blake thorne thinks (deathisboring) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-26 21:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | damon salvatore, tyrion lannister |
Who: Blake and Hunter
What: Hunter comes home drunk and chats with Blake before they both fall asleep cuddling. No, really.
Where: Blake's apartment.
When: After Hunter hung up on Blake.
Warnings/Rating: None. This is straight up g-rated snuggling bitches.
Hunter didn’t really understand the point of bonding with his coworkers. It seemed pointless, ten rounds of beer and still the table with them over there and the table with him over here, chairs slowly migrating away, the smell of cheap soap and clean horses growing more distant until it was just bad domestic and bubbles in his stomach. He liked being in a crowd as long as nobody tried to talk to him; he liked the noise of the radio blasting things nobody liked to hear, and he was even willing to put up with conversation as long as no one expected him to take part.
Hunter had little reason to celebrate. He alluded briefly to Daisy’s loss with his siblings, and he suspected they understood and yet he shied away from actually saying how devastated he was. Hunter was always seeing himself through the eyes of others, and he knew what most people would think about grieving for a dumb lost dog. Hunter’s anger with the world in general was just inflamed by the reappearance of Zee, especially on the heels of that blonde whore he’d found all those years ago, and if he wasn’t missing his dog, Hunter was seething at entirely fabricated visions of the two of them cozied up somewhere in a cheap motel.
Once he was drunk enough, it seemed only natural to call Blake. Writing was difficult right then, and he didn’t have Zee’s number to drunk dial. Blake confused Hunter, always had, but the man represented a certain type of shelter from the world, and Hunter tried to equate the physical roof over his head to some kind of emotional connection. Hunter couldn’t read Blake’s vague allusions to other people and places; every conversation was about him and every general statement must be a rejection.
After hung up on Blake’s urbane, annoyingly sober voice, he hung around the bar for another couple hours, eavesdropping and seething and drinking by turns. He came back to Blake’s apartment (always Blake’s, not his) at around three in the morning. It had taken him three cabs to find one that would let him bring the collie, and he wasn’t stupid enough to try to drive even with this much beer in him. He dropped the dog as soon as he got into the hall, slammed the door none too softly, and wandered into the kitchen to get another beer.
Blake was standing in the kitchen when Hunter entered. There was a half empty bottle of scotch on the table, and an empty glass in his hand. He'd been drinking himself, just as he'd confessed to Hunter on the phone. He was buzzed, but not incapacitated. The drinking had been a slow thing, a burn through the entire evening. He didn't know what it was - the midget in his head, or just his own growing sense of malaise about everything - but he had been going out less and less over the past few months. He still made a good showing, enough that he stayed in everyone's minds and maintained his reputation, not that he really cared. But sometimes, on nights like this one, he stayed in, and drank, and did nothing. He was still trying not to think, but instead of blotting it out with noise and sensation, some nights silence did the trick a little better.
He'd been genuinely surprised when Hunter hung up on him, but he shouldn't have been. Being an asshole was such a practiced reflex that he often did it without even thinking. Hunter didn't have it right - it wasn't that no one was good enough. It was that somebody might be.
Blake took one look at Hunter when he walked in and slid the bottle across the table, reaching up into the cabinet for a second glass. "So," he asked, setting it down in front of him, "Did you turn one of the coworkers or what?" Blake was dressed in the same dark scarlet button down he'd worn earlier that day, but the top few buttons were loosed and the tie and jacket were missing. He smelled of smoke and scotch, and his eyes were red with the late hour and drink. The window was open to the air, and this high up it was fairly cool.
The dog frolicked over to see Blake, all enthusiasm, and by contrast Hunter seemed to drag himself from the kitchen counter to the table, oozing into it in a cloud of wheaty beer drunkeness. He didn’t take the chair, and he didn’t replace the cold bottle he’d taken from the fridge with whatever expensive golden ambrosia Blake had just put on the table. Hunter propped his jean pockets against the edge of the table facing Blake, making all four table legs scrape over the floor a half an inch before settling under his weight. If he’d had one of his plaid overshirts on before he left for work that morning, it was gone now, replaced with a mostly-clean sleeveless more transparent than not and roped muscle under white shoulders and the solid line of a farmer’s tan over his bicep.
“No,” Hunter said. “But I didn’t try.” He shrugged, the one-shouldered shrug that he usually used to pretend he didn’t care. He was obviously under the impression the gesture was more convincing than it was. Hunter reached out long, calloused fingers under Blake’s chin. The gesture was tentative, and resulted in a rasping brush of Blake’s loose collar over the ledge of his collarbone. Hunter watched his fingers doing it without comprehending the action.
