#jeanate

***

They both know they are operating on stolen time. Riko will be back in the space between heartbeats, steady like clockwork and sharp as a knife.

It doesn’t matter.

Nathaniel and Jean need their hands on each other more than they fear their King. What are threats of violence when it’s all you’ve ever known? Pain is still present, but the novelty faded between a handshake deal and a trip across the sea.

Jean is sitting on his twin bed. Twin bodies and twin flames and hands twinning together. Nathaniel is in his lap, knees pressed into the mattress on either side of Jean’s hips. Their arms are a continuous loop, behind neck and behind back. A closed circuit of electricity zipping between the two of them and nowhere to be released, not yet.

Nathaniel’s mouth is hot and his eyes are closed and he’s drinking in Jean as if he’s been lost in the desert for years. Maybe he has been. Nathaniel and Jean are intimately familiar with denial. Food, sleep, autonomy. None of these things are in their control. Their lips? Their hands? Their grinding, searching hips? Riko cannot touch those, not here.

Jean feels the gaze before he opens his own eyes to see it. Nathaniel is blue blue blue. The ocean he crossed at fourteen, the ever present bruises on his skin, the sky he so rarely gets to see. Every color that isn’t red or black feels like a divine gift.

There is something wet on his cheek.

“Did…did you just lick me?” Jean is flabbergasted. Gobsmacked. At war with the hardness in his pants and the Cheshire grin on his friend. “Disgusting. You are absolutely filthy.”

The Ultimate Despair of those 2 (3) December weeks at Evermore, in just 2 hours of songs, (brought to you by not me),