble. Holy shit.”
It’s the only small warning Sam gets. And it’s a collective reaction that his entire department has.
At least for the initial moment or two, it’s a room of war wives waiting to see who gets the telegram. Nobody ever ventures down, you only get called up.
High-end doesn’t stoop low, at least not around here. But Sam’s looking where everyone else is, over at the structural steel staircase, and he thinks, unbidden and fond, charcoal windowpane wool, slate grey buttons, one undone. The necktie is the sort that Bloomingdale’s might describe airily as pinot noir.
And all of that is coming closer, and closer yet, and Ian’s saying, “wizard, wizard,” under his breath and Mr. Smith looks airbrushed even under artificial light.
~
“Sam?” he says, standing there by Sam’s matchstick cubicle. “Wesson?”
That is correctly him, or who he’s supposed to be, so he jerks his chin. But he doesn’t feel as close to his bones as he should, especially right now.
“I. I looked for you in the system,” Mr. Smith says, eyes unsure, a little widened. “It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, leaving it at Lost and Found.” A tiny sweeping tuck of hair is wanting to touch his forehead so Sam focuses on that. “But I—thought you might want it back.”
“Oh,” Sam says, to say. The little strand leans blonde.
“You didn’t hear me, when I tried to say. You didn’t—maybe I wasn’t loud enough. Maybe I. Well. It fell out onto the floor when you were leaving the elevator and,” he smells like a bar of hotel soap when he leans in, “here.”
Sam doesn’t gasp or flinch or puke, and he doesn’t right away think oh that’s why my bag felt 10.7 oz. lighter, he’s not a freak, and in this terrible reality, he hadn’t even known it was gone, but there it is, once Mr. Smith sets it down on his desk next to his mesh cup of pens and his creature from the black lagoon mini lamp.
Sam’s little spiral-topped notebook, curled up corners, fat and brittle-edged on one side where he spilled a drink, once, some shreddy bits stuck in the metal coil, unmistakably well used, sits there. Like it’s harmless.
So Sam says a fogged thank you because he’s got good manners down to his soul.
“Look, I.” Mr. Smith’s voice is screened in and the girl with the bull ring in her nose two boxes down hasn’t quit looking over. Sam can feel gawps all over his arms.
“I didn’t read it.”
Oh. Yeah. Sam, by fairness of cold shock and the sweethearts’ stupor—Mr. Smith is violently pretty, a neat selection of things to look at, lashes and lips and every angle his good side—hadn’t actually made it that far in to the details, and Mr. Smith blurts, backspacing, “I didn’t read all of it.”
Sam’s body has reverted back to its basest, most larval stage.
Mr. Smith says, leaving now, in an almost anxious stammer of energy, “It was, um. Ted Baker. Good eye.”
~
Ian’s using a game show host voice.
He says, “go, go, go” and “right now,” and “when I said he’d get there, I didn’t know he was already there,” and for variety, “Sam, nut up!”
“Saw it.” Dull. “He saw it.” Sam isn’t going anywhere.
“Right, and that’s one for the plus column,” Ian says, ignoring the steady flashes from his phone. “Princesses don’t come down off their towers unless it’s for 1) good dick,” talking in sociopathic bullet points, “2) true love.” Sam’s unofficial diary went home with Mr. Smith. That’s.
“Or the trick answer, 3) both,” Ian says, like Sam’s responsive. “Gallardo.”
~
The 22nd floor.
He doesn’t know his way around, or which hall to take, or what he’ll do when he arrives at the door with the right name plate—but he’ll get there when he gets there and it won’t be soon; Sam’s pushed through the fire exit, taking the stairs for, hmm, at least a few floors. The lift’ll land him there too quick and he isn’t ready, has nothing prepared in his backlog of responses, nothing suitable for when a head supervisor discovers what is, presumptively, your sticky feelings for them that go against every workplace fraternization issue in the rule book.
“Fuck,” Mr. Smith says, one hand on the stairwell railing, not moving.
He hadn’t been walking, Sam sees. Sam had. He’d have fallen right into him if he hadn’t spoken up, chafing the inside of a cheek, thinking how he’d just said to Ian, I don’t even know if I want that, not for real, not out in the clarity of day, where it would be true, and no longer just his, a nothing crush, benign, not hurting anyone, just something to center down on and get through M–F.
