Icarus

Song for this chapter: “Icarus” (Bastille)

Icarus

When they entered Zach’s flat, what Chris noticed first wasn’t the dogs swarming them but a stack of moving boxes, each of them neatly labeled with a name he recognized from various sources. (Because fucking everybody had felt it necessary and appropriate to point out to him that Zach was in a relationship again last fall. And to provide pictures whenever any surfaced. As if he needed proof. As if being forced to consider the nature of his friendship with Zach all over again changed. A. Fucking. Thing.) But damn, he should have paid more attention to what Zach had not mentioned at the theater. Namely, the whereabouts of the current twink that evening.

And he knew it was damn bad style how his stomach was doing fucking flip-flops with relief. He swallowed hard and tried to come up with a suitable comment in reaction to the obvious.

“I … I thought you were happy,” Chris stuttered. “I mean, I saw pictures of New Year’s somewhere. You looked happy.”

“I was happy,” Zach said, his voice expressionless. He closed the door with a decisive shove. When he turned around, Chris caught a glimmer of anger in his dark eyes. “You looked like an actor in Paris.”

That was more than a little unfair, and a lot hurtful. But Zach was hurting. That much was clear. And not just because of that boy, Chris realized with a start. That was new. So Zach had gotten an eyeful of the pictures from his trip with Iris, and he hadn’t liked them. Chris really shouldn’t be that stunned and thrilled as a result. As if his whole universe had just tilted on its axis. Or worse, righted itself.

“I am an actor,” he said softly. Then he attempted a crooked smile. “My publicist tells me that over on Just Jared they still believe I’m gay.”

How Zach didn’t snort now, that was new, too. Or was it?

So far, Zach had always been uncharacteristically aggressive about that issue. Ready to get in the face of interviewers or fans at the drop of a fug hat, really. (“… only good friends. Any suggestion otherwise has more to say about the person making the suggestion …”) And Chris got it, sort of. Or he thought he did, anyway. Zach was just that protective. Of his friends. Of his family. Of helpless animals and various good causes. Even of seemingly sexually confused costars. But Zach’s behavior had always annoyed Chris, too. Almost hurt him, kind of. To be typecast like that without question or comment. Now he wondered if he’d ever really understood Zach’s motivations.

“So, pizza.” Zach grabbed a menu from the sideboard and held it out to Chris. “Pick your poison. And then you need to say hi to Noah and Skunk properly.”

“And to Prince Harry.”

Zach just rolled his eyes at the old joke, and suddenly Chris felt at home.

They shared pizza and a messy mixed salad and a rather noble Montepulciano on the sofa, fighting off Noah and Skunk. (“Ever since that ‘Side By Side’ thing, the damn dogs are convinced pizza is pet food. I swear, Susan is a dog whisperer. She put them up to it. They never begged for pizza before, and now they do it all the time.”) Harry, older and smaller and thinner than Chris remembered him, purred away on his lap like a little furry engine and didn’t mind being “Pined” with morsels of mozzarella. This homely scene set the mood for their conversation, too. They talked small stuff. The fur-babies; how Harold had been sick. Chris’s garden – how he’d learned the hard way that to remove side-shoots from tomato plants is a good idea and what to do about mealybugs in his orange trees. Family and friends. The polar vortex. The solar panels Chris was having installed at his house.

After they had dealt with the dishes and doled out some healthy treats to the pets, they settled on the couch again. The silence was warm and almost intimate. The kind of mood that led to ill-advised confessions.

Perhaps that was the reason why Chris blurted, “I stole a notebook. By mistake. From a fan. At the Ryan premiere in London.”

“How can you steal something by mistake?” Zach raised his eyebrows suggestively. As if he was waiting for the punch line of the joke and fully expected it to be lewd.

“Not like that, asshole.” Chris punched Zach’s arm. “I said premiere, Zach. Brouhaha. Chaos, bedlam, pandemonium. I sign the notebook. My publicist yanks at me. A security guy shoves at me. And the next thing I know it’s early morning in L.A. and I still have that damn notebook.”

