(no subject)

[solafiamma]

My CD challenge story is written, revised, and winging its virtual way to Lily, and I'm feeling right proud of myself. I've made a deadline! Whoo hoo! Another entry for the book of firsts.

If anybody has the remotest clue why I can't fix the formatting glitches in the CD story and in Under My Skin to save my life, I'd be most grateful for the tip. Sheesh. I've just spent over two hours trying to get first lines not to madly indent themselves off to the left, but have nothing to show for it other than eyes that can barely read the screen anymore.

But I've finished! On time! Huge thank you to nonchop for all your help. You rock, dude.

under(his)pants

by Sola Fiamma

For nonchop, because she’s way cool. And a great big thank you to her for offering midnight beta assistance. Any lingering errors are all mine. nonchop also came up with the title, when I was flailing about in desperation. We’ve decided this is the unofficial companion piece to “Under My Skin,” based on title alone. Sort of a “meanwhile, back in the future” sort of thing.

Disclaimer: It’s all fiction, every last word of it.

____________________________________________________

“Mmm. Oh. But mmm, yeah. Fuck. But just, uh. Wait a, ohhh, damn. Stop, C, just wait a sec. Wait.”

Justin tips his head to one side, away from the warm, wet distraction of JC’s tongue in his ear, and tries to shift his hips back to break contact with JC’s pelvis. This last is a bit trickier, because JC has him pinned against the dining room table, and Justin is probably going to end up with a nasty bruise across his ass,JC’s grinding into him so hard.

“C? JC?” JC’s mouth just keeps working against the part of Justin’s neck it still has access to, which feels absolutely fabulous, and his hands keep squeezing the bits of Justin’s ass that aren’t being mashed into the table. He’s making happy little moany, humming noises, and, apart from an odd hiccup-y sound, doesn’t react at all to Justin’s words.

Finally, Justin hooks his thumbs into the back belt loops of JC’s jeans and hauls him far enough away to give their dicks some breathing room. JC is all rumpled and stunned, like he’s just woken from a fourteen hour sleep, and he looks confused.

“No, no, hey, c’mon,” he mumbles, trying to pull Justin back toward him..

“Wait, JC. Just wait a sec. I just. You know. Aren’t we gonna eat first? I thought we were gonna eat first. I thought you’d be hungry,” Justin finishes lamely.

JC wrinkles his forehead and looks even more confused. “Eat?” he asks, like food is a quaint little tradition that only foreigners and really old people still indulge in.

“Well, yeah, dude.” Justin shrugs, and winces at the unfamiliar tightness across his chest and back. Fuck. He’ll never understand why chicks put up with this shit. “I did invite you for dinner.”

“Oh. Right. Right. And you, like, meant dinner, then. As in dinner.” JC nods intelligently, peering around the room, taking in the table set for two -- with a linen tablecloth, and napkins folded into little boats and Justin’s finest china -- the bottle of Beaujolais breathing on the sideboard, and the candles glowing in the centre of the table, on the sideboard, on the windowsill and on every other flat surface in the room other than the chairs and the floor. Justin may have gone a tad overboard with the candles, but whatever. He wouldn’t have done this for another guy, like Chris, say, or Joey, both of whom would have laughed until they puked, but JC is different. He likes candles. Really likes them. He also likes incense, but Justin had forgotten to buy any until it was too late, so he’d just attacked the room with a can of Glade air freshener instead. Close enough. Even if now it does smell more like toilet bowl cleaner than the “lemon fresh scent” promised on the label.

“So. You want to eat?” JC asks. “Now? I mean, sure. Of course. Let’s eat. You’ve obviously gone to a lot of trouble.” He picks up one of the wine glasses with an audible sigh and turns it this way and that, catching the light from forty candles and bouncing it along the walls.

“No. No, not really. Not that much trouble.” Which is true. All he’s done is supervise the housekeepers and summon the caterer. Oh, and light the candles and spray the air freshener, of course.

“Won’t it keep? The food?” JC asks hopefully.

“Um. Maybe? The guy said it’d be ready to serve in forty-five minutes,” Justin consults his watch, “forty-three minutes ago. I guess I could just turn down the oven, right?”

JC blinks at him and wrinkles his forehead again, much in the way of a person who has seen ovens before, and maybe even owns one, but who has never actually been able to figure out their essential purpose.

“Never mind. I could turn down the heat. In the oven, I mean. But. You said. I thought you said. On the phone.”

“On the phone?” Again with the blank stare. Sometimes it’s like JC lives on a different planet. One where they don’t have kitchens or shoes, or anything much besides a lot of singing and fucking and primo weed.But what the fuck? JC might be crap in the kitchen, but Justin knows damn well he knows how to operate a phone.

