Archive of Our Own ^beta

Robby was jolted awake by a knock at the door. It took him a moment to figure that out, although his heart immediately started beating in overdrive. His phone told him it was 2:12 a.m. He'd been asleep since maybe a little after 11.

He flipped on the hall light and the light over the kitchen sink as he padded through the house. At the door, he started to flip on the porch light, but he didn't want to blind whoever it was. Which meant the peephole was next to useless.

He called out, "Who is it?"

"It's Abbot."

He rifled around in his brain for a second. This was Jack's night off, he remembered. Still…

He opened the door to find the man standing on his porch, wearing a gray hoodie over jeans and a t-shirt, hands shoved into his pockets against the chilly late fall air.

"Hey," Jack said. 

"You okay?"

He nodded, adding, "I didn't mean to wake you."

Robby made the kind of face at him that said, You and I both know it's the middle of the night for normal people, brother. If he were to guess, that expression was a little crankier than he meant it to be, owing to the adrenaline still flooding his system.

"I'm sorry," Jack said. "I should..."

He reached out and pulled Jack forward by his arm, forcing him to step through the threshold, closing the door firmly behind them.

"Stop that," Robby said as Jack followed him into the house. "You know what time it is, so you had to know I would probably be asleep, but you came anyway. Since you're not that kind of asshole, something's going on."

"Nothing. I just…didn't want to be alone, I guess?"

Robby raised his eyebrows as he leaned against the back of the couch. 

Robby said, "Didn't want to be, or thought it was a bad idea to be?"

Jack's eyes went a little wide, then he shook his head vehemently. "Nothing like that."

"Would you tell me if it was?"

"Yeah," Jack said, nodding, and Robby believed him.

The nighttime temperature of the house was cool bordering on cold, which he was starting to feel on his bare legs and arms, especially after having the door hang open for a moment. He was suddenly very conscious of being in only boxers and a t-shirt. Jack had, of course, seen him stripped down like this before, but for some reason it felt different tonight.

Jack didn't look at him, really, but his jaw was tight and he was drawn in on himself somehow.

"You wanna take a walk?" Robby said. "Let me get some pants on."

"No," Jack replied with a frown and another insistent shake of the head. "Too tired for that."

He looked about like he did at this time of night when he was working — that is, exhausted but also keyed up. He was studying the man's face when Jack said:

"You should go back to bed."

Robby just stared at him, but Jack didn't offer anything else.

"C'mon, then," Robby murmured, pushing himself off the couch.

Jack made a quizzical face at him.

Robby said, "You look like shit, not to put too fine a point on it. Come lie down with me. We don't have to talk."

"Robby…"

He was well aware that this was not a thing they did, Robby and his straight best friend. Sure, they leaned on each other, physically and otherwise. Sometimes, they even talked at odd hours of the night, although usually by text. They shared complaints at dawn and dusk on the roof. They drank beers in the park and had conversations in trauma bays without speaking. But this felt like all of those things at once and more, and he had no idea what Jack was looking for. He wasn't sure Jack did, either, and that scared him a little. 

"Don't argue with me," Robby said. "C'mon."

Jack looked a little wary, but he also looked like he would follow, so Robby turned and shuffled down the hall.

When they reached the bedroom, Jack stared down at his queen-size mattress like it might swallow him up like quicksand. So Robby followed Jack's own playbook for how to handle a mess of a person who couldn't make a decision, even the decision to move. 

He simply said, "Take the leg and the jeans off," then he turned to go to the bathroom.

When he got back from taking a piss, he was halfway surprised to see Jack had started doing just as he asked. As Robby climbed back into the bed, he saw that the prosthesis was propped up against the nightstand on what would be his side of the bed. The thought — Jack having a side of his bed — settled in Robby's chest like a warm weight.

The room was lit just with street lights and the faint glow of the bulb above the sink that he neglected to turned off as they passed through the house. He watched Jack's silhouette as he pulled the hoodie over his head and then shucked his jeans and folded them, laying both on the nightstand before he slipped under the covers.

