Chapter Text
Charles is bored.
He and Erik have been sitting in their motel room for the past hour doing absolutely nothing, their latest recruiting effort an utter failure and the weather far too hot to even contemplate leaving their air-conditioned room. (Erik’s mutation has been a godsend during this heat wave, ensuring their AC units are always functioning at full capacity; Charles doesn’t even want to contemplate having to suffer through a room with a broken or semi-functional unit.) And while it’s true that their room is sweltering even with the AC on at full-blast, Charles can’t stand this idleness; he wants, needs, to do something besides lying around and twiddling his thumbs like an oaf. But he’s already read everything he brought with him—twice—and Erik’s rebuffed all of Charles’s efforts to engage him in anything, and while a cold shower sounds tempting, it’s not as tempting as it’d be if there were any prospect of Charles getting Erik to join him.
It doesn’t help that Erik is acting...strange.
Well, all right, that doesn’t really say anything; Erik is always acting strange. But he’s being stranger than usual—which, Charles thinks, is saying something.
Not five minutes after they entered their room, shedding their jackets and opening their shirt collars and rolling up their sleeves with relief, Erik planted himself in one of the (horribly uncomfortable) armchairs sitting in the corner of the room, and he hasn’t moved since, except to occasionally alter the angle of his head. But that’s not unusual; Erik’s displayed his ability to sit unnervingly still for hours on end on more than one occasion.
No, what’s strange is that, every minute or so, Erik sniffs loudly, as if he’s got a cold, or as if there’s something rotten stinking up the room (as far as Charles can tell, there isn’t). It’s terribly irritating.
Finally, Charles can’t take it any more.
“What,” he says loudly, striding over to stand in front of Erik. Erik starts and looks up at him.
“What what?” he asks.
“You’ve been—scenting the air, or something, for the past hour,” Charles says, frustration coloring his voice. “Are you ill? Did someone leave a ‘present’ in the bathroom? Is there a skunk that I’m not aware of?”
Erik shakes his head, looking distracted. “No, no.” He looks around the room, then sniffs again. Charles glares.
“Then what?” he demands, resisting the urge to throw his hands in the air.
“Can’t you smell it?” Erik asks.
“Smell what?”
“Something in this room smells amazing,” Erik says, his face taking on a dreamy, vacant cast. Intrigued, Charles tilts his head to the side and...well, all right, he sniffs the air, too.
“I...can’t tell,” he says after a moment. “Describe it?”
Erik thinks. “It smells like...wood, and leather, and a bit musky, but not unpleasantly so, with just a hint of citrus.” He sniffs again. “You really can’t smell it? It just got much stronger.”
Charles inhales deeply through his nose, then shakes his head. “No, nothing.”
“Here,” Erik says. He stands and puts a hand to Charles’s temple. “Read it from my mind.”
Charles is immediately immersed in a whirl of sensation, that particular feel of Erik’s constantly thrumming sense of all the metal around them mixed with his hyperawareness of his environment and frustration with the heat, the scent he described overlaying everything else. Now that Charles knows what Erik’s talking about, he agrees that the smell is very nice, but it’s also oddly familiar...
Oh.
Charles pulls out of Erik’s mind a little more suddenly than he usually would and backs away, trying to maintain his equilibrium.
“Charles?” Erik asks, looking concerned. Ah. Not maintaining equilibrium very well, then.
“That smell,” Charles says, then hesitates.
“Yes?”
“I, uh. I think it’s me.”
Erik tilts his head, his gaze considering. “Really?”
Before Charles can respond, Erik leans forward and sniffs Charles. Charles stiffens and resists the urge to run away as Erik does it again, then starts circling him, sniffing every few seconds. Charles is completely unprepared for Erik burying his face in the space between his shoulderblades and inhaling deeply—and even less prepared for the small groan Erik lets out, or the way it goes straight to Charles’s cock. For a brief, shining moment, he thinks this is the moment when Erik will finally (finally!) make his move.
And then Erik pulls away and says, his voice maddeningly even, “So it is.”
Disappointed, Charles turns around—and is treated to a fabulous view of Erik’s arse as he walks to the bed. He grins, thinking that perhaps not all is lost. But instead of telling Charles to get the hell over there so they can fuck each other silly, Erik pulls out the chessboard and says, “Well, now that we’ve solved that: feel like losing a game or two?”
Charles sighs.
(The next morning, Charles makes sure to put on extra cologne after his shower. He’s rewarded for his effort: the instant he steps out of the bathroom, Erik’s eyes snap up, wide and dark with lust, and thirty seconds later, Charles is on the bed, making all sorts of embarrassing noises as Erik gives him the most fantastic blowjob he’s ever received.
The only sour note comes when Erik pauses in the middle of doing something truly criminal with his tongue, pulls off, looks up at Charles, and says, “Charles. Did you put cologne on your balls?”
“...I don’t have to answer that,” Charles says, blushing beet-red. Erik raises his eyebrows, giving Charles a smirk that says he’s not fooling anyone, and slides up to kiss him.
“I like it,” he whispers. He then buries his face in Charles’s neck and inhales deeply as he jerks them both off.)