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Gale/Randy RPS: Original Sin -*- I wanted his lips to taste of absolution, as if everything could be found in that brief, chaste kiss. It could never last long enough, but at the same time pressed on for so much longer than was good for either of us. I found nothing apart from Gale: the familiar, slightly rough skin, the hot breath as it puffed into my mouth, the traces of beer and cigarette smoke on the tip of his tongue as it carefully tripped against mine, like a dare. I’d kissed him many times over the years, for the show, felt the smooth hard lines of the muscles in his shoulders and back underneath my palms, but somehow, despite it being the same body, the same mouth, it was an entirely different experience. Even his scent had changed. I thought once that his lack of care over his appearance, the spikes of hair protruding from his chin, the scruffy layers of clothes that couldn’t quite bring themselves to match, was Gale’s way of shaking off the forceful personality of one Brian Kinney. But now, I think that perhaps it’s more accurate to say Brian had always had to shake Gale off instead. The pressure of his hand against the small of my back, his hair that tickled my forehead as he pressed closer, for that heartbeat second, made me wish, not for the first time, that we were Brian and Justin, not ourselves. "Randy." He uttered that single word, like an isolated syllable of a mantra that would keep resonating in his head, vocal chords be damned. Yes, it would be a lot easier if we were Brian and Justin. For them, there was an easy rhythm, a matching of innocent young twink with his fate, his destiny: a tabula rasa waiting to be painted upon by the will of Brian Kinney’s explicit, searing tongue. For us, there was only the middle ground - neither of us fresh faced and naïve to this game of sexual innuendo, of stolen touches in places too intimate to be deemed accidental. Yet neither of us contained the woven complexity of Brian either. His history lay like layers of hard skin, his heart a knitted blanket with too many dropped stitches that needed to be gone back over and picked up again. We were just there, neither lacking for, nor in control of, our seemingly innocent attraction, quite possibly made up of the deadliest poison we could have hoped to happen upon. And now it was over. His lips pulled back from mine, and I felt his fingers trace over the lines of my palm before he took my hand. My eyes flickered open, the breath catching in my throat as I looked up at him and caught the residual traces of a knowing, quiet smile. Tell me, I wanted to say to him, pummeling my fists against his beautiful chest. Let me in on this, god damn it! Tell me your secret and help me to stop being so confused. He smiled again, as if he could read my mind, his hand tightening around my wrist as his fingers pressed against my pulse point, the beat mirrored in his fingertips. He knew, alright, as if he had been parry to the secrets my head held, knowing what I wanted, knowing me, all along, even when I didn’t. "Randy," he muttered again, and it was an almost-chuckle. I narrowed my eyes, basking in the anger that began to settle in my stomach, like a lump of hard bread, soaking up all other emotions around it until none were left. I hated him in that moment, like I had at no other time - a pure, undiluted rage that how dare he take my heart without my consent, and hold it like a wounded bird, as if he could nurse it until it could heal, before setting it free to fly away. He blinked, sensing the shift in my mood, and tugged on my wrist a little, as if he was telling me to get a move on. I wondered, briefly, if his gesture was supposed to instruct me to get over him, to move the hell on. The very nature of crushes like this are meant to be a secret: an illicit, dirty little pleasure one kept under their pillow, locked away to take out and indulge in on a rainy day. The object of your affection is not supposed to know; but he did. I stared at him intently, trying to see inside that thick skull of his, longing to search through five long years of stored memories, trying to find if there was anything, something, in there that gave any indication that what I felt for him - this hopeless, bleak, crushing, wonderful love, could somehow be returned. Maybe then it could be enough to sate me through the long, cold months until I saw him again. He cocked his head to one side, as if he was listening to something spoken in a pitch beyond my range, and looked back at me, giving a tiny nod. I quirked an eyebrow in question: I can’t read minds like you can, Gale, and he sighed. "Come back with me," he said, uttering more words in that single request than he had to me the entire evening. "To my apartment." The sentence was complete, but yet his demand was left hanging in the air, as if part of his need, part of the question he was asking me, had been lopped off somewhere along the journey