Mr. Smith’s standing there, here, watching Sam come to a sudden halt.
He’s wearing the same wariness Sam’s come to recognize but it fits a little stranger today, new.
“I never,” Sam says, keeping a sane distance, “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith. I shouldn’t have been—”
“No, don’t.” Mr. Smith waves a hand, then runs it over top his hair. “That’s not—I didn’t mind it. You’re fine.” His mouth uncurls when he says at Sam’s polo logo, “and it’s Dean.”
“Dean.” Dean Smith. Sam moves it around on his tongue, quiet about it.
Both buttons on his suit jacket have come undone and he drums a couple of fingers against his belly, just briefly, and it’s entirely disruptive, Sam’s stare steered to a new place, and Mr. Smith lets out a laugh that comes out a little agitated, dark. “It’s—wasn’t it about me? It definitely was, right? Or.”
“Definitely,” Sam says, to get the disquiet to stop.
“Okay. Yeah, okay.” Relief looks the same on just about everyone.
Slack gladness.
But Sam knows he should be feeling more awful than he does. He says, a little wad of shame loading his throat, “It’s probably, um—disturbing, finding something like that, having to. Read it. It’s not how—”
“I tend to think I’m not seen,” Mr. Smith says, voice bolted down.
Sam’s lunch hour is probably about to start.
He’s kidding, Sam thinks, at first; Mr. Smith fills the entire stairwell with who he is, the building, probably most places he walks into. All anyone does is look, and stare, and long. It’s true for Sam. And Sam says,
“Respectfully, Mr. Smith, Dean, I’m gonna have to—” as Mr. Smith comes one footstep closer, then hurries back two, says, plucking at the tip of his tie,
“No, not,” and the bulbs are low and burnt orange in here, lit like an old warehouse and unfavorable but there’s a pink wash backing his freckles and Sam thinks whatthefuck, thinks, he’s nervous, “Not looked at. That isn’t how I mean.” He looks over at Sam, up at Sam.
“Oh,” Sam says, kind of getting it. Mostly. Being fuckable embarrasses him?
Dean Smith is conscious and self conscious of the fact that people put their fingers inside themselves and see their own construct of his face.
Sam says, no brakes, “You pop all ten knuckles from left to right when you’re trying to remember or memorize. Then you crack your neck, but like a full nelson. I’ve seen you. Four times.”
He sounds like the zodiac killer.
The soft starts of Mr. Smith’s brows come curiously together.
Unprompted, Sam tells him, “If you wander by when I’m eating, I can’t eat anymore. You wear really complementary colors and your knots are military good.”
Mr. Smith, alarmed, is still flecking into what’s maybe a smile, so Sam rushes to tell him, before—before whatever he might be thinking about how Sam is a good one, “but I don’t—” He isn’t any better. “I don’t not think the other stuff, too.”
Mr. Smith’s ears ring red. He says, “As in—”
Sam was only talking shit when he said he wasn’t sure on whether or not—yeah. “Yeah.” Sam definitely, definitely wants that.
~
It’s dumb, Sam decides.
Sam doesn’t feel bad for Mr. Smith that he’s a ten, just that he’s maybe been made to feel as though he’s solely so.
A beautiful idea but still the art that hangs behind a film of glass, perfect in its impersonal distance, guarded by soft velveteen barricade ropes. That diamond bottle of Clive Christian No. 1 that sits, angled so, on the vanity; the packaging is exquisite but every spray drops a heft of its value. Or the 612 parked latent in the garage because it’s too sweet to waste on city miles.
Dumb, Sam thinks again, the little thought getting creased and folded neatly away as Dean makes a slight — sound, an unthinkable little noise, hot, starts mouthing needily at Sam’s neck, again, not talking, they stopped doing that five minutes ago.
The concrete at his back must be comfortless but Dean doesn’t complain.
Sam’s got him with his shirt unkempt, nearly out, everything wrinkled, fucked with, looking like he’s been kissed and kissed and rubbed down on and pressed against, which he has.
