Archive of Our Own

"What do you mean, 'of course you have'," Joe asks Tom, because he likes Tom and all, but sometimes Tom is just incredibly full of shit. "Man, I'm an actor too, doesn't mean I've – wait, are you counting shit you've done on camera?"

Tom squeezes his juice box, crumpling the little tetra pack in his big fist, a gesture so simultaneously childish and hyper-masculine that honestly, no one but Tom could do it quite the same way. "Course," he says. "On camera, and off."

"Bullshit," says Joe, grinning, shaking his head. Tom, who's been maintaining his usual cool lack of eye contact, straightens up a little and sharpens his gaze into full-on alpha male mode, calling Joe out. "Bullshit!" Joe persists, unbothered, amused.

"You never did?" Tom presses, scoffing.

"Never did," Joe concurs easily, still grinning and laughing a little. "Look, no offence, man — not my thing. If it was my thing, I'd say so. Come on."

Tom loses his focus as suddenly as he’d gained it, back to slouching and casual, winging the juice box into the nearest trash can with an easy overhand arc. They’re in one of those no-man’s-land places on the set, maybe fifty feet from the hive of activity that is production. “See, that just tells me you haven't lived, bro."

"Right," Joe says, "no life lived could be complete without macking on another dude, that's just”—

"How would you know if you never tried it," Tom says in that weird inflectionless way he has when he's feeling defensive. "You know, it's really fucking easy to sit in judgement but”—

"Jesus Christ," says Joe, taken aback, straightening up, because Tom is genuinely pissed off, hurt. "I'm not picking a fight, Tom, fuck." But Tom is already wheeling away, swinging his arms around, taking the toothpick out from behind his ear and jabbing it into the corner of his mouth, restless and huge. If Joe didn't know for an absolute fact that Tom isn't that kind of guy, he might actually legitimately feel freaked out right now. "Tom, chill out, man. I'm sorry."

Tom jams his hat down onto his head and looks back over his shoulder at Joe, visibly calming himself down. "I get this shit a lot," he says by way of apology.

"I know," Joe says, standing up too, edging in closer now that Tom's arms are contained again. "I'm not saying I would never try it, you know."

Tom looks up, pulls at the toothpick in his mouth, twists his smile around and casts Joe one of those patented Hardy under-the-lashes looks that is far too innocent given all the shit Joe knows Tom has done in his life. "You coming on to me?" he says.

"Yeah," Joe says, calling his bluff but unable to keep from smiling, "yeah, I'm hoping you'll be my first off-screen dude-on-dude kiss."

"Well," says Tom, flicking the toothpick away, tossing his hat aside, playing gay chicken or some shit, stepping in closer to Joe. They're of a height, the two of them, but it's hard to remember it when Tom's so close, looking the way he does right now for Bane, like steroids hyped up on steroids, a fucking pillar of muscle. "Since you ask so nicely." Tom's hand comes up, brushes the side of Joe's neck, but Joe's not going to be the one to flinch, fuck that - fuck Tom, too, and his stupid sense of humor, Joe's not going to —

Joe feels his smile falter, like a light flickering before it goes out, because Tom's fingers are curling around the side of Joe's neck and he's not sure if it's a caress or a threat, so much strength just grazing across the bump-bump of Joe's carotid. If it's a joke, if it's a fake-out, Tom is committing to it, and Joe — Joe has to stop thinking like that, there are no cameras here, no one standing to the left or right holding a boom mic or a reflector dish, no one to see if Joe's mouth opens just a little, in invitation.

There's always that moment of clarity before a first kiss, that brief one-foot-over-a-cliff moment where you think, I'm going to kiss that mouth, I'm going to — because you know in a few seconds, it will have happened. You can't unkiss someone. It stays there forever, that first kiss, like a mark only the pair of you can see.

Tom has really beautiful lips — there’s a weird fucking thought.

Joe thinks, I'm going to — but Tom gets there first, and Joe would startle (not bluffing, nope, not bluffing) except for those callused fingertips against his neck, holding him steady without the slightest pressure. So Joe doesn't startle, just holds still for a moment, lets Tom's mouth brush against his, then purses his lips out, chases Tom's mouth as it retreats minutely, returns the kiss for kiss before breaking away completely.

This close, Joe can't look into both Tom's eyes at once, flickers his gaze between one and the other, trying to figure out what the — what the fuck, what the actual fuck had that been — "Never did that sober before," says Tom thoughtfully.

"Never did that without someone yelling cut," Joe returns, smiling nervously.

"You sort of did," Tom points out.

"I guess I did," Joe says, and reaches up, brushes Tom's hand off his neck.

You can't undo a moment like this, Joe thinks, watching Tom go over and scoop up his hat, shove it back down onto his head. You can't unkiss someone.

“Dinner, tonight,” Tom says, stopping Joe just as he’s popping by to wave goodbye to everyone, wrapped for the day.

“Tonight?” Joe says, “dinner?” He’s well aware he sounds like an idiot, but he can’t help it. There are people around, tons of people, and Tom kissed Joe a couple of hours ago. Joe kissed Tom. There are people around.

“Steaks,” Tom clarifies. “I know a place.”

“Right,” says Joe, because ‘steaks’ doesn’t sound like — well. It’s not quite the same as dinner, ‘steaks’. “Uh, text me the details? You have my number still?”

“Oh, I have your number,” Tom says, in that certain tone of voice that sends Joe right back to the fact that there are people around, but then he grins and waggles his eyebrows and Joe laughs because Tom is clearly fucking with him now.

“See you later, then,” Joe says, lifting a hand in farewell and then waving it away in amused dismissal. It’s not until he’s walking to the car they called for him that Joe’s throat goes tight with — he’s not sure what. He pulls out his phone on the way back to the hotel and texts Anne.

Do you have dinner plans? Me and Tom are getting steaks.

She must be wrapped for the day too because the answer is almost instantaneous. Wow, am I invited to the sausage party?

Steaks, Joe writes back, smirking, not sausage. I thought you gave up the veggie thing? :0P

Thanks but sounds like a boys’ night out. Say hi to Gary and Christian and Tom for me.

Joe blows out a breath and settles into the upholstery, feeling a tension he hadn’t recognized before bleeding out of him all at once.

Annie’s right, it’s a bit of a sausage party that night. Joe doesn’t know Christian or Gary very well yet, not like he knows Tom, but they seem alright, down-to-earth, genuine. Christian’s sticking with his Batman accent, somewhat unevenly, and Tom’s own accent drifts after his, probably without Tom noticing. Gary smirks across the table at Joe; at least the two of them are firmly entrenched in their own nationalities. Inevitably, they all start talking about work, about Hollywood.

“Oh, Joseph here has opinions,” Tom says, suddenly very English, drawling, playful, “on the industry.” He slips a sideways smile at Joe.

“Don’t we all,” Joe says cheerily, vaguely, and they laugh appreciative actor laughs, and Joe gives Tom a swift ankle-kick of warning under the table, inclines his head politely when Christian starts going on about what a pain the ass it is to have to read scripts for projects that will never happen in today’s climate. If Christian or Gary give a shit what Joe thinks, they can ask him themselves; it’s clear they don’t care though, because they don’t ask.

They’re all at the same hotel, so they share a car back, Joe offering to take the narrow space beside Tom as no one else can comfortably be his seat mate the way he’s built at the moment. Tom’s never that generous with personal space, but it grates on Joe more than usual tonight, the way Tom spreads his legs wide, cups hands on his knees instead of folding his arms up a little. Tom is very warm, pressed along Joe’s side. He smells like meat and coffee: manly, off-putting.

No one waiting in the lobby for them; Nolan’s production people are doing a good job of keeping their hotel a secret. Gary peels off to talk to someone at the desk about something, Christian races for the elevator because he was supposed to Skype with his wife and kid ten minutes ago. Tom and Joe wait for the next one, Tom not-very-subtly checking himself out in the distorted reflection of the brass elevator doors. He’s still standing too close to Joe.

“Thanks for inviting me out,” Joe says, to fill the silence, hands stuffed in his jeans pockets.

“Thanks for coming,” Tom says, earnestly, “fucking terrifying, dinner with those two.”

The doors open, they get into the elevator. More mirrors, real ones this time, on the walls. Tom leans in and checks out his head stubble up close. “I always look like a weirdo without hair,” he says.

“You’ve got a nice head, man,” Joe reassures him. “I had to shave my head for this movie last year, it wasn’t pretty at all.”

“I’m not meant to be pretty,” Tom says, frowning at himself. “I’m meant to be a scary motherfucker.”

“Oh yeah,” says Joe, snorting, “you’re very scary.” He’s seen Tom kiss dogs full on the mouth, seen him go soft and giggly at the sight of babies, seen him get down on the ground, belly flat to asphalt, to commune with a kitten someone brought on set.

“Am I pretty?” Tom asks, straightening up, looking over his shoulder at Joe, mouth curving up. “At least say I’m pretty.”

Twenty-four hours ago, Joe would have had a reaction for that, something normal and easy and funny, but now he can’t for the life of him figure out what that reaction should be. He hesitates a little too long, frozen on the need to improvise, and for one, two, three seconds, Joe can only think of saying, no, you’re not pretty, no, like that’s any kind of rational response from one friend to another. His throat unsticks, and the words rush out, uncensored: “You know you’re pretty.”

It’s at least as stupid an answer as his first impulse — it’s not even honest, Tom can be pretty, has been pretty, but pretty is not what he is right now, tired at the end of a long day, smelling of steak, bald and bulky and thick through the neck, in need of a shave, a change of clothes, a shower. Tom Hardy is not pretty, he’s not—

The elevator pings and lurches to a stop, the break of inertia making Joe inhale sharply, realize he’d been — what? Leaning into Tom?

“My floor,” Joe says, and pushes past Tom, gets out, forgets to say anything else. He doesn’t have any of the lines in his head anyway, it’s all just a weird rush of panic that erases his memory of the short walk to his room, the act of getting his keycard out, getting in, turning on the lights. The next thing Joe remembers he’s sitting down hard in the stiff hotel wingback, stomach queasy.

He should know better than to eat so much red meat at bedtime, Joe thinks, and opens his laptop. He browses Tumblr until the letters get too blurry to read and then it’s easy to get into bed, to fall asleep between cool sheets.

The fact is, Tom is working harder than anyone on this movie, harder than Christian or Anne or Joe, mostly because his bodyguard or BFF or whatever has him doing push-ups on his knuckles every time there’s a lull. Joe would feel sorry for him except it’s kind of fair turnabout after Joe’s six weeks of bruised everything in the rotating corridor for Inception, Tom not doing anything more strenuous than checking his email while lying on the hotel set carpet with his stubble and his pomaded hair.

Gorgeous, smirking, looking up at Joe through thick lashes.

This is the kind of shit that keeps floating to the surface of Joe’s mind, troubling him. This is the weird kind of thing that’s making him pull out his phone over and over, distracting himself with Tumblr, with Netflix, with anything at all that can keep his head busy and away from — from Tom.

Tom, who’s doing some sort of masochistic chin-up marathon not twenty feet away, muscles bulging, cheeks red, neck running with sweat.

Joe gets up, heads for his trailer. Someone will find him if he’s needed.

“New girlfriend or hitRECord?” Anne asks, inviting herself in by pushing open the door.

“HitRECord,” Joe admits, looking up, pushing his glasses up his face, blinking at the sunlight that chases in after her. “Sorry, am I anti-social today?” He’s spent most of the afternoon in here, announcing a couple of upcoming shows, tweeting a little frantically — anything he can think of to do, other than sit and be quiet and let his mind wander.

“I was hoping for a new girlfriend for you, Joseph,” she mock-scolds him, coming over, sitting on his couch. “You seemed more intensely distracted than usual, on set.”

“Yeah,” says Joe, smiling. “I think I’ve had too much coffee or something.”

Anne looks quizzically at him, tilting her head. Her eyes are even huger than usual, dark-lined around and around, lashes sticky black with mascara. It’s like being questioned by a Powerpuff Girl. “Really not a girlfriend?”

“Not a girlfriend,” Joe says, in all honesty. He pivots his screen so she can see for herself, the dark Tumblr background, the paused video, the growing list of reblogs underneath.

“You have that sort of,” she waggles her fingers around him, ignoring his laptop, “sort of freshly infatuated air about you.”

Joe considers laughing, denying it, but instead some impulse makes him twist his mouth ruefully. He blames the anime eyes, the hair. He’s a sucker for a girl with pretty eyes and long hair.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says, leaning over to pat his knee. “Say no more, Jose. I’m needed on set in five. Just wanted to check in on you, make sure you hadn’t actually pined away to nothing.”

“Thanks, Annie,” he calls after her. “You should really knock, though, what if I was naked or jerking off or something?”

“Then it would have been lucky me,” she says happily, and bounces down the stairs, out the door.

The next day Joe’s flying back to LA, has the week off while they shoot more stuff with Bane and Batman. All he has to do, when he’s finally wrapped for the day, is to get in a car, go to the hotel, go up to his room, and sleep. That’s it.

Joe is fine with all of it right up to the sleeping part.

He should be tired, was up for a middle-of-the-fucking-night call time today, spent far too much time sitting on his ass, which always leaves him feeling wrung out and bleary by nightfall. Instead Joe lies in his hotel bed and channel surfs, scratching his belly through his t-shirt, hating everything on TV, needing it to be on anyway. He ignores his iPhone, which is lying on the sheets next to him, on silent.

It buzzes around one in the morning.

finally done for the nite. u still up mate.

Joe looks at the message, clicks the phone’s screen off. He has to be at the airport in five hours, after all.

At one thirty Joe sits up and grabs the phone, reckless.

Room 1506.

The answer, which he hadn’t honestly thought about in any detail, arrives before he’s even put the phone down again.

b there in 5

Joe springs off the bed, abruptly knocked from sleepy impulsiveness into actual mind-numbing panic. His room is kind of a disaster, clothes everywhere, computer cords snaking over the floor, the bed unmade, a slap-chop infomercial on the TV. Joe himself is pretty much a disaster too, unshaven, unshowered, still with traces of movie make-up behind his ears, gel in his hair, wearing last year’s hitRECord merch and a pair of boxers that were kind of worn-looking two years ago and are now downright disrespectable.

Priorities: Joe flicks the TV off, finds a pair of jeans, starts pulling them on over his boxers, and reconsiders. Strips off the underwear and tries again, buttoning the fly with hands that are maybe trembling a little, fuck. Quick reapplication of deodorant, a chase around his face with a tissue to catch up any orangey foundation that might linger, combing his hair messy and then neat again as he scowls at his pale exhausted face in the mirror. What the fuck is he doing, what the fuck does it matter if Tom —

The knock at the door is classic Tom, a series of hyperactive raps followed by three heavy thuds: part cartoon character, part bulldozer. Joe rips the door open and tries to look like he hasn’t just been staring critically at himself in the mirror.

“I want to eat a fucking piece of bread,” says Tom, wearing a t-shirt, dress pants, and a baseball cap, looking gritty-eyed and anxious as Joe himself feels. “I’m hiding from P-Nut.”

Joe laughs in spite of himself and waves Tom in, making over-the-top spy movie gestures, pretending to check that the hall is clear.

Tom is holding a brown paper bag in his fist that he crumples open, revealing a sandwich that looks like it’s spread with diarrhea and boogers.

“Where the fuck did you find a marmite and pickle sandwich in downtown Pittsburgh?” Joe marvels.

“Made it myself, didn’t I,” says Tom with a conspiratorial grin. “Look, I’d offer you some but I genuinely might be forced to rip it out of your jaws, I’m so fucking hard up for carbs.”

Joe holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All yours, amigo.” It’s good, it’s normal — normal as Tom Hardy ever is, eating an English monstrosity in fierce ravenous bites in Joe’s hotel room at nearly 2 in the morning. It’s easy to figure out how to act because Tom’s kicked Joe right into his default mode for dealing with him: amusement paired with bafflement, and a healthy dose of mild disgust to top it off.

Tom perches on Joe’s desk, chewing noisily, looking around with clear interest and a just as obvious lack of judgment on the state of the place. “You flying out tomorrow?” he asks, or Joe thinks he asks, around an ambitious mouthful of bread.

“Yeah, first thing,” Joe says. He sits on the edge of the bed, unthinking, realizes what he’s done, pops to his feet again. “You’re still here in a week? I’ll be coming back.”

“Mm,” Tom agrees, swallowing the last of the sandwich. He exhales dreamily, goes into the bathroom and helps himself to a glass of water. “That was heaven,” he says, coming out, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “That was worth a hundred press-ups right there.”

“Glad I could be your carbohydrate speak-easy,” Joe says with a grand gesture, entertained. “Anytime you want to have yeast-based products, I’m your man.”

Tom is licking his teeth, sucking at them a little, scratching behind his ear, looking for all the world like he really is part pitbull. “Are you?” he says, absently, and then looks up, gaze sharp and curious and ten times smarter than Tom usually lets on. “Are you my man, Joseph?”

He always says it like that: Jozeph, the ’s’ almost a ‘z’. It’s never bugged Joe in the least before, he’s the man of a hundred names, but right now Joe can’t stand the sound of it, abruptly and irrationally annoyed with Tom, with everything about him — the space he occupies, how he fidgets incessantly, his childish oral fixation, the sideways baseball cap he’s been wearing lately.

The cap especially, Joe thinks, pulse thudding dully in his ears, rare anger rising suddenly. He steps forward, knocks the thing off Tom’s head with a swift slice of his hand, thinking that Tom might not be the kind of guy to start a fight but maybe he’s not one to run away from one either. Joe glares at Tom, daring him, bracing himself to get knocked down by one swing of those massive arms, and sure enough Tom’s arm comes up — but not with a fist, with an open palm, fingers grabbing at the front of Joe’s shirt and pulling him forward all too easily because Joe had been back on his heels in anticipation of a shove, a punch, and here Tom is hauling him in close, here Tom is smashing his mouth up against Joe’s.

Joe’s fury metamorphoses instantaneously into a seething hot lust. (Maybe, Joe thinks vaguely, maybe it was never fury at all.) He exhales hard, the sound of it painful, gets his hands on Tom’s face and holds him still for more kissing. This is not the curious platonic stage kiss Tom had offered yesterday, it’s not the head-tilting romantic kiss Joe performs in movies; this is almost savage, this joining of mouths, breathing hard into each other’s lungs, trapped. Tom’s skin is stubbled, his chin scratches against Joe’s; it should be completely repellent, but it isn’t, he isn’t.

Tom’s fist still has Joe’s shirt balled up, stretching the worn cotton, dragging the collar down and the tail up, but somehow it’s still a shock when Tom’s other hand lands on the skin of Joe’s belly. Joe jumps, pulls back, panting, but doesn’t go any farther. He stands there where Tom’s holding him pinned, one hand high on his chest and the other hot and gentle against the flat lightly furred planes of Joe’s stomach. “We can stop,” Tom whispers. His lips are red-swollen and his gaze keeps flickering down to Joe’s mouth, like Joe’s lips might look the same.

“I’m thirty, you know,” Joe says, because he’s been thinking that a lot lately, when he’s not able to successfully think of anything else. “You’d think I’d have — I’ve never wanted to, before.”

Tom’s brows gather and smooth out in a quick flicker of emotion. “It’s bisexuality, Joseph, not juvenile onset diabetes or schizophrenia. It can strike at any age.”

Joe explodes into a helpless chuckle in spite of himself. “You should,” he says, and hiccups a little, fuck. “You should do a PSA maybe.”

Tom laughs and his grip loosens a little, like he’s less worried Joe is going to squirm away. His hand goes flat in the center of Joe’s chest, warm and big and friendly. “Should I stop?” he asks, voice still, serious.

Joe thinks about it for a second, really thinks. Tom’s hands feel familiar, now he’s used to them. They’re just bodies, after all, and as bodies go, Tom’s got kind of a nice one — okay, more than kind of nice — and Joe is surprised to find that he doesn’t have any particular objection to Tom’s body this close to his. Joe shifts his weight from one foot to the other, aware of his half-hard cock up against the denim of his jeans. It’s maybe even a little better than ‘no objection’, he admits. “No,” Joe says, “don’t stop. Just — I don’t know if I. I might have, you know. Another existential crisis.”

“I’ll get you through it,” Tom says warmly, and his mouth is still curving a little as he moves in to kiss Joe, tender open-mouthed kisses that set Joe’s pulse racing all over again.

Once he’s acclimated to Tom’s size, it’s not that different, really. Hands are hands, mouths are mouths, genderless and sexy all at once. Tom peels Joe’s shirt up over his head; Joe shoves down the urge to say something about how he’s a skinny motherfucker, he knows it, because he’s never apologized for it to a girl and he’s not going to start now just because Tom’s built like a mack truck. Besides, Tom doesn’t seem to have any objections or hesitations. His arms go around Joe and hold him steady as he kisses Joe’s shoulders, his chest, pauses for a while on Joe’s right nipple while Joe tries to decide (with only about half his brain cells firing) if it’s socially acceptable to hold onto your partner’s bald head. Joe throws politeness to the wind and grabs on, skates his fingers down over the soft downy stubble, winds up with his hand tucked under the collar at the back of Tom’s t-shirt. “Take this off,” Joe says.

Tom straightens up and pulls the t-shirt off seemingly without looking away from Joe, which should be physically impossible. The slightest smugness plays across Tom’s face as Joe helplessly looks down, takes it in: Tom’s immensely muscled chest, the black ink over skin.

It’s actually, Joe thinks dizzily, blood rushing out of his head and down into his jeans, it’s actually really fucking different, being with Tom. There is not a single plane of that body that could be anything but male.

“Existential crisis time?” Tom asks, the smug look slipping into real concern.

“No,” Joe says, shaking his head, “no, actually, can I just,” and he steps closer, glides his arms around Tom’s narrow waist, drags him in until their chests and stomachs are pressed together, until Joe is close enough to feel the quick animal in-and-out of Tom’s abs as he breathes faster, until Tom’s arms come up again and circle Joe’s waist too. Skin on skin, it’s electric, it’s insane, how could Joe only be figuring this out now, and he’s moving in to kiss Tom’s mouth again when Tom’s hands slip down just a little onto Joe’s hips, holding him steady as Tom pushes his own hips forward.

Joe knows that move, he’s done that move a lot in his life, but has never once been on the receiving end of it. That move is called feel how hard you’re making me, baby, and Joe has to admit, he’s more than a little impressed with what Tom is demonstrating. He upgrades ‘impressed’ to ‘fucking amazed’ when Tom shimmies his ass a little and shows Joe that this move, in this instance, can actually be called ‘feel how hard we’re making each other.’

“Oh fuck,” Joe says stupidly, and kisses Tom’s plush lips with something of their earlier desperation, getting one hand between them so Joe can feel up that wall of muscle: traps and pecs and abs and all sorts of anatomy Joe hasn’t ever known in quite this way. When he pulls back this time, Tom is looking at Joe with that stupid unfocused look guys get when they’re really literally mind-numbingly hard — sort of tender and dimwitted and heated all at once.

“Can I touch you,” Tom asks, downward inflection of his voice that’s thoroughly English, “can I — would it really weird you out if I wanted to suck you off?”

“You want to suck me off?” Joe asks, shaking himself a little to get out of his own tender-dimwitted-heated trance. “Really?”

Tom huffs a laugh, humorless. His hand drifts down Joe’s chest, over his stomach, stops at the top button of his jeans. His thumb taps the metal once, twice. “You haven’t thought about it?” he asks curiously. “I thought — I thought you must have thought about it, the way you came at me tonight.”

“I came at you?” Joe repeats.

Tom bounces his head, midway between yes and no. “I thought you were,” he amends amiably enough. “If I was mistaken, I can”—

—“I would really, really, really,” Joe interrupts, “like it if you wanted to go down on me.”

Tom’s smile is genuine this time, and he just sinks to his knees like it’s nothing at all even as Joe’s pulse suddenly leaps and thuds in his achingly hard cock. Joe closes his eyes, drops his head back, because no, he hasn’t thought about it, but he’s pretty sure he isn’t quite up to watching Tom open his pants, watching Tom pull him out and stroke his cock with his loose fist, watch Tom’s mouth open in a lewd kiss over the head of Joe’s cock. At least, Joe doesn’t think he can watch all that and keep some modicum of self-control. He fists his hands at his sides and struggles for air as Tom sucks, capacious sure mouth, tongue smacking along the underside and then slipping up and down, pointed and clever, playing that little sensitive spot that girls never seem to notice.

Tom pulls off then, and Joe blinks his eyes open, looks down, wondering if Tom’s changing his mind, but no, Tom’s just working Joe’s cock with a loose fist and a truly appreciative look on his face. “Nolan’s costumer has a thing for this, you know,” he says.

“For blow jobs?” Joe asks stupidly, because the sight of Tom kneeling in front of him is as good as he feared.

“For your cock,” Tom corrects mildly. “Well, for cock in general, but yours in particular. Did you never notice how fucking tight she made Arthur’s trousers? And you’re downright obscene in this film too.”

Joe is kind of amazed he can spare the blood to blush, but he feels his cheeks heat up. “You were looking? At my dick? I mean, way back then?”

“Just because you never thought about it,” Tom scolds, flashing crooked teeth, and leans back in, sucks Joe down farther this time.

Joe wants it to last, because it’s crazy fucking hot, and good, and Tom seems to like doing it, but of course that means it’s over sooner than he’d like. One second Tom’s bobbing up and down, sucking, tugging gently at Joe’s balls, and then Joe’s scrabbling for Tom’s ears, his cheeks, trying to warn him. Tom backs off, but only a little, and Joe gets to come into Tom’s mouth with Tom’s pink plump lips still stretched around his cock, sucking gently.

“Oh my fucking god,” Joe says, when he really can’t take more. He pushes Tom away gently by the forehead, takes a couple of staggering backwards steps, hobbled by half-down jeans, to land bare-assed on the hotel bed. Tom gets up, goes back into the bathroom, has his second glass of water for the night, and emerges with his pants open and his boxers tented out impressively in the gap of his open fly.

“Don’t worry,” says Tom, “you don’t have to put it in your mouth.”

“I’m not worried,” Joe says with more bravado than sense. Even his scalp is tingling, still.

“Yeah, well,” Tom says, and comes to stand between Joe’s spread knees, slips the elastic down over his cock and frees it. Joe’s seen some dicks in his day, but never one that’s hard and this close to his face at the same time. It’s — it’s a nice dick, as dicks go, Joe thinks fuzzily. It curves up a little, it’s not monster-sized to match Tom’s Bane body, it’s — it’s nice. It’s wet, too, and as Joe watches it flexes a little and gets wetter. “I’ll just have a wank,” Tom says, still adjusting his boxers and pants. “If you — if you don’t mind just sitting there. I promise I’ll — I won’t be messy.”

“Don’t be a dumbass,” Joe says, and brings his hand up, wraps it around Tom’s cock. It feels like skin, soft and silky, and it leaps a little in Joe’s hand. It’s Tom. “Here, hold onto my shoulder or something.” Tom’s hand closes on Joe’s shoulder a moment later, and Joe begins to stroke, weird at this angle, from this side of things, but Tom’s resettling his weight so his legs are farther apart, he’s making a pleased humming-sighing sound, so Joe must be doing alright anyway. It’s too much, still, again, to look up at Tom, so Joe looks at Tom’s uncut cock, at his neat dark blond puff of pubic hair, at the treasure trail pointing up to his navel, at the ’til I die’ tattoo on Tom’s right hip.

