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Morris Ashley was lonely.
It was an inner storm silenced by the shame of it. It was a tidy little bistro packed with souls, each more similar than the last where not one can look at the other. Morris had bid his beloved Bianca Sophia goodbye when she changed the locks of their two-story villa in Sorrento. He’d caught an outrageously expensive cab from where he’d crash-landed his hot air balloon in Muncie to Tinsel Town, drawn by the pull of bright lights, and the beating heart of the West Coast Jazz scene.
He’d been a little mischievous his first week in; seeing as he’d spent most of his savings on the cab ride there. What little pocket cash he’d sewn into his blue jeans, he’d used to woo the night. A drink here; a show there. Mainly, he sat front seat at The Rhythm Room, tapping a stir stick against a scotch on the rocks he’d poured two sugar packets into, scatting along to Antônio Carlos Jobim, getting saucy on his fourth drink to Mojave, winking at any Hollywood gal who looked a little too long at him.
God, the way he’d gotten so lonely though. Keeping busy used to be an afterthought when he had an air balloon to fly or just a lesson plan. Extreme Science was a niche topic but it required so much study during the day that it never felt like his hot, wild nights were a problem. Except that he wasn’t waking up next to anyone anymore, and he didn’t have an eager group of fans waiting for his office hours.
He’d definitely look for work soon, make his fortune back and send his elegant Bianca Sophia her Flowers of an Eighteenth Apology; he’d probably even host a couple episodes at the local library, but for now, these LA nights were for him to loosen his tie and let the winding notes of an open promise swing him to bliss and a not-that-uncomfortable sleep in a single-occupancy rental loft on top of a sex shop on Skid Row. (Paid for by the residuals of his last published journal Natural Nightmares). He’d put some fresh carnations on the sill to remind him of the smell of his home villa, but still…
The dating apps were the present solution to an uncomfortable problem. He’d scheduled a date with a lady with red hair and a smile like Tuscany. Only now on hour three of waiting at the bar of the noisy Catalina Jazz Club, facing the front door to wait for her, Morris had looked a little sadly at her profile photo–most especially at her awkwardly folded hands, noting with discomfort that it was so very obviously an A.I. photo.
He’d been stood up. By a bot.
“Another scotch on the rocks for me, Vera,” he announced to the bartender, leaning a little heavily on the bartop and sighing deeply. “Just one sugar packet with this one.”
“Sure, honey,” she said distractedly. “Next performance is in five minutes if you want to get a seat. Someone’ll bring it out to you.”
He nodded, gesturing wiltingly to the front of the room. “I’ll be over there, front and centre. Might be an early night.”
It didn’t usually matter the night he was having. He always caught every sh0w, no matter the time. Tonight, this next show would have to be a good one to get the miserable brush with melancholy now perched on his back to take a hike.
The comforting hot lights in the Catalina Jazz Club often did it all for him already; sometimes a couple of plates of the baby mixed greens and steak cubes could turn him around, but he was a jazz hound at heart and some of the more modern performers were so rash with their improvisational peccadillos to the rules of music that he’d forget everything he was worried about. He’d be reminded of the readings on Dada, of what wiping out a whole catalogue of dead men who started the movement could mean if he was awestruck witness to it here and now. Every day that jazz like this played was Creation happening over and over. Science so extreme, it was like simply existing was a revolution.
He craved a sharp piano; an energetic scatter or warbler; maybe someone on the drums with a fresh shot of bourbon in them–these were the things he had to look forward to. Morris accepted his drink while the stage lights dimmed and the murmur of the crowd started to shrink as a new performer stepped on stage.
Oh. Morris had just simply forgotten. He hadn’t even thought a moment of it. He must have had cotton in his ears not to register the host for the night introducing neither the name of the performer nor his instrument.
A saxophone player.
He was an image. Elevated only by the stage platform, he fixed a quick look at the warm bulb of light spilling over his curtain of curly, inky black hair. His gaze seemed auburned by the stare of the audience as he laid the mouthpiece reed to his lower lip, a tiny little sneer on his mouth before he played his first note; as if knowing in those milliseconds just what he was about to do to every single soul in the room.
