#spreadsheet fill

Okay so like, it's not Shayne's fault when shit gets weird. Damien knows that he's the one who is getting caught up in the details, as per usual, and Shayne is just rolling with the punches because he's fucking incredible, the best friend that Damien has ever had. Which is part of why he's so fucking terrified of whatever the fuck they have going on right now. Because he has no idea what the fuck they have going on right now, to be honest.

"Hey Dames," Shayne says, dropping a kiss on Damien's shoulder gently as he walks past him. Okay, maybe it is Shayne's fault. Run it back.

There's no fucking telling when something changed between the two of them. They didn't have a conversation about it, there was no inciting incident of note, they hadn't even done anything particularly bonding in the last year besides just hanging out. And Damien doesn't want to diminish the divine power of hanging out with your best friend, but come on. He's not being weird about this, right? It's weird. They should have at least talked about it before they started going whole hog on the affection thing, right? They haven't kissed on the mouth, and they only sleep in the same bed like once or twice a week, so it's probably nothing. Right? They haven't even had to explain anything to anyone at work, even though they're just as weirdly affectionate on the clock as they are off of it. And Damien has no idea why. Like, he likes it. Of course he likes it. But what in God's green earth is going on right now? Because he sure as fuck does not know.

He ends up following Shayne to his desk; he's not doing much right now, waiting for one shoot's set up to come down so that the next shoot he's involved in can begin. Might as well engage in the best part of working at the same company as your best friend: bothering your best friend. Not that Shayne ever makes him feel like he's actually bothering him. Does he need his meds adjusted? He braces on the clear half of Shayne's desk, not quite sitting on it but not quite not either. Shayne, seated, looks up at him as if he was expected, a fond smile gracing his face. Sometimes he feels as if he and Shayne are magnetized to one another, unable to be in the same space without reaching for one another.

"Come over later?" he asks, not really thinking about it at all beforehand, the question just slipping out. Shayne shrugs his shoulders loosely, relaxed and languid.

"What's in it for me?" Shayne asks in return, head tilted up and just the barest edge of something that could be called flirtation behind the shine of his smile. Damien rolls his eyes and reaches for one of Shayne's hands, the other meeting him in the middle and tangling their fingers. He holds Shayne's hand in both of his and makes a contemplative noise. He always wants Shayne around. He doesn't always know what he wants the reason for Shayne being around to be, but... they've been best friends over ten years. Does there have to be a reason? He kisses the back of Shayne's hand anyway, looking at Shayne through his lashes.

"I could make it worth your while," he says lowly, his voice rumbling deep in his chest. Shayne makes a show of looking him up and down, checking him out in the most overt way possible. Heat moves through Damien's chest. What the fuck are they doing? The weight of those eyes makes him feel grounded, like as long as Shayne is looking at him, everything's good. This is not how someone feels about their best friend. Anyway.

"Don't write any checks you can't cash," Shayne cautions, eyebrow raised. Damien kisses the back of his hand again, smile stretching across his face.

"What if I'm not?" he asks, humor dropping from his voice as he regards Shayne with more gravity than the situation should call for. Shayne looks him up and down again, slower and lingering on their hands, before he pulls one of Damien's hands to his mouth, kissing the back of it in return.

"Then expect to see me at 6:30. I have a few things to handle after work, but we could do dinner?" he proposes, and they both know what will happen if they have dinner together tonight. They'll end up talking, and the conversation will go a little too long, and Shayne will end up bullying him into letting him do dishes, and then they'll remember something they wanted to watch together, and then Shayne will be there til 10:30 and it's already kinda late, what if he just spent the night? It's happened once or twice a week for the past several months. Sometimes more than twice a week. That is neither here nor there.

"Dinner sounds good. You got any cravings?" Damien inquires, raising an eyebrow. Shayne hums.

"You remember the rice we got from that one place that you tried to do but accidentally made it better? Can we do that?" he counters, looking up at Damien innocently like he's not openly making fun of him. Damien rolls his eyes.

"Phrasing it like that is so totally not necessary," he says exasperatedly. He still doesn't take his hand from Shayne's. He still doesn't want to; Shayne is leaning his face onto their hands absently, the knuckles of Damien's hand still laying against his lips. It is... incredibly distracting.

