"I see you've taken the endless criticism to heart," Danny had said, "and have given up on dressing yourself completely."
Rusty just gave him a look.
It became apparent right around the time that Rusty failed to respond in a timely and appropriate fashion that maybe he hadn't been exaggerating, as these things went, when he'd called and said, "worst week of my life."
On the other hand, Danny had been there, and not been there, for many worse weeks of Rusty's life, and many of those hadn't even been located in a hotel suite in California, with a seemingly endless supply of alcohol to lighten things up.
Finally Danny said, "What, did she get bored with you?"
"Actually," said Rusty, "yes."
Danny took a long look at him, then sat down next to him. The sofa was upholstered in a tastefully soothing taupe fabric that almost seemed to melt into the walls. They might've taken the colour scheme a little far. He said, "Toulour, huh."
"Huh," Rusty agreed. He picked up a glass off the coffee table and looked at it. There was a sliver of melting ice in it and a row of sticky fingerprints around it. "You want a drink?"
"You have clean glasses?" Danny asked.
"I do," Rusty said. He stood up with the kind of stiffness that suggested he'd been sitting there too long. Rusty enjoyed his wallowing, when it came to it.
"Sure," said Danny.
A moment later Rusty was pressing a cool glass of something -- scotch, whiskey, close enough -- into Danny's hand. Danny looked at it, and the ice cubes floating in it, and took a sip. "That bad, huh."
Rusty just raised his glass to him and downed it. Danny thought, at least it's doing its job.
"You know what the thing is," Rusty said suddenly. "The thing is that she gave me a line. She -- Isabel, Danny."
"Ah, a line," said Danny. "The dotted kind with the sticky saying 'sign here'? I got a couple of those."
Rusty gave him a look. "No, the kind you attach a hook to and call it fishing. -- No, you know. It's not you, it's me. It's not your fault. It's just not working out. No hard feelings, right?"
"Sure," said Danny.
"No, that's what she said to me."
Danny sat up a little straighter. "She said 'no hard feelings'?"
"I know, right?"
"Man, I thought you had a smart one there. She's a cop, right?"
"If she was smart, she wouldn't have become a cop," Rusty said.
"True," said Danny. He swished his own whiskey around a bit before swallowing the rest of it. He had a lot of catching up to do. "But I think you're just going to have to face it. She just wasn't that into you."
"Yeah," Rusty said. "I figured that one out after she -- it doesn't matter what she said. But let's look at it this way: she's a great liar. I bet they'll be great together."
"Not," Danny said, "that there's any reason to be bitter."
"Nope," Rusty agreed, and he sounded so sincere about it that Danny started to say, "Then what's the prob--"
It was right around then that Rusty kissed him.
Rusty's mouth was soft and unhurried against his own, like he was kissing Danny more for the familiarity of it than out of any real desire -- but Rusty had always kissed like that, had kissed like that the last time, had kissed like that even in those frantic moments before he'd sworn up and down that he was never doing it again, not if Danny was going to marry her again. And he still kissed like that, four years later, and he was definitely doing it again.
Danny opened his mouth only long enough to taste the heat of Rusty's kiss, and then he pulled away.
"I didn't think you were doing this anymore," he said.
Rusty stared at him, then touched his fingers along Danny's jaw. "I changed my mind," he said. And when he kissed Danny the second time, there was more of that aching familiarity, of the damp press of his lips against Danny's, of the hotness of his breath as he sighed into Danny's mouth.
Danny thought, in a very abstract way: we probably shouldn't do this. But suddenly Rusty's lips parted, and there was Rusty's tongue sliding softly against his, against his teeth and the roof of his mouth, and there were Rusty's hands pushing hard against his shoulders, and Danny had never really cared about the ethics of what they should or shouldn't do.
It was awkward doing it on the sofa -- it was never wide enough and you could never get close enough, could never get the right position or the rhythm or anything -- but it didn't even matter. When Danny slid his hands inside Rusty's robe, Rusty's skin was hot and almost damp, and he could feel Rusty's heart jamming hard against his ribs. He wasn't wearing anything underneath. Danny shoved the robe off Rusty's shoulders, then pushed him back to lean against the back of the sofa, pulling their lips apart as he went.
"Are you going to --" Rusty started, but he put a hand on the back of Danny's neck and kissed him again instead, hard enough that Danny could feel the indentations of Rusty's teeth against his lips, his tongue. Danny gasped, like he couldn't get enough air.
He reached blindly and found Rusty's dick, hot and hard against the palm of his hand, and Danny was suddenly aware that, shit, Rusty was hard, and they were going to have sex for the first time since the divorce, since the first divorce, and he didn't even know or care if Rusty was doing it for any other reason except that he was there.