He started with an unnervingly long single note; deep and wistful. Pierced right through Morris like a pin to a butterfly wing. Then it got harder, fast and urgent; began to ululate a swaying wave through the thread the drummer was beating behind him. A trill of notes and practiced fingers on the flat keys of his woodwind. His hips followed the notes, starting to sway as his bare chest flexed over a pair of lungs that could blow a hole in Morris’ sweet long life.
“Oh, my stars…” Morris uttered, taking a hurried, deep gulp of his sugared scotch to assuage how dry his mouth had gone.
It was over too quick. Far too quick. Performances were usually six minutes at their best. The man slid the saxophone strap off his neck and set it on its stand as he acknowledged the applause with a smile that looked like liquored ice.
He stepped off the stage and Morris, not even thinking, cast a hand out. He was unsteady in his seat, the pitch of his tipsiness was throbbing right down to his centre, but he had to say something.
His palm landed on the hot, naked skin of the man’s arm as he passed and stopped right at Morris’ table where he’d tugged at him. His face was dark, shadowed by the mane of shining black curls as he looked down at Morris in those breathing seconds. Reminded him of the breadth of constellations, gazing back down at him on warm, quiet nights in the Italian countryside.
“I must tell you, sir, that that was so sublime,” Morris declared at him.
The smile lit up, goring a knife under Morris’ rib cage. Straight to the hilt with no regard for his frail mortality that time stole multitudes from him every day.
“Oh, I know,” was the reply; his velvet voice was low. A simmering growl of a sound; the danger in it blurred by the smile he spoke around. “I know what rocks, big boy.”
Morris lost the rest of his words and his palm slid off the man’s arm as he continued to pass. Goodness.
The next performance could have been good. There was breathing room before it. It didn’t matter. He could have kept facing the front, nursing a now empty glass. He could have let the night carry it away, the fleeting seconds of what he had kept a tempered ignorance of.
Morris was a lover of women. Full stop. Interested in co-ed baths. Enjoyed the company of long legs in skirts and soft edges, and trilling laughs; sometimes a little too fond of sharp nails on his back. There had been only moments; waifish, silly notions that had come and gone over the years when he’d encounter someone who was distracting with pretty eyes and shoulders Morris wished he had, full of the same under-earth fire that made him a wanderer, but sadly absent were the aforementioned considerables, and Morris had never taken the time to wonder what it would be like.
He’d been an absolute fool until tonight. Wasn’t it just like jazz to try something new?
Tonight. He didn’t keep his eyes fixed forward. Five minutes into the intermission as the next performer started to set up on stage, Morris twisted in his seat to look back.
Happenstance being what it was, Morris expected to look out at a dark throng of tables, expected to find a cool cat like that might have left the club altogether. One and done.
It was not. One and Done. The saxophone player was sitting at the very back of the club up on a mezzanine just in the alcove of a roped-off section. He was leaning forward, accepting a glass from a waitress standing on the stairwell; his black-varnished nails pushed a bill into her hand as his smile spilled out like an overly generous gift he just had so much of.
He must have felt Morris’ stare. Their eyes met.
The music started behind Morris. A new riff. The old piano; the drums; a trumpet this time beautiful and belting. Any other night enough to make him swing his head back round. The waitress left, her small black tray knocking into the stair light above her. It swung and poured orange splashes of a gleam on the saxophone player who raised his glass at Morris. Cheers.
Hot damn.
“Salud,” Morris said, raising what he now remembered was an empty glass.
The sax player leaned back in his seat; he fell right out of Morris' line of sight as time resumed its pulse, and Morris caught himself craning to see, forgetting himself. A disgruntled murmur beside him said he was craning too high. He got up out of his chair and almost stumbled onto the table opposite in his hurry, fully warped by the drum pattern and the rise of call-and-response cheers from the singer just getting started and what had to be a cello.
The back half of the club was so dark; he had to ascend into a caged stairwell just to get up the mezzanine VIP seats and the lounge chair was hugged by an alcove. He was leant back in his seat, fully engrossed in something on his phone right until Morris’ head popped out of the stairwell.
His dark eyes flicked over at him, lit only briefly by the blue glare from his phone before he put it to sleep. His slouch deepened as he appeared to get more visibly comfortable at the sight of Morris, legs spread as he rested his phone over his very naked stomach under his open vest. “Wow,” he purred slowly, letting the words fall between them, weighty like the baritone of his voice. “There’s the tall drink of half and half I ordered.”
