Work Text:
“We demand that sex speak the truth, and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves …” Sebastian’s fingers brush the quote. He knows this quote; he knows this text.
He wishes he knew his own truth. More accurately, he wishes the bookshop owner knew his truth. The bookshop owner with tattoos and muscles and startlingly soft eyes like rolling oceans, steady, tidal, kissed by sun.
The bookshop owner who has paused behind the counter to glance at Sebastian Stan, who almost certainly ought to stop fondling the volume of Foucault’s writings in a public place. The history of sexuality. The uses and lineage of pleasure. The texture of neat binding and crisp pages and the scents of paper and new ink.
He would like to discover the texture of those muscles. Possibly while bent over the counter. On his back. Pinned against a wall. Wherever the bookshop owner would like him.
The man’s continued eyeing him. Sebastian blushes. Hastily ducks around a corner. Science-fiction paperbacks gaze at him with otherworldly sympathy.
“…that truth which we think we possess,” he finishes under his breath, half paraphrasing and half quoting now, “in our immediate consciousness.” He’s talking to a book. But it doesn’t disapprove.
Beyond wide windows a leathery grey sky roils and rumbles, restless. No rain yet. On the way. Sebastian, sheltering in this bookshop, employs his consciousness to peek around shelves. The owner’s ringing up another customer, this one burly and motorcycle-leather clad, buying as far as he can tell six Regency romance novels.
The owner’s name is Chris. Sebastian knows this because, in the three months he’s been failing to have any kind of conversation with those oceanic eyes, he’s overheard cheerful hurricanes of friends and a little brother and two sisters dropping by. Chris Evans, of Dodger’s Books, cheers for the Patriots and spills over with Boston loyalty when he gets excited; Chris Evans lives with a dog named Dodger—hence the name of the shop—and will sing Disney musical tunes when he thinks he’s alone and is tidying up. Chris Evans has big gentle hands and helps little girls find books about outer space.
Sebastian Stan, halfway through a creative writing masters degree and capable of tripping over his own too-long legs, has currently tamed his improbable hair by jamming a baseball cap on it, and only that morning spilled a full cup of coffee on his previous copy of this volume of Michel Foucault’s discourses on pleasure and power. Hence the new one.
He sighs. The bookshelf permits him to lean against it, stalwart support.
He’d be in here anyway, even if he’d not needed the Foucault. He likes bookstores. He likes big plush chairs and cozy nooks and warmth. He likes the atmosphere, the quiet anticipatory promises of pages and ideas, the way each breath’s lined with knowledge and stories just waiting to be discovered. He likes that books treat him as an equal: they don’t care that he’s bashful and clumsy and not quite good at coming out of his shell around strangers.
He’s not shy exactly, or he doesn’t think so. He has friends. He teases Mackie about envying his thighs, and he made Thanksgiving dinner for Charles and Will last year when all their flights home suffered the wrath of winter weather gods, and he speaks up in class.
Friends are different. He’s known them for years. Class is different. Everyone’s there for a purpose and he knows what he’s doing and he’s even maybe kind of good at it, or his professors think so, judging from comments on his half-done space-opera genderfluid rewriting of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
He does not know how to talk to Chris Evans. He’s not good at random conversations. Out of the blue. Conjuring words. In his third language. Cheeks hot. Worrying about not being good enough, not being interesting enough, not saying the right thing in the right way. Or saying the exact wrong thing about pleasure and desire and truth and Chris’s hands.
He’s talked to Chris exactly once to date. He’d been picking up some academic histories of Shakespeare’s life and world—research—and Chris had been restocking and had come around a corner and nearly walked right over him. Sebastian’d made a mouse-sized squeaking sound and dropped Deborah Willis’s Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England directly on his own foot.
Chris had bent to pick it up. Had asked whether he was okay, and had apologized for startling him in a way that suggested Chris now thinks he should be wearing a sign: fragile, please handle with care.
Sebastian hadn’t managed to get words out before someone’d needed assistance at the register. His mouth might’ve squeaked again. He really isn’t sure. Memory strangled by mortified panic.
And treacherous desire. Can’t forget that, nudges his brain; and kicks him into another peek around shelves at generous gorgeousness.
Chris Evans does not currently have a girlfriend or a boyfriend—this fascinating tidbit had been gathered via shameless eavesdropping on a younger brother’s affectionate mockery; Sebastian’s not above listening in, in a hopeless wistful way—but that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in someone. Or pining. Romantically. Heart given away. Sebastian’s writer’s soul constructs a whole narrative out of bad soap-opera plots and the tattoo-ink visible at Chris’s collarbone. Longing and passion. Those large caring hands. Chris would be powerful but tender in bed, claiming a lover inexorably but with kindness, taking them, taking their breath away, until all they knew was him, surrounding them…
He sighs again. The book under his arm has a section on BDSM and the creation of pleasure through new narratives of erotic possibility. This doesn’t help the daydream in the slightest. Especially not the part in which Chris holds his wrists in place behind his back and chastises him with loving dominance for deliberately leaving some Asimov on the wrong shelf.
Chris won’t want him. Chris deserves someone who can make actual audible syllables upon being asked a question. Entire words, even. Sentences.
He ought to go home, he concedes, before the rain descends. Two more pages to write. A new recipe for coconut chicken curry to test.
He inches out from behind the science fiction—a book in hand, because it’d smiled at him and he couldn’t resist—and toward the register. Chris smiles at him as well, encouragingly, but of course Chris encourages every customer and already believes Sebastian requires kid gloves and slow unthreatening motions.
He might like Chris handling him with gloves. Black leather. Meeting his skin.
He can feel his cheeks going red. His ears join in, under the hat and escaping hair. His legs decide to walk a step too far and collide with the counter, and then he doesn’t know what to do or say. He avoids Chris’s eyes. They’ll be compassionate, he knows. Maybe even pitying. But in a nice way, because Chris is nice.
When Chris takes his book to ring it up their fingers brush. Warm. Hot. Electric. Distracting.
That’s probably only him. He swallows hard and tries not to let any thoughts about erotic desire and those fingers turn up on his face. He hopes Chris Evans can’t read minds.
Chris Evans needs to learn how to read minds. Since he has failed in every other attempt to prove he’s not a big, bumbling, hopeless potential serial killer, mystical intervention is his only available avenue. Most of the time he doesn’t care what people think of him but this is true love.
Or pining. Awed infatuation. A concerted effort not to be that bookshop guy who leers and stares and generally makes an ass out of himself in front of his customers.
Having thought that he has loved in every conceivable way over the years, Chris thinks he’s entitled to face this new, butterfly-inducing, palm sweating, foot-in-mouth creating chaos with the panic and desperation it deserves.
