Warnings: None
Author Notes: Thanks to everyone at BrianandMichael for the inspiration and encouragement.
He’s still sitting on my bed tasting me on his lips, struggling to recover from the last few minutes. To come to terms with what happened and what didn’t. To hear what was said and what wasn’t. To think of what he should say and shouldn’t.
That’s what he’s trying to figure out now. Whether he should brazen it out, to pretend he wasn’t going to recklessly throw everything away or if should be honest and vulnerable.
Brian doesn’t do vulnerable. Not even with me. I have no illusions about where this angry moment will go. Nowhere.
As the moment stretches out I begin to wonder if there is another, third option I never thought of. No, I mentally shake my head, I can’t go there. Instead, I opt for the usual response. The expected brush off.
First, I make sure he knows my anger is gone, or at least suppressed. That’s easily done with a smile and ruffling of hair.
Next, I need to establish intimacy and at the same time give him privacy to recover. That’s accomplished by going round the other side of the bed proceeding to change my clothes. Intimate in the act, private in that my back is turned.
I’m surprised to realize a few minutes later as I tie the cords on my sweat pants that he still hasn’t spoken. Normally, he starts when my back is turned so I can’t read his eyes.
Finished, I turn to find him looking at me, his expression inscrutable, even to me. That lack of precedent again.
"It’s been one hell of a year," I say out loud, mainly for the sake of saying something.
At those words he looks away.
"Bri," I crawl over the bed and kneel behind him. Gently I run my hand over his head. I can practically feel his memories vibrating against his hand. Gus. Justin. David. My birthday. New York City. Portland. Prom. Blood. My store. Ben.
Things fate conspired to throw at us to force us to grow up. Or at least make a start, I chuckle to myself.
Ted is wrong. It wasn’t Brian keeping me fourteen years old it was both of us keeping us that way. We promised many years ago to protect the other’s back against all the outside forces that threatened to break us. It afforded us the right to continue habits and fears we developed back then. Except now, at thirty, I realize those forces are getting weaker and are of our own making. There really is, I realize suddenly, so much wrong with how we’ve been living for way too long.
It’s finally time to grow up.
This is what we’ve both been struggling against since the day Brian agreed to father Gus. This is about what we’ve both avoided with pretty good success over the years. This is about relationships. About the meshing of emotion and sex. About growing up and by necessity growing apart, or at least changing the dynamic of our dynamic duo.
I used to think that we both thought that one day it would just happen for us, far, far in the future. That Brian would realize what he was searching for was in me and we would just turn to each other in ways we never had before. That we would feel worthy of the other. That it would just happen without threat or intervention of others.
But what was once the distant future showed up on our doorstep. Thirty. And neither of us was ready. And those threats to tear us apart have appeared. I really thought I loved David, I cared for him deeply. Enough to move over two thousand miles away, away from Brian an the rest of my family. And Brian truly cares deeply about Justin, maybe loves him though he’s not ready to admit it to anyone including himself.
Now, there’s Ben. What he makes me feel is even more scary than the virus he carries like a time bomb in his body. If I can convince him to take me back, what I feel now is only the beginning, I will. Brian knows this.
He knows, as I do, that it may mean that Brian and I will never be. Or at least not until a distant future I cannot allow myself to even think.
"It wasn’t supposed to be like this," Brian says quietly.
The pain in his voice is both a balm to my agitation and a source of my own pain. I lean forward and put my arms around him.
"We based our ideas on comic books, even you," I chuckle into his honey-colored hair.
"How pathetic," Brian played along.
"At least there’s some fraction of gay semiotics in our stupidity," I said.
I felt Brian stiffen in my embrace. Shit, I hadn’t meant to bring Ben so obviously into this discussion.
"Brian, you know I love you. You’re my best friend. No one can change that," I said.
Brian turned around in my embrace and looked me in the face. Doubt and hope struggled there.
"Sometimes it feels as if we’ve drifted so far away from each other," I voiced what he felt. In reaction he pressed his forehead against mine.
"Do you doubt that I’ll be there for you whenever you need me? Or that you’ll be there for me? Like Captain Astro and Galaxy Lad?" I asked.
"No," Brian shook his head, warming our skin with the friction.
"We can still have that even though we don’t tell each other everything, we don’t spend every minute together," I said.
"Sometimes it feels like there are walls between us," he bit his lip. Vulnerable Brian has made an appearance, I’m almost shocked to silence.
"They’re not walls, they’re ramparts. They’re going to make our friendship stronger," I press my lips lightly against his.
"You’re so fucking poetic, Mikey. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking," he sighed, his breath teasing my lips.
"You were thinking if you were going to lose sight of me behind a wall, you’d best get me while I’m still hot," I teased, willing us both to back off from this too intimate discussion. Brian and I didn’t do this, we just were. This was enough.
"You’ll always be hot. You’re Michael Novotny for fuck’s sake," he pressed his lips against mine.
Ever so gently our bodies moved closer together.
THE END