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Eames was not a man who was terribly attached to his clothes, or at least not to individual items of clothing. He was attached to appearing a certain way, to being just a certain level of dated, or offbeat, or whatever people wanted to call it. He was attached to his solo trips to secondhand and consignment shops in each city he visited, and he was attached to the ritual of rebuilding his closet that he went through each time he decided that he wasn’t going back to the place he’d been living for the past however long it had gotten. The individual components of his closet, however, were ephemeral—never permanent residents. They were like Eames, in that regard.
And so it shouldn’t have mattered that a button popped off his shirt, because he could always buy a new shirt (an old shirt… a new old shirt), but it did matter. It was his green shirt, and he’d brought it here with him for a reason: because Arthur had once said something nice about it. “Once” had been at the beginning of a job last year, the first time Arthur had seen the green shirt, which Eames had then only recently found in a thrift store in Montreal.
“Nice shirt,” Arthur had said.
“What?” Eames had replied, his voice flat with shock.
Arthur had waved his hand a little in a pointlessly vague sort of way. “It brings out your eyes.”
Eames had swallowed carefully, and straightened up from where he’d been leaning on a desk reading a file, and narrowed his eyes a bit as he considered Arthur. Arthur had shifted slightly under the scrutiny, and Eames had said, “You actually like my shirt?”
Arthur had pursed his lips. “Like is such a strong word.”
It was the first and thus far only time that Arthur had commented positively on something Eames was wearing—clothing that Arthur had dressed him in in dreams exempted, naturally. So Eames had hung onto the shirt. It had, truth be told, been a bit snug across the chest – and across the middle, and around the arms – in the first place, but still perfectly serviceable. It wasn’t much of a surprise that it didn’t fit anymore, a year later, especially after his last couple of relatively idle months.
Surprise was not, however, a prerequisite for disappointment, and Eames was definitely disappointed in a way that he had never been disappointed about an article of clothing before. Sure, he’d lost nice suits and shirts and socks to senseless tragedies (blood, black tea, food fights) before, but no previous case of a good garment cut down in its prime had ever hit him like this before, like a sharp little stab in the very gut that had just popped loose that little mother-of-pearl button.
It was only a button; it could be easily fixed. But it wasn’t really the shirt that needed fixing.
The problem went like this: Eames was waiting for Arthur.
In a sense, he had been waiting for years. Waiting for things to relax between them, waiting for them to become something (acquaintances), then something more (friends?), than something even more than that (???), the last of which still hadn’t happened yet. In another sense, he had been waiting for four months. He had made up his mind on the last job they worked together: he was going to tell Arthur that he wanted the more that he’d been waiting for, or rather that he wanted more and also less between the two of them: more honesty, more contact, more time; less bullshit, less distance, less pretending that they weren’t something indefinable but important to one another, something they never talked about.
The night before the extraction, he’d looked up at Arthur across the desk where they were both bent over their files, double-checking everything with the red felt-tip pens that Arthur always had in his briefcase for exactly this activity. He’d licked his lips, watching the way that Arthur’s eyelashes fanned across his cheeks when he blinked, the way his thumb traced the curve of the cap of his pen while he was lost in concentration.
“Where are you going?” he’d asked suddenly, without properly thinking it through. He’d just wanted to know. “After this job, I mean.”
Arthur had glanced up at him first, and only afterward actually raised his head. “I have a job that starts next week.”
Eames had frowned a little. “With whom?”
“Lerman.” Eames had tried not to make a face, but must have failed, because Arthur’s eyes had slid to the side and he’d pursed his lips in annoyance that didn’t seem to have been directed entirely at Eames. “I owe him a favor,” he’d explained in a bit of a grumble.
“How long’s the job?”
“Four months.”
It took a lot for Eames to do a double-take, but he’d done one just then. Four months was not an unheard-of amount of time for a job, but it was certainly on the long side of things, and in this instance it’d really put a damper on Eames’s plans. Which had been, admittedly, rather vague, and now he was being forced to reshape that vagueness into something altogether new to deal with the fact that Arthur was about to just drop off the face of the earth (in relation to Eames, whose perspective was really the only one that mattered).