Joe doesn’t remember making the decision to do it, but he finds himself pressing a fond open-mouthed kiss to the ink, then over farther, where the skin is lightly furred and Joe can feel the way Tom’s hips are making tiny involuntary jerky thrusts into Joe’s fist. From there it’s nothing at all to just lift his head up again and put his mouth over the head of Tom’s cock. Feels bigger than it looks, tastes bitter and slick and completely unlike pussy, the pre-come of a dedicated meat-eater, of Tom. Joe hears a low hungry sound and only realizes afterwards it came from him. Tom’s hand in Joe’s hair, shaky but gentle, and then Tom is crying out fast and low, and Joe doesn’t even need the warning, feels it in the heel of his hand, the bump-thud at the base of Tom’s cock. Joe backs off just in time, his hand warring with Tom’s to catch the hot wet pulse of come slipping over the webs between fingers.

Tom tumbles Joe back onto the bed before Joe has time to react, his heavy hard body over Joe’s, his mouth kissing Joe’s mouth, his neck, sloppy and happy and affectionate. “Are you serious,” says Tom into the skin of Joe’s shoulder, still kissing, “how are you so — fuck, Joseph.”

“I was going to wear these jeans on the plane tomorrow,” says Joe as the wet seeps through, but he’s laughing anyway, feeling drunk with fatigue and giddy with release. It’s a fucking adrenaline high is what it is, he admits to himself, palming Tom’s head with familiarity now, it’s like pulling off a perfect stunt, like running flat-out and then stopping for no good reason.

Tom hauls himself up on his palms like he’s going to do another set of push-ups with Joe right under him, but instead he kisses Joe’s mouth, twice. “That was brilliant,” he says, sincerely.

“Yeah,” says Joe, nodding, kissing back, “I, uh, I’m starting to see your point about this whole, guy on guy,” and it’s so utterly stupid that he has to laugh, and Tom laughs too, even though he probably doesn’t know what’s so funny.

Tom gets up after another minute, pulls his shirt on, zips up his pants. “Right, have a good flight then, mate,” he says, while Joe sits up and buttons his pants too.

“Shit, I have to be up in, like, three hours,” says Joe, looking over his shoulder at the clock on the bedside table.

Tom flashes a mischievous grin at Joe. “Good fucking luck with that.”

Joe groans and stands up, stuffs his hands in his jeans pockets and resists the urge to slouch his shoulders inwards, suddenly conscious of his bare chest again. “See you next week,” Joe says, not sure how to proceed.

“Next week,” says Tom, digging his keycard up and picking his hat off the ground, heading for the door.

And then Tom’s gone, and the room is quiet, and Joe sits down on the bed again and thinks, you can’t unfuck someone either, can you.

Joe isn’t trying to kid himself: it’s a relief to hit the ground running in LA, to be back in familiar territory with his own place, his own stuff, more than a week’s worth of clothes. He’s never been good at the concept of ‘time off’ but he tries, meets up with friends, mainlines some movies and TV shows, even gets out the guitar for long enough to realize that he’s not — he can’t make music, right now. There’s a knot of low-grade worry where his singing voice usually sits.

It’s stupid to worry, though. So Joe traded orgasms with a guy; it was an experience, it was a fleeting moment of experimentation, it was fun and surprisingly good, but that’s all it has to be. If it had to happen, it’s kind of awesome that it was with Tom fucking Hardy, who’s hot by anyone’s standards, and who’s eccentric enough to shrug the whole thing off. He seems to be shrugging it off, anyway — he doesn’t text, not so much as a peep.

It is, Joe muses, probably an unlooked-for perk of hooking up with a guy. Look ma, no strings.

His flight is at midday on the way back east, and he goes straight to where they’re shooting because they need to refit his wardrobe or something (the costumer has a thing for this — if anyone measures his inseam today, Joe is not responsible for how much he’ll probably blush). Chris comes by to greet him, welcome him back to the production, and Joe thinks it’s characteristic of the guy, stand-up of him, taking notice of Joe even in this kind of minor supporting role.

“Come down and watch for a bit if you’re not in a hurry,” says Chris, checking his watch. “We’re just waiting for the set to be dressed.”

“Yeah, of course,” says Joe, holding still while the tailor jabs pins into his trouser cuffs. “No, I’ll be there in a few.”

He talks himself down the whole way, back in his street clothes. Tom might not even be here today, even if he is he’s working, even if he’s on a break it doesn’t mean he’ll want to talk, even if he wants to talk, Joe can play it cool…

Tom is talking to Marion, just off to the side near the craft services table, Bane mask pushed up on his forehead, gesturing with his hands. She’s got her arms folded, frowning, serious, beautiful. Joe pulls a breath through his nose, keeping his pace steady, thinking zen thoughts, but just as he draws up within a few yards of them someone pulls Tom away and Joe is free to approach Marion alone, relieved and not-relieved at the same time.

“Bonjour, chérie, comment ça va?” Joe asks, coming up alongside Marion, gently squeezing her shoulder, wary of her costume.

“You’re back!” she says delightedly, and throws her arms around him, kisses each cheek. “Between you and Tom, my English is never going to improve here.”

“Between me and Tom,” Joe repeats, not getting it, horrified to feel his ears getting warm even though there’s actually zero innuendo in Marion’s tone, her words. It seems like the sound of Tom’s name is enough. Fuck.

“Oh,” she says, waving a hand in Tom’s direction, “that one was just prattling away to me in French too.”

“Tom was?” Joe says, confused.

Marion raises one eyebrow and lays her index finger across her lips: secret. “Impeccably, too.”

“He’s fluent?” Joe asks. “Why didn’t he — okay, now I feel like a total idiot.” Tom’s heading back over, free of the mask now, a bit more relaxed now he’s on a brief break.

“Have something to eat,” she says, ignoring his embarrassment, moving away to have a quick discussion with someone on the crew, leaving Joe alone as Tom arrives.

“Back, are you?” says Tom, taking a paper plate and loading it down with vegetables, busy and matter-of-fact and cheerful.

“Marion says you speak perfect French,” Joe says, piling his own plate with pita and hummus. Tom looks over and gives a pitiful sigh at the sight.

“Does she,” Tom answers without answering. He half-sits on a stack of black and steel equipment cases, paper plate bending a little in his hand. He is, if possible, even bigger than he was a week earlier. His shoulders look like they wouldn’t be out of place on a steer.

“C’est vrai?” Joe asks, because he’d been way the fuck at the other end of the table for the Paris Inception press conference and had been too involved in mental translations of his own to even notice if Tom was using the closed circuit translation earbud. Now he’s got a plate full of food, and abruptly no appetite. He’s got to stop staring at Tom’s arms.

Tom’s mouth curls, in reaction to Joe’s words or maybe his darting gaze.

“Enfoiré,” Joe scoffs, a little unevenly. “How’d that happen?” His stomach is twisting, he feels clammy and awful.

“Summers in the south of France when I was a kid,” says Tom, and picks up a broccoli tree, bites into it unenthusiastically. His teeth are very white for all their unevenness.

Joe puts his plate down again, mouth gone dry. “I didn’t know,” he says unnecessarily. “Say something, come on.”

Tom licks his fingers and finishes chewing, mouth going from smile to smile like he’s trying them all on for the right fit. “Alors, tu t'es encore laissé tripoter par la costumière?”

It takes Joe a moment to get around Tom’s accent (which is very good, but different from Marion’s) and another to realize exactly what Tom’s said in that utterly filthy voice, but once it sinks in, that’s it: Joe’s gone from off-kilter and awkward and sickish to straight-up hard as a rock and horny as fuck. “So,” he says, in a great helpless gust of air that’s trying to be casual and missing by a mile, “so, you have a few minutes?”

Tom looks down at his plate of raw vegetables and shrugs. “Nothing keeping me here, I guess.”

They walk from place to place together all the time at work. There’s nothing unusual about it, just two actors who are friendly, who are keeping each other company for a few minutes as they cross the massive studio, break out into the sunshine, make for the little village of trailers at the other end of the lot. It’s all completely everyday — so long as no one looks too long and hard (ha) at Joe’s jeans and sees that he’s one hundred percent not-casual and not-professional at the moment.

They go up into Tom’s trailer, Tom holding the door open for Joe, still picking his teeth for stray broccoli. Tom’s trailer is — it’s a trailer, Joe’s been in a hundred of them, he honestly couldn’t give a shit when Tom’s right behind him. Tom turns the lock on the door, comes up level with Joe, puts his arms around Joe from behind and unhesitatingly lands one hot palm over the ridge of Joe’s hard-on, like he noticed, like he was looking again.

Joe exhales hard, eyes shutting, lets his head sag back against the rock that is Tom’s right shoulder, even as his hips give a slow involuntary roll into the sweet pressure of that hand. “This won’t do,” says Tom, clicking his tongue in mock disapproval, groping Joe’s cock a little roughly, root to tip. “You can’t go round getting your wardrobe all wet like this, you dirty bastard.”

“S’not my wardrobe,” Joe points out, wishing Tom would just — “oh, fuck.”

“Not today it isn’t,” Tom says reasonably, “but tomorrow it will be, and where will that leave us.” His hand lifts, returns with a press of fingers right over the head of Joe’s cock, where the cotton of his underwear is embarrassingly slippery and damp. “Had I better stay away from production while you’re working?” he asks, whispering now. “Or should I just take the matter into my own hands?”

“Hands,” Joe says, genuinely stupid with lust now. “I like the — hands.”

Tom laughs voicelessly, bows his head to Joe’s neck and kisses gently while he works Joe’s fly open, his zipper down. He doesn’t fuck around with Joe’s underwear, just jams his hand between Joe’s stomach and the elastic waistband, and then he’s got Joe’s cock in his callused grip. “Did you think about this,” he asks, less jerking Joe off and more just feeling him up still, “did you do this and think about my hand here?”

Joe isn’t sure what to say, because the porn-dialogue answer is god, yeah, it’s all I could think about; the real-life answer is no, not really, but I like it now; and the honest answer — the honest answer is when I really couldn’t help it, sometimes. He settles for a heartfelt groan and an uncomplicated, “Yeah, god, like that,” because Tom’s hand is fucking awesome and there’s no denying that it turns Joe right the fuck on like a light switch.

Tom’s really doing it now, hard fast tugs on Joe’s cock that are going to land them both in a mess if they don’t slow down, and of course Tom’s already in full wardrobe, can’t get jizz on his fucking sleeve. Joe sags back farther, resisting reality for a moment longer, and then shifts forward again, reaching down to knock Tom’s hand away. “We can’t do this, you have to be back there, you can’t have,” Joe says confusedly, and Tom resettles his hands on Joe’s hips, shoves against Joe’s ass a little roughly, his hard-on quite literally very hard, almost painfully hard against Joe’s ass.

“Will you let me put it in your mouth again?” Tom asks hotly. “If I come in your mouth no one would know.”

That’s — intellectually, that’s kind of repulsive, or it should be — but Joe’s intellect is a distant voice in the background, muffled under a whole lot of fuck, okay, yes. “Yeah,” says Joe, wanting it, not willing to stop and think about what the fuck that might signify. Tom lets him go, gives Joe a little shove in the direction of the couch, yanks down his own pants just enough, and sits down with legs spread, cock out, waiting for Joe to get with the program and onto his knees. Joe blinks, sways. Goes.

It’s more than a two-second kiss in an unaccustomed place, this time; this time, it’s unequivocally about getting Tom off as fast as possible. Joe doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, fumbling more than a little, worried about teeth and what to do with his tongue, the back of his throat, his hand, but mostly he’s thinking about how good Tom’s cock feels in his mouth, big and hard, salt-bitter, live. Joe sucks, goes down as far as he dares, remembers to breathe only when his vision goes a little black and patchy. When girls do this for him, he never touches their hair because one of them told him once that girls hate that, it’s rude and pushy, but here’s Tom’s fingers carding through Joe’s hair, soft at first, but then with a little unsubtle pressure, showing Joe the rhythm he needs, never pushing Joe down further than he can manage — and it’s hot, actually, Tom needing him, Tom wanting this from him, Tom’s little choked grunts like he makes when he’s doing ab crunches or one-handed push-ups, like Joe has the power to make him strain, make him work.

When Tom comes, it’s sooner than Joe expects — he’s only just gotten into a comfortable rhythm, felt like he wasn’t working at full capacity yet — but it’s surprisingly gratifying anyway, backing off hastily and then doing his level best with hand and mouth to contain Tom’s orgasm. Tom’s quick to intervene with a handful of tissues from the box on the end table, thankfully, and Joe grabs one to wipe his mouth, still vaguely surprised by how warm it was, how much there was when it spilled onto his tongue.

He comes up, panting, hot and shaky, letting Tom guide him with a hand under his arm, lands on the couch beside him. The angle of his hips and thigh turns out to be ill-advised, trapping his still-hard (harder?) cock in an uncomfortable way, the sort of thing that’s always kind of embarrassing to fix when a girl’s watching — but it’s Tom, Joe has seen Tom with his hand on his own crotch ten ways from Tuesday, so Joe doesn’t hesitate in reaching down with a slight wince and shifting his cock through layers of underwear and gaping denim.

“I’d return the favor,” Tom says, patting Joe’s arm, his knee, with a heavy sloppy post-orgasmic hand, “but I can’t go out there with a red mouth, I have to take the mask off in this next bit.”

“It’s okay,” says Joe, who had kind of expected Tom to take turns but doesn’t want to be a dick about it.

There’s a knock at the door, a called Mr. Hardy?, and Tom sits up lazily while Joe bolts to get his pants fastened again. “Shh, Joseph,” Tom says calmly, quietly, “no one’s coming in here. I’m wanted on set, not you.” He stands up, pulls his pants closed, looks very calm for a guy who just got finished wiping come off his dick. “Better if you stay a few minutes and go when everyone’s filming.”

Joe sits back down, nodding along, and it’s not like he’s never snuck around on the job before, but it’s been a long damn while, not since the teenage years when his hormones spilled over a little more frequently than was strictly professional.

Tom is mostly ready to go, by the looks of him — no hair to get mussed, only a faint flush high in his cheekbones to betray what he’s been up to. “Make yourself at home,” he says, hand already on the trailer doorknob, “computer’s there, feel free, whatever.”

Joe nods, attempts a smile, casual, friendly.

“If you want to knock one out,” Tom says, pausing, “be a dear and leave some sign of it in here.”

“Some sign,” Joe repeats, baffled, but then has to shut up because Tom’s popping the door open and talking to the PA, alighting from the trailer and letting the door spring shut behind him.

Presumably, Joe thinks, Tom meant ‘no sign’.

He opens his fly again, absently rubs his cock, which had gone down to a startled half-mast with the knock at the door.

Then again, it’s Tom. He’s kind of a giant pervert, likes to tell the story about wanking into his auntie’s knickers thinking that they belonged to a fan.

Joe thinks about that, thinks about tossing the trailer for a pair of Tom’s underwear, about jerking off into them, leaving them wet and crumpled in the middle of the floor. The idea is definitely not without appeal.

Joe thinks he can do better, though.

It’s a while since Joe used a PC. It takes him a couple of minutes to figure out how to work the webcam, another couple to find how to capture video. It’s been years since Joe sat in front of a camera and jerked off, and back then it was for work, trying like hell to shed the wholesome child actor miasma that clung to anyone who did TV work before puberty. Joe feels a little inspired, though, and he’s always pretty comfortable in front of a camera. He does it in a single take (mostly because he’s pretty sure this laptop doesn’t have GarageBand or Final Cut Pro on it, and has no idea how to edit any other way). He keeps eye contact with the lens the whole time, ignoring his own image in the monitor except to make sure everything important is in frame. No clothes, no inhibitions, just getting off while the red light blinks and his mind replays the feeling of holding Tom in his mouth, the fullness of it, the taste of it.

He’s not sure what makes him lick a finger, slip it back behind his balls. From this angle it’s not going to be much other than suggestive, and what the hell is Joe trying to suggest anyway? He likes a finger up his ass, lots of guys do, it’s not — it doesn’t have to be anything more than that. Joe lets his eyes slam closed, though, because he’s abruptly thinking of Tom’s fingers, thick and rough with calluses from barbells. His mind goes, then, from Tom’s fingers to his forearms, imagining them braced on either side of Joe’s shoulders, Tom’s slightly bowed muscular thighs pressing flush with the back of Joe’s legs, fuck, fuck.

Joe opens his eyes, checks the monitor quickly, sees himself with legs spread, white glinting spatters on his stomach and chest. He pulls his hands free, leans into the camera, smiles shakily. “That a good enough sign for you, Tom Hardy?” Impulsively he reaches out, smears his slick thumb over the little webcam lens, cuts the recording there.

His heart is pumping hard as Joe does the necessary clean-up, dresses, sits down again at the computer to make of copy of the file on the thumb drive from his keychain. It’s reckless and stupid to leave anything like this sitting around, and Tom might be a friend but that isn’t the same as being entirely trusted. Risky fucking shit, especially with the last bit, the name, making this something that can’t be written off as a leaked audition tape or even a performance for a girlfriend.

Joe ejects the drive, stands up, checks again to make sure he’s buttoned and zipped and as respectable as could be expected. It smells like come in the trailer. Joe lifts his fingers to his face — they smell too.

It’s less a matter of effort, leaving the trailer, and more a matter of momentum. Joe takes one step, two, refuses to look back over his shoulder at the laptop with the video still front and center, keeps moving until he’s got the door open and is taking the steps two at once, is landing on asphalt, is pivoting off to find someone to call him a car because he really doesn’t think he can sit and watch Tom lumber and prowl and swing his arms, not knowing what they’ve done, what they’re doing.

Hit fucking record, indeed.

Tom texts him at the hotel three hours later.

r u fucking serious u shameless hollywood tart

Joe is still trying to suss out the tone of this message when the next arrives.

what rm r u in? im coming over

Joe texts him the room number calmly enough, ready this time.

dont expect much of me for a bit, had a gr8 wank over that vid just now

Joe gets halfway through typing, Clearly, I only want you for sex, :OP before he realizes that might be a little bit too true. He backspaces and changes tack, Netflix, putain. Did you eat yet?

so much chicken i might lay eggs

Joe laughs at this, shakes his head, orders up some burgers and fries in case Tom feels like breaking the rules again. It’s a bit of a wait before the food arrives, and Joe’s done his dinner and picking at his limp salad before there’s finally a knock at the door, rap-rap-rap, thud, thud.

“Hi, hello,” says Tom, when Joe lets him in, barely waiting for the heavy door to spring closed again before he has his hands on Joe’s head and is kissing his mouth appreciatively. It’s warm and almost gentle, like a kiss for someone you’ve been thinking about kissing rather than thinking about fucking.

Joe backs out of it, a little thrown, and waves a hand towards the room service trays. “Can I offer you some carbs?” he asks in his car salesman voice.

“You’re a right bastard, Joseph,” says Tom, but he goes over and grabs a fry anyway, rips the end off it with his teeth while he dips the fingertips of his other hand into the ketchup puddle, licks them clean. “Mm, jesus, it’s heaven in here, between the junk food and you.”

“I aim to please,” Joe says, sitting on the bed, watching Tom. “So you liked the video?” he prompts, a little shamelessly.

Tom shoots Joe a look that suggests he sees right through Tom’s leading question. “Yeah, got a pretty penny for it from TMZ, cheers.”

“Ha ha, motherfucker,” Joe says, worst comeback ever, but he backs it up with a couple of shadow-boxing jabs that have Tom leaping back out of Joe’s limited range of motion from his seat at the edge of the mattress. He giggles as he goes, fries sticking out of his mouth still. Enough said, really: Tom gets it, he’s going to be careful. It’s still terrifying, but it’s kind of exhilarating too. Joe leans back on his hands, grinning helplessly, feeling giddy with it. “So what do you want to watch?”

They argue over Netflix for a long time before Joe gives up and browses into his iTunes library, points the mouse at the copy of Apocalypse Now. Tom subsides into the mattress and grins, waving his hand in a gesture of get on with it, then.

It feels like a normal night of hanging out with a friend, truth be told. No one’s putting the moves on anyone, no one’s trying to impress anyone except maybe in a Brando-imitation oneupmanship kind of way. Tom wriggles around to get comfortable but stays on his own side of the bed, he scratches his chin and bites his nails and farts twice, all normal Tom stuff. Maybe, Joe thinks vaguely, maybe they got it out of their systems now, maybe all they’d needed was something really pervy and kind of kinky, and now they’re done. Joe isn’t sure he’s even a little attracted to Tom right now, heavy fidgety gassy Tom who squints at the screen and picks his teeth.

“Right,” says Tom, about an hour in, and reaches out a socked foot, slaps the laptop closed with it.

“Hey,” says Joe, protesting.

“Hey,” Tom repeats back in an entirely different way, and rolls across the space between them, grabs Joe by the wrists, stretches his arms up against the headboard, and swings one leg over Joe’s hips, pinning him before Joe can do anything about it. Joe pulls at Tom’s hands, testing, and Tom only tugs Joe’s arms tighter, smirking down at him.

“What the fuck is this?” Joe asks, half-smiling, trying to ignore the way he’s getting hard, hoping Tom doesn’t notice. He’d blame contact with Tom’s ass but it’s actually sitting lower down than that, nowhere near Joe’s dick.

“I don’t know,” Tom muses, and looks down at Joe, contemplative. “I want to hold you down and fuck you, I can’t stop thinking about it.”

That should most definitely not be hot.

Joe isn’t sure, then, what it is that makes his hips arch up so hard, makes Tom laugh a quick surprised laugh, makes Joe’s heart start pounding hard enough that Joe can see it, his chest jumping faintly under his shirt.

“Look, I’m — if that’s going too far, I get it,” Tom says, still holding Joe hostage, effortlessly switching so that he’s got both Joe’s wrists inside one fist, freeing up the other hand to stroke down over Joe’s face, his jaw, his lips. “I’m happy to stick with what we did earlier. Even if you just want me to watch you wanking again, I’d definitely not mind.”

“I’ve never,” Joe says, biting it out, voice strained. “Have you?”

“Course I have,” Tom says, just the way he did when this whole fucking insane thing started, easy and smug and dismissive.

Joe doesn’t think of himself as being a very competitive person — he’s collaborative, he’s ambitious, but he doesn’t have a thing about stepping on other people to prove himself as the best — and yet something about Tom’s little smile makes him just as insane now as it did on set a week ago. “You don’t have to hold me down,” Joe says. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not,” and he lets his arms go as slack as he can given the way Tom’s hauling on them, turns his head and pulls Tom’s index and middle finger into his mouth, lewd deliberate echo of the scene earlier in Tom’s trailer.

“Mm, must be all the training, the fight scenes,” Tom says, shifting up a little on his knees, settling back down and wriggling his ass side to side over the ridge of Joe’s erection, “makes me go all mad and alpha male. All I want to do is rub against things, have them push back.”

“Well,” says Joe, “if it’s a thing,” and throws himself into it with no warning, using his feet as a brace to buck up and pivot, twisting Tom off him partway before Tom can catch himself and regain control — and regain control he does, shoving Joe forcibly down into the mattress with the flat of his palm, pressing his body’s weight hard into Joe’s, lying flat over him, gasping for air, pupils blown.

It’s more skirmish than sex, or maybe it’s skirmishing alternating with sex — Joe hardly knows, only knows his adrenaline is going full bore, between the struggling and the grinding of hips and the kisses that turn into sharp little bites at a moment’s notice. Tom’s strong, has the weight advantage, but Joe’s limber, crafty, and not afraid to resort to a well-timed grope to distract Tom’s focus for the instant it takes to throw him off. Joe has never gotten the rough play stuff before, but he fucking gets it now, it’s about this good-painful push of body against body, like anything that presses you to your limits, makes you slam up against the boundaries of muscle and bone and breath until you’re so wound up you can barely stand it.

Tussling turns to stripping, and soon enough they’re both bare-ass naked, Tom heavy over Joe, kissing and digging fingers into flesh, their cocks riding unevenly against bellies. Joe feels lit up, helpless with wanting, and he’s not really sure when he says it, how he even manages it, but he must have asked somehow, because suddenly Tom is pulling up, kneeling back, hovering over him. He says, “Are you sure?”, and Joe nods without being sure of anything at all.

Tom doesn’t have to hold Joe down, and in fact doesn’t even pretend to try when it comes right to it. He’s gentle, the way he turns Joe over, shows him how to hold his body, nudges Joe’s legs further apart while Joe hugs a pillow and thinks, fuck, fuck, fuck. Tom has lube and condoms; Joe resolutely doesn’t contemplate how Tom decided to bring them along.

“It hurts at first,” Tom says, pressing his fingers in, slick and insistent.

“Bring it on,” Joe mumbles, meaning it, needing the push.

“It gets good, after,” Tom continues, moving in and out, curling finger joints to find the place that makes Joe’s face go tight and then slack.

It hurts at first, but it gets good after, perfectly succinct Hardyesque Guide to Being Fucked, Joe thinks, pressing his forehead into the mattress, mouth open, body open, heaving in breaths like he’s just finished a race, great gulping blade-edged gasps of air that aren’t quite enough to help him cope with the fact that it’s Tom’s cock, Tom’s fucking cock, pressing bluntly into Joe’s ass. It hurts but it’s already getting good; it hurts but it is good; it doesn’t hurt, it’s just good, holy fucking christ, it’s so good.

“Okay, okay,” Tom’s saying, in answer to something Joe is probably saying, or maybe just the noise he’s making, Joe can’t really hear himself over the rushing in his ears, the panting of his breath. “Fuck, you’re tight.” And Tom’s fucking Joe, he’s actually fucking him, little shallow jolts of feeling that have Joe’s eyes watering, have him cursing and biting down on the urge to shove back into Tom, get more. Tom used lots of lube, Joe guesses. It feels slick and easier than he’d guessed; it’s not the in-out that has him sweating, it’s the impossible stretch of it, a stretch that’s easing more with every little thrust. Joe’s body, unasked by Joe’s brain, is letting Tom in.

Joe’s brain doesn’t have much to say about anything after a minute more, subsiding entirely and giving over control to Joe’s lower functions, the ones that are shamelessly needy, that let Joe take what he wants. Tom’s good, he’s very good, fucks like an angel if you ask Joe, alternating slow hard deep and fast shallow frantic. At some point Tom urges Joe up onto his hands, drapes his sweating hard-muscled body over Joe’s back, and that changes everything, makes Joe reach around behind him blindly to get an arm over Tom’s neck, hold him there, kiss him badly at a bad angle.

It’s not about coming until it abruptly is, and Joe holds onto his cock, sketches a few strokes, and comes all at once like a solid thud to the back of his skull, driving breath and need out of him in long ecstatic lines. Tom has him, he’s got him, he’s making awesomely incoherent noises, nothing like working out now. He’s got to be coming too, sounding like that, delighted and overwhelmed and breathless, chin notched solidly over Joe’s shoulder.

Finally Joe can collapse down from shaking arms, barely aware of Tom pulling out, away, moving around the bed to deal with the condom, the mess. Joe usually does that part; he’s aware of that much. Mostly he’s thinking how great the bed feels, how his muscles have gone rubbery and lax like after an awesome run.

“I may have kicked your computer to the floor,” Tom says from somewhere close by, “but it seems okay.”

