Chapter Text
Anakin Skywalker was in trouble.
For a long minute, he just stood in the doorway and stared, hoping he was wrong, hoping there’d been some terrible mistake. Then someone ran into his backpack, and he realized he was blocking the path into the room, and he quickly moved aside, and while that was happening, the man at the front of the room turned around, and, yep, it was exactly who Anakin had suspected it was.
Obi-Wan.
Anakin had been tossing ideas around about how to get Obi-Wan back into his life all weekend, of course, so in a way, this was the best thing that could have happened to Anakin on a Monday morning, and it saved him the trouble of having to bug Padmé to bug her boss to find out anything useful about the man Anakin had maybe-kind-of-sort-of-definitely fallen in love with at Padmé’s work party, and from any more long nights trawling LinkedIn pages of people named Obi-Wan, which hadn’t produced anything useful so far other than giving Anakin a headache.
Buoyed by this rosy thought, Anakin smiled, and even chanced a small wave, catching the eye of the man at the front of the room. Obi-Wan faltered, for a moment – Did Anakin detect a flash of panic in his eyes? But the room was large, and Obi-Wan was all the way at the front, and Anakin all the way at the back, and maybe he’d just imagined it – but then Obi-Wan smiled, too, and raised a hand in greeting, before hurriedly turning his back to Anakin and resuming rummaging through a pile of papers spread out on a table at the front of the room.
Anakin quickly slid into an empty row and sat down, not wanting to embarrass himself any further. The encounter had gone surprisingly well, so far. Obi-Wan had recognized him, too, and greeted him at least semi-pleasantly. That was the good news.
The bad news was, it really, really looked like Obi-Wan was the professor of record for the graduate-level research methods and writing class Anakin had signed up to take this semester. Anakin wasn’t in grad school, yet, but he needed some sort of writing credit to graduate, and his counselor had recommended this one, because if he did ever decide to go to grad school, he’d need to pass it anyway, and this way he could knock it out of the way early and satisfy one of his gen ed requirements at the same time.
Maybe he was wrong, though. Maybe Obi-Wan was…the TA. That could be. (He’d be pretty old for a TA, because Anakin had spent enough time looking at his hair the one single time they’d met to be able to tell that it was just starting to streak through with grey, and obviously people started to go grey at lots of different ages but the upshot of it was, Obi-Wan was an adult, and Anakin liked that about him, liked that he was older, liked that he was more mature and that he was still giving Anakin the time of day anyway, and Anakin hadn’t known he was into…that particular combination before meeting Obi-Wan but after meeting Obi-Wan he was really, really sure that he was.) But there was no age requirement to college, or TAing, of course; lifelong learning was great and everyone’s paths were different and Obi-Wan did seem like the sort of smart guy who’d have four or five degrees anyway; in the relatively short time Anakin had talked to him he’d been…really incredibly knowledgeable about a whole range of subjects. Why not graduate research and writing, too?
The papers Obi-Wan had been shuffling at the front of the room turned out to be stacks of the syllabus, which he handed to a couple of students in the front and told them to pass them back. While he waited for the syllabi to make it back to Anakin’s end of the room, he turned on his laptop, plugged it in to the projector, and pulled up a PowerPoint slide.
DR. OBI-WAN KENOBI, read the slide, right below the title of the class.
Well, there went the TA theory, Anakin sighed. Not only was Anakin crushing on his own professor, he was crushing on a man with a doctorate.
The class schedule had listed the last name of the professor of the class when he’d registered, of course, but Anakin thought back and realized that, in all their far-ranging two-hour conversation a few days previously, things like ‘last names’ and ‘jobs’ hadn’t ever come up. Anakin hadn’t known to connect ‘mouth-wateringly attractive older man in a suit named Obi-Wan’ to ‘Professor Kenobi of Coruscant University’, because he hadn’t even known to connect Obi-Wan and Kenobi.
And, thinking back on it, Anakin realized he may never have mentioned what he did for a living, either. Had they talked about mechanical engineering, or Anakin’s campus job at the university bookstore, at any point? He didn’t think so. They’d talked about F1 racing and whether bingeing a whole season of a TV show in one day or spreading it out one episode a week was better and how they’d both had a very short and ill-fated foray into at-home cocktail-making during lockdown and how Anakin’s stepbrother and Obi-Wan’s younger brother both were named Owen, but Anakin couldn’t actually remember the fact that he was a full-time university student coming up in conversation, at any point.
Obi-Wan was going over the course outline at the front of the room, and Anakin very much wanted to listen to him – Anakin really liked Obi-Wan’s voice, and would happily listen to him talk about literally anything for literally any amount of time – but he was having trouble actually absorbing the information. He looked down at his syllabus. Obi-Wan’s name was printed on there, too, and so was his phone number. Undoubtedly it was his office phone number, but still. Anakin had been thinking about Obi-Wan’s phone number, and how to get it, all weekend, and now here one was, staring him in the face.
But so was the fact that Obi-Wan was, very obviously, dating Satine Kryze. Sure, Anakin could argue that as Satine had not yet seen fit to put a ring on him, that Obi-Wan was technically up for grabs, but Satine was, well…she was Satine Kryze, and Padmé’s boss, and the only things Anakin knew about politics were the bits and pieces he managed to pay attention to when Padmé talked to him about it ad nauseum but even he knew that Satine Kryze was a pretty big fucking deal, and she’d arrived at her own work party arm-in-arm with Dr. Obi-Wan Kenobi, and even though Obi-Wan had spent two hours at said party tucked away in a two-person table in the corner swapping stories with Anakin as their knees brushed under the table, Satine had come by two or three times ‘just to check on them’ and laid her hand proprietarily on Obi-Wan’s shoulder and Anakin could take a fucking hint, thank you very much.
If he entered into a contest with smart, beautiful, rich, successful, powerful Satine Kryze, he’d lose every time. Sure, he got good grades and he'd always respected his mother, he wasn’t not a catch, he supposed, but he was a twenty-two-year-old undergrad with a part-time job and a scholarship. And she was, you know…an adult. Like Obi-Wan.