He thinks the object of his affections is called Sebastian. He thinks this because sometimes Sebastian comes into the store with a battered leather bag slung over his shoulder, and sometimes there is a maroon colored folder inside and the name Sebastian Stan is written in neatly looping letters in the top corner.
There’s no way of testing this knowledge without coming across as infuriatingly nosy at best, or a stalker at worst. And since he has already accosted the man once, Chris is making a concerted effort to be neither of those things.
It would be a lot easier if Sebastian—if that is his name, and at this point Chris thinks he will be disappointed if it isn’t—was just a lovely face. Chris knows his fair share of attractive people: he knows he can content himself with admiring from afar if that’s all Sebastian is. But he’s not. Sebastian enjoys books of poetry and short stories; he likes thick, heavy volumes of political observations and historical biographies; books on feminism, books on travel, books on language and literature; a Dostoyevsky in the original Russian; a selection of essays by Cărtărescu that Chris doesn’t even remember ordering, and a book entitled Fucking Commas that startled the most adorable laugh out of him. And those are just the books that makes Chris’s upstairs brain happy. There’s nothing like harboring a crush on someone who is smart, gorgeous and who likes to read books about pleasure. Chris isn’t sure if he wants to sit Sebastian down and talk Foucault with him, or if he wants to bend Sebastian over the counter and test out a few of his ideas. Perhaps both. Together. Questions asked and answered and Sebastian beneath him, awash with pleasure and pain and trust.
Today it is sci-fi, an old print run of collected short stories with a color faded cover to match. Chris is almost embarrassingly grateful and certain that he can at least ring Sebastian’s order up without his mind running down forbidden paths. Either he fails, or his clumsy oafishness has upset Sebastian even more than he realized. The only explanation really, when Sebastian is so nervous around him that he walks hip first into the counter. Chris winces in sympathy, considers asking if he’s okay…considers again that he’s not even half as good at talking to people as he’d like to be and will likely make things even worse.
He takes the book from Sebastian with a smile instead of a comment and tries not to gasp like a swooning Disney princess when their fingers brush.
The touch is enough to startle Sebastian into meeting his gaze. It’s enough to break Chris’s resolve to keep his mouth shut.
“You like space,” he says. He’s a fucking idiot. Sebastian stares at him, lips parted, expression somewhere between bewildered and curious. “I do too,” Chris says. “Like space, I mean. Sci-fi.”
Please, God, kill him now.
“Oh,” Sebastian says, which is a lot politer than just about every other response Chris can imagine him giving. “Space is cool.”
“Very cool!” Chris agrees eagerly. “Very big. And, um…stars are pretty.”
You’re also pretty. Does he say that part out loud?
Oh Christ, he does.
It’s going to be a competition between them as to who has turned the brightest color. Chris’s face has to be on fire with the heat it is radiating, and Sebastian is pink all the way down to the thin neck of his t shirt. It’s not a warm day, not a warm piece of clothing either. Chris can’t help but think of the fire that crackles and burns beneath a stone mantel. There are two plush velvet couches set close by and Sebastian favors those spots more than any other.
Chris wants to offer more of that fireplace warmth. He wants to offer hot cocoa and blankets. He could. He should.
But Sebastian carefully slips his new purchase into that aged leather bag, thanks Chris quietly, his eyes downcast once more.
He practically runs out of the shop, and he doesn’t come back for three days.
Pretty. Chris called him pretty. Chris Evans called him pretty.
Sebastian’s been turning this statement over and around and every which way in his head for three days. He should know what this means. He’s a writer. He’s a semester and a half away from his MFA in creative writing. He’s writing a play.
He stares at his coffee-cup in despair. It shrugs raspberry mocha helplessness at him. It knows nothing about English nuances. Overhead, unhelpful as well, the sky lurks around and shuffles iron-cloud feet in a lazily menacing way. It’s been heavy and poised all day, satiny and swollen, full with rain.
Pretty? Like—like tulips and rainbows and brightly colored birds and innocence? Like stars in space, big and bright and gleaming, enticing as distant tales of adventure? Like artwork, a piece to hang on a wall and admire but not touch? Does Chris not want to touch him?
Chris Evans thinks outer space is pretty. And cool, which is happily enough a thing Sebastian himself also thinks. And…big.
Sebastian’s brain presents him with more thoughts. About things being big. About Chris wondering about things being big. Inside Sebastian’s jeans. Inside Chris’s jeans. Oh yes. Please.
He considers his Foucault text again. The ways in which pleasure and power seek out, overlap, and reinforce each other. Joined by complex devices involving excitation and inducement to more.
Excitation, indeed. He commits to a few more steps down the street. His feet are going to Dodger’s Books, because his feet want to see Chris Evans, and Sebastian’s only made a halfhearted effort at overruling them. The rest of him wants to see Chris too.
Chris probably thinks Sebastian doesn’t want to see him. It’d make sense; and he winces into his mocha. He’d practically fled the bookshop. Hadn’t known what to say in any language. And then he’d had homework, pages of his own work to submit, and a book review to write, and he’d been feeling a little under the weather—not even a proper winter cold, or not really, but the muttered curse of one, just enough to leave him listless and unfocused and without appetite, huddled under blankets in his grad-student apartment—and he hadn’t felt up to facing problematic potential compliments from the object of his silent longing. He’s unsure whether the three days’ll have made this more or less awkward.
Pretty, Chris had called him.
Pretty: and Sebastian’s brain had on the spot utterly imploded with visions of other moments, other positions, in which Chris Evans might say that to him. Himself on his knees. Himself over Chris’s knees. Cheeks pink; ass pink; flushed and begging, squirming, being good. Pleasure and power. Yes. He could beg very prettily if asked by Chris.
He’d been terrified that his ocean-eyed bookshop owner could read those thoughts on his face, could soak them up through a brush of gentle hands; in the next icy breath he’d known that of course Chris couldn’t’ve meant it that way, just a kind compliment, given to soothe. Offered as one would to a skittish kitten: such a pretty little guy you are, it’s okay, come be petted. Far too nice for any of Sebastian’s kinky philosophy-of-sexuality-inspired daydreams. He’d not been able to look at Chris, leaving.
He absolutely ought to stop thinking about being petted by Chris. He’s in public.
The light changes and he crosses the street to a rumble of thunder. There’d been drops that morning; he’d meant to bring his umbrella to Starbucks and had completely forgotten to grab it on his way out the door. He’d been hoping to get someplace dry before the storm let loose.
The storm has other plans. Sky-rattling, world-drowning, lightning-flashing plans.
