fic: "my sails were set wing to wing"
Mar. 3rd, 2026 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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inthewildwoodTitle: my sails were set wing to wing
Fandom: The Black Phone (Movies - Derrickson)
Summary: The thing about San Francisco is, it’s so much brighter than Denver.
Additional Tags: Road Trips, Intercrural Sex, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia
Rating: M
As it turns out, Jay’s car can make it all the way to San Francisco. Barely.
They stop at a gas station just inside the city - it feels stupid to, when they’re only half an hour away from the hostel, but the tank is almost empty - and once they’ve filled up on gas and climbed back in, the car refuses to start. Just makes a couple of spluttering noises when Jay turns the key in the ignition, then clunks and goes silent. Finn’s pretty sure he can smell smoke.
Jay looks at him, wide-eyed. “Uh,” he says.
And Finn can’t help but burst out laughing at the look on his face. Leans forward and plants his forehead on the dashboard, hiccuping with giggles. It’s just so dumb. They made so many contingency plans for what they’d do if the car crapped out on the highway (if they’d gotten stranded in Utah, the plan had been, “walk until we see a ‘Welcome to Nevada’ sign”) but none whatsoever for what they’d do if it died on them ten miles away from their destination.
“It’s not funny!” Jay says, which only makes Finn laugh harder. “We still have to get back at the end of the summer, and -” Finn can hear the moment when he gives up, just before he starts laughing, too. “And if we leave it here we’ll get towed, and -”
“We’re not leaving it here,” Finn says, finally surfacing from another bout of giggles. “There’s a garage right next door, look. They’ll probably fix it for us for free just to make sure we’re not taking up a parking spot at the station.”
Jay grumbles at him, but he gets out of the car and goes to flag down one of the station attendants. Finn stays where he is for a second, leaving his cheek pressed to the dashboard. It’s warm, and a little slippery. Jay’s car is nearly fifteen years old, a Plymouth Duster - “my stepdad’s old car, from before he upgraded,” he’d told Finn - and the paneling of the dash is all vinyl done up to look like wood. The sun shining through the windshield for the past fifteen hundred miles has heated it like a stovetop, but it’s not uncomfortable like a metal dash would be. It reminds Finn a little of the den in his childhood house, the same shade of mahogany the walls had all been paneled with. Although, now that he thinks of it, that was probably vinyl, too. No one in his family was springing for actual hardwood.
Jay comes around and taps on his window, gesturing for Finn to get up and out of the car. He does, wincing a little when the muscles in his legs protest. This is their first stop since Reno, where they’d had breakfast that morning, and his body is letting him know it. The ache takes a moment to dissipate, along with the pins and needles, so he makes a point of stretching once he’s up on his feet. “What’s the word?”
“They’re towing it to the garage,” Jay says, and makes a face at him. “Don’t say it.”
Finn grins. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
“So were you.”
“Only because you said it first.”
“What, so it’s my fault for being right?” Jay wads up the gas receipt in his hands and lobs it at Finn, who dodges, laughing. “How are we getting into the city, do you know?”
“Yeah, the guy at the station says there’s a bus coming through in about half an hour.” Jay yawns, stretching his arms over his head. The movement pulls the hem of his t-shirt out of his jeans, baring a strip of his stomach, which is nice to look at. “They’ve got a little cafe thing in there we can hang out at until it gets here.”
“Sounds good.” Finn goes around to the back of the car to pull their suitcases out. “You want coffee?”
“Gas station coffee? Fuck no.” Jay reaches out and snags Finn with a finger through his belt loop as he walks by. “Distract me or something. Or wake me up when the bus gets in. Don’t care which.”
“You should get some sleep, probably,” Finn says. They’d slept in the car last night, pulled over on the side of the highway somewhere near Pyramid Lake. Finn hasn’t camped much in his life, hadn’t ever really seen the appeal. Neither has Jay, from what he’s said. Both of them were up and down all night, listening for owls and coyotes and whatever other predators might come crawling out of the desert. It didn’t feel dangerous the way Denver still does, but it wasn’t especially restful, either. And he’d at least been able to nod off this morning. Jay’s been driving all day; no wonder he’s yawning.
Finn’s eyes flick to Jay’s finger hooked around his belt loop, then to the gas station. The attendant’s gone back inside, there’s no one watching them. Even if there was, it’s not a total giveaway. There could be an innocent explanation for that tiny point of contact. But it’s not, really, and someone looking their way could probably figure that out.
Jay sees him looking, lets go. “Hey,” he says. “It’s all good.” It somehow always is, with him. After all these months, Finn still doesn’t know how. He always feels like a bundle of raw nerves, no matter the reason; meanwhile, Jay lets everything roll off his back. Finn can’t decide whether it’s better that one of them is hyper-cautious, or that the other is miraculously calm all the time. Maybe it’s both.
He takes a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it’s all good.” Not good enough for him to take Jay’s hand, while they’re out here, but good enough for him to relax a little bit. “Let’s go in.”
The thing about San Francisco is, it’s so much brighter than Denver.
Or - maybe brighter isn’t the right word. Denver had been bright, but it had also been sharp and cold. Everything under a constant grey film, a consequence of the forever overcast skies. The air biting, even in the summer. Probably it had something to do with the elevation. But even aside from that, his surroundings had always seemed dull, depleted of colour. Grey and white houses, dead grass lawns, gunmetal chain link fences. Every room some shade of brown. Denver drained people like a vampire, until they all were bloodless and bleached. If he’d stayed, Finn knows it would’ve happened to him, too.
San Francisco isn’t like that, and it’s not just because it’s warmer. It’s not even just because the houses are painted bright colours, or because they’re next to the teal-green bay, or because the sky is a vivid, cloudless blue. If Finn had to guess, it’s got something to do with the sunlight. It catches colours the way the light in Denver never did, illuminates it instead of washing it out. Even dull, muddy shades like the faded grey of his t-shirt, catch the eye here. There’s so much brilliance, he almost doesn’t know where to look. But the bay keeps drawing him back.
“I’m going to hit a seal,” he says, as Jay folds his fingers around a pebble. They’ve been trying to skip stones for the better part of an hour, with varying degrees of success - all of Finn’s attempts have either immediately sunk, or landed in the wet sand at the edge of the water - but Jay’s actually managed to make a few skip, so now he’s trying to teach Finn how it’s done. He doesn’t actually seem to know how it’s done, though, so it’s not going too well.
They were alone on the beach when they started, but a group of seals (which, a tourist brochure has informed them, aren’t actually seals; they’re sea lions) have bellied up to the shore and are watching them with bright black eyes. Finn hasn’t actually hit any of them yet, probably because he’s deliberately aiming in the opposite direction. But he’s got the distinct impression that they almost expect him to.
“You’re not going to hit a seal,” Jay says. He’s still got a hand wrapped around Finn’s, ostensibly to guide his arm, but it’s starting to feel a bit like an excuse. “You told me you used to pitch.”
“Yeah, when I was thirteen.” He hasn’t done it since. Part of him misses it. A bigger part, though, is pretty sure that he’s lost the skill in the intervening eight years.
“You don’t forget it, though,” Jay says, like he can read Finn’s mind. “It’s muscle memory. You just gotta spin it, like a Frisbee, then throw it up -” Finn lets him pull his arm up and out, lets the stone fly from his fingers and over the water. It skims the surface for half a second, then bounces, hitting the surface of the water with a barely audible smack. It only skips once: when it comes down the second time, it sinks. But it does skip.
Jay whoops, jumping on Finn like he just scored a touchdown. “I told you!” It’s a cliche, but his grin really does stretch from ear to ear. “Told you you don’t forget.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Finn tells him, but he can’t keep an answering silly grin from creeping across his own face. He didn’t do much of this, when he was a kid - this simple, ordinary kind of fun. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it until now. Maybe they can try out bottle rockets too, sometime.
But he also has a sore wrist from the past dozen or so attempts, so he says, “I’m gonna go sit,” indicating the little spit of land that points out into the bay. The seals - sea lions - are mostly lazing there, but there’s a spot a little ways back where he won’t be directly in their midst. It’s cool even to be this close: he’s never actually seen a wild animal outside of a zoo before. And these things are clearly wild. At ease with humans in their midst, but still wild.
Jay follows him across the beach, but he doesn’t sit down with him: he’s still got a rock in his hand, and he hefts it, eyes narrowed. Then he flings his arm out, sends it spinning. It hits the water and skips three times before it sinks.
“Showoff,” Finn call from his spot on the sand.
“Damn right.” Jay grins at him over his shoulder, then picks up another one and throws it. This one sinks immediately. Finn buries his laughter in his arm.
The sea lions hadn’t bothered to scatter when Finn and Jay came closer; they hadn’t moved at all. Now, as Finn watches Jay gear up for his third attempt, he becomes aware of a soft huffing noise nearby. One of them - a baby, Finn thinks, from the size of it - has shuffled across the sand to inspect this interloper on his beach. Finn eyes it warily. "Hey, do these things bite?"