But…there was still the undeniable fact that Obi-Wan had walked into the party on Satine’s arm, worked the room for a while like a good candidate-for-governor’s boyfriend should, then zeroed in on Anakin and spent the next two hours talking to Anakin and, basically, only Anakin. They hadn’t even agreed to split apart – the only reason they’d stopped talking to each other was because Padmé had work early the next morning and wanted to leave, and she’d been Anakin’s ride there, and she’d all but bodily dragged him from the room. (Anakin hadn’t even wanted to go to the stupid party in the first place; he was only filling in at the last minute because Padmé had already RSVPd with a plus-one but then her boyfriend had gotten sick and Anakin was never one to turn down free food, but then he’d desperately wanted to stay, but he hadn’t been able to figure out a good way to convey that to Padmé while Obi-Wan was sitting right there in time.)
Had Obi-Wan spent all weekend mooning over the memory of Anakin the way Anakin had spent all weekend mooning over Obi-Wan? Probably not. But, if there was one thing Anakin was good at, it was barging into situations without thinking of all the possible consequences of his actions first.
(Padmé, on the other hand, loved thinking about possible consequences before making decisions.)
Ooh, maybe Anakin should ask Padmé for advice. He pulled out his phone (in his lap – no need to alert Professor Kenobi to the fact that he was not paying rapt attention to his class) and opened his texts. His thumb hovered over the keyboard.
Padmé was either going to say, ‘Yes! Go for it! Give him your number! What’s the worst that could happen?’ or she was going to say, ‘Anakin, that’s a terrible idea; he’s your professor; that is so unbelievably inappropriate; do not give him your number’, and Anakin was really sure, already, which answer he wanted to hear. Even if Padmé did make a very good argument against (and she probably would), Anakin would still want to do it anyway.
He closed his text message screen and opened up the school website instead.
Obi-Wan was distracted all through class. It was a good thing it was the first day and he didn’t have anything planned other than going over the syllabus, because he was sure he wouldn’t be able to concentrate enough to actually teach. He resolutely did not glance over anywhere even near Anakin’s direction as he went through his PowerPoint, knowing that would make the distraction even worse. Anakin was just so…captivating, and Obi-Wan did not need captivating right now. (Or, possibly, ever.) He was Anakin’s professor, for god’s sake.
(He probably should have guessed. Anakin had never said how old he was, but, well. Just look at him. Obi-Wan should maybe be counting his blessings that the boy wasn’t still in high school.)
He let class go early, and purposefully took an extra-long amount of time packing up his belongings at the front of the room, because Anakin was seated near the door, which meant to exit Obi-Wan would have to walk right by him, and he had not yet decided how he wanted to handle that. He and Anakin had already acknowledged each other – Obi-Wan responding more out of rote habit and a little bit of shock than anything else, but he had done it – but where to go from there? Should he stop and talk to the boy? Make a joke? Ignore him completely and hope his attraction went away? (It hadn’t yet, but he’d seen Anakin less than three days ago; maybe he just needed to give it more time.)
It was while deliberating this – and cursing the fact that today, of all days, just had to be the day that not one single student had come up to ask him one single fucking question – that Anakin made the decision for him.
“Hi,” a voice said, surprisingly soft for someone so tall, and Obi-Wan recognized it immediately.
“Hello,” he replied, and then had no idea where to take the conversation from there.
Fortunately, Anakin did, but maybe unfortunately, the direction he chose seemed to be…ripping Obi-Wan’s syllabus in half?
“I worked hard on that, you know,” Obi-Wan said.
“I’m sure,” Anakin said. “Can I borrow a pen?”
Obi-Wan passed him one, but he took the opportunity to heckle him a little, too. “You came to the first day of class without a pen?”
“Nah,” Anakin said, as he set the top half of his syllabus on the podium (Obi-Wan’s teaching podium, thank-you-very-much) and started to write. “I just wanted an excuse to steal yours. This is mine, now.” Anakin finished writing, straightened up, and tucked the pen behind his ear. “But this is for you,” he continued, holding the torn piece of paper out.
“I already know what the top half of my syllabus says; I wrote it” –
“It’s my phone number,” Anakin blurted out halfway through Obi-Wan’s sentence. “Because I dropped your class. You can…” He took a deep breath. “You can call me, or not, I guess; but I don’t want you to not call me just because I’m your student. So…now I’m not your student,” he repeated, and shook the paper, which reminded Obi-Wan that he hadn’t taken it yet.
He took it without looking at it. “You dropped my class just now?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s the first day; it’s not hard.”
“Don’t you need it to graduate?”
Anakin rolled his eyes. “You’re not the only professor at this school, you know. There are other people who teach this course.”
“Right,” Obi-Wan said, because of course he knew that.
“Look, this is me asking you out on a date,” Anakin said, taking another deep breath. “And I know I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of competing with Satine Kryze, but I’d hate myself tomorrow if I didn’t at least ask. So call me, or don’t, but…that’s how I feel.”
And then he turned and walked away.
Obi-Wan didn’t answer. Well, Anakin supposed no answer was a kind of answer, in the end, and that answer was ‘no’, because Obi-Wan let Anakin get all the way to the door of the classroom and didn’t say a damn thing. Anakin wrenched the door open and stepped out into the hall, desperate for air and definitely not planning on spending any longer in that classroom than he had to.
Once he was outside, he leaned against the wall and pulled his phone out, needing a distraction and something, anything to think about that wasn’t how badly he’d just embarrassed himself in front of Doctor Obi-Wan Kenobi.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
I’m not dating Satine Kryze
Or anyone else, for that matter :)
Except maybe you, if you’re still interested in that date?
Anakin whirled on his heel, yanked the classroom door back open again, and stood there, panting with a sudden surge of adrenaline, his phone in one hand and the doorknob in the other. “I’m still interested.”
