(~(~)~)
As for the white dress shirt that started the whole mess, most people assume Gordon threw it out. After all, who'd keep a shirt that led to the calling off of your engagement - especially if it was somebody else's shirt? It must be rotting in a landfill, or languishing in a Salvation Army resale shop, or lining the bottom of Gordon's elegant gas fireplace.
(~(~)~)
Someone's in their office. Dan senses the presence as he jogs in, calling over his shoulder to Elliot about how Casey's joke about lugers in the 4-block didn't go the way it was supposed to. It can't be Casey in their office, because he just left Casey in the control booth arguing uselessly with Dave. Somebody else is hiding in their office. Dan scowls. Only they are allowed to hide in their office. "Hello?"
"Dan. Hey."
Dan skids to a halt beside the table. "Sam?" He throws the light switch, and there's Sam Donovan, sitting on his couch, blinking in the sudden illumination.
"Dan. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to..." Sam holds his forearm in front of his eyes to shield them from the glare. "I don't know what...what I'm doing here."
Sam wears the sharpest outfit Dan has ever seen him in. A real suit, severely pressed and somber; shoes shined and everything. An expensive suit, if Dan is any judge of these things. It hangs off of Sam in all the right places, and Dan is not going to lick his lips. There are only so many unattainable men he can pine after at once. Then Dan notices the dark circles under Sam's eyes and the slump of his shoulders, taking away any edge the suit might've given him. Here sits a man defeated.
"Shit, Sam. You look awful."
Sam laughs. "I can believe it." He stares at his hands and offers nothing more.
"I didn't know you were back in town."
"I'm not." Sam shakes his head, too-long red-blond hair falling into his eyes. The moustache is gone; it's the only thing that saves him from looking like a bum coming off a week-long bender. "I was in D.C. Just flew down."
Dan sits beside Sam on the couch, eyes narrowed. "Are you--"
"I just," Sam's voice hitches. "I needed to be around friendly faces tonight."
"Sam. You hate us."
"I don't..." Sam shakes his head again, still staring at his hands. "I need friendly faces."
"Okay." Dan relaxes into the cushions. "We're here. Whatever you need. We're going to Anthony's, if you want to come."
"I, ah. No. That's not a good idea. Dana wouldn't be happy to see me."
"Right." Dan nods. He doesn't know what happened the last time Sam was in New York, but after he left, Dana spent a week on a three-second tape delay. "Which does not explain what you're doing sitting in our office with the lights off."
"I don't know. I'm a little bit--" Sam leans forward, swipes a square of paperboard off the table, and holds it out to Dan.
Dan looks at the card and feels that awful old tightening in his throat. Hokey pink watercolor carnations and the ribbon underneath that reads, 'In Memoriam.' He takes the card from Sam's unresponsive fingers. "Shit, Sam. I didn't realize." He opens the card. 'Simon Lewis Donovan, 1951 - 2002.'
"My brother," Sam says flatly.
"Oh." Dan rubs his forehead with the back of his hand. "Sam, I'm so sorry."
Sam takes the card and returns it to the table. "He was in the Secret Service. Covered the President at Rosslyn during the assassination attempt. Came through that without a scratch. But this week--" A stunned laugh. "This week he walked into an armed robbery. And they shot him."
Dan leans closer. It isn't a thing he thinks about; he just does it, because another human being has lost someone and is hurting, and Dan knows what that feels like. "I'm so sorry." Empty words - empty words he's already said - but it matters little what he says just now. What matters is that he says it, and that Sam believes it.
"Dan, let's go; let's get this show on the road!" The voice of Dan's other unattainable man floats across the room. "It's Friday night; come on! Closing time and tide wait for no man." Casey bops into the office and stops abruptly. "Sam."
Sam does a pathetic impression of a smile. "Hi, Casey."
"I didn't know you were back in New York."
"I'm not."
Casey rocks uncomfortably on his heels. "Okay. You coming, Danny?"
Dan looks at Sam. "What do you say, Sam? Might do you good to be around people. We'll protect you from Dana."
Sam's smile twists into something bitter and mocking and is suddenly much more believable. "Thanks, Dan. But I don't think so."