Jack lay on his back, arms over his head. Robby was on his side, facing him, and he found that he couldn't make himself change positions for all the world. If he watched his profile long enough, the shape of his nose and lips, the scruff of hair dusting his upper lip and chin, maybe he could figure out what Jack couldn't. Not that that was likely — unraveling knots was usually his speciality, not Robby's.

"Too cold?"

"Nah." Jack's voice was rough, quiet. "It's good."

After a long pause, he said: "What's going on, brother?"

"There's not a specific thing. I feel like I haven't seen you much lately. I couldn't settle down for some reason, so I got in the car. It brought me here."

He wasn't used to this quality of uncertainty in Jack's voice. He let his hand close over Jack's bicep, just for a moment. Jack didn't flinch, so he brushed lightly at the soft skin there with his thumb before he let go. 

It was true that they hadn't seen each other much in the last couple of months. When he thought about it, he realized it was because he hadn't turned up at Jack's door himself in a while. He'd actually been in a pretty good head space of late. He hadn't needed to be talked off any ledges, metaphorical or otherwise, in weeks, not since he started talking to a therapist after the PittFest MCI.

"You think you could sleep?" he asked him.

"Maybe. But you're up in just a few hours."

"I'm off tomorrow. But, yeah, I can't really sleep in anymore. Doesn't mean you have to get up when I do."

"You're going to start your day off with me sleeping in your room?"

"I guess most guys don't invite their buddy to join them in bed."

"Most people, period, don't knock on their friend's door at, what, 2:30 in the morning?"

He said, "Maybe they should, you know?"

His fingers were still lingering there on the pillow beside Jack's arm, occasionally making easy passes across sensitive skin — because Jack was allowing it. He wasn't flinching. In fact, he was very clearly not flinching, which was hard to interpret.

In the end, Robby took his silence — and his remaining right where he was — as agreement, at least tentative.

"You know I don't wake up to an alarm," Robby said, "so you won't be disturbed."

"Noise isn't going to bother me. Or light. You can take a shower, dry your hair, use the microwave. I won't hear a coffee maker, but I might smell it. You'll have to decide what you value more in life: caffeine or peace."

At that, Robby rolled over onto his back. He said, "I don't even own a hair dryer." He smiled then, hoping it could be heard in his voice: "But you have your sleepover spiel down cold."

Jack snorted, but that seemed to smooth down some of his tension. He finally brought his arms down, tucking them against his sides, over the blanket. Robby's arms were mostly under the blanket, but it was nice to have the weight and heat of Jack's body there beside him.

"Towels in the bathroom closet if you wanna shower."

He could feel more than see Jack nod in response.

He wanted to wait for Jack to really settle in, but he told himself that he might be waiting for the next four hours. His body had recovered from being jolted awake, so he forced himself to take long, slow breaths and try to calm his mind, put away his concerns about the man. Now that Jack had given over to the idea of lying down with him, he seemed less forlorn. That would have to be enough for now.

(This, he thought with a sudden shock of clarity, must be what it's like. How does he always know what to do?)

Robby woke up after the sun but a little while before he normally needed to be functional. From the slope of the mattress, he could tell before he even opened his eyes that Jack was still there. He turned his head and saw that he was curled on his side, facing away from him. Robby resisted the urge to turn over. If he was asleep, it would wake him. If he wasn't, he didn't want to be that guy, staring at the man while he slept.

(Lovesick, he said to himself.)

He lay there for a few more minutes, drinking in the quiet and imagining he could hear him breathing. Finally, he gingerly slipped from the bed. Jack didn't wake at that, or at his steps on the creaky floor. He paused in the doorway and glanced at his face. It was amazing how he could look both so young and perfectly middle aged, all at once. Freckles and eyelashes and graying temples and lines on his forehead and soft lips and hard cheekbones. He made himself turn away and pad into the kitchen.

He waited a whole hour before he ran the coffee maker. When the smell of dark roast didn't wake Jack up, he poked his head into the bedroom to make sure the man was okay. He was sleeping on his back again, blanket pushed down around his waist, one hand resting on his stomach. Peaceful, at the moment. 

