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This is all he has, really. Teaching Lightning how to race, and making fists in his dirty clothes.
——
It’s not Doc’s fault.
It’s the washer’s fault. The terrible 80s washer in the back house Lightning’s been renting from Flo since he and Sally figured out they were better off as friends. Doc doesn’t have to chalk his messy boundaries to anything other than bad wiring, shot fuses, old plastic.
Or, that’s what he tells himself when he agrees to let Lightning wash two hampers worth of dirty clothes at his house. “Uh, my washer is busted,” he'd said sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his neck, stumbling on Doc’s porch under the weight of all his dirty laundry. There were socks overflowing from it, dirty fruit of the loom socks from target, because Lightning had a ton of money but he still shops at Target “Can I do a few loads over here?”
Doc says yes, of course. Because even when Lightning should be annoying, he’s mostly just charming, and sweet, and he asks for help now and Doc wants to keep encouraging that behavior, even when it requires him to do something that might end up being painful.
The thing is, he’s great at teasing Lightning, but it’s all talk. When push comes to shove, he’s been increasingly terrible at actually setting boundaries with him, because setting boundaries is hard when you’re in love.
It’s just a single favor, though. So, he doesn’t think much of it initially.
It doesn't end, though. A few loads turn into a few more, and in only three short weeks Doc becomes Lightning’s personal laundromat. He should be irritated or tell him to bother someone else with a washing machine, but he doesn’t, because in spite of all his grumbling, he doesn’t actually mind. He even sort of likes it, because he’s old and pathetic and his self esteem relies too heavily on being useful to Lightning in any way he can. He likes that it’s his house Lightning shows up to, likes that it’s his washer he wanted to use (because it’s probably the nicest in town, he’d said ), likes that he gets an extra few hours a week with him outside of their training regime because he always hangs out while he’s waiting for the loads to finish up. It’s sad, but Doc is stupidly grateful that he’s the first person Lightning thinks of when he needs something practical.
My boy, he thinks privately to himself, even though he tries hard not to, even though Lightning is not his boy and never will be.
—-
At first, Lightning comes by once every week or so, uses the washer and dryer, and leaves when it’s done unless it’s late and they’d traded the beer for whiskey and in that case, he sleeps on the couch and Doc doesn’t sleep at all, kept awake by an obnoxious feedback loop of want, and want induced guilt. But then, because Lightning is lazy and easily distracted, he starts to come over, leave the hampers in the laundry room, and get caught up in doing something so thoroughly he loses sight of the reason he’s at Doc’s house all together. More than once, he accidentally forgets the laundry, and Doc is stuck with a bunch of his dirty clothes just sitting there, taking up space in his laundry room and reminding him of all the things he’ll never have.
So, he sometimes he ends up doing Lightning’s laundry for him, so he can give it back and stop feeling sorry for himself. It doesn't always work, though. First off, Lightning’s thrilled to have someone do his chores, so it just encourages him to “forget” more, and on top of that, It just makes Doc feel worse, more pitiful. Not only is he Lightning’s personal laundromat but his personal assistant. Cleaning up after his boy. His boy who’s not even his boy.
But he perversely likes this part, too. There’s a softness to the ritual. Shaking each article out from the tangled mess of jeans, spreading it gently and looking for spilled coffee or sweat marks on his white shirts, spraying them with stain remover and tossing them into the washer with the rest. He likes touching Lightning’s things, knowing they were once warm from his skin. It feels intimate, and intimacy is something Doc hasn't authentically experienced in a long time. This is all he has, really. Teaching Lightning how to race, and making fists in his dirty clothes.
He knows it’s turned into a weird, possibly invasive thing, but at the same time, Lightning abandons his goddamned laundry here because he knows Doc will do it. It’s not like he’s crossing a boundary, or keeping a secret, or even doing anything Lightning’s not already aware of. It’s not the action itself that’s loaded, it’s the symbolism in the action. And he can’t help that. If Lighting doesn’t want him turning his boxers right side out and thinking too much about the last place they were, maybe he should wash his own goddamned laundry instead of conning his old, gay, and pathologically lonely crew chief into doing it for him.
It gets harder to justify when he starts doing more than just washing it.
Nothing terrible, or unsanitary. It’s just that one time, Lightning also leaves the flannel he’d been wearing that day at Doc’s house. He stripped it off when it got too warm and walked around in a fucking under shirt all afternoon, and forgotten it when he’d left that evening.
When Doc half-resentfully, half-complacently starts sorting the laundry the next day, he grabs the shirt off the back of the couch and inhales from it reflexively, to test if it’s dirty enough to throw in with the rest. It’s what he does with his own clothes when he’s not not sure if they’re clean or not, and he doesn’t even really think about it beyond that.
It’s a terrible mistake.
So suddenly, his lungs are completely full of Lightning MvQueen. The perfect smell of him, concentrated and overwhelming and fuck, he just stands there for a minute, clutching his flannel and inhaling from it deeply, eyes shut, hands trembling in the worn plaid. He should stop. He knows he should stop; he concretely thinks quit that, but he doesn't actually do it. He just breathes and breathes, sucking in slow, deep inhalations, eyes stinging like he might cry. He loves the way Lightning smells, like salt and gasoline and sweat under the AXE because no matter how many times Doc’s seen him slather on deodorant, he can still always smell the notes of boy under it, sharp and spicy and ripe. It always makes his mouth water, his stomach drop. Not because he’s turned on, necessarily, but because it’s so much easier to imagine holding Lightning, breathing him in, having him close when he knows exactly what he smells like.
