Sex. Sean doesn’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean. Plus he despises himself for wondering.
It’s like being half of a crazed wild animal, this licking and sucking and fucking. He ends up flattened at the end of it, sticky and anxious and far too awake. This morning it’s enough to get him out of his warm, inhabited bed with its thick low-tide protein smell, and make him lug his hangover downstairs to the wrecked kitchen.
Day blooms around the house in unhealthy colours. Last night’s cigarette smoke is dispersing in the leaked light from the fridge door, which is hanging open. There’s a smell of burn.
‘Fuck.’ Sean’s bare feet are sticking to the lino.
About 3 am the hobbits hit on the idea of making some concoction called Blue Blazers, which involved pouring arcs of ignited Curacao back and forth between two mugs with the lights off. It hadn’t seemed such a bright idea at the time and now -
- ‘Jesus fuck.’ The soles of his feet, as well as sticky, are electric blue. He legs it onto the rug, wipes them on the anonymous flowers.
He’d had at least three sets of second thoughts about leaving them to it, because they were so drunk they seemed like they were set to commit some fairly serious arson. Probably sit arseholed and giggling like maniacs on the patio chairs, toasting the inferno.
‘They won’t set themselves on fire.’ Even in the dark, Sean had been able to tell Viggo was smiling. He knows Vig’s voice, its rich amusement and thinned-out aversions, because he is so often looking at something else when Vig talks.
Then there was a minor explosion and four sets of blue lips saying ‘shit’ simultaneously.
‘Probably they won’t set themselves on fire,’ Viggo amended. He upturned his beer and drank it to the bottom. The muscles in his jaws tensed when he swallowed.
He was so close in the bluish dark that his hair brushed against Sean’s face when he turned to put down the can. He smelled of sweat and beer and charcoal pencils.
When Viggo kissed him, Sean kissed him back without thinking about it particularly,. A little bit of him put his glass down and switched off the other little bits of him that were trying to catch his attention.
After a while they went upstairs in the dark.
There aren’t any dead hobbit bodies in the kitchen this morning though, which is definitely good.
Sean pulls up the blind. He runs the tap and fills the kettle while the sun rises grudgingly over the suburb and thinks about the careless, environmentally-unfriendly way he does this every morning. Often he boils it three or four times, standing around in a trance with a teabag, just flicking the button again.
But this morning isn’t like other mornings.
For one thing, he is having serious thoughts about electricity and teabags at 6 am. He wonders if there are other men leaning on the edge of their sinks in ratty bathrobes and listening to their plumbing. For all he knows there’s support groups for this kind of thing.
Just as the final gurgle of the toilet dies away, footsteps cross the landing from the bedroom to the bathroom.
He lines up two cleanish mugs side by side on the drainer. Whichever way he arranges them, the distance between them looks wrong.
One of the mugs is covered in pictures of cartoon rabbits having sex with each other in about fifty different positions. Like the hobbit collective. Planet Hobbit. Hobbit Mothership.
‘So long, thanks for the shag,’ they carol, ungluing themselves from each other as they emerge from bedrooms, toilets, cupboards under the stairs. Dom and Billy, Astin and Lijah most often, though the combinations vary like a maths problem. Then four separate sets of giggles. Four pairs of shoes lined up in a row along the rail of the balcony, like the tough hombres in westerns, only wagging along to the hi-fi, and barely visible through the permanent fug of cigarette smoke.
It’s like the idea of personal space hasn’t been invented. They pick dandruff out of each other’s hair, stick their tongues in each other’s ears. They massacre any stray lyrics that come their way.
‘ALL YA NEED IS DRUGS
DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH’
Or
‘SOMETIMES ITS HARD TO BE A HOBBIT
GIVIN’ ALL YER LUUUVE TO SARUMAN’
The footsteps recross the hall overhead.
Sean flips the radio on. A chirpy woman’s voice sings a jingle about low-fat yoghurt, backed by a chorus of mooing cows. He switches stations.
The footsteps descend the stairs.
The thing is, the hobbits all have dangerous inner toddlers. Their emotions come crashing out in a way that is definitely dangerous. The slightest thing will do it. A snowfall, a pillow fight, a couple of beers too many, and the emotion-toddlers come out to play, all messy and chocolate-faced, colliding frantically with each other and the furniture and anyone who gets in their way. Maybe more like wriggling kittens than toddlers. Or more like terrorists than either.
Sean is not like that. Like bank safes and weed-killer bottles, Sean is designed to be self-locking.
The footsteps are in the room.
‘Christ.’ Viggo skids on a patch of Blue Blazer. His voice is raspy with sleep and he is more visible than anyone has a right to be.
‘Careful.’ Sean’s hand visibly changes its mind in mid-air about grabbing Vig’s wrist.
When he comes out of the skid, Viggo collapses onto a chair and puts his long bare feet up on the rung, like he does this every morning. He rummages in the fruit bowl.
‘Get a load of this guy.’ He’s holding an apple. He looks rough, squinting in the daylight.
‘Jesus.’ The apple is deformed, with something like testicles. Viggo has a soft spot for food that is too organic for even the health food crowd.