(Gorgeous, he thought, at pretty much every moment.)

Robby took a deep breath and headed back to the living room and the safety of the couch.

It was almost eleven when he heard Jack cross into the front of the house, sans shower, with his slightly uneven gait, the kind of thing he mostly didn't notice at work, on concrete, but was obvious over hardwood. More than eight hours. How long had the man just been pushing himself forward?

"Sleep okay?" Robby asked him.

Jack smiled and nodded. "Yeah, somehow. Thanks."

"Was about to make a sandwich. You could stay for a while."

Jack lingered there a few feet away. "I should get out of your hair."

For a moment, he looked like he was stuck, but then he suddenly made a move to go, so suddenly that Robby found himself getting to his feet, laying a hand on his arm.

"Abbot."

Jack looked back at him with pleading eyes and — there it was: naked want.

He'd always thought there was a spark of something there, but he'd never been sure. He learned a long time ago that sparks don't always mean fire, metaphorically. He also knew that having someone he liked and trusted mattered just as much in his life as finding someone to hold at night or fuck until they fell apart in each others' arms. 

That's what he thought when he was being reasonable. But the truth is if he had thought for one moment this man could really want him — the same way Robby wanted him — he probably would have done something about that a long time ago. He would, in fact, like to fuck him until they fell apart in each others' arms, then hold him through the night.

But who could say precisely what Jack wanted, or whether he wanted to want it. But it was there. He supposed that the man had been trying to keep him from seeing it. He had to have been. All the times Robby just showed up at his house or dragged him to the bar or just stood too close to him in the ambulance bay, pouring out whatever was going on in his brain and heart and…

The alternative? Jack hadn't known. Maybe he'd hidden in from himself. Robby could remember that stage of his dawning queerness all too well. For him, there hadn't been a sudden flash of insight, just a slow and sure recognition of new feelings, first fondness then attachment then need. Eventually, of course, he passed the point of no return, and he'd had to say to himself: I want him. 

Here in his living room, he'd like to say he made a conscious decision to bridge the gap, choosing to solve this problem for them, but in reality he was simply reacting to the desperation in Jack's eyes and the weight of what he could feel keenly now was literal months, maybe years, of wasted time. He was sure that if he didn't lay hold of him now, the man would leave. Worse, he may never have the chance again, because Jack would begin drifting away from him in more ways than one.

So Robby turned the man toward him and pulled him into a hug. Jack was startled by it — they hug sometimes, but quick and friendly, not like this — but Robby just hooked his chin over his shoulder, holding him there. 

The hug lingered past the normal point of separation, but Jack didn't leave his arms. His body fought tension and surrender.

Robby murmured, "I wish I knew what to do to make you…" 

"It’s okay."

"It’s not.”

"It took me like an hour to get to sleep, okay," Jack said. "It was like I could still feel your fingers on my arm."

"Sorry," he murmured.

"No, not— Christ, Robby," he said. 

For the briefest second, Jack's face pressed against his neck, and he could feel his lips ghosting across his skin. It was too much.

Then Jack murmured, "Please."

So Robby kissed him. How the most articulate motherfucker, the most self-assured person, a man the least afraid and the least bothered, could be standing here practically shaking in his arms, he might never know. But he opened up to the kiss so easily, like they were a lock and key, a mechanism that should be rusted with time and disuse but wasn't, somehow. 

(Because it's been turned so many times before, right? he thought. Only now it's opening something different.)

Jack's stubble was scratchy as hell, and he tasted like mouthwash. His hands, balled into fists, were trapped between their chests, but once Robby forced him to turn his head a little, take the kiss deeper, he felt those hands and arms unfurl and then circle his waist. Still sort of clutching, though.

When he pulled back from the kiss but not at all out of Jack's arms, Jack said, "This okay?"

"Mmm hmm," Robby replied, and he moved to plant easy kisses on Jack's jaw, lips dragging up toward his temple.