A hand is wrapped and squeezing around the back of Sam’s neck, a little up into his hair.
“Sam, I,” Dean finally gets out, when Sam stops to glance between them, glances down.
Dean’s mouth is messy red and it looks like it’s trying to say please but doesn’t know how, has never had to know that word before, so Sam nods, starts peeling Dean’s pants open.
Carefully—but in a hurry.
He breaks away at the button and zip, nerves fumbling him a little then a lot when Dean goes back to putting uncertain little kisses against Sam’s concentrating, parted lips, the corners, then slipping the edges of his tongue and then the rest of it into Sam’s mouth when Sam closes a very disrespectful hand around the warmth of his cock, starts working it right there in the stairs.
~
“Please—” Sam says, after, “please don’t,” when Dean starts reaching for him, sweetly trying to return the favor.
Dean’s face, thrown, powers down quickly from ready, hopeful—to chastened.
That all just—went further than Sam thought, from a tug to a blow on impulse, and Sam didn’t spit, and then they kissed some more, and Mr. Smith is an exact nice mouthful, pretty to look at even there, and he laughs when he comes, Sam knows that now, a ticklish sigh, and, “I can’t let you,” Sam says, still holding his boss’s wrist away.
“If you even touch me a little bit right now,” Sam pinches the sides of his forehead, scattered, wants to pinch his balls instead. It’s a big feeling.
Dean doesn’t try to pull out of his grasp. He knits his lips together, though, waiting.
Sam sighs. Says, whispered and gritted, “I will fuck you right here.” He means, I’ll just keep going. He means, I won’t be able to stop.
Dean looks strangled.
And he does start testing the bounds of Sam’s hold then, his stare flown down to Sam’s mouth, then his eyes, calculating risk percentages and weighing outcomes in his head. Sam can tell. Mr. Smith is Director of Sales for a reason.
~
He doesn’t favor the longer calls, the slow repetition/winded tirade/hey you wouldn’t happen to know something about thermostats, too, would you/on-hold type calls, not usually. But when Sam gets back to his seat, he’s glad Ian’s on one.
“Extended lunch hour,” Ian says, chirpy once he’s hung up, not meaning what he means, exactly. Or, only kiddingly meaning it.
Sam bothers with adjusting his headset, unusually detailed about it.
He made sure his hair was okayish in the bathroom, quick finger comb, some cold splashes to his fever cheeks, avoided his lovefool eyes in the mirror, avoided the thick ache between his legs also.
“You’re not fired, though, right?”
“No,” Sam says. And kind of rudely takes a call. He doesn’t mean to be. But Sam is—can be—a form of old-fashioned, sometimes. A little bit of a moralist. He doesn’t suck and tell, at any rate. “Tech Support, you got Sam.”
You don’t go around letting everyone know you just had crass, furious, third date sex with a supervisor most everyone’s hot for. Even if you’re already ready to do it again. Possibly especially then.
~
Their first actual date is after their first actual fuck.
At 5:07 on the same day that had Ian gabbing on, forwarding articles about twin souls and circular circumstances, Sam is a little late to the elevator.
Only a few others are on, thumbing at their phones, most of the way dead on their pump heels, jangling keys. Mr. Smith isn’t one of them.
Sam has eight full floors to worry it over, thinking, trying to see if he can come to terms with it only ever being a sex thing, just a one-off, and then the doors cut open and Mr. Smith is standing next to a potted fiddleleaf fig tree in the lobby, looking perfectly normal if not for the terse look of his mouth. The awkwardness of him in his $1,400 suit looking gorgeous and unsure. He’s waiting.
For Sam.
“Hey.” Sam blocks off the thought that tries to come, the one about how Dean gives kisses like a dirty movie and has the eyes of a Dear John letter.
“Hey,” Dean says back, when he sees him. The little cramp of worry in his face fades.
Sam thinks about asking for his number. Maybe I can take you out some time? Or, do you think you’d ever wanna—
“My tie collection is moderately extensive,” Mr. Smith says, weirdly. “I’ve been accumulating them for awhile now, I guess,” and Sam thinks this guy is a kook, he’s not normal at all, and then he clicks on as Mr. Smith says, “If, if you’re interested in checking out—”
Sam isn’t normal either. He doesn’t really want to be.