He comes to his senses the second the guilt starts to roil in his gut, chasing away the longing. It’s one thing to notice the distant smell as he rifles through his dirty clothes, it’s another to fucking huff them like some glue-sniffing teenager looking for a fix. Doc tosses the shirt onto the hamper, contemplating the new, mortifying low he’s sunk to. He wills himself not to do it agin.
But like all of his vices, he ends up powerless against it.
—-
The flannel is like a gateway drug, a crack in a dam. Once Doc’s done it once, he can’t fucking stop. He spends too much time with a whole load of Lightning’s clothes right in front of him and they all presumably smell like him and he knows what that’s like now, getting to bury his face in soft cotton and be surrounded by it, and no one is here to witness his sins so he just…does it. One more guilty transgression in the dark.
He takes his time. Smells each of his shirts, some sweatier than others, some faded from having been stuffed in the pile for so long, but all of them distinctly and unmistakably Lightning’s, the sensory memory of him clinging to the fibers. It’s so good. It’s so bad. He knows he shouldn’t, that it’s not fair to Lightning and not fair to himself, but at the same time he can’t help but thinking just let me have this. The ghost of you in my lungs, since I’ll never have a real thing.
And eventually he gets bolder, hungrier. At first it’s just his shirts, because that’s at least only minimally invasive. But then, after a particular difficult day when Lighting arrives uninvited on his doorstep in the morning, makes them both coffee, and spends several hours complaining about an apparently very bad date he went on before leaving (without doing his laundry), Doc is feeling both self destructive and self pitying about the whole being in love with an unattainable straight thirty-year-old, so. He sorts the laundry, and when he comes across one of Lightning’s many pairs of threadbare black boxer briefs, he thinks what the hell and brings them to his face, nose pressed right into the Y front.
Lightning’s underwear definitely smells like dick. As soon as that information properly dawns on Doc, as soon as he realizes his fucking impulses have consequences (like knowing what the unattainable straight thirty-year-old he’s in love with’s dick smells like forevermore) he just sniffs harder, cock stirring in his own boxers. It’s not that he doesn’t feel terrible. He definitely does. It’s just that there’s no going back from this, so he might as well settle into the filth of it, make a home in the shame of being a disgusting person by wallowing in it like some mud-dwelling swamp creature.
The smell is dirty and delicious, sticks in his mouth and throat like something solid, something he could swallow. He loves the smell of men, has spent so many nights with his hand under the elastic of his sweats, longing so hard for that particular brand of dirt that his heart aches when he comes to the memory of it. And here it is, right now, in his hands, his lungs. Not just the smell of a man but the smell of Lightning McQueen, his boy, who he’s been inhaling secret for months now, wondering how much sharper and muskier it would be between his thighs.
And if he’s come this far, embraced this much depravity, what’s a little more? Does it even matter anymore? He’s never going to get flesh and blood Lightning, he’s never going to get more than the mild, pathetic satisfaction of smelling his dirty laundry. He’s going to die with his hands and heart empty, nothing to show for loving Lightning McQueen save for the Piston Cups he helped him win, and the shameful knowledge of how his stale sweat smells in cotton. So what’s one more stolen moment alone in the laundry room?
Doc’s fully hard now, throbbing and hot and tenting the front of his slacks, and it’s clouding his brain, making it impossible to think clearly, ethically. He inhales deeply, mouth flooded as he fishes around in Lightning’s hamper for another pair of underwear before unbuckling his belt and fisting his cock, using the thin, dirty fabric as a barrier, rubbing it up and down his shaft, thinking God, boy, you smell so good, how’m I supposed to survive it? What am I supposed to do, when you leave these in my house, make me touch them? What m’I supposed to do?
It feels so good and so fucking dirty. The elastic waistband is punishingly rough, scraping against his balls on the down-stroke, but the worn-out cotton is so goddamned soft, and it smells like him, like Lightning where he’s dirtiest, so as Doc comes, that’s what’s pushing him over the edge. The knowledge that he’s emptying himself into that salty, burning, glorious scent.
He stays there for a moment as he comes down, breath labored, hand trembling as he slowly lowers it, waiting for regret to hit him as he sucks in fresh air. But even as he cleans himself off and drops the now sticky pair of underwear into the wash, followed by the one he was drooling into, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Nothing feels real.
It’s not until Lightning stops by the next day to pick up the clean clothes, grinning so wide and thanking him over and over again, that Doc starts to feel truly awful. He sees the neatly folded briefs at the top of the stack of clean clothes as he hands it off, and the words not clean, not really, never again, skirt guiltily across his mind as he bites the inside of his cheek so hard it tastes metallic. He tongues the almost-wound after Lightning leaves, wondering if it’s worth it. The scraps, the crumbs, the unforgettable, intimate details of Lightning’s body that he shouldn’t fucking know about. Maybe it was better, back when he was just wondering. When the smell of him was a wish, and not a reality.
—-
Doc’s wake up call happens in the pits a month or so later, while he and Lightning are being swarmed post-race by camera crews. At this point, Lightning’s washer has been broken for an entire four and a half months, and Doc’s been trudging through purgatory the whole time, caught in an endless cycle of indulging his cravings and hating himself for it and then doing it all over again. He was starting to thinks he could carry on his way indefinitely until Lightning fucks it all up.