“I do that all the fucking time,” Joe says, not bothering to open his eyes.

The mattress tilts a little and Tom’s lying alongside him, still damp with sweat and too hot to touch. “Do you want to finish the movie?” Tom asks. His hand rests on Joe’s lower back, like Joe just happens to be where Tom wants to put it.

“Ha,” says Joe, already mostly asleep.

“Just being polite,” says Tom. “Next I’m going to offer you a cuppa.”

Joe hears himself snort in an imitation of laughter, and then he’s out.

Okay, so Joe is fucking Tom Hardy.

Or Tom is fucking Joe. Whatever.

This is the fact that Joe forces himself to swallow along with two or three gulps of scalding coffee, sitting in the make-up trailer the next morning, trying to make eye contact with himself in the mirror and not quite managing it.

They’re fucking, and Joe likes it. They’re fucking, and he woke up this morning sore all over, grinning, hearing Tom singing very badly in the shower behind a half-closed bathroom door. Tom’s staying over now, that’s how much they’re fucking.

Tom’s two chairs away getting a shave and reading a magazine, slouching and sloppy and doing a passable imitation of someone not fucking Joe.

“Jet lag?” asks the girl doing Joe’s make-up.

Joe looks at his reflection sharply, sees the circles of fatigue under his eyes. Joe’s skin does this, shows everything he’s been through in the last twelve hours. Drives make-up people insane. “Yeah, a little,” Joe says, not willing to break his own gaze now he’s managed to make contact. He looks the same, if sleepy. He doesn’t necessarily look like a guy who got fucked last night by Tom Hardy.

“Not me,” says Tom, unasked, “I was up all hours having wild sex.” He cants a grin at the woman shaving his head and she pulls a doubtful face, smiling back in spite of herself.

“Damn,” says Joe, too tired to even think of blushing, “why didn’t I say that?”

“Believability,” says his make-up girl, wry twist of lips, and they’re all laughing now, Joe feigning indignation.

It’s a packed shooting schedule that day, especially for Joe, twelve hours on the call sheet which inevitably balloons into sixteen hours of hurry-up-and-wait. Tom’s around for most of the first half of the day, and then it’s mostly Joe and Christian, Joe and Gary. Joe appreciates Chris’ thoughtfulness, of course, condensing Joe’s scenes into as few days of work as possible, but by the time he’s finally done for the day Joe feels like he’s been through the wars, aching and gritty-eyed and with a low-grade headache nudging the base of his skull. He drowses helplessly in the car on the way back to the hotel, and when he’s finally in his room he barely manages to set his phone’s alarm before kicking off shoes, socks, pants, and falling asleep.

The next day is much the same, flat-out work. He and Tom really have very little material together on this project, which means of course that Joe’s busy days are the days when Tom is barely needed at all. Joe catches a glimpse of him for the first time about midday, in street clothes, hovering at the fringes of the activity with his hat on sideways and his ever-present cardboard coffee cup in hand. P-Nut is nowhere to be seen, surprisingly.

Between takes, Joe goes over and stands by Tom, hastily eating yogurt from craft services because they haven’t had time for a meal break and he hasn’t eaten anything but half a bagel at the crack of dawn.

“Good work, out there,” Tom says, pointing his chin at the artificially snowy street.

“Yeah,” says Joe, “I’m really good at walking and frowning.” He tilts an eyebrow up and looks over at Tom. “What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you weren’t called until evening.”

“Well,” says Tom, “I rarely come when called.” His mouth purses and then moves into a curve, mocking.

Joe scrapes the last of the yogurt out of the cup and spoons it into his mouth, hurrying, seeing that Chris is waving him back in already.

“Hang on,” says Tom, and catches Joe by the shoulder, reaches out and swipes a thumb over the corner of his mouth.

“Make-up would have caught that,” Joe says, instead of thanks, thrown into jittery heat by the graze of Tom’s hand. He pivots and hastens back to the set. The next time he looks, Tom is gone again.

It’s hard to get away; there are always union breaks but those tend to be the moments when Chris wants to gather the actors in and talk about what they’re really doing, talk story and character. It’s what makes him more than just a blockbuster director, Joe gets that, but it’s still all he can do to hold still and listen, to nod and agree that he understands whenever Chris pauses and looks at him.

Finally Joe catches fifteen minutes at the end of a dinner break, hastening away from the set with his phone already half out of his pocket.

Where are you?

The answer comes a long minute later: gone mate

Joe slows down his pace considerably, frowning at his phone screen while he thumbs back an answer. Off the lot, gone?

new york gone, comes the reply. pr 4 warrior

Joe stops in his tracks. All day he’s been anticipating this moment, he realizes abruptly, fully caught out in this knowledge only now that he’s brimming with disappointment that he’s not going to get his five minutes with Tom. It takes him a few tries to come up with an answer that’s the right mixture of nonchalance and affection.

You back soon? he finally sends.

The third time Joe clicks his phone’s screen on to check for a new message, he realizes he was due back on set two minutes earlier, and he has to sprint so he won’t be holding everyone up too badly.

“Uh, Mr. Gordon-Levitt?” asks a PA, approaching him sort of widdershins, obviously new to the gig by both obeisant tone and mode of address. “Sorry, Dan says we need the phone out of your pocket, it’s, ah, it’s breaking the line of the pants or, or something.”

Joe, used to this from the days of tight trousers on Inception, surrenders his iPhone with a sigh, tries not to think a little pitifully of how Tom would be shooting him a dirty shark’s grin if he’d been close enough to witness this encounter. But because Joe’s a professional, and works hard, he shelves the unsettled feeling in his gut and turns his mind back into the moment, to lines and delivery and the moment they’re trying to create.

If his character is a little edgier than he’d planned, it’s nothing Chris seems to mind anyway.

The original nine o’clock wrap on the scene they’re shooting becomes ten, ten becomes eleven, and it’s nearly midnight by the time Joe is set free, by the time the PA surrenders Joe’s phone back into his custody. Joe takes it as casually as he can manage — he knows he’s already got a bit of reputation for being a gadget addict around set — but he doesn’t make it more than a few steps away before he’s clicking the screen on and unlocking the phone.

Several texts waiting, of course, a couple of missed calls, a fucking landslide of emails Joe doesn’t want to contemplate right now: they’re probably almost all Tumblr and Twitter notifications. He strips down one-handed in the wardrobe trailer, switching the screen from palm to palm as needed, clicking through first the calls (his agent, his publicist — everyone else knows he’s shooting Batman and wouldn’t be bothered trying to get him) and then the texts (his agent again, his publicist again, his personal assistant back in LA with his Toronto film festival travel plans, some hitRECord details for the upcoming shows, and—)

—And: back 2mrw. come by when ur free. 1602.

Just like that, all the tension goes of out Joe. He pulls on his street clothes at a slower pace, abruptly aware of how exhausted he is, how long a day he’s had. He’s basically going to faceplant into his mattress back at the hotel, no energy left in him for anything else. It’s just as well, he thinks.

Joe is one step inside his room when his sneaker skids over something on the carpet. He looks down to see the white plastic of a hotel room key under his foot, positioned like it had been pushed in under the door. He stoops down, picks it up, turns it end to end in his fingers absently before moving quickly and slapping it down on the TV stand.

He gets ready for bed in quick efficient motions. Crawling between the sheets is bliss for his exhausted body.

Half an hour of tossing and turning later, Joe gives up, throws the covers off, sticks his hand in his boxers. He jerks off thinking about the little muscles high up Tom’s forearms, how Joe kept seeing them flexing and flickering whenever he’d looked over for a moment while Tom was fucking him. It’s a weird thing to fixate on, probably, but it seems beautiful in retrospect; it’s easier to remember, too, than anything else about that night.

Joe’s honestly still about half-asleep in the make-up chair a scant few hours later when he becomes vaguely aware of the quiet conversation taking place between two of the make-up artists. They’re talking in quiet tones, obviously thinking Joe really has drifted off, not wanting to disturb him more than their jobs require.

“I know, I was surprised too, I remember everyone saying what a sweetheart he is,” says the woman who’s tending to Joe.

“No, I think he is, he really is,” says the other one, who’s waiting for Marion to arrive.

Joe, who’d been contemplating stirring to let them know he’s actually awake, decides to stay still for a moment.

“Well, you could have fooled me last week,” Joe’s make-up artist says, a little archly.

“It’s that regimen he’s on, haven’t you seen him out there with that personal trainer he’s got? Anyone would be in a bad mood, the work he’s doing.”

“Well, all I can say is thank god for whatever girl took him home this week.” Her hand comes down onto Joe’s shoulder as she speaks, gently, but it’s all Joe can do to hold in his guilty startle, like she’d known somehow that Joe was the — well, the girl in question, he supposes.

Instead Joe clears his throat and blinks his eyes open, reaching for his coffee. He can see, in the mirror, the little moment of eye contact between the two women as they try to guess if he’s going to be upset with them for gossiping about a fellow actor. He settles back with his coffee and gives it an ironic lift, quirking his mouth. “To whoever fucked Tom’s grumpies away,” Joe toasts, with aplomb.

“Salut,” says Marion, entering at exactly this moment, far too lovely for this time of day, for anyone who is coming into the make-up trailer rather than leaving it. “May we all be so lucky,” she adds, raising her own latte and shooting a twinkly-eyed smile at Joe.

“Amen to that,” says the woman now sponging foundation onto Joe’s neck.

Joe’s day, though brutally early, is over pleasantly soon. It’s barely noon when they wrap his scene. Joe tries to deaden the bounce in his step a little as he leaves set, but it’s hard not to grin at passers-by. It’s one of those days where everything seems amazing: the intricately organized chaos of a Nolan production, the work they’re doing, the crisp lines of everyone in their wardrobe. The warmth of the August sun and the chatter-rumble-honk of the streets of the city as Joe walks to the car they’ve called him.

Are you at the hotel? Joe types once the car gets going.

The answer is immediate: yes ru coming up?

Joe grins at the phone but doesn’t bother replying; he’ll be there soon enough.

He’s never considered himself to be a very sex-driven person; Joe has never in his life gone out with the express purpose of getting laid, never pursued a girl just because he wanted to see her naked, never dedicated any serious time to exploring the twists and turns of whatever kinks are hardwired into his own psychology. Sex is fun, it’s good, it happens when it happens, and when it doesn’t happen there are easy ways to get around feeling a little horny, ways that don’t cheapen other people, cheapen Joe.

It’s weird, then, to step into the elevator and catch sight of his own face in the mirrored walls, see his own pupils wide and dark with anticipation, notice the impatient drumming of his fingers on his thighs. Joe’s been putting a considerable amount of energy, the last couple of days, into not obsessing about this. Now his brain has a free rein and suddenly Joe’s pulse is kicking up just from watching the numbers light up, one after the other, up to the sixteenth floor.

Joe steps into the hallway, trying to check his pace into something at least a little dignified. He doesn’t even fucking know what he’s expecting to happen when he gets the door open, that door down the hall, only that Tom’s probably there, waiting. Waiting for Joe.

He fumbles the key out of his pocket and sticks it in the door, but the little LED flashes red, rejecting the swipe. Joe swears under his breath, pulls the card back, double-checks that it’s the one Tom left for him, does it again. Red. “Motherfucker,” he says, annoyed now, turning the card around, making sure he’s got it the right way. Red.

The door knob rattles and turns before Joe can make a fourth attempt, and there’s Tom standing in the doorway, wearing nothing but a pair of blue briefs.

“Fucking card isn’t working,” Joe says by way of greeting.

“Done for the day?” Tom replies. All the ink on him, it’s almost like he’s always a little clothed, Joe thinks, and takes an involuntary step forward. “How’d it go?” Tom is holding the door open now, moving aside so Joe can come in.

Joe comes in, dropping his laptop bag on the floor as he does. He yanks his t-shirt over his head, gets right to work on his belt buckle. Tom releases the door and it swings closed with a muffled bang, muted by the hotel’s thick carpeting. He’s watching Joe but not getting involved — maybe he just woke up? Joe kicks off his jeans, shoes and socks, drops his boxers, and loses them too. He’s already hard, he’s not sure when that happened.

“The curtains are open,” is what Tom says, looking Joe over quite openly and yet without the sharp greedy interest of immediate arousal.

“We’re on the sixteenth floor,” Joe points out, starting to feel a little stupid because Tom’s not — Tom’s not doing anything, he’s just standing there like Joe being naked and hard doesn’t signify any need for action on his part. Joe should make a move but he’s frozen, still half-expecting Tom to reach out first.

Tom looks Joe in the eye again. “Is this meant to be some sort of hint?” he asks, deadpan.

Joe laughs, nervous now. “Too subtle?”

Tom takes one step closer, still not smiling.

Joe can’t stand it, reaches out his hand and strokes fingers over Tom’s shoulder, broad and sleep-warm. Just the faint contact brings his breath short. Joe doesn’t even know what’s going on with him anymore, fuck, but Tom feels right, he feels necessary. “I can be less subtle,” Joe offers in a low tone. “Do you want me to be less subtle?”

Finally Tom’s expression fractures out of its weird stillness, his mouth dropping open with the quick sip of air he takes. “I shudder to think,” he says, very soft and low, and when Joe’s fingers trip over his nipple, he literally does shudder minutely, quickly.

Joe edges Tom back to lean against the closed door with his fingertips alone, little points of pressure against Tom’s solid chest, urging him to go where Joe wants him, and then his fingers trace down Tom’s sides, raising visible goosebumps as they trail.

Joe has never done this, never been like this, not in real life, but something about the solidity of Tom, his breadth, his heat, makes it seem easy, natural; he’s kneeling before he’s aware that he’s decided to kneel. He’s mostly only thinking that he wants to see his thumbs pressing into the little divots that run in converging lines above Tom’s hips, wants to hook the elastic of those blue briefs over his hands and pull it out and down. He wants to push his cheek against the soft-secret place beside Tom’s hardening cock. He wants to open his lips against the shaft, wants to drag his mouth up as Tom’s cock lifts and stiffens, wants to suck the round slickened head into his mouth, push the foreskin back with his lips, wants to take it in as far as he can, feel Tom’s length against the trough of his tongue, the live-beating heat of him.

Joe wants to do it all, so he does; for long minutes he’s lost in it, somewhere between the work of coordinating breath, lips, jaw, tongue and the sheer physical animal pleasure of it all. He’s dimly aware of Tom’s hand, pushing back gently through Joe’s hair, skidding down a little messily to cup Joe’s jaw, where Tom must feel the hollowing of Joe’s cheek as he sucks. Tom’s quiet except for the occasional gasp and sigh, but his fingers are shaking a little, shivery against the flushed heat of Joe’s face, his temple, his forehead.

It takes Joe a minute to register it, that Tom’s hand isn’t just stroking over his brow but actually pushing gently on it. He pulls back with an utterly embarrassing wet sound as his mouth breaks its hold on Tom’s cock — but looking up the landscape of Tom’s body, Joe is honestly too impressed to bother with blushing. Seems a waste of time anyway, what with the probable state of his mouth — wet, swollen, gasping a little. Joe’s past the point of worrying about seeming desperate; he just flat out is, now.

“Did you eat lunch already?” Tom says.

Joe blinks, closes his mouth. “What?”

“Lunch?” Tom repeats, not at all like Joe is on his knees in front of him, halfway through sucking him off. His cheeks are hectic red, his lower lip looks like he’s been biting it, and even his voice is a little rough — but here he is — what? Wondering if Joe is feeling peckish?

“I,” says Joe, swallowing fitfully. “Not yet, no.” He slides his hand up and down Tom’s shaft, slower than he’d been going a moment ago, but firmly. “Is this leading up to a really tacky line about needing more protein in my diet?” he asks, maybe getting it now, smiling a little uncertainly. “Because I was already going to try swallowing, you don’t have to be all sleazy about asking.”

“No,” says Tom, hand closing around Joe’s fist, stilling it. “No, it wasn’t — it’s not a line. I just — we could order up lunch.”

Joe slips his hand out from under Tom’s, gets back on his heels and then pushes to his feet. The thrumming need of a moment ago has faded into a dull ache at the base of his skull, in his balls. His ears feel too hot, his skin abruptly too cool. He grabs for his boxers, starts tugging them over his feet.

“I was thinking buffalo wings,” says Tom, snagging his own underwear with his toes, bending down to grab them, get them on. “Wings and celery. You could get something else if you want. You like those, those chicken tenders, don’t you? I can’t have them, breaded and all, but”—

—“Look,” says Joe, hastily yanking his jeans up, buttoning the fly, “you don’t have to be so polite about it. You want me to go, I’ll go.” He keeps his gaze down, like he needs to watch to make sure he gets the right hole on the belt when he buckles it.

“No,” says Tom, literally stepping on Joe’s toes in his eagerness to interject, “no, that’s not it, I want you to stay, I just“— Joe slows down in spite of himself, caught by the earnestness of Tom’s expression, his alarm. Tom purses his lips, blows out a breath of air. “It’s been two days since we had more than a minute, I’ve just got back from the airport, I’m tired and I probably stink, I“—

—“You don’t stink,” Joe says, because he sometimes says entirely the wrong thing. But it’s true anyway; Tom smells good as usual, better maybe. He drops his hands from where they’ve been slowly buckling his pants, moves them over and around to steady Tom, hold him by the waist, hold him where he’s standing — too close, maybe. Too close to resist kissing, anyway.

When Tom pulls back a moment later his expression is utterly transformed, smiling and fond where he was worried and intense. “I don’t stink?” he repeats, lifting his eyebrows, amused.

“Well,” Joe equivocates, “no more than usual.”

“What do you want to do?” Tom asks quietly, mouth still curving. “Should we keep it simple?”

Joe nods dumbly before pulling Tom in again, kissing his ridiculous mouth, grabbing hold of his thick upper arms, his solid lower back. “Truth?” he asks, lips open against Tom’s.

“Mm,” says Tom, not sounding particularly interested in much beyond getting Joe’s pants back off.

“Truth is, I keep thinking,” Joe says, “about the other night. When you — it felt — I keep thinking, it can’t have felt as — I must be remembering it wrong, building it up in my memory a little.”

Tom’s matter-of-fact now, his hands moving steady and friendly and quick as he gets the buckle open, the fly, yanks both jeans and underwear down so Joe’s ass is exposed again, a little more gently when he comes back around to hook the elastic down over Joe’s cock. It’s weird because girls aren’t generally like this, they’re more hesitant or coy, they leave the pragmatic stripping to you. But it’s also not weird, somehow, because Tom’s not being sexy Tom or flirty Tom, he’s just — he’s just taking Joe’s pants off. Yet it’s surprisingly hot, his assured motions, his confidence. “So,” says Tom now, once Joe’s jeans and underwear drop back to the floor, “you want me to fuck you and see if I can measure up to the last guy who bent you over and made you scream?”

Joe has to laugh at this, because only Tom could be so ridiculously self-deprecating and self-congratulatory in the space of one inane question. “I don’t remember screaming,” he muses, still grinning.

“Well,” says Tom with great authority, “that makes me absolutely certain I can do better.”

Joe has his doubts, privately; he’s still pretty sure that his memory has been playing tricks on him, telling him he liked it more than he did, because he can’t really have liked it that much. But for all Tom’s playful smiling he seems to have taken the challenge to heart, because it turns out that it really is as good as Joe remembered; it’s better, in fact.

They don’t make it to the bed after all, and maybe that was even part of Tom’s plan, because the bathroom counter gives Joe two walls at right angles, perfect for bracing himself while Tom hauls Joe’s leg up, knee over Tom’s huge biceps, and pushes in. The granite counter is a little cold at first and then slippery once it’s warmed up; it’s all Joe can do then to hold steady while Tom fucks him, not as gently as last time, not nearly as gently. Tom’s all hard muscular framework, moving parts, determined and hungry and not particularly worried about Joe being able to keep up, to take it.

Joe loves a challenge.

He especially loves this kind of a challenge, the kind that pushes him past the point of thinking, turns his mind into a neat succession of action-reaction pairs, drives him to discover what his instincts are when all the intellectual pretensions are just stripped away and Joe is most purely himself. Left to their own devices, it seems, Joe’s hands can’t seem to stay away from Tom’s broad shoulders, Joe’s leg will keep hooking around and hitching him closer, Joe’s head will fall back and his mouth will gasp. With so much of him seemingly out of his conscious control it’s maybe not surprising that Tom succeeds in making him shout after all.

Finally Tom breaks, or maybe Joe’s own desperation overwhelms him, but they finish it out with Joe on his back on the floor, sticking and slipping against the cold marble tiles while Tom holds his legs up and ruts between them, frantic, messy, savage, makes them both come in a matter of a minute or less.

“Holy fucking christ,” says Tom into Joe’s armpit, some time later. “That was intense.”

Joe reaches down and gets Tom’s ear between his fingers, not really caring what he’s doing as he wiggles it around, just wanting some part of Tom in his grasp. “Are you always like this,” Joe says, “or is this more of the muscle-building carb-depleted roid rage thing?” He hastens to add, “Not that I’m complaining, obviously.”

Tom shakes his head, laughing quietly. “I’m substance-free, Joseph. But if you’re asking if I’m the same when I weigh twelve stone and am allowed to have a scone at breakfast, the answer’s no.” He lifts his head up so he can look at Joe. “I’m not very flexible, like this,” he says, and leaves it there, like he doesn’t know how many thoughts he’s just triggered in Joe’s mind. Joe’s still working through some of them a minute later when Tom pipes up again. “So for this big fight sequence we’ve been choreographing,” he says, like Joe has come into an ongoing conversation, “I thought I’d try something.”

“We have a fight sequence?” Joe asks, still probably a little debrained from coming so hard.

“Me and Christian, of course,” Tom says. “Shooting in New York, next month.”

“Oh,” says Joe, because of course he’s read the script, but he hasn’t honestly spent a lot of time worrying over the stuff that doesn’t involve him directly. He’s got enough irons in the fire as it is. “Oh yeah?”

“Got the idea off one of the reporters in the junket for Warrior, actually,” says Tom, rolling onto his back, stretching his arms. “Apparently there’s this MMA fighter who has a training routine, he doesn’t ejaculate for six weeks before a big fight.”

The way Tom says it is so bland and easy, it takes Joe another minute to catch up. “What?” he says, blinking, getting up on his elbows to watch as Tom comes to his knees and then his feet, goes over to the sink, wets a washcloth.

“Well, it’s not quite six weeks for me,” says Tom, losing the condom, giving himself a swipe with the cloth. “It’s like, four and change?” He turns around and offers the cloth to Joe, who takes it for lack of a better response. “I figured, worth a try. I really need to access something different for Bane, I don’t want people thinking I’m just reprising Tommy Riordan in a mask.”

Joe sits up and stares, holding the cloth, dumbfounded.

“So,” says Tom, stepping around Joe, back out into the main part of the hotel room where he can rescue his briefs from the floor, tug them back on. “So, that’s the plan, anyway. From here on.”

Joe stands up, sponges himself off, feels lightheaded and sore-muscled, like the aftermath of a good run, except that Tom’s just replaced the wobbly adrenaline high with a pit in Joe’s stomach. “Okay,” he says, not sure if Tom’s actually seeking his opinion or his permission or just notifying him. He edges around Tom, not wanting to brush up against him.

His jeans are crumpled up again, and it takes some digging to pull his underwear out of one leg, to get at least a little covered up. The pit in his stomach is heavier now, growing. He wants to get the fuck out, wishes he had done so the first time he’d had the impulse.

“Here,” says Tom, and passes Joe his t-shirt. “Still want something to eat? I’m starved.”

Joe yanks the shirt from Tom’s hands a little too abruptly, trying to calm down. So they were fucking; now they’re done fucking. He’s not sure what else he was expecting. “Yeah, I don’t know,” Joe equivocates, balling his shirt up as he looks for the waistband. “You probably have stuff to do, right?” He can at least exit gracefully, he can do that much.

“Have a few hours before my call yet,” says Tom easily. “Let’s eat. Fancy some telly?” His mouth quirks, easy, relaxed. Tom doesn’t think this is a big fucking deal, obviously; maybe it’s not a big fucking deal. Joe doesn’t even know anymore.

“No, I,” says Joe, sticking his thumb back over his shoulder, forcing a smile. “I’ll leave you.”

“Take my key, at least,” Tom says, getting the card from the bureau. “I can get another one next time I go through the lobby.”

Joe takes the card reflexively before his brain works out what Tom just said. “You still want me to have it?” he asks, even though the card is in his jeans pocket by now.

“Yeah,” says Tom, and a brief look of confusion flickers into revelation. “Oh, fuck, you do realize it’s just me that’s banned from coming?” He must see Joe’s own lack of comprehension, because he reaches up, curls his warm strong hand around the back of Joe’s head, tugs him in and kisses him quickly. Joe’s too startled to accept the kiss, Tom’s pursed lips against Joe’s half-open mouth. “I was kind of keen on continuing to serve your needs,” he says, while Joe continues to gape. “In the field of orgasms,” he clarifies helpfully, “if you’re interested.”

Joe manages to get his mouth shut; that’s about it. Tom is full of surprises, he thinks.

“Go on, stay,” Tom says warmly, scraping fingers up and down the short-cropped hair at the back of Joe’s head. “Telly. Food.” He leans in, kisses Joe again, but Joe is ready this time, gets his head tilted and kisses back by way of an affirmative.

When Tom retreats this time, he nods down at the t-shirt Joe is still clutching. “Put that on, you’re always cold,” he says, and heads over to the phone to order up some food.

It turns out that Annie is also at loose ends that evening, so she and Joe meet up for sushi and drinks in a quiet neighborhood where either no one seems to notice who they are, or care much. Anne’s got her hair up in a high ponytail, scarf wound around her long neck, wearing leggings and a blousey shirt and (because she’s Annie) high-top pink Converse. She looks adorable, in other words.

Joe eats as neatly as he can with chopsticks while he and Annie talk about just about everything: work, friends, family, stupid internet videos, music, anything at all.

After dinner, Joe coaxes Annie into partaking in a cup of sake even though she’s not normally one for drinking, and is rewarded by the immediate flush high up in her cheeks, her ordinarily bright eyes almost sparkling with humor. Joe has a wistful half-moment of wondering what it would be like if Tom could drink even that much, what he must have looked like with this sort of low-grade buzz making him grin like Anne’s grinning.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she says, playing with her porcelain chopstick rest.

Joe shakes his head, tilts back the last of the sake in his cup. “You’re lowballing my thoughts,” he says, “these are some fucking awesome thoughts.”

Annie digs in her purse and comes up with two quarters, slaps them down between them, arches an eyebrow.

“I was thinking that it’s too bad you and me missed our chance,” Joe says, sliding the coins towards him.

“Bullshit,” she says, snorting, amused. “I saw the look in your eye, you were thinking about the new girl.”

Joe blushes with confusion first and understanding second, shaking his head through it all. “Not,” he says precisely, “not the new girl. I told you, there is no new girl.”

Anne’s hand comes across the table and covers Joe’s, grabs it and turns it over. “What’s wrong with this picture?” she asks, shaking his open palm.

“What?” Joe says, not getting it.

“Hello, iPhone Addict, I have met you before,” she says. “You haven’t peeked at it all night.”

