Rhapsody on a Theme (35 page)

Jayden curled a little closer and kissed his cheek. He felt too hot and over-sensitised, and more than a little odd with them both being naked from the hips down, but fully dressed from the waist up, but also as though he were in the perfect place.

They dozed together for maybe half an hour over the sheets before rousing themselves to return to the party. Darren abandoned the tight suit trousers in favour of his jeans (thankfully dark and well-fitting jeans, so they didn’t look
too
bad) but left the dress shirt because he was a
dick
, and he liked to
tease
, and it made Jayden want to lock the door and do it all over again because Darren had
every idea
what seeing him dressed up properly did to Jayden and therein lay the
problem
, but…

Jayden reined himself in, kissed Darren once more at the hotel room door, and smoothed down a few of the really mental curls. “You look fucked,” he said honestly, and Darren grinned crookedly.

“Yeah, well, that’s your fault.”

Jayden laughed, kissing him again at the lift. Who
cared
, for once? It was a
wedding
, and he could kiss his partner if he liked, and Darren was wearing this ruffled air of
just been screwed through a headboard
, and he was
actually
walking tense, like his back ached or something (definitely the ‘or something’) and Jayden felt weirdly proud of it. He did that. And nobody else could. Nobody else knew what Darren looked like when he was being fucked, or fucking, and…

“I am the luckiest guy at this whole wedding,” he said in the lift, and Darren rolled his eyes.

“Because you got your end away?”

“Because I got my end away, with you in that suit,” Jayden clarified.

Darren hummed and nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Jayden laughed and pulled him out of the lift by the hand as the doors opened into the lobby again. The music had been turned up, and some lively pop song was dying away.

“Dance with me,” Jayden said, tugging Darren towards the noise, and Paul, chatting up one of the bridesmaids as he’d promised, grinned at them.

“Oh, I know
that
face!” he said and raised a hand. “Come on, man, skin.”

Darren gave the requested high-five and grimaced. “I’m not sitting at that piano for a bit,” he confided, and Paul laughed.

“
Nice
, Jayden!”

Jayden grinned. Maybe it was the alcohol from dinner, maybe it was the atmosphere, maybe it was the dregs of the afterglow, but for once he didn’t care about revealing their sex life in public, or cracks being made at it. He felt stupidly happy, maybe even a bit smug, and he pulled Darren towards the dance floor insistently as a slow song started up, sliding his arms around those wide shoulders when they got there and kissing him quickly.

“Love you,” he murmured in his ear, to be heard over the loud if slow music.

“I gathered that,” Darren smirked, and his eyes slid sideways. Jayden glanced aside, and an elderly woman—likely Lillian’s relative, judging by the size of her—glowered back. “Problem, love?” Darren asked obnoxiously, and Jayden turned away from her to laugh into the top of Darren’s shoulder. “Didn’t think so,” Darren grumbled, and Jayden kissed him, dizzy with all the positive emotion, and smiled against his mouth.

“You were gorgeous up there in the church,” Jayden confessed. “And at the dinner. I wanted to just pull you away from the piano right then when you started playing. I forgot how fucking sexy you look when you play, and dinner was
so awkward
.”

“Sorry.” Darren smirked.

“No, you’re not,” Jayden laughed and then softened. “In all seriousness, I think I just fell in love all over again.”

Darren’s mouth ticked upwards in a quick, fleeting smile. There was something intangible behind his eyes, and Jayden kissed his cheek again, burning still with the need to touch him, even if not for sex this time.

“You’ll never claim to be sorry for that,” he murmured, and Darren chuckled.

“Yeah, think you’re right there. Hypothetically, you know, we could do it all over again and get free wine and presents if we got married.”

“Yeah but I couldn’t sneak you off in the middle of it. The people getting married are kind of crucial to the deal, and that would be crap having to watch you walk around in a proper penguin suit all sexy and shaggable and everything and have to
wait
.”

“It’d be our wedding; we could do whatever we liked.”

Jayden smiled, kissing his other cheek. The faintest rasp of stubble made itself known against his lips, and he transferred his attention to those lips, mouthing at the faintest split where he had bitten it too hard in the hotel room. “Are you asking?”