He groped for his jacket. And yeah, it was probably a little strange – okay, maybe even a lot strange – how he had taken to carrying that notebook around with him wherever he went.

“I think it belongs to a Star Trek fan. There’s some incomprehensible computer stuff and some very strange quotes inside. Actually, I was wondering if you recognize this one.” He opened the notebook at the page with the shadow quote. “For some reason I can’t get it out of my mind.”

Zach frowned at Chris. Then he frowned at the quote.

“That’s Jung,” Zach announced promptly. “From ‘Two Essays on Analytical Psychology’. Jung says that while the logical opposite of love is hate, the psychological opposite is will to power. Depending on your nature, you need the one or the other for balance. His concept of the Shadow that exists within each of us is really interesting. I think you’d totally dig that.” He ran his hand through his hair. Freshly washed after the show and left unstyled for once, it was a beautiful mess by now, all soft and tousled. “But how do you get from Jung to Star Trek?”

Chris blinked. “So you really meant it at that AMA thing, when you wrote you’d be a shrink if you hadn’t become an actor?”

“You read Reddit for me?” Zach asked, incredulous. “That’s … kind of sweet.”

Heat rushed into Chris’s cheeks, and one look at Zach’s twinkling eyes told him that he was flushing like a teenager in the throes of a crush. “Nrgh,” he groaned. “My publicist has an intern. The boy needs to be kept out of mischief. I was just doing my civic duty, is all.”

He turned the page. “The Star Trek I got from this.” He pointed at the comment about mind melds. “Though it doesn’t seem to go well with the bits of Carver here.”

“Carver, is it?” Zach raised an eyebrow à la Spock. Or maybe à la Zach. His eyebrow game was a bit like the chicken/egg dilemma. And watching Zach’s face like that did funny things to Chris’s stomach. A different effect from mere months ago. Stronger. Kind of desperate.

“I’d do it, you know,” Chris admitted, staring intently at the fan’s comment near the bottom of the page. He swallowed hard. “I’d pick mind melds, too. If, you know, Trek was for real. All that bonding stuff. That uh… that intensity of connection.”

Zach stayed silent just a moment too long for his facetious reply to be effective in delivery. “Tsk tsk, Christopher.” He even wagged his index finger at Chris. “Have you been watching ‘Amok Time’ again? You know you’re not supposed to watch that on your own.”

Chris almost whined “But you weren’t there,” although he hadn’t watched or even thought of the episode in ages.

When he didn’t say anything, Zach reached out and flipped to the following page. For a heartbeat, Chris wondered if Zach’s hand was really shaking or if he was imagining things. “That one’s from a song. Home. ‘Home is wherever I’m with you.’ By Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.”

“It’s a good song,” Zach said softly.

“I miss you too much.”

Fuck, why couldn’t he keep his stupid mouth shut? If he’d been blushing before, he should have been burning up now. Instead, Chris shivered. He turned to the next page and froze. Without blinking, he stared at the text in front of him. Until his contacts felt dry. Then he did blink, violently, before focusing on the notebook again. He hadn’t read that far yet. The left side was blank again. The lines on the next page could have been a poem, if not for the fact that he recognized two phrases.

entering orbit
so wise we grow
strive seek find yield
post tenebras lux

“No idea about entering orbit and the Latin stuff at the end there, but ‘so wise we grow’ is from Alexander Pope.” He did his best to ignore Zach’s warmth at his side, and the subtle woodsy scent of that pretentious pheromonic perfume Zach loved so much. “We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so,” Chris quoted, feeling more unwise than ever before. And that was saying something.

“I think I can help you with ‘the Latin stuff at the end’,” Zach said, as if he hadn’t heard Chris’s outburst over the song lyrics. “It means ‘light after darkness’. In the Vulgate – that’s a fourth century version of the Bible – the phrase shows up as ‘post tenebras spero lucem’ in Job. After darkness, I hope for light.” He drank the rest of his wine and turned to look at Chris, his gaze too intense, his mouth Montepulciano red. Damn it, hearing Zach speak Latin shouldn’t affect his dick like that. Nothing short of an overdose with Viagra should have that particular effect. “That motto is also inscribed on the first editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote,” Zach added.