“Yeah. Remember? Last week, when you called me? You said there was something you needed to say before we. You know. Got involved.”

“Oh! Right!” The look of confusion vanishes in one of JC’s brilliant smiles, the kind of all-out, no holds barred smile that makes Justin want to fuck him where he stands. “No. I mean, yes, sure. I do. Have something to say. But that can wait until we, uh, get involved, as you put it.”

“Uh huh. And this,” Justin waves his hand toward their crotches, still separated by less than an inch of air and a couple of layers of denim. “This would be what, exactly?”

“Sex, Justin. This is sex.” JC rubs his knuckles lightly along Justin’s fly. “Sex. Getting involved is the talking part. I thought maybe we’d have sex before dinner, and then get involved after dinner. Or during. That could work, too.”

Now Justin is confused. Chris had said--.

“But, I thought. Chris said--“

“Chris?”

“Oh, well, yeah. Couple of nights ago. I told him you’d finally gotten over your age issues, which he totally agreed were just lame, by the way. He said it’s about frickin’ time, and if you weren’t such a shit for brainsasshat, you’d have said yes years ago. Kind of his way of giving his blessing, I guess. But anyway, he said you’d already talked to him and he knew what you needed to talk to me about, and--“

“He told you? That’s pretty rude, man. That’s kind of personal stuff.”

“Yeah, no shit. But you were planning on telling me yourself, anyway, right? And you can’t expect Chris to keep that kind of thing to himself. He just wanted to make sure I was. Um. Prepared. You know. He is my best friend, after all. Best friends don’t keep secrets, dude. Not that kind of secret.”

JC looks at him skeptically, but whatever. Thank God Chris had told him JC’s secret. Without that forewarning, he’d have screwed this up for sure. He’d been trying to talk his way into JC’s pants for far too many years to let one little detail, even as weird a detail as this one, get in the way. It had been such a close thing, too. If he’d been just a tiny bit less persistent, Chris never would have told him.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

They’d been in the Skybar at the Mondrian, drinking Jack Daniels and Sambuca (a disgusting concoction called, according to Chris, “A Flying Fuck”). The waiter kept smiling hungrily at Justin, like there wasn’t much he wouldn’t be prepared to do to land a walk-on part in “Edison”, and glaring at Chris, who couldn’t seem to keep his feet off the furniture or his high pitched cackling at an indoor volume.

“No, of course I won’t tell you,” Chris had said. “What kind of friend would I be if I went around doing that kind of shit? JC will tell you when he’s ready.”

“What kind of friend are you if you *don’t* tell me? You suck, man. I *need* to know what he’s going to say. I *need* to, Chris.”

“Don’t whine, dude. It doesn’t make me want to tell you, but it does make me inclined to pour my drink into your pocket. Or your drink into my pocket”

“No, but, c’mon, Chris. What if I, oh, I don’t know. What if I’m, like, startled or shocked by whatever it is, and I react in some kind of weird way, but maybe all I really needed was a little time to think about it, but I don’t have that time, and then he gets all offended and doesn’t want to get with me after all? I don’t want to fuck this up, Chris, I really don’t, but I don’t do so well with surprises sometimes. You know that.”

“Yeah. But. A confidence is a confidence. What if he asked me to tell him one of *your* secrets?”

“I don’t have any secrets.” Chris had raised his eyebrows. “Oh, well. A couple, maybe. You wouldn’t tell him, though. Would you? I mean, it’s different, anyway. Me being your best friend and all, that changes everything, right?”

“Hmm. Not so much, no.”

“Oh, Chris, come on. Please, please, you gotta  tell me what he’s gonna say. I’m begging you, dude.”

Chris had slammed his glass down on the table, earning another frown from the waiter. “You’re relentless. You’re a relentless, whiny little turd. Except for the ‘little’ bit. Are you on steroids, or what? ‘Cause thatshit’ll screw with your brains. I knew this guy once--”

“Chriiiis! Please!”

“Okay, fine. Have it your way. Make me betray your boyfriend’s deep, dark secrets before he’s even your boyfriend. Not a very promising way to start a relationship, though, I have to say.”

“Oh, shut up. It’ll be fine. He won’t care. I won’t tell him, anyway, so he’s not even going to know. And it’s *JC*. The secret can’t be that deep and dark. Can it? Chris?”

Chris had sighed and signalled the waiter for another round of drinks. “Justin. Look. JC’s a bit. Well. He’s unique, you know that.”

“Uh huh. Yeah.” Fucking duh. Why would Justin be interested if he weren’t?