Darren shrugged. “Hypothetically, if I did, would you say yes?”

“Mm,” Jayden hummed. “Are you asking?”

“If I were asking, I’d have
asked
.”

“Well.” Jayden slid closer, until they weren’t so much dancing as hugging and rocking lightly on their feet together. “Hypothetically, you know, if in a hypothetical situation you were to ask
properly
, with a date at my favourite restaurant and a ring and everything like that, then…I suppose
hypothetically
I’d say yes, yeah.”

Darren grinned, squeezed him a little tighter, and said nothing in reply. Jayden rested his head on one wide shoulder with a sigh, smiling at the warmth of one hand at his hip and the other around his back, and the gentle power settled in Darren’s body. Jayden felt truly calm for the first time in months, felt as though they really had won the battle, felt as though…as though Darren’s illness couldn’t beat them.

Not as though they
had
won, but as though they
would
win.

“Darren?” he murmured.

“Mm?”

“You’re…it,” he said finally, and Darren kissed his ear.

“Yeah,” he said. “Think I figured that out by now.”

* * * *

They retired from the wedding entirely at midnight, after far too much champagne and not enough food and when the dance floor started rocking gently under their feet even when they weren’t dancing. Jayden retrieved Darren from the dance floor and the clutches of Lillian’s sister, who had flirted incessantly with him all night, and Paul drunkenly bade them ‘Merry Christmas!’ as they said their goodbyes. Ruby laughed, said she’d see to her brother, and wished them good night.

Darren was very drunk, the pills probably heightening the effect of the booze, and a faint prickle of concern started up in the back of Jayden’s mind as he steered him into and out of the lift, into the hotel room, and onto the bed—and then it faded, when Darren caught his tie, pulled him down for a messy and slack kiss, murmured an endearment, and drifted off to sleep.

“Love you,” Jayden mumbled, turned him onto his side, and went to shower.

When he came back, Darren had woken up a bit, and disappeared into the shower himself. Jayden tidied up their abandoned clothes and flicked on the TV very quietly. He felt exhausted, drunk, sated, and lucky. Supremely, ridiculously lucky. When Darren returned, naked and dripping wet and smelling of hotel shower gel, Jayden kissed him and reeled him in by the hair and ended up with a living blanket. They were too tired and too far gone to make much use of the lack of clothes, and Jayden dozed, woke, and dozed again to the deep power of Darren’s half-asleep breathing, the damp motions of his lips against whatever skin he found closest, and the occasional venture of a clumsy hand over Jayden’s chest, ribs and belly.

In the end, they must have slept, because Jayden eventually woke to a mild hangover and summer sunlight leaking in around the curtains. He was bathed in light and warmth, and his head ached, and his lower back had a twinge from the too-soft mattress, but the sun was warming the back of his head through the flimsy hotel curtains, and a familiar, heavy kind of heat was beckoning under the sheets.

Squinting against the light, Jayden cracked an eye open and flung out a hand, dropping his arm over Darren’s waist and pulling until he could mould himself up against that smooth back and inviting skin. He was flushed hot, and Jayden kissed the little mole to the left of his spine, just below the hairline.

Nothing. Darren was deeply asleep, and Jayden peered at the clock on the side table before giving up on it. Darren’s pill was an hour overdue, but he’d be okay. He’d been in a good mood, and he’d gotten proper sleep, and they didn’t have to get up for a few hours yet, and the new drugs didn’t have to be taken
on the dot
, which was good because of his shifts for work and…and screw it. They could sleep for a bit longer.

Jayden curled closer, pillowing his head between those broad shoulders and listening to the steady thump of Darren’s heart through his back. It was picking up, and a moment later, a long leg shifted under the sheets. Jayden tucked his knee between Darren’s, kissed one shoulder, and tightened his grip.

“Morning,” he whispered contentedly. Darren’s arm shifted, elbow pulling back in that jerky fashion it had had since he was sixteen, and fingers wrapped around Jayden’s wrist to squeeze lightly before going slack again. Jayden pressed his nose into Darren’s hair and inhaled. “You awake?” he murmured.