"Okay." Dan looks at Casey. "I'll catch up with you tomorrow."
Sam pushes his arm. "No, Dan, you go. You should be with your friends. You should not sit around being maudlin and pathetic with me."
Dan shrugs. "I spend twelve hours a day with my friends. Besides, it's our office, and you're not allowed to be maudlin and pathetic in our office without one of us here with you." He smiles at Casey.
Casey nods. "He's right. That's a rule, Sam; that's an office rule." Dan and Sam don't move. "All right. I'm heading out. Good to see you, Sam."
Sam nods vaguely, and Casey, with one more unreadable look at Dan - which Dan does not acknowledge - disappears.
A long silence stretches between them.
"Thank you," Sam says.
Dan looks at Sam, who's staring at the ceiling. "No big deal. God knows, if I'd had a friend around when my brother died--" He sighs and stares at the ceiling, too.
Sam turns his head slightly. "Then you understand."
Dan turns so they face each other, heads against the back of the couch. "I do."
Sam's hand comes hesitantly off his lap, hovering near Dan's chest. Dan holds his breath. Sam snorts and drops his hand, turning his face back towards the ceiling. Dan lets his breath out in a rush and pops off the couch. "Well."
"Well, what?" Sam's voice weighs a ton.
Dan shrugs. "I was trying to figure out what to do with you. Normally, under these circumstances I'd get you plastered to forget your problems, but you don't do that anymore."
"No. But don't think I haven't considered it a thousand times this week." He smiles deprecatingly.
"In that case, there's only one thing to do."
Sam tilts his head so they're looking at each other again. "What's that?"
Dan grins. "The Three Stooges."
(~(~)~)
Sam protests. As any sane human being would. But Dan will not be dissuaded. The only cure for a grieving man who doesn't drink is early American slapstick.
Somewhere in the middle of the Frankenstein one, Dan looks over, still laughing so hard he has to hold his ribcage to breathe. Sam's not watching the screen. Sam's just sitting there, staring at Dan. Dan't not sure how long he's been doing that, and it starts his heartbeat doing a little racing. "You're not watching," Dan says, mostly to buy time out of his adrenaline jolt. "Sam, you gotta watch - this is the best part."
Sam smiles faintly. "You've said that five times."
"They're all the best part," Dan says defensively. They turn back to the screen, but anybody can see that Sam isn't paying attention. Every two minutes, Dan darts a quick glance over and away, until he sighs and hits the mute button. "This isn't helping, is it?"
Sam shakes his head quickly. "No, it is. It's helping." Something unreadable slides fast across his eyes, and Dan swallows hard. "I don't think it's got a lot to do with Larry, Moe, or Curly, though."
Dan's hand clenches around the remote. "Sam--"
"The President came to the funeral."
Dan blinks, thrown by the abrupt mood change. "President Bartlet?"
Dan realizes how stupid that sounds as it's leaving his mouth, and he expects a snide comeback, but Sam nods. "And Ron Butterfield - the head of the Secret Service. And the press secretary, CJ Cregg. I got the feeling they were--" He shakes his head. "I can't say for sure, but she seemed so upset. And of course I was honored, and my mother was touched, and we thanked them properly for coming." Sam's hands rest awkwardly in his lap. "But a funeral is family and friends saying good-bye. It's not a motorcade and a security sweep and a man who hardly knew my brother giving a eulogy." He looks, for the briefest instant, at Dan. Then away again. "Instead of me."
"Sam. That's...that's just no good." On the muted television screen, Larry takes another jab to the eyes. "If you want to deliver your eulogy, you know, here, now...I didn't know Simon or anything, but I'm a good listener. I think. Casey says I have issues, but, Casey has issues, so I don't listen to him."
Sam shakes his head. "It's fine, Dan. No. Not fine, I guess, but." He scrubs his hands over his face. "I want a drink."
"I know you do."
"And I can't have one."
"No."
"I want my brother not to be dead."
"I know that, too."
"And it's not going to happen."
"No."
"I want life to make sense."
"We all want that, Sam."
"And that's going to happen least of all."