Blake ran a hand over the dog's head and didn't bother to pour Hunter out a glass when he didn't do it himself. It was clear enough that he'd done a lot of drinking already, but he'd offered it all the same. Sharing seemed only fair, considering he'd managed to piss him off enough to get him to hang up the phone.
He'd accepted that idea enough that the fingers at his collar came as a real surprise, halfway through the act of topping off his glass. He stopped, and set the bottle down, turning to regard Hunter with dark eyes. He was obviously wasted, which probably explained why he seemed to have entirely forgotten that he'd been angry at him earlier. "What are you doing?" he asked. It wasn't casual or amused and was strange for him in that, and had a sort of quiet gravity and real confusion that came with being on the buzzed side. It probably wouldn't have shown itself if he hadn't been drinking. His gaze lingered briefly on the soft twist of corded muscle in Hunter's arm as he touched his shirt. "Hunter...look," he said, watching him. "If you want to fuck, we can fuck." He laid a broad hand on Hunter's waist, and made a decidedly thick, male sound of satisfaction before going on. "I'm interested," he said, voice gone rough around the edges. "But you're not going to like what comes after."
Hunter was slow to hear, slow to blink, eyes sandy and streaked. The whiskey brown had turned to tarnished gold in the harsh light of the kitchen, and Hunter surveyed Blake’s face through a drunk haze and a shield of girlishly long lashes. He dropped his arm, not immediately reacting to the hand on his hip. The choppy rash of Hunter’s emotions were immediately visible on his face, like flesh scraped raw. “The part where you kick me out?” he asked, working his tongue and forcing it into making the right words. Another slow blink.
Blake watched Hunter's reaction, the flash of emotion across his face, and he felt sorry. Sorry - him. Somehow, hearing Hunter say it, it didn't sound so great. "Yeah," he said, looking more tired and down than inscrutable, all of a sudden. "That part." He ran his thumb up and down over the thin ribs of fabric, and waited.
Hunter didn’t have anywhere to go. He blinked again, and then kept his eyes open so long that they watered. He peered into Blake’s face, trying to figure him out for what seemed like the billionth time. “‘Kay. Then don’t.” Hunter put a limp hand against the inside of Blake’s wrist where the other man’s hand trickled down the fabric to make some pretense at pushing it away. There wasn’t any effort in the movement. A second later Hunter was reaching again to fondle Blake’s collar again, the rough edges of his cuticles making little zips of sound just under Blake’s ear.
Blake couldn't help but crack a small smile at that. "You're blitzed," he said, apparently making a decision in that moment. He slid his hand from the edge of Hunter's waist around to the other side, encircling his middle with his arm even as the dog wove around his feet. "Come on," he said, tugging him in the direction of the hall.
Hunter had never heard that particular slang for his state, and he chuckled a little under his breath. He resisted a second at first, for no reason other than to be contrary, a fleeting drunken picture of going the other way resulting in some random pull of direction, but then he settled into going whichever way Blake was, leaning against him and quite blatantly pushing his hand inside the hem of Blake’s pants in the small of his back. Blake’s shirt meant there wasn’t any contact, but he wasn’t holding on to his arm for balance. “Taking advantage of me?” The question was laced with laughter.
Blake noted the hand down the back of his pants, surprisingly, and chuckled. “Getting you to bed. You sure you’re not taking advantage of me?” He didn’t do anything to pull that hand away, however, walking with him down the hall, toward his room. He tightened his grip around his waist as he began pulling this way and that, keeping him flush to his side, and therefore upright. “Ever ride one of your horses when you were this drunk?” he asked, aimed at keeping Hunter’s thoughts occupied, and maybe dragging them from the track that they seemed dead set on barreling down.
"You make a habit of climbing up six feet of animal and trying to balance there when you've had a few, Blake?" Hunter asked, grinning at the thought of Blake on a horse and slurring enough that he found the whole sentence hilarious.
Hunter hadn't lived in the room for three days before it starting acquiring certain aspects of his personality, and by now it was more him than it was anything else. His clothes, mostly wrinkled and/or filthy plaid and jean, were spread all around. Spare change was collecting on the dresser, and the window was cracked open a couple inches in the expectation of good weather that rarely came. Someone had come in to straighten during the day, which explained the made-up bed. The puppy, which was big enough now that it wouldn't be able to keep the name for long, trotted in to take up occupation on a large green pillow that was probably the newest thing in the room. After about two seconds there, it ran off to make trouble in the kitchen while the both of them weren't looking.
Hunter kept his grip on Blake's waist while dropping down on the end of the bed, and he was very strong. "You don't have to worry about making me go. People leave me all the time." Hunter smiled into the other man's face, obviously not hearing the difference between one scenario and the other.