Nothing, but he was getting there. The complete relaxation had ebbed, and his breathing was a little quicker than it had been. He’d be awake soon. And anyway, Darren almost never reacted to Jayden—or anything else—when he was
dead
asleep.

Jayden contented himself with touching, rubbing the pad of his index finger over the tattoo on Darren’s shoulder before brushing his flat palm down Darren’s chest, smiling when he shifted and mumbled even in sleep as Jayden touched his nipple, and toying with the jut of his hipbone idly, tracing the very edge of his fingernail around the thin skin there. He could feel the heat coming off Darren in waves, maybe stronger because the sheet hid them both from the chest down, and when Darren’s hand swatted at the disturbance idly, Jayden just kissed his shoulder again and carried on drawing circles around his hip.

“J’yden…”

“Mm?”

“Fuck’f,” Darren slurred, and Jayden smiled, pressing his hand to the flat expanse of Darren’s lower abdomen, just brushing the wiry hairs, and leaning over his shoulder to kiss his cheek. “S’not fucking off.”

“You don’t really want me to,” Jayden coaxed, kissing his ear and wrapping both hands around his shoulder to pull Darren onto his back. Darren squinted up at him, groaned, and pulled the sheet over his head. Jayden pulled it back down, kissed him, and settled over his chest, half to pin him in place and half to hug him. After a pause, Darren tugged the sheet back up over both of them, and tucked his face against Jayden’s with a heavy sigh.

“What d’you want?” he mumbled sleepily. Jayden peeked to see closed eyes.

“You,” he murmured, stroking a finger down one cheek and kissing along the bone in tiny, feathery presses until he could kiss Darren’s ear. “I feel amazing right now.”

“Good for you,” Darren sighed more than said, his breath a soft exhale over Jayden’s ear, and Jayden kissed the tattoo, pushing himself up to drop fleeting kisses over whatever he could find: the shoulder tattoo, two freckles by his collarbone, a scrap of scar tissue, a faint red line where the shirt collar had pressed too tightly yesterday…“Mm,” Darren murmured, clumsily stroking Jayden’s hair before dropping his hand to Jayden’s shoulder and squeezing. “What’d you want?” he repeated.

Jayden kissed his neck. He felt…lucky, and too full, like he was going to burst. He wanted to do something, like there was too much energy under his skin, and he wanted to wrap himself up in Darren’s heat, and…

“You,” he repeated, and tilted his head, resting his chin on Darren’s chest. Under the lashes, he could see the faintest slivers of green. “I still have one of my Christmas vouchers.”

Darren’s fingers stilled in his hair. He was half-hard against Jayden’s hip, but he always was in the mornings—at least, he was without the SSRIs, and he was apparently back to that
now
, and Jayden chewed on his lip as he waited.

“Can we?” he said eventually. “I want to feel you and have…nothing in between.”

Darren raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?” he said, sounding far more awake. “After yesterday’s performance?”

Jayden laughed, feeling breathless, and kissed his chest. After a moment, he mouthed at the closest nipple, swiping his tongue flat over it, and braced his hands against Darren’s chest when he groaned and arched.

“That’s dirty pool,” he hissed.

“I know you cleaned yourself in the shower last night,” Jayden said, still paying homage to Darren’s chest, and Darren groaned. “You always do after.” And deep, too. Jayden had long since learned that the best times to jump him were very late in the evening, or very early in the morning.

Like now.

“I’ll go slow,” Jayden promised. Darren was reacting to what he was doing, he could feel it against his thigh, and it
was
dirty pool, but sometimes Darren called for a few tricks, and anyway, he wasn’t exactly shy about telling Jayden to sod off either, so…

“You better,” Darren breathed into his mouth, and pulled his hair. “Really bloody slow.”

Jayden laughed, shook the hand off, and kissed him properly. Darren tasted of sleep, stale cake, and still the tart fizz of champagne at the edges of his tongue. He tasted of love and lust and heat and allure and beauty and skill, and Jayden settled between his legs comfortably without breaking the kissing, rubbing both hands over that slowly moving chest and pushing his fingers along skin and hair and the ridges of shifting muscle and bone. He pushed lower, massaging knotted thigh muscles lightly for several minutes before shifting one hand around and fumbling on the side table momentarily with the other.