"Probably," Jay calls over his shoulder. "They eat fish, so they've gotta have sharp teeth." He tosses his latest pebble, then turns, grinning. "Looks like he likes you, though."
The sea lion is shuffling closer, doing that funny, flapping walk they do. He stops by Finn's foot, head tilted like he's contemplating something. He doesn't look aggressive, Finn thinks, but there's several larger ones a few feet away - probably the parents - who are keeping an eye on the whole interaction and who he doesn't doubt will swarm him if he makes a wrong move. He stays still.
"Hi," he says to the baby. He's actually not sure, come to think of it, if it's a boy or a girl. How do you even tell? Whatever it is, it's still watching Finn. It noses at his foot - he's really glad he didn't think to kick his shoes off, earlier - then, with several noisy huffs, launches itself up onto Finn's lower legs. It's heavier than it looks, and warmer. He can smell the fish on its breath from here, and catch a glimpse of teeth which - yes - definitely look sharp enough to bite. The baby rests its head on Finn's knee, eyes unblinking as it stares at him. Finn contemplates staring back, then wonders if sea lions are like gorillas and will attack if they think you're challenging them.
He looks away, then groans at what he sees. Jay's still parked in the same spot, but he's somehow manages to grab the Polaroid camera they packed out of his backpack, and is busy snapping pictures. His shoulders are shaking with silent laughter. Finn grunts, shifting under the weight of the sea lion - which is rapidly becoming uncomfortable - and glares. "Little help, here?"
"Not sure there's anything I can do," Jay calls. He takes a final picture, then lowers the camera. "Not unless you want me to fight Mom and Dad over there. It'll move when it wants to."
He's probably right, much as Finn doesn't like hearing it. He's not, generally speaking, a fan of heavy things on top of him. This isn't the normal kind of weight, obviously - a sea lion isn't going to do anything to him besides lay there and be a pain in the ass, and he really should be stopping to appreciate how cool it is that it even got this close. But he still doesn't enjoy being pinned. He shifts one of his legs, drawing his knee up so that it pokes the sea lion in the stomach. The animal huffs in aggravation and - thank God - launches itself off, rolling to the side and then righting itself as it waddles off towards the rest of the group. One of the bigger ones greets it with a nuzzle, making honking noises that Finn's pretty sure translate across language and species: I told you not to do that.
"Here." When he looks up, Jay's standing next to him, offering a hand to help him up. He takes it, letting Jay pull him upright, and bends to dust some of the sand off his soaked jeans. He pulls a face. "Laundry tonight."
"Guess so," Jay says, then offers a Polaroid. "You gotta admit it's pretty fucking cute, though."
Finn looks at the picture, and laughs in spite of himself. Jay managed to catch him before he looked away from the sea lion, so he's locked in a staring contest with an animal the size of a spaniel. The sea lion looks curious; Finn looks like he's five seconds away from shitting himself in terror. It is cute - well, the animal is cute. He's not prepared to say the same for himself.
"Please tell me we're burning these," he says, and Jay snatches the picture out of his hand. Sticks it in his pocket before he has a chance to grab it back.
"No way," he says, "are you kidding me? I'm framing it."
"You -" Finn lunges at him, half-grappling, and Jay twists in his hold so that they both go toppling over into the sand. They wind up with Finn on top, his calves tucked along Jay's sides, the two of them swatting ineffectively at each other. They're both laughing too hard to actually accomplish much. They're sandy and damp within minutes, breathless with the silliness of it all, Jay sneaking a hand up under his shirt to tickle his ribs so that Finn yelps and jumps back. Jay doesn't try to climb on top of him - they learned that lesson early - but he does hook a leg around Finn's to keep him in place, propping himself up on his elbow. "Uncle?"
"Yeah," Finn gets out between full-body chuckles. "Uncle, yeah. I give." He flops back in the sand. "You better be framing that in your room. Behind something."
"I was thinking my dresser," Jay says, stretching out next to him on his stomach. "Next to the one from Christmas."
The mental image makes Finn soften. Jay bought this particular Polaroid camera specifically for this trip, but only because his old one had been on its last legs. He likes taking pictures, prefers the Polaroid so he doesn't have to worry about taking them to get developed. They'd spent the past Christmas together, and ended up with about a dozen pictures of themselves goofing off around the shitty little plastic Christmas tree Jay's roommates had put up in the living room. Finn's not brave enough to put any of them up in his dorm room - he's probably not going to get inspected by the RA, but the possibility is always there - but he does keep one pressed in his copy of The Damnation Game that he got at Open Pages. When he's got a place of his own, he thinks, he'll tack it up on the wall.
There's a splash from the direction of the sea lions: when he looks back, they're plopping into the water one by one. The baby is being nosed along by one of the adults, who are clearly impatient to get back to swimming, but it stops long enough to look back at the beach. Tries to turn around, but it blocked by the adult behind it, who all but shoves it into the water. It bobs under for a second, then surfaces, jumps, and disappears again. The others follow, until there's nothing left to show they were ever there except ripples in the waves.
"Think they'll come back?" Jay says. He looks a little wistful.
"They live here," Finn says. "So, probably." It's a nice life, he thinks. Even by human standards. Swim all day, lay out on the beach when you're tired, then go back in the water when you feel like it. Pop your head out only when you want to. Be fearless enough that you can just go right up to the strange, two-legged animals sitting on your beach and investigate without worrying that they'll hurt you.
"Guess they do," Jay says, and puts his hand over to cover Finn's. Finn glances up and down the beach, but there's no need for it - the place is deserted, at this time of day. It's just the two of them, and a few seagulls perched on the pier. Now that the sun is going down, his jeans feel clammy and cold, but not so much so that he wants to go inside. Besides, his hand - the one Jay's holding - is still warm.
Nice life, he thinks again.
The other thing about San Francisco is: they don't need to worry about being loud, here.
It was always at the back of their minds - well, it was always at the back of Finn's mind, and he's pretty sure Jay was thinking about it, too - back in Boulder. They had an excuse ready for why Finn was in Jay's room all the time (although, as the months went by, he'd started to suspect that they were less believed and more tacitly tolerated) but that excuse was not going to cover the sounds of two guys fucking, so they had to be careful about it. Finn's room was even worse for that, because he lived on a floor with seven other guys and no excuses to offer if they happened to notice Jay coming by. Neither of them had money for a motel, especially after they started saving for the trip, and going home to Denver was possibly the worst option of all. So they stayed quiet, as a rule. Finn got really used to sticking his fist in his mouth, or muffling Jay's noises with his hand. Just in case. They might have been able to get away with it, if they'd gone to the bar, but Finn had never scraped up enough courage to suggest it. Everywhere they went, people were watching and listening. They might not even realize they were doing it, until they noticed something off, but they still were.
San Francisco is very obviously not like that, from the moment they set foot in the hostel. Part of it is just that they're anonymous here - if someone sees and disapproves, then it's bound to be a stranger who can't report back to their classmates or families even if they wanted to. But it's more than that. There's kind of a default assumption here - at least, in the neighbourhood where their hostel is - that everybody around them is here for the same purpose, so nobody has any reason to look sideways at anyone else. When they arrive to check in to the hostel, there's two guys in line in front of them, and one had his hand shoved in the other's back pocket. Not groping him, exactly, but just comfortably resting there, like his hand isn't on another man's ass in front of anyone who might walk by and see. Which Finn had, and he'd stared, open-mouthed, until the two men were done checking in and Jay was nudging him because it was their turn. As far as he can tell, nobody even notices him looking. And at night, they can hear soft sounds from the neighbouring rooms, chatter and laughter and sometimes the kinds of grunts and gasps that are unmistakable for anything but sex. No one makes an issue of it. No one cares.
It's a good thing, as it turns out. Absent any reason to muffle themselves, he and Jay are both really fucking loud.
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck," Jay chants, one arm tight around Finn's shoulders to keep his balance as his hips keep jolting. They're both sitting up in bed, and Jay's got his legs splayed around Finn's waist while Finn jacks them both off in one hand. It feels so good, there's black spots dancing around in front of his eyes. He's heard the saying about going blind from jerking off too much, but it had never occurred to him that you could go blind from jerking someone else off. It's not even the jerking off that feels good, really (although it does feel good) it's having Jay wrapped around him like this, skin on skin everywhere, no nagging fears that someone's going to kick the door in any minute and catch them. Nothing to focus on at all except the pleasure of it: his body and Jay's rocking together, both irrefutably male, irrefutably eager and wanting. He can taste salt when he pressed his mouth to Jay's shoulder, smell the musk of him. It sends a spike of pleasure through his stomach, winds him up. Based on the noises Jay's making, he seems to feel the same way. "Jesus fucking, Jesus- Christ, God, fuck -"
He sounds like Gwen when she really gets on a tear, Finn thinks, and the thought makes him shake with laughter. Jay's voice is slurred with pleasure, his eyes nearly crossed, but he still manages to gather himself enough to frown at Finn. "What's funny?"
"Nothing," Finn says, and moves his hand a little faster. Just to hear Jay swear again, which he does. "I was thinking, if my sister could hear you -"
Jay huffs, rocking his hips again. "You wanna talk about your sister? Now?"
