Okay, so I’m still somewhat hooked on the notion of Liam turning out to be aro/ace, but I am also very into him coming home one day in the near future and asking the room at large how do you know if someone likes you?
Ian, on one of the high chairs by the kitchen counter, gives a snort of a laugh – but off Liam’s offended stare, quickly says: “Not laughing at you. Just remembering asking my friend Mandy that once, when I was trying to figure out if this grumpy asshole I’d been seeing was into me or not.”
The look he throws Mickey’s way is decidedly teasing.
Mickey raises one eyebrow, but he’s grinning too. “Oh yeah? What she say?”
“To check if he got that look in his eye when I was with him.”
At that, Mickey’s smile immediately morphs into a (faint) scowl. “What fucking look?”
“Mmm, asked her that too. She said I’d know it when I saw it.”
“Did you?” Liam interjects, torn between being curious and being not quite ready to have this entire conversation be hijacked by Ian and Mickey being Ian and Mickey.
Ian shrugs. “Not then, no. Mick got sick of me staring at him, asked me what the fuck I was doing.”
“I was fucking right to,” Mickey says. He takes a sip of his beer. “Don’t remember it, though.”
“It was just after you got out of juvie for the second time. You know, right before you fucked Angie Zago.”
Liam is on the verge of asking Mickey you slept with women but clamps his mouth shut, because on second thought he doesn’t actually want to know. In fact, he wishes he knew far less about Mickey’s – and Ian’s – sex life than he does. It’s a small house. Thin walls.
“How did you know then?” he asks instead; does it quickly, because Ian and Mickey are eyeing each other with the sort of half-glare that usually turns into bickering proper or into them making out (or into both, more often than not).
“Knew what?” Ian asks, not looking away from Mickey.
Liam rolls his eyes. For a pretty sharp guy, Ian can get pretty damned ditzy when his husband is around. “That Mickey liked you.”
“Ah.” And now he turns towards Liam; the glare is gone and he’s grinning again; a little amused, a little smug. “Probably when he followed me all the way downtown and then beat up my date ‘cause he was jealous I was having a drink with another dude.”
And it’s at this point that Mickey starts spluttering into his beer and launches into a rant about how Ian wasn’t just having drinks he was going to bang some old grey-pubed pervert and Mickey wasn’t fucking jealous anyway he just didn’t have any fucking patience for walking corpses thinking they could ride whatever teenage dick they wanted just ‘cause they were fucking loaded.
Liam’s pretty sure he doesn’t need to hear this. Ian is eyeing him like maybe he’s thinking the same thing. He gets up and walks over to Mickey, crowding him, putting his large hand around the back of his husband’s head with a small smirk like is that so, huh.
Liam takes it as his cue to leave. Maybe he can find Debbie, ask her instead. Or Lip.
He pauses on the way out, though. “Ian?”
When his older brother straightens – breaking away from Mickey muttering who the fuck says I even like you, asshole against his lips – and gives him a questioning look, he continues: “You ever see the look?”
And Ian’s face softens; his smile is soft, and his eyes are soft, and the thumb he runs over Mickey’s cheek, seemingly unconscioulsy, is soft too. “All the time.”
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