Dan slides closer on the couch, his hand coming up to rub Sam's upper arm. Sam shudders once, and again, and then he's sobbing, silently, without tears, the tremors shaking his body the only clue that it's going on.
While it happens, Dan slowly rubs Sam's arm, then reaches around to his back. When the tremors slow and eventually stop, Dan rises from the couch, lightly grabbing Sam's wrists, pulling him up as well. Gently, he reaches out to unknot Sam's tie.
"What are you doing?" Sam asks, his voice scratchy, his breath quickening.
"Shh." Dan eases the tie off and drops it on the couch. Sam's black suit jacket follows, and Dan thinks how strange it is that Sam's been wearing his funeral suit the entire night and neither of them noticed.
"Fuck, Dan," Sam says, and Sam's mouth crushes his ruthlessly, violently, and Sam's hands squeeze his biceps, and Dan hangs on and rides it out. A bite on his lower lip draws blood, and he lets Sam lick it away, take it as proof that there are still living people in this world, people who can bleed.
And Dan needs this, too, and he's not ashamed to admit it - to himself, of course; never out loud, not even to Abby. Dan needs to be needed. Maybe it's warped, and he really has always been attracted to Sam, but Sam's never seemed sexier than he is right now - a little lost, a little fragile.
Sam clings hard to him, and every one of his touches sears Dan, burns Sam's pain and anger into him. Sam's done with tears, but there are things that need to work their way out of his body, and Dan takes them willingly, because Sam was right. Tonight, he needs friendly faces - and hands, and mouths, and beds to fall asleep in, a sleep as silent and deep as the grief he's trying to outrun.
Dan isn't surprised when he wakes in the morning and Sam is gone. He is surprised to find half a pot of coffee on the warmer and a note in blocky, barely legible handwriting sitting next to it.
"Dan,
Had an early flight and couldn't wake you up. I've met coma victims who were easier to rouse. Hope you don't mind I made coffee; doubt I would've made it to the curb without it.
Thanks for everything.
Sam."
There's any number of things Sam's note doesn't say. Dan reads them there anyway.
Dan finds the tie between the back of the couch and the cushion. There's a cufflink monogrammed 'SD' under the bed. Sam's shirt is behind the bedroom door. He thinks the shirt looks familiar but, apart from wondering what Sam was wearing when he left, he dismisses it. Dan puts the cufflink in the box of random crap on his dresser. He washes the shirt and hangs it and the tie in the back of his closet. He has no idea when Sam's coming back to New York. He has no idea if Sam's coming back to New York. But maybe if he does, he'll want his shirt and tie and cufflink back.
(~(~)~)
They stay in touch - little emails tossed back and forth. Mostly, they talk about the show, but sometimes Sam will share a story about his brother, and every time he does he ends by saying, "Thank you." Dan understands everything he's being thanked for. But Sam doesn't come back to New York.
Dan isn't notorious for his attentiveness to detail. When he moves his winter wardrobe to the front of his closet, Sam's shirt comes up with the rest of the shirts and sweaters, and Sam's tie falls off the hanger.
The day that Dan puts the shirt on, he has no idea that it isn't his. It's soft and comfortable, well-worn. Must be one of his older ones, one of the ones he didn't wear last winter when he was trying to be hip. So he goes on with his day, and by the time he and Casey get to Wardrobe, his shirt's the furthest thing from his mind.
"Danny--"
"I think it's something to consider."
"In no way is it something to consider."
"I think it would be good for national morale."
"I think it would make us look like idiots."
"Baseball is our national pastime. 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' is the song of that national pastime."
"We're not changing the national anthem to 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame.'" Casey opens the door to Wardrobe. He's walking ahead of Dan, but Dan senses his eye-roll.
"It's a happy song, Casey."
"So is 'The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine,' but you wouldn't advocate making that the national anthem."
"I might, but the endorsement of Major League Baseball may have more heft with the American people than that of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws."
Casey smiles as he ponders the tie Monica's put out for him. "This is a great blue," he says. It is indeed, Dan thinks; it will look very good with Casey's hair - but, no, Dan is not going to lose this debate because he's thinking about Casey's hair. "You should abandon this quest, Dan. Like so many of your quests, this one should be abandoned. It should be returned to the ditch from whence it came and there, abandoned."