"Nope," Finn says, and tips them over so that Jay's on his back with Finn lying on top of him. The change of angle feels - not as good at it had before, harder to keep his hand moving between their bodies. But it does let them just slide against each other, mindless humping, wet heat spreading across both their stomachs. "Hold on, hold on -" Finn rocks to one side and drags Jay with him, so now they're face to face, both propped up on their elbows. One of Jay's hands joins his on their dicks, while the other slides down his lower back, fingers finding the divot just above his tailbone. He's kissing Finn everywhere he can reach, but he stops and pulls back long enough to say, "this okay?"
Finn mouths at his neck. "Yeah," he says, "yeah." There's been a lot of experimenting, for the two of them: a lot of trial and error to figure out what works, what feels good and what doesn't, what's going to make Finn shake and pant in a bad way. There's places he doesn't like being touched without warning, and some where he doesn't like being touched at all. But this, here - this is okay. They drew the curtains when they got in, but there's still a bit of sunlight creeping in through the gap, and the air is warm and damp and salty in a way that Colorado never is, never has been. He's here. He's here. He can't be anywhere else.
Jay’s hand on his back is urging him to move closer and faster, which he does, but it doesn’t feel like enough and also he can’t hold Jay as close as he wants and still have space to move. Jay huffs again, says, “fuck, hang on, let me -” and pulls back just long enough to flip over so that they’re chest to back and Finn’s slotted into the hot, slick space between his thighs. Jay groans, reaches back with one hand to grab his hip and encourage him to keep moving. It’s really not necessary: Finn can’t stop moving in this position, can’t keep himself from thrusting into that heat. It feels like fucking, actual fucking. They haven’t done that yet. Giving or taking, he’s not ready for it. Might never be. But this way, he can press against Jay from thigh to shoulder, reach around to jerk him off even while he’s driving forward almost frantically. He might cry. He has before, a couple times. Jay doesn’t care, but Finn does, so he buries his face in Jay’s neck and mouths at his shoulder, biting down hard enough to leave a bruise but not enough to break skin. It’s good, having something in his mouth. It helps him focus.
He brings his free hand up to Jay’s chest, palming the soft area around his nipple. He thinks maybe this is how you’re supposed to feel up girls, and the basic principle is the same. It works, if the way Jay arches into his grip is any indication. He flicks at a nipple with his thumbnail, remembering how it had felt the last time Jay did it to him, how sensation had shot from the point of contact down to his stomach and his groin, like a string being yanked. Jay makes a noise like, “hah-ha-ah,” and Finn feels the way he stiffens all over when he comes, his thighs clenching tight around Finn until he’s practically holding him in place. Finn buries his shout in Jay’s shoulder and comes after him. It keeps going and going until his whole body feels like hot wax, shapeless and fluid. If they were standing up, he thinks, he’d collapse on the spot.
They both stay where they are for a minute, breathing heavily, until the stickiness of their bodies pressed together starts to feel more uncomfortable than not, and then Finn peels himself off. Rolls to the side and gets rid of the condom, tossing it at the garbage pail. They don’t use condoms, always - they got checked out at the campus clinic months ago, and they’re both clean - but it’s useful for when they don’t want to wash the sheets. He can hear Jay doing the same thing on the other side of the bed, before he rolls back to the middle and flops on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow. “Fuck me,” he mutters through a mouth full of cotton.
“Just did,” Finn says, because it’s too easy. Jay snorts and swats at him, but doesn’t move otherwise. Finn pushes himself into a sitting position, taking stock of them both. The condoms did help, but they’re both still pretty messy. “You wanna shower?”
Jay makes a disgruntled noise into the pillow, and Finn laughs. Jay, he’s learned over the past eight months, will inevitably pass the fuck out after they have sex. Doesn't matter the time of day or the circumstances - it knocks him out no matter what. His eyelids are already drooping, which means that if they’re going to get any kind of cleaned up, then Finn has to be in charge of making it happen. He swings his legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll get a washcloth,” he says over his shoulder.
He gets the washcloth from the hostel bathroom, runs it under the tap until it’s warm, then comes back to the bedroom. Wipes Jay down first, while he’s still semi-conscious, then cleans himself off and drops the cloth in the laundry basket before he crawls back in next to Jay. He’d fished his boxers off the floor while he was up, so he pulls them back on. He doesn’t like sleeping naked. Jay, either too lazy to get up or just content with this state of affairs, stays as he is. There’s a bit of a breeze from the window, but the room’s still warm enough that they don’t need to bother with the blankets.
“Hey,” Jay mumbles, and Finn starts a little. He’d thought he was already asleep. He waves a hand vaguely in Finn’s direction, then manages to find his hair and comb his fingers through it. “‘S good,” he says, and Finn can tell he’s too sleepy to make it sound like a question, but the intent is still there.
“Yeah,” Finn says, and means it. “Really good.” Better than he thought it could be. Better than he thought he could be.
“. . . good,” Jay says, or something like it. He’s snoring not a minute later. Finn smiles at the ceiling, listens to the ocean outside the window, and breathes. Just breathes.
“Is this it?” Finn asks.
They’re standing on Castro Street in the late afternoon - late enough for the bars to be open, not late enough for it to be dark out. It had been Jay’s idea to try and track down the bar he’d tried to get into back in the day, and Finn had agreed just for the fun of it. They’re probably not actually going to end up drinking there - for one thing, neither of them have turned twenty-one yet, though they’re both carrying IDs that say otherwise - but it’s an excuse to wander up and down the street, picking out places that kind of match Jay’s fuzzy memories of his first trip to the city. After two hours, though, Finn’s pretty sure it’s a lost cause.
“Maybe?” Jay squints at the building Finn’s pointing to, a wood-paneled building with a flashing sign out front that says DETOUR. “I think it started with a P or a B or something. And there was a takeout place next door, I remember that part. I got chicken there before I went back to the hotel.” He shrugs. “The place might not even be there anymore. I dunno how long these bars last.”
Finn glances up and down the street; he can see at least three other bars from where he’s standing, and that’s not counting the ones they found down various alleys and side streets. “Plenty of competition.”
“Yeah.” Jay nods at the crowd in front of the Detour. “Plenty of customers, too. Hey, you wanna sit down?”
There is, miraculously, an unoccupied bench nearby; they all but pounce on it before someone else beats them to it. Finn leans against the back of the bench, slouching a little as he watches the crowd go by. A lot of guys walking around shirtless; a lot of women with short and shaggy hair, several of whom could probably pass for boys if they wanted to. Lots of leather. More men than women in skirts, although some of them have so much makeup on, he can’t really tell whether they’re men or women at all. He hadn’t dressed up for tonight - he’s in jeans and a t-shirt, like always - and, for the first time in his life, he feels a little underdressed. Not that he wants to start wearing eyeshadow but. Well. He could take his shirt off. If he was feeling brave enough, which he isn’t. Jay’s leaning casually against his side, their hands interlocked, and he thinks that’s as noticeable as he wants to be, for now.
“How’d you even figure out where to go?” he asks. “There can’t have been a brochure or anything.”
“Honestly?” Jay shrugs, looking sheepish. “I just wandered around until I found - well, this.” He gestures. “Waited til everyone was asleep and then swiped my brother’s ID and snuck out. Lucky he was still out when I got back, or I would’ve got my ass kicked for that.” His fingers twitch in Finn’s grasp, a sure sign that he’s thinking something through before he says it. “I guess I wanted - I dunno. I’d heard about this place. People told my parents to keep us away from here, when they heard we were coming to town. They made it sound cool. Probably didn’t mean to, but they did.” He laughs a little at that, a laugh Finn’s learned to interpret over the past eight months as the sound he makes when he’s trying to brush something off. Finn tries not to poke at him, when that happens. He knows what it sounds like when someone’s circling something too open and raw to touch. But they’re here, on purpose, and their hands are still clasped tight, and he thinks maybe it might be okay to ask something a little sideways of what Jay’s talking about.
“Did you,” he starts to say, then stops. Tries to think of a better way to phrase it. “You were - I mean, you knew you wanted, when you were fourteen - ?” He has no idea what a normal person’s timeline for making those kinds of discoveries is. He knows what his looked like, but he’s fairly fucking certain he’s not the norm. He hopes so, anyway.
“God, yeah.” Jay laughs again, and it’s not exactly the same laugh, but it’s close. “Shit, I knew when I was eight.”
“When you were -” Finn blinks. Even for ordinary people, he wouldn’t have thought it happened that early.
“Yeah. Well.” Jay shifts a little on the bench. “I guess maybe I didn’t know, but other people did. And they kind of told me. So I didn’t figure it out, I just -” He waves his free hand. “You know?”
“. . . yeah,” Finn says, because he does. How old was he the first time someone called him a fag? Nine? Mom had still been alive, he knows that, because he’d come home and asked her what it meant and then she’d gone pale and he’d known he’d said something terrible without understanding what or why. But maybe he’s remembering wrong and it hadn’t been directed at him the time he asked Mom about it, because she’d been dead by the time he was ten and the kids at school hadn’t started that particular name-calling in earnest until sixth grade. And he for sure hadn’t figured it out for himself until a few years after that. So.