“Why?” Arthur had asked, taking Eames a bit off-guard as he knocked him back out of his somewhat petulant, pensive annoyance.
“I’d just… hoped we could meet. And talk.”
“About anything in particular?”
Eames didn’t actually make it a habit to lie to Arthur, both because Arthur usually found out and because he’d found some time since that he just didn’t feel like it anymore. He’d lied then, though: “Business. Nothing specific. Just… business.”
Arthur had given him an odd look, which was only appropriate because Eames had been behaving rather oddly, but he didn’t seem irritated or particularly confused. “Can it wait?”
It had already waited what felt like forever, in Eames’s estimation, so what was a little longer? Well, four months was a little longer, but he could deal with it. He’d been through hundreds of months in his life. “Yes. Yeah, of course.”
Arthur had still been watching him with a sort of guarded, passive scrutiny when he said after a moment, “Okay, so where do you want to talk business in four months?”
“Las Vegas?” Eames had offered. It had been the place he’d planned to take Arthur if he could coax him to go somewhere together. He and Arthur had never agreed much on what sort of places they liked, but Eames enjoyed oppressive heat and gambling and midcentury kitsch while Arthur liked air conditioning and sleek modern furniture and high end shopping. The world offered limited locations that truly suited them both.
“Vegas,” Arthur had repeated, rolling the letters around on his tongue as though they formed some obscure word that Arthur had rarely had occasion to use before. He’d only ended up sounding thoughtful, though, and perhaps even pleased underneath his mostly inscrutable exterior. “I could go for Vegas. I’m sure I’ll need a break after this next goddamn job.”
Four months, Eames thought. Four fucking months.
The first few weeks alone, Eames didn’t really think a whole lot about Arthur, or at least not any more than had become usual for him. He was too busy to dwell, because Eames did not believe in making major decisions halfway. Asking Arthur for something (and it could only be something, because where men like Arthur were concerned one would be a damn fool not to play things by ear) was certainly a major decision—a rebirth, in a way. Eames didn’t want to sell Arthur on his whole life; he only needed to sell him on himself, and so he should simply be himself.
He did what he always did when he got restless or felt the need to start over, which was to go to the local market where cheap and counterfeit goods were available, pick up a mid-sized suitcase, and fill it with anything in his current residence that he didn’t care to let go of just yet. It was somewhat empty this time, as Eames hadn’t been in his current location all that long comparatively. He took it and little else, and he left the rest, and he went to London and dropped the case off in a small storage unit that held little more than various other similar no-brand cases.
“Moving again?” asked the old man who owned the facility as Eames left, and Eames smiled crookedly.
“Always.”
“See you again sometime next year, then?”
Eames slowed, tilting his head in thought, and glanced back as he said, “You know, maybe not.”
He didn’t have to go straight to Las Vegas. There were months yet before Arthur would be there, and Eames could waste that time anywhere at all. He could even take a job, if he felt like it. He wanted to be ready, though—to be calm and settled and thoroughly relaxed. So he went to Vegas and he got a six month sublet from some executive who was going to Brussels on business possibly forever, the flat furnished in modern greys and creams with clean lines and big windows that overlooked the clean lines and big sky of the desert. He thought that Arthur would appreciate all of that, and he rather liked it, too. He was easy when it came to furniture; all he had to do was fall into a lovely nap on the low-backed sofa once and he was quite thoroughly pleased with his choice.
Eames would not describe himself as a gambling addict. It was just that he was fairly good at it—some of it, at least, since he was bad with numbers and an utter failure at counting cards—and the physical act of it appealed to him as a lifelong fidgeter. He could stop anytime and knew that he could because he frequently did stop when something more interesting came up, whether it be a job or a burst of artistic inspiration (which was increasingly rare) or a relationship (which was almost never). Eames didn’t gamble out of compulsion; he gambled out of idleness.