"Stop failing up and I'll stop phrasing things like you're failing up," Shayne replies, the hum of his voice and the slant of his smile so, so nice beneath Damien's hand.

"You're a menace, Shayne Topp," he says fondly, knowing damn well he's not keeping how much he just fucking loves Shayne off his face. Best friend he's ever had. Most important person in his life. Menace to society.

"I learned it from watching you."

"Fuck off, get back to work," Damien says, pressing a kiss to the top of Shayne's head and extracting his hand from Shayne's, vacating the surrounding area immediately before Shayne can pull him back in. Either verbally or physically, seeing as both are definitely options. What the fuck did he just agree to? He's gets out of here at 4:30 today, and that's only two hours to emotionally prepare himself for whatever the fuck is going on. He starts mentally putting together a list for a quick grocery run he has to do before he can make the rice Shayne is asking for; he does, in fact, know exactly what Shayne is talking about, but only because that's always how Shayne refers to this particular dish. Damien doesn't even cook that much. Still, being with Shayne makes him want to reach for things he would otherwise leave alone. It's very troublesome to be the nervous best friend of a man who makes everyone around him want to do better, be better.

It's a good thing he already knows he has the apartment to himself tonight; his roommate is visiting his parents, won't be back for another week. Not that he and Shayne are going to do anything they need full free roam of the apartment for. They're two friends having dinner. Two or three things added to his cart during his quick grocery run definitely make the clerk attending the self check-out at the grocery store think it's something more than it is, eyebrows raised and smirking as they made small talk with him about a big night and third dates.  He's been on more dates with Shayne with probably any romantic partner he's ever had, maybe even all of them combined. He and Shayne are just friends. There's never been anything just about the relationship he has with Shayne.

When he gets home, he just lays face down in his bed for a few minutes with his nose pressed into Zelda's fur. Freyja curls up on the small of his back when he doesn't move for a few minutes, apparently deciding he'll make a safe seat after so long stationary. The cats communicate back and forth for a moment, steady mrrp sounds vibrating the belly fur beneath him. God, he loves them. They're such good little creatures. He lets himself have this for maybe half an hour, closing his eyes and desensitizing from the typical, every day kind of overstimulation, his phone plugged in and playing music from his bedside table. 

He gets up carefully to shower, dumping Freyja onto the comforter gently. She mrrps at him and rubs against his hand when he reaches down to pet her. He puts off showering for a few minutes just to pet and hold her, Zelda watching from the head of the bed looking very much like she's already had enough of Damien. He still scritches the top of her head before heading to shower. She's just a little creature.

Showering is quick and somewhat mechanical; he has a contentious relationship with experiencing water on his skin, but it's not as bad as it could be today. That's not to say that he's having a great time, because that is not the truth either. Whatever, doesn't matter. He's been learning to be more careful with his hair since he bleached it again, drying it gently, just enough so that it's not dripping anymore. Air drying is apparently more healthy than what he was doing before. He had a very long and informative talk with a group of cosmetologists while going through the silver dye process. They had taught him a lot about an industry he had only ever known minimal information about, so it was interesting to get their perspectives.

Knowing that he's autistic has made it so much fucking easier to interact with people he doesn't know well. At least now he knows why he doesn't get some stuff socially, and he can figure out how to navigate the discussion without stepping too heavily on anyone's toes. He dresses in comfortable clothing, throwing on a hoodie that possibly might have been Shayne's once and contemplating not putting pants on with it. He can go grab pants when Shayne texts that he's on his way. He leaves his room just in his boxer briefs. And the hoodie. And it's not like he's putting together some fanfiction-esque situation in his head, some sexed up nightmare version of them fucking on his kitchen table just because Damien didn't feel like putting on pants. The thought does make him laugh though, which is to say that it does occur to him.