“Third grade,” Jay says abruptly, and Finn realizes with a jolt that he’s not done. “I think - yeah, it must’ve been third grade. We were doing Shakespeare for the school play, you know the one with the fairies? So all the kids in my class got their faces painted, and I had a butterfly right here -” He taps his left cheekbone. “And my parents had split by then, so my dad didn’t come to see the play, but he came to the house after to pick us up. And he saw the butterfly, and he hit the fucking roof.” His laugh this time definitely isn’t brushing anything off, even if he means it to. Raw, Finn thinks, and tightens his hold. “I could hear him and Mom going at it in the other room for a fuckin’ - it must’ve been an hour. He was yelling about how she was raising a little faggot, and she was yelling about how he could show up more than once a month if he wanted a say, and eventually he just walked out. Never talked to him again, after that. He came by to pick up Connor and Megan a couple of times, but he always stayed out in the driveway. Dunno if Mom wouldn’t let him in, or he just didn’t want to come. Anyways, he stopped coming by after Megan finished high school. I think he died a couple years ago.”
“Jesus,” Finn says. “I’m sorry.” He’s thinking about the house he grew up in, the way screams sounded through the walls; about how it had felt as a little kid, hiding under covers with your fingers stuffed in your ears, thinking you could make it not real if you just didn’t hear the words. How much he’d wanted his dad to get better, even after the beltings started, and how he would’ve felt if he’d just disappeared one day. Disappeared because of him. It’s too big for him to get his head around, too alien. What’s worse, your dad being the monster in the house, or your dad not being there at all?
“Don’t be, he was an asshole,” Jay says. His voice is deliberately light, and it doesn’t fool Finn for a fucking minute.
“Yeah, obviously,” Finn says. “I mean, I’m sorry he was an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.”
Jay turns his head to look at Finn properly. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody deserves anything, at least when you’re a little kid. You just get lucky, or you don’t. I mean, what kid actually deserves to get treated like shit? It just happens.”
“Yeah,” Finn says. “Because people make it happen.”
Jay huffs a little. “Feels like we’ve talked about this before,” he says. “Only last time, I was the one telling you that.”
And Finn can’t really argue with that, because it’s true. On the rare occasions they’ve talked about what it was like for Finn, growing up, he’s brushed off any offers of sympathy. If he accepts them, then he has to agree that there’s a need for it, and that acknowledgement would open up a screaming void in him that he can’t let himself fall into. If he lets himself think about it, he’ll go insane. But it’s different when it’s someone else.
“Besides,” Jay goes on. “I’m here now. And he’s dead. And I -” He tugs on Finn’s hand lightly. “I won, I’m pretty sure. If there was anything to win, I won it. Shit, just look where we are.” He waves his free hand at the street, encompassing them, the bars, and the crowds. “He’d fucking hate it. And it doesn’t even matter, because I don’t hate it. This is what I wanted. And I’m here. We're here. So.”
Finn looks around, then back at Jay. Thinks about the time it took to get here - not just the drive, but the years, the fear and the rage and the hiding and the fighting he’d had to do just to survive. He hadn’t been meant to survive, he’s pretty sure. If anyone was making plans - which he doubts, but anyway - they hadn’t planned for him to live this long. He hadn’t planned to live this long. But Jay's right: here he is.
He doesn’t have words for that, though. So he just squeezes Jay's hand a little tighter and says, “do you wanna go in there?” He waves at the bar that seems the least intimidating - which is to say, they won’t stand out for their lack of glittery makeup. There's no bright lights or pounding music, just the sound of someone playing a guitar. It seems like it could be manageable. If he tries.
Jay squints at him. “Do you want to?” Finn can’t blame him for being surprised: he’s shied away from public places like this for as long as they’ve known each other. And before, come to that.
But he can be brave, for this. He shrugs. “We can give it a shot. What’s the worst that happens, we listen to shitty music for an hour and then leave?”
“I think the worst that happens is, we get carded,” Jay says, gravely enough that it makes Finn laugh. “But sure, okay.” He gets to his feet, pulling Finn with him. “Let’s give it a shot.”
It can’t last forever. He knows that. Summer break is longer in college than it was in high school, but they still have to go back in September. Actually, they have to go back at the beginning of August, because they hadn’t been able to save enough money to stay a full three months. It comes faster than he’d expected.
“I’ll miss this,” he says quietly. It’s their last night before checkout, and they’re sitting on the beach by the pier, where they’ve spent most of their nights since they got there. The bar they ended up getting into hadn’t been that bad - more of a coffee house than anything, complete with an open mic and some truly terrible singers inviting themselves up onstage - but he still prefers the beach. Likes the feeling of fresh air on his face, the breeze ruffling his hair. The sight of the ocean stretching out forever, like he could get up and jump in and swim until his own exhaustion stopped him - there wouldn’t be anything else in his way.
“Yeah,” Jay says. He's quiet, too. It’s like the beach demands it of them: they could make noise, but it would feel useless. Like a little kid throwing a tantrum for an audience of none. “Gonna miss all of it.” He makes a face. “Especially in January.”
“God, yeah.” Just the memory of a Colorado winter is enough to make his teeth ache. Nearby, the sea lions sprawled out on the sand - there’s fewer of them at this time of day, but they’re still around - eye them lazily. One of them snorts, like he’s agreeing with them. “Wish we could stay.”
He digs his toes into the sand, feeling the damp silt rubbing against his skin. Everything is beautiful here. Even the dead seaweed washed up on shore, or the foamy garbage patch floating by the pier. It’s beautiful because it’s here. Finn's never been in a place before that was beautiful just because of what it means instead of how it looks. He doesn’t know how to leave it.
“We could,” Jay says. He’s sitting up, his elbows resting on his knees. His own hair has grown shaggy since they arrived, and the breeze lifts it off the back of his neck. Under other circumstances, Finn would want to put his mouth there. But tonight feels too sacred for that. “If we wanted to.”
Finn frowns at him. “And what, drop out of school?” He’s in the education department, and Jay’s in Earth Sciences; they both have two years left until they get their degrees.
Jay lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “They’ve got colleges out here, don’t they? Bet they take transfers.”
Finn had been laying back on the sand; this makes him sit up. “I don’t know if you can transfer on a scholarship. It might just apply to the one school.” And he for sure can’t afford to finish his degree without one. Jay’s not on a scholarship, because he has an inheritance from his grandmother, but if he went and Finn stayed - ? The idea feels like a lump in his stomach.
Jay seems to see some of it in his face, because he scoots a little closer. “Okay,” he says, “so we don't do it yet. We finish up our degrees and then we move out here. There must be jobs. Or, if you wanted to go to teacher's college - they’ve gotta have those out here, too. You could get the degree and work part-time, maybe. Or if I got hired at a research lab, they pay pretty well. If we found a place that was cheap to rent - we could afford it, probably.”
Finn looks at him, hard. Jay's expression is - “Have you been thinking about this?” he asks, slowly. “Looking into it?”
“Kind of.” Jay slides closer until they’re pressed hip to hip. “I mean, I started looking last September. I knew I didn’t wanna go back to Albuquerque once I graduated, and I didn’t really wanna stay in Colorado, either. So I was thinking either here or New York, but I fucking hate the weather in Colorado, and the East Coast probably isn't any better. And -” He taps one finger on his knee. It’s a nervous gesture. “I mean. You like it here, right? After we got out here last month, I thought maybe, if you wanted to move out here for good and you couldn’t afford a place - and we could -” The tapping gets faster. Finn puts a hand out, covers Jay's hand and knee. Holds on tight. "I mean. I can't afford a place either, on my own. So, if you wanted -"
Finn can feel the tremors running through his body, just from the way they're pressed so close. His expression doesn't change, he looks as calm as ever. But it's been eight months, and Finn knows how to read him a little better, now. It's been eight months. That's not a lot of time, in the grand scheme. But it feels like longer. Maybe that's what happens, when you meet someone: time collapses, folds in on itself, because this is where you were supposed to be, and the universe is finally settling now that you're in the right place. He doesn't trust the feeling, really. Hasn't had a lot of practice trusting anything. And it could be that they'll hate each other two years from now and their plans will fall through and then - ? Then they'll be back where they started. It's not risking that much, just agreeing to this right now. But it feels like it is. Feels like he's making a promise, even if it's just to wait and see.
He hasn't made a lot of promises in his life. Never feels like he'll actually be able to keep them. This one feels different.
"Where would you want to get a place?" he asks, which is not saying yes out loud, but it's as close as he can get. "The Castro? Are there houses there?"
He feels the moment Jay absorbs what he's saying: the tremors speed up, then wind back down until they're barely there. The shaky aftershocks of fear, when your body hasn't quite caught up to the fact that the danger has passed. He knows the feeling very well. "Probably," Jay says, breathless. "But a house is - it's gotta be what, three hundred thousand? We can't afford that right after we graduate. We'd have to look for an apartment first." He pauses. "Have you ever lived in an apartment?"