He didn’t want to get arrested in Vegas. Arthur would be profoundly irritated if he showed up and Eames was out on bail and getting ready to flee the country, so he didn’t do anything terribly illegal, and as such within two months he was down more thousands of dollars than he cared to think about and up more weight than he had been in some time. Gambling required sitting, and waitresses were always offering him alcohol, and it was too damn hot out in Vegas this time of year to safely go running.
Normally Eames wouldn"t have cared much; surely at some point a job would come along in a country where the food didn"t agree with him, or a job that kept him far too busy to drink or to eat much more than the bare minimum, and he"d drop the weight again. He always did. But that job wasn"t going to come along before Arthur did, and Eames was supposed to be impressing Arthur, and Arthur himself was frustratingly perfect and correspondingly difficult to impress.
So he stopped gambling and got a personal trainer instead. It took two weeks for him to decide that he was not dropping weight like he thought he would, to which complaint his trainer said, "I thought you wanted to bulk up."
"I"m already bulky; that"s the bloody problem."
"So you want to cut."
"What the hell is that?"
Cutting as his trainer described it sounded like torture, so Eames tried simply eating healthier food and spending a bit more time on the treadmill.
His weight was far from the only thing that needed some fixing up. The four month mark drew closer, and Eames did his best to make himself look less chronically single. He trimmed some places, shaved others, and got his eyebrows waxed. When he went for a haircut, he asked for a trim, and the stylist said, "Don"t get me wrong, you"re hot, but this haircut is doing nothing for you."
Eames stared at him in the mirror. The stylist just stared back with one fist resting on his hip and one eyebrow quirked. He actually sort of reminded Eames of Arthur, for some reason. His build, maybe, or his willingness to blatantly criticize Eames"s appearance. "What are you suggesting?"
The stylist waved his hand in a way that didn"t remind Eames of Arthur at all. "Texture?"
Eames left with less hair and more texture. "Wow, you look great. Like ten years younger," the receptionist said as he paid. In that case, Eames thought, he looked about as old as Arthur tried desperately not to look.
It was three days short of four months exactly when Eames heard from Arthur. Arthur preferred to do almost everything via text, but this time he called from a burner phone, which certainly surprised Eames, as did the curt request he issued the moment Eames answered. "Can you meet me at six?"
"Tonight?" Eames asked. He felt like he should have been offended that Arthur didn"t even greet him, but generally Arthur didn"t mean to be rude when he was rude. Generally.
"Tonight. In front of those big fountains.”
"What? The Bellagio fountains? Why Arthur, I’d no idea you had such a romantic soul." He made it sound like a tease, but stupidly, Eames hoped it was supposed to be romantic. He was sort of a romantic, deep down.
Arthur was silent for a long moment, and the silence could have been anything from annoyance to embarrassment. At last he grumbled, "Look, I haven"t been to Vegas since college, okay? They"re the only landmark I remember."
"No, that"s fine," Eames said immediately. "Perfect. Six, then."
"Six," Arthur reiterated, as though he was afraid Eames might somehow forget, and he hung up.
Eames had pictured how this would go. He"d pictured Arthur showing up, looking as always far too perfect for someone who’d just got done with a long day of flights. He wouldn"t compliment Eames, but he would definitely notice that Eames looked amazing, because Eames had spent the last six weeks making sure he looked amazing in ways Arthur would definitely be unable not to appreciate.
“No, don’t bother with a hotel,” Eames would say. “You’ve been in hotels for the last four months. You can stay at my place.”
They would drop Arthur’s luggage. Arthur would be stunned that Eames lived in such a beautiful flat. He would not express that he sort of wanted to stay in it forever, but he would definitely think it. Eames would take him to dinner at a quiet Italian place nearby (which he made a reservation for as soon as he got off the phone with Arthur, leaving some extra time in case Arthur’s flight was delayed).