What on earth could he mean? Morris laughed like someone had punctured his lung. “My name’s Morris. Professor Morris Ashley.”
The sax player bit his lip as he smiled, trying to stem some sort of amusement at something he saw in their exchange. “Fabian.”
“Fabian?”
“Sax.”
“Fabian? Sax?”
“Fabian Sax.”
“Marvelous name, in my opinion. Humbly.” Morris fidgeted a bit, rising out of the stairwell fully. He watched Fabian take in his height with an oddly caloric look.
“I noticed you put sugar in your scotch, Professor Morris,” said Fabian artfully.
Morris felt himself beam just as his insides went molten. It was nice to be noticed. Nice to be watched, too, while they’re at it. “Indeed, I do. I like the sweet grains at the bottom of the glass.”
“Fuckin’ weird, big guy,” Fabian said, a little singsong; a little cruelly, but his charmed, narrowed eyes and fixed smile were sweeter.
Morris was beside himself. “Well… you see, I was once kicked in the noggin by an inky black mare.”
He didn’t know why he said it.
Fabian’s eyebrows rose and a little laugh fell out of him. Youthful; free of any agenda or judgement. “Now, that’s jazz.”
It was, wasn’t it? So Jazz. Maybe. Forty stitches worth. Bloodsport Jazz. The kind that might shock a man to death.
Fabian gestured for him to sit, a light little wave of his hand toward the open space on the leather seat beside him. The trumpet was so saucy now and Morris felt a little like he could dance but he sat instead, only bobbing his head a little as Fabian seemed to feel the draw of the solo right along with him. Fabian’s arm drew with purpose over the back of the seat, closer now as Morris’ knees knocked into the table, trying to slide closer as well.
“So it would seem,” Morris murmured, lowering his empty glass to the table and fixing a look at Fabian, hoping his meaning would come across clearly despite his nerves telling him to be less forward. “Fabian, what can it mean that your playing has unceremoniously changed my life?”
Fabian’s palm landed on Morris’ shoulder, swept up to his neck, and brushed a meaningful thumb along the edge of his collar. Hurt like electricity all of a sudden to be touched.
“I think I know what it means,” Fabian replied, looking out at the crowd beneath them. His booted foot continued to tap rhythmically against the little table in front of them, his thigh brushing Morris’.
“Mm?” Morris didn’t want to open his mouth in case only vowels fell out.
“Because I’ve been watching you sit at those tables pining over jazz you hadn’t heard yet for weeks. I think it means we all meet our inky black mare eventually.” Morris watched Fabian’s mouth form the words; it was like something in him knew he needed to read his lips as he said it or it wouldn’t be real. “And just the thought of getting a chance to put you in my mouth is mine.”
His next flush was hotter than the summers in Sorrento. Morris went up like a dry leaf. He’d be ashes presently if he didn’t just—
Fabian’s lips were softer than he expected, purposeful like he spent all his time just smooching and Morris was elated to be mainlining Fabian’s generous gift.
He didn’t breathe when Fabian closed his lips over his lower lip in a slow testing motion, shifting a caress with his mouth to Morris’s upper lip, gingerly parting Morris’s lips with the flush of his own. He felt Fabian’s fingers-- just the tips-- touch his jaw, not even holding him there, just touching the way people make tentative contact with the iconography of something they most furiously believe in. It was so reverent; Morris felt an immediate sense that Fabian had decided something about the both of them. Together. Mutually bonded in this raging horror of attraction.
Morris pushed his fingers right away--like he’d wanted to since the moment he’d beheld him-- into Fabian’s long curtain of black hair, curved into a hot head of curls, and closed his lips on Fabian’s tongue, shivering because Fabian kissed in a way that was so careful like he knew how it was meant to be for them. This was not two strangers testing shallow waters at the back of a jazz club; this was…
The way Fabian reached down, drew silk fingers up Morris’s palm, slipped in and interlocked fingers with him, spreading Morris’s fingers to fit himself--large, rough knuckles in the tight spaces of Morris's narrow ones.