Torrents open up and land on his head. Deluges. Apocalyptic proportions. Sebastian yelps in protest, drops his mostly-gone coffee and clutches his bookbag—fortunately no laptop today, he’d left it at home charging—and runs. Water bounces up from city pavement just to join in the splashing fun.
He slips and slides and flails. He regains balance just in time to stay on his feet, drenched and dripping, at the front window of the bookshop.
Inside the fire’s glowing welcome at him from that old-fashioned back-room reading-space nook, and shelves of new and old paperbacks tilt covers outward in concern; the shop’s practically empty, not many people out in this weather, and Chris Evans is on the phone in an aisle checking to confirm that yes they’ve got a copy of what looks like a Bill Nye science book in stock, embodying big-hearted safe harbor in plaid flannel and dark jeans, comfortable muscles and rolled-up sleeves—
Sebastian wants. Sebastian wants so badly that he forgets to move, standing under rain, looking in. Icy drops slide down the back of his neck.
The thunder at this point gets impatient with him and booms some more. Loud. Pointed. Over his head.
Chris glances toward the window automatically. And then those lovely eyes go wide and his lips part in shock, and he says something Sebastian can’t hear, being on the other side of the window; Chris dives for the door and yanks it open, hands reaching for him. “Come in—oh my God—oh God you’re so fucking cold, you feel—I thought I’d, you’d, you wouldn’t ever come back to—come in, please—”
Chris’s hands on him. Touching. Guiding. Warm. Chris’s voice: worried, wrapping around him, providing the support of almost certainly unconscious commands—come in, come here, let me—and equally warm.
Sebastian can’t find words for oh so many different reasons, but he can’t say no, and he is shivering, and he wants to have this, to have this much, this single small moment of daydream-made-flesh, if he can; so he willingly comes.
Sebastian stumbles inelegantly across the threshold of the shop, awkwardly clutching both his bag and Chris’s arm as he tries to regain his footing. Chris, caught somewhere between elation and panic, wraps both of his arms around trembling shoulders and tries to will the heat of fireplace warmed wool into the frigid chill of Sebastian’s body.
“You’re dripping!” he exclaims in dismay, resisting the urge to tuck Sebastian in his arms, carry him over to the fire and half smother him in home-knitted blankets only by reminding himself of how very close he has been to pining at Sebastian’s absence these last few days. The last thing he wants to do is scare him off. Again.
Oh, but Sebastian is so cold. His hair, usually so soft and fluffy, clings wetly to his forehead, dark against stark paleness and only drawing more attention to the sodden, almost sickly look of him. Chris wonders if he is imagining the more pronounced sharpness of his cheekbones. Maybe. Possibly. But he doubts it.
His attention drawn to the rapidly expanding puddle beneath his feet, Sebastian makes a small sound of distress. “Sorry, I’m so sorry. I can clean that up if you have a mop or something, or—”
“Stop,” Chris says sternly. Sebastian obeys without hesitation, color rising to previously bloodless cheeks, and okay, that’s not the reaction he’s expected, not at all, and they should talk about it, but first: “I don’t care about the floor. You’re wet, and you’re freezing and neither of these things is good, so please. Just let me?” Let him what, that’s the question. Look after him? Hold him? Peel him out of all those sodden clothes? He settles instead for asking, “What were you doing out there in weather like this?” before he considers the thinness of Sebastian’s clothes, the thinness of Sebastian, and worries that maybe there’s less of a choice at play here and more of a desperation. If Sebastian hasn’t come back to see him, but because he has no place else to go.
“I wanted to see you,” Sebastian blurts, allaying one fear and almost immediately raising another.
“You did?” Chris tries not to sound as pathetically hopeful as he thinks he probably ends up doing.
“Yes, I…I didn’t mean to run away, the other day.” There’s something utterly spellbinding about the weight of Sebastian’s gaze. It’s earnest and honest and there’s a depth to it that Chris wants to drown in. “When you said that I was pretty.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Chris says, trying to make things better and instantly regretting opening his mouth.
Sebastian, in spite of previous shyness, looks almost amused. “You didn’t?”
“I…” Chris opens his mouth. Shuts it quickly. Then stomps down on the giddiness growing inside his heart. “We can talk about that later. When you’re not about to catch hypothermia in the doorway of my shop.” He nudges the door closed with his heel and encourages Sebastian further inside with a firm grip on the wet sleeves of his woefully inadequate jacket. “Sit,” he says, plopping Sebastian down into the arms of expectant leather and velvet. The couch almost swallows him whole and Chris thinks again about all the ways he might have scared Sebastian away from a much needed place of refuge.
Another log gets thrown on the fire as Chris busies himself in all the practical ways he can make amends. Extra warmth and the soothing crackle of burning wood. Comforting things. Like blankets and plans for cocoa. Like the subtle way Sebastian leans against him when Chris encourages him out of that flimsy jacket.
“Good,” Chris praises, draping sodden fabric over the back of a wooden chair to dry out. He thinks he might have an old coat or two in the closet upstairs and he wonders if he can convince Sebastian to take it. And maybe a couple of sweaters. “That’s good. You feeling warmer?”
“Yes,” Sebastian says, hands untucking from his chest to warm by the fire. He has long fingers, slender and slightly ink smudged. Chris wants to take them in his own hands. Wants to rub warmth back into pale skin. Wants to take them in his mouth and see if he can taste that ink. “Thank you. You really don’t have to go to all this trouble.”
Because offering shelter is trouble.
Chris squares his shoulders. Prepares himself for the worst. Asks, “Do you have somewhere you can go?” then panics when Sebastian starts to rise from the couch.
“Of course, I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
Chris puts his hands on Sebastian’s shoulders and pushes him back down on the couch. Not rough. Not hard. But firm. He keeps them in place.
“I wasn’t asking you to leave. I was asking if you…” There’s no delicate way to ask, so he just comes out with it: “…if you have a home, or a place to stay, or—”
Sebastian’s dark eyebrows pull together in confusion. “Of course I do. Why would you think otherwise?”
Relief makes it hard to feel any embarrassment at misjudging the situation. “You’re soaked. And you’re freezing. And you spend a lot of time here. I wasn’t sure if that’s because you want to, or because you need to.”
“I like books,” Sebastian says, “and I forgot my umbrella. It wasn’t raining when I left.” He sounds a little indignant, but it doesn’t escape either of them that he’s made no move to extract himself from beneath Chris’s hands until that moment. Then, with a cry of alarm, he wriggles free and dives for his bag. Opening the weathered leather, he removes a book that has clearly been well loved, and sighs miserably at the wet, clumping pages. Chris recognizes the cover.