He’s high in the way he always is after he wins, hair wet with helmet-sweat and champagne, smile taking over his whole face, sweet and cocky and beautiful. Doc’s chest is tight with pride, and he’s steering Lightning to the Sports Illustrated press crew when Lightning stops in his tracks, rounds on him. “Hey, hey, hey wait,” he says. “That girl’s gonna interview me? The redhead?”
“Yeah,” Doc says, shrugging. “She’s got the mic. Let’s go brag.”
“She’s pretty, I feel like—I dunno I feel like I smell,” he says, lifting his arm and twisting at the waist so his pit is right in Doc’s face. “Do I stink or should I go spray myself before I talk to her?”
He does smell, of course he does, he’s been stress-sweating in the roll cage of hot car for two hundred laps. Up until recently, Doc has associated that particular brand of sharp, acrid sweat with races, with competition, with hugging Lightning tight after he’s won and patting his back and telling him You did good, son. But now, he’s transported immediately back to his own laundry room. To layers of guilt and hunger and self-loathing and desire and the hot, gut-wrenching shame of coming into Lightning’s clothes while he suffocates in this exact smell. The bite of his sweat is so much more than just him now, it’s the pain of Doc wanting him and knowing he’ll never have him, loving him even though there’s nowhere for that love to go.
He reels away, heart pounding. “Fuck,” he mumbles, rubbing his face with his hands, suddenly hot as the blood pounds deafeningly in his ears.
“Well? AXE or no AXE?” Lightning asks, because that’s what he’s thinking of, right now. How to make himself presentable to this pretty redhead Sports Illustrated reporter, because he’s an idiot, and he’s straight, and he’s the sort of guy who thinks AXE is real deodorant. And she—she would want him to smell nice. Sally probably did too, and on some level that sends a spike of indescribable grief racing through Doc’s body as he thinks brokenly I would hold you down and push your arms above your head and breathe you in after a race. I’d lick you up. I’d scrub all the soap and lotion right off of you just to drown in your skin. Love you like this, love you ripe and fresh and dirty and scared. Love you every way.
“Just get over there,” Doc scolds, guiding Lightning to the mic with a hand firm in his lower back. “You’re still working, save the flirting for the afterparty.”
And his voice sounds flat and even, but his heart is pounding, his mouth is dry. This needs to stop, he thinks firmly, as his fingers fall away from the sweat-damp small of Lightning’s back, burning with secrets.
—-
Lightning doesn’t end up going to the afterparty at all. He steals some vodka and a souvenir shot glass and makes his way back up to the hotel room from the banquet hall, collapsing onto Doc’s bed next to him.
“Where’s your redhead?” Doc asks, warily moving his leg so they’re no longer touching. This needs to stop he thinks again, making a nervous fist in the sheets with the hand that’s not holding his paperback.
“What?” Lightning asks, furrowing his brow, eyes shut.
“Never mind,” Doc sighs, sitting up and dog-earing his place before shutting the book. “Are you drunk?”
“Tipsy. And…sad, I guess Sort of,” he says, rolling over, looking up at Doc with his pupils wide and hazy, his mouth chapped. Doc frowns, a warning wave of heat crashing in his stomach like the tide.
“About what? You won,” he reminds him, eyes following his back around the room as he hops up, pours himself a shot of vodka into a hotel glass and tops it off with a coke from the mini-bar. “You should be celebrating.”
“Sometimes I sort of feel like I’m going through the motions,” he says after a moment of thoughtful silence and a long, measured sip of his drink.
“With racing?” Doc asks, even though he can sense it’s not that, it’s something deeper, more troubling. Still, he presses on, needing a safe, sterile topic to steer this conversation away from Lightning’s interior. He knows what he smells like, he can’t also know how he bleeds. It’s too raw, and there’s only so much he can sustain with these brittle old man’s bones. “We can rework your training regime, if you want. Mix things up, bring back those old resistance routines—”
“No, not racing. It’s like…the stuff that comes along with it,” he explains, making Doc an identical drink even though he knows he doesn’t drink anything but whiskey with coke. He hands it over, and Doc is careful to avoid touching him. He’s broken down so many walls in washing his clothes, but he’s got to build them back up before this thing kills him.
“Ok,” he says warily, taking the drink, hating the chemical burn as he sips it. Lightning made it though, he’s obligated to take whatever he’ll give. “So, the parties. The girls.”
“Especially the girls,” Lightning mumbles, shaking his head. “Dunno if it’s like, that m’not over Sally, or if I’m just getting older, but I just—I don’t want to do the whole dating thing anymore. I’ll think I do, but then—I’ll be there at the party, surrounded by women and holding a glass of champagne just wondering what you’re doing up in the hotel room.”
Doc lets it sit in the charged air between them, waiting for something to change, for the words to bend into an acceptable, justifiable truth. They remain mystifying though, a mess of cipher: just wondering what you’re doing.
“Nothing interesting,” he eventually forces out after a cough. “Reading paperback westerns.”