They would not talk about business. Eames would make sure of that; they’d talk about ice hockey, because Eames happened to know that Arthur liked it, because he’d caught him streaming it from time to time (at very odd times, depending on the time zone) and the season had started a month ago and Eames had been watching Arthur’s team, and he was roughly at the point where he’d mostly puzzled out line changes but still didn’t understand terms like “peanut butter”, and no, he hadn’t figured out a way to casually explain away the fact that he’d recently taken an apparently inexplicable shine to Arthur’s specific interests, but he’d figure out something. He lied best under pressure.
Arthur would be very taken with him. He might demand to ravish Eames immediately upon arriving back at the flat, or perhaps not. Maybe he’d make Eames wait a few days. Maybe he was a bit of a stickler for second or third dates or all that, even though they’d known one another for years. Eames was pretty sure that Arthur would at least like to fuck, and he’d just have to coax him into the rest.
“I love you,” he’d say. Not right away, but before Arthur left, whenever he left. If he left. Because Eames had had four months to think on it, and he did love Arthur, and he wanted Arthur to know before he had the chance to do something stupid like go off on a four month job with fucking Lerman again.
And then a button popped off his green shirt. The one that Arthur thought was nice, the one that Eames had been specifically saving for their reunion. Eames thought that he looked different; he thought that he looked better, but apparently he was still bigger than he had been six months ago, and there was a definite stab of disappointment there. It took him fifteen minutes to find an acceptable alternative, and after said search most of his clothes were in a pile on the bed and he was running late, so he gathered them all up and threw them back into the walk-in closet to be dealt with later.
He managed to be a few minutes early, but as it turned out after he walked up and down the street once, trying to seem casual, Arthur wasn’t there. Maybe his flight had been delayed, though if he weren’t going to make it tonight at all he was sure Arthur would have contacted him, so he would wait.
The fountains were playing “Fly Me to the Moon”. Eames found a place to stand and try not to get cruised, though he kept getting cruised anyway. After a half hour the fountains played “God Bless America”, which might have been the worst few minutes of Eames’s life. He took out his phone and tried to look busy. It was in the middle of “My Heart Will Go On” another half hour later that someone came up to him, and stared, and wouldn’t go away even when pointedly ignored.
Eames could see, even though he was very specifically not looking, that the man had a full beard and was wearing an absolutely disgusting combination of a baseball cap of some sort, cheap sunglasses, an ill-fitting trench coat, and a shirt with bloody toucans all over it. The man kept staring, and then he moved closer, and Eames looked up only to snap lowly, “I’m not an escort!”
“Okay, good, thank you for clearing that up,” Arthur deadpanned, and Eames just blinked at him for what felt like it was probably an awkwardly long time.
“What are you wearing?” he asked at last, aware that it was a stupid question. Anyone could have seen what he was wearing from a half mile away, and used the information to carefully avoid him.
“Oh, like you have room to talk,” the horrible stranger with Arthur’s voice grumbled. Eames consciously allowed the offense he took at that to show on his face, and Arthur added, “Not right now. In general.”
“I’d say in general I still have plenty of room to talk.”
“Fine. Yes, you do,” Arthur admitted. He sounded grumpy and he looked like an utter creep, and this was not the way Eames had expected any of this to go. “Could we just…?” He gestured a little to indicate the general idea of leaving. Eames thought that was a great idea; he was getting antsy as someone who was wanted by Interpol and currently standing next to someone as over-the-top suspicious as Arthur.
“Do you want to come to mine?”
“Yes,” Arthur breathed, his body language relaxing visibly, even under the awful trenchcoat. “Wait, you have a flat here?” he added when they were in the back of a cab and Eames gave a residential address off the strip.
“I’ve been living here, yes.”
Silence. Eames glanced over to find Arthur staring at him with an odd look on his face—which he could see now, because Arthur had taken off his sunglasses to reveal exhausted eyes with dark circles under them. Eames stared back, and for a moment he couldn’t figure out why they were just staring at one another.