Obi-Wan had been…surprised, the first time Anakin had turned him down for a date, because up until that point Anakin had agreed to literally everything Obi-Wan had suggested. He’d been very excited about dinner at the falafel place, very excited about lunch at the gyros place, and had so excitedly invited himself along to go grocery shopping with Obi-Wan when Obi-Wan had offhandedly mentioned that he was planning on going after work that Obi-Wan had jokingly asked if Anakin wanted to help him pick up his dry cleaning, too. (Anakin had waited just a beat too long before laughing. “Haha, no! ‘Cause that’d be weird, right?” he’d chuckled awkwardly.)
But when Obi-Wan had suggested going out for a movie, Anakin had texted back,
Sorry, I’m busy Sunday!
So Obi-Wan had gone to the movies by himself, and he had enjoyed it, a little, but mostly he’d spent the time wondering what Anakin was doing, and if Obi-Wan had done something wrong, and why Anakin hadn’t told him what he was busy doing, and then berating himself for being so damn nosy, because he and Anakin had only been seeing each other for a week, by that point, and jealousy was not attractive.
But then Anakin came to see him the next day. Or, rather, a ‘student’ did.
“Student here to see you, Dr. Kenobi,” Cody said gruffly into the phone.
Cody was the student worker currently assigned to the English department, and he and Obi-Wan had worked out a system, over the summer semester, that while Obi-Wan, like every other professor, held the university-mandated number of office hours each week, he also, personally, did not mind if students came to see him with questions other times during the week, as Obi-Wan was well-aware that many of his students had other time obligations than just his class and were not always available during the times he had set aside for student consultations. If he was in his office, he’d told Cody, even if it was not an official office hour, it was fine if Cody sent students to him.
Cody, staunch upholder of the rules he was, had not initially liked this plan very much – ‘office hours are office hours, sir,’ he’d protested when Obi-Wan had first explained his policy, which had then necessitated a discussion about how it wasn’t necessary to call Obi-Wan ‘sir’ – but they’d eventually worked out a compromise wherein, if a student asked for Obi-Wan outside of his office hours, Cody would check to see if Obi-Wan’s door was open. If it was closed, he’d send the student away. If it was open, Cody would call Obi-Wan’s office line and ask if it was a good time.
On this particular Monday, the day after Anakin had declined the offer to go to the movies, Obi-Wan got a phone call while grading papers that someone was in the office waiting to see him. “Send them in; thank you,” Obi-Wan said, glancing at his watch. He needed to be in a classroom two buildings away in fifteen minutes, but he only had one annotated bibliography left to grade. He could probably squeeze a student in there between those two tasks as long as their question was not too involved.
Except the person who poked their head around his office door was not one of his students at all, but Anakin Skywalker. “Sorry,” Anakin blurted out, as Obi-Wan looked up in surprise, pen in hand hovering over the final bibliography. “I…sort of…lied? To your assistant. I told him I was your student. I…didn’t tell him I’ve only ever been your student for an hour.”
Obi-Wan grinned. “Cody’s not my assistant, but you’re welcome to come in.” Anakin did. He was wearing a black backpack and carrying a skateboard under his arm. He hovered awkwardly in the doorway for a moment.
“Can I…help you with something?” Obi-Wan finally prompted.
“Sorry! I didn’t know you were busy,” Anakin rushed to say. He pointed at the paper on Obi-Wan’s desk.
“I’m not, particularly. Would you like to sit?”
“I…wanted to know if maybe you wanted to have lunch with me today?” Anakin said, all in a rush, and resolutely remained standing.
“Ah.” Obi-Wan said. “Well, I would, but unfortunately right now I have class in…” He checked his watch. “Thirteen minutes, and I still have one last annotated bibliography to grade.”
Anakin grinned. “Want to help me write mine?”
“I would provide you with what I would to any student who came to me for help on another professor’s assignment – very detailed directions to the campus writing center.”
Anakin snorted and then, very abruptly, changed topics. “Hey, so, sorry about yesterday. It was my DnD night, and we’d already planned it and it was too late to change it. Maybe you and I could go see that movie…tonight, instead? Or maybe tomorrow?”
He looked at Obi-Wan with a hopeful look on his face and his bottom lip snagged between his teeth, and Obi-Wan was suddenly very grateful he’d already thrown his ticket stub away. Anakin would never have to know Obi-Wan had already seen it.
“That sounds nice,” Obi-Wan said, and Anakin’s lip scraped free as a smile lit up his face. “What time are you done with class? I can come pick you up, if you’d like?”
OBI-WAN
I’m out front whenever you’re ready
ANAKIN
Sry, running late
Thought I had time to do a load of laundry before u got here but some sob was hogging all the dryers
OBI-WAN
Sob?
ANAKIN
S.O.B.
Son of a bitch
OBI-WAN
Ah
ANAKIN
Maybe it should be soab?
Anyway I’m running out of flat surfaces in my apt to lay out my clothes
Sry to make u wait, are we going 2 miss the movie??
OBI-WAN
No
I’m here quite early in fact
Please don’t rush on my account
ANAKIN
Well I can’t exactly show u a good time but if u want to help me drape wet sex all over my desk it would help me out
*SOX
Sry
I’m apt 501
Obi-Wan had a bad feeling about this. He really wished Anakin lived off-campus. Much like there was not specifically a rule against dating a student, so long as they weren’t or were ever going to be your student, there was also an unwritten but no less enforceable rule against a professor visiting a student in their dormitory. After dark. (The argument that Anakin wasn’t Obi-Wan’s student was probably a nuance perhaps too subtle for a headline of the campus student-run newspaper to convey. Just Obi-Wan’s luck their head photographer would live in this same building, or something.)
The door to 501 was wide open. “Hey, Obi-Wan!” Anakin greeted, with a delighted smile, and some but not all of Obi-Wan’s nerves dissipated. “Come on in!”
Obi-Wan edged forward a foot or two. “I’m not sure I can,” he admitted.