from his mind to his mouth. "I don’t think that’s a good idea." I tried to pull my arm back from his tight grasp; my eyes darting around the thinning-out bar of our final cast party, looking for an exit, a reason, anything to give me a chance to escape. "Please." My eyes shot back to his face, widening at the tone of his voice - quiet, with a light dusting of desperation, and his slightly confused expression, as if he wasn’t quite sure why he was asking in the first place. There was something there, something he thought he needed from me, and I paused in spite of myself, deliberating whether to follow him into something I could never find my way back out of, or to turn away, and walk quickly towards the exit, without a backward glance. I gazed into his eyes, hypnotized by a tiny flicker of uncertainty there. I struggled to keep my lips to myself. "Okay." He licked his lips, his eyes darting down to mine, where I mirrored the gesture, and he nodded, reassuring himself. "Okay," he parroted, and we walked to the exit in synch, slipping outside onto the cold, deserted Toronto street. And so it began. -*- Gale’s apartment looked like his personality felt: an odd mismatch of colors and textures that seemed to come together without rhyme or reason, yet at the same time somehow made beautiful, crazy sense. I sat down on his battered leather sofa, curling my legs underneath myself, and watched as he prowled across the room like an exotic, dangerous, jungle cat contained in a cage. I forced myself to wait for him to speak first. "Randy." He said my name again, in a half-whisper, as if he was trying to convince himself that this was real, that this was about me. About us. "You like me," he said next - a statement rather than a question, and I scoffed, opening my mouth to speak. He held up one of his long fingers, prompting me to close my jaw again, and he continued his pacing, his hand smoothing over the rough hairs on his chin, as if somehow the answer could be found there. I wondered why now, why here, amidst the clutter of our lives, the show coming to an end, plans being made to begin other, perhaps more suitable projects, he had decided to do this. For me, any idea of Gale, of an us, had long since passed, the foundation I thought we had built turning to rubble as the years passed, and we had continued on in our sweaty haze of mutual adoration, the words burning our tongues and remaining unspoken. I had, eventually, given up. I found refuge in the calm, steady arms of someone else - someone who, despite not being able to heat me up and cool me down through just a touch, a glance in the corridor between makeup and costume, who couldn’t make my stomach plunge ten stories in a split second, into the basement of my feet - someone who, despite all of that, made me feel safe. Made the world stop spinning long enough for me to stand upright. And he never once thought to hide behind a worn cloak of a façade that it was, that we were, only acting. I looked back up and met Gale’s eyes, twitching slightly when I realized he had stopped his incessant wearing out of the already thread-bare carpet, and was standing there, his eyes drilling holes into my face, waiting for me to speak. "What?" I asked, as if this was all his fault, thinking that in a way it was. He had to go and be that fucking beautiful, infuriating, wonderful man he was; that man who rarely made any sense once he had taken fancy to a particular subject for long enough for his brain to work its magic upon, but nonetheless always managed to give off an air of intellectual superiority. I didn’t ask to fall in love with him. "You like me," he said again, his voice quieter this time, and I looked away from his penetrative gaze, hating that I couldn’t find anything other than a morbid curiosity in those blinding eyes of his. "Gale, why are you saying this now?" I asked, with a sigh, defeat clear in my voice. I leant my head back against the shoulder of his couch, trying to will the beginnings of a headache away. I felt him shrug from across the room, and hated that I automatically began to examine how I knew what he was doing even with my eyes shut. "Closure, perhaps," he replied, and I forced myself not to roll my eyes. "Closure for whom?" I asked him. "It doesn’t feel like closure to me." He was silent, and I opened one eye to peek, watching the lines furrow in his forehead as he thought over my question, examining it from every-which-way before he spoke. "I needed to know," he said, picking his words carefully, as if he was walking across a field of land mines and may step on a live one at any moment. "Why?" I watched him steadily, having no intention of letting him off the hook so easily when he was the one who chose to open this infernal can of worms in the first place. "For your ego, Gale? For what?" "I’m not sure really." He licked his lips, the skin there dry; his eyes flickering back to meet mine. He calmly walked over to join me on the couch, his toes nudging