And then it hit him: Arthur hadn’t known where he’d been living. Arthur always knew where Eames was living. It was a point of pride, and something that he liked to lord over Eames—and Eames of course pretended that it wasn’t flattering even when they both knew that it was.
“How long?”
“About four months.”
Arthur fell silent, and he took to looking out the window. He didn’t have much to say about the flat when they arrived there, which was about as much of a disappointment as the fact that he hadn’t had much to say about Eames when he’d arrived at the fountains. He looked around with slightly narrowed eyes, as though he couldn’t quite figure out how Eames and minimalist interiors had somehow joined forces.
“Make yourself at home,” Eames said, gesturing broadly, because he wasn’t really the sort to give an awkward formal tour. The kitchen was visible from the entry, and Arthur seemed to take the invitation to heart and made a beeline straight for the fridge.
The fridge was nearly entirely empty, save for some beer that Eames had only really put there figuring that Arthur might like it. He hadn’t been drinking lately; it was part of his “cutting”. “Sorry, I don’t really know how to cook,” he said after a moment of somewhat chagrined silence. Arthur closed the door and turned to look at him, and Eames added, “I’d made us dinner reservations.”
“Yeah. I, um…” Arthur gestured to roughly every aspect of his person.
“Carryout is fine!” Eames interjected. “I’ll just run and get us something, shall I?”
“Would you?” Arthur sighed. There was a vulnerability in his open relief and gratitude that Eames couldn’t recall ever hearing from him before.
It took Eames the better part of an hour to retrieve dinner from the little Italian place they were originally supposed to go to. When he came back, Arthur was sitting at the kitchen table. He’d made tea and set out an extra cup in anticipation of Eames’s return, and that was really shockingly considerate, but Eames didn’t even have time to be surprised about that because he was too busy staring at Arthur. He’d shaved off his patchy beard and washed his hair, which seemed a bit overgrown, though of course this was the first time Eames had seen it un-gelled—much less in clean, damp curls—so he couldn’t be sure.
He was wearing Eames’s clothes. It took a moment to really make sense of that: his grey sweatpants and black undershirt, loose on Arthur’s slight frame. Arthur’s newly-exposed skin covered in scrapes and bruises. Eames swallowed heavily.
“My luggage got lost,” Arthur said, and normally something like that spoken by Arthur, to Eames, would have likely come out defensive, like a challenge to Eames to say something about the commandeering of his pajamas. Now it just sounded apologetic. Eames shook his head and slid into the chair adjacent to Arthur’s.
“Does that have anything to do with the fact that you look like you’ve been run through a rock tumbler?”
“That would’ve had to be a pretty big rock tumbler,” Arthur said, watching Eames set out the two small pizza boxes and container of garlic bread he’d brought back. Arthur reached out for the box closer to him, and in shifting exposed the dark, expansive edges of what looked to be a particularly nasty bruise peeking out from the neckline and armhole of the oversized shirt.
“How did you know I like anchovies?” he asked when he opened the lid.
“You ordered pizza once in Toronto, and I always remember gross facts about my colleagues,” Eames said absently as he leaned forward and hooked his fingers rather gingerly around the fabric of Arthur’s shirt, pulling it away from his body so he could get a better look. The bruise was enormous, nearly black in the blue parts and sickly yellow everywhere else, covering a good portion of Arthur’s chest. “Arthur, were you shot?” he asked, his eyes flickering up to meet Arthur’s gaze. Arthur’s expression was somewhat pinched. “Did you fake your own death?”
A tight little laugh, not really amused. Almost wistful, like faking his own death would have been much nicer. “No, that was a local drug lord. In Malaysia.”
“What on earth were you doing in Malaysia?”
“It’s a long story.” Arthur picked up a slice of the pizza, and it was as though he couldn’t get the food into his mouth fast enough. Eames gave him a few minutes, picking at some of his own white pizza with spinach, but he wasn’t terribly hungry.
At last Arthur slowed down and said, “It only took like… what, two weeks? For everything to fall apart.”
“Two weeks? Have you been on the run this whole time?”
