Andy unlocks the door just as Nicky fires up his laptop to check his email.
“Oh, thank fuck,” she says as soon as she sees him sitting on the couch. “Answer your fucking phone, jackass, I thought you drowned in the Mediterranean or something.”
“Why would I have?” Nicky asks absently. One hundred and seventy-seven unread emails. Not bad for a two week absence.
“Because you didn’t answer your phone and tell me you got back okay.” She straddles one of the dining room chairs. “I was worried.”
“Oh,” Nicky says. “Right. My phone died.” His phone had run out of battery in London and the charger had been at the bottom of his suitcase. It hadn’t seemed that important at the time. It’s charging in his bedroom right now, because if he keeps it in sight, Nicky will check it every two seconds for messages from Joe.
“Well, next time, don’t let it. How was Malta?”
Nicky thinks of sunset on the hotel balcony, Joe in nothing but Nicky’s shirt, eating grapes they had bought from a stand by the side of the road after hiking all day. He swallows. “It was good,” he says.
Andy rolls her eyes. “Come on, fess up. Do you have a paper in the works yet about some piece of iconography on one of their churches?”
Nicky blushes to the roots of his hair. “I didn’t go into a single church while I was there,” he admits.
Andy applauds.
“You told me to vacation,” Nicky says. “So I did. Don’t act so surprised. Would you like some tea?”
He’s stretching his legs a bit in the kitchen while the water boils when she appears in the doorway, clutching the marriage license he had stupidly left on the coffee table.
“Nicky,” she says, deathly quiet. “Nicky, what the fuck is this?”
“What does it look like?” He snipes back.
“It looks like you got married in Vegas,” she yells, brandishing the license.
He doesn’t respond. What is there to say?
“No,” she says, “no, this must be a joke. You wouldn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” He asks, almost insulted
“You’re practically celibate!” She yells, throwing her hands up in the air. “And you take about two years to order a sandwich for lunch, how would you end up married after two weeks?”
“I’m not celibate,” Nicky contests hotly; that is a phase of his life he has left very much behind him. “And maybe I just fell in love.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What?”
“No one falls in love in two weeks.”
“You can’t know that,” Nicky argues, thinking of how poorly they left it in the subway.
“I know you, Nicky,” Andy says, and she’s not wrong. She’s seen Nicky through the hardest parts of his life, through bad breakups and his Ph.D. defense, through all of it.
Nicky turns around to look at her. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he admits.
“What do you even know about this guy?” Andy asks, squinting at the license. “Yusuf Al-Kaysani. If that’s even his real name.”
“He’s an artist,” Nicky says. “He’s thirty-three. He’s…” He swallows the end of the sentence. He can’t say, he’s kind, his eyes are lovely, he makes me come harder than anyone I’ve ever been with, he makes me feel like I might have done something right.
Andy stares at him, aghast. “That’s it? Where was he born? What are his parent’s names? Do you have his social security number?”
“I wanted to marry the man, not commit credit card fraud,” Nicky snaps back.
“Oh my god,” Andy moans, “that must be what he’s after.”
“I don’t have anything worth stealing!” Nicky points out.
“What about a greencard?” Andy demands. “Or health insurance?”
“I’m not even a citizen.”
“But you have great health insurance.”
Nicky sighs. “Andy, I refuse to listen to this. Joe is a wonderful man.”
Andy stalks out of his apartment not long after, having threatened to find him a divorce lawyer. Nicky drinks his tea alone, in silence. He’s caught between anger that Andy thinks him so weak and sheltered and “practically celibate” as to be duped, and doubt that maybe, just maybe, she could be right. What does he know of Joe? His last boyfriend, Nicky dated for four weeks before they even kissed.
He’s scrolling blindly through his unread emails – about a third seem to be one incredibly long email chain about whether or not it falls into Stephen Merrick’s job description to actually grade his students’ exams on time. Nicky deletes the thread with extreme prejudice. He hasn’t told Joe about Merrick, yet, or about Andy and Quynh, or about any number of people he sees every day of his working life.
What was he thinking?
The buzzer rings, drawing Nicky out of his misery.
He almost expects it to be Andy, back to apologize, or, more likely, to berate him some more.