“Do you like that one, Sebastian?” Chris asks, a confidence found in his relief, and in the downturned edges of Sebastian’s mouth.
“How’d you—” Sebastian starts to ask.
Chris points at the now visible cover of his folder. “Is Sebastian your name?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Chris—”
“Evans,” Sebastian finishes. “I might have heard your brother talking to you the other day. And when you were on the phone to your supplier. I do spend quite a lot of time here.” There’s a bashfulness to his expression that fits with the previous quiet skittishness Chris has observed, but beneath that there is something gently teasing and almost playful. Sebastian might be shy around strangers, but Chris is starting to sense that he’s no wilting wallflower once that initial hesitation has been overcome.
“Back on the couch,” Chris instructs, reassuring with his smile when Sebastian does as he is told. “Stay under the blanket a few more minutes. I think I have a copy in stock. You can have it. Don’t get that many readers of Foucault in here.”
“I can pay you for it,” Sebastian protests. He’s wrapped himself up in the blanket again, his gaze never leaving Chris as the ruined book is passed over. Chris turns it from cover to cover, contemplating.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he says. “Do you like it?”
Sebastian starts to answer, pauses, takes a breath. He can feel himself blushing, but also wanting, sharp and clear and bright as the fire washing over icy skin. Chris knows which volume this is, and Sebastian knows he knows, and the knowledge hangs in the fireglow between them—and he finds a sudden hopeful courage in that understanding.
He says, “Questions?” and then, quoting a line they both apparently know, from the delighted expression that spreads across Chris’s face, “...and so the pressing questions gave focus to the pleasures felt by the one who was required to reply, and pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered…yes, you could say I like it.”
Chris swallows. Hard.
Sebastian smiles. Guileless and innocent. Or not so innocent. And he’s thrilled when Chris grins back and leans in a bit more: using his body, his weight, putting those muscles in closer proximity.
“So,” Chris murmurs, still holding Sebastian’s rain-damp copy of volume one, turning it over, hands on the book, hands moving upon wet and pliable cover and spine, and oh fuck, Sebastian’s mesmerized and halfway to a quivering spontaneous climax in his soaked jeans, “that would be you replying. To me.”
Sebastian at this point can’t remember how to talk. So he gives Chris his best smile, and it really is his best, somehow brighter than ever before because it’s Chris: teasing because they’d been talking about questions and replies, and this is his reply.
Chris laughs. Chris reaches out and strokes clinging hair from his cheekbone. Sebastian’s lips part.
“Stay put and stay warm,” Chris tells him, “I want to find you right here when I get back,” and goes off to flip the shop’s sign to Closed and to rummage around in the philosophy shelves. Sebastian Stan, stunned and quivering and yearning, sits breathless and lightheaded with need.
Chris comes back after a moment. Holds out a book, smiles, tucks the blanket more closely around his shoulders before sitting down. “You didn’t move.”
“I…didn’t.”
“Good.”
Sebastian heroically stifles a whimper. Despite rain-drenched chill, he’s suddenly overly hot. He takes refuge behind his new copy of the History of Sexuality, which gives him an idea. He thinks that maybe Chris won’t be opposed to this idea. He thinks that maybe, maybe, he’s not misreading that tone in that voice, that new intent focus in ocean-floor eyes. “I’ll…have to think of some way to pay you back.”
“Oh. Um. You—” Chris hesitates, authoritative gentle dominance falling into doubt for a second. “Seriously don’t worry about it, I mean it’s not—think of it like I bought it and gave it to you? For letting me help?”
“Letting you help…” He remembers Chris’s earlier question. He’s not offended; Chris cares. He does want to ease some of that worry into nonexistence. “You told me to. Come in, stay warm, let me help, you said. And I did.”
“…you did.”
“When I said I’d have to think of some way to pay you back…” He’s got the blanket around his shoulders; it slithers downward when he turns to face Chris more fully. He kind of wants to laugh at himself, but on the other hand he can’t, not here and now, not when they’re on the brink of—
Of something, he thinks. Bathed in firelight and the rhythm of rain. Buoyed up by books and Chris’s hands.
And for once he stops fretting over his own sentences. Lets them come. For Chris. “I thought—I know it sounds like the worst pick-up line, I didn’t mean it like that, but you know the History of Sexuality and you told me you’d take care of me and—and maybe I did mean it like that, I mean if you—”
“Sebastian,” Chris interrupts, and actually puts a hand out to touch him: instinctive, as if the universe would break in half if Chris Evans did not caress Sebastian Stan just then, did not cup his cheek and run a thumb ever so gently along his skin.
Sebastian, dizzy, whispers, “You know I’m a writer, I’m a grad student, that’s why the weird hours and the research texts, and I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner, I should’ve come back, I did tell you I wanted to see you, I like seeing you.”
“You wanted to.” Chris’s voice holds a curious flex, a bend of emotion: relief, amusement, curiosity, excitement that matches the pulse-beat humming in Sebastian’s veins. “Were you busy? Work? Classes?”
“No…well, yes, partly…the first day…but then I sort of got sick and—” Chris’s fingers, which’ve been cradling his face, learning his shape, tighten on his chin: not enough to hurt, but shocked. Sebastian skips a breath at the instant bullet of sheer lust that hits his gut: blossoming, blooming, reaching toward golden sun.
“You got sick,” Chris repeats. His eyes rake over Sebastian’s face, thinness, body; Sebastian winces, glances away. He knows he’s not anything special; he’s not unattractive precisely, but odd: hair too energetic, legs too long, mouth too wide. Chris doesn’t look pleased.
But Chris’s voice, when it comes, is heartbreakingly soft. The hand asks his face to come out of hiding. “Sebastian? What’s—I’d like it if you told me what’s wrong, you don’t have to, but I’d like to know, if you feel okay with that, okay? If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d like to.”
He manages to meet Chris’s gaze. With the help of that hand. That touch. Chris watches him with nothing but honesty. “I’m okay. It was just—just a cold. Not fun. But. I’m fine.”
“I’d’ve been there,” Chris murmurs, still holding him in place, “if you’d let me know…I’d’ve brought you chicken soup. Or orange juice. Or something. How’re you feeling now?”
“Better.” Wholehearted. Astonished. Happy. Whole. “Creative.”
Chris gets that reference too, and laughs: full-bodied and overjoyed, even as his hand slides to Sebastian’s neck, to rest at the side of his throat. The weight extends and settles, finding its home. “A creative enterprise…inventing new possibilities of pleasure through the eroticization of the body…I see how it is. You like that quote.”