“Sort of.” Arthur picked up a piece of garlic bread, then just sat there holding it, staring at a spot on the table. “Yeah. I mean, basically. It was okay for a while, and then Lerman botched a bunch of my paperwork, I got stuck in Manila…”
He took a bite of the bread and frowned as he chewed. Eames gave him a minute, because he’d never seen Arthur so fundamentally shaken over a bad job. He even talked about the Cobol incident like it had been a minor annoyance, but then again, Arthur hadn’t gotten shot then.
“That’s why I was dressed like that. I had to find new clothes at the airport so there was basically no selection, and nothing else would fit over the Kevlar—which was a blast to get past security, let me tell you—and I knew it would be chilly if I got here late, so I had to look like a fucking creep wearing a trenchcoat with a tropical shirt—”
“Who cares? You’re safe. You don’t have to explain your temporary fashion emergency to me, Arthur.”
“Yeah, I do, because you look amazing,” Arthur said, waving half a piece of bread in Eames’s direction.
Eames was glad there was no way for Arthur to know about how shocked and fluttery that made him feel. Yes, he’d been trying to make Arthur think he looked amazing, but he hadn’t expected Arthur to actually say anything about it. “I do?”
“Well, yeah. That’s the best haircut you’ve ever had. And I like that shirt.” It wasn’t even the poor out-of-commission green one. Eames had managed to buy another shirt that Arthur actually approved of? Arthur picked up another slice of pizza and this time took his time on it, glancing at Eames and looking sort of oddly thoughtful. “Was all that for a job or something?”
“I haven’t been on any jobs. I’ve just been here.”
“Oh.” There was an odd note in Arthur’s voice. Everything about him was a bit strange tonight, slightly awkward. There was an undercurrent of uncertainty that Arthur almost never showed. “Um. I used the extra toothbrush in your medicine cabinet. Sorry. I’ll buy you another one tomorrow.”
For a moment, Eames couldn’t make sense of the change of subject. He just blinked. Arthur wasn’t making eye contact anymore.
“If I could stay tonight, I’ll get a hotel in the morning,” Arthur added belatedly, and suddenly it clicked. Arthur thought that he was imposing. He thought that Eames had gotten cleaned up for someone else, that the toothbrush had been for someone else, that he was planning on having someone else back to this flat. Someone in particular, no one in particular. It didn’t matter, because neither of those things was the case.
“The toothbrush was for you,” he blurted out, and then he felt stupid, because what a stupid thing to say.
“Oh,” Arthur replied. He furrowed his eyebrows a little. “All right.”
Eames was great at people—at manipulation, at seduction, at getting what he wanted. None of that mattered just then, because Arthur wasn’t people and never had been. He was Arthur, and he was his own beast. Eames had never been able to get the hang of him, and maybe that was part of the reason he wanted him and had gone through all of this for him. Of course, that also made Arthur rather terrifying.
Arthur seemed to be finished, so Eames got up and closed up the remaining food up, and he went to put it in the otherwise barren fridge. “Did you just fly twenty hours straight to get here?” he asked all of a sudden.
“Closer to thirty. There were delays. I got rerouted through Taipei.”
“Arthur.” Eames watched him as he got up, noticing how gingerly he treated himself. He must have hurt all over, and Eames couldn’t imagine how it must have been for him on those planes, even if he’d managed to snag upgrades. “You don’t always have to go so hard on yourself, you know. It wasn’t as though I was expecting you today.”
“I just wanted to get here.”
Eames took a somewhat shuddery breath. “You must be exhausted.”
“Yeah.” Arthur laughed briefly. “Could we go to bed?”
Eames showed him the guestroom, which he’d barely been in himself. Arthur peered into it, taking in the warm greys of the monochrome color scheme, the plush bedding, the carefully curated selection of books, which Eames had not chosen, that inhabited the rather severe, blocky headboard.
Arthur sighed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t have a guestroom.”