Attacking windmills at sunrise, Chris thought. Might be a nice painting, at that. Actually, he almost felt as if he was tilting at windmills right now. Or at least fighting something much bigger and stronger than he was. For quite some time, already. For far too long, already. And without any discernible effect. But he didn’t know how to give up. Kind of Kobayashi Maru: How to win when you lose? His heart was pounding. His pulse was throbbing in his ears, and in other parts of his body as well. He was dizzy, and the one bottle of wine they had shared so far had nothing to do with that.

“And then there’s Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, only not. Strive seek find yield.” He almost didn’t recognize his voice – kind of rough, all sorts of desperate. He looked up again and met Zach’s gaze. “Icarus then,” he said and swallowed hard. It hurt. But he was all out of damns to give. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and wondered if that was how Icarus had felt, his wings burned to a crunchy crisp, plunging into the dark, dark sea far below.

“I—” Chris swallowed again, closed the notebook, and carefully put it on the coffee table. Now his hands were shaking, too. “I yield.”

“Chris.” Zach sounded almost angry. No. Scratch that. Not almost angry. Really angry. And oh yes, desperate, too. Fighting some imaginary giants or sliding toward an abyss of his own, perhaps. “You can’t do that. You can’t just show up here, unannounced, and say things like that. And you definitely can’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?” Chris asked.

But he tried not to stare at Zach as he thought of that particular interview. Of how he’d read Zach’s description of his eyes. Cerulean; Bombay Sapphire; the deep end of the pool. Of how he’d read it a second time. And a third time. No lover had ever looked at him like that. He thought of that stupid song still stuck in his head. Home is wherever I’m with you. He’d never felt at home with anyone before.

“You’re a good swimmer, Zachary.”

“The boxes in my hallway would indicate that I rather suck at swimming,” Zach objected. But he didn’t sound angry anymore. Drained, maybe. “And you’re not …” He gestured randomly, a last ditch attempt at deflection. “No matter what those stalkers at that website are saying.”

“No, I’m not gay,” Chris agreed. “But I’m pretty sure I’m not straight, either.”

Zach lowered his gaze to Chris’s erection. He had the grace to blush. A little, at least. “Yeah, I guess I can see that.”

“Goddamn it, Zach.”

Chris wasn’t surprised when Zach put his hand around the back of Chris’s neck in a possessive gesture. Zach always touched him that way. He’d done so from the start. There were photos to prove it. And Chris had always liked that. Liked it a little too much.

Then, finally, fucking finally, Zach kissed him. Lips and teeth and tongue, as if he were drowning, as if he couldn’t wait to go under. Chris let himself sink into the kiss, into the taste of wine and Zach. Each touch of their tongues, each almost-but-not-quite painful nip at his lips sent sparks shooting through his body, right into his groin.

An eternity or mere minutes later, Chris was on his back on the sofa, and Zach was on top of him. Right. He knew that. He knew Zach was a top. And it was almost scary how much he wanted that. Needed it. To be pinned down like that, to feel Zach’s dick pressed against his, hot and hard even through those slinky skinny jeans. Chris was out of his damn mind with need. With a craving that didn’t qualify as regular desire anymore. It went too deep. It was too intense. After a build-up of seven fucking years. Yeah, de Nile was a wide, wide river.

“Need you, need you, need you,” Chris whimpered and pushed himself against Zach, hoping that after seven years of foreplay he’d last seven minutes. Or heck, at least seven seconds.

“Chris, you’re crazy.” But in spite of the insult, Zach clutched Chris like he was the only thing that kept him afloat, kissed him as if this was the only way Zach could stay breathing.

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Author’s Notes

• “Entering Orbit” refers to the story with the same title by museaway.

• “So Wise We Grow” refers to the story with the same title by Deastar.

• “strive seek find yield” refers to the story with the same title by waldorph.

• “post tenebras lux” refers to the story with the same title by jouissant.

Those are all fabulous stories. Go read them and leave the authors some Kudos and comment love!

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