Dan leans on a rack of suits. "The appeal of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' is undeniable. People know the words; it's in a singable key; and peanuts and crackerjacks are a hell of a lot more encouraging than the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air."
"You know the words to the 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' And if Natalie's drunken World Series party was any indication, it is at least singable for Dana."
"I'm just saying--" Dan pulls off his sweater. "I'm just saying that in these troubled and uncertain times, what America may need is - Casey? Casey, buddy, are you all right?"
Casey doesn't look all right. What Casey looks like, in fact, is six-odd feet of distinctly not all right. And he's staring at Dan's shirt. "Why--" Dan's never heard Casey's voice sound so strangled - "are you wearing my shirt?"
Dan looks at the shirt. "Uh, Casey, this is my shirt. And the reason I know it's my shirt, as opposed to your shirt, is that you are wearing your shirt."
"It's my shirt, Dan." Casey's voice is still doing the weird strangled thing. "It used to be my favorite shirt."
"No, I remember your favorite shirt," Dan counters. "That was the one that - oh, fuck."
"Yeah."
"You left your favorite shirt at Sally's."
"Yes."
"And then Gordon went home with it."
"Not a week later."
Dan stares at Casey. "How the fuck did it end up in my closet?"
"Precisely what I am asking you, Dan," Casey snaps, sinking into a chair. Dan sinks into the chair next to him, staring at the closed door they just came through and trying to figure out how the hell he comes to be wearing Casey's former favorite shirt without having had the opportunity to be naked with Casey first. "Please, Danny," Casey pleads, voice raspy, "please tell me you didn't sleep with Gordon."
"What?" Dan almost falls off his chair. "No! Absolutely not. No way."
"Thank God." Casey's head falls back. "As long as that's not how you ended up with it."
"No way, man. I have a soul." He frowns and looks at Casey, then back to the rack of suits, wishing he was still leaning against it having a conversation about the national anthem, rather than sitting in these chairs having a conversation about Casey's former favorite shirt. "I did sleep with Sam Donovan."
Casey's jaw clenches so quickly that no one but Dan would have noticed. "Is it possible that he slept with Gordon?"
"I wouldn't have thought so. He seemed like a man with a soul." Dan stands and puts his hand on Casey's shoulder. "Casey, I am so sorry. I'll figure this out. I promise."
"You'd damned well better." Casey stands and reaches for the clothes laid out for him. "And for God's sake, put that shirt someplace where I can't see it."
(~(~)~)
Mind partly on the show, mostly on the shirt, which he knows is backwards but can't be helped, Dan can come up with only one explanation that doesn't involve Sam sleeping with Gordon. It makes sense; it's a relief, really, but Dan oh, so very much doesn't want it to be right, because if it is, he'll have to involve the one person he'd hoped would never have any idea that this was going on.
Ideally, Dan would be subtle about this. Sneaky. But every time the camera was on him tonight, Casey's eyes bored into his head, and at every C-break Casey took the opportunity to be anywhere Dan wasn't. And so Dan doesn't have time to be subtle.
And, come to think of it, he's never done well with subtle. He's tried; he continues to try; and he continues to suck.
"Dana!"
Dana's feet don't slow for him. "Daniel."
"I need to talk to you."
"Whatever you need to talk to me about, Dan, I am here. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be here for whatever you need. Tonight, I am not available for mediations or meditations or, indeed, medications of any sort. Tonight, I am going out, and I am drinking." She grins at him as they enter her office.
"Again?" he asks.
She doesn't look at him as she holds the door open for him. "Tomorrow, Dan."
"Did you sleep with Gordon after you broke up?"
Dana lets go of the door so fast it almost breaks Dan's nose. "I beg your pardon?"
"You and Gordon, after the engagement was broken off, did you have some sort of...break-up sex?" He hates himself for this, but he hates himself more for the conversation in Wardrobe.
Dana faces him, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. "First, that is none of your business. Second, Gordon called it off with me, so thank you for bringing up that particular painful memory. Third...third, it's none of your business, Dan!"