If Eames hadn’t been leaning against the doorjamb, he might have fallen over. Arthur glanced over at him, and here it was, this was it. Eames had gone into this knowing he had to be careful, to make sure not to push too much and to respond to the little cracks in Arthur’s façade, except that there was no façade here. There was just Arthur, his expression both open and guarded at once, his cheeks a little pink, his hair a mess.
“I don’t have a guestroom,” he said immediately, and he leaned over, grabbed the handle, and yanked the door shut so abruptly that Arthur actually jumped a little. “No one is allowed in there.”
Suddenly one of Arthur’s dimples was showing. He looked like hell, and yet there was one dimple, and he was utterly gorgeous, really. Eames licked his lower lip, took a breath. “I got this place for you,” he admitted. “And the haircut. All of it. I didn’t want to talk about business when you got here.”
The words were barely out before Arthur was kissing him, lips parted, one hand on the back of his neck and one ineffectually seeking purchase in his freshly-cropped hair. He managed, somehow, to press Eames back up against the doorjamb without actually pushing up against him, which of course he couldn’t, because it would have hurt. Eames barely remembered to be extremely gentle when he touched Arthur, hands coming to rest on his hips. He couldn’t be sure of the locations of all of his injuries.
At least not yet.
“I was going to seduce you when I got here,” Arthur murmured when they’d broken off, breathless, and made their way to Eames’s bed, and Eames was trying to help him get settled under the covers as painlessly as possible. This wasn’t the way he’d pictured sharing a bed with Arthur for the first time to go, but he’d absolutely take it. He paused in what he was doing at those words, sitting there staring down at Arthur leaning exhausted against his pillows, and Arthur gave a wry smile. “I had it all planned out, and then everything was fucked and things just got worse and worse. I was so mad. Four months and here I am and I’m fucking useless, and I look like shit.”
“You don’t look like shit,” Eames said, and he’d been about to get up to go change into something for bed himself, but he changed his mind and just started on his shirt right there. Arthur’s eyes locked on his fingers. “Don’t get me wrong, darling, I love your fancy little suits, but I think you were born to be in my clothes. And my bed.”
Arthur let out a sharp laugh, though it seemed to hurt him a bit to do so and he stifled it quickly. “Is that your idea of a line?”
“No, a line would be me offering to kiss you anywhere it doesn’t hurt.”
“Marion Ravenwood!” Arthur exclaimed, pretending to be scandalized, and Eames was definitely in love.
As it turned out, Arthur’s lips didn’t hurt. The right side of his neck didn’t hurt, and neither did his left nipple—it really, really didn’t hurt. His hips didn’t hurt, and his cock didn’t hurt, though Eames’s mouth had to be quite slow and gentle with it so as not to strain all of the other places that weren’t in such admirable shape.
“Do you remember when we first met?” Arthur asked him afterward, when Eames had cleaned them both up and gotten under the covers. Arthur was already half asleep from the sound of things.
“In Mexico? When you tried to pick me up in a bar while we were both pretending to be different people?”
“Yeah. I wish that I hadn’t freaked when I felt you up and found your sidearm. I wish I’d just kept going.”
Eames laughed under his breath, because the memory of the look on Arthur’s face when he’d realized Eames was armed and abruptly broken off from kissing him to slowly piece together what was happening was actually rather priceless, even as disappointing as his subsequent anger had been. “No use in regret. We’re here now, aren’t we?”
Arthur moved a bit closer to him, slow and careful and with a little grunt of discomfort until he settled in with his side pressed to Eames’s chest and Eames cautiously slid an arm around his waist. “We are. And speaking of here, what’s with this apartment? It’s like a hotel room.”
“Well, yes, I thought it would be to your tastes.”
“It’s nice, I guess, but I was kind of expecting somewhere a little more… you.”
Eames lifted his head a little, trying to get a look at Arthur’s expression as his eyes adjusted to the dark. “You would have liked a place that was a little more me?”
Arthur yawned, barely mustering up the energy to cover his mouth. “Like is such a weak word.”