Anakin had said it was a studio, and indeed, the room contained a twin bed, one door that opened into a closet, another that led to a small bathroom, a window, and a desk and chair set. All of these surfaces – bed, tops of doors, doorknobs, closet pole, desk, chair, windowsill, shower rod curtain, toilet lid, and sink – were covered in wet laundry of all types and colors – t-shirts and boxer shorts and jeans and running shorts and shoelaces and swim trunks and one single, slightly sad blue dress shirt on a hanger on the inside of the front doorknob. The only space that wasn’t taken up by damp clothing was a square spot on the bed surrounding Anakin’s laptop, which was open, and playing some sort of rock music Obi-Wan didn’t recognize.
It was the detritus on the floor, though, that had really snagged Obi-Wan’s attention. Anakin’s scooter was down there, folded in on itself, and a couple of skateboards, and another something that looked like a skateboard but thicker, and some disassembled pieces of more skateboards, and what looked like a very small car engine, a couple of screwdrivers, a mallet, a cardboard box labeled ‘spark plugs’, a handful of no. 2 pencils, three spiral-bound notebooks, four separate pairs of plyers, and probably a number of more items that Obi-Wan just couldn’t currently see because they were buried under all those other things.
In the middle of all that was Anakin, who was holding a laundry basket on his hip. To Obi-Wan’s relief, it seemed almost empty.
“Well, there is a trick to it, but I’ll have to show you some other time,” Anakin said, and tossed Obi-Wan a pair of sweatpants, which he caught. “Here. Find a place to hang those. Anywhere’s fine.”
Obi-Wan was near enough to the closet that he was able to slide a pair of wet jeans down a little and drape the sweatpants over the clothespole. “Do you only do laundry…once a year?” he asked as they worked, because it looked like the contents of Anakin’s entire wardrobe had exploded into a 12’x12’ space.
Anakin chuckled and turned the volume down on his laptop. “Basically. I wait until I run out of underwear, and that takes me a month or two, usually.”
“How many loads was this?” Obi-Wan asked, as he laid a pair of socks on top of one of the skateboards.
“Got it in two,” Anakin said proudly. “They’re big machines. The washers at my old place were tiny; I took up a whole row of them by myself.”
That seemed a baffling system. “What, just…lights and darks?”
Anakin snorted. “Try, ‘top half of my laundry basket’ and ‘bottom half of my laundry basket’.”
Obi-Wan was so flabbergasted by this that he forgot he should probably be embarrassed he was holding a pair of boxer briefs that did not belong to him. “You don’t sort? You just…put these” – he held up the black underwear, again pushing past the embarrassment – “in with those?” He pointed at the white ankle socks lined up on the seat of Anakin’s desk chair.
“Yeah,” Anakin nodded.
“How do you function? Truly.”
“It’s been fine so far!” Anakin yelped. “Nothing that bad’s ever happened.”
“I suppose you just do everything in hot water, then?” Obi-Wan recoiled from the very thought.
Anakin nodded again. “Yeah. I know it’s not great, energy-usage-wise, but I figure I’m saving a ton of energy by only doing laundry six times a year so it probably makes up for it.”
“Well, I suppose you are air-drying, at least,” Obi-Wan said. The laundry basket was now empty, and he stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the damage.
“Only ‘cause the machines were taken, and I didn’t have time to wait.”
Obi-Wan made a pained noise, almost a whimper, in his throat. “You mean, on a normal day, you would have turned around and loaded…all of this into a clothes dryer, too?”
“Yeah; why not?”
“Oh my god.” Obi-Wan wasn’t usually religious, but this conversation might be enough to convince him. “Let’s just…go to the movies and pretend this never happened.”
Anakin grinned toothily “‘K. Let me just open the window; otherwise it’ll get all musty in here.”
It was already musty in there, but Obi-Wan hadn’t been planning on saying anything about it. Anakin stood on tip-toes to avoid crushing any of the items on the floor and stretched to open the window behind his bed’s headboard. The view out the window was nothing but the windows of the brick building on the opposite side, but the view of Anakin’s ass was much nicer.
“You have your keys?” Obi-Wan asked, as Anakin closed the door behind them.
Anakin patted his pants pockets. “Keys, phone, wallet. Yup, we’re good.” He locked the door to 501. “‘Do I sort’,” he mimicked under his breath, but he was smiling, too. “Who are you, my mother?”
Obi-Wan paused, right there in the hallway, and stared at him. “Anakin, it is entirely possible that your mother and I might be the same age.”
“And I like that, in a man,” Anakin said confidently, and he’d never stopped smiling, despite the fact that Obi-Wan was not. He draped an arm over Obi-Wan’s shoulders – which wasn’t difficult for him to do; he had a couple of inches on Obi-Wan – and said, “Come on, Professor. I’ll buy the popcorn.”
Obi-Wan looked nervous. “I have something very important to ask you, and I am very sorry for not having asked sooner,” he said, so seriously that now he was making Anakin nervous, too.
“Okay?”
Obi-Wan took a deep breath, like he was preparing both of them for some terrible news. “Are you allergic to dogs?”
“No?”
Obi-Wan frowned. “You don’t sound very certain about that.”
“No, I don’t think I’m allergic to dogs,” Anakin said, more firmly. “We never had a dog, so I guess I’m not one-hundred percent sure, but I’ve pet other people’s dogs, and I’ve always been fine, and my mom had me tested for allergies and the only thing that came up was penicillin, so” –
“Do you like dogs?” Obi-Wan switched tacks to ask.
Anakin shrugged. “Never bothered me before.”
“Do you mind if we pick my dog up from the dog daycare on the way to the house?”
Anakin was so excited to have been invited to Obi-Wan’s house that he probably would have agreed to picking up a uranium bomb on the way, but he tried to keep it cool. “No, I don’t mind. Just out of curiosity, though, given as I’m already in your car – what would you have done if I’d said I do mind?”
Obi-Wan gripped the steering wheel and frowned. “I admit I…may not have exactly thought this through all the way.”