Finn shrugs. "I live in a dorm." At least an apartment wouldn't involve a shared bathroom.
"Huh. Yeah. Good point." The tremors have just about stopped, a shy smile stealing over his face. "Can you cook?"
"Can you?" It's a redundant question, he knows Jay can. He's eaten his cooking before, on weekends when his roommates had all gone home and they'd had the house to themselves. He's not Julia Child, but he can make spaghetti and meatballs without killing anyone. And they can eat it on the couch in front of the TV, watching old movies and arguing about whether Night of the Living Dead is better than The Crazies. Split a carton of ice cream afterwards, eat it straight out of the box.
In their own apartment, Finn thinks, they won't have to wait for anyone to go home to have the place to themselves. They can just do that whenever they want. Fall asleep in front of the tv, curled up on the couch together, and not worry about anyone coming home early and catching them.
Jay wedges himself even closer to Finn, until Finn has to wrap an arm over his shoulders to keep them both from overbalancing and falling over. Buries his face in Jay's hair, which smells like salt and seawater. He laughs a little, and doesn't even know what he's laughing at.
"I can learn," he says. "I've got two years. We've got two years." What a strange thought, that this is something they're sharing. Maybe time goes faster, split in two like this. "And we can save up and - I don't know. Buy furniture?" He's not actually sure what goes into getting your own place. Well, neither of them have ever done it before, so they'll have to figure it out together. They have time.
"Yeah," Jay says. His voice is a little muffled: his face is smushed against Finn's shirt. He wriggles, and Finn eases his hold so that Jay can sit up. They're still a tangle of limbs, but both their heads are free. "We can start planning tomorrow, while we're driving."
Finn holds on tighter. "Right," he says. Closes his eyes, presses his nose to Jay's cheek. It's like kissing, but not quite. It's the thing that you do when you're not kissing, you're not trying to really do anything besides be close. The thing you do when you love someone, maybe. That still seems to fragile to say out loud, too embarrassing. But also, they just agreed to move in together. Does it even need saying?
Two years, he thinks. Two years to plan, two years to say what they need to say. Two years to learn how to say it. They have nothing but time.
Fandom: The Black Phone (Movies - Derrickson)
Summary: The thing about San Francisco is, it’s so much brighter than Denver.
Additional Tags: Road Trips, Intercrural Sex, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia
Rating: M
As it turns out, Jay’s car can make it all the way to San Francisco. Barely.
They stop at a gas station just inside the city - it feels stupid to, when they’re only half an hour away from the hostel, but the tank is almost empty - and once they’ve filled up on gas and climbed back in, the car refuses to start. Just makes a couple of spluttering noises when Jay turns the key in the ignition, then clunks and goes silent. Finn’s pretty sure he can smell smoke.
Jay looks at him, wide-eyed. “Uh,” he says.
And Finn can’t help but burst out laughing at the look on his face. Leans forward and plants his forehead on the dashboard, hiccuping with giggles. It’s just so dumb. They made so many contingency plans for what they’d do if the car crapped out on the highway (if they’d gotten stranded in Utah, the plan had been, “walk until we see a ‘Welcome to Nevada’ sign”) but none whatsoever for what they’d do if it died on them ten miles away from their destination.
“It’s not funny!” Jay says, which only makes Finn laugh harder. “We still have to get back at the end of the summer, and -” Finn can hear the moment when he gives up, just before he starts laughing, too. “And if we leave it here we’ll get towed, and -”
“We’re not leaving it here,” Finn says, finally surfacing from another bout of giggles. “There’s a garage right next door, look. They’ll probably fix it for us for free just to make sure we’re not taking up a parking spot at the station.”
Jay grumbles at him, but he gets out of the car and goes to flag down one of the station attendants. Finn stays where he is for a second, leaving his cheek pressed to the dashboard. It’s warm, and a little slippery. Jay’s car is nearly fifteen years old, a Plymouth Duster - “my stepdad’s old car, from before he upgraded,” he’d told Finn - and the paneling of the dash is all vinyl done up to look like wood. The sun shining through the windshield for the past fifteen hundred miles has heated it like a stovetop, but it’s not uncomfortable like a metal dash would be. It reminds Finn a little of the den in his childhood house, the same shade of mahogany the walls had all been paneled with. Although, now that he thinks of it, that was probably vinyl, too. No one in his family was springing for actual hardwood.
Jay comes around and taps on his window, gesturing for Finn to get up and out of the car. He does, wincing a little when the muscles in his legs protest. This is their first stop since Reno, where they’d had breakfast that morning, and his body is letting him know it. The ache takes a moment to dissipate, along with the pins and needles, so he makes a point of stretching once he’s up on his feet. “What’s the word?”
“They’re towing it to the garage,” Jay says, and makes a face at him. “Don’t say it.”
Finn grins. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
“So were you.”
“Only because you said it first.”
“What, so it’s my fault for being right?” Jay wads up the gas receipt in his hands and lobs it at Finn, who dodges, laughing. “How are we getting into the city, do you know?”
“Yeah, the guy at the station says there’s a bus coming through in about half an hour.” Jay yawns, stretching his arms over his head. The movement pulls the hem of his t-shirt out of his jeans, baring a strip of his stomach, which is nice to look at. “They’ve got a little cafe thing in there we can hang out at until it gets here.”
“Sounds good.” Finn goes around to the back of the car to pull their suitcases out. “You want coffee?”
“Gas station coffee? Fuck no.” Jay reaches out and snags Finn with a finger through his belt loop as he walks by. “Distract me or something. Or wake me up when the bus gets in. Don’t care which.”
“You should get some sleep, probably,” Finn says. They’d slept in the car last night, pulled over on the side of the highway somewhere near Pyramid Lake. Finn hasn’t camped much in his life, hadn’t ever really seen the appeal. Neither has Jay, from what he’s said. Both of them were up and down all night, listening for owls and coyotes and whatever other predators might come crawling out of the desert. It didn’t feel dangerous the way Denver still does, but it wasn’t especially restful, either. And he’d at least been able to nod off this morning. Jay’s been driving all day; no wonder he’s yawning.
Finn’s eyes flick to Jay’s finger hooked around his belt loop, then to the gas station. The attendant’s gone back inside, there’s no one watching them. Even if there was, it’s not a total giveaway. There could be an innocent explanation for that tiny point of contact. But it’s not, really, and someone looking their way could probably figure that out.
Jay sees him looking, lets go. “Hey,” he says. “It’s all good.” It somehow always is, with him. After all these months, Finn still doesn’t know how. He always feels like a bundle of raw nerves, no matter the reason; meanwhile, Jay lets everything roll off his back. Finn can’t decide whether it’s better that one of them is hyper-cautious, or that the other is miraculously calm all the time. Maybe it’s both.
He takes a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it’s all good.” Not good enough for him to take Jay’s hand, while they’re out here, but good enough for him to relax a little bit. “Let’s go in.”
The thing about San Francisco is, it’s so much brighter than Denver.
Or - maybe brighter isn’t the right word. Denver had been bright, but it had also been sharp and cold. Everything under a constant grey film, a consequence of the forever overcast skies. The air biting, even in the summer. Probably it had something to do with the elevation. But even aside from that, his surroundings had always seemed dull, depleted of colour. Grey and white houses, dead grass lawns, gunmetal chain link fences. Every room some shade of brown. Denver drained people like a vampire, until they all were bloodless and bleached. If he’d stayed, Finn knows it would’ve happened to him, too.
San Francisco isn’t like that, and it’s not just because it’s warmer. It’s not even just because the houses are painted bright colours, or because they’re next to the teal-green bay, or because the sky is a vivid, cloudless blue. If Finn had to guess, it’s got something to do with the sunlight. It catches colours the way the light in Denver never did, illuminates it instead of washing it out. Even dull, muddy shades like the faded grey of his t-shirt, catch the eye here. There’s so much brilliance, he almost doesn’t know where to look. But the bay keeps drawing him back.
“I’m going to hit a seal,” he says, as Jay folds his fingers around a pebble. They’ve been trying to skip stones for the better part of an hour, with varying degrees of success - all of Finn’s attempts have either immediately sunk, or landed in the wet sand at the edge of the water - but Jay’s actually managed to make a few skip, so now he’s trying to teach Finn how it’s done. He doesn’t actually seem to know how it’s done, though, so it’s not going too well.
They were alone on the beach when they started, but a group of seals (which, a tourist brochure has informed them, aren’t actually seals; they’re sea lions) have bellied up to the shore and are watching them with bright black eyes. Finn hasn’t actually hit any of them yet, probably because he’s deliberately aiming in the opposite direction. But he’s got the distinct impression that they almost expect him to.
“You’re not going to hit a seal,” Jay says. He’s still got a hand wrapped around Finn’s, ostensibly to guide his arm, but it’s starting to feel a bit like an excuse. “You told me you used to pitch.”
“Yeah, when I was thirteen.” He hasn’t done it since. Part of him misses it. A bigger part, though, is pretty sure that he’s lost the skill in the intervening eight years.