Dan risks taking a step towards her. Her tongue doesn't fly out of her mouth and knock his head off, so he risks another one. Her whole body jerks backwards, so he stops risking and backs up slightly. "Believe me, Dana, I probably want to be having this conversation even less than you do--"
"No chance of that."
"But something happened today. Something very bad, and my continued friendship with Casey may depend on your ability to confirm that you did, in fact, have some sort of liaison with Gordon after you were officially no longer engaged."
"Dan."
"Dana, I'm serious. With everything that I am, I am serious. Every cell in my body that is available for seriousness is involved in the business of being serious."
With a sigh, Dana stalks to her couch and drops onto it. She shakes her head in disbelief. "Yes, okay? Yes. We did." She raises her hands and can't figure out what to do with them, so she drops them again. "About a month after. I went to his place to take him the things he'd left at mine, and, yes. We had break-up sex. It was some of the most incredible sex of my life, and then I left." She looks up at him. "Why did you do that?"
He sits on the couch, at the far distant end from her. "Is it, by any chance, possible that you left wearing a different shirt than the one you arrived in?" He hopes he's wearing his 'I don't do this to hurt you' face. "More to the point, is it possible that you left wearing the shirt of Casey's that Gordon ended up with after sleeping with Sally?"
Dana's eyes are wide with disbelief that he's subjecting her to this. "Yes, I suppose it is. How much more of this crap is there?"
Dan's on the verge of dropping the whole thing, but the look on Dana's face says she can't hate him more than she does already, so he might as well finish. "Did you, at some point, sleep with Sam Donovan?"
For the first time, Dana looks like she's stumbled onto a happy memory. "That I did. And not only at some point, but at many points. At many, many points, I slept with Sam Donovan. We were practically engaged, for a while."
Dan looks at her. "You were?"
"Practically."
"All right, then." He stands, but he has to make absolutely certain. "And might he, at some point, have ended up wearing that shirt?"
"Which shirt?"
"Dana!"
"Oh. That shirt." She thinks for a minute. "Yes, I suppose it is. It's not impossible."
"Okay." He crosses to the door, stops, turns back to her. "I'm really sorry about this, Dana."
Her eyes harden. "Was your friendship with Casey really in that much danger?"
"All that and then some."
"And we won't do this ever again?"
"Never again."
She nods. "Okay, then."
And it is okay, for her. But for Dan, it's just begun.
(~(~)~)
"...but after the funeral, Sam came to New York and spent the night at my place and left the shirt behind." Dan watches Casey from his vantage point on the couch. His palms are sweaty.
Casey nods slowly, and he's breathing at a more normal rate than when Dan told him about Dana's break-up sex with Gordon and her practical engagement to Sam. "Was everything all right?"
Dan shrugs. "As much as it could be."
They have years of practice understanding things unsaid, so Casey leaves it at that. He nods. "All in all, I'd say it makes perfect sense."
Dan blinks. "It does?"
"My shirt is a slut."
Dan snickers. Casey's going to be okay. "It does seem to get around."
"More than I do." Casey shakes his head and rotates his chair. "I should be relieved that someone around here is getting some. Several someones, apparently," he adds, frowning.
"So, do you want the shirt back?"
Casey's eyes go very wide. "Dan, that shirt has been worn by at least five people within the CSC sphere of influence, only one of whom is me. No, I do not want it back."
"Oh. Yeah. I guess not." Dan stares out the glass door into the bullpen for a minute, then turns back to Casey. "I am sorry about all of this."
"It's not your fault. Everyone falls prey to the wiles of my white dress shirt."
"I always thought you looked sexy in it." Dan groans, cursing himself, as that falls out of his mouth.
Casey looks at him and blinks slowly. "Really?"
"Forget it, Casey. I didn't mean anything by it."
"Didn't you?"
Dan's heart races, and his breath knocks around in his lungs, unable to figure out where it's supposed to go now. "Maybe, just a little."
Dan's not sure when Casey moved, when he got out of his chair and crossed the office, but he's standing over Dan, who shrinks into the couch and stares at him, not sure what's going on. Casey sits, slowly, on the edge of the couch, his eyes never leaving Dan's. "You looked pretty good in it, too."