Sean puts tea by Viggo’s elbow.
‘Fuck.’ Sean scalds his mouth on his own mug and sets it down on the table. ’I feel like a pig shat in my head,’ he offers.
‘Teach you to drink hobbit-brew in future,’ Viggo says.
Sean lets the corners of his mouth lift. There’s an established joke that the hobbits couldn’t tell a bottle of Chateau Sacré Bleu 1902 from Heineken in a boot.
Viggo seems to be concentrating hard on some taste at the back of his mouth. Or a secret sound, a tuning fork struck inside his head. Hardly the radio station, which has a play-list that must be in cold storage since 1980.
Sean says belatedly, ‘Anyway, I treat my body like a shrine.’
Viggo lets out a breath of amusement. He is turned around on his chair checking the fridge door for milk. ‘More like a science project.’
He waggles the carton. The fluorescent light outlines the angles and planes of his face, the scruffy skim of stubble overlying them. ‘Is New Zealand milk supposed to have chunks in it?’
‘I thought Americans regard dairy as Satan’s work.’ Escaped tealeaves float on top of Sean’s tea in flotillas.
Viggo deadpans. ‘Oh yeah. It’s in the constitution, alongside the right to bear arms.’
The strength of the black tea is making Sean’s mouth go dry. His stomach is turning itself gradually inside out the way you would a sock from the wash.
If you were to take a photo of Viggo now, sitting at the kitchen table, this is what it would show:
(a)a section of magnolia doorframe
(b)the corner of a fridge with photographs of the hobbits bungee jumping held on by a magnet
(c)a tall man coiled onto a chair, shuddering his messy Aragorn bed-hair off his neck. He’s wearing a cheap white t-shirt inside out, with the tag sticking up at the nape. There is a small raw mark in the angle of jaw under his right ear.
You wouldn’t see anything of Sean, except for maybe a twirl of steam off his tea in the foreground, which is fine by him.
Sean’s teeth and tongue made the mark on Viggo’s neck, though. This is a fact. Facts are usually good, Sean is comfortable with them. You know where you are with a fact.
But this morning there is a whole new category of tricky facts that Sean knows. A quick inventory might go something like this:
(a) The invisible slogan on Viggo’s inside-out t-shirt says I WAS DEEP-DISHED AT LEONARDO’S. It is also the one he was wearing yesterday, right side out, and Viggo is still wearing it because he didn’t go home last night.
(b) The length of grubby string around his neck leads down to a small bone pendant that hangs on Viggo’s breastbone exactly level with his nipples. It gets warm and salty and slippery when he sweats. It bumped lightly, like an extra pulse, on Sean’s spine the night before, when he was face down on the bed while Viggo collected what he liked from him.
(c) Viggo’s angular jaw pulls back into softened folds of chin when he takes Sean in his mouth and sucks him, with the same look of devout concentration he gets when he’s drawing.
Sean knows all this stuff a camera wouldn’t tell you, and he hasn’t a clue what to do with this information. He doesn’t understand things sometimes; quite easily, he can get confused by a word or a look or a tiny event.
Viggo is saying something. ‘Well, better show up anyway.’ His eyes are water-pale and elongated in the light from the window.
‘Huh?’
‘On set. That place we go every day?’ His vowels are careful, like they won’t fully commit to an American accent. ‘Even if you feel like shit. Being handsome will only carry you so far in life.’
Sean rolls his eyes and drinks cooling tea. ‘Yeah, thanks, so I’m told.’
Viggo starts to say something else in his level newsreader’s voice and then his eyes flick too quickly away from somewhere below Sean’s face.
Sean has a fresh bruise blooming just above collar level. Makeup will love it; he’ll spend the next week getting lobbed on the jaw with Max Factor.
Viggo pushes up from the table. ‘I’ve got to take a piss.’ The backside of his jeans is so faded it is nearly white.
Tiredness hits Sean like a sack of cement.
The chaos in the kitchen has its own kind of permanence by now. He knows the patch of runner by the back door well enough to pass an exam on it; the surface is so worn that white threads stick out like bare ribs. On the ground near the cabinet, the shards of a glass plate have been lying where they fell for so long they’re practically part of the décor.
He tips his tea down the sink, and wonders whether his head will stand stooping to pick things up.
Bonnie Tyler is leaking from the radio. Someone should slap a preservation order on this station as a site of special historical interest.
Sean puts a bunch of blue-stained mugs in the sink, but can’t face actually washing them. The colour makes his stomach perform slow contortions. His teeth are probably still blue.
Both of them are acting like some demented stranger broke in last night and did these things to them, which has more than a slight ring of truth about it. If Sean was feeling less like a lump of bones and gristle and sticky bad blood, he might have had a couple of interesting thoughts about how pretending to be someone else for a living makes you good at this kind of thing, but he can’t muster the energy.
Eventually, he picks up a beercan, puts the can on the floor, crushes it flat with his heel and chucks it into the small almost full rubbish sack hanging by the sink. This is better.
When Viggo comes back in, he’s on his tenth can.