“I like a lot of things.” He deliberately sets his hand atop Chris’s. Presses: lets Chris’s fingers indent skin. “What did you think about his claim that we need a movement in which sex is redefined, not a secret but a living process…one which spreads sexuality over the surfaces of things and bodies…arouses it…draws it out and bids it speak and respond to being bidden…”
Chris lets out a low rumbling sound, very nearly a growl, and the next second Sebastian finds himself flat on his back on the squashable secondhand couch, ensnared in his blanket, with his bookshop owner atop him and pinning him down. He wriggles just to feel himself be trapped more.
“You,” Chris informs him, “aren’t shy at all, are you…and here I was fucking sure I’d scared you away for good, kid, and you were looking at me and reading about pleasure and discipline and S&M…”
“Kid?”
“Yeah.” Chris slides a hand along his arm, lifting it over his head. Sebastian promptly moves the other one to meet it, lets Chris capture both his wrists, spreads his legs wider. He’s rock-hard and he knows Chris can feel it; Chris is too, though Chris isn’t wearing wet jeans. The roughness of fabric throws the pleasure into clearer definition, limned by a twinkle of pain: the pleasure in being harried, being pressed, being made to yield up self and soul. “I mean, not really, you’re not a kid, you’re calling the shots here, say stop and we’ll stop—”
“I know. I know you will.”
“—but yeah, I kinda like you like this. A grad student, you said. Forgetting your umbrella, getting lost in writing, out in the rain. Coming to me for help.” Chris nuzzles their noses together, even while tightening that grip on his wrists. Sebastian gasps; Chris smirks. “Letting me take care of you. My sweet kid.”
“Yes,” Sebastian breathes.
“Power…” Chris kisses him, kisses words into his mouth: a first kiss, drenched in firelight and heat and the lingering taste of rainwater and the tingle of lyrical erudite sentences like poetry, melting him inexorably into hot wax, pliant and flowing. “The power which took charge of sexuality…which set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas…electrifying surfaces…you want me like this? Taking charge?”
Sebastian, sparkling all over, hips rocking up into Chris’s of their own accord and chasing sensation, pants, “You…hadn’t…noticed?”
And Chris starts laughing all over again, silly and sexy, keeping him in place without harshness. “God, you’re amazing. What’d I do to deserve this? You?”
“You opened this bookshop,” Sebastian says, truth laid bare the way he wants to be laid bare before Chris Evans, naked and vulnerable and trembling in the hands of power, “and you gave me someplace to go that felt like home, when I was tired or struggling with a line or doing research or just wanting a new story, and you’re kind. That’s what it was, at first. You’re so kind to everyone.”
“Kind?” Chris lifts fingers from his wrists: not all the way, watching his face. The other arm takes some of his weight. “Is that what you want? More careful?” Chris doesn’t quite ask the rest of the questions, though they crowd his eyes with preemptive sadness: did someone once upon a time hurt you, were you scared, are you scared, do you want me to stop, are you safe, what can I do?
Chris Evans will pull his own heart, that huge beautiful rainbow-colored heart, out of his chest and give every last ounce of it to keep someone else safe. Sebastian knows this.
And because he knows this, because he knows—he does, he does—that Chris wants him too, he makes a wordless vow: he will equally spend all of himself, give his own heart, to safeguard that shining knightly generosity. There’s only one Chris Evans. And Sebastian Stan will keep him safe, in turn.
He says, “I said at first that was it. The kindness. And then I saw you taking care of people, finding books for people, playing with your nephews, running this store full of stories and loving it…I wanted you to take care of me.”
“You—”
“I wanted you to bend me over the counter and take care of me. Repeatedly.”
“Oh my God,” Chris says, lying atop him, not moving.
Sebastian hesitates, and in the end doesn’t exactly make a conscious decision; the words come out, because he’s on his back with Chris’s hand loosely wrapped around his wrists and he’s confessing everything, spilling himself, given into safekeeping. “I never thought…I didn’t think you’d even look at me.”
“…what,” Chris says this time, eyes going wide and comically dismayed.
“I’m not…” He’d shrug, but he’s now being pushed more assertively into the couch while Chris looms over him, employing weight. “I know I’m not…I sometimes get lost in my head and I can’t say what I’m thinking and I worry about being good enough and I’m—”
Chris puts a hand over his mouth. Sebastian’s entire body snaps to attention. Command, power, obedience. Being good for someone. Flawless arrow to his weak spot.
Plus, the hint at breathplay, at the surrender of even that, lights up every single darkly radiant desire. His cock jumps.
Chris’s eyebrows shoot up. “Huh.”
Sebastian tries to shrug with his expression: you’re on top of me talking about caresses and power and intensity, what’d you expect?
Chris snorts. “Brat.” But his eyes say more, tender and rueful as an extended hand across swift deep waters. “You know I’ve been, like, in love with you for the last three months, right? And yeah, I know that’s dumb, the first time I ever talked to you I scared you into dropping a book on your foot, I mean, love, as if we even know each other, but you’re gorgeous and you’re brilliant and you think about stuff, really think about everything, books and bodies and us, and also you know what I mean. I think you do. Because you do, don’t you?”
Sebastian nods behind the hand. He does. It’s that same unshakeable silvery shiver that races down his own spine in Chris’s presence: he can’t quite believe yet that it’s real, but he knows it is. Bedrock deep. Beyond rationality, beyond processing. The way Chris knows which quotes he likes best from that volume, the way he knows what Chris is asking.
“Yeah.” Chris lifts the hand, watching his eyes. “You do. And that—and that’s good. You’re good. My good boy.”
“Oh fuck me,” Sebastian says in Romanian, because he’s literally forgotten English for a second and can only think in his first-ever childhood language.
“Hmm,” Chris says, grinning. “What language was that? And what’d you say? Will I like it?”
“I…ah…Romanian. I. Um. Speak Romanian. And German very badly, and English mostly these days—fuck me, I said. Um. Please.”
“So polite,” Chris ponders, sitting up. “Don’t move your hands. You’re good at that, too. Not moving. Listening to me. Are you warm enough?”
He’s flushed head to toe and not above begging. “Chris, please—”
“Answer the question.” Chris puts the hand on his stomach. Slides it up to toy with his left nipple: pebbled with cold and heat and desire, visible under his drying t-shirt. Then slides it back down, further, to press lightly just above his straining cock. “Like a good boy.”
Sebastian swears at him in German this time—it’s a good language for that even if he’s forgotten most other vocabulary—and then, as Chris’s fingers pinch his hip in splendid warning, “Yes, yes, sorry, I’m sorry, yes I’m warm enough, I’ll be good—”
“And you’re feeling up to this. You’ll tell me if you aren’t.” Chris kisses him again with this order: long and slow, discovering his mouth, unhurried. They’ve got time now. They’ve got each other. They’ve got this storm-soaked fire-lit dream of a fairy-tale come true, and his hands where Chris put them, and Chris’s hands exploring him.