"That I want this, I mean?" Jack added.

Robby stopped. He pulled back and raised his eyebrows. "You think I'm, what, humoring you?"

"No. Just…trying to wrap my mind around it."

He was scared. Of course he was. Maybe he didn't know that Robby was, too. Still, it wouldn't do to give over to that. There was no fucking way he was letting either of them talk themselves out of this.

"We don't have to figure out what this is," Robby said. "It can just be."

Jack laughed, then, dark and self-deprecating.

"Pretty sure we know what this is. I think I've somehow been knowing it without knowing it?"

Robby just nodded, a little caught up in the feel of his fingers there in the short hair at the nape of the man's neck, how he wasn't tensing and pulling away. In fact, at the easiest of caresses, Jack's head dropped onto his shoulder, and he sighed, saying:

"You already knew, didn't you?"

"Knew what?"

"This."

"How could I, you know? I knew what I felt. I didn't know what could be. But I decided at some point that it probably didn't matter in the long run."

Jack pulled his head up, and he reached up to pull Robby's hands off his neck. Frustrated, but not angry. He took Robby's face in his hands and said:

"No. You matter. This matters."

Robby nodded. "Us. Yeah. But the shape of it…"

At that, Jack finally pulled away from him a little, at least enough that he could run his hands over his face and sigh.

"What?" Robby asked.

"How have you…? I want you to touch me so bad I can't focus on anything else."

"Well," he replied, slow and warm — trying to calm himself a little, and failing — "now that I know I can, that's beginning to feel like a real pressing concern for me, too."

"Yeah?"

Robby stepped closer again, without reaching for him, and said, "Do you have the first clue what you do to me?"

Jack grinned, sweet and surprised, although he pretty quickly also grasped his hips, pulling him close so he could kiss him.

(Oh, he thought. There. There he is.)

Warm hands molded to his waist as Jack sucked at his lips and finally slipped his tongue inside with a soft tease. It was kind of breathtaking feeling him approach the kiss with confidence, somewhere between the shaky bravado of a teenager and the practiced ease of a mature man. It was intoxicating, really. Robby clutched at his back and made a soft whimpering noise at one particular thrust of his tongue. If he was planning not to get painfully hard in his living room before lunch, it was too fucking late.

Jack teased a bit more, then he broke the kiss without separating their faces or bodies much at all.

"Fuck, Robby," he said in a tone Robby had maybe never heard from him, low and rough. 

He knew what he'd feel if they really brought their hips flush together, and he almost couldn't stop himself from doing just that.

"Admit it," Robby said. "That reaction is at least partly because I taste like coffee."

"For sure," Jack replied with a soft smile.

Now that beautiful mouth of his was kissing his cheek, over his beard, and moving down to his neck.

"I can make another pot," Robby said.

"You can stay right here and let me find at least a couple of spots that make you come unglued."

"Easy." Robby tipped his head back a little. "Right under my ear."

He still wasn't prepared for it, how the feel of Jack's warm, wet mouth made his whole body shudder. By the time Jack was nipping at the skin near his collarbone, Robby was laughing. 

"What?"

"Feels good. Feels very you."

"Me?"

"Intense but trying not to seem like it."

"Pretty sure I'm trying for intense right now."

"Are you?

He challenged Jack with his eyes, and he was delighted to see Jack react with a grin and a face of brash determination.

He let Jack walk him back into the door frame between the living room and the kitchen. The man's strong, nimble hands pressed up under his t-shirt at his stomach, and he spread his fingers wide, brushing over ribs with his thumbs. He kissed him hard and slow, like he was trying to pull his soul out of his body. He leaned into him enough to make clear that he was already pretty turned on, but he didn't grind. His fingers were traveling up to his chest, and one of them brushed a nipple but didn't linger there. 

When he pulled out of the kiss a moment later, he looked at Robby with expectation, but only for a moment before he returned his attention to Robby's neck.

"Mmm," Robby murmured. "You winding me up, Abbot?"