Fabian’s fingertips curled on the back of his palm, tense and hungry, so jump-started by Morris claiming handfuls of his hair. Fabian leaned in like the contents of Morris’s sentence had relinquished all meaning, got right up against him, knees between his legs and hands scooping under his jaw to angle him right, the tip of his little nose grazed the bridge of Morris’, a teasing little contact. Another. Just like the first. Only this time Morris couldn’t keep still. He brought one hand down from where it was fixed around Fabian’s nape, tried fingers around the edges of his velvet vest, and touched down his chest. He felt Fabian lean into it, felt the fullness of his chest in his palm swell, smooth and hot until he let his fingers touch along his nipple.
Fabian’s groan licked the inside of Morris’ mouth, felt like a scrape over his tongue first, made him have to part his lips-- a quivering whimper in own his throat he knew they both felt. It felt like Morris touching him like that had changed something between them. Taken a sultry little kiss and electrified it with intent. He was so unfathomably drunk on the twinge of whiskey on Fabian’s tongue--fizzy and burning-- and the sway of the room as Morris’ brain hummed with all the liquor he’d imbibed. He honestly didn’t care where this was going as long as it kept feeling like this.
“You’re kinda wild, aren't cha, Morris?”
The sound of his name in Fabian’s low growling tone singed him; he was pushing Morris’s head back as he sucked and licked the skin of Morris’s throat in, and then it didn’t matter since Morris forgot what his name was the moment Fabian’s hands were heaven-dragging down his chest, pressing patterns through his shirt and he did something so troubling and scraped teeth up the curve of Morris’s Adam's Apple.
There were like a thousand things he wanted to ask him about. Morris had already held a mental symposium on them, readying his topics like it’d be a lively debate, but then Fabian’s thumbs massaged his jaw, made him utter the faintest sound, like an interrupted breath, sharp and desperate and it felt like Fabian swallowed it from the way he paused, mouth open over Morris’ on a panting breath.
Fabian sighed, nuzzling a little at his moustache, eyes shut as if swimming in what that had just been. “Not gonna lie, Morris; I’m getting a feeling this was meant to be.”
Morris started to witter a bit. “I flew a hot air balloon across the ocean to get here. It definitely…had to be.”
Fabian let Morris nip at that pouty lower lip and felt it curve into an engaging, encouraging smile. Everything around them felt like steam as if it were cold outside and the wail of the trumpet down below could be cooling the air. The lights had gone down lower, only a stage light blue. Morris couldn’t see a damn thing; his glasses must have fallen off at some point.
Fabian just tasted so good. He must have said it, mumbled it against Fabian’s tongue because he was quite suddenly made aware of Fabian as a whole. Fingers slipped from his jaw to the curve of his nape, curled there and guided Morris into a delicious arch so they were tight against each other, Morris’ long leg slipping up his lap in an abruptly chilling contact and Fabian’s erection dragging a promising line on his thigh.
Oh. Morris guessed he was trying everything tonight.
“All right,” Fabian whispered like Morris had asked him something; fingers were between them, pulling and tugging at his belt buckle and the tight fabric of Morris’s blue jeans, trying to get them open. Morris touched down the valley between Fabian’s pecs, brushed over the top of his stomach, open enough for a peek at a glittering navel piercing.
“Oh my, that’s pretty,” Morris remarked at it absently and Fabian laughed in his mouth.
Fabian’s fingertips were rough scratching with just a hint of nail at the delicate skin of Morris’s hipbones. He pushed into Morris’s jeans far enough that the edge of his palm grazed Morris’s dick through the thin material of his underwear.
“Oh, so we’re just going to...?” he began, overcome.
Fabian licked his own lips, so red and bitten as they’d become thanks to Morris. Felt invigorating to him to see what he could do to Fabian, gave him an assortment of ideas. “I think we’re going to, but that’s just one man’s opinion,” Fabian said softly, coaxingly. “What are your findings, Professor?”
“Might need further study,” Morris mumbled. Fabian had gotten the angle of his wrist corrected and his fingers started to creep along the underside of his dick. Morris’ hands dropped to the seat; he felt so exposed and Fabian was looking at him with his eyes full-blown with want.