“Like, I guess what I’m really asking is – would you have rescinded your offer to make me dinner and driven me back to my apartment, or would you have found a dogsitter?”
“I’d choose the dog. Definitely,” Obi-Wan said firmly, but he smiled and reached across the center console and squeezed Anakin’s knee at the same time.
“Wow. Good thing I’m not allergic then.”
Obi-Wan’s dog turned out to be a yellow Labrador retriever named Argos whose tail never seemed to stop wagging. “Argos, up,” Obi-Wan said, holding the back door of his car open, and the dog jumped in easily. He immediately noticed there was a new person in the passenger seat of the car, too, and as Obi-Wan shut the back door and came around to get back into the driver’s seat, Argos leaned forward and licked a long stripe up the side of Anakin’s face.
“Argos! Sit,” Obi-Wan reprimanded, and Argos did, his tongue lolling as he panted and his tail going a mile a minute, thumping against the upholstery. “Sorry,” Obi-Wan said to Anakin as he turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll get you a disinfecting wipe at the house.”
“It’s fine,” Anakin said, wiping his wet face off on his sleeve. “Better that than deciding he hates me right off the bat, I guess.”
“He’s a lab; the only thing he hates are squirrels.”
“How can I help?” Anakin asked as he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. He’d enjoyed throwing a ball around the backyard for Argos, who seemed, for a dog anyway, incredibly grateful for the attention, but it was a more…slobbery game than Anakin would have imagined, and Anakin was planning on putting his hands on Obi-Wan Kenobi’s ass, at some point this evening, and he’d rather not be covered in dog drool while he did it.
“Please do absolutely nothing other than have a drink and sit and talk to me,” Obi-Wan said, kitchen knife in his hand as he stood over a cutting board. “I poured you a glass of wine, if you like red.”
Anakin wasn’t hugely into any kind of wine, so he supposed it didn’t matter. He gamely took a sip anyway. “Come on, you gotta let me chop something. Or stir! I’m great at stirring.” He winked at Obi-Wan over the rim of his glass as he took another sip.
Obi-Wan waited a beat too long to demur, and Anakin knew he had him. “Polenta does like to be stirred,” he admitted, a little grudgingly, and Anakin smirked. “But first I have to get these veggies in the oven.”
“Well, you’ve already done an onion and those peppers; that’s a good start.” Anakin declined the offer to sit and leaned back, wine glass in hand, against the counter instead, next to Obi-Wan’s elbow.
“I…chopped the onion this morning before work,” Obi-Wan admitted.
“Getting a headstart on dinner?”
“Well, yes, that was a side benefit, but mostly my intention was not to let you see me cry.”
“Aw.” Anakin knocked their shoulders together. “I wouldn’t have minded. I cry all the time. Sad movies, cute videos, TV commercials…”
Obi-Wan laughed out loud. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to keep some of the mystery alive, then. Besides. As Jane Austen said about poetry, crying in front of my date might nourish an already strong relationship, but there is such a thing as too much, too soon.”
“Jane and I will have to agree to disagree on that one.”
“Well, she’s been dead for more than two hundred years, so you have by far the upper hand. Pass me that tomato, would you?”
Somehow, in the course of making dinner, they ended up on the topic of Anakin’s skateboard collection. “Well, the skateboards I started getting into in high school, because as long as it wasn’t raining it was faster to ride to school than to wait for the bus,” Anakin said as he stirred the polenta over Obi-Wan’s stove, Obi-Wan grating cheese nearby. “But the longboard thing I only got into my freshman year. I was taking this physics class, and I got paired with this girl, Ahsoka Tano – she’s my friend now, she’s super cool, but that’s how we met – and she was bringing a board to class, too, so we were like, oh, that’s funny, we got paired together and we both skateboard but I’m the tallest person in class and she was the shortest. It was just random, or whatever, but it made us laugh.
“So when we were thinking about what we wanted to do as our final project, Ahsoka said, you know what would be interesting, would be trying to design a longboard that would work for both of us. Totally different styles, shoe sizes, everything” –
“Pardon my reach,” Obi-Wan said, leaning over to sprinkle the cheese over the bubbling polenta (which was really just cornmeal and milk. Anakin had had to ask). “Please, continue.”
Anakin realized he’d been yammering away about skateboards, for some reason, for a really long time. “I’m, uh, done,” he said. “That’s the end of my story.”
“Like hell it is,” Obi-Wan snorted. “You haven’t even told me what grade you got on this project, much less if you actually managed to engineer this universal longboard design.”
“You don’t want to hear about that anyway. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me about, uh, Jane Austen.”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, and he set down the grater and looked Anakin straight in the eye. It was a tiny bit unnerving. “I asked you to keep me company while I cook our dinner. You have been very kindly obliging me up until just now. What’s wrong?”
Anakin caught himself squirming under Obi-Wan’s undivided attention and forced his hands and feet to still. “Nothing’s wrong,” he mumbled. “It’s just, um.” He felt his face start to go red, and he hoped Obi-Wan would think it was from the heat coming off the stove and not because he was about to reveal something embarrassing and personal. “I know I talk too much. Everyone says so. You’re just being polite. Seriously, Obi-Wan,” he practically whined. “Tell me about your day?”
“Everyone, hmm.” Obi-Wan repeated, and nodded thoughtfully, looking like his thoughts were very far away. Then he snapped back to giving Anakin his full attention. “Anakin? Look at me, please.”
A little grudgingly, Anakin did so. (Only a little. Anakin really liked looking at Obi-Wan. He was really handsome, and very nice to look at.)