“Yes. I swear, yes, anything, I’ll tell you—I’m fine, though, I’m incredible, I feel wonderful, Chris, would you please —”
Chris drops that big hand to rest over his cock, over drying denim and newly slick underwear and friction. The impact’s not hard enough to hurt but abrupt enough to make him stop talking, openmouthed, each sensitive nerve-ending frayed and fluttering with need almost past bearing.
“You’re right,” Chris concludes, stroking him slowly through his jeans, “you do feel wonderful.”
Sebastian’s smile turns to sunset warmth: exquisite and inspiring, unforgettable. Chris paints a picture of it on his mind and kisses Sebastian again, just because he can. The night feels like a fairytale dream. A wild, impossible fever that has struck them both down and wrapped them in a velvety madness. He needs, wants, craves more, and Sebastian is offering it to him, his expression open. Welcoming.
Needs, wants, craves, yes, but beyond the desire to feel Sebastian’s body beneath his, Chris longs to take care of him. In all the ways he can. Leaning back, he presses an adoring kiss to the knuckles of Sebastian’s hand, and says, “Take off your wet clothes then get back under the blanket.”
Sebastian meets his gaze with an upward glance through dark lashes. “All of them?”
There’s a cheesy line in there about not wanting Sebastian to catch a cold, but Chris can only say, “All of them,” his voice rough and held even through sheer force of will. He’s not an overexcited teenager, he’s not even unpracticed at all the things the longing in Sebastian’s voice calls for when he speaks of choices and answers and pleasure shared. “And back under the blankets. Wait for me?” He makes the last part a question, aware of what he is asking, of the bravery Sebastian is showing, and wanting nothing more than to protect that fragile sanctuary they have found themselves in. Not to frighten, not to startle.
Sebastian says, “Yes Chris,” and starts to rise, nimble fingers reaching for the edges of unwanted clothing. Chris stands and walks slowly to the stairs, forcing himself not to run. Control. Calm. Control of himself, not just Sebastian’s wants.
And on the inside every uncool, Disney loving, pop-song singing, tap dancing part of him is cartwheeling around his head in excitement.
He comes back with an armful of supplies and finds Sebastian has followed his instructions only to the very broadest definition. His heart is halfway to overflowing, a small part of him expecting to find the couch and his bookstore and his life devoid of Sebastian. Scared away or merely a beautiful blossom of a dream formed on a night where the skies have opened and the world turned itself outside in.
Sebastian is still there. Sebastian is under the blankets. Just. Barely. One leg curled beneath him, the other extended, bare. He’s laid out like a model waiting for his artist to finish admiring him; like a courtesan waiting for his lover to finish worshiping him. Chris plans on doing both.
“You’re still here,” Chris says, half wonder, half exhilaration.
Sebastian tilts his head towards the sound of Chris’s voice, unthinkingly elegant. “Don’t you want me to be?”
Chris circles the couch, checks the fire has enough fuel to burn bright and warm, and puts his fingers under Sebastian’s chin, drawing his head upwards, leaving him bare for a kiss. “I want everything,” Chris says. “So long as you want it, too.” He runs his thumb across the swell of Sebastian’s bottom lip and imagines he can still feel the spark of their kiss. Sebastian, sweetly but not innocently, draws that thumb into his mouth and sucks.
He swallows, loud and hopeless. Vulnerabilities exposed to Sebastian, who wears hand-knitted blankets like a robe and his nakedness like a crown.
“Please,” Sebastian whispers, letting Chris pull his hand away.
Chris steps around him, a fraction of distance to gather his wits and to turn his thoughts away from the aching hardness between his legs. He sits down on the couch, sets his supplies on the floor beside him, and directs Sebastian into a reclined sprawl with a gesture. “You said you wanted me to take care of you.”
“Please,” Sebastian says again, “Chris…”
Chris soothes him with a whisper, hands finding strong, slender thighs and gentling over soft skin, calming and careful. “I’ll take care of you. I won’t make you beg. Not for this, anyway,” he adds teasing, unable to hold back the smile now that Sebastian’s want turns into a pout. “For other things, sure. You can beg me to let you come.” The words are a trial, a test to gauge reaction. Sebastian whimpers, eyes fluttering closed, his throat bared. Yes, Chris thinks they will both like that. “Rules first. You tell me to stop, I stop. No matter how far along we are, not matter what we are doing. I’ll stop.” He’s said this before: he’ll say it again a hundred times if he needs to. “I’m not going to tie you down, not today,” he doesn’t rule out anything in the future, not when he already has a hundred and one ideas for what they might do together. Right at the top is the image of Sebastian with his hands bound, straddling Chris’s lap, stuffed full of Chris’s dick, stuttered poetry caught between the sobs of his lips as he rides Chris slowly. “But you are going to do as you are told.”
“God,” Sebastian breathes, his fingers loosening on the edge of the blanket in a way that’s not wholly deliberate.
One bared pink nipple invites Chris to reach up and pinch, sharper than anything they have done yet. “Aren’t you, Sebastian?”
Sebastian is as responsive as he is sweet, a choked cry twisting into a promise as Chris pinches again. “Yes, Chris, please. Please, I’ll be good.”
“You are good,” Chris tells him. “And you are going to tell me if you start to feel cold, understood?” He doesn’t have to underscore the instruction with another twist of Sebastian’s rapidly swelling nipple, but he does.
“Yes,” Sebastian sobs.
“Hands above your head,” Chris instructs. “Do not move them unless I do something you don’t like.” They are still strangers to each other’s bodies and Chris won’t take advantage. As soon as Sebastian obeys, Chris pushes aside the edges of the blanket, lays him bare.
“Such a good boy,” he praises, releasing Sebastian’s sore nipple and leaning down to take it in his mouth. He soothes swollen flesh as Sebastian cries out beneath him. Bathes it with his tongue, worshipful and gentle. And when Sebastian settles, when the hurt gives over entirely to pleasure, Chris repeats the torment on its partner. He stops only when Sebastian’s thoughtless squirming becomes desperate, his dick hard and leaking against the denim of Chris’s jeans. Chris is mouth is tingling and his heart is floating and Sebastian is a shuddering, writhing temptation beneath him. His arms are still crossed over his head though, and Chris removes the rough tease of his denim clad thigh away from Sebastian’s pretty leaking dick. “Warm enough?” Chris asks, playful innocence in his voice rewarded by a whimpered laugh.