He had left the majority of the groceries on the counter during his sabbatical from behaving like a normal human person, being as they're all produce and dry ingredients and why bother putting them in the crisper and cabinet if he was just going to get them back out? He puts on a Youtube video to make noise in the background, not too picky about his selection given that he's not going to be paying much if any attention to it. Some video essay or another. Corporate greed and the destruction and decay of the trust of the American people, et cetera, et cetera. Possibly something about some cartoon animal or another. He's measuring beans from a can before deciding that the whole can is fine, actually, so it's not like he knows what's going on. It's just weird to be alone with his thoughts. Not that he, like, avoids that. He just also doesn't typically seek it out.

Cooking is formulaic to the point of being soothing, step after step of a routine that's already set out in his head, no real decisions to be made. He listens to the droning tone of some Youtuber that he's sure he's seen before, but he doesn't know if it's in a met them at Vidcon way or more of a saw them on Tiktok situation. Drone, in this case, is not a particularly negative descriptor for the voice; their cadence is constant and their tone is just animated enough to not have the flatness of an underpaid college professor. A noise startles him out of his reverie and he pauses the video somewhat automatically, overly cautious when alone in an apartment in Los Angeles. Actually, he thinks that's pretty normal. People in LA are fucking weird.

Shayne hadn't texted him, and yet Damien hears a key in the lock, and really, Shayne is one of the only people in the state that have a key. It hadn't been two hours since his roommate responded to his how's home? check in text with an exaltation of spending time with the children in the family, so it's not him. The only person Damien has ever given a key to besides Shayne is his mom, and that's not terribly likely. His parents still have a house phone, and he called her this morning before work to ask her about something he could swear had been real, but did she remember it or was it maybe a dream?

It had been a dream. Apparently a recurring one he's had since he was a little thing. Love to hear it.

More to the point, Damien is standing in the kitchen of his own apartment pantsless with a considerably large knife in his hand when his best friend walks in the door. Reaching to pull his key out of the lock, Shayne looks up to see him and immediately bursts into laughter. He struggles to get the key out of the lock and closes it behind him once he does, sliding down it with the weight of his laughter. Damien huffs out a laugh of his own and puts his knife down on the cutting board. He starts heading to his bedroom, wanting to at least make this less awkward for Shayne if possible. It's a weird position to be in, right? Showing up at your best friend's place and he knew you were coming over and he still doesn't have pants on when you arrive, that's gotta be an odd one. Shayne puts up a finger, still laughing but apparently having a point to make before Damien can make his exit. Damien pauses with a put upon sigh. Making a big show of collecting himself, Shayne picks himself up off the floor and gives Damien one of those big, stupid smiles, and he makes it hard to be annoyed or embarrassed, even when Damien should be.

"This is so not what I expected to see when I opened the door," Shayne says helplessly, still breathless with laughter. He's looking at Damien with those stupid, sparkling eyes, and grinning with that stupid, pretty mouth and Damien knows he's bright red, but still, all he feels is fondness. Safety.

"Yeah, yeah, if you had texted me like I thought you were going to, this never would have happened," he says, huffing another laugh out through his nose. He feels dumb, he feels shy, he feels flustered. It's certainly not a collection of feelings that a person has about a man who is simply one's best friend. They should talk about this. Grown ups talk about things, right? They're in their thirties. They should be talking about things. But even if they do, that should maybe happen when he has pants on. Damien moves toward his bedroom again but Shayne once again holds up his hand, staying him.

"Hey man, it's your place, you're obviously comfortable. I don't mind if you don't," he says, one eyebrow raised and shrugging a shoulder. Damien blinks, considering it for a moment. In the end, he shrugs back and returns to the cutting board, dicing an onion in preparation. He always gets all of his ingredients together before he starts cooking, even if it would ostensibly make more sense to do some of the knife work while other things are getting their start on the heat. He's boiling water! That's the best he can do without his anxiety running riot. Focusing on other things while things are actively cooking freaks him out. Shayne walks into the kitchen and hops onto one of the counters Damien isn't using, immediately starting in on a story of something that happened at work when Damien was otherwise occupied, then about a video game he had discussed with Spencer, then about getting Tommy to break in a new TNTL. He likes the way Shayne also wants to tell him everything he doesn't experience without him, like things aren't written in stone until both of them know what happened to the other.

Like they're a team. It's pretty fucking cool.