“Thank you. Anakin” – Obi-Wan reached out and put a hand on Anakin’s hip. Anakin sucked in a sharp, surprised breath. The flush on his cheeks started to come back. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this – I thought I was being pretty obvious but perhaps I’m mistaken – but I quite like listening to you talk. That was the very first thing I – all right, maybe not the very first thing I liked about you, but certainly very, very early on after meeting you I came to the realization that you are funny, and sharp, and breathtakingly intelligent, and you have a deep, deep passion for physics and mechanics that I absolutely do not share but listening to someone talk about things they are truly competent in is one of my passions, and I don’t know who told you that you were wrong to be interested in things or to want to share those interests but they were wrong, all right? Before five minutes ago I was not even aware that skateboards and longboards were not the same thing, or that one might want them sized differently based on body shape, but now I do, and I want to know more about that, because I like learning new things, and you are teaching me something I didn’t know before. And later, yes, of course we can talk about Jane Austen, if you really want to, and how she was actually making reference to a line in Twelfth Night, because that’s what I know about, but please don’t think that what you are studying, or what you are intrigued by, or how you spend your free time is any less important or interesting than anyone else’s.”
Obi-Wan reached up with both hands and cupped Anakin’s face between his palms. “I want to hear about the damn skateboards,” he said firmly, not breaking eye contact. “Please don’t make me ask you again.”
Anakin took a deep breath. “Fuck, Obi-Wan,” he whispered, a little hoarsely. “See?” he managed to chuckle, and brought his sleeve up to dab at his eyes. “I told you I cry all the time.”
Obi-Wan laughed then, too, and he took his hands off of Anakin’s face and Anakin almost blurted out a really dumb request for him to put them back but then Obi-Wan smacked him on the ass, hopped up to sit on the counter, took a long sip of wine, set the glass down, put his hands on his knees, and said, “So. Freshman physics class?”
“Are you asexual?”
Obi-Wan coughed, hard, into his hand. “Excuse me?”
“‘Cause it’s okay if you are,” Anakin said quickly.
“I agree it would be, but no, I am not. Why do you ask?”
“‘Cause…” Anakin sighed and looked out the window as Obi-Wan turned his car onto Anakin’s street. Somehow he’d found it without being told, even though he’d only ever been there once before. “I don’t know about you, but I had a really nice time tonight, and I’ve had a really nice time every other time we’ve seen each other, but you haven’t even tried to kiss me yet, so I’m trying to figure out if you don’t like sex, or if you just…don’t like me.”
There wasn’t much room to park, on the street (there almost never was), so Obi-Wan simply pulled up next to a row of car, put his emergency flashers on, and tugged on the hand brake. “If I didn’t like you, inviting you over to my house for dinner would be an odd move to make,” he said.
“Yeah,” Anakin nodded. “That’s kind of what I thought too, but I didn’t want to presume” –
The rest of his sentence was swallowed up as Obi-Wan reached out, took Anakin’s chin in his hand, pressed his thumb into the divot below Anakin’s bottom lip, waited for Anakin to drop his mouth open, and kissed him, hard.
Anakin caught himself moaning with pleasure. This was what he’d been waiting for. Obi-Wan’s mouth was warm and wet and he took charge of the kiss, angling his head to the side to avoid bumping noses and he licked into Anakin’s mouth and laid one heavy hand on Anakin’s shoulder and slid the other one up into Anakin’s hair and Anakin knew he was moaning again but he couldn’t manage to care. He scrambled to get up onto his knees, blindly thinking of climbing over the center console and right into Obi-Wan’s lap; he was getting hard already and –
Obi-Wan pulled away. He smiled, but he also leaned back, far against the driver’s side door, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Does that answer your question?” he asked, slightly smugly.
Anakin wanted to pout about being aroused and Obi-Wan not doing anything about it, but he couldn’t help grinning back; Obi-Wan’s smile was too damn infectious. “I’ve, uh, wanted to do that since we met,” Anakin admitted. “I like your beard. I’ve never kissed anyone with a beard before.”
“So maybe you would…like to come over for dinner again?” Obi-Wan asked, and Anakin hated that he sounded tentative, like maybe he wasn’t sure Anakin was going to say yes. (Anakin was absolutely going to say yes.)
“I would like that,” Anakin said, very firmly, wanting Obi-Wan to know he was serious. “But next time is my treat. Can I take you out on…” (Was Saturday being too eager? He was eager, but he wasn’t ready for Obi-Wan to know quite how eager just yet.) “Sunday? There’s this Mexican restaurant I like; it’s close enough to walk to. You could park here and we can walk” –
“Is it dog-friendly?”
Anakin thought back to the last time he’d been there. “We could eat on the patio. I’ve seen people with their dogs there before.”
“I’d like to bring Argos, if you wouldn’t mind. Rather than leaving him home alone.”
“I don’t mind. Is that a yes?” Anakin bit his lip and gave Obi-Wan his most hopeful look.
“That sounds lovely. Thank you, Anakin.”
“Cool.” But, still, Anakin was Anakin, and even flush off the high of having successfully asked Obi-Wan Kenobi out, he still had to lean down and ask through the car window before going up to his apartment, “Okay, last chance to have your way with me in the back seat of your car walking away in three, two, one…”
Obi-Wan smiled, again. Anakin was becoming – okay, was already dangerously – obsessed with making Obi-Wan smile. “Perhaps some other time.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi was a patient man, but he wasn’t a saint. When Anakin, just a little flush from some combination of their walk and the two margaritas apiece they’d each knocked back at dinner, had invited him upstairs, Obi-Wan had said yes.
What he hadn’t done was think through the implications of having an eighty-pound Labrador retriever with them, too.
“Shh,” Anakin breathed, holding his finger to his lips. “We’ll just sneak in, real quiet-like.” He took Obi-Wan’s hand and tugged him down the hall.
“So I take it this is a pet-free dormitory,” Obi-Wan whispered as Anakin searched for his keys.
“There’s a girl down the hall with a bearded dragon.”
“I’m sorry; I would have left him at home, but I didn’t know how long we’d be, and he tends to get bored and start chewing on the house if I leave him home alone for more than a few hours,” Obi-Wan said as Anakin yanked his door open and pulled Obi-Wan and Argos through.