"I hope so." His hands, wandering Robby's chest, slowed but didn't stop. "But I gotta tell you… Not that I think this will shock you, but I've never been with a guy before."

"Me either," Robby replied, and he snorted out a soft laugh. "Don't make whatever face I know you're making. Yeah, I know you didn't know. I don't know why I didn't tell you."

"Probably the same reason I never told you. Haven't had a lot of conversations about it in general. I guess I'm bi. I've been shoving that down most of my adult life. Real easy to do while I was married. But I don't think I wanna run from it anymore."

"Same. Women and men. I've been exploring it, let's say, on my own. I guess I feel like I'm kind of…old to be bothering anybody about it."

"You're not old," he said with a soft smile. "And you won't be bothering me." He paused, then he added, "Wouldn't, I mean. Because we don't have to—"

"Don't be stupid."

Jack rolled his eyes.

Robby said, "Am I supposed to believe you can't feel the hard-on you're giving me right now?"

"Fuck."

"That's the general idea."

He snorted out a laugh and looked at him wide-eyed, so Robby took his head in his hands again and kissed him on the mouth, a little like he was gentling a wild animal.

(Not that I want him gentle, exactly.)

Then Robby said, "But, yeah, we don't have to do anything complicated, now or ever."

"By complicated," Jack said, "you mean anal."

"You know it's not a requirement for guys that have sex with guys."

"Why not? I'm game. Haven't you ever…?"

Robby could feel his eyes go wide. "With a woman?"

Jack laughed. "Okay, so I guess we know who the bottom is gonna be."

"Fuck."

"Still the idea, yeah?"

"Shut up."

"I mean, if you don't want…"

"I want." Robby thrilled at the way Jack's face lit up into a grin, both sly and open at once. "I just meant we don't have to get in our heads about it at this very moment."

"We're doctors. We know how anatomy works. Can’t be that difficult."

"We're emergency room doctors. We've pulled way too many phallic things out of downstairs parts."

"Strangely, that's not talking me out of it."

"Not trying to talk you out of it," Robby said. "Trying to talk you out of your clothes. Sometime this century, brother."

With heavy frosting of sarcasm, he asked, "Did I mention I missed you?"

Robby gave him a mischievous grin. "I mean, you did say you were lonely and hadn't seen me in a while. I guess a few hours ago counts as a while now."

At that, Jack actually blushed a little. 

(So fucking cute.)

"Alright," Robby said. "Bedroom. Now."

Without a lot of conversation or delay, they shed themselves of their clothes and Jack's prosthetic, then Jack pressed Robby down on his back on the bed. At first, he knelt between his legs, looking his fill, which made Robby feel a whole lot of things he couldn't rightly identify, most of them good, all of them making him feel overheated. Or maybe it's because he was looking at Jack's hard body, somehow sexier because it wasn't on a fucking 25 year old, and his long, flushed cock. He wanted to grab it, honestly, but he could wait.

Jack, apparently, could not. The man's eyes had zeroed in on his cock. Without any preamble, Jack reached out and wrapped a calloused hand around it, giving it a slow, easy pull. It was all Robby could do not to moan kind of wantonly.

"Wow," Jack said. He rubbed his thumb over the head and watched Robby's face as he reacted. "I think touching somebody else's dick might be even better than touching your own."

"Gotta give me some data to confirm," Robby murmured, reaching for Jack's hips. Jack obliged by crouching over him, and the groan that rose to his lips when Robby's hand closed around his shaft was a thing of filthy beauty. 

His eyes were dark and his face was flushed. Actually, his whole body was coming over flushed now, especially those perfect shoulders. 

(So many freckles, he thought. How did I not realize that before?) 

Jack gave his cock a less tentative stroke, and Robby's eyes slipped shut as his hips came up off the bed a little.

"This is going to be over fast," Robby muttered. "Come here.

At that, he grasped Jack by his well-muscled ass and dragged him down. It was too much, and the literal heat between them was going to be miserable soon, but he couldn't be bothered to care. All he wanted was to rut against Jack's hips and thighs, to feel his cock slipping between their bodies, against his own. 