“You don’t forget it, though,” Jay says, like he can read Finn’s mind. “It’s muscle memory. You just gotta spin it, like a Frisbee, then throw it up -” Finn lets him pull his arm up and out, lets the stone fly from his fingers and over the water. It skims the surface for half a second, then bounces, hitting the surface of the water with a barely audible smack. It only skips once: when it comes down the second time, it sinks. But it does skip.
Jay whoops, jumping on Finn like he just scored a touchdown. “I told you!” It’s a cliche, but his grin really does stretch from ear to ear. “Told you you don’t forget.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Finn tells him, but he can’t keep an answering silly grin from creeping across his own face. He didn’t do much of this, when he was a kid - this simple, ordinary kind of fun. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it until now. Maybe they can try out bottle rockets too, sometime.
But he also has a sore wrist from the past dozen or so attempts, so he says, “I’m gonna go sit,” indicating the little spit of land that points out into the bay. The seals - sea lions - are mostly lazing there, but there’s a spot a little ways back where he won’t be directly in their midst. It’s cool even to be this close: he’s never actually seen a wild animal outside of a zoo before. And these things are clearly wild. At ease with humans in their midst, but still wild.
Jay follows him across the beach, but he doesn’t sit down with him: he’s still got a rock in his hand, and he hefts it, eyes narrowed. Then he flings his arm out, sends it spinning. It hits the water and skips three times before it sinks.
“Showoff,” Finn call from his spot on the sand.
“Damn right.” Jay grins at him over his shoulder, then picks up another one and throws it. This one sinks immediately. Finn buries his laughter in his arm.
The sea lions hadn’t bothered to scatter when Finn and Jay came closer; they hadn’t moved at all. Now, as Finn watches Jay gear up for his third attempt, he becomes aware of a soft huffing noise nearby. One of them - a baby, Finn thinks, from the size of it - has shuffled across the sand to inspect this interloper on his beach. Finn eyes it warily. "Hey, do these things bite?"
"Probably," Jay calls over his shoulder. "They eat fish, so they've gotta have sharp teeth." He tosses his latest pebble, then turns, grinning. "Looks like he likes you, though."
The sea lion is shuffling closer, doing that funny, flapping walk they do. He stops by Finn's foot, head tilted like he's contemplating something. He doesn't look aggressive, Finn thinks, but there's several larger ones a few feet away - probably the parents - who are keeping an eye on the whole interaction and who he doesn't doubt will swarm him if he makes a wrong move. He stays still.
"Hi," he says to the baby. He's actually not sure, come to think of it, if it's a boy or a girl. How do you even tell? Whatever it is, it's still watching Finn. It noses at his foot - he's really glad he didn't think to kick his shoes off, earlier - then, with several noisy huffs, launches itself up onto Finn's lower legs. It's heavier than it looks, and warmer. He can smell the fish on its breath from here, and catch a glimpse of teeth which - yes - definitely look sharp enough to bite. The baby rests its head on Finn's knee, eyes unblinking as it stares at him. Finn contemplates staring back, then wonders if sea lions are like gorillas and will attack if they think you're challenging them.
He looks away, then groans at what he sees. Jay's still parked in the same spot, but he's somehow manages to grab the Polaroid camera they packed out of his backpack, and is busy snapping pictures. His shoulders are shaking with silent laughter. Finn grunts, shifting under the weight of the sea lion - which is rapidly becoming uncomfortable - and glares. "Little help, here?"
"Not sure there's anything I can do," Jay calls. He takes a final picture, then lowers the camera. "Not unless you want me to fight Mom and Dad over there. It'll move when it wants to."
He's probably right, much as Finn doesn't like hearing it. He's not, generally speaking, a fan of heavy things on top of him. This isn't the normal kind of weight, obviously - a sea lion isn't going to do anything to him besides lay there and be a pain in the ass, and he really should be stopping to appreciate how cool it is that it even got this close. But he still doesn't enjoy being pinned. He shifts one of his legs, drawing his knee up so that it pokes the sea lion in the stomach. The animal huffs in aggravation and - thank God - launches itself off, rolling to the side and then righting itself as it waddles off towards the rest of the group. One of the bigger ones greets it with a nuzzle, making honking noises that Finn's pretty sure translate across language and species: I told you not to do that.
"Here." When he looks up, Jay's standing next to him, offering a hand to help him up. He takes it, letting Jay pull him upright, and bends to dust some of the sand off his soaked jeans. He pulls a face. "Laundry tonight."
"Guess so," Jay says, then offers a Polaroid. "You gotta admit it's pretty fucking cute, though."
Finn looks at the picture, and laughs in spite of himself. Jay managed to catch him before he looked away from the sea lion, so he's locked in a staring contest with an animal the size of a spaniel. The sea lion looks curious; Finn looks like he's five seconds away from shitting himself in terror. It is cute - well, the animal is cute. He's not prepared to say the same for himself.
"Please tell me we're burning these," he says, and Jay snatches the picture out of his hand. Sticks it in his pocket before he has a chance to grab it back.
"No way," he says, "are you kidding me? I'm framing it."
"You -" Finn lunges at him, half-grappling, and Jay twists in his hold so that they both go toppling over into the sand. They wind up with Finn on top, his calves tucked along Jay's sides, the two of them swatting ineffectively at each other. They're both laughing too hard to actually accomplish much. They're sandy and damp within minutes, breathless with the silliness of it all, Jay sneaking a hand up under his shirt to tickle his ribs so that Finn yelps and jumps back. Jay doesn't try to climb on top of him - they learned that lesson early - but he does hook a leg around Finn's to keep him in place, propping himself up on his elbow. "Uncle?"
"Yeah," Finn gets out between full-body chuckles. "Uncle, yeah. I give." He flops back in the sand. "You better be framing that in your room. Behind something."
"I was thinking my dresser," Jay says, stretching out next to him on his stomach. "Next to the one from Christmas."
The mental image makes Finn soften. Jay bought this particular Polaroid camera specifically for this trip, but only because his old one had been on its last legs. He likes taking pictures, prefers the Polaroid so he doesn't have to worry about taking them to get developed. They'd spent the past Christmas together, and ended up with about a dozen pictures of themselves goofing off around the shitty little plastic Christmas tree Jay's roommates had put up in the living room. Finn's not brave enough to put any of them up in his dorm room - he's probably not going to get inspected by the RA, but the possibility is always there - but he does keep one pressed in his copy of The Damnation Game that he got at Open Pages. When he's got a place of his own, he thinks, he'll tack it up on the wall.
There's a splash from the direction of the sea lions: when he looks back, they're plopping into the water one by one. The baby is being nosed along by one of the adults, who are clearly impatient to get back to swimming, but it stops long enough to look back at the beach. Tries to turn around, but it blocked by the adult behind it, who all but shoves it into the water. It bobs under for a second, then surfaces, jumps, and disappears again. The others follow, until there's nothing left to show they were ever there except ripples in the waves.
"Think they'll come back?" Jay says. He looks a little wistful.
"They live here," Finn says. "So, probably." It's a nice life, he thinks. Even by human standards. Swim all day, lay out on the beach when you're tired, then go back in the water when you feel like it. Pop your head out only when you want to. Be fearless enough that you can just go right up to the strange, two-legged animals sitting on your beach and investigate without worrying that they'll hurt you.
"Guess they do," Jay says, and puts his hand over to cover Finn's. Finn glances up and down the beach, but there's no need for it - the place is deserted, at this time of day. It's just the two of them, and a few seagulls perched on the pier. Now that the sun is going down, his jeans feel clammy and cold, but not so much so that he wants to go inside. Besides, his hand - the one Jay's holding - is still warm.
Nice life, he thinks again.
The other thing about San Francisco is: they don't need to worry about being loud, here.
It was always at the back of their minds - well, it was always at the back of Finn's mind, and he's pretty sure Jay was thinking about it, too - back in Boulder. They had an excuse ready for why Finn was in Jay's room all the time (although, as the months went by, he'd started to suspect that they were less believed and more tacitly tolerated) but that excuse was not going to cover the sounds of two guys fucking, so they had to be careful about it. Finn's room was even worse for that, because he lived on a floor with seven other guys and no excuses to offer if they happened to notice Jay coming by. Neither of them had money for a motel, especially after they started saving for the trip, and going home to Denver was possibly the worst option of all. So they stayed quiet, as a rule. Finn got really used to sticking his fist in his mouth, or muffling Jay's noises with his hand. Just in case. They might have been able to get away with it, if they'd gone to the bar, but Finn had never scraped up enough courage to suggest it. Everywhere they went, people were watching and listening. They might not even realize they were doing it, until they noticed something off, but they still were.