Joe frowns; he’d decided to keep the phone in his jeans pocket to resist the temptation of checking for texts all evening. “We’re having a nice night out,” he begins, with a wounded misunderstood tone.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says, still amused, “I’m happy to know that you actually can be physically separated from your phone in non-work situations, but it’s kind of a red flag when you don’t even take it out now and then.”

Joe takes his phone out now, intending to prove some sort of point, but is caught by the blue notification window and the buzz-buzz of an incoming text. done for night, it reads, r u in.

“Ha,” says Anne smugly, reading his expression all too easily even as Joe jams the phone back in his pocket, worried that she might see Tom’s name and guess everything. “Oh my god, look at you!” she exclaims, leaning across the table, peering at him. “Jose! Never have I ever seen this face! What’s her deal? Is she someone totally embarrassing?”

“No,” Joe says automatically, laughing, then reconsiders. “Maybe a little. I can’t — I haven’t, we haven’t said it’s cool to talk about it.” That much is true; he’s pretty sure Tom wouldn’t be too excited about Joe telling anyone.

“All right, all right,” Annie concedes, palms out, settling back into her chair. She looks at Joe for a minute, searchingly, still grinning, and it makes him squirm against his will. “Dude,” she says, fondly.

Joe twists around and looks for their server, suddenly desperate for the check. Of course she’s nowhere to be found. He’s forced to face Annie again, Annie who’s continuing to smirk across the table like she knows anything at all about this whole crazy situation. “Shut up,” he says, sounding and feeling about sixteen.

“Oh, give it up and text her back, you’re dying to do it,” she laughs.

Joe takes the phone out again and tries to scowl, fails, sits way back in his chair so she can’t even see across his screen at an angle, types, Out w/ Annie, be back soon. Your place or mine :oP?

The answer is immediate: yours, pnut has mine staked out

Joe laughs before he can stop himself, looks up to see Annie’s face going all tender. “It’s not like that,” he tells her.

“Oh, it’s like that,” she insists. “You should see your face right now.” She lifts two fingers in the air and the server appears like magic, bill in hand.

On impulse, Joe clicks over to the camera app, gets the phone set to the front lens, holds it at arm’s length and snaps a shot of himself. He huddles over the screen and studies the resulting photo, curious, but it’s just Joe: narrow face, sticky-out ears, stupid Batman haircut. Annie’s way off on this one.

Tom kisses Joe on the mouth and backs off almost right away, wiping his lips. “What have you been into?” he asks, making a moue of distaste.

“Sushi, fuck, sorry,” Joe says, covering his mouth, horrified.

“Not that, the,” and Tom goes into the bathroom, spoons water into his mouth from the tap, swishes it around, spits into the sink. Coming from a guy who will french kiss a dog and not bat an eyelash, this is starting to feel mildly insulting. He straightens up, wiping his mouth again, exhaling with relief. “What was it, sake?”

“Oh,” Joe says, “yeah, it was — fuck, I didn’t even think. Sorry.” He pushes past Tom and grabs for his toothbrush, feeling like an asshole. “The whole recovering alcoholic thing is new for me,” he says by way of apology around the handle of the toothbrush. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Tom says, casual now, leaning on the counter. “Just — try not to have it on your breath? Does my head in, still, having that taste in my mouth when I’m not expecting it.”

Joe nods, brushing very thoroughly. When he’s done he rinses twice, just to be safe, before turning back to Tom. “Better?” he asks.

Tom comes in closer and sniffs Joe’s breath rather than kissing him. “A bit, yeah,” he says, and tries a kiss this time. “Now you just taste of mint.”

“Sexy, right,” Joe says, disheartened. Tom is bulky and warm and solid, and Joe’s mind can’t seem to decide between replaying their earlier antics in Tom’s room and wanting nothing more than to curl up on top of Tom like a cat.

“You look knackered anyway,” Tom says. “Long day, yeah? Let’s just call it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Joe concedes, though with no good grace. It’s surprising, then, when Tom heads for the bed rather than the door or his abandoned jeans, stripping off his t-shirt as he goes. “You’re staying?” Joe asks.

“If you don’t mind,” Tom says, already getting under the covers. “P-Nut literally has my room staked out. He wants me to do another set of press-ups tonight but my arms are going to fall off if I try.”

“I have a stupid early call again tomorrow,” Joe says, hesitating.

“S’alright, I have to hit the gym first thing,” Tom answers evenly, getting the light next to his side of the bed. He pats the mattress beside him. “Come on, then.”

Joe doesn’t hurry, fucks around a little first, plugging in his phone, setting an alarm, doing one last check of his email and hitRECord shit. By the time he changes out of his street clothes into his t-shirt and pajama bottoms, Tom is down for the count, sprawled across the bed on his stomach, the covers down around his waist. In the day or more since he’s filmed anything (this afternoon having been a rehearsal only) Tom’s hair has started to make a reappearance; even the faint shadow of it softens his whole face, makes him more recognizable as the same guy Joe spent time with last year and the year before that. Joe can’t decide if this is comforting or worrying, so he climbs into bed and clicks off the lights, falls asleep far more quickly than he’d expected, given the circumstances.

The sleep doesn’t last, though. Joe wakes up a scant couple of hours later, disoriented and stunned, not sure what woke him. The confusion only lasts as long as the space of an exhalation from Tom, because it’s followed by a truly window-rattling snore on the inhale. Joe rolls over, gets up on an elbow, squints down at Tom, who has rolled onto his back and has his mouth wide open as though to amplify the noise as much as possible. Joe’s had girlfriends who snored, and he’s been told that he snores himself, but honestly, Joe’s easygoing, he’s had no serious complaints. It’s never been an issue.

Tom breathes out softly and inhales incredibly loudly. Joe rubs his eyes and tries to decide if it’s humanly possible to fall asleep again next to this sound. He doesn’t want to be rude or anything.

This conviction only lasts about a minute, when even a pillow wrapped around Joe’s head proves useless. Joe rolls over again, nudges Tom’s shoulder. It’s no good, Tom’s like a boulder even in sleep. He barely budges. Joe pushes a little harder. Nothing.

“Tom,” he tries, quietly, “Tom, roll over.” A moment later, he says it again, louder, with added nudging.

It escalates upwards until Joe is actively shaking Tom’s shoulder, his face, but Tom is dead to the fucking world and Joe is starting to feel a little crazed with it. Something makes it through to Tom at last, though, because abruptly he closes his mouth, opens his eyes, and frowns up at Joe. “Now?” he says muzzily.

“Now, what?” Joe says, just relieved the snoring has stopped.

“Now you want me to,” Tom says, and brings up a hot sleepy hand, cups it around the back of Joe’s neck. “You know.”

“That’s not what,” says Joe, beginning to explain, but Tom’s touch is unexpectedly welcome, warm and gentle. “You were kind of snoring,” Joe says apologetically. “I was just trying to get you to roll over a little.”

Tom’s face does something complicated, an expression between amusement and hurt. “God, I can’t wait to be done with all this training,” he says, dropping his hand again, rubbing his forehead. “I feel like such a monster, honestly, like a big ugly carnivorous beast.”

Joe smiles fondly, because only Tom can look like he does and express regret over not being pretty anymore. There’s a sudden weird sense of intimacy. Their voices are low, and they’re close, lying together in the midnight darkness, sharing Joe’s bed. The realization kicks Joe’s pulse up a little, and if it weren’t for that regretful sweet look on Tom’s face Joe might roll over, mumble something about being tired, but Tom’s so fucking guileless, so endlessly raw, Joe can’t — he leans down, kisses Tom’s eyelids, the bare space between his eyebrows. “You’re not,” he says, “you’re still really fucking gorgeous, okay.”

“Mm, say it again,” Tom says, shameless, turning his face up so Joe can kiss his mouth.

It’s nothing Joe planned to get started now in the middle of what’s going to be a short night anyway, but somehow a minute later Joe’s flat on his back and Tom’s hand is down his pants, Tom’s jerking him off in hard hasty motions, Joe’s coming so fast that he’d be embarrassed if it weren’t for Tom saying, yeah, come for me, do it, Joseph soft in his ear. Tom tucks himself around Joe afterwards, his own hard-on jammed against Joe’s hip, both their hearts pounding, and this time Joe falls asleep first even though he hates sleeping with someone all up in his space like this, he hates it but Tom is warm and hard and holding Joe in place and Joe doesn’t think about it, just melts into Tom and drifts off into the brief hours left.

It’s ramping up on the Batman shoot. Joe himself has a little less to do, but Tom’s back in the action right away. Joe sticks around on the lot the next day and watches; it’s not worth it to go all the way back to the hotel when he’s up in a few hours anyway.

Tom isn’t managing the mask very well, truth be told. It’s hard to talk through, harder still to hear through apparently. Tom’s worked out a system of off-camera hand-signals with the ADs so he knows when to bellow one of his lines, unable to tell what Christian’s saying most of the time.. There’s even talk of a new mask entirely, it’s becoming such a monumental pain in the ass.

Joe sort of knows what it’s like, from working on GI Joe a while back; weird having your voice matter so little, as an actor, weird having to do your acting without the benefit of your face to portray the character. Tom’s good at it, of course, has a knack for whole-body acting like a lot of pretty-boy actors don’t. He can communicate eloquently with just the tilt of his head, the angle of his elbow, the splay of fingers.

Joe’s so absorbed in watching Tom’s performance, actually, that he jumps when someone shouts next to him the instant Chris calls for a union break. “Hey, man, over here!” the voice says, about a foot from Joe’s right shoulder — P-Nut, Joe sees, turning his head to see. He’s never formally met the guy but he was around a bit even on the Inception shoot, Tom’s bodyguard if not trainer for that film. On Batman he’s been Tom’s faithful shadow, the one responsible for Tom’s terrifying physique, the way Tom’s turning into a real-life comic book villain.

Tom’s shoulders are a little rounded as he approaches, reluctance written all over his posture in a way that’s kind of hilarious given how the guy was just drawn up like the world’s most muscular bowstring, strutting and swinging all over the set. “Yeah, yeah,” he says as he rips the mask off, not giving P-Nut a chance to address him, already shrugging out of his jacket, looking for a clear space on the floor. He spares a moment to shoot a look Joe’s way, though, just a quick flash of hi, you’re here, hi, before he’s on his belly and toes, pushing the floor away, clapping his hands between reps, launching back onto his haunches while P-Nut counts off the whole thing in an utterly unsympathetic voice. It looks like fucking torture, but Tom moves briskly enough for a guy who was at the gym at the crack of dawn, who’s been doing this kind of thing every day all day for weeks and weeks. Joe watches idly, thinking about Tom saying he felt ugly, Tom with his traps that seem to be winching his shoulders up towards his neck, his pecs that pop out alarmingly as he works, his arms and neck and forehead coming over with a faint sheen of sweat. Ugly, Joe thinks vaguely, isn’t quite the word.

“Okay, up,” says P-Nut after about ten minutes of this. Tom sort of flops onto the floor with a groan before peeling himself up and back, finally coming to his feet. P-Nut hands him a water bottle and a plate of steamed broccoli with a plain chicken breast. Tom tucks in, businesslike, perching on a nearby pile of equipment crates. He’s just barely finished when the break’s over and the wardrobers are hurrying to dust Tom off, make-up’s dabbing his face, and Tom’s back into the shoot. He gives Joe a nod, heads over to the set with the AD trailing him the whole way.

“Jesus fucking christ,” Joe exhales, impressed in several ways at once. Tom’s shaking it off like he didn’t just execute a crazy-ass workout while everyone else was drinking coffee and chatting. It’s not new, of course, it’s been the way of things every time Tom’s on set, but it’s something else to see it up close, to see it with the knowledge of Tom having had very little sleep, of Tom already having a bad time of it with the Bane mask. Tom’s back in character, nodding as Chris talks him through the next shot, bulky and looming and intimidating enough that even the grips seem a little hesitant to get in with the key lights Chris wants on Tom, sort of edging around him until the DP waves them closer irritably. Joe glances back at P-Nut to see if he’s reflecting Joe’s own respect on his face, only to find that P-Nut’s not watching Tom at all: he’s staring steadily at Joe, nearly expressionless. “You’re working him pretty fucking hard,” Joe says, trying to smile.

P-Nut purses his lips, shakes his head. “My job is to keep him on track,” he says, “but Tommy’s the one setting the bar, man. Just when we get him where we planned to go, he’s adding something else to his list of goals.”

Joe nods, impressed, his eyes drawn back to Tom as they resume shooting.

“I mean, some of his goals are a little fucking crazy if you ask me,” P-Nut says, and his tone is so unaltered that it takes Joe a minute to clue in that P-Nut’s diverged from the usual professional trainer spiel. Joe looks over again, raising eyebrows a little, smiling with surprise. “That’s when my job’s really important,” says P-Nut with a little nod, folding his massive arms over his massive chest.

“Achieving the impossible, huh?” asks Joe, pulling what he hopes is an appropriately respectful face. “Well, he looks awesome, man.”

P-Nut nods, accepting this praise. “Tell you the truth,” he says, leaning in towards Joe like he’s about to impart a secret, “half the time it’s not about working Tommy to death, it’s about making sure he doesn’t get hurt along the way.”

“Yeah,” says Joe, failing to see the monumental importance of this statement, but nodding like he does.

“Not everyone gets that,” says P-Nut significantly. “He looks hard out there, but that’s just for show. Tommy bruises easy.”

“He’s a fucking good sport about it,” says Joe absently, caught up in Tom’s action now, distracted by the curve of Tom’s shoulder, the arch at the small of his back.

When P-Nut’s fingers close around Joe’s shoulder, they squeeze just a little harder than they need to, making Joe flinch instinctively and look over at him. P-Nut is giving Joe a very steady look that makes Joe’s blood run cold all at once. “He bruises easy,” he says again, slowly.

“Right,” says Joe, has to clear his throat, try it again in a less broken tone. “Look, it’s not — trust me, I’m not — there’s no bruising, okay?”

P-Nut studies him for a moment, as if evaluating his earnestness.

“It’s not like that,” Joe says, as sincerely as he can, and either P-Nut’s more trusting than Annie or Joe is doing a better job of being convincing under threat of dismemberment, because P-Nut abruptly lets go of Joe’s shoulder and smiles so naturally that for an instant Joe thinks he just imagined the whole thing.

But his heart’s still hammering in his throat by the time he closes his trailer door behind him a few minutes later. As messages go, that one was pretty fucking effective, Joe thinks.

“He never,” Tom says later, lounging on Joe’s trailer’s couch and eating peanuts one at a time — or he was, anyway, until a moment ago. Now he’s frozen with a peanut pinched between forefinger and thumb, mouth agape, eyes wide.

“He fucking did,” Joe insists, laughing about it now if only because Tom’s so shocked. It wasn’t funny, earlier, when Joe was still having cold sweats over the conversation, wondering how P-Nut knew, if he would tell anyone.

“Oh my god,” says Tom, sagging back into the seat cushion, amazed. He looks up at Joe. “He really told you off?”

“I think it was less telling me off and more telling me that no one would ever find the body, you know?” Joe says, reaching down, buttoning his fly. Tom hadn’t been more than a few steps inside the trailer when he’d had Joe’s jeans open and halfway down his thighs. Joe hasn’t come this often since he was a teenager. It’s kind of awesome.

“What did you say?” Tom asks, popping the peanut in his mouth at last. A quick glance tells Joe that Tom’s still worked up from the blow job, his jeans betraying an uncomfortable looking bulge, but it’s not for Joe to deal with. It’s not to be dealt with at all. No use thinking about what Joe might want to do if that weren’t the case.

“Oh,” says Joe, blinking, realizing his quick glance had become a lingering stare, going hot around the ears. “Oh, don’t worry, I straightened him out.”

“You…” Tom trails off, shifts a little awkwardly. “You — straightened him out?”

“You know,” Joe says, buckling his belt, averting his eyes. “I told him there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Did you,” says Tom fondly, and brushes the salt from his greasy fingers. “Did you indeed.”

Joe smiles easily across at Tom, leaning back against the little counter that comprises the kitchen area. All that mask work, he thinks a little vaguely, it’s easy to miss Tom’s face a little.

“I have your flight details for Thursday,” says Joe’s personal assistant over the phone. “I’m sending them now.”

“It’s Tuesday,” says Joe, nonsensically.

“I know, can you believe it,” she says, “summer’s almost over.”

“When am I back on the shoot?” Joe asks, though he knows the answer. He listens while she clicks through his calendar.

“Umm, end of September,” she says. “In New York.”

“So,” Joe says, trying to look at this like he would have two weeks ago, “I have like, a good amount of time off.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say time off,” she warns. “You should see the PR stuff for 50/50 the next two weeks, and then there’s the shows here, then Toronto. But we’ve got you some interviews for RECollection and stuff. Did Sophie tell you about Time?”

“Yeah, she did,” Joe says, working up a little excitement in his voice. The end of September seems really far away.

Wednesday night Joe goes to Tom’s hotel room. He’s half-worried that P-Nut might be there and he writes himself a mental script of friendly conversation he can run if necessary, but it turns out to be a needless exercise. It’s just Tom, watching television, dutifully working through the last of a water bottle after his evening gym session. He’s shower-damp and naked against the sheets, casually sprawled like he doesn’t care who sees the fold in his belly where his body bends, the way his immense upper body tapers down to his hips, almost ridiculous when seen unadorned like this.

“Hi,” he says, smiling at Joe, drawing up one knee, stretching and wincing. Joe hasn’t been here since the night of the snoring, since the first night of Tom’s new vow of sort-of chastity. It’s only been a few days but it must seem longer to Tom.

“So I’m gone tomorrow,” says Joe, toeing out of his shoes but leaving the rest of his clothes on, going over to sit up against the headboard next to Tom, not touching.

“You are?” Tom says, startled.

“Yeah,” says Joe, “I’m wrapped for Pittsburgh now.” He keeps his gaze fixed on the TV, ignores the way Tom’s looking over at him.

Tom finally looks away and lifts the arm closest to Joe, hooks it around Joe’s shoulders and hauls him in against Tom’s side. Joe oof’s in response, laughing, but goes easily enough, liking the heavy feel of Tom’s arm over the back of his neck, the press of Tom’s lips to his temple. “Are you staying, then?” Tom asks.

“Yeah, thought I would,” Joe says casually even as his pulse kicks up and his brain adds one last time.

Joe doesn’t want to be the one to start anything that night, so he doesn’t make a move. But neither does Tom, and it gets to feel like they’re just — hanging out. Just friends, maybe.

Tom’s loyalty, his true fiercely affectionate side, is reserved for a very favored few: P-Nut, for one, and Charlotte while they were still together, and of course Tom’s son, his son’s mother. They’re all members of Tom’s tattoo club, inked into his body permanently as an outward manifestation of the way Tom imprints on some people, takes them under his skin, like wards against loneliness, like a talisman of connection.

It’s not Joe doing amateur psychology, figuring this shit out. Tom has said as much, over the time they’ve known each other, because Tom spills his innermost secrets as easily as most people talk about foods they like, about buying a car, about the weather. Tom’s probably told lots of people about his tattoos, about his most beloved friends. He told Joe casually back on Inception while they drank coffee and waited out the set lighting — and again now, twisting and turning his bare torso around as he gives Joe the guided tour of his ink, television on in the background, the pair of them lounging on the hotel bed.

“You ever thought about it?” Tom asks, this time, settling back against the headboard. His pecs really are enormous right now. Joe has to avert his eyes consciously now that the tattoo show-and-tell has ended.

“Thought about it,” Joe repeats, half-asking, not really paying attention. He wriggles back to sit beside Tom again, their biceps brushing slightly, Joe’s t-shirt sleeved arm up against Tom’s bare one.

“Right now my favorite artist is out of Vancouver,” says Tom, clicking the volume up two notches on the TV. “He did the London skyline and the Madonna.” He looks over at Joe. “I could introduce you. He’s really fantastic.”

“Oh,” Joe says, catching up. “Oh, tattoo artist?” He’s got a line about tattoos; actually, he’s got several, each suited a little better to a particular situation. Joe likes to keep his body a blank canvas (it’s an actor thing); Joe thinks tattoos are a fad right now (it’s a hipster thing); Joe thinks tattoos are great on other people but don’t suit him, really (it’s a personal choice thing). He opens his mouth, about to deliver one or all of these excuses, finds himself being weirdly honest instead, saying the thing he’s only ever admitted to his best friends, his own circle of a favored few. “I can’t think of anything I’d want to have on my skin forever,” he says, and twists his mouth wryly. “My brother says — he always said, I mean, that it was about my commitment issues.” He smiles reflexively, squeezing the expression past the sudden unwelcome lump of grief he still gets in his throat when he thinks of Dan.

“You don’t have commitment issues,” Tom says unexpectedly, seriously. He thumbs the mute button and looks over at Joe, frowning and kind of beautiful.

“Yeah,” says Joe, laughing, uneasy, “I think pretty much all my exes might disagree with you there.”

Tom licks his lips, troubled. “You don’t have to commit to a person to show commitment,” he says. “You’re dedicated to your work, aren’t you?” It’s not a question, it’s an affirmation, it’s Tom stating a fact that is so plain to him that he can’t quite believe that Joe doesn’t see it the same way. “You live for it, for the people who work with you on it.”

“You think that counts?” Joe asks, taken aback.

“Of course it fucking counts,” Tom says, almost annoyed on Joe’s behalf. He reaches across, slings his arm back around Joe’s shoulders, gives him a squeeze. “You should get a red record button,” he says, and slides his hand a little under Joe’s shirtsleeve. “Here, right here.”

“And if anyone asks, I can say it’s because I love Japan,” Joe jokes.

Tom tilts his head in, kisses the side of Joe’s neck, gentle and fond. “You wouldn’t need to tell anyone,” he says, pulling back again. “People who knew you would know.”

Joe doesn’t mean to fall asleep, and only realizes he has when he wakes up in the dark some time later. The TV is off and Tom is lying on his side facing away from Joe, sheets up to his hips. Joe kicks out of his jeans and socks and scrambles under the covers, chilled enough that it seems natural to wriggle closer to Tom, sling an arm over all his bulky warmth.

“Sorry, ‘m I snoring again?” Tom asks, stirring.

“A little,” Joe lies.

“I’ll stop,” Tom promises in a mumble, and falls back asleep on the next breath in. After a few more breaths, Joe follows.

“That’s your alarm,” Joe says when the beeping won’t stop.

“I know,” Tom says. They’ve shifted in their sleep so that Joe’s back is flush tight with Tom’s front, Tom’s arm cinching Joe in close at his waist. It’s warm and comfortable and Joe just wants the beeping to stop so he can sink back into sleeping like this.

“That’s your alarm, Tom,” Joe says again, unhappily.

“I know,” Tom says again, like they’re stuck in a loop. But this time he lifts his arm up, rolls away for a second, and does something that makes the noise stop. He’s back in a moment, burrowing up against Joe, making sleepy displeased sounds into the back of Joe’s neck. “I have to fucking get up,” he says.

Joe keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t answer, half asleep and half unwilling to acknowledge the truth. But his body’s dragging his mind up towards daylight anyway, Joe’s starting to become aware of the faint seep of sun through the curtains, the itch of morning stubble on his chin, the drag-press-stick of Tom’s mostly-hard cock at the small of Joe’s back. “Hi,” says Joe, unthinking, his own cock twitching in answer, and angles his hips back into Tom’s in a slow friendly roll.

Tom’s arm tightens around Joe’s waist and his hips swivel up in answer, cock slotting now into the shallow divot at the top of Joe’s ass. “Mm,” says Tom, “fuck.”

The feeling triggers a faint sense memory and Joe smiles to himself as he recalls that Tom’s been doing this same move sporadically for the last couple of hours, just enough to rouse Joe a little as whatever Tom’s dreaming makes him rut lazily against Joe. It can’t have been a terribly restful night for Tom. Joe reaches down and covers Tom’s arm with his own, bracing it, and pushes back against Tom again in a slow maddening rhythm.

“Oh, fuck,” Tom says, and opens his mouth hotly against the top of Joe’s spine, grinds his hips into the pressure, sets up a rhythm of his own. He’s hard now, really hard, and the head of his cock is tucked up under the waistband of Joe’s shirt, skin to skin, even though the rest of it is nestled against the cotton of Joe’s boxers. Joe works back against the hard length, flushing with heat, wanting it, like all of Tom’s abstinence is his now, like Joe needs Tom to come as badly as Tom does.

“Here, here,” Joe says, and reaches down, yanks his boxers down over his ass, rolls back into Tom so Tom can feel Joe’s heat, his skin. Tom groans and presses even more desperately into Joe, hand slipping lower to pin Joe’s hips against his for better leverage even though Joe’s not going anywhere, he’s driving back into Tom’s thrusts as steadily as he can. Tom’s making little hurting noises now, his face feels burning hot against Joe’s neck, he’s exhaling hard and fast. “Yeah,” Joe says, loving it, “yeah, fuck, Tom, I want to make you come.”

Tom grates out a half-shout at this and both his arms wrap hard around Joe now, solid as steel bands, his hips snapping and working frantically, obviously on the verge of orgasm.

Joe wants it, wants to feel Tom spurt over the small of his back, wants it so badly it’s like a painful lump in his gut, but then Tom’s alarm starts beeping again like a wash of cold water and Joe wrenches himself away with a Herculean burst of strength. It’s probably more Tom’s surprise and less Joe’s effort that lets him pull away, to be honest — but pull away he does, even as Tom almost throws himself after Joe with a broken desperate sound of dismay. “No, we have to stop,” Joe says, disentangling himself, getting over to the far side of the mattress, looking at Tom, Tom who is bright-eyed and red-cheeked and gasping, sweating, on the brink.

For a long moment Tom is visibly stupid with it, with being so very close to coming, but then he seems to remember where he is, what he’s doing, what the the beeping of his alarm on the nightstand behind him means. He flops onto his back with a curse, panting, his cock curved rock hard up onto his belly, sticky at the tip. “Fuck,” he repeats, a little louder, and then he slams his fisted hands into the mattress and shouts it.

“I’m sorry,” Joe says, pulling his boxers back up, his shirt back down. There’s a cool damp spot on his lower back. “I shouldn’t have,” he begins, and trails off awkwardly. He feels like the world’s biggest cocktease. It’s an entirely unfamiliar feeling. He doesn’t like it.

“No,” says Tom, now grinding his fists into his eyes, getting his shit together. “No, it’s good you stopped me, I almost went off.”

“I know,” Joe says, shaky. “I wanted you to.”

Tom’s fists uncurl and he rubs his face, slaps it a little, groaning and sighing. His erection isn’t going away but he seems to be doing a better job of ignoring it. Joe licks his lips, swallows. Tries not to think about how it would feel to crawl back over and take that hardness into his mouth. “You can, if you want,” Tom says, and it takes Joe a moment to realize Tom’s not talking about Joe sucking Tom’s dick. “Just — sorry — maybe you could go into the loo? I don’t know that I’m up to watching you right now.”

It’s only then that Joe realizes he’s as hard as Tom, has been this whole time. Joe looks down at himself, startled, seeing the spreading wet patch on his boxers, the tented fabric. “No,” he says, a little stunned, “no, I’m okay.”

“Go on,” Tom says, dropping his hands, looking over at Joe. “No need for us both to suffer.” He rolls his shoulders, shakes his head, blows out a sigh, still shaking it off. His cock is going down a little, finally.