my thigh as he tried to fold his long legs into the space I had left him, which wasn’t much. I didn’t feel inclined to leave him room to manoeuvere. "I didn’t want to leave with unfinished business between us." I closed my eyes again, listening to the thrum of my heart. Because really, how could I answer something like that? With Gale, I felt there was always unfinished business of one kind or another - always something left unsaid, a million words floating between us that I longed to pluck out of the air like brightly colored balloons and burst each one systematically in his face. I suspected then, in that moment, that no matter what he gave me, it would never be quite enough. "Life is complicated," he said, in his quiet timbre, as if he was musing on a great philosophical puzzle he had no intention of letting me in on. I didn’t know whether to feel humbled, or enraged that my feelings had been brought down to this. I waited for him to elaborate, but no other words came. It seemed fitting, I suppose, for him to drop a comment like that without offering up any sort of solution, or further opinion on his part. I think maybe it would have been easier if he had told me to get lost. I bit down on my bottom lip, as I was inclined to do when I couldn’t work myself out of whatever mess I had managed to get myself into, my eyes snapping open when he placed a thumb against my mouth, halting the progress of my teeth as they tried to chew through my flesh. "Don’t," he whispered. "You’ll ruin them." That’s when he leaned forward and kissed me again, his chapped lips moving against mine. Not because there were answers to be found there, or even that he was searching, but simply because there was nothing else left to do. As I began to kiss him back I thought that perhaps no such word as closure existed in my dictionary; there only existed variants of want. -*- His kisses were heated in ways that Brian’s, that Simon’s, had never been, his tongue pushing past the gate of my lips to explore and probe my mouth. There was a sense of quiet, factual investigation in his kiss, the way in which he routinely moved his tongue over my teeth and along the line of my gums; he was almost textbook perfect. His body hovered in the air before he lowered himself, covering me completely like a blanket I had held onto for many years, but after just one wash, felt new all over again. His uneven beard grazed my cheeks, and I wondered idly, my fingers finding the hairs against the back of his neck, what his face would feel like pressed between my thighs. There was a moan, and I couldn’t distinguish whether it was mine or his, the sound caught between us in the combined air of our mouths before our lips crashed and our teeth clashed once more, trapping it inside. One of his hands dipped under the hem of my shirt, and I struggled against his mouth, breaking free of my captor to pull my shirt off over my head and toss it with abandon over the side of his couch. I’d forgotten that Simon had given it to me last Christmas, and even if I had remembered, at that point, I couldn’t care less. Gale’s fingers were warm on my skin, their itinerary precise as they skipped over my ribs, almost as if I was a piano and he was practicing his scales. My breath hitched in my throat as he nipped at my neck, his eyelashes fluttering over the underside of my jaw, the feeling intensifying as I closed my eyes and basked in my living, breathing daydream. He made light work of the fastenings on my pants, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether his one-handed removal of them was a skill he had learned during his stint playing Brian, or one he had been practicing long before. His head dipped down, his shaggy, rough hair grazing the soft skin of my belly as he brushed his mouth over the head of my cock, his lips sliding down in an even, flawless movement. Too flawless. "Gale…" My voice sounded strange to my ears, underneath the rushing of my blood, and perhaps it was that tone that made him look up, his eyebrow quirking in question, his lips shiny-sweet around my now half-flaccid cock. I looked down at him, meeting his eyes, studying the simple questioning look in them: why’d you make me stop? In movies, memories are played back in reverse, rewinding through the past, right back to the start, but real life never works that way. The mind is a funny thing, I have discovered, and it latches onto non-linear moments, splicing and cutting in its own editorial suite until the perfect sequence for any given occasion is complete. I thought back, over all of the times I had known him, over all of the heart-stopping, stomach-clenching, toe-curling, blinding moments, when I just stopped whatever I was doing to watch him, the same thought on a loop in my head: God, how I love him. My thoughts were disturbed by his tongue on my cock again, and I looked down to find his gaze still fixed on my face, the hints of green drowning the hazel as he played me out like a