He tells Shayne about his day too, cooking the two of them dinner in a yellow-lit kitchen in Shayne's hoodie and his underwear, casual as anything. In a time before Shayne, he never really let his friends get too close. It hadn't really been negotiable with Shayne, but Damien found himself not wanting to negotiate change anyway. Spending time with Shayne is so fucking easy, whether they're talking or gaming or sitting in silence and scrolling their phones in the same space, it's easier just for having Shayne around. If he were a cheetah, Shayne would be the dog they pair with cheetahs to alleviate their anxiety. He says as much to Shayne, who barks a laugh.

"Happy to help?" he says, looking over at Damien like he's said something absolutely insane, tinged with affection and disbelief. Damien grins at him, open and wild, before refocusing on the task at hand. He always cooks the vegetables almost all the way before he stirs in the rice; that had been one of the problems he had wanted to fix while making it the first time. The restaurant they ate at hadn't sauteed the vegetables first, so they were still crunchy and the rice texture with the fresh vegetables was fucking awful, so when he recreated it, that was the one thing he made different on purpose. And you know, he was mostly cooking for himself back then, but cooking for Shayne and cooking for himself, they're practically the same thing in his head.

The conversation moves on and they bicker about video games for a bit, moving from topic to topic with the grace of two people who have spent far too much time together and don't plan to stop any time soon. When Damien makes a joke that inspires a particular exasperation in his best friend, Shayne does that thing where his mustache puffs out, sending Damien into hysterics. 

The fondness that stupid fucking mustache inspires in him would be embarrassing if it were for anyone else. He's used to feeling this way about Shayne- so fond he's fit to burst. That's his best friend. It's nice to see Shayne playing around with his appearance, finding stuff that makes him smile, figuring out who he wants to be and how now that they're in their thirties. He likes watching Shayne grow, in a way. Sometimes, he wishes that he and Shayne had known one another as children, wants to know what it would have been like to play on the playground with him, to pass him notes in class, just have him there. If he's thinking about who he was before he met Shayne though, he's sometimes glad they didn't meet that young. Kids totally shouldn't be blamed for the decisions they make when they're eleven years old. However, this is him, and oh my fucking god.

Making dinner doesn't take long in the grand scheme of things, and certainly not long in the scheme of how much time he and Shayne can waste just bantering back and forth. It's even worse at home than it is at work. He knows that he and Shayne can get a bit... distractable when they're allowed to be in proximity of one another in what is supposed to be an at least semiprofessional setting. Has he made any conscious effort to change that about the two of them? Absolutely not. Being silly with Shayne is one of the best parts of his life, and if part of that is being silly in front of a camera and getting paid for it, he isn't hearing a downside.

"Watch something or eat at the table?" he asks once he's started serving up the food, pouring rice into a bowl that he thinks of as Shayne's bowl despite the fact that it's not something they've ever discussed. Shayne shrugs a shoulder and so they eat at the table, flitting through topics in the way only best friends really can and not lingering too much on any one thing. It feels like a date. It feels like every other time they've ever had dinner together in their lives. They're sitting on the same side of the table and way too in one another's space. Comfort diffuses through his chest with a warm honey thick sweetness, the air heavy with something more than tension; this apartment has never felt more like home than it does when Shayne is in it. By the time they finish eating, they're pressed against one another shoulder to thigh.

He lets Shayne pick out what they're watching after- there's no way that Damien is going to be able to focus on anything but Shayne right now, so he doesn't want to put on something he actually wants to watch. He says as much to Shayne (perhaps leaving out the cause of his short attention span), and there's nothing quite as good as making him laugh like that. Shayne lives up to this challenge by putting on a fucking documentary, shoving Damien down onto his own couch and all but climbing into his lap. He doesn't even pretend that they're going to sit somewhat separated from each other, instead leaning into Damien's chest and looking up at him with big blue eyes til Damien wraps his arm around him. He really does love this motherfucker so much. Shayne adjusts to be even closer to Damien's chest, turning a bit so that he can lace his fingers with Damien's. For love nor money, Damien would not be able to tell someone what this documentary is about.