“No,” says Joe, “I’m really,” and he is, actually, he’s okay with it, with the insistent press of his cock, with the low-down sick ache of his balls. The disappointment is all for Tom’s side of things, somehow.

Tom looks at him, stares for a moment, and then his mouth curves on one side. The alarm goes on beeping. “Christ, what a send-off,” Tom says wryly, slapping for the alarm, subsiding back into the bed with a little more ease as his cock gives up.

“You,” Joe says, voice uneven, “I have a lot of fucking respect, you know?”

Tom looks over at him again, brow wrinkled.

“As a fellow actor,” Joe clarifies. “What you’re doing. It’s pretty fucking awesome.”

Tom’s puzzled look gives way to something a little softer. “Me too,” he says, “for you, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah,” Joe scoffs, smiling now, “real hardship, having someone get me off regularly and ask nothing in return.”

“S’not what I meant,” says Tom, soberly. “I admire you, I really do. I think you’re brilliant.”

Joe gets hot air blown up his ass all the fucking time, he honestly does, and usually he answers with a polite grin and thanks, takes just about none of it to heart. He can’t remember the last time he felt like someone meant it, really fucking meant it, let alone someone who Joe — who is so completely — let alone Tom.

“Listen,” Joe says, getting onto his side, hitching himself just a little closer, “listen, I have a huge fucking favor to ask of you, but you can totally say no. I mean, I bet you don’t even have time.”

Tom arches an eyebrow, attentive.

“There’s this event coming up,” Joe begins, heart hammering, fingers playing with the corner of a pillowcase.

Two weeks pass in a heady haze of work and preparations. Tom was right about Joe, about his commitment to everything hitRECord; it’s always more joy than grind when he has the time to dedicate to his production company, it’s like acting in the best movies with the best directors even when he’s doing everyday shit like promoting the new collection, making videos about it. There are meetings and planning sessions and hours spent in the Rec Room editing and browsing until Joe feels kind of pale and squashy like a fungus or a cavefish. He loves every fucking second of it.

It’s not all radio silence from Tom this time, but he’s back in England for a brief visit with his kid between Batman and the PR junket leading up to Warrior and then the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy premiere. So his texts come at odd hours, middle of the night, early afternoon, and then nothing at all in the evenings when Joe takes his guitar out and tries to come up with some shit to play for the shows. He scrolls through the texts of the last several days to look for inspiration, because taken together it’s like fucking weird free verse, the downloaded contents of Tom Hardy’s brain in 144 characters or less.

ha nearly got taken down by dbl decker bus, bloody cars on wrong side of road here

louis pulls down pants and says look daddy i have a pnut too

pnut not amused

skiving off gym time, hiding in waterstones, reading abt the joy of cooking

is a water chestnut the same as cress

are molasses the same as treacle

thinking longingly of cali salsa, eat pollo loco for me mate

fuck i miss chips they are bloody everywhere and smell like heaven

eat a chip for me

never mind i ate some, will pay for this later when pnut finds me

it is two in the morning here, can’t sleep, can’t wank. nightmare.

have you noticed that people on the internet are mean

i mean, really mean. fucking hell.

do i honestly look like a bloody ugly chav

i don’t do i

no ur fucking right man, not looking anymore, swear it

miss u joseph

and not just because u tell me im pretty

Joe grins over this last run of messages, one of the few where Joe had been around and awake to answer, thank god — Tom’s glaringly ridiculous and yet endearing insecurities interspersed with Joe’s own reassurances and directions to stop browsing stupid comments, until finally Tom had been convinced by Joe saying he wasn’t, in any sense of the word, ugly, jesus fucking christ. Joe hadn’t answered the last message beyond a silly emoticon, but now he impulsively types a new message:

Three more days until you’re here.

It’s late here which means it’s very early there, and Joe genuinely doesn’t expect an answer, jumps when his phone chimes a few minutes later. It’s a photo of Tom in the morning, obviously a self-portrait as he lies in bed with just the top of Louis’ blond head visible in the crook of his elbow, mouth curving fondly, scalp dark with stubble.

Joe sends another message in reply:

I'm so excited / I can't wait to meet you there / And I don't care / I’m so horny, that's okay / My will is good

Tom is fast on the response, another photo with a comically baffled face.

Nirvana? Joe writes, laughing.

Yet another confused look.

Oh my fucking god, we are fixing this oversight in your musical education, hip hop boy.

i just liked the part about u being horny, Tom answers.

Joe snorts and tucks the phone away, starts strumming the first few chords of Lithium. He has an idea for the show.

They’re halfway through the Seattle show, Joe standing in the wings while MMM plays, when the stage manager grabs him by the shoulder and says, “Your guest is here.”

“Oh, thank fuck,” Joe says, because it was ten hours ago that he’d gotten a run of increasingly grumpy texts about flight delays and he’d honestly thought — but coming over from the backstage entrance, here he is, mouth somewhere between put-upon and happy, circles under his eyes because it’s about five in the morning for him. There’s a brief moment of worry about how they’re going to greet each other but Tom solves it for both of them, grabbing Joe by the hand and moving in to bump shoulders, the sort of bro move that Joe can’t ever pull off convincingly.

“What the fuck are you wearing, man?” Joe says as he steps back and drops Tom’s hand, because he can’t quite bring himself to say, you came, you showed up, you’re here in the way he wants to.

Tom looks down at the pink tank top, which Joe has seen before on him but never so snug as it is now on Tom’s Bane physique. “I like to be comfortable when I fly,” he says, grouchy, the beginnings of his smile dropping away entirely. “Is it — I thought you said it was casual?”

“No, no,” Joe hastens to tell him, feeling like an asshole. “No, it’s fine. Just. It’s kind of a hipster crowd, I guess. Do you have anything“—

Tom grabs his hat by the brim and yanks it sideways, outright glaring at Joe now. “Are you fucking serious,” he says flatly.

“You look fine,” Joe says as earnestly as he can. “Look, it’s fucking great that you’re here, I’m being a dick, forget I said anything.” The neckline of Tom’s shirt is gaping a little. Joe closes his fist on the impulse to grab the slack fabric and reel Tom closer, kiss an apology into his temple. There are fucking stage hands all around.

Tom hesitates, visibly pissed off and hurt, probably exhausted too. On stage, MMM is almost over.

“Are you cool to do the reading?” Joe asks tentatively.

Tom shoots Joe a dirty look. “Sure I won’t shame you?” he says, surly.

“Just,” Joe says, “the next segment, I have to introduce it, give me,” and he grabs the mic the sound guy is holding out in his direction, lopes onto the stage with a forced grin, hoping like hell that Tom’s still there when he gets back.

Before the flight delay happened, it was going to be all different. They were supposed to have dinner, run Tom’s bit, chat; afterwards, maybe, they might have had time to hang out in Joe’s dressing room at the theatre. In Joe’s head, the hanging out might have been a little bit naked.

Instead it’s already bad between them, and even as Joe smiles and chatters and feeds off the manic energy of the audience he’s thinking maybe they’ve been forcing this thing too far, pushing it past benefits with friendship when it doesn’t need to be anything more, and it’s Joe’s fucking fault because he’s the one who asked Tom to be here. Maybe it’s better if Tom takes off on him, maybe they need some distance, some clarity. Momentum has maybe carried them too far, and it’s just as well if they fly off the cliff tonight.

But when Joe goes back into the wings, it’s to find Tom still there. Tom, actually shirtless and pantless, is bent over his duffel bag in nothing but boxers, presumably looking for something to wear that’s a little less white gangsta. He straightens up with a black t-shirt in his hands and holds it up for Joe’s approval, his eyebrows raised pointedly, still annoyed.

“You should wear what you were gonna wear,” Joe says stupidly, looking over Tom’s shoulder, past him, because Tom’s bigger, bigger than Joe remembered, and his arms — Joe’s mouth is dry.

Tom sighs, exasperated, and pulls the t-shirt over his head anyway. It’s tight, obviously from his pre-Bane days, choking his biceps just a little, the v-neck almost obscene centered over the divot between his pecs. He pulls on jeans next, jams his feet into his hip hop sneakers with the laces all undone. He’s ridiculous, actually, he’s — Joe swallows again, braces himself.

“You came,” he says, and it sounds as stupid as he’d feared. Clears his throat, forces himself to go on. “You showed up, you’re here.”

Tom’s abrupt angry posture melts away all at once and his chin comes up as his gaze zooms in on Joe. “Course I did,” he says, just like of course he’s kissed a guy, of course he’s had sex with a guy too, of course everything unexpected and shocking and amazing, everything Joe doesn’t anticipate, everything that pushes Joe off-balance until he’s breathless with it.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Joe says, wanting to smile but too freaked out to manage it.

Tom smiles for both of them, shy and worried and pleased. Joe’s stomach does a move right out of Singing in the Rain.

“So,” Joe says, and his voice breaks like it does when he’s worked up, “so, let’s just go over what you’re doing.”

Of course Joe didn’t tell the audience who he meant by ‘special guest’ but it was pretty clear they’d been expecting Anne Hathaway, who’d done the London show. There’s a beat where no one seems to know who Tom is, mostly bald still in ill-fitting clothes, and then there’s an explosion of screaming and applause while Tom looks embarrassed and pleased.

Tom does well, of course. Guy’s got a fucking great voice, never mind his knack for nuance, for hitting the exact right word in any given sentence. The audience is still and breathless, claps and whistles wildly afterwards, and Joe grins and waves his hand at Tom and says something sort of confused about how Tom was doing him a huge favor and how he was so fucking happy to have him — here, in Seattle — to — Tom fucking Hardy, everyone! and they scream and hoot and Joe claps Tom on the back and shakes his hand and grins and grins.

They only have the one night in the Seattle hotel room; tomorrow Tom’s shooting Batman in LA and Joe’s back in the city too, doing more hitRECord stuff for a bit, some PR for 50/50, interviews. He’s not needed on set for this part of the shoot, last he’d heard, and it doesn’t make sense for Tom to drive into town to see him when they’re shooting way the fuck out in Studio City.

So it’s just the one night.

“You should fuck me,” Tom says before they’re more than five feet into the room.

“Haha, motherfucker,” Joe says, snorting, dropping his bag to the floor, kicking out of his sneakers.

But Tom means it, it turns out, because half an hour later they’re on the bed and naked and Joe’s pressing into the tightest hottest place his dick has ever been while Tom props himself up on his elbows and knees, hangs his head and curses fluidly.

“You’re insane, seriously,” Joe tells him, gasping, shifting his sweaty palms over Tom’s ass, his hips, his lower back. “How is this fun for you?”

Tom half-sighs, half-groans, the sound low and sexy. “Gonna use this,” he says thickly.

“Should I be collecting, fuck, collecting a fee for this then?” Joe asks, spreading his knees a bit wider, trying to figure out how this works, this way.

“Shut up and fuck me,” Tom says, shoving back into Joe.

Joe shuts up and fucks Tom, because it feels awesome, because it’s hot as fuck to have all this muscle and strength pinned open for him, because Tom is shaking and crying out, because Tom wants it, is going to use it, and Joe is all about the art.

He’d like to say he can’t bring himself to come when Tom’s not going to, but Joe isn’t really that noble and it’s too good to hold out anyway, what with the way Tom’s saying his name and urging him on and getting noisy as hell, noisy enough so that people passing in the hall must know that someone named Joseph is putting it to this other guy pretty damn well. “I can’t,” says Joe, blinking the sweat out of his eyes, rolling his hips, “Tom, I’m gonna.”

“Fuck, yes,” Tom says, “come on, come in me.”

Joe — Joe hadn’t framed it quite that way, somehow — coming in Tom, jesus fucking christ, and that’s all it takes to push him over the brink. He rests for a minute, after, draped over Tom’s back that’s solid as a table but better, sweaty and hot and live. Joe presses his nose up against inky skin, breathes and shudders and wriggles his hips a few times until Tom makes a choked noise and says, “Okay, okay, out, god.”

Joe’d sort of forgotten what with the amazing orgasm and all, but it’s clear from Tom’s voice that he’s way closer than Joe thought given that neither of them has touched his cock. Joe straightens up, pulls out while Tom grinds his teeth audibly and huffs his breath in and out. The second he’s clear Tom lunges away, bounds off the bed on unsteady legs, fists his hands and releases a terrifying series of angry noises.

“Bust something if you want to,” Joe advises, because Tom looks — Joe hasn’t seen anyone look quite like this, not anyone outside some weird primal acting class exercise anyway. He looks capable of anything. He looks deadly. He’s limned in light from the window, flushed down his torso, heavy with meaty shoulders and chest and back, heaving air, painfully hard. If Tom really does manage to use this, his Bane is going to be the stuff of nightmares.

Tom rolls his shoulders back, shakes his head as though to clear it. “No,” he says, “no, I’m — I’ve got this.”

Joe has a flash of P-Nut’s words — Tom bruising easy — and suddenly he sees it, how in spite of his propensity to shy away from hard work, he’ll push his body to the ends of the earth if it’s for a role. It’s like he doesn’t even see what he’s doing to himself after a certain point, how the bruises are spreading, how his body is slamming up against itself like it’s going to break apart any minute. Joe can understand, now, how dangerous a thing it must have been when Tom was drinking. It’s not a matter of not knowing where his limits are; in this state, Tom honestly doesn’t seem to know he has any limits at all.

Tom paces and swings his arms, like he did back on the set that day they first kissed. In spite of Tom’s reassurances, Joe still expects Tom to lay into something – the wall or a lamp or the TV – but he paces and paces until his breathing slows, his flush fades. Joe eases back into the mattress, releasing a breath he hadn’t known he was holding, busies himself ditching the condom and tidying up the sheets a little. When he looks up again, Tom is standing still in the middle of the room, naked but not hard anymore, rubbing the side of his pec, frowning.

“You cool?” Joe asks, pulling on a t-shirt and boxers.

“Yeah,” says Tom, nodding, staring into the middle distance. “I’m cool.”

“We’re not doing that shit again,” Joe says, feeling like it’s a sensible normal thing to say, unsure why his voice is coming out all crackly and fucked up anyway.

“No,” Tom agrees, not bothering to argue it. After all, they’re not seeing each other anytime soon and Joe’s resolution is kind of stupid in that light.

“Come over here,” Joe says, still in that tight angry choked voice, his throat hurting. “Fuck, come over here, jesus fucking”— and it’s too physically painful to keep talking through it, so Joe shuts up and watches as Tom looks over, finally, wets his lips, moves back to the bed.

“You angry at me?” Tom half-asks, kneeing onto the bed, flopping down next to Joe.

“No,” Joe says shortly, though he kind of is, angry at Tom and at himself too.

“I liked it,” Tom says, “right? I mean, I really fucking liked it.”

Joe looks over at Tom, not buying it, feeling stupid and angry and tired all at once. He clears his throat, finds something more like his normal voice. “I wanted to make you feel good,” he says.

“You did,” Tom answers immediately, “you really did, Joseph. Best sex in ages. Pity about the ending, but that’s my choice, not yours.” He’s still rubbing his chest, almost like he doesn’t know he’s doing it, kneading fingers into the muscle just under his arm.

“Not just good,” Joe corrects him, “you know, good.”

Tom snorts, smiling. “Well, you know I can’t.”

“Lie back,” Joe says irritably, “no, with your hands at your — here, move your arms.” He gets Tom pinned out flat on his back and shifts over to straddle his hips.

“Don’t start anything, Joseph,” Tom warns through an amused look. “My balls get any bluer, they’re going to fall off.”

“Shut up,” Joe says, not smiling back, and leans the heel of his hand into the spot Tom has been rubbing, rolls his weight over it in circles. Tom goes taut for a second and then exhales blissfully, melting into the mattress. “That okay?” Joe asks, suddenly feeling lighter, like the tension in Tom’s muscles was somehow winding him up.

“That’s brilliant,” Tom mumbles, eyes closing. “Don’t stop, fuck.”

Joe’s always found his hands more useful than beautiful, a little too big and gangly for his smallish frame; they’re good for music, fine for holding prop guns and machinery, the perfect size to wrap around a beer bottle or a C-cup breast. They’re proving their worth again now as they work into the tense lines of Tom’s chest, his arms, Joe’s too-long too-knobby fingers pushing into flesh until it yields little by little. “Breathe,” Joe reminds Tom sometimes, when he’s working a particularly sore spot. “Say if it’s too much,” Joe says nonsensically, knowing Tom won’t, using the involuntary cues of Tom’s body to guide him instead.

Eventually he gets Tom to roll over — Tom by now nearly boneless and half-asleep — and starts in on his back. Joe honestly thinks Tom’s drifted off when suddenly his chest rumbles under Joe’s fingers, the indistinct words muffled by the pillow.

“Hmm?” Joe says, pausing.

“Said, all that’s missing is a good bedtime story.”

Joe laughs, glad to feel at ease again, entertained by how Tom can simultaneously be a huge hulking monster and a toddler seeking comfort. “Have I got a story for you,” Joe tells him, and starts rambling on about some stuff he’s been getting into on hitRECord, stuff that’s on his mind most of the time anyway. He’s pretty sure Tom isn’t even listening, that he’s ninety percent checked out, but Joe talks anyway as he eases up on the backrub. Eventually he’s just tracing lines up and down Tom’s back, liking the feel of his skin, how warm it is. He doesn’t stop — talking or touching — until Tom issues a quiet snore.

They oversleep, having neglected to set any alarms what with all the nudity and sex and whatnot, so the next morning starts out frantic and doesn’t let up until Joe runs onto the plane and flings himself down into his seat, apologizing to every single person who looks at him, feeling like the worst example of Hollywood douchebaggery that ever breathed for holding up the flight. He’s so spun that he forgets to turn off his phone and gets a new round of dirty looks when the fucking text message notification dings somewhere over northern California.

made my flight thank fuck

Joe flicks the sound off and figures if he was going to crash the plane with texting he’d have done so already. He writes back, Me too, it was close though.

thx for making me feel good

Joe grins and puts the phone in airplane mode before someone calls a flight attendant on his ass.

For the first time in their series of separations, Joe is having trouble keeping Tom out of his head. It’s not so bad when he’s working — and Joe is nearly always working — but Tom creeps up on Joe at the weirdest times: when he’s looking in the fridge for a beer, or answering people’s questions on Twitter, or deciding what pants to wear.

“What’s that face about?” asks Dave when they’re out for drinks one night.

Joe flips the cardboard coaster over again, shakes his head. He’d been looking at his hands and thinking of how they’d looked against Tom’s skin. It’s the kind of thing he has no business thinking at a moment like this. “Sorry,” Joe says, shaking it off, “just, couldn’t remember if I’d fed my dog before I went out.”

Thankfully Dave is most emphatically not Annie, and he doesn’t pursue it further, going back to whatever story he’d been telling when Joe spaced out on him.

On the other hand, Joe thinks, deliberately putting the coaster down and setting his drink on it for good measure — when Dave Krumholtz starts noticing this shit, it probably means something.

“Are we recording?” Joe says, more out of habit than anything, because this isn’t going up on the web. He sits back in his chair and stares at himself in the monitor, curious. There’s nothing new or interesting in the lines of his face, no tell that Joe can see. He takes a deep breath, leans forward, and makes eye contact with the lens of the camera. “So, I guess this is for you, Tom.” And there it is — Joe hits pause and runs the recording back just a second, sees how his mouth shapes that name Tom, sees the involuntary flash of fondness in his eyes.

He skips back to where he stopped and tries again. “Well, it kind of seems like we might be about done, here. I won’t be seeing you again until New York, I think, and — I mean, I don’t know how these things usually work, but I’m getting that feeling, like when you see your exit coming up on the freeway. I don’t want to“— he pauses, clears his throat, and grins at the screen. “I don’t want to miss my turn-off, you know?” Joe shakes his head. It’s a stupid metaphor, but he thinks Tom will get it. Tom’s got to be thinking the same thing by now.

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you — I wanted to say, thanks, I guess. Thanks for being cool about this whole thing, thanks for — for making this shoot way more than I expected it to be. I meant what I said,” and here Joe looks into the lens again, stops playing with his hands. “About how much respect I have for you. We might not see eye to eye on how we go about it, but I know you really value the — you’re the real thing, Tom. You’re the real deal. It’s an honor to get to know a little bit more about what makes you tick.”

Joe’s chest is going tight as he gets closer to the end of what he wanted to say, and he sits back in his chair again, lets out a nervous laugh. “I’ve always thought that the best thing one artist can do for another is to inspire him to be more…to, to stretch himself past his usual boundaries. So — so, thanks for that.”

There’s a lump in his throat now; if Joe had any doubt he was doing the right thing, it’s gone now. His body’s waving a million warning flags at him — the stomach flip he got backstage in Seattle repeats itself every time he gets a text notification. It’s only a matter of time before — Joe doesn’t want to miss his exit. “I sincerely hope,” Joe says, his voice a little rough around the lump still lodged in his larynx, “that we work together again in the future. I think I have a lot to learn from you.” Joe looks at the camera again. “Professionally speaking.” He clears his throat again. “Fuck,” he says, and hits pause, because that — that sounded fucking ridiculous.

Joe blows out a breath, hits the record button again, takes another shot. “I wanted to tell you,” he says, with difficulty, “that you’re really a beautiful — shit, motherfucker.” He pauses again, hesitates, and shuts off the camera, but not before saving the whole stupid file in a password protected folder. He’ll take another crack at this tomorrow, maybe, or the day after; sometime when he doesn’t keep thinking about stupid shit like Tom’s smiles, the way he fidgets, the way his weird and crazy mind darts around from subject to subject. Joe’s got time, after all; it looks like he might need all of it that he can get.

They must be keeping Tom busy on set because the texts are few and far between for a while; it’s either that, Joe thinks, or Tom’s dwindling communications are his own version of the still-incomplete video Joe keeps trying to shoot. It’s been two days since the last text when Time fucking Magazine comes calling for an interview with Joe. It’s the best distraction Joe could hope for – or it is until the interviewer pauses midstream to check a text about his sister being in labor just as Joe’s own phone buzzes in his jeans pocket. Joe takes the opportunity to sneak a peek at the message while the reporter grills Joe for an appropriate answer to his own text.

“Can you tell me what yours is?” the guy asks, probably hoping Joe’s going to let a piece of Batman slip.

Joe blinks at his phone, too stunned to answer properly.

“Is it good news or bad?” pursues the reporter.

Joe stabs the home button with his index finger and jams the phone back in his pocket. “It’s not as exciting as yours,” he says, pulling a strained smile.

“So you’re not going to say,” says the guy, smirking.

“No, sorry, man,” Joe answers with a little too much tension for the smile he’s affecting. He does his best to carry on with the interview but it’s hard to focus when his mind keeps circling back to what he saw on that little screen.

got inked, it read, do u like it. The photo was grainy and too-small and for a minute Joe had been sure he was seeing it wrong, because that — that was quite literally right off the shirt Joe’s wearing, except it was black ink on pale skin instead of grey cotton: a heart made up of shadows with a telling little red dot near the top.

The interview ends after what feels like the longest thirty minutes ever, and Joe shakes hands and smiles and spouts stuff about how it’s really an honor and he’s so fucking excited to see how it comes out, blah blah blah, the phone in his pocket like a lead weight he’s desperate to hold in his hand again. No sooner has the guy left than Joe’s publicist is in the room pumping him for details, and Joe has to give her the recording and pretend like he’s thrilled with everything. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and jams a thumb in the direction of the bathroom.

Joe’s hands are cold and his fingers are numb as he unlocks the phone and clicks back to the message. It’s real, there’s no denying it. Tom has gone and had someone tattoo a hitRECord image right into his fucking flesh, the underside of his arm by the look of it, where anyone could — Joe turns the screen off and drops the phone onto the bathroom counter, breaking out into a panicky flush, his stomach flopping far more unpleasantly than it has for any of Tom’s texts before this. A heart. A fucking hitRECord heart. Joe leans on the counter and stares into the mirror, thinking, fuck, fuck, fuck, because it seems like he couldn’t have been more wrong about — about everything, every fucking thing to do with Tom.

You can’t unkiss someone, can’t unfuck them, it’s true; worst of all, Joe thinks sickly, you can’t ask someone to unlove you.

Joe goes to bed that night with a mildly scratchy throat and wakes up before dawn drenched in sweat, his head bursting with greenish snot. The only upside of the whole thing is that it gives Joe insurance against any recriminations Tom might throw his way about not replying immediately. Joe stands in the steamy spray of his shower for a long time feeling like shit and yet not quite awful enough to shut his brain up entirely. All he can do is replay the last several weeks with Tom and try to figure out where exactly Tom got everything so fucking backwards, and how Joe could have missed it entirely.

So Tom’s not the most orthodox person, fine, Joe gets that. But now he wonders if he hadn’t misunderstood the depth of Tom’s eccentricity, if Joe was supposed to understand that Tom’s behavior was less sex-driven and more affectionate. Maybe, Joe thinks, maybe when Tom offered to hold Joe down and fuck him, maybe that was some sort of declaration of his feelings. Maybe that one afternoon when Tom had seemed to prefer lunch to fucking, at least at first — maybe that was Tom Hardy’s version of the relationship talk. And wanting to get Joe off even when Tom had sworn off orgasms himself — of course it hadn’t been a weird actorly kink on Tom’s part, it’d been — what, exactly? A sign of fidelity? Of commitment?

And then there are the things Joe now realizes he shouldn’t have missed, things he only missed because, well — Tom is a guy, and whether Joe likes to admit it or not, it’s not natural for Joe to frame Tom’s behavior in any kind of romantic light because of that. But the longer Joe thinks about it, huddled under his duvet and waiting for the cold medication to kick in, the more he realizes that Tom’s been throwing some serious signal flares for some time. You’re always cold, he’d said, like he’d noticed. And people who knew you would know, that little soft phrase that Joe had taken to mean ‘your friends and family’ but that Tom had obviously used in place of the simple pronoun ‘I’. Most killingly, Joe realizes, Tom fucking came to Seattle, he cut his visit with his kid a whole day short just to be in Joe’s show, to make Joe happy.

Put in that light, Joe thinks, rolling over and grabbing another handful of tissues, he’s the world’s biggest fucking idiot for not putting this together sooner. Sure, it had started out like fucking for fun, but at some point Joe must have missed, it had become something much more — at least on Tom’s part.

Joe blows his nose, groaning at his own stupidity as much as at the painful pressure in his sinuses.

And okay, Joe is willing to admit now, he’s been maybe straying up the same trail that Tom’s been blazing. He knows what it feels like, getting infatuated, getting carried away, but Joe also knows himself well enough to head that shit off at the pass. It’s what he’d been doing, with the video. He’d never for a minute imagined that it was too little, too late, for Tom; if anything, Joe’d feared that Tom would find the whole thing melodramatic on Joe’s part, that he’d sense Joe’s own growing affection and be freaked out or maybe just amused at Joe’s expense.

It’s a huge fucking comedy of errors, Joe decides, giving up on keeping ahead of his runny nose and just stuffing a tissue up each nostril as a preventative measure. He doesn’t know how gay men do it when it’s clear that guy plus guy equals total fucking failure to communicate. Now Tom Hardy thinks he’s — what? — in love with Joe? — there’s no way this can end but badly.

Joe falls asleep finally, tosses and turns for a few restless bleary stuffy-nosed hours, and wakes up in the mid-afternoon with the chilly beginnings of a fever. Blessedly this saps his ability to beat himself up; Joe’s about to pop two tylenol and try to sleep some more when his phone rings.