Lightning smiles, throws back half his drink and shakes his head. “Yeah, maybe. But at least it’s real, you know?” Then he kicks off his shoes and wanders back to the bed, curls up next to Doc. He showered before the party, so he smells like hotel shampoo and hair gel, but his clothes, his clothes smell like Doc’s detergent and that's enough to make his chest ache, his throat choke up with frustration. This needs to stop he thinks, followed by I need to stop this. Because it’s not just something that’s happening to him, it’s something he’s doing, something he's in control of. he needs to stop crossing lines, and hurting himself, and washing Lightning McQueen’s fucking laundry for him. It’s messing everything up.
Instead he just forces the reflexive smile creeping onto his face into nothingness, weak, weak, weak. “Well, you’re always welcome to come up and be boring with me,” he tells Lightning. “If those NASCAR afterparties are getting too wild for you. You know m’not much for the ladies, anyway.”
Lightning snorts, flipping on the TV. “Drink your vodka, old man,” he mumbles fondly.
“I hate vodka,” Doc tells him, but it sounds more like I love you.
—-
Back in Radiator Springs, things are both better and worse.
For one, Lightning stops telling Doc about his shitty dates because he has presumably stopped going on them. He has also starts coming by Doc’s house without the guise of laundry to be done. It leaves Doc wondering if he needed the laundry as an excuse to spend time with him, if it was all some strange, messy game born from the tragedy of straight guys not knowing how to have friendships, how to ask for another man to simply listen to him. It’s confusing, and in some ways a relief, to not have his laundry room crowded with Lighting’s ever-present parade of overflowing hampers.
That being said, Doc also perversely misses the ritual of it, the blessing of being entrusted to tenderly handle Lightning’s clothes, even if he ended up breaking that trust when left to his own devices. He’s grateful to be temporarily rid of the temptation, but when Lightning shows up at ten PM on a Wednesday with red-rimmed eyes and a full hamper, the sensation that washes over Doc is something like relief. “What’s wrong?” he says, eyes skimming over Lightning’s body, his dirty sweats, his rucked up hair, the way his exhalations smell sharp with liquor. “Another bad date?” he asks, ushering him in.
Lightning laughs humorlessly, stumbling under the weight of his full hamper. “No,” he spits out, sounding self-deprecating and sheepish as he spills out drunkenly on Doc’s couch, leather squeaking under his weight. “Confession.”
“Oh,” Doc says, heart leaping in his throat, even though he has no idea where this is going. He keeps Lighting at arm’s distance most days. Close enough to look at, to smell, but not so close he can predict anything he might come clean about. He already allows himself too much, he can’t take on anything more. I need to stop this was too impossible a mantra to keep up, so in the last few weeks since the race it’s morphed into I need to build up immunity. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. Or, nothing new,” Lightning slurs, eyes fluttering closed. Doc’s seen him much drunker, but he gets him a glass of water anyway. “It’s more like, what I’ve been doing, for months. And not telling you. And I thought I could stop but I can’t, so here I am.”
“Stop what?” Doc asks, blood icing over. He doesn't feel like he can stand anymore, apprehension stiffening him up so he sits down in his armchair across from the couch gingerly, before his ligaments lock and he topples to the carpet. Lightning does this to him sometimes, comes in and knocks him over, smashes his carefully built walls in a single sentence. He’s silent, now, pouting there with his arm draped over his closed eyes and Doc is dissolving, fraying, so he repeats more urgently, “Kid, stop what?”
“Making you do my laundry,” Lightning spills out, sitting upright in a messy flail of limbs, eyes bright and wet as stares accusingly at his hamper. “I’ve been lying since November. Flo’s washer was only busted for like, two weeks. But I liked having an excuse to hang out with you.”
Doc stares, thumbing into the leather of the armrest. “You don’t need an excuse,” is all he can say.
“Well, I felt like I did. I don’t know why. I don’t need an excuse to hang out with any of my other friends, but I’m weird with you, I’m—I dunno, you’re my crew chief and the Hudson Hornet and I guess I told myself, for awhile, that it was because I admired you or something,” he grinds out, dropping his gaze down between his knees and rubbing at his temples, like this conversation is giving him a headache. “Ugh, I fucking hate this,” he adds, voice muffled.
“You—“ Doc falters, not sure what he means, where he’s going. His heart hurting and his pulse is too fast and he can’t stop his eyes from volleying between the laundry and Lightning’s bony wrists, which look pale and vulnerable right now as he cradles his own skull. The laundry. The laundry he’s been bringing over for months, he could have been doing at his own house. “Your washing machine works,” he finally settles on, still baffled by it.
“Yeah. It works fine,” Lightning sighs. “But I stopped wanting to use it because like—and here’s where it gets really fucking weird so m’sorry, I’m just gonna say sorry right now—I like it better when you do it.”
Doc frowns, wishing he had a drink. “Well, sure. You’re lazy.”
“No! I mean, yeah,” Lightning says, voice getting sharp and reedy with frustration. “But it’s not just that. I like when you do it because it’s—nicer, like, it just feels really nice?” he forces out, face crumpling into a mask of conflict as he scrubs his hands through his hair. “I dunno. I like getting the clothes back and they smell like your detergent and you use that nice old man fabric softener and—it’s just better. Plus, my clothes stopped smelling clean to me if I washed them myself.” There’s a note of desperation at the end of it all, and he’s left breathless.