“Anyway, he has this thing.” There had been a lengthy pause while Chris had fiddled with his glass, and then folded and refolded his cocktail napkin.

“Thing?” Justin had asked. “You mean, like a birthmark?” He’d known as soon as he said it that it was stupid. He’d seen JC all kinds of naked on all kinds of different occasions, just like he’d seen all the guys naked. If there was some kind of horrible, disfiguring scar or strawberry mark or whatever, he’d have noticed for sure.

“Yeah, right. Of course. Under his left testicle. Doofus. Not that kind of a thing. Not a *physical* thing.More of a mental thing with physical consequences, if you know what I mean.”

“Um. Not really. Unless. Are you saying he’s crazy?”

“No. Well. He* is* crazy, he’s one of the craziest mother fuckers I’ve ever met, but that’s not what I’m saying, no.”

“Fuck, Chris. Would you just spit it out already? You’re making me crazy!”

“Patience, grasshopper,” Chris had said, patting Justin’s knee under the table. “Do you know what aparaphilia is?”

“Mm. No.”

“Of course you don’t, you ignorant brat. If you opened a book once in a while . . .”

“Hey! I open a lot of books! I read!”

“Yeah, well, ‘Men Who Love Women Who Love Guys From Ohio Who Fall in Love with Their Pet Crickets’ doesn’t count. And neither does the horoscope section of the newspaper.”

“Fuck you. I read *lots* more than that. Asshole.”

“You know, I *could* just let you wait and find this out from JC. In fact--“

“No, I’m sorry. I am. Go on.”

“Okay, then. Just so you understand, the only reason I’m telling you this is because I really don’t want to see JC get hurt. You’re right. You are going to need some time to process this, and it’s probably better for you and for him that you do that processing before he actually tells you. It’ll give you time to figure out how you’re going to handle this. And this way you won’t end up saying the first stupid thing that comes into your head.”

“Oh, my god. See? I knew it was something big! I could feel it. Oh, Jesus. Is it--. Is he, like, having problems, you know. Getting it up? Is that what that means? That pair of whatsits?”

“Paraphilia. And, no. That’s not what it means. A paraphilia is like when a person gets all bent out of shape sexually about something unusual. Like getting turned on by drinking piss out of someone’s sneaker. Or getting the hots for corpses. That kind of thing.”

“JC likes dead people?”

“I hope so. Otherwise he’s going to have a hell of a time trying to figure out what to do with your body when I dump it on his doorstep. Are you congenitally incapable of shutting your mouth and listening for two consecutive minutes?”

“Sorry. Really. Go ahead.”

“Thank you so much. As I was saying. Paraphilia. JC has this thing about. About. Oh, hell, there’s no point pussyfooting around it. When he’s with guys, he only gets really aroused if they’re wearing women’s underwear when they fuck him.”

“Shut up! That’s just. You’re making it up!”

“Fine. Fuck you too. I’ll see you next time I feel like beating my head against a wall.” Chris had stood up to leave, but Justin had yanked him back into his seat.

“Wait! Don’t go. Don’t. I’m sorry, it’s just. Whoa. It’s a bit of a shock. Fuck. That’s some messed up shit. You mean, like--“

“I mean, like, women’s *underwear*, Justin. Bras, panties, teddies, slips, camisoles, garter belts, merry widows. Shit. You date women. You know what they wear under their real clothes.”

“Yeah, of course, but. Oh, man. Fuck me.”

“Pass. Look. What’s the big deal? It’s just a funny little quirk, that’s all. Guy’s got a million of them. This shouldn’t be that big a surprise.”

“Well. It kind of is, though.”

“What’s the big deal? You were gonna fuck him anyway. What difference does it make what you’re wearing when you do it? Just hang your jacket over the mirror and get to it.”

“What if it was Lance? Would *you* do it?”

“Are you serious? I’d wear a floor-length ball gown and a tiara if that’s what it took to get into Lance’s pants. Fortunately, he prefers his men in pants. Or better still, naked.”

 “Shit. I dunno, man.” Justin had stared at the table for a few minutes and tried to think this through. He’d wanted JC for years. Years and years. Since he’d first realized that he liked guys as much as he liked girls.Was he really going to let this ruin everything? “What should I do, Chris? I mean, do they even *make* women’s underwear in my size?”

Slapping Justin on the back hard enough to make him bite his tongue, Chris had beamed at him. “That’s my boy! I knew you wouldn’t let him down. Of course they make it in your size. You think Roseanne Barr sews her own? I’ll make you a shopping list, but first, where the hell is that snotfest of a waiter with our drinks?“

Part 2 is here.