Worse Than That
Recipient: kiltsandlollies
Author: eyebrowofdoom
Pairing: Dominic/Billy
Rating: NC-17
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Here they are then, Billy's back under his hands, the valley of his spine familiar like it's a place Dom might have gone camping as a kid. Billy smells warm and like his denim jacket has been washed recently, with powdered soap.
Which is to the good, because it's fucking freezing. Fucking Scotland.
"Fucking Scotland," Dom says. He rubs the top of his head, because he needs to start somewhere.
Billy tilts his head and smiles.
While they're stopped at some lights, Dom puts his whole torso out the window of the car and casually shouts across the roof to a motorcyclist, "Evening. How are you?" He can feel the escaping heated air from inside the car inching up under the hem of his shirt.
When he gets back in, Billy is looking patient, though not entirely displeased.
"What are you doing for Christmas?" Dom asks.
"We'll go and see my grandmother," Billy says. "Then round to Ali's family's. What about you?"
"Manchester," Dom says. "The usual."
In the kitchen back at Billy's, they both go for the fridge at the same time, and Dom ends up half under Billy's arm. And so Dom pushes against the door handle while Billy is trying to pull, and Billy has to snort amusedly against the back of Dom's neck, and wrap an arm around Dom and shuffle him bodily backwards.
There was a time, Dom thinks, when Billy would have stayed against Dom's back for long enough to slide his hand up under Dom's shirt and rub his belly, and maybe bite his shoulder to scold him -- but that time mustn't be now. Billy looks at him brightly enough when he steps away, though, and says, "Do you want one or not?"
Dom stands, feet splayed, with his hands on his hips, grinning. The key, he knows, is never, ever to look embarrassed.
***
Dom would like to think he's drunk, but it's worse than that.
They're sitting on the sofa.
"Thing is," Dom says. "Were we dating? Were we dating all that time?"
Billy's philtrum contracts a bit as he listens.
"The thing is, you didn't break up with me," Dom says.
Before Ali, he means.
"If you didn't break up with me," Dom says. "I suppose we can't have been dating."
Billy puts his hand on Dom's knee. Dom doesn't have look at it to know the way the slim, knobbled-knuckled bones will splay and the skin will stretch and the fine little blonde deep-pored hairs will curl. Dom never has to fight for Billy's attention, does he? Dom is being a complete twat and Billy is just listening and taking it, and holding Dom's knee, even.
Sometimes he feels like Billy already knows everything in his head, and Billy just pretends that he's hearing things for the first time when Dom says them aloud. Pretends it to please Dom -- like playing peek-a-boo with a kid.
Dom climbs into Billy's lap. Billy has to put his beer down abruptly on the end table, and steady it -- Dom can hear it rocking around on the rim of its base. Dom is sitting awkwardly with most of his weight on one of Billy's thighs; he's probably hurting him but Billy isn't letting him know, he isn't shifting about or straining. Dom feels like he has to be conscious of things like that now, like whether it is okay to touch Billy sometimes and whether Billy really wants to go out or do this or that -- but Billy doesn't let him know, he never does.
Billy holds the side of Dom's neck with his beer hand, which is damp and cold. They sit there for long enough that it gets warm.
"I'm turning into a girl, Bills, sorry," Dom says. "Which ought to solve our problem, in its way."
"I don't want you to be a girl, Dommie," Billy says. Billy doesn't have a vacancy for one of those. Billy knows not to say it, though. The weight of things that Dom is grateful to Billy for is sometimes so heavy it's awful.
"I don't want to have a problem with you," Billy says, softly. Dom has such a hunger to hear Billy talk to him in that voice, even if Billy is sad -- even more if he is sad, even more urgently -- he never wants it to end.
He turns his head and hides his mouth in Billy's palm. Otherwise he might take the tender lobe of Billy's tiny little pale-translucent ear between his teeth and actually start to eat him.
"I don't know," Billy says. "I don't know if we were dating. Maybe I should have broken up with you. I wish we had been dating in a way. And then we would have broken up when things happened and we would have known where we were."
***
Later when Dom fucks Billy, it is like: something. Like, he had forgotten how the soft damp back of his other knee felt -- his third knee, one of the ones that nominally belongs to Billy.
And then never mind that, because it's all about the holding Billy's knees open hard, and the shunting levering action of pushing it home, and the agonised vacant roll of Billy's eyes as Dom gets going giving it to him; Billy's slack crumpled upper lip.
Dom gets to lick Billy's earlobe, and kiss him and push his tongue in his mouth, and bite his chin, and rub his fingers in his underarms, and find his little nipples in his chest hair and twist them. And he decides not to think about whether that's okay, because Billy is letting him fuck him -- he takes that as permission for all of it.
Then they are lying still and sweaty. Dom has his arm across Billy's chest, and Billy is holding the back of Dom's hand against his face.
"I haven't told Ali about us. Do you want me to tell her?" Billy says. Billy is saying "Ali" with Dom's hand against his cheek.
"I don't know," Dom says. "Do you want to tell her?"
"What kind of a question is that?" Billy says.
"I told you," Dom says garrulously. "I'm a girl. It's a girl question."