Stunned, Doc tries to swallow, but it gets stuck in his throat and he coughs instead. Lightning looks very small right now, a confused little boy on his couch, flinging words into the space between them until one barbed edge catches soft skin and imbeds itself. But Doc has built so many walls they just ricochet off and he keeps thinking this can’t, it can’t be what it sounds like, I’m hearing what I want to hear. “Kid,” he eventually sighs, thumbing back and forth over his mustache. “I need you to say it plain, whatever it is.”
“Okay! Fine. Fine. But you’re gonna hate it. You’re gonna think I’m so dumb,” Lightning promises.
I already think you’re dumb, kid Doc almost says, but he knows this isn’t the time for jokes. There's the truth, which is could never hate anything about you, you’re my boy even if you’re not my boy, you’re my whole world but he can’t say that, either, so he’s got to find a middle ground, somewhere between deflection and blood. “I won’t think that,” he says, as gently as he knows how. “I’m listening.”
Lightning takes a deep breath, like he’s about to take a deep dive into cold water. “So. I tried to do my laundry tonight, like an adult or whatever. And instead I just took a tequila shot and cried, for some fucking reason, because I don’t know, I’m—everything’s been so weird since Sally and I broke up, nothing makes sense. Drinking is easier than thinking about it. But I had no fucking clean clothes, so I walked over here like a fucking idiot because—because I don’t want to do my laundry. I want you to do it, because I—I have this thing, where I want weird shit from you. Like. Like my clothes to smell like your house.”
He leaves the words there, like they have meaning beyond the obvious, like they explain everything.
“Hm,” Doc mumbles, watching and waiting for the world to end, the roof to cave in, a storm to come. Instead there’s Lightning’s wrists, narrow and white, blood thrumming in them so hard he can imagine what that two-beat tattoo would feel like if he were to curl his fingers around his pulse. Doc licks his lips and ventures, “Is that all you really want?” he ventures then, thoughtfully rubbing over his mustache. “For me to do your laundry? What are—are there other things?”
“No, it’s not just laundry.” Lightning says miserably, eyes wide and wet and blue. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, “I want other things too. But—but.”
“But what? Do you know what you want?” Doc asks then, heart pounding. He has to know, he must. He needs to see this messy thing to its equally messy end, even if it’s a car wreck, a smoking heap of metal.
“Not really,” he says, turning his head, rubbing his wet cheek into the jut of his shoulder. The he laughs, though it comes out mirthless and strangled and dripping with regret as he mumbles, “To smell your shirt, for starters.”
It hits Doc like a punch to the gut, sudden and searing. And maybe he should find out more, maybe he should dig into the bruise to see how deep it goes, but he’s been wanting this—wanting anything—for so long, he can’t be bothered. Not now. So, he gets up on numb legs. “Move over,” he tells Lightning, who looks back to him, bewildered.
“You don’t have to! I know—I know it’s like—”
“Kid, stop. Just stop. C’mere,” he sighs, making a fist in Lightning’s dirty V neck and dragging him close, guiding him down into a hug, or maybe something else, something sweeter, softer. There’s the briefest resistance before Lightning relents to curl up against him, melt into his arms and rubs his cheek into his navy, pilling Haynes pull-over. He sobs gratefully against Doc’s terrified heartbeat, leaving dark tear-specks on the cotton. “Jesus,” Doc murmurs, astounded, rubbing gently down the notches of his spine. “You’re a mess, aren't you?” he marvels.
“I don't know what’s wrong with me,” Lightning admits, sniffling.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Doc mumbles, pulling him closer, lips in his oily hair. He can smell him; the tequila sweetness on his exhalations, the fear on his sweat. The smell of spice and boy and salty wet tears. Doc’s smelled a lot of Lightning’s secrets, but never his tears. He soaks them up, ghosts his fingers down the flushed back of his neck, stomach in knots of awe, disbelief. “I used to think there was something wrong with me, too. That I was broken. But that was a long time ago. It’s just how some people are. You’re not wrong for wanting—for being curious about it.”
Lightning rubs his face experimentally into Doc’s sweater. “I really do like girls,” he says, though it doesn’t sound defensive, just confused, honest. “Just—not lately. Or something.”
“Ok, so, you like girls. And you like the smell of my clothes?” Doc asks, hand stilling on the shape of Lightning’s shoulder blade. He’s looked so many times, patted it, while he mimicked the way straight men hugged. But now he feels it out, memorizes the way it fits in his palm.
Lightning whimpers. “So fucking much. I—ugh.I can’t sleep without it. Dunno how that happened, but its true.”
Doc makes a loose fist in Lightning’s hair, like he’s preparing for impact. “I smell your dirty laundry,” he admits. “Been beating myself up for it.” Been beating off in it, too, but he doesn't confess that bit just yet. He needs to see how far this goes, how real it is before he lays all his cards out on the table.
Lightning gets tense and breathless in his arms. He’s not crying anymore, lashes clotted and golden as he peels away to look at him, cheeks stained, swollen. Doc wonders if he’s ever actually seen him up close like this before, if he’s ever let himself count the freckles scattered over his nose like brown sugar. “Really?” he asks.
Doc nods solemnly, watching him waver, wondering if he’s tipped the scales, if Lightning is gonna kiss him now, or hit him in the mouth with bare knuckles, or maybe push up off of him, run home in the dark. Instead he lets out a long breath, settles into his arms again, tips Doc back until they’re half-reclined on the couch together in a haphazard tangle. It should be uncomfortable, but somehow, it’s not. It just feels fragile, breakable, so Doc tries not to breathe too deeply, and holds on.