“That’s okay. I like him. And that’s kind of how I get when I’m left home alone for too long, too,” Anakin said with a laugh. “As you can see by the state of my room.” He flipped the light switch on, frowned, and then quickly turned it off again. “The light from the window’s enough, right?” He slowly picked his way over there, threw the curtains wide, and then tiptoed back again.
“Um…” Obi-Wan edged a stack of textbooks over with the toe of his sandal. “Argos…sit?” Usually he would try to make that sound like a command and not a question, but he wasn’t sure, just then, if Argos would be able to sit, in the very small square of carpet space available to him. But he gamely tried anyway, and he mostly managed, although when Obi-Wan scratched him behind the ear he wagged his tail so hard the motion toppled over a box of paintbrushes. “Sorry,” Obi-Wan said, and leaned down to pick them up, but Anakin caught him by the elbow and stopped him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “This room can hardly be more of a mess, you know?”
“I know you said this was all organized in some sort of system, but” –
“It is, but I think it takes ADHD to be able to figure it out,” Anakin said, tapping the side of his head with his finger. Then his smile fell and he suddenly got very serious. “You wanna make out right here in the doorway, on my bed, or in the bathroom?”
Obi-Wan considered his options (and didn’t bother considering option four, which would be ‘not making out at all’. That one, he rejected out of hand). It was entirely possible ‘making out’ would lead to oral sex, and Obi-Wan had given up kneeling on hard tile bathroom floors years ago. The bed would be more comfortable, but he doubted his ability to get to it without knocking any more of Anakin’s belongings over, and besides it was only a twin bed, so it was only winning ‘more comfortable’ by a small margin.
He took Anakin by the hips, spun him around so that now Anakin was the one with his back to the wall, pushed him roughly against it, and kissed him.
One thing – just one out of many, really – that Anakin really had going for him was how enthusiastic he was about everything. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and his heart must have told him that kissing Obi-Wan was a good idea because he responded immediately, body lighting up like a live wire, and he tried to simultaneously kiss Obi-Wan back but also touch him with every single body part he possessed. Obi-Wan ended up with Anakin’s hand in his hair, then an arm looped around his neck, one of Anakin’s legs hooked around the back of his knee, another rubbing against his bare ankle, and Anakin’s crotch rubbing against Obi-Wan’s belt buckle, all the while Anakin’s lips were moving all over his face, sliding against his jaw and his chin and down his neck and then up to his ear and then over to his lips again –
Obi-Wan, for his part, still had Anakin by the hips. (God, Anakin had such a tiny, perfect little waist. Obi-Wan had wanted to get his hands all over that waist the first time they’d met…and also every single time after.) “Anakin,” he said, his mind reeling with the fact that he didn’t have condoms or lube or literally anything else; the only thing in his pocket was his phone. “Are you comfortable with me touching you?”
“Yes!” Anakin squeaked, then slapped a hand over his mouth. “Sorry. I know we’re trying to be quiet,” he amended in a whisper. At their feet, Argos, tired of sitting, was trying to lie down, but he had to attempt it three or four times before he managed to find a clear square of carpet in which to do so. Anakin watched him fondly for a second, then asked, “Why Argos?”
It took Obi-Wan a second to switch mental tracks from ‘asking for consent’ to ‘talking about my dog’. “It’s from the Odyssey,” he said. “Odysseus’ dog waited twenty years for Odysseus to return home from the Trojan War.”
“Oh. Cool.” Anakin looked away from the dog and back to Obi-Wan with a smile on his face. “Yes. Touch away.”
“All right.” Obi-Wan kissed him again, but at the same time slipped a hand between them and started to undo his flies and then Anakin’s. Without any lube, he was just going to have to improvise.
“I’ve…been tested,” Anakin gasped, turning his head and breathing out against Obi-Wan’s ear as Obi-Wan pressed a row of kisses down Anakin’s neck. “Just in case. They do it at the…the campus health clinic,” he stuttered.
“Good,” Obi-Wan praised. He put his hand on Anakin’s bare stomach, underneath his shirt, and then slid down. He stopped when his fingertips had just breached the elastic waistband of Anakin’s underwear. “Is this still all right?”
“You want me to take my pants off?” Anakin offered. He gulped. “Or yours?”
“It’s dark; I can’t see how it would really matter.”
Anakin snorted. “‘Can’t see’. Good pun.”
Obi-Wan hadn’t intended to be funny, but he could see the joke, now that Anakin had pointed it out. “Ha. Yes.”
“So that’s a no on fucking me tonight, then?” Anakin asked, sounding disappointed. The back of his head thunked against the wall behind him.
“Maybe later,” Obi-Wan said, and then kissed him, mostly as a distraction to keep him from blurting out something more accurate but also terribly sentimental like, ‘how’s Tuesday look on your calendar?’
Anakin whimpered when Obi-Wan pushed his tongue into his mouth, and if the sound weren’t so arousing it would have been distracting, but all it did was shoot a bolt of desire straight through Obi-Wan’s gut to his dick, and he, rather quickly, pushed down his own slacks and underwear far enough to free his straining cock, and then proceeded to tug on Anakin’s jeans.
“Wait, wait,” Anakin said, turning his head to take a break from the strenuous kissing. “Lemme help,” he slurred, and then his hands were on top of Obi-Wan’s. “You kinda gotta…there.”
Anakin’s jeans were so tight that he’d had to literally shimmy them down his hips, and Obi-Wan suddenly very much regretted having the lights off, because he would have liked to have watched Anakin’s ass while he did it. Oh, well. Maybe next time.
Obi-Wan took advantage of the fact that Anakin was not currently plundering his mouth and spat on his own palm, then wrapped his hand around his cock and spread his saliva around quickly, not wanting to work himself too hard. Anakin watched in open-mouthed amazement. “Can…can I…” he tried to say, staring at Obi-Wan’s hand.