He’s already drawing in breath to defend himself even though he’s not sure he actually should as he opens the door, only to find Joe standing there, leaning against the doorframe, dark circles under his eyes.
“Hi,” he says. “I know we said space, but I had to see you. I just – I can’t go back to my life the way it was, not after you. Or, I could, but I don’t want to. I want – I am so excited to have a life with you, Nicky, and I want it to start now. I hope you think this is charming and not creepy.” The last he says sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.
Nicky drags him into the apartment by the lapels of the open flannel shirt he has on over a stupidly tight T-shirt.
“How do you do that,” he whispers against Joe’s lips. “How are you so brave, so honest.”
“Some would say stupid,” Joe points out between heated kisses.
“Charming,” Nicky says. “In case that wasn’t clear.” He dips his head to set his teeth at the sensitive edge of Joe’s neck and Joe throws his head back, gasping.
“I – ah! – I hoped,” Joe gets out.
“I keep getting scared of this, of what we did,” Nicky tells him between harsh bites at his skin, sliding his hands up under Nicky’s shirt. “And then I see your face and I fall in love all over again. How do you do that?”
Joe arches his whole body against Nicky, the sinuous movement of it more than enough to erase all of Nicky’s doubts. “It’s a gift,” Joe tells him.
Nicky makes a noise in the back of his throat he hasn’t heard from himself before. He lifts Joe up by the backs of his thighs, forcing Joe to wrap all his limbs around Nicky or lose his balance, and carries him to the bedroom.
“Okay,” Joe says when Nicky has deposited him on the bed, “okay, that was ridiculously hot.”
“Take off your clothes,” Nicky demands, pulling his own shirt over his head before helping Joe to squirm out of his jeans. He drags off his own pants and then straddles Joe’s hips. “You know I thought about joining the Church, once?” He tells Joe. Joe doesn’t know; Nicky hasn’t told him yet. That’s not the point. “I thought maybe if I devoted my life to God, if I didn’t let myself look too closely at what it was I really wanted, maybe it would go away.”
Joe is sprawled out on Nicky’s dark purple sheets, hands clenched tight on Nicky’s sheets. His eyes are wide and wanting, and Nicky’s lost in him.
“It would have been such a waste,” Nicky finishes. “If I had done that. If I had never had the chance to meet you.”
Joe surges up to kiss him again, thorough, harsh, fingers pulling at the hair at the nape of Nicky’s neck. God, the abs on this man, Nicky thinks hysterically.
“Every moment of my life has led me here, to you,” Joe tells him breathlessly. “Every second of it.”
Of course Joe would understand. Joe has understood him effortlessly since the moment they met, or at least, since a few moments after they met.
Nicky kisses him again, less roughly than before, trying to convey without words how much he loves this impossible man. “I want you inside me,” he mumbles against Joe’s lips.
“Are you—” Joe starts to ask, but Nicky’s nodding already.
“I – took a long shower, when I got home,” Nicky tells him. “I thought – well. I was going to call you if I didn’t hear from you. I hoped I would see you, and that we could–”
“You’re perfect,” Joe says. “So perfect for me.”
Nicky digs blindly for the lube, pressing it into Joe’s hands and tearing off his boxers. “Come on,” he hisses. “I want you now.”
“I won’t hurt you,” Joe says, but he’s quick about it, going as fast as he safely can, hissing each time Nicky’s senseless writhing brushes his thighs against Joe’s cock.
“Have I told you today how beautiful you are?” Joe asks, teeth clenched. “Because you are, and you’re killing me here, Nicolò.”
Utterly breathless, Nicky sinks down on his cock. It aches and stretches and his head is swimming with pleasure and exhaustion, and maybe that’s what makes Joe seem so ethereal, makes the sunset outside reflecting in gleams off of his hair so perfect Nicky nearly cries, but Nicky’s pretty sure it’s just Joe.
“My husband,” he sighs, thighs unclenching as he settles fully, sprawled over Joe’s hips, Joe deep inside him.
Joe makes a wordless, garbled noise, hips rocking up.
Nicky gasps.
“Fuck.” Joe’s voice is like gravel and whiskey. “Fuck, fuck, Nicky, my husband.”