With Shayne leaning against his chest and Shayne's fingers between his own and Shayne's other hand on his bare thigh and being able to feel when Shayne laughs at his own jokes while making fun of the creation of the documentary they're watching (because Shayne is fucking adorable and has opinions about how documentaries are shot), Damien feels brave. He presses a kiss to the top of Shayne's head before nudging him, gesturing for him to lean against the back of the couch instead. Shayne raises a curious eyebrow, somewhat disgruntled at being displaced.

"I'm in love with you. You're aware of this, yes?" Damien asks, blank and honest.  Shayne barks a laugh but presses his face into Damien's shoulder, so Damien is only a little worried, such is his nature. Shayne presses a kiss to his shoulder before lifting his head.

"I hate you so much," he says, voice dripping with fondness. When Damien snorts, he continues, "I'm in love with you too, asshole. You're ridiculous." His grin is so wide and so pretty and Damien is fucking in love with him, the bastard.

"I want to kiss you. That cool with you?" Damien asks, bringing his hand up to cup Shayne's jaw. Shayne nods, still grinning, and meets Damien halfway. Kissing Shayne is just as good as Damien always thought it would be, just as warm and just as perfect and just as unbelievable. There's other things he didn't think of when he imagined this before; he didn't anticipate the mustache, for example. There's just as much warmth and solidity to Shayne as there always has been, familiar and tantalizing, a foreign homecoming. The first kiss is long and languid, but Damien can't help but follow it with another, and another, and another, soft and worshipful little kisses he just can't help. Shayne gives him just as good as he gets, turning completely so he can sit with a knee on either side of Damien's hips, the firm pressure pushing Damien down into the couch weighted blanket comforting. His hands are cupping Damien's face now, thumbs sweeping broadly over Damien's cheekbones and jaw like he can't get a good enough map of Damien's face, navigating it purely by touch. 

His greedy hands rest on Shayne's waist, keeping him in place with the kind of desperation typically associated with starvation. He's hungry in his pursuit of Shayne if nothing else; he knows damn well that his fingertips are fit to leave bruises, but he can't force himself to care if Shayne doesn't, and Shayne most definitely does not. When Damien loosens his grip a little, Shayne drops a hand to press down on one of Damien's, encouraging to hold on just as hard and then harder than before, only coming back up when Damien squeezes him hard enough to make him squeak a little. Adorable. It's not a particularly sexual kind of possession in the rest of his hands, but the possession itself is undeniable. Shayne is Damien's person. He'll hold onto him with both hands til they're both long gone, dig bruises into his bones when the two of them are nothing but skeletons. 

I would rot with you is a terribly intimate and macabre sentiment to give another person, and yet Damien is sure that Shayne would know exactly what he meant. He always does. 

The press of their mouths grows lazy with time, too tired and too comfortable to dip into something more heated. Love lays heavy in Damien's chest, his heart straining from his chest if it means that love can be closer to its subject, its reason, its lord. Love is its own kind of religion, right? Affection meets its maker in the palms of Shayne Topp, two fingers hooked in the neck of Damien's hoodie now, the other hand flat on his chest. He wonders idly if Shayne can feel the heart that beats with him in mind, but perhaps Shayne could feel that anyway. He hopes Shayne could feel that anyway. Shayne presses kisses to his mouth that feel different than the last few, a needful kind of goodbye, and Damien isn't having any of that, even when Shayne pulls away. 

"I should probably head out," Shayne says with palpable reluctance, standing up with the cracks of a few joints. Damien stands up with him, unwilling to part with his touch.

"Come to bed with me," he whispers, his nose tucked down under Shayne's ear. Holding Shayne to his skin like this, sure, is enough to make him feel as if he's holding a flame, warm and comforting but so dangerous if you're not careful. Shayne is beneath his hands and still there's a yearning in his chest that tells him that Shayne could never be close enough. Shayne rubs his back with sure fingers, pulling him closer like that's possible without the two of them fusing into one being, and it's so reassuring, the idea that Shayne's feelings and his are in the same ballpark. They stand there for a moment just breathing the same air, feeling the heat of each other near, temptation palpable in the air.

"Dames," Shayne says, his voice ragged as he pulls Damien down to rest their foreheads together. Damien grins, dipping down to kiss him again, just a quick little thing. Shayne chases him when he breaks it, so he gives him another, another, another, just little flutters of affection.