Obi-Wan tried to guess what he was getting at. “Go ahead,” he said, and put his hand, flat and palm up, between them. Anakin spit on it. “Good boy,” Obi-Wan said, and this time he took Anakin’s cock in his hand and smeared the wetness up and down the shaft. Anakin gasped, bucked his hips, pushing his cock further between Obi-Wan’s curled hand, and rested his forehead on Obi-Wan’s shoulder, presumably so he could watch Obi-Wan get them off.
Obi-Wan let go of Anakin’s cock, which made him hiss, but then shuffled closer and wrapped his hand around both their cocks at once. Spit wasn’t as good as lube but it was better than nothing, and Obi-Wan pumped his hand up and down and tried to focus long enough to think about what he liked, when touching himself, and trying to translate that to giving it to Anakin, but Anakin’s cock just felt so good against his, warm and plump and soft yet hard all at once, and it felt good in his hand, too, and Obi-Wan felt his own hips jerk as Anakin made a pleased, punched-out sound.
“I’m…I’m gonna…” Anakin tried to say, but Obi-Wan was close, too.
“Go ahead, good, baby, that’s so good,” he babbled mindlessly, rocking up onto his toes and chasing his own pleasure just as much as trying to give it to Anakin. He twisted his wrist and Anakin came, beautifully, strong and forceful, with a gasp and a solid bite to Obi-Wan’s shoulder.
“Good, good,” Obi-Wan praised, and he let go of Anakin’s hip with one hand as Anakin sort of stumbled forward into him, resting his chest against Obi-Wan’s, and Obi-Wan tangled his fingers in Anakin’s hair at the back of his head and drew in a couple quick breaths before he was cumming too, liquid spurting between his fingers and up onto their stomachs, probably ruining Obi-Wan’s shirt, but just then he couldn’t say that it hadn’t been absolutely worth it.
They just stood there, panting and holding one another, for several long moments. “Is it weird that I just came in front of your dog?” Anakin finally asked, having let go of his mouthful of Obi-Wan’s shoulder at some point, but his head was still tucked pleasantly up underneath Obi-Wan’s chin and Obi-Wan had the very cheesy thought that if it were possible, he would like to stay like this for hours longer.
Obi-Wan chuckled and rubbed his fingers against Anakin’s scalp. “I doubt it will cause him any lasting emotional damage.”
“If you…wanna clean up in my bathroom, I’ll probably have to walk you there,” Anakin admitted, sounding slow and sleepy against Obi-Wan’s chest.
Obi-Wan should get cleaned up, he knew – he was wearing linen after all – but this felt…wonderful, actually, just standing in Anakin’s dorm room with all the lights turned off, holding this impossibly beautiful boy in his arms. “Yes,” Obi-Wan said. “Just…let me have this, for a moment, if you would.”
Anakin had never thought of himself as particularly alluring before, but he figured he must be doing something right, because Obi-Wan kept inviting him places.
Unfortunately, one of those invitations was to go jogging at seven fucking a.m. On a weekend.
“Uh…” Anakin, who hadn’t woken up before noon on a weekend since elementary school, said, caught off guard.
“I usually take Argos out a little further on weekends, to make up for the weekdays,” Obi-Wan was saying, and the only saving grace to this whole interaction was that he was facing away from Anakin at the time, stacking some books on the shelves in his office, and couldn’t see the panic on his face. “There’s a coffee shop a mile or so away that has outdoor seating; we usually jog there, rest a while, then jog back. I’m happy to pick you up and then go, if you’d like to join us.”
Anakin didn’t really remember saying yes, but he remembered that Obi-Wan had smiled at him, and that was enough to make it worth it to Anakin to set an alarm for six-forty-five on a Saturday.
Obi-Wan was idling in his car outside Anakin’s apartment building at seven on the dot, because of course he was. “We’re definitely going to get coffee, right, because – those are different glasses,” Anakin said, freezing with his seatbelt in his hand halfway pulled across his chest.
“…No they’re not?” Obi-Wan said, clearly lying.
“Yes they are,” Anakin said firmly. “I spend a lot of time looking at your face – not in a weird way,” he quickly added, backtracking a little. “Just a super normal way that I always look at attractive peoples’ faces. And those are not your reading glasses.” His forehead wrinkled in confusion. “Why are you wearing reading glasses to drive, anyway?” He finally finished buckling his seatbelt. Obi-Wan was big on seatbelt-wearing and would remind him if he didn’t.
Obi-Wan sighed, sounding defeated. “I…thought I remembered to put my contacts in this morning.” He dragged a hand down the bottom half of his face. “Apparently not.”
Anakin was still confused. “Since when do you wear contacts?”
“Oh, about age fourteen or so.”
Anakin wondered if Obi-Wan was trying to gaslight him for some stupid reason. “Look, I know it’s early, but I swear I’ve seen your reading glasses before. Like, every time you’ve read something. A menu or a book or” –
“I wasn’t exactly ready for you to know that my eyesight is so shit that I wear the reading glasses on top of my contacts,” Obi-Wan said firmly, gripping the steering wheel tightly in his hands. “I just…” He twisted his hands. “It makes me feel old, all right?” he admitted on an exhale.
Anakin drew back in surprise. “You’re not old.”
“Ha.” Obi-Wan didn’t sound like he thought it was very funny. “I am very much older than, say, you.”
“Yeah, but.” Anakin drew one leg up underneath him as he twisted in his seat to face Obi-Wan head-on. “Shit eyesight doesn’t have anything to do with age. Some people just…have shit eyesight.” He held up his right hand. “My hand aches every time it rains because it’s full of screws and plates, not because I’m a certain age or not.” He let it fall to his lap again. “Also” – he took a deep breath because he was about to share something probably earlier than it should be shared but that was pretty typical, for Anakin – “I like that you’re older than me. I’m not dating you for your eyesight, Obi-Wan. I’m dating you because I like you. I think you’re great, and I think your glasses are really sexy, and I don’t care if you wear them all the time because” –
Anakin never got to the because, because just then Obi-Wan leaned over the center console and kissed him. “I like you, too,” Obi-Wan admitted.