Oh. That’s what it feels like to hear that, Nicky realizes, and has to move, has to lift himself up and fuck back down onto Joe, hard.
They both lose themselves to it, after that, Joe’s hands clenching tight on Nicky’s hips to help guide him, his knees bent behind Nicky’s back so he has the leverage to thrust up when Nicky sinks down. Nicky’s nearly sobbing, he distantly realizes, deep breaths punching out of him with each thrust, and they didn’t bother with a condom, why would they, that ship has sailed and they’re married now, but the thought of Joe bursting hot inside him, marking him up with come, it’s—it’s—
“Touch me,” Nicky gets out. “Fuck, Joe, just—”
Joe gets a hand around his cock, strokes him just right, and Nicky curls in on himself when he comes, so hard his balls ache, so hard he can feel himself tighten up all around Joe, so hard there’s nothing but buzzing and white noise in his ears for long moments as he contracts and opens in pulses and pulses and pulses.
Joe, underneath him, is red-faced and panting when Nicky can see again. “Please,” he says, and Nicky tightens up around him one more time just to see him lose it, crying out and rocking up and fucking himself as deep into Nicky as he can go.
They clean up perfunctorily with a damp towel and then collapse together into bed. It’s only eight PM, but jetlag is as jetlag does.
“The light here is perfect,” Joe mumbles into his pillow. “So’s the bed.”
“Mm,” Nicky agrees, pleased. “So you’ll move in?”
“Tomorrow,” Joe tells the pillow.
They’ve just almost sunk into sleep, Joe wrapped tightly around him, when Nicky remembers. “Joe?” He asks.
“Mm?”
“Do you have health insurance?”
“Wha…? Mm, yeah.”
“’s it any good?”
Nicky can feel Joe shrug against his back. “It’s American,” he says. “So, no. Dental’s shit. But I’m healthy, and I don’t have any family history to worry about.”
Andy would absolutely destroy him for it, but the last thing Nicky says before falling asleep is, “You could be on my health insurance. I’ve got great dental.”
Fill: Joe/Nicky, Aftermath of a whirlwind romance and marriage 4/?
“Oh, thank fuck,” she says as soon as she sees him sitting on the couch. “Answer your fucking phone, jackass, I thought you drowned in the Mediterranean or something.”
“Why would I have?” Nicky asks absently. One hundred and seventy-seven unread emails. Not bad for a two week absence.
“Because you didn’t answer your phone and tell me you got back okay.” She straddles one of the dining room chairs. “I was worried.”
“Oh,” Nicky says. “Right. My phone died.” His phone had run out of battery in London and the charger had been at the bottom of his suitcase. It hadn’t seemed that important at the time. It’s charging in his bedroom right now, because if he keeps it in sight, Nicky will check it every two seconds for messages from Joe.
“Well, next time, don’t let it. How was Malta?”
Nicky thinks of sunset on the hotel balcony, Joe in nothing but Nicky’s shirt, eating grapes they had bought from a stand by the side of the road after hiking all day. He swallows. “It was good,” he says.
Andy rolls her eyes. “Come on, fess up. Do you have a paper in the works yet about some piece of iconography on one of their churches?”
Nicky blushes to the roots of his hair. “I didn’t go into a single church while I was there,” he admits.
Andy applauds.
“You told me to vacation,” Nicky says. “So I did. Don’t act so surprised. Would you like some tea?”
He’s stretching his legs a bit in the kitchen while the water boils when she appears in the doorway, clutching the marriage license he had stupidly left on the coffee table.
“Nicky,” she says, deathly quiet. “Nicky, what the fuck is this?”
“What does it look like?” He snipes back.
“It looks like you got married in Vegas,” she yells, brandishing the license.
He doesn’t respond. What is there to say?
“No,” she says, “no, this must be a joke. You wouldn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” He asks, almost insulted
“You’re practically celibate!” She yells, throwing her hands up in the air. “And you take about two years to order a sandwich for lunch, how would you end up married after two weeks?”
“I’m not celibate,” Nicky contests hotly; that is a phase of his life he has left very much behind him. “And maybe I just fell in love.”