“I’d love to see your tie collection,” Sam says, and it feels the same as sticking your head out the window of a car burning the blacktop.
~
Thin conversation, easy listening radio, navigation alerting minor accident in two miles, alternate route, wave to the doorman, Sam’s heart almost beside itself.
They coolly make it all the way inside.
Enough time, anyway, for the door to clack shut and for Sam to look around, see high shine and heavy architecture, one mesh patio chair outside, a severe view of the far below downtown, before they’re down on the floor and tugging helplessly at standard cotton and dry-clean-only, mouths clinging together, Dean’s body fitful beneath him, his hands in fists, his hands fanned out, hands massaging Sam through his pants and shocking a heavy orgasm out of him.
~
“I thought, god I really thought,” Sam says, when he has Dean on the bed and he’s holding him by the thigh, pushing it up, pushing himself in, “that you hated me.”
Dean breathes out long, his eyes clear and open, watching Sam as Sam fucks him.
“No,” Dean says. His arms strap to Sam’s back, caging the spine.
“Okay,” Sam says, because Dean is done, isn’t going to say more, so he slides out and then sinks it back in in a rush, in love with how full Dean looks, how Dean’s lips go loose from it, how his hips try to unfurl and spread for more.
“You look so.”
Sam can’t finish, cannot talk.
Mr. Smith, the most classically beautiful person Sam’s ever put hands on, is his hottest lay for sure, plus he’s neurotic and crazed and, god, a total pervert. Sam’s gone on him, quick. Even Mr. Smith’s prickly shell. Sam likes that, too. A lot.
And Dean, when he’s been made a mess of, looks even better than he does put together.
He’s softness where you don’t expect it, and refreshingly profane where you do. Dean almost punctures the skin at the base of Sam’s throat with the points of his teeth and then keeps sucking there, holding Sam in by the back of his head, other hand to Sam’s ass, asking to be loved harder.
The headboard’s all sleek black quilted leather and Sam comes perilously close to ramming Dean into it headfirst the more this keeps on, the more Dean feels all tight and new around him, like he’s Sam’s, could only be that.
He unburies his cock, flexing wet in the lamplight, and looks. Stares down where Dean’s all sore pink and only a little shy, Sam made stupid by the sight of it.
Sam has been in him. And Sam wants to leave him gross and soaking inside.
“Sam,” he says, a whole conversation.
When his dick drops back in, Dean’s hands are crushing at the silky pillowcases.
It’s a terrifying tenderness that he feels and it gains on him when Dean crisscrosses long, narrow feet at the curved dip of Sam’s back and, bossy, makes Sam give him these deep, tongued out kisses that can’t seem to stop.
But Sam was probably always going to be obsessed with the gentle intricacies of Dean’s face.
~
It takes until after—once Sam has, to his own satisfaction, finished thoroughly screwing him, is watching the blades of the ceiling fan dance, lost to thoughts—for Dean to say, “Those elevator rides were fucking unbearable for me.”
For him to actually say, “I couldn’t calm down,” while he’s rolling up his day’s clothes like he’s packing, dropping them in the hamper, habit, “you’d get on and that would be it.” He stops, like he’s already disclosed much too much.
Then he says, “I don’t think I’ve ever,” Sam is up on his elbows, high alert, “looked at someone and wanted to know them. I felt sick.”
“Dean—”
“You coulda stuck a square of gum in your mouth, or checked your watch, said something quiet to that friend of yours. When you’d cough, I was aware of it. I was never going to be relaxed around you.” Dean has slim muscles in his back, faintly defined self maintenance. “But I never—I couldn’t. Hate you. Not you, Sam.”
~
“Is that,” Ian says, stolen fountain pen behind his ear, “are you wearing.” His hands slide over his kneecaps, considering Sam. “Those socks say Gucci, right?”
Sam scoots around in his chair, nips at his khakis until the hem goes closer to the ankle, face blotchy warm. Ian cricks his neck out, “or, wait. One Gucci sock.”
“Um.”
“Wow.” It’s five syllables and all wind. “You really—did it. Sam, that’s.”