"Can you…like this?" Jack said in a pant against his neck. 

"Fuck, maybe? I don't know. Don't care."

"Well, I need more friction. Can you get a hand around both?"

So Jack stretched up and Robby got his right hand around both of them — not all the way, but enough, and wasn't that fucking incredible — and started to meet the thrust of Jack's hips. They just settled into a workable rhythm when Jack moaned and his hips stilled.

"Oh fuck," he murmured as it started to pulse out of him, splashing hot over Robby's chest, then he was moving again. The glorious mess of it all left Robby feeling like he might lose his grip, even when he let go of Jack's cock and focused on his own. Then Jack reached for him, fingers just brushing over his stomach, and Robby came without warning, throwing his head back as he jerked himself through it, then collapsing back against the pillow with a groan.

Jack didn't lower down on top of him again, just raised himself up onto his knees, his hands grasping Robby's calves just to keep them anchored to each other. 

"Holy fuck," he said, shaking his head. "Hello there, Michael Robinavitch."

Robby grinned. It was hard to take his eyes off him, and he sure as hell couldn't keep his hands to himself anymore, maybe ever. He stretched out his arm and let the back of his hand trail light and easy up and down the inside of Jack's thighs. He was slick there, between his legs, with sweat and some of their intermingled release. The rest of it was on Robby's chest, and he was by no means missing the way Jack's eyes took it in.

Jack sat back, maneuvering his legs out from under him to lay them against Robby’s as he leaned back on his elbows.

Jack said, "I've only got one note about this whole gay sex thing."

"Oh?"

"Twice the dicks, twice the spunk."

Robby snorted, saying, "You should put that on a bumper sticker or maybe embroider it on a pillow."

"Don't pretend you like getting painted up."

"Getting is not a problem, apparently," he said, and he could feel himself blushing, mainly because he hadn't actually known that about himself, maybe? He added, "Being, once it's all over, is less awesome."

"Well, is your shower big enough for two?" 

Robby was suddenly having to boot up his brain to think about exactly what the inside of his shower looked like, which was weirder than it should have been considering he used it every day.

Jack poked him. "Hmm?"

"There's a bar. One. But that's about all you'd get for accessibility."

Jack acknowledged his concern with a nod but moved to crawl off the bed anyway. 

"All that tells me is we can only have shower sex at my place. And that I need to keep a pair of crutches here."

"The crutches I can do. For shower sex, you'll need a way more coordinated partner. Is it smart to…?"

"Smart? I've done worse for less reason. Showering-wise, something quick, with no shenanigans, is very doable with a little help. But I can also do a lot with just a washcloth."

"Was that supposed to be innuendo?"

"Oh, you'll know when it's innuendo. It'll be way more obvious than that. And clumsier, usually."

Robby laughed. "We're a good match, then."

"Yeah, I've seen you try to flirt."

He rolled his eyes. "I meant that I appreciate sledgehammer approaches to seduction, but I guess I'll have to hope that you do, too."

"Clearly," he said, slipping into the leg and nothing else and heading toward the bathroom.

Before he shut the door, Robby said, "Towels and stuff are in the closet."

"I know," Jack said. "I've cleaned up at your place before."

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Then why did you ask me about…?"

Jack leaned his shoulder against the door frame and laughed, this beautiful thing that must've been the last few hours catching up to him.

Jack said, soft and warm: "I was trying to spend more naked time with you, dumbass."

"Oh," he replied, flushing a little as Jack swept his eyes over his body, making him feel nothing at all like the soft-bellied middle aged dude he was.

As Jack turned to finally go in and close the door, Robby said, "Wait. I have a plastic step stool in the kitchen. Two steps, about" — he made a motion indicating its rough height.

When Jack turned, he already had a grin on his face. "Well, go get it, baby."

Robby grinned as he launched himself off the bed, trying not to think about his best friend standing naked in his bedroom, calling him baby, how his body wasn't nearly ready again for all the things he wanted to do to him.