“I think I’m going to burn,” Sebastian says dreamily. “From the inside out. A phoenix.”
“That could be the fever,” Chris jokes, reaching up a hand to test the warmth of Sebastian’s forehead. Warm, but not hot. That’s good. “A phoenix, huh? Do I make you want to fly, Sebastian?”
Sebastian turns his head to press a kiss to the palm of Chris’s hand, thoughtlessly stealing what little part of Chris that has yet to fall in love with him. Chris will do anything for that smile, for that kiss. Chris can do anything, when Sebastian is looking at him like that.
He’s drowning in the storm. He’s swept under by thunder and torrents, rushing, swelling, devoured and electric. Every nerve ending sings.
Chris Evans smiles at him, above him, like the lightning. Sebastian’s nipples ache and the ache reverberates everyplace, a deep slow throb of presence and purity. Chris makes him so: purely himself, a creature of wants and needs and a craving body and a craving to please.
He murmurs, languid, “I think I am. Flying.” Chris smiles more and traces the line of his lips. Sebastian opens his mouth for Chris’s fingers. For Chris to play with. Anything Chris wants.
What Chris wants now seems to be gentle: soothing strokes along his sides, hips, thighs. Not touching his straining arousal. Sebastian loves this at first—being petted, being adored, being caressed—but after a few moments the deliberate slowness becomes maddening. He whimpers. Wriggles in place.
“Shh,” Chris tells him, and pets his stomach: measured leisurely touches that go nowhere near his cock, his nipples, the places he’s pleading to have surrendered himself and been overrun. He squirms. Chris tsks. “Be good.”
He’s trying. He’s trying and he needs more, he needs Chris’s touch, he needs to be opened up and claimed, he needs to fall over that radiant precipice, he needs—
Chris rubs a thumb across his left nipple. Sebastian chokes on a sob. Keeps his hands in place.
Thunder rattles bookshop windows. Rain billows, a rattle of noise and life and renewal for the world.
“My good boy,” Chris says, low, “so good, for me, wanting me.”
Something in Sebastian’s head switches on or off or all the way to perfect. Time distills. His body goes pliant, lax, molten. When Chris pets him again, one long caress from shoulder to thigh, he moans faintly but nothing more. He wants nothing more: he wants to be used how Chris chooses to use him.
He also wants to come, but the sensation’s far-off and unimportant. He knows his cock’s rigid and dripping, messy on his skin. He will spill himself in climax if Chris tells him to, and if not, he’ll wait. The rub of denim—Chris’s jeans, as Chris kneels above him—against sensitive flesh feels nice. He likes that.
His thoughts gather themselves up and fade away peacefully, white as clouds and as airy.
Chris touches his chin, holds his head, kisses him deep and lazily assertive. Sebastian opens and yields and submits to sensation. Being tasted, being guided, the scratch of that beard, the weight atop him. Good. Yes.
“So sweet.” Chris sits up again. Picks up something. Clamps. Deceptively simple. Golden. Sebastian whines at the first bite to his already hurting nipple, and then settles as the second one goes on. Wandering in the blur of pain as it becomes pleasure, he turns his head, says Chris’s name without sound. Chris touches his lips again. Sebastian nuzzles contentedly into the hand.
Chris slips fingers into his mouth and lets him suckle at them, feeling full and happy. “Guess you did need me to take care of you, huh? You’ve been wanting this, haven’t you, Sebastian? Thinking about me, thinking about what we could do…”
Mouth occupied with Chris’s fingers, he nods. Emphatically. Chris laughs. “So was I. We could’ve been doing this much sooner. Should’ve been.”
Sebastian nods again, and earns another laugh. It shimmers through him like praise.
Chris bends down to look into his eyes. The moment gathers wings and hovers, poised. Fire warms his skin. Light pours along the clamps on his nipples. Sebastian’s swimming in ruby and gold.
Phrased as an order but carrying a question—stop and no will be heard and regarded, as established, as they learn each other’s responses and reactions—Chris tells him, “I’d like to be inside you. I want to fuck you, Sebastian.”
Sebastian nods again. Chris could’ve used other phrasing: not I want to but I’m going to. Chris is asking, though with assertion. He likes that too: knowing Chris wants him, wants to be in him, to have him. Here on the couch. In the bookshop where they’ve glanced at and ducked from and fumbled around each other for so long. Their bookshop.
“That’s a yes, right?” Chris keeps watching him, endearingly attentive. “Can you talk? You can move your hands if you want.”
Sebastian, who has Chris’s fingers in his mouth and golden haze suffusing his senses, summons enough self-awareness to raise eyebrows at him.
Chris blushes, laughs at himself, takes the hand away. Sebastian makes a disappointed little sound. His bookshop owner—his lover, now, or at least here at this moment they are making love, or it feels like love, enchanted in a swirl of rain and fire—considers this response, and taps Sebastian’s cock with the flat of that hand. Not a real slap, but it makes his erection bob and jerk, as he lies naked and exposed; he whimpers involuntarily at the chastising, and loves it.
“Was that, um, a yes? And—was that okay?” Chris bites a lip, visibly tries not to be anxious, starts nevertheless to wonder. “Sebastian?”
“Yes,” Sebastian says, “yes, yes, please, Chris, yes that was okay, I—I like—intensity, and yes, I want this, I want you, please.”
Chris kisses him more. Chris’s fully clothed body comes down above his, weight pinning him to the couch, strong and irresistible over clamped nipples, wet-tipped arousal, tingling skin. Sebastian sighs and tips his head back, murmurs incoherent words as Chris tastes his throat, his collarbone, his shoulder. Chris rocks hips against him, purposeful; Sebastian whines, and only realizes he’s moving, thrusting back, lifting hips frantically to rub his needy cock against Chris’s denim-clad iron length, when Chris stops and holds him down.
“So sweet, I said. Eager for me.” Chris taps his cock again, a bit harder though careful about it. “And impatient.” Sebastian sobs, head rolling blindly across cushions, losing himself in a bliss starred by fleeting white-hot supernovas. “Shh,” Chris says, and there’s a hand between his legs, “shh, you’re okay, it’s okay, I’m taking care of you,” and that hand’s opening him up, fingers and slickness, pushing into him—just enough prep, hasty, he’ll feel that cock as he takes it, but Chris won’t hurt him—
Not more than he wants to be hurt, anyway—not more than he wants to—to be good, to take this, whatever Chris wants—to surrender every piece of himself and his world to those hands and those kind eyes and commands, because Chris will be kind—
The fingers find and stroke that spot inside him. Sebastian’s back arches. His world goes white. But Chris’s other hand’s on his cock—he thinks that’s Chris’s hand, he can’t see—and it squeezes, and this one does hurt, and he collapses in bewildered rapturous anguish, shaking intermittently, not having come. His cock’s leaking so steadily he thinks he has, for a moment, but it’s not, he’s not, he’s been good.