“Oh, come on.”
“What?”
“No one falls in love in two weeks.”
“You can’t know that,” Nicky argues, thinking of how poorly they left it in the subway.
“I know you, Nicky,” Andy says, and she’s not wrong. She’s seen Nicky through the hardest parts of his life, through bad breakups and his Ph.D. defense, through all of it.
Nicky turns around to look at her. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he admits.
“What do you even know about this guy?” Andy asks, squinting at the license. “Yusuf Al-Kaysani. If that’s even his real name.”
“He’s an artist,” Nicky says. “He’s thirty-three. He’s…” He swallows the end of the sentence. He can’t say, he’s kind, his eyes are lovely, he makes me come harder than anyone I’ve ever been with, he makes me feel like I might have done something right.
Andy stares at him, aghast. “That’s it? Where was he born? What are his parent’s names? Do you have his social security number?”
“I wanted to marry the man, not commit credit card fraud,” Nicky snaps back.
“Oh my god,” Andy moans, “that must be what he’s after.”
“I don’t have anything worth stealing!” Nicky points out.
“What about a greencard?” Andy demands. “Or health insurance?”
“I’m not even a citizen.”
“But you have great health insurance.”
Nicky sighs. “Andy, I refuse to listen to this. Joe is a wonderful man.”
Andy stalks out of his apartment not long after, having threatened to find him a divorce lawyer. Nicky drinks his tea alone, in silence. He’s caught between anger that Andy thinks him so weak and sheltered and “practically celibate” as to be duped, and doubt that maybe, just maybe, she could be right. What does he know of Joe? His last boyfriend, Nicky dated for four weeks before they even kissed.
He’s scrolling blindly through his unread emails – about a third seem to be one incredibly long email chain about whether or not it falls into Stephen Merrick’s job description to actually grade his students’ exams on time. Nicky deletes the thread with extreme prejudice. He hasn’t told Joe about Merrick, yet, or about Andy and Quynh, or about any number of people he sees every day of his working life.
What was he thinking?
The buzzer rings, drawing Nicky out of his misery.
He almost expects it to be Andy, back to apologize, or, more likely, to berate him some more.
He’s already drawing in breath to defend himself even though he’s not sure he actually should as he opens the door, only to find Joe standing there, leaning against the doorframe, dark circles under his eyes.
“Hi,” he says. “I know we said space, but I had to see you. I just – I can’t go back to my life the way it was, not after you. Or, I could, but I don’t want to. I want – I am so excited to have a life with you, Nicky, and I want it to start now. I hope you think this is charming and not creepy.” The last he says sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.
Nicky drags him into the apartment by the lapels of the open flannel shirt he has on over a stupidly tight T-shirt.
“How do you do that,” he whispers against Joe’s lips. “How are you so brave, so honest.”
“Some would say stupid,” Joe points out between heated kisses.
“Charming,” Nicky says. “In case that wasn’t clear.” He dips his head to set his teeth at the sensitive edge of Joe’s neck and Joe throws his head back, gasping.
“I – ah! – I hoped,” Joe gets out.
“I keep getting scared of this, of what we did,” Nicky tells him between harsh bites at his skin, sliding his hands up under Nicky’s shirt. “And then I see your face and I fall in love all over again. How do you do that?”
Joe arches his whole body against Nicky, the sinuous movement of it more than enough to erase all of Nicky’s doubts. “It’s a gift,” Joe tells him.
Nicky makes a noise in the back of his throat he hasn’t heard from himself before. He lifts Joe up by the backs of his thighs, forcing Joe to wrap all his limbs around Nicky or lose his balance, and carries him to the bedroom.
“Okay,” Joe says when Nicky has deposited him on the bed, “okay, that was ridiculously hot.”
“Take off your clothes,” Nicky demands, pulling his own shirt over his head before helping Joe to squirm out of his jeans. He drags off his own pants and then straddles Joe’s hips. “You know I thought about joining the Church, once?” He tells Joe. Joe doesn’t know; Nicky hasn’t told him yet. That’s not the point. “I thought maybe if I devoted my life to God, if I didn’t let myself look too closely at what it was I really wanted, maybe it would go away.”