"Rusty," he said. He could feel Rusty shaking a little, his breath coming in short bursts, his muscles under Danny's hands quivering. Danny leaned forward just enough that their lips caught when he said, "I'm going to suck your dick."
Rusty made a sound that might have been "oh god", and tipped his head onto the back of the couch. His hands suddenly felt heavy on Danny's shoulders, like they'd leave and imprint once they'd gone. Then Danny moved down, putting his hands, his lips on Rusty's body, on his neck, his collarbone, his nipples. He could hear Rusty's breathing go harsh, erratic, and that too was familiar, just like the feel of Rusty's skin against his, like it was him that Danny'd spent the last four years with and not someone else.
"Just do it, Danny," Rusty said, indistinctly. Danny could feel Rusty's hands tightening in the fabric of his shirt.
Danny tightened his grip on Rusty's cock, and laid his other hand on Rusty's hip. He could feel the muscle tensing close to the bone, like Rusty wanted to move but couldn't, or wouldn't. Danny breathed, and bent to open his mouth against Rusty's cock.
It felt strange, after all this time, to taste the weight, the heat of Rusty's dick on his tongue. It'd been there enough that it wasn't new any more, but it wasn't the same old, either, though Rusty still swore as Danny sucked his dick further into his mouth, still fidgeted with Danny's collar instead of grabbing his hair and forcing him down.
Rusty still came quietly, and suddenly, with a long exhalation of breath.
"Danny," he said after a while, once Danny had sat back on the sofa. He looked kind of hazy and uncertain, and Danny wondered how much of this really had to do with Isabel.
"Do you want me to," Rusty started.
Danny leaned his head back and didn't look at Rusty. He was still hard, half-hard, and he could feel the pressure of it in his abdomen, but he swallowed, still tasting Rusty, and said, "No."
Rusty said, "I'm taking a shower."
*
The phone was ringing when Rusty got out of the bathroom. The phone had, in fact, been ringing for the entire time that Rusty had been in the shower, as though the callers had calculated the precise moments at which exactly no one was going to answer.
The first call had been from someone named Leanne -- or, that was what the caller ID said -- who called and left a message, and then called again just in case the first time had been a fluke.
The second one had been Isabel, who had her own personalized, annoying ring tone that went on and on and on until the voicemail must have kicked in. Danny had let that one ring, too, but when he checked he saw that she hadn't left a message. He couldn't imagine what she would have had to say, anyway.
"Your phone," said Danny, once Rusty had emerged from the bathroom, wearing a towel and little else, "is still ringing."
"Why didn't you answer it?" Rusty asked.
"I didn't think it would be appropriate to chat up your ex-girlfriends."
"Ah," said Rusty, and picked up his phone before it vibrated its way off the table and onto the floor. "I should probably take this. It's not Isabel," he added.
Danny gestured helpfully at the phone.
Rusty answered it. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Okay, hey, look. Didn't I tell you not to call me at this number? Yes, I did. Call the other one. I'm not talking about it now." Then he hung up, and, without another word, went to get dressed.
When he came back he was wearing an un-cuffed, un-buttoned shirt that shone with less vigour than it might have in past years, but it was no less hideous for that. The pants, Danny noticed, were normal, at least, and he'd even taken the care of putting them on all the way.
"You're not even going to ask?" Rusty said.
"What, where you get your god awful fashion sense?"
"Europe," said Rusty.
"Okay," Danny said. Rusty sat down across from him, in the chair. "Who was it?"
"Just a guy I know," Rusty said.
"Oh," said Danny. "You know a guy, do you?"
He didn't think that Rusty meant what it sounded like he meant -- like he knew a guy, like he was on the job. Rusty hadn't done a job for months now, maybe even a year, not since Isabel had moved in and Rusty had said, matter-of-factly, "What do I need to do it for, anyway?" He definitely didn't need the money. Not to mention, it just wasn't practical in Europe. Rusty'd gotten too hot.
Danny'd never thought Europe was any good for Rusty.
But he'd seen Rusty's point. Tess had seen it, too, and said, "Good for you, Rusty," like giving up the job was a decision Rusty had made all on his own, and like it was one that Danny hadn't made at all, like he hadn't gone straight, honey, Tess, just for her, like she'd asked.
But now that Isabel was gone, he supposed it gave Rusty something to do, to go back on the job. It had given Danny something to do after the second set of papers came, but he had at least told Rusty about it.
"Not in the Biblical sense," Rusty said, "but yes. I know a guy."
"Huh," said Danny. "Does he know a guy? In the Biblical sense," he clarified.
"He knows a guy," Rusty said.
"And you're just supervising?"
"I'm just supervising."
"Well," said Danny. "It's always good to have protégés."
"Or just the one," said Rusty.
"Or just the one," he agreed. Then he couldn't think of anything else to say, so he said, "Well."