"What's up, baby boy?" he asks, the rasp of his voice nearly unrecognizable as his own. Shayne scans his face, looking for an answer to a question Damien doesn't know. Shayne leans up to kiss him again, open mouthed but quick.

"You're making it really fucking hard to be a gentleman, dude," he says, another kiss on Damien's lips when the words are barely out of his mouth, impulsive. Damien's laughter breaks the kiss again, leaning into Shayne as he snickers.

"Nobody's asking you to be a gentleman, Shayne," he replies, suggestion heavy in his tone. Shayne leans back to look up at him, that studying look on his face again. He doesn't have any idea what to do under that scrutiny, doesn't even know where to start, but he would happily live under it for the rest of his life if it meant that Shayne was looking at him.

"I'm asking me to be a gentleman. I wanna treat you right, Dames. I don't want to rush anything with you," Shayne explains, looking down and away from Damien. A delicate feeling swoops in Damien's stomach, like butterflies, like doves, like hope is the thing with feathers. He cups Shayne's face in both hands, tilting his head up til he's looking at Damien again. The kiss that follows is soft, gentle. Careful. Slow. It's over a decade of friendship with still the romance taken slow, it's a very first date with the person who knows him very best. Shayne's hands are heavy on his forearms, holding him in place like Damien would ever want to be anywhere else. They exchange several more short kisses, trying halfheartedly to separate the entire time. It's not even heated or anything. It's just now that Damien knows he can do this, he doesn't know how he and Shayne are ever going to get anything done ever again, because this is- it's everything. It's Shayne under his hands, tongue in his mouth, overwhelming all of his senses.

Slow or not, he still doesn't want Shayne to go. He still doesn't want Shayne to leave his sight, really. Like everything will revert to normalcy if he takes any chances, like this is something too good to be true and too wanted to be believed. He pulls back from the kiss anyway. He doesn't want Shayne to do anything he doesn't want to do. He rests their foreheads together again, trying to get his breathing back into check.

"Is sleeping in the same bed antithetical of not rushing things?" he asks; the worst that can happen is that Shayne laughs a little, says yes, and goes home. The best? Shayne stays. If he didn't say it at all, Shayne would leave anyway. Shayne chuckles, but what follows is not confirmation.

"With you? No," Shayne says instead, pulling Damien in for another quick kiss. Damien's smile is a little too wide for kissing to be comfortable, but Shayne works around this by holding Damien's face in his hands, sprinkling kisses on his cheeks, his nose, his forehead, even his chin. Damien is abruptly hit with the reminder that he hasn't been wearing pants this entire evening. He giggles, pressing his face into Shayne's shoulder. Shayne makes a curious noise, pressing a kiss to the side of Damien's head.

"We finally had an adult conversation about our feelings and I'm not even fucking wearing pants," Damien says, laughs really, a snort or two in there because there's nothing dignified about this. Shayne joins him in laughter, hand on the back of Damien's head as he peppers kisses on Damien's face. Even more flustered now than before, Damien stays in place. He doesn't want this to end. He doesn't want to lose this extra thing with Shayne. He catches Shayne's mouth in a kiss, turning it into something slow and gentle. Shayne kisses him back but ultimately pulls away, sliding his hand from Damien's face to his collarbone to his shoulder and down to his hand. He lifts Damien's hand to his mouth, kissing the back of it.

"I love you," he says, like he knows doubt when it makes its way across Damien's face, and maybe that's because he does. Maybe Shayne knows every stupid thing about him and maybe Shayne is still standing in front of him, loving him, wanting him, keeping him. Maybe it's that Shayne is the best fucking friend he's ever had in his life, and here he is. 

"I love you," he whispers. Not too; he loves Shayne, not as a matter of reciprocation but as a matter of simple fact. He's loved Shayne so long it's a part of who he is. They built their whole worlds around one another. "Come to bed," he murmurs, his fingers fisted in the bottom of Shayne's shirt, pulling him closer to kiss him again, gentle and wanting. Shayne kisses him back with just as much delicacy, a transferal of warmth and feeling. He pecks Damien on the mouth when he pulls back, flashing him a lazy grin.