It’s not Tom.

Joe answers.

“Hey, Joseph, you’re around town for the next couple of weeks, right?”

Joe’s agent, bright and cheerful. Joe sniffs and manages a weak affirmative.

“Okay, because Chris Nolan’s people have moved some stuff around and it looks like they need you on set after all. I’m getting them to call your PA and set it up around your preexisting 50/50 commitments but I think we can make it work.”

“No, I can’t,” Joe says automatically. “I’m — I’m sick.”

“Yeah, you sound like shit,” agrees his agent. “But it’s okay, they don’t need you for a few more days. Lots of fluids, kid, okay? I’ll forward the shooting schedule as soon as I have it.”

Joe wants to protest more, but can’t come up with anything logical in his feverish brain. He hangs up instead, and spends a good minute squinting at the grainy photo of Tom’s hitRECord tattoo, which seems to be wiggling, alive, to his overheated eyes.

By the next evening Joe’s recovered enough that he can’t put off answering Tom’s text anymore, especially as Tom has gone totally silent since then. Wherever Tom is, he’s probably pissed off by now, maybe hurt, wondering why Joe’s abruptly shut him out right after his — admittedly, extreme — show of devotion.

Joe drafts a few replies in the memo app, not wanting to send anything off with an accidental slip of his thumb until it’s perfect. Finally he settles on:

Holy shit! (Sorry I didn’t answer sooner, I’ve been sick as fuck.)

‘Holy shit’, Joe feels, conveys shock without necessarily being positive or negative. With any luck, it’ll be enough to appease Tom without digging Joe further into this mess before they can meet in person and get everything sorted out. But there’s no reply from Tom, not for the rest of the evening while Joe fucks around on his computer, and not for the couple of hours after he should have gone to bed but is watching Netflix instead. Finally he caves and goes to sleep, because he’s only got one more day off before he’s back on the shoot and he’s going to need his strength in more ways than one.

There’s a new message waiting for him in the morning.

sorry to hear it mate…hear ur on set tmrw?

Joe types back right away. This one is easier.

Yeah, I am. We should grab a meal?

Tom must be idle at the moment because this time his answer comes right away, three messages in quick succession:

yes must do, how the fuck do u put those winking faces in

;)

no, makes me feel like a twat, never again

Joe laughs before he can help himself, and then he scrapes his palm over his face and sighs, because this is going to suck so, so much.

“Dinner?” Christian asks, when Chris finally lets them go for an hour around eight o’clock.

Joe twists around, looking to see if Tom has appeared yet, but Tom’s been absent from the set all day and he’s still nowhere to be found. It makes sense — he’s not in any of the scenes they’re shooting — but Joe can’t help but feel like there’s a message for him in there, too. “Yeah, sure,” Joe says, turning back to look at Christian and smiling to cover his unsettled feeling. “Thanks, man. I just — let me find whoever grabbed my phone from me.”

And this time when he turns around, it’s to run right into a wall of Tom Hardy, Tom who’s smiling free and easy and holding Joe’s iPhone in his hand. “I think I’ve worked out why you’ve not answered any of my texts in the last couple of hours,” he says, and waggles the phone.

“Gimme that,” Joe says, not sure if he’s relieved to see Tom or not, riding a wave of adrenalin that could be fear or joy. His fingers twine with Tom’s as he grabs the phone and Tom resists his grasp, and that kicks everything off in entirely a new direction. If Joe had expected Tom’s feelings to shut down Joe’s own — his want — well, it doesn’t seem to have happened that way. Joe’s grin falters and Tom’s does too, an instant later. Tom lets go of the phone. Joe takes it and steps back, shaken.

“Will you join us?” Christian asks, breaking in like nothing’s happened. Maybe, from his perspective, nothing has. Joe hopes so.

Joe checks Tom’s expression; he’s pretty sure that this doesn’t fit with Tom’s plans for dinner with Joe. But Tom seems perfectly calm about it, easy-going. “Yeah, cheers,” he says, and they head towards the little dining area that’s been set aside for the actors. Annie’s there, and so is Marion. Chris is just loading up his own plate. It’s a normal dinner on a movie set. It’s not exactly what Joe had pictured, and it certainly doesn’t afford him a chance to have that talk that he and Tom really fucking need to have.

“Can you eat this stuff?” Joe asks Tom, seeking an out. It earns him a quick glance from Christian, and then all eyes are on Tom, waiting for his answer. “I mean, with your,” Joe clears his throat, wondering if this sounds as much like a boyfriend question as he fears, “with your training regime and”—

“Oh, I can cobble something together,” Tom says with all casualness, grabbing a chicken wrap and scooping salad onto his plate. “Don’t you worry about me.”

I’m not worried, Joe thinks, but doesn’t say. It’s kind of a lie, anyway. Joe’s not worried about Tom’s food, but he’s worried about Tom in general, about what this might mean later, if this is going to turn into recriminations about how Joe sat around and had a chatty normal dinner with Tom and plotted to dump his ass the whole time.

There are several empty chairs yet at the table. Joe heads for the seat next to Annie, knowing that guy etiquette will have Christian and Tom in the chairs opposite, on either side of Marion. Chris has headed off, already, presumably to his trailer to eat in peace.

But while Christian takes up an empty seat beside Marion, Tom comes around the table and takes the one next to Joe. Their knees brush, Tom’s bulk bumping up into Joe’s space unapologetically. There’s general chatter, about the food or the hot weather or the probable length of the shoot tonight — Joe’s honestly not sure, keeping his head bowed to his plate, sick but forcing himself to eat anyway. Next to him Tom’s dissecting his wrap and picking through the contents to separate chicken and veggies from rice.

“Oh, Tom!” Annie exclaims, leaning around Joe to look at Tom. “I heard Joe popped your cherry in Seattle!”

Tom laughs and Joe chokes on his water, coughing while everyone else exclaims and laughs and leans in to hear the rest of this story.

“hitRECord,” Tom says, which makes everyone go ah and settle back, grinning. “Yeah, no, I nipped up and did a reading at his show. It was — it was good fun, yeah.”

“He was awesome,” Joe says, wiping his mouth, clearing his throat. “He — did a great job.”

“It’s really a fucking brilliant thing,” says Tom, “have you heard about this, Christian?”

Joe nudges Tom’s foot under the table in warning. Much as Joe loves hitRECord, loves to talk about it, he has a rule that he won’t be the one to bring it up, especially in such august company. The last thing he wants to do is come off like an overeager film student; that’s not his schtick. If Tom is about to direct Joe to explain the whole thing, Joe’d rather cut him off at the pass.

But Tom doesn’t ask Joe to jump in. He just leans across the table and — and holds forth. Tom talks crowd-sourcing, he talks about the collaborative nature of hitRECord. Tom quotes Disney, like Joe does. He name-drops four or five of Joe’s more successful collaborations, and then he wraps it all up by saying, “Honestly, it’s the future of film, what he’s doing,” sitting back in his chair and folding massive arms across massive chest as though challenging anyone to question this statement.

Joe has forgotten to eat, he’s so stunned by Tom. He looks down now and realizes he’s still holding a forkful of salad he’d speared three minutes earlier.

“That,” says Christian, since everyone is obviously waiting on his judgement, “that sounds brilliant, Joe.” It’s a little unenthusiastic but Tom seems appeased anyway, unfolding his arms and grinning over at Joe.

“It really is,” Tom says fondly, and kicks Joe’s ankle gently.

“Excuse me,” Joe says with a taut smile, and pushes his chair back, leaves his plate and his bottle of water, knowing only that he’s got to get the fuck out of here, not caring particularly how weird it must look for him to be taking off after Tom’s just gone to bat for him so enthusiastically. His heart is racing and his mouth has gone dry. He’s not sure where he’s headed but he’s not surprised when he finds himself alone in his trailer, leaning on the kitchenette counter and taking deep heaving breaths.

Joe’s not surprised, either, when his trailer door bangs open short seconds later and Tom hops up the steps. “You’re still not well,” Tom says, all concern and kindness, and since when does Tom fucking Hardy give a shit if Joe’s stomach is in knots? This is so fucked up, Joe thinks weakly, and laughs in spite of himself.

“I’m fine,” he tells Tom even though it’s patently not true, rubbing his hands over his eyes.

“You’re not, you look like spoilt custard,” Tom says, coming over, taking Joe by the wrists gently, tugging his hands down. “Are you going to be sick?”

“No,” Joe says, and kisses Tom.

Tom resists for a startled moment and then drops Joe’s hands, breathes out with a groan, and gets Joe by the waist, pins him against the counter, really lays into him. Joe responds helplessly, like a reflex at this point, bracing himself on Tom’s shoulders, his neck, the back of his head, kisses back a little frantically. This is wrong, it’s not what — but while they’re kissing it’s almost possible to stop thinking.

Almost, but not quite.

Joe pulls away, palms flat to Tom’s chest, saying ‘cut’ with his body just like that first time. “Tom,” he says thickly, voice crackling, “Tom, I’m so so fucking sorry.” Tom doesn’t get it — of course not — and on impulse Joe runs his hand over and pushes Tom’s upper arm out and away from his body, looking for — and there it is, scabbed over now, unappealing and yet gorgeous anyway, tucked in with the rest of Tom’s ink like it belongs. “You shouldn’t’ve,” Joe says, gutted, and can’t go on.

“I shouldn’t have?” Tom prompts, looking between his newest tattoo and Joe, puzzled.

Joe wets his lips, tells himself to nut up, and meets Tom’s eyes. “I’m not in love with you,” he says.

Tom’s brows flicker into a frown. His lips part a little as though he wants to speak but has no words — and that’s just wrong, Tom Hardy at a loss for words.

“I don’t,” Joe says, “I’m not.” He exhales, abruptly tired of himself. “It’s like you said,” he says. “My commitment, it’s to what I do. That’s where I give my passion. That’s where I give everything I have.” He blinks, refocuses. “But it’s been — I meant what I said, about respect. I feel like you’ve — given me so much. So much inspiration, and it’s been — I really truly respect you.” He shakes his head, losing the thread.

“You said that already,” Tom says, very very quietly.

“I know,” Joe says, and lets go of Tom’s arm.

Tom follows suit, dropping his hands away from Joe’s waist, stepping back a little.

“I’m sorry,” Joe says, repeating himself again.

Tom pulls his palm over his shaved head and fixes his gaze on the floor. He bruises easy, P-Nut had said, but that was the least of it. Tom looks like he’s not just bruised, he’s fucking bleeding out all over the floor of Joe’s trailer. “Right, okay,” he says, nodding to himself, and leaves.

Joe wants to stop him but has no fucking idea what he’d even say. Instead he sags back against the counter and watches Tom go, feeling like he might actually throw up after all.

By the time Joe’s called back to set, Tom’s gone again. Joe still feels like shit but he’s worked most of his life and he’s an expert at compartmentalization if nothing else. They go through the evening’s shooting schedule and everything goes fine.

Joe does his job.

What had been a curse before becomes a blessing; Joe is never on set when Tom is. They don’t have any material together in this part of the shoot.

It doesn’t mean word doesn’t get around, though.

“It’s the battle of the Toms,” Annie groans when Joe spends a lunch hour (hiding out) in her trailer.

“What do you mean?” Joe asks, glad that she’s too absorbed in her plate of food to notice the way he flinched at the name.

“Tom the stunt coordinator is going to kill Tom the actor,” she says. Annie’s been in rehearsals with Christian and Tom the last few days, working some big fight sequence. “Because — no offense, I know you guys are BFFs or whatever — Tom the actor is being an immense d-bag.”

“We’re not BFFs, jesus,” Joe says, a little more acridly than he should. “We’re barely Fs.”

“Oh, you’re more than Fs,” Annie says knowingly, and this time she’s looking up and obviously catches Joe’s expression. Of course she’d meant that Joe and Tom were good friends, of course she had, but for a split second he hadn’t read it that way, and she’d caught it. “Oh my god,” she says, straightening up in her seat.

“No,” Joe says, shaking his head.

“Oh my god,” she says again, and to her credit, Annie doesn’t have the gleeful gossipy tone she’d had when they had sushi in Pittsburgh. She sounds genuinely shocked, and worried.

“No, no, no,” Joe says hastily, waving his hand at her, trying to get her to settle down. “Whoa, no, you’re way off.”

“This makes so much sense,” she says, ignoring him, still stunned. “Oh my god, the way he went after you the other night.”

“No, I just wasn’t feeling well,” Joe says, because this has been his line all along. He forces a laugh, smiles at her. “Annie. Come on. I’m not having some secret gay love affair, jesus.”

“Not anymore you’re not,” she says, because Annie is a fucking good actor, and fucking good actors are all too observant. “Joe, did you — did you dump Tom Hardy?”

Joe sets his plate down and sighs, because that makes three times he’s denied it and it’s getting far too martyristic in here. “I had to dump him,” he says instead. “Annie, he literally got a tattoo for me. Guy’s“— and Joe wants to make a slur here, say something about how Tom’s unhinged, but it doesn’t feel right or fair. Joe closes his mouth around the end of the sentence and hates himself a little.

Because Annie’s a truly good person, she doesn’t fill in the blanks for Joe either. Instead she puts her own plate down and studies Joe, really looks at him. “How long?” she asks. “Since London?”

“No,” Joe says. “Pittsburgh. Early on, in Pittsburgh.” It’s weird, having it out in the open like this. It’s — it’s not as hard as he’d thought it would be.

She looks at him, big eyes curious and frank. “I didn’t know you dated guys,” she says.

“I don’t,” Joe says without thinking. “I didn’t. I mean, I honest to fuck thought we weren’t — I thought it was just messing around, okay? Until he pulled this crazy shit with the tattoo, that’s what I thought!”

Annie chews on her lower lip for a second, thinking. “Are you talking about the heart tattoo?” she asks.

“Yeah, exactly, it’s a fucking heart,” Joe explodes, because it’s still completely insane that Tom would — that he had —

“Joe,” she says, urgently, “that’s not about you. At least, that’s not how he tells it.”

Joe huffs out a humorless laugh. “Come on,” he says, “what else could it be?”

Annie tilts her head. “He says it’s because he loved that story, the shadow caste story. He says“— she pauses, as though trying to remember it correctly — “something about liking the symbol of the darkness inside each of us, the shadow-self. I don’t know, he got all Jungian about it when we were talking the other day, right after he got it.” She blinks and shakes her head. “I mean, it’s Tom. I don’t ever get the sense that he’s big on misdirection, you know? Tom feels something and everyone knows it.”

“Tell that to someone who hasn’t been having sex with him for weeks and weeks without anyone knowing,” Joe says, not buying it.

She sighs, exasperated. “Look, I don’t know what’s gone on between you,” she says pointedly, “but I can tell you that you’ve got at least two things wrong, okay? First of all, no one but you thinks that Tom’s tattoo is a love letter to you, so get over yourself. Secondly, you’re the one who was all gooey last month about this new person you were seeing — no, Joe,” she says warningly, seeing him about to object, “I was there, I saw how you looked when you got that text from him, you weren’t fooling anyone. So even if Tom did literally tattoo his heart onto his sleeve for your sake, what the hell is wrong with that? You can’t honestly tell me you’re not feeling the same way.”

“I’m not fucking feeling the same way!” Joe explodes back at her, furious. “Jesus fucking”— and he has to stand, does, paces the length of the trailer feeling as caged and ferocious as Tom looked in his Bane body. “I’m not, okay? Maybe I was — I was starting to — but I shut it down, okay? I had to shut it down.”

“Why?” Annie asks, baffled and angry. “What is your deal, Joseph?”

“Don’t“— Joe says abruptly, “don’t call me that.” He stops and exhales hard. “Tom calls me that.”

Annie sighs loudly and stands up, throwing a scarf around her neck, fixing her ponytail. “Okay, I’m done here,” she says, pissed off. “There’s clueless and then there’s stupid, and I’m okay with clueless but stupid is,” and she doesn’t bother finishing the sentence, just grabs her sunglasses and heads for the door, the second person to storm out on Joe this week.

Watching movie making is far from glamorous; it’s usually roundly boring, especially if you’re literally just on the sidelines and without a useful role. There’s a tremendous amount of standing around and waiting, and then when filming happens it’s a crapshoot whether you’re going to catch all the dialogue and see the performances from whatever out-of-the-way vantage point you’ve managed to find.

Joe stands well out of the way, probably more than he has to, and watches Tom filming. The tension on set is palpable; Joe immediately sees what Annie was talking about. It’s hard to hear the specifics but it’s obvious that Tom is snappish and difficult, struggling still with the Bane mask and losing all good humor about it too. Even Chris, who is the definition of a calm person, seems to be stressed by the situation, going over to Tom repeatedly and talking to him in a low voice but keeping a respectful distance, like Tom’s personal bubble is much larger than usual. It’s no wonder, though; Tom’s shoulders, already huge with muscle, seem to be amplified by a visible tension that just about screams hands off.

For a huge guy, P-Nut is amazingly stealthy. One second Joe’s spotted him safely on the other side of the action and the next there’s a terrifyingly heavy arm slung around Joe’s shoulders. “I think you’d better go,” P-Nut says, voice neutral.

Joe looks over at P-Nut and then at Tom. “He hasn’t spotted me,” he protests.

“Do you really want to see what happens if he does?” P-Nut asks, again with a perfect lack of emotion.

Joe swallows hard, and takes his leave.

Joe knows he’s got to try to talk with Tom, if only to do a better job in explaining what he’s been trying to say to him since he did that stupid video last week. But after seeing Tom on set, after P-Nut’s warning, it feels easier, more attainable, to fix things with Annie first. Besides, he thinks, trying to recount the whole mess to Annie might help him sort shit out in his head a little more, and he needs that pretty badly at this point. He’s not sleeping well, and the continuing murmurs on set about Tom’s bad moods aren’t helping assuage his conscience in the least.

So Joe sends Annie a text apologizing, asking her to forgive him, he’s being a jackass, he’d really like to hear what she thinks. Annie’s reply is a little chilly, but she agrees to go out for dinner, and by the time they actually meet up, face to face, she’s back to her old self. Annie’s kind of terrible at holding a grudge even if her temper flares up hot and fast once in a while.

“Is it the gay thing?” she says quietly, earnestly. “Because I get it if it’s the gay thing.” She shuffles the straw in her drink. “I mean, if I suddenly started up with another girl, that would take some adjusting to.”

“It’s not the gay thing,” Joe says, and then shakes his head, trying for more honesty. “It’s a little bit the gay thing.” He squints, trying to balance everything out in his head. “Look, you know me. People should be with whoever makes them happy, fuck trying to define everything to death. Whatever. I never — guys never did it for me, before. I guess they do, now.” He smirks helplessly and takes a sip of his beer to cover it. “Tom says bisexuality can strike at any age.”

Annie laughs appreciatively. “He’d know, I guess,” she says.

“No,” says Joe, “actually, he’s always been a little bent, or so he says.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Annie says, “but so have you, be honest.”

Joe laughs grudgingly, because yeah, okay. He might never have thought about it, much less acted on it, but for years half of the industry has been convinced he’s at least a little gay. It’s never bugged him; he doesn’t know why it would bug him any more now just because it’s finally true.

So, okay, it’s not the gay thing, not really. “You know me,” he says, “I don’t buy into all that hearts and flowers shit, right?”

“Yes, yes, it’s all a vast conspiracy sold by the movie industry to make guys shell out more money to make their girlfriends happy,” Annie says, rolling her eyes. “I’ve heard this rant before. And you know what I always say, too.”

“You always say,” Joe recites, “that I’m just saying that because I’ve never, quote, really been in love.” He pokes at the salt shaker, bothered by this idea more than he ever has been. “I still think it’s bullshit, though. So there goes your pet theory.”

Annie reaches across the table and grabs Joe’s fingers like his fidgeting is bothering her — but then she squeezes his hand and Joe looks up and reluctantly meets her gaze. She’s not smiling, she’s utterly deadpan. “Okay,” she says, “let me just try,” and she licks her lips, holds his gaze, and says, “Tom Hardy.”

Joe’s ears flush red instantly.

“Oh come on,” he gripes, smiling anyway, “that’s not fair, I know you’re expecting me to react, so I react.”

“Tom Hardy,” she says again, more slowly, not letting his hand go.

Joe snorts in laughter and averts his eyes, because Annie is killer funny when she wants to be. “Okay, okay,” he says. “Yes, it’s a magical test to check and see if the thought of someone turns me on, you win.”

“Tom,” she says slowly, squeezing his fingers, “Hardy.”

Unwillingly, now, Joe thinks of Tom — really thinks of him. His face, the way he smiles sort of shy and dirty at the same time; the clipped cadence of his speech, his warm voice; the tuck of his fingers just into Joe’s waistband, the way he’d hold him there casually, under the weight of his muscled arm. “So, what if it’s real,” Joe says, before Annie can crow in triumph or something, “what if it is?” He pulls his hand away from Annie’s and sits back in his chair. “If it’s still not something I want, what does it matter?”

Annie doesn’t throw Joe a line about not being able to choose these things, how sometimes they choose you. She’s not like that. Instead she reaches over and grabs his beer glass, takes a swig and slams it down again. “Well,” she says plainly, “then you’re just screwed.”

Being screwed, it turns out, means a lot of things. It means trying over and over again to delete his text message history with Tom, but not managing to do it. It means waking up at three in the morning from a dream where Tom was lying next to him, rolling over onto the cool side of the bed and feeling lonelier than he’s ever felt. It means distracting himself with work only to find himself clicking through WireImage photos of Tom’s Warrior premiere, not sure if he’s more proud or sad or horny.

Being screwed means that Joe never really feels hungry when it’s time to eat, or like sleeping when it’s time to sleep. He gets through the day okay, does his job, keeps his head up and smiles and acts normal enough when he needs to. But later on, Joe’s awake in the middle of the night and eating bacon with his fingers just because he doesn’t feel like doing anything else (and bacon has never stopped signifying rebellion for him anyway). He’s asleep in the afternoon in his trailer while everyone else is at the craft services table chatting and laughing during union breaks.

Sometimes Annie comes and hangs out with him, and mostly she seems to sense when he wants to talk about dumb irrelevant shit, when he just wants to be quiet. One time she starts to say, “Maybe you should talk to him,” and Joe isn’t ashamed to admit that he’d laid down right there, put his head in her lap and confessed, “I can’t, I’m afraid of what I might do.”

She strokes his hair and plays with his ears and Joe closes his eyes, wonders how long it’ll be until it stops getting worse and starts getting better again.

Toronto’s good, Toronto’s what Joe needs. He feels his heart lightening even as the plane lifts off, leaving LA behind. The premiere goes well, the show goes well. Seth is awesome and Joe feels proud, closer to normal than he’s felt since this whole thing with Tom started. It helps that Seth always has good weed, Joe thinks, cheerful as he stops by the hotel’s reception desk to pick up his messages and mail.

There’s a bunch of hitRECord business, things that need signing, stuff from his agent, his publicist. And there are the latest drafts for the New York part of the Batman shoot that kicks off for Joe in just a couple of weeks now. Joe flips through them idly, noting the changes since the last version, checking out how much dialogue he has and how much action. It’s not until he sees the word BANE just below one of the lines marked BLAKE that it clicks for Joe.

He’s going to have to work with Tom again, and soon.

Can we meet up sometime before you’re off to NYC? I’d like to talk.

go fuck urself

That could have gone better, Joe thinks.

It would be good, Joe thinks, to see Tom at least once before New York; better yet if they can exchange a few words and somehow agree on mutual civility, at least in a professional context.

So Joe sends texts, calls at odd hours, leaves voice messages that he’s practiced carefully beforehand from scripts he’s written. Barring that first angry reply, though, Tom ignores everything completely. Joe remembers all the times Tom’s confessed hiding from P-Nut and thinks that Tom’s probably an expert at avoiding people he doesn’t want to see. There’s no help for it — Joe’s going to have to track him down in person.

Joe doesn’t know where Tom is staying while he’s in LA but he knows someone will tell him if he just tries hard enough. He picks up the phone and calls his agent, makes up some bullshit excuse about having planned to meet Tom for drinks in the hotel bar but forgetting to check where it was, Tom’s phone doesn’t seem to be working, blah blah blah. His agent’s known Joe a long time and probably knows when he’s full of shit, but he at least pretends to buy the story and promises to make some calls and see if he can’t track Tom down.

Joe thanks him one time too many and hangs up, sags back into his armchair, draws his feet up under him. He gets why Tom’s angry, he really does, but it’s fucking exhausting to be the one doing all the work. Joe blames himself for having misread Tom, but he’s sure there’s at least a little blame left over for Tom’s side of things, Tom’s apparent inability to verbalize something so simple and yet important as I think I’m falling for you. And okay, Joe fucked up the whole breaking up talk, he knows it, but couldn’t Tom at least acknowledge that Joe wants to set the record straight now?

It’s pissing down rain when Joe gets to the hotel that night, which is actually a stroke of good luck because he knows for a fact that tonight’s shooting schedule involved outdoor work and they’re sure to cut it short in this weather. Joe parks himself just outside the entrance to the hotel, leans against the wall under the awning, waits. The air smells like wet car exhaust fumes and everything has that soggy tired hush that comes with a real downpour. It makes Joe feel tired to the bone, and Tom hasn’t even shown his face yet.

When Tom does show his face, Joe nearly misses it; Tom’s hunched under a hoodie with the hood pulled over a baseball cap, hands stuffed in his pockets, shoulders hunched down against the rain. Tom looks for all the world like a bull with its shoulder to the yoke, like he’s dragging something impossibly heavy just behind him. Joe’s throat hurts just watching him, and when he goes to speak his voice is a little choked. “Tom,” he says, and steps forward, makes himself known.

Tom looks up, sees Joe. His step checks a tiny bit but then he keeps moving, faster now.

“Tom, come on,” Joe says, “Tom, dammit!”

Tom stops, frozen, but doesn’t turn his face to look at Joe.

“I just,” Joe says, coming closer warily, “I just need to know if we’re going to be cool when we’re shooting in New York. You know, professionally.”

Tom’s face is shadowed from the brim of his hat; all Joe can make out clearly is the way his mouth twists downwards. “I managed to be a professional when I was off my head on crack ten years ago,” he says neatly. “What makes you think I’d be any different now?”

Joe nods quickly, accepting this. “Okay,” he says, trying to sound appeased, calm. “Yeah, that’s — that’s all I wanted to”—

—“That’s all you wanted to know?” Tom breaks in, lifting his chin now, making eye contact with Joe. “That’s the whole reason you’ve been leaving messages constantly?”

Joe blinks, unprepared for this. “Well,” he says, “that was — no. I mean, if you“—

“If you start in about how much you respect me again,” Tom says in a dangerous low voice, “I will lose my shit, Joseph.”

“That wasn’t what,” Joe begins, confused, but now he can’t think of anything else to say. He sticks with the obvious: “I’m really fucking sorry.”

“Oh, well,” says Tom, “if you’re sorry,” and he shoulders through the hotel door without another word, leaving Joe gaping with all the things he should have said instead.

So Tom goes to New York, and Joe follows shortly after, and soon enough he finds himself on set with Tom. There are enough other people around that things are well buffered between them, but not so many that anyone could help but notice the coolness between Tom and Joe where there used to be friendliness.