“I was worried—I dunno. I thought maybe I was just some stupid kid to you. That you would never like me like that—like this,” he explains, tilting his lips back towards Doc’s shirt, inhaling raggedly, desperately. “And then I worried that even if you did, that I couldn’t—god, I dunno. That I’d be able to touch you and smell your clothes but I’d freak out at the thought of something more? That maybe I was making up how bad I wanted you.”
Wanted you echoes in Doc’s head, catches in this throat so he feels like he can’t speak, like he can’t think. He pushes one of his hands up into Lightning’s hair, kneads gently at his scalp.
“Are you making it up?” he asks.
“No,” Lightning chokes. “I was—I was underestimating it. I can barely—God. I want so much more than to smell your clothes,” he admits.
That makes his stomach drop, spiral earthward like a shot bird. Doc shakes his head, still floored, still mired in disbelief even as Lightning presses against him, heartbeat against his own chest, breath rising and falling alongside his own. “Stupid thing to think,” he mumbles. “That I wouldn’t want you. I’ve been driving myself crazy loving you, thought it was gonna kill me.”
Lightning makes a sound, something hiccupy against Doc’s chest, hands tightening in his shirt before they spread tentatively over his shoulders, then up, past the collar of his shirt to touch skin. It stops Doc’s breath, makes him forget what he was going to say. “I really want to kiss you,” Lightning says then, pulling back to study his mouth, a line through his brow. “I’m not sure what more I’ll be ready for, but I at least know I can do that. That I want to do it.”
Doc closes his eyes, licks his lips. “You can kiss me,” he says, still stroking Lightning’s hair, fraying it to flyaway between his searching fingers. “We can take the rest real slow, or not at all.”
And then Lightning’s blonde lashes flutter, he ducks to hide his blush. “You’re being so nice to me,” he says before looking back up, gaze electric blue and bloodshot and so fucking pretty Doc feels his stomach twist up agonizingly. “ I thought you might laugh. Like no matter how you felt, I thought you’d laugh at me for all this.”
Doc shakes his head, pulls him closer, close enough to smell his tequila-hot breath, which makes his own mouth water in longing. “I’ll laugh at you later,” he promises. “Once I believe this. Once it sinks in. But m’gonna need that kiss, first, kid. M’gonna need to know you’re serious.”
And just like that, Lightning’s lips are on his, soft and warm alongside the scraping stubble of his jaw and the rough, curious shift off his hands. He tastes like alcohol, and then, as Doc holds him steady and licks into the burning heat of his mouth, he tastes how he smells. Salt, fire, engine, musk, boy. Doc groans involuntarily, shuddering as he shifts to accommodate him, as he opens up, letting Lightning prod his tongue into his mouth, everything about his kisses trembling and nervous but so, so sure. Doc can taste the way he wants this and that makes him crazy, allows him to melt into the fissures and cracks in Lighting’s facade of certainty and put him where he wants him. He pushes him onto his back, rolls him into the couch cushions and breaks their kiss to gaze down, broken, gasping. “Oh my god,” Lightning murmurs, eyes still closed, pulse flickering in his throat under the gold shine of his skin. “Jesus.”
“What?” Doc asks, fingers in his hair, hips keeping him pinned. He doesn’t think he’s a flight risk, not anymore, but he still wants to hold him here, like an important note tacked up to cork board. Some precious love letter, a list he can’t forget. “You ok?”
“Yeah, I’m—god,” Lightning murmurs, scrubbing his hand over his red face. “Maybe you think this is stupid, because m’not young enough to say something like this but I’ve—I’ve never felt this way before. I’m like. I’m on fire.”
Doc shakes his head, thumbs over the swollen pout of Lightning’s lips before he bends down to mouth hungrily over the corner, where he’s twisted up inso a hectic smile. “Kid, you’re so young,” he reminds him, voice nothing but a rough whisper. “Too young, even. Nothing but a boy. My boy,” he adds then, before he can stop himself, before he can keep from gunning it because now that his heart is racing so is the rest of him, and it’s hard for his fear to keep up with his hunger.
It makes Lightning crumple though, soften up against him, rub his face into his pullover, the loose skin of his throat, up to his thinning hair. “I am, I totally am your boy, I have been this whole time,” he whimpers, palm spread wide over the thunder of Doc’s heart. “I’m so stupid for trying to convince myself it was something else. For running so hard. M’sorry.”
“Hey,” Doc whispers, holding him close, inhaling from him, thinking m’never gonna let you go. “Maybe we both ran hard. I could have talked to you, about the laundry. Instead I was too busy jacking off into your clothes and hating myself for it to wonder why Flo was taking so goddamned long to fix her washer.”
Lightning looks up at Doc, eyes wide, stricken, too-blue. “You jacked off into my clothes?” he asks, sounding impressed rather than disgusted.
“I always washed it afterwards,” Doc admits, frowning. “But yeah. Not my proudest moment. But you kept bringing it to me, and I never thought I’d have you any other way.”
Lightning kisses him again, this time wetter, slicker, hotter. It’s a messy kiss and it makes Doc’s stomach clench and burn, his hands wandering all over Lightning’s back, down as low as the elastic waistband of his sweats. He wants to push under them so bad it’s all he can think about, but he also promised to take it slow so he holds back, and settles for kneading at Lightning’s lower back, loving the filthy arch of it as he grinds against him.
