Home of Greg Sanders Slash Fiction
Chapter Three
The next day Greg is thoroughly professional. He handles the evidence he's given, makes all the right noises at the right times, even picks up on something no one else catches. He takes the compliment Gil gives him, and only once - just after the communal break when everyone is stretching and thinking about going back to work - does he give Nick a smouldering look that by all rights ought to have set off the sprinklers.
Nick makes his excuses when he feels blood rush up to his face, and bolts for the unprocessed paint transfers waiting for him in his lab. He hopes no one else noticed the electricity that passed between them. He knows Gil did - he caught the little flash of amusement that should have hurt but didn't - but it's not Gil he's worried about.
Truthfully, he's worried about himself, about what he's doing and why he can't bring himself to stop. But it's easier to think that he's worried about what Catherine and Sara and Warrick think, so he lets himself dwell on that, instead. He figures as long as he knows he's lying to himself, it's not really lying.
When quitting time rolls around, he glances down the length of the corridor and sees Gil on the phone, worked up in a state about something. He smiles, accepts that he won't be seeing him at home anytime soon, and slouches into the locker room.
"Heading home?" Warrick asks, looking up from the mirror in his locker.
"Guess so," he hears himself say.
"You don't sound convinced."
He quirks up the corner of his mouth. "Got some restless energy," he says.
Warrick gives him one of his shrewder looks. "You okay?" he asks.
"I-" He shrugs. "I don't know, man. Hey, you wanna grab a bite?"
He can feel that he's being assessed critically, and it makes him feel good. He hasn't had a friend like Warrick since high school, and every now and then it catches him by surprise that he has one, now.
"Sure," Warrick says, closing his locker. "Manny's?"
"Deal."
Manny's is a greasy spoon off the strip, clean enough to be decent but shabby enough to scare away the tourists. It's mostly empty when they get there, and Nick picks a booth that�s out of the flow of traffic.
"So," Warrick says, sliding into the vinyl-lined booth across from him, "what's eating you?"
"What?"
Warrick shakes his head. "Don't act like it's nothing, Nick," he says. "You've been jumpy for a couple days. What gives?"
He smiles his 'caught again' smile and drops his head. "Something weird," he says, "and I need some advice."
"Warrick is open for business," he says after has the waitress shown up and taken their orders.
"Well," Nick says when they're alone again, "I'm seeing someone."
"Oh?" Comically raised eyebrows. "How long?"
"A while now."
"My my my. Usually you can't keep your mouth shut when you get lucky. Nice girl?"
He blushes. "It's serious," he says, sidestepping the itty-bitty detail of 'girl'.
"How serious?"
"Serious serious."
"Wow." Warrick grins. "That is pretty weird."
Nick tosses a balled-up paper napkin at his head. "Ha ha," he says. "Maybe now I won't tell you."
"Aw, come on. You walked into that one." Warrick kicks him under the table. "So - spill."
He takes a deep breath. "Like I said, it's serious. But lately - lately I've been doing something stupid."
"Uh-oh." Warrick isn't quite shaking his head with pursed lips, but he might as well be.
"Been sort of - sort of fooling around with someone else."
Warrick's head starts to move from side to side, slowly.
"And before you bite my head off," Nick rushes, levelling a finger at him, "this person already knows about it."
"Which person," Warrick asks, "your girlfriend or your on-the-side friend?"
"The one I'm serious about."
"Ouch." The waitress appears with sweating glasses of water and coffee, drops them off wordlessly and moves on. Warrick glances after her, then brings his attention back to Nick. "And?"
"And..." Nick considers his words carefully. "I think I've been given permission."
The cup of coffee stops an inch from Warrick's lower lip. "You what?"
He shrugs. "It... seems like it's not a problem."
"Wow."
"What do I do?"
"That's, uh..." Warrick looks down at the steaming cup under his nose, sets it back down on the table and drums the fingers of his left hand next to his fork. "That's a tough one. You said Serious knows about Fling, right?"
He nods.
"Are you sure Serious isn't just feeding you a line? She's really okay with it?"
He shrugs. "I don't know," he says. "I think so - I mean, it seems genuine."
"And how about Fling? Does she know about Serious?"
He winces. "Sort of."
Warrick's eyebrows go up. "Sort of?" he asks. "Isn't that like 'sort of pregnant'?"
He sighs. "I told Fling about Serious," he says, "but I don't think it registered."
"You gotta tell her," Warrick says decisively. "I mean, if you can pull off dating two girls at once, more power to you. But if it's going to work, and not shoot you in the ass when you least expect it, everyone's gotta know about everyone else."
"Yeah, well...." He squirms, and can feel Warrick's glower. "It's complicated."
"You're damn right it is," he agrees forcefully, and reaches for his coffee again. "But you asked me for advice, Nick, so don't go chicken on me now."
"They know each other," Nick says. "Serious and Fling. It... could get ugly."
Warrick sips, considers the coffee and sips again. "Already sounds ugly," he says. "How badly do you want this to work out?"
"I'm serious about Serious," Nick says automatically, "and I don't want to lose what we have. But this thing with Fling - it's... different."
More coffee. "Fling," Warrick says after a pause. "How serious are you gonna get about her?"
"I don't know."
"Does Serious - Jesus, Nick, can we have some real names here?"
Nick clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head. "Can't, man, sorry."
Warrick narrows his eyes. "Why not?"
"You, uh... it might get back to them."
"I KNOW them?" Warrick asks, and almost slops his coffee down the front of his clean white shirt. "Are you - wait a second." He sets the coffee down and leans forward. "Is this Catherine and Sara?" he demands. "Are we talking about CATHERINE and SARA?"
"NO!"