“I’d like to discuss some factors. A few independent variables, if you will. We’re in a jazz club, Fabian...anyone might see,” Morris informed him, panic and arousal shaped together as Fabian’s mouth leaned so close and Morris could hear his breath grow ever more ragged. He was ruined; he was absolutely going to let Fabian do this here; his protest was so hollow when he continued.
“The waitstaff...are also very attentive here.”
“Mm, but it’s mid-show,” Fabian said against the shell of his ear. Something about the energy of their arguing this out felt organic; felt like home. “They’ve already given me my drink; they’ll leave us alone. Your independent variables lean in our favour.”
Fabian continued to massage him to full hardness as he mouthed down his throat, humming soft words and pinning him back against the lounge seat. Morris gasped in heavy breathing waves as Fabian slid down his front, and dropped to his knees right on the carpet of the lounge, tucked between Morris’s legs.
“Relax” Fabian murmured at Morris in his lowest tone, silky black curls crowning the brown of his eyes. “Enjoy the show. Think of the jazz of this moment.”
Morris’s mouth went dry. A hand in his jeans was one thing, but Fabian making good on a holistic promise to get his mouth involved was… “Yes, yes, of course....oh dear,” He whined the words, hearing them crack and break in a way his voice hadn’t done in years.
One hand –God, it had to be on fire to be that warm- slid back into his underwear and Morris tried to arch off the back of the seat. Fabian grinned at him wicked sweet, gaze dropping a little slyly until he was peeking at Morris from under black eyelashes. He was so flushed like Morris’s dick in his hand was just as good as a hand on his own. Morris’ heart skipped and started over again on triple time- god he was going to have a heart attack right here and now if Fabian kept touching him and making faces like that.
Fabian peeled his underwear away, hooking the band under his fingers and pulled them down, keeping the material just enough out of the way until Morris was exposed to the air, his dick just bobbing right out of his jeans. Fabian gave it a pointedly decisive once-over from hilt to tip. “You expect me to get a look at this, and not put it in my mouth?”
“P-point taken.” Morris shifted to spread his legs a little wider, and bumped his knee hard into the tiny little table in front of them, almost tipping their belongings and–oh, found his glasses.
There must have been no blood left anywhere else in his body and even less to his wired brain because clearly, he wasn’t thinking straight if he was hoping the song they were playing on stage would go on the whole night because the thought of what Fabian was about to do and the idea of it ending felt like the end of the world.
He looked down at Fabian, dark-eyed, lit by the catalogue of shadows from the now blue light burning off the stage. The stage was peppered with only silhouette figures, hammering beautifully in rhythm with his heartbeat. He was one with the room.
Fabian’s hands gripped Morris’s knees, biceps flexing hard as his palms slid up Morris’ thighs. Fabian opened his mouth to take him, letting Morris dredge up along his tongue before his lips closed. Morris moaned and scrambled, practically kicking the table. He watched Fabian’s upper arms as his fingers kneaded at Morris’ hips then, digging blunt black fingernails in until Morris was rocking, hands braced behind him, his head thrown back against the seat. He was so. Close.
Fabian stopped. Halted the moment with a cruel sort of stillness and Morris grit his teeth, looked back down just in time to watch Fabian’s lips, raw and red and full around the head of his dick as it popped out, wet and gleaming. He had waited for Morris to look at him, hadn’t wanted him to look away. He squirmed when he felt the rough, hot pad of Fabian’s tongue flicking at him, tip curving on the slit like he was trying to coax the slowest, meanest orgasm out of him.
“Just like candy,” Fabian said breathlessly, Morris’ dick on his lip as he spoke. “All that sugar in your scotch is paying off, big boy.”
Fabian was teasing him but looking at him so fondly and it felt like Morris’ entire body spilled with a new kind of flush.
“Now, that’s just not scientifically feasible–” he thought he must have begun saying even though warmth shimmered around him when Fabian laughed at him in his throat, grabbing a shameless tight handful of the base of him before letting the head of Morris’s cock follow the middle of his tongue so Morris could see the rivulets of drool sliding down his shaft before he closed his lips again, slurping him in with a purposefully noisy swallow.
That was…
His hands got caught up in Fabian’s curls over and over so he slipped his fingers close to the root, tugged him there, marvelled at how it made Fabian gasp around his dick, thumbed the skin under his ears, cupping the curve of his skull and running his nails over the back of Fabian’s neck until he saw Fabian bring a hand down to the front of his own jeans, shifting the visible shape of his erection out of the discomfort.