“That’s so fucking hot,” Lightning breathes as he pulls away panting, lashes still sticky with salt and red from crying things Doc actually notices because their faces are so close. “Fuck. Just kissing you makes me really hard,” he confesses then, shifting his hips so Doc can feel it, the heat and steel-hard line of it burning him through the fabric of their pants.
“Goddamn,” he murmurs, thumbing over Lightning’s cheek, licking the peak of his top lip. “You want me to do something about it? Or are we still taking this real slow?”
Lightning presses his forehead to Doc’s, breathes his air, rubs against his leg so eager and experimental, like he’s testing his resolve, the strength of his want. “Here’s the thing,” he says, gaze flicking up nervous and hooded. “I really want you to touch me. I think about it all the time. Your hands—fuck. I love your hands.”
“But?” Doc asks, gently, carefully shifting one of the hands in question just under Lightning’s T-shirt, to touch the smooth, scalding skin of his back. It’s sweat-dewy, and he wants to lick it, he wants to spread his boy out on his sheets upstairs in his bedroom and look at him, map out every freckle. But he can wait, too. He’s made a life of waiting. So, he just traces his spine, the dimples that frame it, and thinks about all that might come to pass.
“But m’super nervous to touch you. I like. I want to, in theory, but m’scared, I guess, because I’ve never done it it before, and I’m worried I’ll be bad at it,” he says in a rush, eyes shut like he’s worried about Doc’s reaction. “Sorry if that’s a turn off.”
Doc pulls him close, kisses him so deep and so long he’s shivering by the end of it, messy and beautiful and pink-cheeked, a wet spot on his grey sweats where they’re pulled tight across the crown of his cock, so fucking ruined and pretty Doc almost forgets what they were talking about. “You don’t have to touch me until you’re ready,” he murmurs, kissing Lightning’s neck, sucking at the drawn-tight skin, scouring his tongue on golden stubble, drunk on the salt of his sweat. “Just getting to touch you is enough. Just getting to kiss you.” His voice gets ragged as he says it, because it’s true. It really is enough, more than enough. Just this morning he was convinced he’d be buried in his grave with only the shift of dirty cotton against his skin to ever prove he loved Lightning McQueen/ “I’ll do whatever you want, kid. You just tell me.”
He whines, squirming on the couch for a moment before he confesses, “I want you to jack me off.” Then he finds Doc’s hand, moves it so he’s cupping his cock, brushing over it through his sweats. “And then I want you to jack yourself off while I watch.”
Doc swears, needing no further encouragement to feel Lightning out, push his hand under his waistband and take his shaft in hand.
It’s heavy and burning hot and so fucking perfect in his palm. Lightning’s not very big but he knew that already, because he’s looked at him too much, seen the bulge of it, the sweet palmful when he was soft and wearing nothing but boxers and lounging around his house so brazen he made Doc wonder if he was showing off, teasing on purpose. It’s still so fucking good to feel it though, stroke it hungrily, push his thumb through the beading fluid at the tip and spread it all around. “God, so fucking wet for me,” he groans, shoving his hand deeper to cup his balls, roll them gently in his palm, watch Lightning’s head fall back to expose the bobbing line of his throat as he swallows and gasps. “How do you like to be touched?” he asks then, withdrawing so he can get Lightning’s sweats around his hips, really see him.
“Um,” Lightning mumbles, getting the picture and getting his cock out, gaze still locked on Doc’s hands like he doesn’t care how he’s touched, as long as Doc is touching him. “I dunno, I’ve never thought about it. I—I guess not super rough?”
Doc laughs low in his throat, pulling Lightning close and taking him in hand again, squeezing, pulling, making him gasp and fuck his fist because it’s easy to do, easy to impress a boy who’s clearly never taken the time to figure himself or his body out. It’s fine, though, because Doc will figure him out. He’ll study him and flay him open and make Lightning McQueen his life’s work. “You tell me if you don’t like something I do,” he prays into his mouth as he plays with his cock, loving every little sound he makes, every little jump and shift of his hips.
“Fuck, I—ok,” Lightning whines through his teeth, the white flash of them so pretty Doc has to bend down to lick over it. “Can I tell you if I do like it?”
“Yeah, tell me. Let me hear you, love those pretty sounds you make,” Doc rumbles against his throat, pulling on him sweet and slow and tender, loving the way he twitches and flexes like he’s already close. “You don’t have yo hold back or seem tough around me, kid, you can fall apart. I’ll catch you.”
Lightning sobs weakly, arching his back. “God,” he moans, fucking Doc’s hand, trying to speed up the motion, create more friction because he’s impatient, always racing. “You—it’s like you always say what I need to hear. What m’wanting, even if I don’t know it yet, even—fuck, Doc,” he grinds out, cock pulsing. “How is that so good?”
“I know what m’doing,” Doc assures him, at the same time he thinks I watch how you move, I’ve thought about how you fuck. My whole life has been waiting for this moment, right here. My boy, in my hands. “God, look at you. You’re close to coming, aren’t you? You like a man’s hand on your cock.”
“Yeah,” Lightning hisses, hips rolling, hair clinging his forehead and dark with sweat. “Like it so much. Like it too much, best thing I've ever felt.”
