blve velvetvale

It had been odd to see Casey in the paddock again, surrounded by the familiar sight of bikes and uniformed team members running around and the press crawling up and down the pitlane with their sound crews and camera men. Familiar but jarring, it had felt wrong that Casey wasn’t in the bright red leathers of Ducati, to see how Casey’s face was lined with age and to feel the weariness in his own bones.

Sometimes he looked into his own face and saw the handiwork of time and thought, “fuck, I’m getting old!” With a surprise not fit for his age. It was hard to make amends with the fact that they were getting older, time seemed to be slipping through his fingers, but it was somehow worse to see it in Casey.

Still, Valentino wouldn’t lie and say that they were too old for him to have had a brief, vivid moment of delusion where they were again young and their teeth ached to bite down on another win to bring them closer to their name on the metal of the Tower of Champions, but he had looked away before a camera caught him watching.

Now, the paddock was packing up again, the circus getting ready to move onto the next country and Valentino was walking somewhat aimlessly until someone needed him. It was bittersweet for him, coming back to the paddock, old memories coming back to settle heavy in his chest.

He found himself wandering over to Ducati – he had no real intentions to talk to Casey, the air of Misano already coating his mouth with a bad taste, but maybe it was nostalgia and old sentiments and he found himself walking towards Casey. He stood beside him silently for a second and watched on as the Ducati mechanics loaded the bikes into the trucks.

“The bikes are so different,” Casey said after a pause and Valentino turned to look at his face. There was no sense of longing in Casey’s eyes, not like how Valentino couldn’t let go, but there was a distaste to the tension between Casey’s eyebrows.

He knew he had held on for too long and some part of him would never leave the race track behind, haunting the paddock in whispers of his name and half of his soul no matter where in the world he found himself. He knew that Casey would forsake every part of the race until it was stripped down onto the bike and the pilot, machine and man, and he had to stifle a laugh. If there were any two people more unlike one another, Valentino would be astonished, but he had heard that opposites attract.

“You don’t like the bike, no?” Valentino stated more than asked. It was amusing, just slightly.

“No, I don’t,” Casey said stiffly, never turning to face Valentino. Valentino hummed in acknowledgement and again they stood in silence.

“Come to my motorhome?” Valentino found himself asking, and again he couldn’t exactly fathom why but it felt right; nostalgia, whim, or whatever else could be blamed.

That seemed to capture Casey’s attention because he finally looked up at Valentino. “What?”

“Eh, I said come to my motorhome,” Valentino said again,

“I thought we didn’t do that anymore.”

“Allora, you do not say that at the ranch,” Valentino said salaciously, which got Casey’s eyes to widen slightly and his cheeks to tinge rosy pink. 

Casey glared at him before whipping his head to look around as if trying to find a journalist with a microphone in hand hiding behind a corner waiting to accost them. It was odd, Valentino had always been the more image-cautious one of the two of them. They had hugged in the middle of the paddock with people all around them, compared to that just talking together seemed innocent enough in his opinion.

Finding that no one had popped out of the ground with a camera to livestream to the world that two MotoGP world champions had fucked, Casey rounded back at him to level him with a glare. “You want something, just tell me what it is and then leave.” 

Valentino would have probably fucked off by this point if Casey hadn’t been so hostile, but the man’s prickly demeanor after seemingly starting to begrudgingly accept Valentino’s friendliness made him a little curious. Casey had always been a little touchy, easily provoked by things that Valentino didn’t understand fully and hadn’t really ever had a care to try – at least until now that was.

“Come to my motorhome. You eat dinner with me, we chat about when we were racing like old men, nothing bad,” Valentino said, loud enough that anyone with a curious ear would think enough. Casey looked at him scrutinizingly, up and down his face as if he could divine a motive from it.

“Fine, I can do dinner,” Casey said slowly, still seemingly not trusting Valentino fully, “but only dinner.” At that, Valentino broke out into a grin, he still knew how to sway Casey; it wasn’t like the man ever had the restraint of a monk anyway. 

“Only dinner,” Valentino repeated innocently, but the smile on his face made him look like the cat who got the cream.

•••

When Valentino had been younger, he had been something of a risk-taker with his passions. Girls were acceptable – hell, girls were encouraged – but sometimes Valentino wanted a broader figure to envelope his own, lanky one and a calloused hand to thread in between his fingers and press him down into the springy mattresses of the hotel rooms that had made up his youth. The more eyes that trailed on him as the years passed, although, the more hesitations that sprung up.

However, even at the height of his career with the devoted eyes of thousands scrutinizing him, he had found ways to. It was a careful oasis of privacy that he would never be made to give up when there was a man in this bed, a piece of his life that he could keep selfishly to himself and which no one would ever ask him to surrender.

Some people had told him to settle down with some model, have a kid or two, not risk it as much as he did, but Valentino had never been one to play it safe. He never took their advice; he had always wanted everything the world had given him and then some more and he was nothing if not greedy.

There was a youthful freedom in taking a man into his bed and a more than a little bit of giddy delight in pushing Casey down onto the bed. He pulled himself into the younger man’s lap, crashing their lips together in a messy kiss. 

As so often as it did, the world narrowed down into just the bedroom and its inhabitants, then further down into the throbbing pain in his lips as Casey bit down harshly, the feeling of Casey’s hand running against the sides of his torso from where it had sneaked under his shirt, the throbbing of his cock in his shorts. Almost in spite of himself, Valentino ground down against Casey’s crotch, the friction making them both moan into each other’s mouths as they rubbed against each other like teenagers.