Sam, lame, lets his dimples run deep into his grin. He’s also got an ugly hickey under his clavicle and another near his armpit; his dick hurts with overuse. He thinks recklessly of hyphenations, debates over Smith-Wesson or Wesson-Smith.
Fugitive thoughts. They don’t mean anything. It’s okay.
~
The lights are off in the 15th floor conference center—a corridor, a turn, and an old file closet away from the closest receptionist’s desk. It smells dimly of lemons, wood shine.
Sam leans back against the wall and doesn’t let his eyes slip shut. That’s the point.
Mr. Smith is the sort of guy who’ll say a quiet hello to uncollared pups on the street, who built his professional reputation on a high competency in stakeholder analysis and consistently ensuring commerciality, who will back you through a door you’ve never been through, layer sucking kisses along your jaw hinge until you’re worked up enough to push him pleadingly to the carpet and only then will say, his lips glossy full, “they’re not prescription or anything,” and go down on your dick so nastily, so inexhaustibly you’re afraid he’ll swallow your leaping heartbeat, too, all while you stare down at him overcome, while he stares up at you through the lenses of his glasses.
“You said,” Dean says, cheeks cherry hot, fat part of his palm dragging over his mouth for cleanup, “you wrote—you liked when I wore them?”
Sam hasn’t fully uncrossed his eyes before he wraps Dean in a harsh, knotted up hug.
~
He’ll learn things, in time.
How Mr. Smith is oddly controlling about little stuff—like his car stereo, when Sam goes to turn the dial and gets an indignant protest that’s more of a pout but relents when Sam arrives on a good song anyway, smiles slow as Sam says, “my mom would hum this to get me to fall asleep,” and Mr. Smith says, “Metallica? Metallica was your lullaby?” not mocking but kind of intrigued, possibly impressed, and Sam says, “or, my dad. Someone did.”; but less so about others—the bigger things, like when Sam tells him by the break room soda machine, low and slow, “Gonna put it deep in your ass tonight. Up against your countertop, you want that?” and Dean doesn’t forget, lets him, waits unblinking for Sam to do it. He’s almost breathtakingly powerless then.
There’ll be a day, a lucky Wednesday, when Dean’s out of the office for a key luncheon he has to attend, some power talk for corporate sharkboys.
Sam will hack-cough into the phone, feed the IT leader a light little lie, and take the day off to go with him. He’ll wait in the 2 hour parking lot, in the passenger seat, and let the throb of hysteria throwing itself around his skull sweep through him while he thinks about the new way Dean’s started calling him Sammy when he’s being gruesomely affectionate.
After, at a crusty taproom on the other side of nowhere with rippy booths and a 1972 vinyl jukebox that still works, Dean will surprise Sam, surprise himself if the neat glee on his face says shit, by not losing the bet to land a bullseye behind his back, suck that, fellas.
“Who are you?” Sam will say, having to clench down on his trembling inner thighs.
He’ll sit at his work station one day and scrawl: sparkling pear water, Allure Homme aftershave, no underwear
~
Flannery O’Connor wrote, if you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you. Sam thinks, at its origins, it was probably about a love affair.
~
Mr. Smith wears a classic four-dot purple bow tie and a shirt the color of crushed lilacs that fits him wickedly. He orders the sweet potato carbonara with swiss chard and mushrooms, asks for “a side dish of julienned carrots. Do you recommend the spiced yogurt dip?”
Sam spends a gob of the evening looking at Mr. Smith’s hands, both the nourished cuticles and the spattering of old scars gone white by time.
Mr. Smith uses a napkin after each bite, has surprisingly irascible opinions on The Sirens of Titan. But he also twines his foot with Sam’s under the table at a posh who’s-who eatery and listens when Sam talks about a study he read on twins getting merged in the womb and, if successfully separated, the likelihood of surviving the chronic sorrow of having to be alone.
Sam likes that he keeps catching Mr. Smith sneaking little forked bites off Sam’s plate of lamb loin. Likes more that he gets to makeout with Mr. Smith afterwards in the car’s backseat like a pair of heartsick runaways desperate for each other, fingers him like he’s nineteen and novice and scared.
It’s half true.
He has a lot to tell his journal later.