There's a long moment of silence between them, and then they both start laughing. "Thank God," Warrick says eventually. "That would be... a disaster."
Nick rubs at his forehead. "Let me try to get rid of that mental image," he mumbles. "Thanks a lot. I'm never going to be able to look at either of them again."
"Serves you right, you two-timing pig," Warrick says, still laughing. Their breakfasts arrive and he thanks the waitress, who maintains her utterly non-responsive job attitude.
"So how do you meet girls like this?" he asks, digging into his eggs.
Nick pushes his own food around on his plate. "By accident," he says. "I didn't go out looking for this."
"Lucky you," Warrick says. "What are you going to do?"
"I have no idea, man," Nick says, picking up a slice of toast and contemplating it. "I really have no goddamn idea."
He gets home before Gil does, and takes a quick shower and flicks through daytime tv until he hears a key in the door. "Gil?" he calls out, muting the box.
Gil appears around the corner, and drops his briefcase on the floor next to a potted plant. "Morning," he says. "What are you doing still up?"
"Waiting for you," Nick says. "Long day?"
Gil shakes his head and rolls his eyes. "It never ceases to amaze me that there's an evolutionary niche for people like Conrad Ecklie," he gripes, rolling his shoulders and cricking his neck.
Nick pulls himself out of the sofa cushions and rests his hands on Gil's shoulders. "I've been thinking about you all night," he says, working the muscles under his fingers.
"Oh?"
"Yeah." He kisses Gil's neck just above the collar of his shirt. "Come to bed?"
Gil turns in his arms and kisses him. "Have I ever turned you down?" he asks.
"Not yet," he concedes, "but there's always the possibility."
"Statistically unlikely," Gil says, and slides his fingers under Nick's tee shirt, runs the palms of his hands up his spine, pulling him in tight.
"Maybe," Nick says, his breath hitching in his throat as Gil's hands travel back down and dip beneath his waist, "but I, uh... think I need to gather some more empirical evidence."
"Good idea. Can't have too much empirical evidence..." He nibbles at a convenient patch of skin. "Very... scientific."
Nick laughs, guides them down the hall towards the bedroom. "I'm a big fan of the scientific method," he mumbles into Gil's open mouth, and relishes the buzz he gets from the taste of him.
"Mmmm," Gil agrees, but gives up on words for the more immediate communication of touch.
They undress each other without any great hurry, exploring and marvelling at each new realm as it's uncovered. Every time they do this, Nick falls in love again, as though from scratch. Gil has a few scars here and there, and each of them is a prize, a thing to be kissed and cherished and squirreled away for the future. He knows Gil is doing the same to him.
Gil has taught him about slow love-making. It has taken him a long time to understand that slowing down the inevitable end isn't enough, but that every moment should be stretched to its breaking point. Gil has always been there, guiding him and loving him and more patient than any person had any right to be, and Nick has never been so glad of being in over his head as he is when he is naked with Gil.
Tonight Gil wants to steer and Nick lets him, surrenders the eternity of his body to Gil's staggering wisdom. This has taken him a long time to learn, too; another powerful thing he has been given. These nights are his favourite, when Gil is determined to celebrate every square millimeter of him, to push the boundaries of possible pleasure.
Gil starts at Nick's face, kissing and touching and caressing every place that shows emotion; and while his lips are engaged in the laugh-lines around his eyes, his hands begin to investigate his neck and shoulders. He crawls down the length of Nick's body this way, visiting every place that makes him gasp and beg for something, anything, for more. Sometimes Gil keeps a breathless commentary of the wonders he's uncovering and what they're doing to him, but tonight he's silent. Focussed and determined, and so gentle it's almost painful.
By the time Gil reaches his knees, Nick can't stand it anymore, needs to break Gil's patient rhythm of touch and taste before he passes out. "Come here," he manages to say, astounded as always at how low his voice has become, how much strength Gil has to bring him to this point.
Gil licks the inside of his right knee and climbs back up his body, kissing here and there as he moves, settling in next to him, mouth-to-mouth.
"I love you," Nick tells him, and feels his eyes tearing up when Gil's hand finds him between their bodies. He strokes once, twice, not enough goddammit he wants to say but he can't; and then Gil has wrapped them both in one hand, and that feels like fire through his entire body, and he begins to grey out from sensation.
Gil manages to hold them both there, in that suspended place, for what seems like hours; too intense to be pleasure but too fine to be anything else and it lasts too long, too too long but it's over much too soon.
He does cry then - freely and without shame - when he comes, finally, aching and desperate and whispering Gil's name with a devastated breath that is drawn out in interminable waves. Part of him is aware of Gil's reactions that mirror his own, Gil's exquisite pain and overwhelming pleasure, and they swear into each other's mouths as the last of their energy is wrenched from them.
He feels blessed when he surfaces again, cleansed of the earthly world and touched by something holy, something so pure it is invisible, impossible. His awareness washes over him in random firings, starting with the perfect solidity of Gil next to him (on him, under him, around him, in him - wherever they have expended themselves) and then extends to the bed and then to the room, and then to the universe.
"You're the only thing that matters," he whispers in Gil's ear as he begins to move. "If I ever forget that, remind me. Don't let me walk away from this."
He knows that Gil is still too deep to have understood anything, but the tone of his voice at least has penetrated the fog because Gil shifts and kisses him, whispers, "I love you."
Nick wraps his arms around him, finds the blanket behind him and pulls it over them both. He kisses him softly, kisses him again and holds him as tightly as he dares. He loves shepherding Gil into wakefulness again, loves the opportunity it affords him to cherish him unashamedly and to lavish him with all the care that Gil has ever shown him.
If perfection is a tangible thing, he thinks as he drifts, this is it.