Joe is sprawled out on Nicky’s dark purple sheets, hands clenched tight on Nicky’s sheets. His eyes are wide and wanting, and Nicky’s lost in him.
“It would have been such a waste,” Nicky finishes. “If I had done that. If I had never had the chance to meet you.”
Joe surges up to kiss him again, thorough, harsh, fingers pulling at the hair at the nape of Nicky’s neck. God, the abs on this man, Nicky thinks hysterically.
“Every moment of my life has led me here, to you,” Joe tells him breathlessly. “Every second of it.”
Of course Joe would understand. Joe has understood him effortlessly since the moment they met, or at least, since a few moments after they met.
Nicky kisses him again, less roughly than before, trying to convey without words how much he loves this impossible man. “I want you inside me,” he mumbles against Joe’s lips.
“Are you—” Joe starts to ask, but Nicky’s nodding already.
“I – took a long shower, when I got home,” Nicky tells him. “I thought – well. I was going to call you if I didn’t hear from you. I hoped I would see you, and that we could–”
“You’re perfect,” Joe says. “So perfect for me.”
Nicky digs blindly for the lube, pressing it into Joe’s hands and tearing off his boxers. “Come on,” he hisses. “I want you now.”
“I won’t hurt you,” Joe says, but he’s quick about it, going as fast as he safely can, hissing each time Nicky’s senseless writhing brushes his thighs against Joe’s cock.
“Have I told you today how beautiful you are?” Joe asks, teeth clenched. “Because you are, and you’re killing me here, Nicolò.”
Utterly breathless, Nicky sinks down on his cock. It aches and stretches and his head is swimming with pleasure and exhaustion, and maybe that’s what makes Joe seem so ethereal, makes the sunset outside reflecting in gleams off of his hair so perfect Nicky nearly cries, but Nicky’s pretty sure it’s just Joe.
“My husband,” he sighs, thighs unclenching as he settles fully, sprawled over Joe’s hips, Joe deep inside him.
Joe makes a wordless, garbled noise, hips rocking up.
Nicky gasps.
“Fuck.” Joe’s voice is like gravel and whiskey. “Fuck, fuck, Nicky, my husband.”
Oh. That’s what it feels like to hear that, Nicky realizes, and has to move, has to lift himself up and fuck back down onto Joe, hard.
They both lose themselves to it, after that, Joe’s hands clenching tight on Nicky’s hips to help guide him, his knees bent behind Nicky’s back so he has the leverage to thrust up when Nicky sinks down. Nicky’s nearly sobbing, he distantly realizes, deep breaths punching out of him with each thrust, and they didn’t bother with a condom, why would they, that ship has sailed and they’re married now, but the thought of Joe bursting hot inside him, marking him up with come, it’s—it’s—
“Touch me,” Nicky gets out. “Fuck, Joe, just—”
Joe gets a hand around his cock, strokes him just right, and Nicky curls in on himself when he comes, so hard his balls ache, so hard he can feel himself tighten up all around Joe, so hard there’s nothing but buzzing and white noise in his ears for long moments as he contracts and opens in pulses and pulses and pulses.
Joe, underneath him, is red-faced and panting when Nicky can see again. “Please,” he says, and Nicky tightens up around him one more time just to see him lose it, crying out and rocking up and fucking himself as deep into Nicky as he can go.
They clean up perfunctorily with a damp towel and then collapse together into bed. It’s only eight PM, but jetlag is as jetlag does.
“The light here is perfect,” Joe mumbles into his pillow. “So’s the bed.”
“Mm,” Nicky agrees, pleased. “So you’ll move in?”
“Tomorrow,” Joe tells the pillow.
They’ve just almost sunk into sleep, Joe wrapped tightly around him, when Nicky remembers. “Joe?” He asks.
“Mm?”
“Do you have health insurance?”
“Wha…? Mm, yeah.”
“’s it any good?”
Nicky can feel Joe shrug against his back. “It’s American,” he says. “So, no. Dental’s shit. But I’m healthy, and I don’t have any family history to worry about.”
Andy would absolutely destroy him for it, but the last thing Nicky says before falling asleep is, “You could be on my health insurance. I’ve got great dental.”