San Francisco is very obviously not like that, from the moment they set foot in the hostel. Part of it is just that they're anonymous here - if someone sees and disapproves, then it's bound to be a stranger who can't report back to their classmates or families even if they wanted to. But it's more than that. There's kind of a default assumption here - at least, in the neighbourhood where their hostel is - that everybody around them is here for the same purpose, so nobody has any reason to look sideways at anyone else. When they arrive to check in to the hostel, there's two guys in line in front of them, and one had his hand shoved in the other's back pocket. Not groping him, exactly, but just comfortably resting there, like his hand isn't on another man's ass in front of anyone who might walk by and see. Which Finn had, and he'd stared, open-mouthed, until the two men were done checking in and Jay was nudging him because it was their turn. As far as he can tell, nobody even notices him looking. And at night, they can hear soft sounds from the neighbouring rooms, chatter and laughter and sometimes the kinds of grunts and gasps that are unmistakable for anything but sex. No one makes an issue of it. No one cares.
It's a good thing, as it turns out. Absent any reason to muffle themselves, he and Jay are both really fucking loud.
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck," Jay chants, one arm tight around Finn's shoulders to keep his balance as his hips keep jolting. They're both sitting up in bed, and Jay's got his legs splayed around Finn's waist while Finn jacks them both off in one hand. It feels so good, there's black spots dancing around in front of his eyes. He's heard the saying about going blind from jerking off too much, but it had never occurred to him that you could go blind from jerking someone else off. It's not even the jerking off that feels good, really (although it does feel good) it's having Jay wrapped around him like this, skin on skin everywhere, no nagging fears that someone's going to kick the door in any minute and catch them. Nothing to focus on at all except the pleasure of it: his body and Jay's rocking together, both irrefutably male, irrefutably eager and wanting. He can taste salt when he pressed his mouth to Jay's shoulder, smell the musk of him. It sends a spike of pleasure through his stomach, winds him up. Based on the noises Jay's making, he seems to feel the same way. "Jesus fucking, Jesus- Christ, God, fuck -"
He sounds like Gwen when she really gets on a tear, Finn thinks, and the thought makes him shake with laughter. Jay's voice is slurred with pleasure, his eyes nearly crossed, but he still manages to gather himself enough to frown at Finn. "What's funny?"
"Nothing," Finn says, and moves his hand a little faster. Just to hear Jay swear again, which he does. "I was thinking, if my sister could hear you -"
Jay huffs, rocking his hips again. "You wanna talk about your sister? Now?"
"Nope," Finn says, and tips them over so that Jay's on his back with Finn lying on top of him. The change of angle feels - not as good at it had before, harder to keep his hand moving between their bodies. But it does let them just slide against each other, mindless humping, wet heat spreading across both their stomachs. "Hold on, hold on -" Finn rocks to one side and drags Jay with him, so now they're face to face, both propped up on their elbows. One of Jay's hands joins his on their dicks, while the other slides down his lower back, fingers finding the divot just above his tailbone. He's kissing Finn everywhere he can reach, but he stops and pulls back long enough to say, "this okay?"
Finn mouths at his neck. "Yeah," he says, "yeah." There's been a lot of experimenting, for the two of them: a lot of trial and error to figure out what works, what feels good and what doesn't, what's going to make Finn shake and pant in a bad way. There's places he doesn't like being touched without warning, and some where he doesn't like being touched at all. But this, here - this is okay. They drew the curtains when they got in, but there's still a bit of sunlight creeping in through the gap, and the air is warm and damp and salty in a way that Colorado never is, never has been. He's here. He's here. He can't be anywhere else.
Jay’s hand on his back is urging him to move closer and faster, which he does, but it doesn’t feel like enough and also he can’t hold Jay as close as he wants and still have space to move. Jay huffs again, says, “fuck, hang on, let me -” and pulls back just long enough to flip over so that they’re chest to back and Finn’s slotted into the hot, slick space between his thighs. Jay groans, reaches back with one hand to grab his hip and encourage him to keep moving. It’s really not necessary: Finn can’t stop moving in this position, can’t keep himself from thrusting into that heat. It feels like fucking, actual fucking. They haven’t done that yet. Giving or taking, he’s not ready for it. Might never be. But this way, he can press against Jay from thigh to shoulder, reach around to jerk him off even while he’s driving forward almost frantically. He might cry. He has before, a couple times. Jay doesn’t care, but Finn does, so he buries his face in Jay’s neck and mouths at his shoulder, biting down hard enough to leave a bruise but not enough to break skin. It’s good, having something in his mouth. It helps him focus.
He brings his free hand up to Jay’s chest, palming the soft area around his nipple. He thinks maybe this is how you’re supposed to feel up girls, and the basic principle is the same. It works, if the way Jay arches into his grip is any indication. He flicks at a nipple with his thumbnail, remembering how it had felt the last time Jay did it to him, how sensation had shot from the point of contact down to his stomach and his groin, like a string being yanked. Jay makes a noise like, “hah-ha-ah,” and Finn feels the way he stiffens all over when he comes, his thighs clenching tight around Finn until he’s practically holding him in place. Finn buries his shout in Jay’s shoulder and comes after him. It keeps going and going until his whole body feels like hot wax, shapeless and fluid. If they were standing up, he thinks, he’d collapse on the spot.
They both stay where they are for a minute, breathing heavily, until the stickiness of their bodies pressed together starts to feel more uncomfortable than not, and then Finn peels himself off. Rolls to the side and gets rid of the condom, tossing it at the garbage pail. They don’t use condoms, always - they got checked out at the campus clinic months ago, and they’re both clean - but it’s useful for when they don’t want to wash the sheets. He can hear Jay doing the same thing on the other side of the bed, before he rolls back to the middle and flops on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow. “Fuck me,” he mutters through a mouth full of cotton.
“Just did,” Finn says, because it’s too easy. Jay snorts and swats at him, but doesn’t move otherwise. Finn pushes himself into a sitting position, taking stock of them both. The condoms did help, but they’re both still pretty messy. “You wanna shower?”
Jay makes a disgruntled noise into the pillow, and Finn laughs. Jay, he’s learned over the past eight months, will inevitably pass the fuck out after they have sex. Doesn't matter the time of day or the circumstances - it knocks him out no matter what. His eyelids are already drooping, which means that if they’re going to get any kind of cleaned up, then Finn has to be in charge of making it happen. He swings his legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll get a washcloth,” he says over his shoulder.
He gets the washcloth from the hostel bathroom, runs it under the tap until it’s warm, then comes back to the bedroom. Wipes Jay down first, while he’s still semi-conscious, then cleans himself off and drops the cloth in the laundry basket before he crawls back in next to Jay. He’d fished his boxers off the floor while he was up, so he pulls them back on. He doesn’t like sleeping naked. Jay, either too lazy to get up or just content with this state of affairs, stays as he is. There’s a bit of a breeze from the window, but the room’s still warm enough that they don’t need to bother with the blankets.
“Hey,” Jay mumbles, and Finn starts a little. He’d thought he was already asleep. He waves a hand vaguely in Finn’s direction, then manages to find his hair and comb his fingers through it. “‘S good,” he says, and Finn can tell he’s too sleepy to make it sound like a question, but the intent is still there.
“Yeah,” Finn says, and means it. “Really good.” Better than he thought it could be. Better than he thought he could be.
“. . . good,” Jay says, or something like it. He’s snoring not a minute later. Finn smiles at the ceiling, listens to the ocean outside the window, and breathes. Just breathes.
“Is this it?” Finn asks.
They’re standing on Castro Street in the late afternoon - late enough for the bars to be open, not late enough for it to be dark out. It had been Jay’s idea to try and track down the bar he’d tried to get into back in the day, and Finn had agreed just for the fun of it. They’re probably not actually going to end up drinking there - for one thing, neither of them have turned twenty-one yet, though they’re both carrying IDs that say otherwise - but it’s an excuse to wander up and down the street, picking out places that kind of match Jay’s fuzzy memories of his first trip to the city. After two hours, though, Finn’s pretty sure it’s a lost cause.
“Maybe?” Jay squints at the building Finn’s pointing to, a wood-paneled building with a flashing sign out front that says DETOUR. “I think it started with a P or a B or something. And there was a takeout place next door, I remember that part. I got chicken there before I went back to the hotel.” He shrugs. “The place might not even be there anymore. I dunno how long these bars last.”
Finn glances up and down the street; he can see at least three other bars from where he’s standing, and that’s not counting the ones they found down various alleys and side streets. “Plenty of competition.”
“Yeah.” Jay nods at the crowd in front of the Detour. “Plenty of customers, too. Hey, you wanna sit down?”
There is, miraculously, an unoccupied bench nearby; they all but pounce on it before someone else beats them to it. Finn leans against the back of the bench, slouching a little as he watches the crowd go by. A lot of guys walking around shirtless; a lot of women with short and shaggy hair, several of whom could probably pass for boys if they wanted to. Lots of leather. More men than women in skirts, although some of them have so much makeup on, he can’t really tell whether they’re men or women at all. He hadn’t dressed up for tonight - he’s in jeans and a t-shirt, like always - and, for the first time in his life, he feels a little underdressed. Not that he wants to start wearing eyeshadow but. Well. He could take his shirt off. If he was feeling brave enough, which he isn’t. Jay’s leaning casually against his side, their hands interlocked, and he thinks that’s as noticeable as he wants to be, for now.