Casey’s hand trailed down to Valentino’s hips and stilled them. With a mournful groan, Valentino pulled away from Casey to glare at him.

“No offense, but I don’t think that either of us could go for a second round,” Casey said, panting ever so slightly with his pupils blown wide and absurdly, Valentino broke down laughing. He hid his face in Casey’s chest, shaking with laughter and Casey tensed underneath him as if he thought Valentino was going insane mid-foreplay.

Before Casey could do anything about it, though, Valentino pulled his head up and framed a confused Casey’s face with his hands, a wide smile on his face. “We are so fucking old.”

Casey rolled his eyes at Valentino’s but he still smiled, Valentino could feel the sides of his mouth turn up underneath his hands. He pushed Valentino off and stood up to start taking off his clothes, leaving Valentino to flop down on the bed and watch him with a dopey grin.

“You do know we can’t have sex if you’re going to be dressed the whole time, right?” Casey asked when he had gotten his jeans off but Valentino was still laying on the bed, his eyes trailing up the bare skin that Casey had exposed. Valentino sighed heavily at the idea of getting up.

Seemingly done with Valentino’s theatrics, Casey rolled his eyes and stripped down to his boxers in the most utilitarian strip tease that Valentino had ever been in the receiving end of. Still, Valentino whistled in appreciation for a second to which Casey blushed bright red before pulling him up to his feet to take off Valentino’s team polo in one smooth motion.

His shirt was thrown somewhere across the room uncaringly but Valentino didn’t even have a chance to whine about it before Casey began to suck bruises into Valentino’s shoulders and the crook of his neck. The boys were going to drag him through the mud about it but Valentino found himself groaning in a mixture of pain and pleasure when Casey got a little bit meaner with his bites.

Casey’s hand went down to play with the buckle of his belt, toying at the clasp before taking it off and letting Valentino’s shorts fall to the ground as well. Valentino threaded his fingers into Casey’s hair and pulled him away from where he was biting into Valentino’s shoulder. It was kind of hot to see the dazed look on Casey’s face. The low light of the bedside lamp made him look even more debauched, yellow light highlighting the red of his cheeks and the dilation of his pupils.

Impatience pooled in Valentino’s stomach as he finally pulled off his and Casey’s boxers, leaving them both fully naked. He pushed Casey onto the bed before moving down to be face to face with the other man’s dick. Casey looked down at him with half-lidded eyes and Valentino met his gaze as he took Casey into his mouth. 

“Jesus Christ,” Casey groaned under his breath as Valentino bobbed his head up and down slowly to get used to the familiar feeling of a dick down his throat. He would have made a cocky remark that his name was Valentino, but he wasn’t really interested in pulling away from Casey’s dick at the moment.

This time, it was Casey’s fingers which threaded in Valentino’s hair. He made no move to fuck Valentino’s mouth, just placed his hand on top of his head like a reminder. Casey started to breathe harder, little restrained groans escaping his throat before Valentino let his teeth graze him ever so slightly and Casey moaned loud enough that the sound filled the room.

As the seconds flitted by, any grasp that Casey’d had of himself slipped more and more until he was bucking into Valentino’s mouth with curses spilled under his breath. A particularly rough thrust made Valentino splutter, pulling off Casey as he began to gag slightly. But before Casey could move away, Valentino took another breath and went back down on him.

It took little to make Casey come down Valentino’s throat. Valentino pushed his tongue against the underside of Casey’s dick and sucked on his tip and Casey was arching off the bed. Coughing, Valentino pulled off Casey’s dick and swallowed, licking his lips with a cheshire grin that Valentino could swear had made Casey stop breathing for a second.

For a second, Casey closed his eyes and Valentino was worried he was going to fall asleep. He could have probably made do with the sight of Casey’s red, flushed skin and the sheen of sweat on his body to jerk off, but what was the point of having someone else in his bed if they weren’t even going to make him come? But Casey got up again, twisting around to the nightstand to grab the bottle of lube to coat his hand with.

“I don’t think I could give you a blow job right now if I wanted to,” Casey said, coming back to Valentino’s side, “so you’re going to have to do with my hand.” Honestly, Valentino couldn’t be bothered to give a shit; sex was sex, Casey was Casey, and he had never been that picky anyway, so Valentino just nodded mindlessly in agreement.

The first touch of Casey’s hand against Valentino’s cock felt like heaven. He hadn’t known just how desperate he had been until Casey started to move his fist up and down Valentino’s dick. His eyes closed without his consent and a constant litany of noise and an unintelligible mixture of Italian and English passed through his lips. It didn’t take long before Valentino was tumbling over the edge, but who could blame him?

He collapsed again onto the dirty sheets with Casey falling right beside him. The sheets were disgusting and they would have to inevitably get up to clean themselves but that could wait. They had until morning light would light up their sins to the world and in the afterglow, that seemed forever away.

“I can’t believe you roped me into sex only for it to end in a blowie and a hand job,” Casey said finally, a mixture of disbelief after they’d both caught their breaths.

“Fucking takes a lot of energy, I’ve had a busy day,” Valentino shrugged, stretching out his limbs as a pleasant exhaustion weighed him down and Casey scoffed a laugh.

One of Casey’s fingers was trailing absentminded figures into Valentino’s skin. They were both filthy but neither seemed to want to get up and break the illusion that they had made together. It never lasted, one of them had always left – it simply was how the story always went. Still, Valentino wanted to relish in the moments he had, to hold Casey close for a moment longer.