He’s crying. Chris stops. “Sebastian?”
“I’m okay,” Sebastian whispers. He is. They’re not bad tears. They’re just here. He’s opened up and clenching around Chris’s fingers and vulnerable in Chris’s hand and he’s put all of himself in, yes, Chris’s hands, and he’s chosen to do that. He’s raw and exposed and quivering and made over anew: the person he is with Chris Evans here and now.
The person who can fly.
He breathes from the core of his soul, Chris’s hands carefully quiescent on him, “Please take care of me more, Chris.”
Chris makes a sound that might be laughter or awe or tears in turn. And flings off shirt and jeans and boxers, and comes to him, and comes into him.
That glide feels like truth. Like they’ve always been made to be here. Chris’s body over his, penetrating his, heavy and hot and hard through that thin condom. Sebastian reaching up, reaching for him—allowed to move hands, Chris said he could, so he’s being good—and holding on as Chris moves and pushes deeper and thrusts into the space that’s needed so very badly to be completed by this man.
They stay without moving for a second, lost in each other, eyes and breaths and bodies, when Chris sinks fully home.
The fire pops. Thunder, not to be outdone, rattles the afternoon. Sebastian laughs because he’s happy, the world’s happy, his body’s weightless and illuminated by happiness; and Chris laughs too, and then starts fucking him harder, faster and rougher when Sebastian moans the yes, the exactly wonderful side of merciless and conquering and possessive. Chris groans, “My sweet boy, Seb, so good for me—” and Sebastian moans as a shudder of ecstasy ripples through him, and he clenches around that glorious cock. Chris groans again and slams into him. Sebastian’s legs fall helplessly more open. Chris yanks them up into the air, repositions bodies, gets Sebastian’s legs over his shoulders, and takes him even more deeply, if that’s possible, if he’s not already thoroughly ravished and plundered and won.
He’s drifting again, unfocused, knowing only the pounding rhythm in his body, against that shining spot that echoes brilliance up and down and everywhere. Chris says something. His name. Then again. Then a comet streaks across his chest, exploding diamonds, crashing and confusing and dazzling. He blinks. Chris took off one clamp. His nipple’s a center of iridescence, burning.
“Still with me?” Chris pauses, buried in him, one hand petting his hip again: reassurance for one or both of them. “Seb?”
“Yes,” Sebastian says, pleads really, panting and falling through galaxies of light, “yes, I’m here, I feel—I feel—Chris, I need—I need you, I need, please—”
“I know,” Chris agrees gravely, though relief colors those oceanic eyes: relief and utter joy. “I know, sweet boy. I’m taking care of you, I know what you need, you need to come, right, baby?”
“Yes, yes—”
“I’m gonna take the other one off. And then I’m going to fuck you, and I want you to come like that. Actually…” With a completely splendid smirk: “Hands back above your head. On the couch. You’re gonna come without anyone touching your cock, like the good boy you are. My good boy.”
Sebastian makes another sound. Not one he’s ever heard himself make. Begging. His arms feel sluggish and weighed down, slow as honey falling in drops and drips.
“So obedient.”
“Please…”
“We did say you’d beg,” Chris murmurs, “I like it, I mean I like you asking, and me giving you this, and you—” Me giving you what you need, says his gaze. Me being the one who can do this for you. The one you want to do this for you. You, and me.
“Chris Evans,” Sebastian says dreamily, “I like you giving me what I need, and I like you too.”
Chris breathes out, amused but with slightly damp eyes, and then seems to run out of words, or to tumble into emotion and gestures instead. And snaps open the clamp on his other nipple.
Sebastian cries out. In the same instant Chris starts pounding into him again, no holding back, unerringly finding that spot that makes him tighten and twist and burst into fireworks. He keeps his hands in place, because—because Chris told him to, and no one’s touching his cock, it’s rubbing against his stomach and the pool of its own need, and he’ll come like this, spilling all over himself without a hand on him because Chris wants that, wants to see him—
That thought takes him apart. He splinters into crystal: reflected and refracted, becoming prisms, imbued with rainbow light.
He feels Chris thrust into him. Feels Chris groan and gasp his name and go tense. Feels the solid weight of Chris atop him, cradling him close, whispering words into his hair. Sebastian, having become rainbows, simply clings and floats and lets sensations pour through him, carrying him along.
After a few moments or hours or decades, Chris Evans pushes himself up to gaze down at Sebastian’s face. His cock’s softening, slipping; he swears under his breath, adorably Boston in phrasing and accent, and moves to take care of that. Afterwards he comes back to the couch and gathers Sebastian’s limp body into firmly muscled arms. “…Sebastian?”
“Mmm. No. Very asleep, try again in an hour…but keep petting me, I like that…”
“No, come on, I love that you’re a brat after sex, but are you okay?” Chris strokes his hair, though, which does nothing for the waking-up request. “Kid?”
“Kid,” Sebastian doesn’t exactly protest, yawning. He’s weightless and effervescent, drained and euphoric. No past explorations, no decadent daydreams, can compare. Never, never, never this good. This bright. This cherished and protected and secure. And he trusts Chris to hold him. He truly does. That understanding warms him from the inside: whatever else this is or will be, it is real. “After that? I’m not exactly—”
He can feel his eyes go wide as his brain catches up. Love?
He snaps his head up so fast he nearly collides with Chris’s chin. Chris is staring right back, eyes comically dismayed. “You—”
“I didn’t mean—I don’t know—words just sort of—” Chris gulps. Squares up to his own admission: a hero with broad shoulders, with nipple clamps casually lying around in a box of supplies, with that big honest heart. Everything Sebastian wants: right here. With their bodies entwined. “I don’t know. Maybe. I wasn’t thinking—but I know I like you. I know I’m—I want to know you. More. I want to take care of you if you’re sick. Or even when you’re not. I want to, um, try everything we’ve read about. With you. So. Maybe, yeah.”
Sebastian Stan, naked and safe in his bookshop owner’s arms, drenched in firelight and the rustle of rain, sticky and tranquil with release, his bookbag and their volume of Foucault and the elements of a possible future spread out messy and true across the floor, says, “Didn’t you hear me earlier, I said I like you too, I might—I might love, um, being a brat for you after incredible sex?—and yes—please yes, if you want, Chris—yes to trying more. Everything. With you.”