“Depends on how broad we’re making ‘animal’,” Blake mused, with a grin. He kept a firm hold on Hunter, moving into the room with him and watching as the dog joined them for a millisecond before rushing back out again. He’d never had a dog himself, never thought about getting one, but Hunter’s almost made him want to change that.
Blake didn’t have much of a choice but to follow when Hunter sat down on the bed and dragged him down with him. He didn’t mind sitting with him for a bit, despite the danger it posed with Hunter in his current state. He made sure to stay upright, but didn’t untangle himself from him, His smirk didn’t disappear when Hunter began slurring his way toward a conversation that was bound to do nothing but make him feel guilty, so he diverted. “Not sure those are the same thing, sweetheart, hate to break it to you. So did you just basically drink until everybody else fucking collapsed or what?”
Hunter started to lean like melting ice cream into both Blake and the bed, as if his muscles ran out of energy almost as soon as he stopped paying attention to which way he wanted to go. The result was a constant, gravity-like pull against Blake’s waist and spine. “Drank until they all left,” he said, in a tone like agreement even if it wasn’t quite anything like it. “You’re changin’ the subject, too.” Hunter took the hand that had been occupied with Blake’s hip up his spine to brush fingers through the ends of his dark hair, just over his shirt collar. The motion appeared to take a great deal of concentration. “And like I was saying, it is the same.” Pause, attempting to remember. “Making me leave and you leaving is the same. Same thing happens in the end.”
Blake was still feeling warm and a touch buzzed, and he felt the light slide of fingers through his hair and hummed a little, turning his head to look at Hunter as he sank down onto the bed and dragged Blake with him. He didn't pull away hard enough to totally dislodge him, and ended up on the bed alongside him, propped up on his arm. "I don't want to kick you out," he said, rueful. "And you're drunk. You're not thinking straight." Blake flicked Hunter's hair out of his eyes, where it had fallen as he did. "You shouldn't be messing around with me anyway. You should be out there...I don't know," he said, head tilting up, "Finding a guy with a kink for being fucking reliable and looking after you."
Hunter wasn’t used to the luxury of a bed, and even now it was so soft that sinking into it made his eyes go heavy with the pleasure of it. Maybe when you were rich you just got used to that kind of thing. Hunter folded an arm under his head and pressed one hip against Blake’s so that they were parallel in the center of the bed, and then he blatantly curled into him, knees up. He chuckled. “I look after myself. My family is good at that shit.”
Blake stayed right where he was. So what, it was comfortable. "Yeah? Why's that?" Hunter remained mostly a mystery to Blake. He didn't know much more about him now than he had when Hunter had picked him up at the side of a desert road. Some people liked their secrets. He knew that pretty well himself. "You all raise packs of dogs too? Do you just have a group kennel someplace?"
Hunter sighed an exhale of hops and sour alcohol over Blake’s shoulder. “Learned it from our mom. And it’s just me collecting the zoo.” The way he said it seemed to imply a phrase not his own, someone else’s comment recycled. “...But Callum said on the journals he picked up a dog from some woman,” he added, sounding a little surprised at it himself. “Didn’t figure him the kind to take care of... stuff.”
"Yeah?" Blake said. It was strange, but it was kind of alright, just lying there, listening to somebody else talk about themselves. He hadn't had a conversation like this since...well, in a while, anyway. He turned a little further onto his side, and contemplated how far it was to cigarettes in the apartment. He could get off the bed and get them in a minute. He wanted to hear Hunter keep talking, chip out a thing or two about the mystery he'd gone so far to cultivate when they first met. "Callum's the older brother or the younger? Why's he not into taking care of anything?"
"We all took off soon as we could," Hunter murmured, his head rolling off his wrist and dropping onto the curve of Blake's shoulder. "Of everybody, I can't believe that fucker made it. Money, job. Figures." He was starting to snore before he even fell asleep, his breathing deepening and his eyes closing against Blake's shoulder. "You smell nice," he said, the comment too deep to be as young as it really should be. He wound up in Blake, first one heel over his foot, and then an arm over his hip. He pulled himself up flush to Blake's body, sighed a little as he settled--and then promptly fell asleep
Blake hadn’t exactly anticipated being used as a pillow, but here he was all the same, with Hunter curled around him, dead asleep so fast he didn’t even have a chance to move away. He didn’t fall asleep next to anybody anymore, pretty much as a rule, but he couldn’t bring himself to untangle Hunter and wake him up again. Damn.
Blake watched him for a moment. Really, when he didn’t have that guarded look on his face, Hunter pretty much looked like a big, overgrown kid. The image fit. Into animals, a little bit petulant and defensive. He could see it. The image made him smile a little, and he sighed, resting his head on the comforter. Oh, fuck it. He was buzzed anyway, and he hadn’t been going anywhere. It took him a while longer to fall asleep, and when he did, it was with the vague contentment of not being alone.