"Yep," said Rusty. He was fidgeting with his cuffs, like he wanted something to do, something so he wouldn't have to think about talking. "If you're mad because I didn't tell you --"
"Do I look mad?" Danny asked. If Rusty wanted to help some kid get his start, Danny wasn't even interested, let alone mad. But it was the same sort of disinterest that he'd felt when Tess gave him the papers, the second time, and that almost worried him. He said, "It's great. I'm happy for you."
He'd said that then, too.
*
Danny reached across the coffee table and very deliberately turned Rusty's phone off.
Having room service was not the same thing as actually convincing Rusty to leave the room and go downstairs and sit in the restaurant and act like a normal human being, but Rusty had said, "It's my hotel, man," and Danny had had to agree that yes, it was, but that didn't mean he had to live there.
Rusty had rolled his eyes and picked up the room phone.
"That thing," Danny said presently, "is driving me crazy."
"It could have been my mother," said Rusty.
Danny considered taking that one at face value. "I thought this one was your personal phone," he said instead.
"Harsh," Rusty said, and went back to poking at his food. He was eating fried calamari with a fork -- they were too hot yet for anything else, and too greasy to really look appetizing. But then, Danny'd never had much a stomach for seafood.
"What's it take to get a decent calamari around here, anyway?" Rusty asked.
"Something else," said Danny.
"Huh," Rusty said. He popped a calamari in his mouth, and chewed for a long moment before he said, "You know what your problem is, Danny"
"Stop me if I've heard this one before," Danny said.
"Shut up," said Rusty. "I think you expect too much of people."
Danny looked at him. "Why, am I expecting too much of you?"
"You're expecting me to be over this," Rusty said. He wasn't even looking at his food as he ate it anymore. Maybe that made it easier.
"Tess divorced me twice," Danny said.
"Sure," Rusty said. "And that makes you an expert."
Danny finished his drink. "I'm a little sick of being your go-to guy, Rus."
"Is that what you think this is about? You're not going to -- do -- anything, just because you think I'm upset that my girlfriend left me for a Frenchman?"
"No," Danny said.
"It's not about her," said Rusty.
"That's a new one," Danny said. "You want to give me something other than a line? I hear they've gone out of style."
"I didn't say I wanted to see you so I could forget about Isabel," said Rusty. "I just wanted to see you."
Danny went very still.
"She wasn't the only one that was bored," Rusty said.
*
When Danny kissed him later, he tasted spicy, and Danny could almost feel his tongue burning on contact. Rusty's mouth was wet and his tongue slick, and suddenly the way he kissed was not at all familiar: there was desperation in it, and that was new, as though for once it was Danny that Rusty wanted to be kissing, and not just any mouth at all.
Rusty's skin was silky under his shirt, under his pants, but Danny had only just got the buttons out of the way when Rusty pushed his hands away, and shoved his own down the front of Danny's pants.
"You don't --" Danny started.
"Shut up, Danny," said Rusty, and then he was guiding them towards the bed, while he pushed Danny's clothes out of the way. Once Danny's were gone and on the floor, Rusty shrugged out of his own, and put a hand on Danny's chest. "Just stop thinking about it."
Rusty pushed him down on the bed and crawled on top of him, though the movement made the bed knock against the wall, and the sound made Danny freeze. It had been a long time since they'd had this, since Rusty could shove him down and jerk him off, and Danny never once had to think of anything else but the taste of Rusty's skin.
Rusty smiled against his mouth. Rusty's hands were rough on his cock, like he wasn't afraid to touch it, and when he finally started to move, Danny thought he might come from that first feel of friction alone. He felt like his whole world had narrowed to the points of contact between his body and Rusty's -- his cock in Rusty's hand, his tongue in Rusty's mouth, and the whole left side where Rusty was pressed against him, grinding his cock against Danny's hip.
Then suddenly Rusty stopped, and shifted, moving over Danny to lower his hips so that he pressed flush against him. Danny nearly bit his lip as Rusty aligned their cocks, close enough that Rusty could hold them together, jerk them together. Rusty's cock was hot and smooth against Danny's, familiar and yet not. Danny reached between them and covered Rusty's hand with his own, pressing harder, hard enough that Rusty suddenly went very still, and then came.
When Danny's own orgasm hit him, it was with a low moan that he felt buzzing against Rusty's lips, like it had been Rusty and not him. But Rusty just kissed him harder, moving his lips against Danny's to get a different angle, to get their mouths closer, hotter, until finally Danny had to stop to breathe.
"Danny," Rusty said after a while. He was still pressed close against Danny, with one hand on Danny's shoulder blade.
"Yeah," said Danny.
"It wasn't about her."
"First rule of the game, Rusty," he murmured, against Rusty's throat. He could feel Rusty smiling.
"I think we've been in long enough," Rusty said, "that we can afford to start breaking it."