violin, begging me to allow him to continue. Instinctively I pulled backwards, almost throwing myself over the arm of the couch to get away from him (or perhaps myself). I clutched my pants, trying to keep them up my thighs to protect my sudden modesty, as I righted myself, and finally managed to pull them back up, buttoning them with less finesse than he had used to undo them in the first place. "Randy?" His voice was a question mark, and I looked up at him, watching as he unfurled from his hunched position on the couch, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, its home of stasis and hibernation, and I fixed my gaze upon his slightly swollen lips. "I thought you wanted this?" he asked, sounding a little aggravated now he had time to digest the slight. I do Gale, I thought, from my dazed position on the floor, my fingers pressing into the pile of his carpet as I waited for the world to stop spinning on its axis and right me again. But… "You don’t." -*- "I don’t?" He sounded less unsure than I thought he would, considering my statement; it was almost as if he had known all along, and had been waiting for me to catch up. "No." I shook my head, my eyes on him as he brushed one of his thumbs over his lips, still wet from his saliva. > "Why would I be here if I didn’t?" he asked, and I wondered if somehow I could smash his head against the wall and plead self defense. "I don’t know." I pulled myself up from the floor, trying hard not to look like a hurricane (a god damn Gale) had just blown through my brain, and sat myself back on the couch, as far away from him as possible. "Why don’t you tell me?" "Nothing to tell." He shrugged and gave me a sideways glance, before diverting his gaze to his lap where the little tattooed six letter word sat on his finger. Resist. In all the time I had known him, I had yet to draw the symbolism out of him. "Resist what?" I asked, and cocked my head towards it. "Huh?" Gale blinked and followed my gaze to his finger. "Oh…" He shrugged and lifted the hand, running it through his hair. "It means resist temptation. It’s supposed to be an ironic sort of ‘fuck you’ to my upbringing, but…" "But?" I was curious now; it was almost as if I needed to know this. "It kept me out of trouble more than once." I nodded, trying to understand, and was left with the feeling I was barely scratching the surface of the annoying, crazy man in front of me. "You weren’t resisting me," I muttered, and his head shot up, his eyes boring into mine for a moment, before he lowered his head again, fidgeting. I furrowed my brow, wondering on his reaction. Sure, he had resisted me, for five fucking years, but surely if that was what he was thinking about he would have maybe laughed or shrugged, rather than… Unless… "I’m not a temptation for you, am I?" I asked, so sure I had arrived at the heart of all of this. He sighed and shook his head. "Yes, and no." My eyes narrowing, I glared at him, wondering if it was possible for him to get any more infuriating. I somehow doubted it. "Gale, what the fuck does that mean?" I asked, trying to sound calm and patient, when I was anything but. "Nothing." He turned to face me again. "Nothing. Can we stop talking and carry on now?" I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or cry. Somehow, with that seemingly innocent question, he managed to both melt my heart and harden my cock, in equal, inexplicable measures. "Not until you explain yourself." I folded my arms across my chest, telling him that I meant business, and he pursed his lips. "I do want to," he said suddenly, his eyes latching onto mine. "I want to do this for you. For me, so we can move on." I blinked, opening my mouth to speak, and then shut it again, immediately letting out a noisy breath through my nose. "You’re mad; I knew you would be mad." Gale scratched his whiskers and I fought the urge to kiss him until my face was raw from the friction. "I’m not mad. I just….how can you want someone but yet want to move on?" He furrowed his brow again, as if he had been thinking on this for a long time, but needed more time still. "I want to want you," he finally said, after the silence had stretched on for minutes, caressing the tension between us and wrapping it up in a false sense of security. I swallowed hard. "But you don’t…" "No, I do! But…" he looked at me then, not in confusion, or anger, or lust, just straightforward (if there could be such a thing) Gale: the man I knew, the man I loved. "But…?" I prompted, needing to hear what he had to say, even if it hurt. "Not in the way you deserve." It didn’t just hurt, it burned. "And what the fuck do I deserve?" I shot back, letting the first sparks of anger ignite and consume the pain underneath. "What the fuck do you know about what I deserve?" Gale sighed and looked away, as if he knew this would happen, as if all along, from the first day we met, he knew that at some point in the future we would be sitting down having the conversation about the ‘us that never was.’ "I just know I can’t be what you want me to be, however much I wish I could be," he said, wringing those large hands that I had dreamt of moving down my stomach towards my cock, so many times before. I stood up, pacing for a few moments, before I fished behind the couch and found my shirt. I slipped it on over my shoulders, distracting myself with the routine comfort of dressing, and shot him a glance. "Why am I not surprised? You string me along, acting like we have something, that we are something…and then when it comes to it, you just can’t bring yourself to do it." "It’s not like that, Randy…" His head was bowed low now, like he was carrying a huge weight, and I felt the urge to add to it. "No? What is it like then Gale? From where I’m standing, and believe me, I’m not the only one who thinks this, we have something. I can’t define it, although god knows I have tried, but it’s still there. You act like you’re my boyfriend, playing the protective act, getting worried or annoyed when I’m not around, spending all your free time with me, when god knows, there are enough other people out there you could be with. What the fuck would you call it?" "I don’t know," he replied, his head lifting to look at me, the confusion clear in his eyes. I almost felt like relenting, but this had gone on long enough, far enough. It was either make or break, and if the tiny sharp shards stuck in my chest were anything to go by, it certainly wasn’t the former. "You don’t know." I parroted back at him, running a hand through my hair. "You don’t, do you? You can’t explain what this is, but you know it’s something. You just can’t reconcile what you feel with what you think." "Randy…" I stopped my tirade, letting out a long breath, my chest rising and falling as I stood in the silence of his apartment. According to what I felt was right, I should be in his bed by now. "What?" I looked at him, my anger disappearing as quickly as it had arrived, and took in the pained look on his face. "I’m an ass, what can I say?" He paused, trying to work out how he could say what he had to, and make me understand. "There is something, you’re right. This connection. Mental, emotional, physical. I’m not going to deny that I have feelings for you. A stupid, stupid crush." I blinked, raising an eyebrow, waiting. "I admire you," he continued. "The way you can act so easily, like it isn’t any effort. The way you hate the media machine, your celebrity status. It’s like…I want to be you when I grow up." "Gale," I scoffed. "You’re older than me." He waved one hand. "Not where it counts." He paused again, meeting my eyes. "How can I explain to someone that I love them, but there’s something…be it my fear, my personality, who knows what…that’s telling me I can’t be this for you? It’s just too much pressure." "What pressure?" I was confused more than anything, wandering around the maze of his words, looking for the way out, or preferably, the prize in the middle. "I don’t put any pressure on you." "No," Gale replied, smiling wryly, as if his lips were trying to wring out a distasteful emotion. "I put it on myself, because I watch you, listen to you talking about what you want and need and wish for. I can’t be that. I can’t rely on myself to be anything other than a part time, irregular fuck. And probably a bad one at that." "But.." I licked my lips, trying to get my head around the whole sorry mess. "That works for me. We can do that." "No, we can’t. Didn’t you learn anything from Brian and Justin?" "Not as much as they could have learned from us," I said, laughing, and drew him into giving me a tiny smile. "I’m being serious, Randy. If nothing else, they showed me that you have to be true to yourself before you can be true to another. And I’m just…you’re not…we’re not…" I shut him up with a kiss then. How else could I react to those words, those heartbreaking, honest words, stripped bare from his usual sugar-coating of complacency, of clinical philosophy? His lips parted under mine without hesitation, and I wondered how something that felt this good could possibly be doomed to failure. I pulled away after a few moments, watching the changing colours in his eyes as he looked back at me, silently begging me to make this right, because he just didn’t know how to anymore. I swallowed hard and reached up, running my thumb along the bones of his cheek before pressing my forehead against his. "You’re going to make someone very happy one day," I told him, not trusting my voice to rise above a whisper. He nodded, his eyes locked on mine, and when I met them he smiled. "You already do." I wrinkled my nose, then let out a breath against his lips. He was right. As usual. "Simon." "And me." I smiled then, brighter than I could remember it being for a long while, and pecked his lips again, before standing up. I moved towards the door and opened it, giving him a tiny wave before I slipped out. Sometimes the only language that made sense to love, was leaving. |