Chris wisely pretends he doesn’t notice though, and everyone else follows his lead, and it’s fine, because Tom wasn’t shitting Joe — he really does have the professional chops to pull through anyway. Joe tries not to be too surprised, but this is the same guy who fidgeted through every single Inception junket like a toddler hopped up on apple juice; that guy is the guy who now seems to have pulled himself together, abruptly, become steady and quiet and focussed in rehearsal. Even his bad moods seem to have gone, much to everyone’s obvious relief.

Instead, Joe is the one having a hard time.

It makes no sense. Joe has literally been doing this job since age six, and even if he hadn’t, Blake’s not exactly a deeply challenging emotional role or anything. Still, Joe’s never struggled like he’s struggling now, blowing blocking and then lines, and then fumbling words he never fumbles, and then stepping on someone else’s lines in a hurry to get his right. It’s like amateur hour, and Joe hasn’t been an amateur in over two decades.

“Okay, take five,” Chris finally tells everyone while Joe wishes the floor would open up and swallow him whole. Fucking Gary Oldman is here; Christian Bale is here. Chris Nolan is probably rethinking ever including Joe in this project, and rightly so at this point. Joe smiles, tries to shake it off, winces apologetically at Chris even as Chris heads his way.

“I know,” he says before Chris can speak, “I’ll get it together.” Joe’s seen other actors get this treatment but has never been there himself. His ears are burning.

“Yeah?” Chris says. “Because we can move on to other coverage and come back to you.”

“No, you’ll have to stop and relight everything,” Joe hastens to say, “don’t — I’ve got this.”

Chris gives him a steady searching look. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” Joe nods. He waits until Chris is headed back over to talk to the DP before he shakes his hands, his feet, his face, trying to refocus, jittery like he’s had too much coffee even though he hasn’t had any yet today. He can’t shake it out of his mind, though, the knowledge that Tom is only a few feet away, hating Joe. It’s overwhelming. He looks over, though he’s been avoiding it all day. Tom’s out of the Bane mask for the moment, drinking water and playing with his phone.

They’ve got about a minute left before they resume shooting, and Joe doesn’t feel any better. His phone buzzes suddenly in the inside pocket of his suit jacket, and Joe slips it out, takes a look.

use it

Joe blinks. The message is from Tom.

Use what? Joe writes back, rather than lifting his head and speaking, because apparently this is how they’re doing this.

The answer is swift: whatever it is thats blocking u, use it

Joe is too thrown to make any sense of this at all, just tucking the phone away again and trying to remember his lines, but the phrase Tom chose has awakened the memory of the night in Seattle, Tom on his knees and elbows in front of Joe, Tom saying gonna use this. Joe’s skin is prickling hot, then cold. His stomach is pitching. If anything he’s in worse shape than he was before the break. Maybe that was Tom’s intention. Joe looks over at him to see if he’s gloating, but Tom’s masked again now and Joe can only make out the glitter of those slanted grey-blue eyes above the blank space where Tom’s nose and mouth should be.

They start calling the cues: rolling, speed, marker, then clap. Set, action. Joe swallows, takes a moment.

Use it.

Joe lets himself think about it, about Tom, lets himself feel Tom so close and yet so distant, breathes out through his nose, and starts to act.

better innit

Thank you, seriously.

well sometimes u cant stuff it all down no matter how hard u try

Smile now, cry later? I remember reading that somewhere.

“Sit here, mate,” Tom says when Joe hesitates, last to the table. Tom hooks his ankle around the chair next to him and pulls it out for Joe. Joe unthinkingly checks with P-Nut, sitting across from Tom; P-Nut gives him a hint of a nod. Joe sits.

They don’t talk anyway. Christian and Marion are dominating the conversation, and Tom himself is continuing that strong silent type thing he’s been doing the whole time they’ve been in New York. Still, he’s a warm presence at Joe’s left elbow. Joe keeps a respectful few inches between them, resisting the impulse to brush his arm casually against Tom’s, sure that would fracture this new detente. It would be going the wrong direction anyway, because there’s an important difference between moving on and falling back.

At some point P-Nut excuses himself for a minute, and the moment he’s gone Tom’s hand snakes over and grabs one of Joe’s roasted baby potatoes. Joe laughs in spite of himself and Tom grins around the potato already in his mouth, unrepentant, mischievous, handsome. “Carb speakeasy,” Joe says, snorting.

“Good show you’re back,” Tom says, “I was having to find my carbs in the gutters.”

“Digging through cigarette butts for fallen fries,” Joe says, giggling now.

“Offering sexual favors for a taco shell,” Tom elaborates mournfully.

“You’re giving it up for taco shells, man?” Joe says, feigning shock and dismay. “You should hold out for, like, a dinner roll. You’re a big Hollywood star now, it’s all over the news.”

“Right, I’ll hold out for a dinner roll next time I’m hard up,” Tom promises, finally cracking up too, holding up a hand in demonstration. “No, wait, Joseph Gordon-Levitt says that a croissant is the going rate for a blow job in a back alley.”

“Damn right I do,” Joe says, and Tom is wriggling with laughter in his seat now, and it feels so fucking good and easy, and Joe thinks — maybe they can get through this after all. It’s the happiest he’s felt in weeks.

“Hand goes here,” says the stunt coordinator, and takes Joe’s wrist, lays his palm flat on Tom’s shoulder. “Push off like this, step back with your right to open your body to the camera, then Tom, your right hand comes up from under here and you, yes, one-two-three — Joe, back it up, that’s it, we’ll have a mat for your landing.”

Joe’s trying to stay focused — he’s done a lot of fight choreography though it’s sometimes a bit alien to him, all the sharp moves and intensity — but it’s even harder when he can feel the way Tom flinches back from the simple brush of Joe’s hand in answer to the stunt coordinator’s directions. Tom’s gone back to cool and polite today, and it seems like he might be retreating further still into hostility the way he’s reacting to this little bit of choreography rehearsal.

“Okay, try it,” says Tom the stunt coordinator. “Slowly.”

Joe goes to throw the left hook first and Tom holds steady, but when his right hand comes up and makes for Tom’s shoulder, Tom goes tense and shrugs it off, the move ridiculous when Joe’s meant to be inflicting actual injury, however mild.

“Steady that shoulder,” says the stunt coordinator. “Come on, Tom, steady. Again.”

Joe backs up, starts over, and again Tom slips his shoulder out from under Joe’s touch. “Sorry,” Joe says automatically, like he’s at fault. Then, confusedly, he apologizes again — “Sorry, sorry,” — because he’s back at that hotel entrance on the rainy LA night, watching as Tom shrugs away Joe’s apologies just like he’s shrugging off Joe’s touch now.

“Steady, Tom,” says the stunt guy again. “Roll into it.”

Tom shakes his arms out, bows his chin, nods to show he’s ready for another go. This time he doesn’t pull back from Joe and they get into the part where he lands three punches to Joe’s side, three of them, Tom’s big fists bumping gently in mock battle while Joe staggers back like the blows are landing hard. “And then the mat?” Joe checks, because it’s doing funny things to him too, having Tom’s hands on him, even in this mock fight.

“And then the mat,” says the other Tom, nodding. “Remember to land hips first, spread your arms out to distribute the impact more evenly.”

“Can’t we use a double,” says Tom, breaking the silence he’s been keeping this whole time. “For Joseph?”

“No, Chris wants to get in some close-ups of this sequence,” says the stunt guy, shaking his head. “Joe can do it, no worries.”

“I can do it,” Joe affirms, nodding along. “Tom, I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” says Tom, shuffling his feet, looking at some point over Joe’s shoulder. “Sure, let’s — let’s run it again.”

Tom goes on like that, running hot and cold, laughing with Joe one minute and barely able to make eye contact the next, and Joe gets it, he really does, because he’s the same way even if he’s less obvious about it. Talking to Tom is one thing; touching him is another thing entirely. Happily Joe’s character doesn’t present much of a physical challenge to Tom’s, so their fight sequence is short — but short in movie terms still means the better part of an afternoon to shoot, four different angles for coverage and waiting to relight every time.

“You okay?” Joe dares to ask while they wait for the last set-up to be complete. Tom’s holding a coffee cup but seems to have forgotten the fact, staring into the middle distance and looking lost in thought.

Tom snaps out of it at the sound of Joe’s voice, though. He looks over and blinks, like he’s surprised that Joe is so nearby. “Yeah,” he says, and squints like he’s still in the middle of an internal debate. “You know, I’m still on that bloody training regime.”

“I know,” says Joe sympathetically, because everyone has seen Tom and his press-ups between takes, his endless plates of chicken and vegetables.

“No, I mean,” Tom says, and lifts his eyebrows, making eye contact, “that training regime from that MMA fighter.”

“Oh,” says Joe, then gets it. “Oh. Fuck, really? This whole time?”

“Really,” says Tom, nodding grimly. “It was just getting easier finally and now“— He gestures at Joe. “Now it’s not.”

Joe feels the blush sweep up from his neck as this sinks in. Tom’s having trouble with the fights not because he’s angry with Joe (though maybe he is) but because — Joe swallows hard. “Sorry about that,” he says, always apologizing.

“Yeah,” says Tom, smirking, “would you stop being so fucking fit?”

Joe laughs with surprise, partly at Tom’s words and partly at the fact that Tom’s not rejecting his apology this time. “How much longer is it?” he asks, trying to sound like it’s a matter of polite interest.

“A week,” says Tom. “We’re meant to be wrapped on the bridge sequence one week from today.”

“Big night,” Joe says, grinning.

“Big sixty seconds in my trailer the second Nolan calls cut,” Tom says, sketching a hand gesture, pulling a wild face.

Joe knows he’s supposed to smile and make a joke in answer, but his brain is abruptly hung up on the image, Tom flushed and desperate and still in wardrobe, working himself off frantically, Tom coming hard after weeks of abstaining. How would he look, Joe wonders — how much would his hands be trembling, after waiting so long?

He realizes too late that he’s missed his chance for a casual answer, looks over and sees the way Tom is watching him, curious and open. “Just,” Joe says, blushing, “just — I bet that’ll — huh.”

Tom’s gaze sharpens a little more and his cheeks flush in answer, like he’s thinking about it too, or maybe thinking about how Joe’s going to jerk off picturing it later. “You definitely keep me keyed up,” Tom says, matter-of-fact. “I guess I should thank you for that.”

“Well, if you win an Oscar,” Joe says, “you can add it to your speech.”

“Oh, I will do,” Tom says, “I’ll thank the Academy, and Chris, and my family, and then I’ll praise your hands and your dimples and your pert little arse.”

It’s gone too far; they realize it at the same moment. Joe clears his throat, steps away to the craft services table in search of water, tries not to pay too much attention to the way Tom’s suddenly broken into another series of press-ups even though P-Nut isn’t anywhere to be seen.

They get through the final shoot of the scene; that’s about all Joe can say about it.

“Have you heard the latest?” asks Marion when she arrives on set the next day, kissing Joe on each cheek, smelling heavenly and looking even better.

“No,” says Joe. “The latest what?”

“Oh,” she says, “only that a friend emailed me, apparently you and I are having a scandalous affair on the set of Batman.”

Joe breaks into delighted laughter; sometimes the gossip rags get things so wrong, it’s actually hilarious. “You and me?” he repeats.

“Don’t be too amused, you’ll hurt my feelings,” she says with mock reproach.

“Well,” Joe says, “not that I wouldn’t be honored to have a torrid on-set romance with you, but I think your boyfriend might have something to say about it.”

She purses her lips against a smile. “Well, apparently you and I have split up now,” she continues. “You are heartbroken and I am cruel.”

“Where do they even get this shit from?” Joe marvels, shaking his head.

Marion lifts a shoulder. “I can’t be sure,” she says, “but it’s something to do with you singing Piaf in Toronto at your show, according to the article.” She switches to French, voice light and amused. “Chanter Piaf est forcément me faire une déclaration d'amour, comme tu le sais.” Singing Piaf is the same as declaring your love for me, as you know.

Joe grins ruefully. “My fault, then,” he says. “Je suis vraiment désolé.”

“De rien, chéri,” says Marion, waving it away. “I quite like the idea of having a younger lover. Makes me seem more glamorous.”

“As if you need any more glamour,” Joe says gallantly. They’re called away to make-up a moment later, and as Joe goes he notices that Tom’s arrived at some point during this conversation, hanging out a few feet away with his phone in hand as usual. Joe squeezes a tight smile his way, and Tom presses his lips together in answer. Joe would lay odds that neither of them feels very glamorous at all about their own failed on-set affair.

It’s a long-ass day, Chris doing his level best to pack all Joe’s remaining New York scenes into the time remaining before he and the production will be decamping to Jersey to shoot the big climactic bridge sequence, at which point Joe himself will be headed home again. But even with Chris’s maneuvering, Joe doesn’t get done until after midnight.

He’s moving slowly by the time he gets back to his trailer to collect his belongings; he blames his exhaustion for the fact that he doesn’t notice the murky shadows a few feet away until they’ve already resolved into a figure moving fast towards him. Joe’s pulse kicks up with alarm because this person is moving with purpose, and there’s no one else anywhere in sight, no one to see or help him. He takes a step back, dropping his trailer keys to the asphalt, hands in the air, and registers that it’s not a stranger bearing down on him, it’s — and then Tom’s got him pinned up against the side of his trailer and he’s kissing Joe.

Joe was braced for some kind of assault but this isn’t anything like what he’d anticipated. It takes him a minute to get with the program — Tom’s hand pushing Joe’s shoulder against cool metal, the other cupping his jaw to hold him steady — and then Joe’s all in, unthinking, pushing back against Tom even though it’s futile, kissing him and gasping for air and past any thought other than I missed this, I missed it, I missed him.

When Tom pulls back Joe goes after him helplessly, making a frustrated sound, but Tom is smiling in the half-light and Joe has to pause to take it in, the sight of Tom smiling like that for Joe; he’d never appreciated it properly before. “What’s this all about?” Joe asks, not really caring.

“Chanter Piaf est forcément me faire une déclaration d'amour,” says Tom in perfect quiet French, and for a long minute Joe doesn’t get it in the least, and then he does. His cheeks heat up with embarrassment.

“You saw that?” Joe asks, pulling a face, smiling.

Tom’s suddenly letting go, digging in the pocket of his hoodie, pulling out his phone. “Couldn’t stop watching it all day,” he says. “It was driving Christian mad, I think.” He fiddles with it, turns the screen around so Joe can see, and there Joe is, on stage in Toronto with his guitar, giving his spiel about liking to play something that’s not hitRECord’s intellectual property at every show, strumming and tuning as he goes.

So I guess I’ve been having kind of a shitty time lately, Joe says on the little screen, trying to get over something I never planned to — well, broken hearts are all the same, who the fuck cares how they get that way. This one goes out to everyone who knows what this feels like. And Joe-in-the-phone plays a few chords, steps a little into the mic, and starts singing Hymne à l’amour. Truth be told, the song is too big for Joe’s singing voice, and he’d been too tired from the 50/50 premiere to give it the effort it had deserved, and a little too choked from thinking of Tom to do it justice, and it’s kind of a low point in the show from Joe’s perspective — but Joe looks up from the phone to see Tom watching it raptly, and Joe abruptly can’t feel a little bit regretful about how he’d sung a single note.

The song finishes out to sort of lukewarm applause and Tom looks up at Joe, beaming. “I — did you mean it?”

“Did I mean it?” Joe repeats, not getting which part Tom means.

“Is your heart broken, Joseph?” Tom says, quietly, breathlessly. “How could it be broken if you’re not in love with me?”

“Fuck,” Joe grates out, heated with embarrassment and fear and happiness until he doesn’t even know what he’s feeling most. He grabs Tom by the back of the neck in lieu of words, reels him back in to kiss him with Tom’s phone pressed awkwardly between them.

“No, no,” Tom says, pulling back a moment later even though he’s iron hard against Joe’s thigh, “no, not without saying it. Say it, go on.”

Joe doesn’t want to say it, but the words are already lodged in his throat and hurting him, and it’s clear he won’t be allowed to go back to kissing Tom until he lets them out. Joe rubs the pads of his fingers up through the faint stubble at the back of Tom’s head, gathering his courage. “Yeah, okay,” he admits, roughly, “okay, yes. I — I’m in love with you.”

Tom wrinkles his nose at Joe and drops his mouth open with playful shock. “Are you mad, saying something like that when we’ve only been shagging for what, two months?” he says, all feigned outrage. “That’s as crazy as getting a tattoo for someone who — ouch, stop it, you git!” And Tom’s laughing and wriggling as Joe tries to pinch his nipples in retaliation. “Annie told me all about it. You honestly thought I got inked for you? I’m not a nutter, you know, I just play one in the movies.”

Joe laughs and finally gets a hold of Tom’s right nipple, twists it, and Tom yelps and laughs and pushes Joe’s hand away. “I don’t believe in love,” Joe tells Tom, because it feels safe to say it, now. “It’s a terrible idea.”

“I can’t disagree with you there,” Tom says, “but if you’re going to go mad with it, at least you’re in good company.”

Joe’s breath catches and he grabs Tom’s shoulder, big and warm under his palm. “You say it now,” he says, a little embarrassedly.

Tom’s mouth goes soft at the edges and he stuffs his phone away before bringing his hands up to hold Joe by the waist. “I’m in love with you, Joseph,” he says, “so you’d better not say anything about inspiration or respect or professionalism or bloody passion for your work.”

“Oh,” says Joe, casually, “trust me, I’m feeling very disrespectful at the moment,” and he closes in, grinds his hips to Tom’s, tucks his face up against Tom’s neck and licks a stripe over a bit of ink poking out from the edge of the hoodie.

“We should go in the trailer,” says Tom, fingers gripping into Joe’s waist, breath coming short.

“Are you kidding me?” Joe says, lifting his head. “We’re in New York. I have a place here.”

Tom looks startled and then tremendously pleased. “Are you inviting me over?” he asks.

“Of course I’m fucking inviting you over,” Joe says, laughing, “are you coming or not?”

“Well,” says Tom, pained, “I’m coming, but you know I can’t come, right?”

“Oh shit, seriously?” Joe says, because he honestly thought that Tom would bend his rule on this occasion.

“Six more days,” Tom says. “Unless — fuck, you’ll be back in LA, won’t you?”

“No,” says Joe, “no, I have a feeling I’ll be hanging out in New York for a while longer.” It feels stupid, saying it out loud, but it’s worth it to see Tom smile again. “Come over,” Joe says, kissing the corner of Tom’s beautifully curving lips. “I’ll be a perfect gentleman, I swear.”

“Oh, I fucking well hope not,” Tom says in a low raspy voice, turning his face a little to kiss Joe again, pulling Joe in closer.

“Nosy,” says Joe when he emerges from the bathroom to find Tom with his head in the pantry.

“Forward thinking,” Tom corrects, turning around with a bag of Starbucks beans in his hand. “I wanted to make sure you had the necessary supplies for the care and keeping of Tommy Hardy.”

“Do I pass muster?” Joe asks, coming around the counter, feeling somehow more naked than he ever felt when it was Tom in his hotel room. Joe’s wearing his favorite pajama pants, the ones with a thready hole in the crotch, and an Eagles t-shirt that used to belong to his brother. It’s not exactly his most fetching ensemble, but it felt right when he was changing into it a moment ago. Suddenly Joe’s not so sure.

“Depends,” says Tom with a leer, “do you have any dinner rolls?”

Joe’s surprised into a laugh. “Am I expected to compensate you for services rendered now?”

“Less of an expectation, more of a courtesy, really,” says Tom with a shrug, setting the beans down, bringing his hand around and tucking fingers into Joe’s waistband, warm and sure as Joe remembered. “You look tired,” he says, leaning in, resting his forehead against Joe’s. “We’ll make it quick, hmm?”

“No,” says Joe, who sincerely thought about this while he was in the bathroom, who decided that if Tom was waiting six days then Joe could wait six days too, who resolved to say as much to Tom, who secretly thought it would be kind of a grand gesture on his part. “No, I,” Joe says, with the noblest of intentions, and then Tom’s other hand pulls the drawstring of Joe’s pants and Joe forgets everything he was just planning to say. Tom’s hands are square, strong, good. His mouth is hot and his lips are plush as he gets down on his knees and kisses the tops of Joe’s thighs.

“No?” says Tom, looking up through thick lashes, lower lip shining already with spit, ready.

“No, don’t stop,” Joe revises easily, heart in his throat, and gasps when Tom moves in with alacrity and sucks Joe down.

Joe doesn’t last very long, which is maybe polite under the circumstances. Tom stands up, spits in the sink, grins at Joe. “I like your shirt,” he says. “Is that vintage?”

“Oh my god,” Joe says, still shaky and stunned, and he has to reel Tom in by the shirtfront, has to kiss him.

Joe had maybe also planned, in the ill-fated bathroom strategy session, to sprawl out on his mattress with Tom and make out for a long time, but between the blow job and the already long day, Joe is stifling a yawn even before he tugs back the covers and waves Tom towards the bed.

“Tomorrow you’re showing me that studio I saw, in the back,” Tom tells him, yawning back, sticking his bare feet between the sheets, rolling around to get comfortable like a vastly overgrown puppy.

“Yeah, of course,” Joe promises, getting in the other side. He tugs the covers up to his chin; the loft is awesome but it can be chilly on cool autumn nights before the building’s boiler is running for the winter. Less than two feet away Tom’s throwing off heat like he’s made of radioactive material.

“Oh, get over here,” Tom says. “You’re practically shivering.”

“‘M not,” Joe says, but goes anyway. Tom is warm and solid and seems bigger than he should be given that he’s only as tall as Joe. “Don’t want to get you all worked up,” Joe apologizes.

“Not into narcolepsy, never fear,” Tom says. “I’ve gone all zen about the whole thing, anyway. I think my cock’s given up on ever coming again.”

Joe utters an attempt at a laugh, though he’s not sure that Tom is joking, and melts up against the warmth. He feels a little silly though, snugged up to Tom like this, like maybe they’re falling too easily into an uncomfortably romantic pose, a cliche, a rerun. He wriggles against Tom’s side, thinking about rolling back over in a casual way.

“Sorry,” says Tom for no apparent reason, and farts.

“Oh my god,” Joe says, too tired to react any way but verbally. “Tom.”

“No one said same sex relationships were a bed of roses, Joseph,” Tom tells him, giggling.

“Ugh,” Joe says, and buries his face in Tom’s familiar-smelling chest, trying not to giggle along with him.

“Broccoli,” says Tom, and farts again.

“I’m going to kill P-Nut,” Joe says, tugging the neck of his t-shirt up over his nose.

“Sweet dreams, my love,” says Tom, kissing Joe’s forehead.

The funny thing is, Joe falls asleep between one breath and the next.

“Don’t you have a night shoot tonight?” Tom asks when Joe half-stumbles after him into the shower.

Joe grunts an affirmative and props himself up against the tiled wall.

“Why are you up then, you fool?” Tom asks, lathering up, shiny wet and huge, the shower’s spray leaping off his broad back.

Joe can’t say it — to make sure you’re real — so instead he just throws Tom a tired loopy grin and steals the soap from him. It’s a big shower but it seems crowded anyway with the two of them bumping limbs and jockeying for position under the shower head.

Joe wakes up gradually as the steam curls into his lungs, but it still takes him a few minutes to catch on when Tom styles his hair into a fauxhawk under the pretense of a scalp massage, beatboxing the whole time like it’s a normal thing to rap in the shower — and maybe it is, if you’re Tom Hardy.

“You’re just jealous,” Joe says, pulling away and letting the shower flatten his hair back down.

“I miss having hair,” Tom says pitifully, not bothering to deny it, skimming his hands over Joe’s back, his sides, making Joe’s cock stand up and take notice. “Here, let me,” he says, pressing his front into Joe’s back, sliding a hand down and around to wrap around Joe.

“No, it’s okay, man,” Joe says, batting at Tom’s arm. “I want to wait, too. You’re waiting.”

“Mm,” says Tom, and wriggles his hand back. “But I like your cock.” He’s half-hard against Joe now, and he wriggles his hips a little as though to prove his sincerity.

“My cock is flattered,” Joe says, struggling now for words. “But”—

—“Just to relax you,” says Tom, kissing the side of Joe’s neck, “so you can get back to sleep when I’ve gone, you need your rest.”

“Well,” Joe says faintly, mouth falling open as Tom’s hand gets going, “well, just — to relax me.”

“Aw!” Annie says later on in Joe’s trailer, except it’s not just two letters the way she pronounces it. It’s got about seven, and her voice rises alarmingly with each one.

Joe wants to frown censoriously at her but he can’t help it, he grins stupidly instead — because Annie’s adorable, of course. Certainly not because he secretly agrees with her sentiments.

“Jose,” she says, and squeezes him with an arm around his shoulders. “Look at you.”

Joe scrunches his nose up, resisting the urge to broaden his grin still further. “I can admit when I might have been wrong,” he says, instead.

“So so wrong,” Annie coos, punctuating each word with a kiss to Joe’s temple. “So you’re not mad that I told him about the tattoo thing?”

“No,” Joe assures her, laughing. “No, it’s — you were right, it wasn’t about me.” He hesitates. “Tom doesn’t think it was about me, anyway. I think — well, maybe it was, just a little.”

“You’re sweet on him,” she says, like Joe is a bunny rabbit crossed with a kitten crossed with Shirley Temple.

“Yeah, I am pretty sweet on him,” Joe says, giving in to it, laughing.

Night shoots are fun, actually; Joe’s never been such a rigidly scheduled person that it fucks with his sleep routines like it does with some people. He drinks a lot of coffee, entertains himself online, gets up about once every half hour or hour and works, goes back to hanging out in his chair with his iPad on his knee. When they finally let him go, dawn is just starting to streak through the sky, and Joe gets the driver to let him off once they’re back in Manhattan so he can walk downtown in peace and enjoy New York before everyone gets going, the quiet streets just starting to rattle with security blinds being shoved away, pigeons pecking around the streets until they’re startled up by a lonesome cab.

Joe passes a few people doing the walk of shame, messy last-night hair and evening clothes and smudged eye makeup and wrinkled ties, and he grins at them easily because, yeah, he’s been there.

He’s not there now, though; Joe is, instead, coming into his loft with his headphones hanging loose around his neck, dropping his bag and plugging his phone into the charger, keeping his movements quiet and small. There are some dishes on the kitchen counter, some loose script pages too, and a pair of bulky bright-white sneakers that look like they were kicked off halfway to the bedroom. Joe toes out of his own shoes and follows where the sneakers are pointing.

“Time’s it,” says Tom, lifting his head up mid-snore.

“Five,” says Joe. “It’s Sunday. Go back to sleep.”

“You quit, right?” Joe asks when Tom joins him on the roof later that day. “Sorry, I can”—

—“No, not on my account,” says Tom, waving Joe back to his cigarette. “I like the smell, still.” He leans up against the railing and takes in the view. “This isn’t half bad, Joseph.”

“Yeah, wish I could spend more time here,” Joe says ruefully. “Downside of getting more work, right?” He taps the ash off the cigarette end, nudging his arm into Tom’s.

“Tell me about it,” Tom sighs. “I miss London like mad.”

“Love London,” Joe agrees. “Don’t have a place there though.”

“I do,” says Tom. “You’ll see it when you come.”

Joe stubs out the cigarette and clears his throat, straightening up.