And every word from his lips is so fucking sweet Doc needs to taste each one, he needs to kiss those pink spit-slick lips so he does. He licks them open, sucks Lightning’s tongue into his mouth fierce and possessive. And like that, between filthy kisses, Lightning tenses up and spills over Doc’s fist, ribbons of fire-white, hot and bitter when Doc brings his hand to his mouth once it’s all over.
“Oh god,” Lightning murmurs, touching himself as he softens up, feeling what Doc did to him while he watches him lick up his come, staring wide-eyed. “You like that?”
“Want all of you. Love how you taste,” Doc admits, stunned at the tangy-salt bite of him on his tongue, everything about it overwhelming, perfect. He can still hardly believe this is happening so he reaches out and touches Lightning gently: his hair, the flutter of his pulse, the stained tee-shirt he’s washed one hundred times. Then, he follows his gaze, catches those blue eyes skirting down between their bodies. “Still want to see me make myself come? S’fine if you don’t. I know things feel different after getting off”
Lightning shakes his head, chews his lip. “I definitely still want that,” he murmurs. “Might even want to touch you a little, if you’ll let me.”
Doc hums, the sound low and longing in his throat as he unbuttons his pants and works them down, gets his cock out for Lightning to see the real thing, since he can’t know what he’s talking about yet. You can imagine the weight and the heat and the terror all you want, but there’s nothing like actually seeing a man’s cock in the flesh, not really. So, he doesn’t expect anything more than this as he shows Lightning, stroking his length slow and deliberate, exposing the thick red head as he pulls down the fold of his foreskin.
But Lightning doesn’t reconsider, or pull away. He stares, and continues to touch his own cock almost idly, mimicking Doc’s motion, licking his lips over and over again. “I make you hard like that?” he asks, voice barely more than breath.
“Mmhm,” Doc says, eyes climbing up and town Lightning’s body as he touches himself, drinking in the sight of him half naked, spread out, gorgeous. “Everything about you makes me hard. The way your sweat smells. The way your hair smells.”
“The way my dirty clothes smell?” Lightning asks, very carefully, experimentally reaching out and touching Doc’s wrist as he tugs on his cock, shifting the skin over the bone. It’s not an overtly sexual touch but it coils low and hot in Doc’s gut, makes his breath catch, his hand speed up hungrily.
“Yeah. Not at good as the real thing, though,” Doc murmurs, pulling him closer, inhaling from the sweat-damp ditch of his neck, the warm, secret place behind his ear. “Love the way you smell. S’gonna make me come.”
“Fuck,” Lightning gasps, clutching at Doc, then, after a sharp intake of breath, reeling back to beg, “Will you—can I taste you? Will you come in my mouth?”
And a more cautious, less starved version of Doc might have told him no, not this time, kissed him while he spilled between their stomachs, but Doc is not that man. Not tonight. He’s parched and he’s desperate and he’s in love and he’s drunk on the smell of Lightning McQueen’s body and not just his laundry and so, he grinds out a broken “Yes, fuck, c’mere,” as he rises up and manhandles Lightning down, just in time to spill al over the flushed, gasping slick of his parted lips.
Lightning’s eyes flicker shut for a moment as he winces, but then they’re as wide and blue as the sky again, white on his cheek, on his mouth, tongue flicking out to lick it away and god, he’s so fucking perfect Doc thinks he must be a dream, an apparition through the static haze over his vision. But he’s miraculously still there after it clears, he’s still there even as Doc thumbs his come up from the angle of Lightning’s jaw, and licks the shine it left. “Was that ok? Are you ok?” he asks, worried he’s destroyed the fragility of this somehow, that it’s too much, too soon.
But Lighting just grins wild and golden before he buries his face in Doc’s shirt and inhales. “I’m fucking great, I made you come,” he announces. “Or, I guess I didn’t do anything, but you came, and I was here, so.”
“You made me come,” Doc promises, making a fist in his hair, tilting him back to marvel at. “Came because of your pretty face. Your perfect mouth. The way you smell.”
Lightning grins sidelong then, all cocky now that he’s high on coming, that he’s gotten what he wants. Doc still can’t wrap his head around the fact it’s him that Lighting wants, that they’ve gotten this far and no one’s incinerated, so he touches him all over, breathes from his skin, his oily, perspiration damp scalp. “Maybe you can fuck my mouth next time,” Lightning decides. “If you think m’so cute.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, kid,” Doc teases, gripping his ass, heart leaping at the way he fits himself into it, and does not pull away. “Jesus. You had me so fucked up. You had me coming in your laundry. I’ve never done something so fucked up in my life.”
“Well,” Lightning says, peeling off his shirt and using it to mop up his face. “I didn’t mind. In fact, it would have made me feel a hell of a lot better about the way I was laying up all night smelling my clean clothes because they reminded me of your house and wondering why the fuck that made me feel so many feelings.”
Doc closes his eyes, and finally, lets himself smile. “Well. Now that I know you have a functioning washer, m’not gonna keep doing your laundry for you. But, you can come smell my sheets whenever you want.”
“Deal,” Lightning says, beaming so hard Doc ends up kissing teeth when he pulls him down. So, instead of kissing he pushes his face into his hair and fills his lungs, and for the first time since he met Lightning McQueen, he doesn't feel guilty about it one bit.