Sean puts on the kettle again for something to do when he runs out of beercans.
Viggo stoops and picks up one of the crushed cans, composed as a geisha, as if he is thinking of drawing it. Concentration is something he does the way other people do breathing.
Then Viggo does something surprising. He sets himself precisely on the patch of malnourished rug between Sean and the rubbish sack.
‘Move, mate.’ Sean’s hands, one can in each, are sticky and slippery with spilt beer.
‘Uh, no.’ Viggo’s expression is fully cocked and loaded. ‘Make me.’
If anything, he moves closer. Their faces are exactly level.
Sean makes to sidestep him but there is suddenly no room. Shoving against the dense immovable obstacle that is Viggo is as bad as going along with things and he’s not going to do that.
‘Fuck sake, what are you at, Vig?’ His voice comes out with a strange Doppler effect.
Viggo scratches a spot above his eye and says nothing, doesn’t even look much. Sean lets him take the cans. They hit the drainer with a double flat clang.
Then his arm grazes Sean’s side. Whether this might be accidental becomes irrelevant as his elbow raises and nudges Sean slowly in the ribs. It nudges again and again and again. The shoulder follows, leaning, until the whole solid shape of his arm, his side, is against Sean.
The radio is slipping off the station into static. Beside it, the kettle’s tone deepens and widens as the water heats.
Viggo angles a denim thigh along Sean’s. His breath pushes not quite evenly against Sean’s neck where Sean is turning his head
away.
Sean’s cock tenses and lifts. The familiar process is kicking in. He doesn’t want to be subject to this process.
He is going to say something like this when Viggo kisses him. His lips are rough and warm, slightly chapped, and his tongue, when it persists in not taking no for an answer, tastes bitter, of strong tea and salt. His mouth still has faint ridges on the inside of the cheeks from where he sucked Sean off last night.
For a while they both pretend Viggo’s thigh is not insinuating itself between Sean’s. The radio makes tinny demented noises.
Sean is glad of the static. It covers up the odd little whimper that escapes him when Viggo slides a hand down to the small of his back and presses hard, and there’s the shiver of muscles pulling in tight, and pure concentration.
Then Sean says, ‘Uh, sorry, I can’t do this.’
Viggo’s voice is as flat as a pool table. ‘I only want to fuck you. I don’t mean it metaphysically.’
Shivers start in on Sean. A familiar lack comes itching up his arms. The blood is ticking in his skull and jaw.
‘Bad idea,’ he manages. His system is protesting, every damper and safeguard off. He’s avid, his skin is crawling with curiosity.
‘Well, yeah.’ Viggo moves his arm around till his thumb is touching the back of Sean’s neck, and Sean lets him slip in and down between his robe and the little knuckle vertebrae and the slick private temperature of his back.
Then Sean leans into Viggo and bends his head down to the pulse in his neck and licks it. Viggo’s pulse jumps under his tongue.
The jugular. Sean is going for Viggo’s jugular. Nobody move, nobody get hurt, is what he is thinking. The bad guy or sometimes the good guy says it. He’s said it himself probably.
The kettle will boil soon. It’s moving toward the quiet low roar of boiling point.
***
Much later, when Sean and Viggo are downstairs and more or less dressed again, there are blurry noises from the living room.
OH WHAT A FUCK OF A MORNING
OH WHAT A FUCK OF A DAY
The Hobbit Philharmonic Chorus sounds severely underpowered. The Oklahoma tribute is punctuated by someone being sick in a half-hearted kind of way.
Dom comes out of the living room in tartan boxers, talc-pale, and warily carrying a waste paper bin half full of what looks like acid blue sick.
‘Billy, the fuckwit,’ he says, stumping past, mouth-breathing, head averted from the bin.
The tone doesn’t fool anyone. Sean and Viggo note the carefully offhand way in which the hobbit collective looks after its members.
They hear the downstairs toilet flush.
‘How do people ever stay together?’ Sean gets busy trying to find his car keys among the bottles on the hall table.
Viggo’s head emerges from the crumpled pizza shack t-shirt, which now has a small tear by the neckhole. His eyes are unreadable. ‘Well, they hardly ever do.’
‘Uh huh’, Sean says. He picks the keys out of a pool of beer and wipes them on his jeans.
Lijah and Astin emerge half-dressed, draped over each other, slit-eyed in the light and with matching blue lips. Lijah’s clash slightly with his sapphire eyes.
‘Ah, the lineaments of gratified desire,’ Viggo says, treading into his shoes.
Dom comes back with the washed bin and a face like a slapped arse. The rucked-up leg of his boxers shows a tender pink slice of testicle. ‘Vig,’ he says, ‘just for interest’s sake, why are you always such a headfuck?’
Summary: In which Sean and Viggo face the perils of the morning after.
Rated: NC-17
Categories: Actor RPS Pairing: Sean/Viggo
Warnings: NoneChallenges:
Series: NoneChapters: 1 Completed: Yes
Word count: 2965 Read: 929
Published: 31 Jul 2009 Updated: 31 Jul 2009