Dan has to defuse this...this intensity of Casey's. "You don't know that; you were too busy freaking out about the fact that I was wearing it."
"It was my shirt, Dan," Casey says, leaning into the couch - away from Dan. "You'd freak, too."
"I would not. I would not, because this never would have happened to me. I would never have left an article of clothing at Sally Sasser's apartment in the first place. Do you know why?"
Casey grins, and Dan grins back in relief. "Because Sally Sasser is an alien?" Casey guesses.
"She is an alien. There is no way that woman is human - or a woman, if you come right down to it."
Casey laces his fingers behind his head. "Oh, she's a woman, all right. She's all woman."
"Don't speak to me."
Casey frowns. "Did you really sleep with Sam?"
Dan nods. "I did."
"More than once?"
Dan's eyes widen. "That's hardly a decorous question."
"When has that ever stopped you before?" Casey snorts.
"It was just that night. After his brother's funeral. It was what he needed."
"You're a real humanitarian, Dan."
"I'd do it for you." Dan doesn't think before he says this, but it's true, and they both knew it already. Dan swallows and forces his eyes to meet Casey's. "You know I would."
Casey drops his hands to his thighs and leans forward. "I know," he says gently.
"All right, then." Dan pushes off the couch and heads towards the desk; it's been half an hour since he saw a sports event or score of any sort, and he's going into withdrawal. Doesn't hurt that the computer's on the other side of the room, well away from this conversation.
His finger freezes half an inch above the computer's power button when Casey says, "I think I could stand to do some grieving. It turns out my favorite white dress shirt's been unfaithful."
Dan doesn't turn. "Don't, Casey."
"Don't?" Casey sounds surprised.
"Don't do this."
"Dan--"
"It's not a joke to me, Casey," he says quietly, and now he turns. "I've spent a lot of years wanting you, and you've spent a lot of years not wanting to know about it, and that's how we've been able to keep working together and being friends. If you turn it into joke fodder, it's not going to work anymore."
Casey stands and comes towards him. "What if I've changed my mind about not wanting to know?"
"Because everyone's getting laid but you and you feel left out?"
"Because you have the shirt. You have my shirt, and I kept thinking - never mind."
"Thinking what?"
"Forget it, Danny." Casey tries to turn away, but Dan moves in front of him, insinuates himself into Casey's personal space and waits for Casey to panic - and run away. Casey neither panics nor runs away, just stands there with this look in his eyes, and somewhere deep in his gut, Dan's body starts humming.
"Thinking what?"
"I was furious when I saw you in the shirt, and I couldn't figure out why. I started thinking about it, and I realized - it seemed right, you having the shirt. But then that it was all wrong, because of however you'd ended up with it. And I thought...I thought, if we were going to be wearing each other's clothes, we should be...you know. We should be two guys who wear each other's clothes."
Dan's knees start to buckle. Casey reaches out and his hand trails down Dan's cheek, and Dan's knees collapse altogether. He lets himself pitch forward, and he's kissing Casey. He's had so many dreams that start this way, and what happens next will determine if it's the dream that makes him smile for days or the one that makes him wake up sweating and shivering and wishing he wasn't too old to sleep with a teddy bear.
Casey's kissing him back.
Tentatively, uncertainly, without the vigor and the tongue that make up Dan's best dreams, but what does that matter - Casey's kissing him back. He's not running; he's not pulling back and apologizing and stammering that it was all a mistake.
Dan makes a gurgly, whimpery, completely involuntary sound, and Casey draws away. "I'm sorry," Casey says, but gently. Not like he means it.
"Don't apologize, Casey. Please, don't ever apologize for kissing me."
"Can I - can I do it again?" Casey blushes.
Dan smiles at him. "I would love for you to do it again."
Casey does it again. And Dan loves him for it.
Casey will want to take it slow. The funhouse of homosexual desire is new to Casey, and, compared to him, Dan's dead grandmother is a daredevil, so Dan reconciles himself to slow. He gets Casey. He can crawl if that's what it takes.