He could see it in the moist spell of his eyelashes, Fabian looking up at him, beautiful in his own arousal. Sucking all the wishes out of Morris. And he was going to tell him every single one. Morris wanted Fabian on his back, wanted him to bite at the edges of him; oh, he’d ask him to bite and kiss until he forgot the sting of whatever he’d been so caught up in over earlier. He wanted to listen to Fabian play with that twisted mouth of his; wanted to dance drunk under portico lights with him. Wanted every single night Fabian had left on this earth.
He was making forever plans in the erotically chilled seconds of being soaked with Fabian’s mouth.
Morris’s knees shook as tried to brace his heels on the table legs, but it shifted when he leaned hard on the back of the lounge seat. His shoes kept slipping against the carpet when he tried to rock upward, balls tight and spine straight, tense. Fabian slid back with a slow, sweet drag of friction, and Morris groaned. That was it. The sound coming from him tangled with the tightness of his throat, and he came. It washed through him, tingling pleasure in waves coming in Fabian’s open mouth, barely registering how Fabian watched him, rapt; circling palms against his lower back through it. Morris didn’t look away from him, not once.
Every touch of Fabian’s skin was hot when he slinked up off his knees and crawled right into Morris’ lap, grinding sensitivity through his jeans into the give of Morris’ belly. Morris was wowed suddenly by how Fabian felt when he was holding all of him. Something about him otherwise seemed so immense, provoking. Frightening. Beautiful. He was the single note he played at the start of his jazz number.
Fabian’s lips were hot and his jaw had to be sore, but their kisses were so wet and deep. Morris was trying to lick into him, a little desperate and hungry for more. Fabian’s broad shoulders were sharp under Morris’ fingers, his palms eclipsing him.
He wanted to hold Fabian everywhere, sit him in the palm of his hand and secret him away. Mostly, he pictured Fabian spread on a silky bedspread, tickling the petals of a carnation up his gorgeous brown back.
“You know,” Morris said. The performance had long ended and the stage lights were burning bright beacons of red over the crowd below. It made Fabian’s gorgeous mouth on his look even redder. “I might have more of the kind of jazz you like at home?”
He felt Fabian’s laugh in his own throat.
A mere hour later, he was the one lying sweating and shaking on his silky bedspread. Fabian had such clever devices for the use of his mouth and tongue. Morris’ dress shirt was probably absolutely ruined by now because neither of them had managed to do much but divest Morris of his jeans before Fabian shed his vest and pushed his jeans just out of the way.
Fabian’s chin and throat were wet with his own saliva when he rolled a shaking Morris over on his back to look up at him. His brown skin was ruddy with a flush, spreading down across his chest; he looked such a vision.
“Your eyes,” Fabian said softly, delicately like they were new words crafted just for Morris. His voice was even lower, rumbling a bass in Morris’ chest. “They’re incredibly….brown, did you know?”
Morris couldn’t be expected to know anything in these moments, to be absolutely fair.
Seconds later, Fabian was sliding into him and he took every inch, arching his back and groaning like it was being ripped out of him.
It was morning before Morris could speak coherence between them. Fabian had turned him into a salty pretzel a few more times and the cold Hollywood sunshine was buttering the whole front room, blurring the pink edges of where Morris was feeling raw. Fabian’s arm was slung around him and he heard him stir. Morris shifted so that he was brushing his thumb over the wet shine of Fabian’s bottom lip.
Fabian’s austere stare was sleepy and satiated; his lashes fluttered as if he were swimming in and out, keeping Morris in his field of vision.
“You said you watched me for weeks pining for jazz I hadn’t heard yet. Did you mean to say the song you played last night was what I’ve been waiting to hear?”
“Maybe.” The word was pressed against the pad of his thumb, Fabian’s tongue touching it like a sly little kiss. “Maybe that jazz is something we’ve both been pining for.”
Morris Ashley stretched a little, delighting in the erotic quiver in his joints, remembering how good it felt when Fabian had pushed his limbs to twist in fantastic ways.
“Maybe we could create something together,” Fabian said.
Now, that was the ticket.