“Right, sorry,” Tom says, “I’m weirding you out again.”

“No,” says Joe automatically. “A little.” He reaches over and wraps his hand around Tom’s. “You get that this is hard for me, right?”

“It’s hard for me, too,” Tom says, a little pointedly. “You know I’d sworn off men before you came along?”

“You had?” Joe asks. This is news.

Tom looks over at him and raises his eyebrows, earnest and annoyed. “Course I had.”

“Course you had,” Joe echoes back, amused. “Jesus. What changed your mind then?”

Tom’s eyebrows come back down again as he huffs out a short voiceless laugh. “What do you think? You and your, oh, I’ve never kissed a dude,” he says, pulling Joe’s American accent out of nowhere, “and the way you looked at me, after, fuck. I couldn’t stop thinking about”— and Tom cuts himself off by closing the space between them and kissing Joe’s mouth briefly. When he backs away again he looks calmer. “So it’s taken some getting used to, the notion of being with a man after all.”

“What, you’ve never done this with a guy?” Joe asks, meaning them, all of it, their — relationship, Joe supposes, pulling a face at the thought — but he’s bracing himself for another careless course I have.

“No,” says Tom instead, fixing his gaze on the skyline. “No, never.”

Joe has to look away too, to take this in. “So,” he says, processing, “so when you were so pissed off at me, after that night in the trailer — that was — but you said”—

“I wasn’t at the point of saying that I loved you,” Tom says, getting what Joe’s after, “but I thought maybe we were headed that way. And it wasn’t just you saying that you weren’t in love with me, Joseph, it was the way you prattled on afterwards talking shite about how you thought I was really nice and everything but ultimately not someone you could ever love.”

Joe gapes. “Oh my god, that’s so not what I said!” he exclaims.

Tom scowls and glances at him. “S’what I heard, innit.” He looks so thoroughly put out that Joe has to lean over and butt his head gently up against Tom’s, reminding him that he’s not supposed to be angry anymore. It works; Tom sighs and relaxes a little, leaning back into Joe. “Anyway, I couldn’t stay pissed off, could I?”

“Yeah, I noticed,” says Joe, smirking. “Not that I’m complaining, but why”—

—“Dimples,” says Tom, abruptly, almost irritably. “The dimples did me in.”

Joe snorts with laughter and rings his arms around Tom’s waist, tugging him in unwilling or not, not satisfied until Tom’s hugging him back with all his might, pressing his stubbled cheek into Joe’s shoulder. “So tell me about your place in London,” Joe says when he finally pulls away. “Where is it exactly?”

Tom’s leaning in the doorway of the studio, suddenly. His mouth is moving but Joe can’t make out the words.

Joe blinks away from the computer screen and wheels back from the mixing board, pulling his headphones off. “Did they let you go early?” he asks, rubbing his eyes.

“It’s nine o’clock, Joseph,” says Tom. “I said, have you left this room since I headed out?”

“Yeah,” says Joe, checking the screen to make sure Tom’s right. “Yeah, no, I went out for lunch and — and to pee.”

“Well, that’s reasonable enough,” says Tom, coming over, obviously exhausted and sore himself. He leans down and blows a raspberry on Joe’s neck. “What’s so fascinating?”

Joe tilts his head over into Tom’s, laughing, and pulls up the project he’s been editing, just some recordings that need mixing down, some guitar tracks he’s been fucking around with. It’s not much yet, but it will be. He watches Tom listen intently to the sound coming through the headphones even though this isn’t remotely his kind of music. “I’m not good at having time on my hands,” Joe confesses when Tom’s finished.

“Yeah, well,” says Tom, reaching into his coat pocket, pulling out a padded mailer envelope, “lucky for you I’ve found something to occupy you whilst I’m off beating Christian Bale to a pulp.” He hands the envelope over to Joe. “You know, if you’re bored.”

Joe grabs the envelope and digs inside, extracts two DVD cases with plain white covers. The labels are small, nondescript, and are more legal jargon than actual information, but it’s not the first time Joe’s seen a screener and he zeroes in on the title quickly enough: Warrior. “Oh my god, this is awesome!” he exclaims, beaming at Tom.

“Yeah?” says Tom, abruptly going shy.

Joe flips to the other DVD, already pretty sure what he’s going to see, and sure enough, it’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. “Can we watch one now?” he asks.

“No,” says Tom, and pops the top button of Joe’s shirt.

“Oh,” says Joe, fumbling the DVD cases and sort of letting them fall onto the desk. “Oh, okay.”

“Yeah, boom!” Joe shouts, and leaps to his feet, slams his arms down onto his imaginary opponent. “That’s it, son!” He whirls around and grins crazily at Tom. “This shit is sick! You’ve got to show me some of this.”

Tom raises an eyebrow, clearly both amused and pleased.

“Come on, put ‘em up,” Joe urges him, holding up his fists, dancing back a little.

“Joseph, you’re, what, eleven stone to my thirteen and a half right now?” Tom asks, getting up anyway, pausing the movie. Tom can’t resist a good fake sparring round, and Joe knows it. “This is not a great match-up.”

“I have no idea what a stone is but I can totally whup your ass, boy,” Joe tells him, circling now, teasing.

“You’re meant to be moved to tears by my broody Brando-esque performance,” Tom says, lifting his fists, “not bouncing around demanding to have your chance trying to kick my teeth in.”

“I’ll watch it again for emotional stuff later,” Joe says. “Show me what you’ve got, come on.”

Tom lunges at him, and about two pulled punches later, Joe goes down like a tower of wooden blocks, laughing crazily the whole time, pinned against the floor by Tom’s stupidly heavy trunk, his ridiculous arms. “I rather like you with all your limbs working,” Tom says, not even breaking a sweat.

Joe pulls a Brando face straight out of the Godfather, sticking his chin up at Tom, hoping to get his guard down. It works; Tom eases up for a second and that’s all Joe needs. He rears up, gets out from under Tom, comes down hard on his back and twists his arm behind him. Tom, like Joe, is laughing too hard to resist much, but he taps out anyway and Joe collapses down onto the wide space between his shoulders. “I have plenty of stones,” Joe tells him, and gently bites the nape of Tom’s neck. “Don’t go questioning my stones.”

“My apologies,” Tom says, shivering delightfully, turning his head and looking up at Joe. “Have you given any thought to tomorrow night?”

“Hmm,” Joe says, and bites again, watches Tom shiver again. “Maybe a little thought. You?” He rolls off onto the floor, and Tom pushes up with one hand, getting up on his side to face Joe, their legs still twined together.

“I’ve thought of little else,” Tom says with characteristic honesty. “I don’t suppose I can persuade you to be waiting in my trailer?”

Joe laughs. “All oiled up and lounging on the bed in my speedos?”

“Don’t be daft,” Tom says, “why would I want you in speedos when you could be in the buff?” He reaches over and cups his hand over Joe’s shoulder, pressing his thumb into the hollow at the front of the joint. “I suppose I can wait until I get back here,” he says, but he says it like Joe’s asking him to climb the Himalayas instead of endure an hour of very early morning traffic.

“And when you get back here,” Joe says, changing the subject to something a little less fraught, “then what?”

“Well, it’ll be early morning,” says Tom thoughtfully, “so eggs benedict, minus the muffin of course, and then a round of badminton, and then you with your legs up around your ears for the rest of the day, perhaps?”

“Right,” says Joe, taking this in, grinning, “I’ll make a list for the grocery store — eggs, hollandaise, and lube.”

“Oh my god,” says Tom, with comically wide eyes, “we’re real gays now, aren’t we?”

“Promise me you’ll text the second you’re done,” Joe says for the third time as Tom settles the strap of his shoulder bag across his chest. The sun’s just beginning to set and the apartment is filling up with golden autumn light. Tom’s stubble — head and face — glows faintly as the sunbeams contact him. He’s really fucking pretty; Joe’s gotten used to thinking that, now.

“I do so faithfully swear,” Tom says distractedly, checking to make sure he has his phone, wallet, keys.

“The second,” Joe says again. “Like, when you’re in your trailer.”

“Yes, yes,” Tom says, satisfied he has everything. He looks up and his expression flits from hurried to sweet. “You’ll be waiting?”

“I’ll be waiting,” Joe promises. “I bet I won’t get a wink of sleep.”

“Mm,” Tom answers approvingly, and because he’s Tom, and more than a little weird, he doesn’t cup Joe’s jaw and kiss his mouth. He instead leans in and gently bites the tip of Joe’s nose.

“Ow,” says Joe, even though it didn’t hurt.

“Sometimes I think about eating your face,” says Tom, like that’s a normal thing.

“Go to work,” Joe says, snorting. “And text me.”

“Yeah, cheers,” says Tom, and goes.

chris called cut

am just getting out of wardrobe

heading to trailer

if ur asleep through all this i will show u no mercy later

No, I’m awake, haven’t slept much. Tell me when you’re in the trailer.

r u going to sext me something filthy joseph

Just say when you’re there.

im here

Okay, check the front pocket of your bag. You should find a set of headphones and a USB drive.

Joe had, of course, recorded the whole thing the previous day while Tom was on set.

“Lock the door,” is the first thing Joe says into the camera. “Lock the trailer door and then plug in the headphones. Use ‘em.”

He has the tripod set up in the bedroom, blinds closed, bedside lamp casting an amber light over everything. He was stuck for a while on what to wear because he’s still not sure what might be a turn-on for Tom. It’s easy for girls: bra and panties and some kind of negligee, maybe heels or stockings or both. Joe doesn’t even own particularly interesting underwear. He’s settled for a newer pair of boxer-briefs, blue, tight, and nothing else.

“Okay, once you’ve got that done,” Joe tells Tom via the camera, “get comfortable — but leave your clothes on for a minute. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and it’s not fair to make you wait any longer to get off, it’s not fair to expect that when you’ve been so fucking awesome about getting me off all the time. So I guess I’m giving you two options, here: you can either shut this off and head back to my place, and I will gladly jerk you off or blow you or whatever you want.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Or, if you want, you can watch the rest of this video and jerk off in the comfort of your trailer.” Joe cants a smile at the lens and scratches his belly, turns the scratch into more of a caress, drifting up his chest slowly. He might not know what Tom likes him to wear, but Joe at least knows that Tom likes looking at Joe touching himself. “Either way, I’ll be waiting for you.”

Joe shifts a little, surprised to find that this has abruptly become more than a command-performance jerk-off video; he’s getting hard, thinking about Tom watching it, Tom’s eyes tracing Joe’s body in the video, Tom getting his lips wet and leaning in close. “Get your hand out of your pants, Tom,” Joe says, grinning, leaning back a little so Tom will be able to see that Joe’s getting hard for him. “There’s a catch.”

Joe pictures the little pursed-lipped surprised face that Tom will make at this juncture, smiles at the thought, and addresses the camera again. “I guess I missed your birthday, a couple of weeks back. I — I shouldn’t have missed it. So, if you’ll just — there should be something waiting for you if you look under the throw pillows on your couch.” This part had taken some managing, and he’d had to enlist Annie’s help to make the plant. “Pause while you open it,” Joe tells the camera, and waits for a few seconds as he imagines Tom leaping up, unearthing the two packages, ripping open the wrapping, stopping and looking confused. “It’s not much,” Joe says, because it’s really not, “but I know you were saying you didn’t have anything good to make videos with, so”— and he pauses, a little embarrassed in retrospect, hoping a Flip HD camera and a tripod are actually something Tom might like. He clears his throat, forces himself to go onward. “It should be charged up and ready, so go ahead and mount it on the tripod, there’s a screw thingy on the base, the short side — it — I’ll shut up and let you figure it out.”

Joe rolls his chair back a little and palms his cock without thinking about it, realizes he’s still recording, and grins ruefully. “See,” he says, “I’m all for you getting off sooner rather than later, but to be honest, I didn’t want to miss it either. If you’re going to do this, I’m going to have to see it for myself. So, Tom — hit record.”

The explanation over, it’s time for Joe to get down to it. He gets up, checks the camera angle — he’ll edit this out later — and gets onto the bed, supplies at the ready. “I don’t think you’ll last long,” Joe says, getting hard again just thinking about it, how Tom will be settling in now, unbuttoning his jeans, tugging them down and out of the way, “so I’m not going to draw it out too much either, if that’s okay.” He lies back, gets onto his side, fixes his gaze on the camera, and runs a hand up and down his side, his stomach, imagining Tom watching him through the lens. His hips stutter up at the image, and Joe keeps his promise, glides a palm right over and grinds the heel of his hand into his cock, gasping, watching the camera like Tom’s actually on the other side of it. “I can’t wait to make you come,” Joe confesses, “it’s been — all I could think about, sometimes, god, just — holding your cock in my hand, or in my mouth, fuck.” He rubs up and down the length of his cock. “You’ve been so fucking good to me, Tom,” he says, “but I want to be good to you for a change.”

By now Tom would be rubbing himself too, maybe even with his dick out; Joe can’t take too long about it. He lifts his hips up, flipping onto his back, shimmies out of his underwear, spends a minute fisting his cock even though it’s about as hard as it’s going to get just from thinking about Tom watching him. Joe’s making helpless little noises though he’s usually quiet when he jerks off, because it’s — it’s so much more, having that little red dot blinking at him, having the promise of Tom’s gaze there in front of him. Joe huffs a laugh, breaking eye contact with the camera and looking down at himself. “Getting wet,” he remarks, sort of impressed with how fast this is going, actually. “I need to,” and Joe slaps around, grabs the bottle of lube, and realigns himself to the angle he’d figured out before he’d started, lying with his upstage thigh pulled up out of the way, his ass in full view, obscene and waiting.

By now there’s no question, Tom will be going full throttle, flushed and choking with need, gasping in and out. Joe doesn’t hesitate, just slicks up his fingers and slips one in, pushes in and out, shimmying his hips down into the pressure. “Fuck,” he grates out, “I want this to be your cock, Tom, fuck.” He switches to two fingers, fucks himself with them a little more, and then starts jerking off too. He’s not going to last; it’s a miracle if Tom’s waited this long anyway. Joe wants to keep his eyes on the camera just in case, but finds he can’t, caught up in too many images flashing in his imagination — Tom watching him, Tom jerking off frantically, Tom coming back to the apartment afterwards and spreading Joe out just like this, pushing inside, Tom kissing Joe’s mouth and coming inside him. “Oh, oh, fuck,” Joe shouts, and comes. “Tom, fuck yeah.”

He’s shaky for a bit, afterwards, embarrassed like he always gets after he records something so private, but Joe gets up anyway, wipes his hands off, his stomach, and comes over to the camera, gets in close. “While you’re watching this,” he says, “I’ve been lying in bed with my fingers in my ass again, getting ready for you.” He pauses, catching his still-racing breath. “What are you waiting for, Hardy? Get your ass over here. And bring that fucking camera with you, too.”

It feels a lot longer, waiting alone in the apartment. There’s been no contact from Tom beyond a delightfully worded text: happy fucking birthday to me, u are mad in all the best ways xx. So Tom made use of the video, recorded one for Joe in return, is probably on his way back now. Joe probably rushed the getting ready stuff, not wanting Tom to come in and catch him unprepared, but now he’s stuck sitting on the bed, a little weirded out by the slipperiness of his ass cheeks and inner thighs, keeping warm inside his bathrobe until he hears the warning click of the front door.

Tom might not be ready for round two, Joe reminds himself; Joe will have to be patient, maybe. It’s only fair, the length of time Tom’s waited to come at all, Joe shouldn’t mind the thought of another half hour, but he can’t stop thinking about it, about having Tom come for him again after all this time has passed — coming for Joe, or on him, in him…Joe honestly doesn’t care how it happens at this point. He flops back onto the mattress, stomach lurching with impatience and nerves. Everyone’s made a big enough fucking deal about how great it is, having sex when you’re in love; Joe wants to check out if the hype is justified already, goddammit.

Maybe it’s about the romance, Joe supposes, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe that’s how it will be, all sort of soft-porn and tender and drawn out with lots of repetitions of I love you and kissing. Joe wriggles unhappily; he hopes not. It sounds — maybe it’s better when you’re in it, though.

He’d kill for a smoke, or maybe a drink; neither is going to taste very good on his breath though, especially given how Tom had reacted to that sake flavor.

Should there be music, Joe wonders suddenly, and rolls up to his feet, goes over to the stereo on the dresser, hits play. Of course it’s some weird trance shit cued up, Joe doesn’t even know where this CD came from, he — he should get his phone, there’s good music on there, but he left it in the living room he thinks, and — Joe straightens up, panicked, and realizes that Tom’s standing in the doorway.

“Oh, fuck,” Joe says, and slams on the stop button, fumbles with the tie of his robe. “I didn’t hear you come in!”

“How could you, over that racket?” Tom asks, smiling. Even if Joe didn’t know for a fact that he’d already gotten off in his trailer, it would be obvious. Tom’s loose-limbed and mellow like he hasn’t been for days, except maybe in his sleep. He’s still got his bag over his shoulder, the tripod visible sticking out the flap.

“This was supposed to be a lot sexier,” Joe says, defeated, laughing.

“That robe is ten kinds of sexy,” Tom assures him with a grin.

Joe finally manages the knot, shrugs out of the robe and lets it fall to the floor — and abruptly feels stupid being naked when Tom’s fully clothed. “Sorry,” he says, “did you want breakfast?”

Tom laughs at him and puts his bag down. “How could I think of food at a moment like this?” he says, not coming any closer.

Joe shivers, and not because he’s cold, for once. Tom’s gaze is —

“Thanks,” Tom says, “for the gift. And the video.”

Did you like it? Joe wants to say, but can’t. He’s frozen, and he doesn’t even know why; it’s only that Tom is here, he’s here in Joe’s bedroom and he’s real and gorgeous and looking at Joe like that and Joe’s abruptly not sure that any words are adequate to this moment.

“God, what a look you have on your face,” Tom says in a rough voice, which is what Joe should have said, would have if his brain ever started working again. “You’re so lovely, Joseph.”

What, me? Joe doesn’t say. He swallows, and his gaze catches on the little V of flesh in the open collar of Tom’s shirt.

Tom moves first, and then everything rushes forward crazily like the first careening zoom of a roller coaster, lips pressed to lips, both of them fumbling to get Tom’s clothes off, crashing against the bed and sprawling out over it while Tom’s shirt is dangling off one arm, caught at the still-buttoned cuff, his pants around his ankles. It should be completely hysterical but it’s not, actually, it’s — Joe pushes Tom down into the bed and kisses him fiercely, shaking with trying to keep himself in one piece because he honestly thinks his limbs might go flying, his body might fall to pieces like shingles tumbling off a roof. Tom’s hands have him, though, have him by the hips, and now one hand is coming over and around, fingers pushing between Joe’s ass cheeks with breathless familiarity. “You were serious,” Tom says, “you’re ready for me, aren’t you?”

Joe throws a leg over Tom and pushes his hips back into the pressure of Tom’s curious fingers, shameless. “I want you to fuck me,” he says, “but I can wait, if you — if you want, or need more time, if“—

“No,” says Tom, interrupting, “I’m”— but instead of finishing the sentence, he just pulls his hand back to Joe’s hip and pushes him down so Joe can feel for himself, how hard Tom is already, his cock like a brand against Joe’s thigh. “We just need”—

— “Here, here,” Joe says, getting a condom and the lube, slapping both into Tom’s hands, because Joe’s in no state himself, shivering and desperate like he’s the one who hasn’t had sex in weeks — and okay, he has, Joe’s had Tom’s hands and his mouth and even his ass that one time, but — but this is more than that, this is — Joe holds himself up on his knees and listens impatiently to the crackle of the condom wrapper, the click of the lube bottle’s lid, the wet sounds as Tom readies himself.

“Like this?” Tom asks. His fingers are slippery as they press into Joe’s thighs. “You on top?”

Joe hesitates for a minute, thinking about soft-focus sex and being in love, all the kissing and slow motion. He doesn’t want to get this wrong; he also just wants to sit back and push Tom’s cock into his ass fast as he can manage. “I love you,” he says, experimentally.

“I love you too,” Tom says, matter-of-fact. “Sit on my cock, please.”

Joe laughs without meaning to, and he’s still giggling fitfully when he eases back, holds steady as he can while Tom helps line his cock up. Joe stops laughing at the first dizzying press, though; Tom’s bigger than he’d remembered.

“Flattery,” says Tom, because Joe must have said it aloud. “Very well done.”

“Might have to take it slow,” Joe answers with difficulty, “I”—

—“Don’t think about it,” says Tom, breaking in, “look at me. Think about how good it’s going to feel in a minute.”

Joe looks at Tom, thinks about how good it’s going to feel in a minute, and his body opens up, takes Tom in.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Tom says, reaching out, stroking Joe’s cock back into full hardness, then slipping his fingers over Joe’s belly and pressing in a little, searching.

“You can’t feel it from the outside,” Joe tells him, blinking sweat from his eyes. “Trust me, it’s in there though.”

“I can’t feel it, but you can,” Tom says, and presses a little harder, and Joe shouts with surprise because — who the fuck knew that was a hot spot? It’s not — it’s not urgent, it’s like a squeeze of pleasure, it’s — Joe lets his head fall back a little and rolls his hips into Tom’s hand. “Yeah,” says Tom, sounding strained now, “fuck me, Joseph.” His fingers ease up so Joe can move more freely, and Joe opens his eyes — not sure when he’d closed them — and resettles his weight, Tom’s cock hard and urgent in his ass. Joe lifts himself up a little and sinks back down, not sure how this — another few tries and Joe finds it easier every time, Tom rolling his hips up to collide with his downward motions.

Soon enough, they find a rhythm, and abruptly it’s just — they’re just fucking, slapping hips to hips, groaning together, speeding up and slowing down together, Joe grabbing onto Tom’s sides, his chest, his belly, like Tom’s a life raft keeping him afloat on this cloud of pleasure. It’s not soft-focus and it’s not tender in the least, it’s two hard male bodies colliding frantically, it’s good and it almost hurts, and it’s riding somewhere on the knife edge of panic and ecstasy, and Joe probably looks ridiculous riding Tom like this, his hard cock bouncing untouched, but Joe can’t care, he can’t, and Tom doesn’t seem to think anything is ridiculous, the way he’s gripping Joe’s thighs, his hips, gasping and cursing and fucking Joe hard as he can from his angle. Joe’s throat hurts from holding in his cries, so he lets them go a little, and Tom shouts back, and Joe needs him to come now, he needs to feel it filling him up, he —

“You too, you too,” Tom says, and reaches his big hand around Joe’s cock, jerks him unsteady and hard like he’s barely got control of his hands at this point. It shouldn’t be enough, this uneven shaky hand job, but Joe’s closer than he realized because he’s abruptly aware of his orgasm building hot at the base of his spine, shivery and huge and threatening to break free. “Come then,” Tom says, “fucking come, Joseph, I want you to, fuck,” and he’s suddenly snapping his hips up in one, two, three, four long arcs, lifting off the bed and crying out as he comes, and that’s it for Joe, that’s all he has left, the climax raging free, shaking loose as Joe’s cock pulses and shoots onto Tom’s flushed sweaty front.

Joe’s laughing, he realizes, some seconds later, he’s laughing like a maniac and Tom’s giggling along with him, like they’ve just stumbled over the world’s best joke, one that only they get. “Fuckin’ A,” Joe says, moving up so that Tom can pull out. “Is it just me or are we super awesome at this?”

“Well,” says Tom, snickering, “we are famed Hollywood actors and all.”

“Yeah, usually that means you suck in bed,” Joe says, collapsing forward, not caring much about the come all over Tom’s belly, now spreading between them.

Tom’s too wrung out to answer beyond another giddy laugh, arms flopping heavy across Joe’s back, his heart pounding hard enough that Joe feels rather than hears it.

“I really did get hollandaise,” Joe says, “and I even talked to P-Nut, you have a special one-time dispensation for half an English muffin.”

“I want the whole fucking muffin,” Tom says, slurring a little now. “The whole thing.”

“I suppose you’ve earned it,” Joe concedes, and then he lifts his head, studies Tom’s half-asleep countenance. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Tom answers, cracking his eyes open again.

“Hey, was that — should I have gone on the bottom?”

“What the fuck are you on about?” Tom says, frowning. “I told you to sit on my cock, didn’t I? You certainly seemed like you liked it well enough.”

“No, I,” Joe says, because it seems stupid to ask; then again, lack of communication hasn’t really been a good move for them, historically. “I thought maybe you’d want to kiss more, or something.”

“I can kiss you now,” Tom offers, not getting it.

“Because we’re in love and shit,” Joe elaborates painfully.

Tom frowns at him. “Is that what you wanted?” he asks.

“No,” says Joe, and revises it. “I don’t know, I’ve never done that, really.” He has, of course, with girlfriends who seemed way more into it than he ever was; but maybe it would be different with Tom. “Have you?”

Tom licks his lips, pondering the question. “Are we trying to decide if we just had sex wrong?” he asks instead of answering. “Because I really fucking enjoyed that. And so did you.”

“No, yeah, of course,” Joe assures him hastily. “Probably the best sex I’ve”— and he clears his throat, embarrassed.

“I love you,” Tom says, lifting his head up, kissing Joe’s mouth quickly.

“I love you too,” Joe says, heart flipping.

“I love how filthy you are,” Tom says softly, “and I love that you still blush when I tell you so. I love how much you want to make me come. I love how red your mouth gets when you come yourself. I love how your hips move, how you strut around in those tight trousers. I love how you smile so easily, so often, and how you always seem shy about it anyway. I love that your smile is totally different when it’s just us.” He pauses, puts a hand on Joe’s head, urges him to rest it against Tom’s shoulder. Joe goes, shakily. “I — I’ll fuck you any way you like, Joseph. But I’ll love you through it no matter what.”

“Okay,” Joe says, cheeks hot, breath coming fast. “Me too.” He thinks maybe he’s supposed to come up with his own list right now, but he’s too poleaxed by Tom to even know where to begin.

“Good,” says Tom, apparently not bothered by this minimalist reply, stroking fingers up through Joe’s hair. “Now, get off me before we’re glued together permanently at the groin.”

Joe rolls off to the side, laughing, and Tom grabs a handful of tissues and wipes himself down, offers them to Joe in turn. Joe thinks about showering, maybe making breakfast, letting Tom nap for a while. Instead he wrestles himself under the covers and curls unashamedly into Tom’s warmth. “You know,” he says, “I wasn’t even looking for you, that day in Pittsburgh.”

“What are you on about?” Tom mutters, drifting.

“That day we kissed,” Joe says, “I was just trying to check Twitter in peace.”

Tom snorts. “Typical.”

Joe’s eyelids are drooping now, lulled a little by the slow in-out of Tom’s breath under his ear. “I just mean, if I hadn’t run into you, we might not have kissed. And if we hadn’t kissed, we wouldn’t have fucked. We wouldn’t have fallen in love.” It seems almost miraculous, in retrospect. Joe feels his mouth falling open on a half-snore, closes it again, reminding himself not to drool on Tom.

“Mm,” says Tom, “I would have kissed you eventually.”

“Yeah, right,” Joe scoffs, too close to sleep to laugh.

“No, I would have,” says Tom. “Why do you think I brought it up, my having snogged guys?”

Joe blinks his eyes open. “That was, what? You hitting on me?”

“Worked, didn’t it,” says Tom muzzily, and then he’s sleeping. A moment later, so is Joe.