But Casey McCall doesn't do anything halfway. Once he's committed, baby, he's committed. The minutes tick by, and they continue to stand in their office making out. Casey's kisses become more insistent, more slurpingly wet. His tongue and Dan's dance a lambada. Dan knows he's running out of oxygen because he just thought 'lambada,' but, see, that's Casey's tongue in his mouth, so screw oxygen. Casey's hands drift further and further down Dan's body. Every time they rip themselves apart for air, Casey's eyes look wilder and glassier, and Dan realizes that the night is going to end with him getting clubbed over the head and hauled to Casey's cave. Dan starts looking for a large blunt object to hand Casey to speed up the process. He's got a large blunt object he's more than happy to hand Casey, but clubbing himself over the head with it would defy the laws of anatomy.
"Casey," he moans.
"Mm-hmm." Interpreting that barely cogent gasp as encouragement to continue, Casey keeps licking his way down Dan's neck.
"No - Casey."
Casey looks at him, and he's gone totally Neanderthal. "No?"
"Do you want to get out of here? Take this someplace that isn't our office?"
Casey seems to remember that this is their office, and that their office has glass walls, and that the "West Coast Update" crew will be charging around in little time at all. He licks his lips, and Dan swoons. "Uh."
Dan holds his breath, because once they've walked out of this office, once they've committed to traveling the distance to a place with a bed and a kitchen and one of their names on the mailbox, there's no going back. There's no way to shrug it off as the heat of the moment or something in the building's ventilation system. If they take 'this' someplace else, 'this' becomes real. And maybe Casey's not ready for that.
Casey smiles goofily. "My place?"
"Mine's closer," Dan counters.
"Mine has a more comfortable bed."
Dan can't argue with that. Wouldn't bother to, if he could. Casey's ready.
They drive separately, and wouldn't you know this is the night every car in the goddamned borough wants to park in front of Casey's building. Dan circles for fifteen minutes. He wants to scream, to banish cars altogether, to pull his car up to Casey's front door and deal with the impound fees in the morning.
When he buzzes the apartment, Casey lets him in before he can draw breath to say anything. Too impatient for the elevator, he charges up the stairs. Casey's waiting outside his apartment, and as soon as Dan's in sight, he makes a sound in the back of his throat that Dan feels in his toes. Casey grabs his shirt and hauls him into the apartment, slamming the door behind them and Dan against it. "What the hell took so long?" he demands between kisses.
"Cars. I hate them."
Apparently angry at Dan's sweater, Casey rips the offending garment over Dan's head and tosses it across the living room floor. And then sucks in a hissing breath. "You've wanted this for a long time?"
"Almost since the day we met."
"And I haven't?"
"That's been the impression I've gotten."
"I have been a blind, stupid idiot."
"Ah. A stupid idiot. I've always found - gaaah!"
When Casey's lips close over Dan's nipple, Dan discovers he doesn't have a snappy comeback for everything.
By the time the parade makes it to the bedroom, Dan's ready to get on his knees and beg. Somehow he's pretty well naked, and Casey's still dressed, and it's just not right. So Dan lights into Casey's clothes like they insulted his mother, and then they're kneeling on Casey's bed, naked, panting, seeing each other for the first time.
"Jesus, Danny," Casey breathes, and reaches for him.
It's so gloriously awkward. Casey's never done this with a man, and Dan's never done it with someone he's wanted so much, for so long. It's a tangle of legs and tongues and cocks, and if Dan had to relive everything his life has been up since the instant he met Casey, if he had to do it all a thousand times to get tonight, he would.
Dan fights sleep as long as he can. He wants to keep being awake, to keep feeling Casey, sweat-drenched and utterly content, draped across his chest. He fears he'll wake up tomorrow in his own bed, alone, with another man's dress shirt in his closet, and this will have been a dream. But sleep is stronger than he is, and he's almost out when Casey says his name, so it's a struggle to find the correct answer. "Hwuh?" This may not be the correct answer.
"Danny."
"Yeah, Case."
Casey sighs. It's a sigh that has suffered much. "All right, fine - give me back the goddamned shirt."
END