“How’d you even figure out where to go?” he asks. “There can’t have been a brochure or anything.”
“Honestly?” Jay shrugs, looking sheepish. “I just wandered around until I found - well, this.” He gestures. “Waited til everyone was asleep and then swiped my brother’s ID and snuck out. Lucky he was still out when I got back, or I would’ve got my ass kicked for that.” His fingers twitch in Finn’s grasp, a sure sign that he’s thinking something through before he says it. “I guess I wanted - I dunno. I’d heard about this place. People told my parents to keep us away from here, when they heard we were coming to town. They made it sound cool. Probably didn’t mean to, but they did.” He laughs a little at that, a laugh Finn’s learned to interpret over the past eight months as the sound he makes when he’s trying to brush something off. Finn tries not to poke at him, when that happens. He knows what it sounds like when someone’s circling something too open and raw to touch. But they’re here, on purpose, and their hands are still clasped tight, and he thinks maybe it might be okay to ask something a little sideways of what Jay’s talking about.
“Did you,” he starts to say, then stops. Tries to think of a better way to phrase it. “You were - I mean, you knew you wanted, when you were fourteen - ?” He has no idea what a normal person’s timeline for making those kinds of discoveries is. He knows what his looked like, but he’s fairly fucking certain he’s not the norm. He hopes so, anyway.
“God, yeah.” Jay laughs again, and it’s not exactly the same laugh, but it’s close. “Shit, I knew when I was eight.”
“When you were -” Finn blinks. Even for ordinary people, he wouldn’t have thought it happened that early.
“Yeah. Well.” Jay shifts a little on the bench. “I guess maybe I didn’t know, but other people did. And they kind of told me. So I didn’t figure it out, I just -” He waves his free hand. “You know?”
“. . . yeah,” Finn says, because he does. How old was he the first time someone called him a fag? Nine? Mom had still been alive, he knows that, because he’d come home and asked her what it meant and then she’d gone pale and he’d known he’d said something terrible without understanding what or why. But maybe he’s remembering wrong and it hadn’t been directed at him the time he asked Mom about it, because she’d been dead by the time he was ten and the kids at school hadn’t started that particular name-calling in earnest until sixth grade. And he for sure hadn’t figured it out for himself until a few years after that. So.
“Third grade,” Jay says abruptly, and Finn realizes with a jolt that he’s not done. “I think - yeah, it must’ve been third grade. We were doing Shakespeare for the school play, you know the one with the fairies? So all the kids in my class got their faces painted, and I had a butterfly right here -” He taps his left cheekbone. “And my parents had split by then, so my dad didn’t come to see the play, but he came to the house after to pick us up. And he saw the butterfly, and he hit the fucking roof.” His laugh this time definitely isn’t brushing anything off, even if he means it to. Raw, Finn thinks, and tightens his hold. “I could hear him and Mom going at it in the other room for a fuckin’ - it must’ve been an hour. He was yelling about how she was raising a little faggot, and she was yelling about how he could show up more than once a month if he wanted a say, and eventually he just walked out. Never talked to him again, after that. He came by to pick up Connor and Megan a couple of times, but he always stayed out in the driveway. Dunno if Mom wouldn’t let him in, or he just didn’t want to come. Anyways, he stopped coming by after Megan finished high school. I think he died a couple years ago.”
“Jesus,” Finn says. “I’m sorry.” He’s thinking about the house he grew up in, the way screams sounded through the walls; about how it had felt as a little kid, hiding under covers with your fingers stuffed in your ears, thinking you could make it not real if you just didn’t hear the words. How much he’d wanted his dad to get better, even after the beltings started, and how he would’ve felt if he’d just disappeared one day. Disappeared because of him. It’s too big for him to get his head around, too alien. What’s worse, your dad being the monster in the house, or your dad not being there at all?
“Don’t be, he was an asshole,” Jay says. His voice is deliberately light, and it doesn’t fool Finn for a fucking minute.
“Yeah, obviously,” Finn says. “I mean, I’m sorry he was an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.”
Jay turns his head to look at Finn properly. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody deserves anything, at least when you’re a little kid. You just get lucky, or you don’t. I mean, what kid actually deserves to get treated like shit? It just happens.”
“Yeah,” Finn says. “Because people make it happen.”
Jay huffs a little. “Feels like we’ve talked about this before,” he says. “Only last time, I was the one telling you that.”
And Finn can’t really argue with that, because it’s true. On the rare occasions they’ve talked about what it was like for Finn, growing up, he’s brushed off any offers of sympathy. If he accepts them, then he has to agree that there’s a need for it, and that acknowledgement would open up a screaming void in him that he can’t let himself fall into. If he lets himself think about it, he’ll go insane. But it’s different when it’s someone else.
“Besides,” Jay goes on. “I’m here now. And he’s dead. And I -” He tugs on Finn’s hand lightly. “I won, I’m pretty sure. If there was anything to win, I won it. Shit, just look where we are.” He waves his free hand at the street, encompassing them, the bars, and the crowds. “He’d fucking hate it. And it doesn’t even matter, because I don’t hate it. This is what I wanted. And I’m here. We're here. So.”
Finn looks around, then back at Jay. Thinks about the time it took to get here - not just the drive, but the years, the fear and the rage and the hiding and the fighting he’d had to do just to survive. He hadn’t been meant to survive, he’s pretty sure. If anyone was making plans - which he doubts, but anyway - they hadn’t planned for him to live this long. He hadn’t planned to live this long. But Jay's right: here he is.
He doesn’t have words for that, though. So he just squeezes Jay's hand a little tighter and says, “do you wanna go in there?” He waves at the bar that seems the least intimidating - which is to say, they won’t stand out for their lack of glittery makeup. There's no bright lights or pounding music, just the sound of someone playing a guitar. It seems like it could be manageable. If he tries.
Jay squints at him. “Do you want to?” Finn can’t blame him for being surprised: he’s shied away from public places like this for as long as they’ve known each other. And before, come to that.
But he can be brave, for this. He shrugs. “We can give it a shot. What’s the worst that happens, we listen to shitty music for an hour and then leave?”
“I think the worst that happens is, we get carded,” Jay says, gravely enough that it makes Finn laugh. “But sure, okay.” He gets to his feet, pulling Finn with him. “Let’s give it a shot.”
It can’t last forever. He knows that. Summer break is longer in college than it was in high school, but they still have to go back in September. Actually, they have to go back at the beginning of August, because they hadn’t been able to save enough money to stay a full three months. It comes faster than he’d expected.
“I’ll miss this,” he says quietly. It’s their last night before checkout, and they’re sitting on the beach by the pier, where they’ve spent most of their nights since they got there. The bar they ended up getting into hadn’t been that bad - more of a coffee house than anything, complete with an open mic and some truly terrible singers inviting themselves up onstage - but he still prefers the beach. Likes the feeling of fresh air on his face, the breeze ruffling his hair. The sight of the ocean stretching out forever, like he could get up and jump in and swim until his own exhaustion stopped him - there wouldn’t be anything else in his way.
“Yeah,” Jay says. He's quiet, too. It’s like the beach demands it of them: they could make noise, but it would feel useless. Like a little kid throwing a tantrum for an audience of none. “Gonna miss all of it.” He makes a face. “Especially in January.”
“God, yeah.” Just the memory of a Colorado winter is enough to make his teeth ache. Nearby, the sea lions sprawled out on the sand - there’s fewer of them at this time of day, but they’re still around - eye them lazily. One of them snorts, like he’s agreeing with them. “Wish we could stay.”
He digs his toes into the sand, feeling the damp silt rubbing against his skin. Everything is beautiful here. Even the dead seaweed washed up on shore, or the foamy garbage patch floating by the pier. It’s beautiful because it’s here. Finn's never been in a place before that was beautiful just because of what it means instead of how it looks. He doesn’t know how to leave it.
“We could,” Jay says. He’s sitting up, his elbows resting on his knees. His own hair has grown shaggy since they arrived, and the breeze lifts it off the back of his neck. Under other circumstances, Finn would want to put his mouth there. But tonight feels too sacred for that. “If we wanted to.”
Finn frowns at him. “And what, drop out of school?” He’s in the education department, and Jay’s in Earth Sciences; they both have two years left until they get their degrees.
Jay lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “They’ve got colleges out here, don’t they? Bet they take transfers.”
Finn had been laying back on the sand; this makes him sit up. “I don’t know if you can transfer on a scholarship. It might just apply to the one school.” And he for sure can’t afford to finish his degree without one. Jay’s not on a scholarship, because he has an inheritance from his grandmother, but if he went and Finn stayed - ? The idea feels like a lump in his stomach.
Jay seems to see some of it in his face, because he scoots a little closer. “Okay,” he says, “so we don't do it yet. We finish up our degrees and then we move out here. There must be jobs. Or, if you wanted to go to teacher's college - they’ve gotta have those out here, too. You could get the degree and work part-time, maybe. Or if I got hired at a research lab, they pay pretty well. If we found a place that was cheap to rent - we could afford it, probably.”
Finn looks at him, hard. Jay's expression is - “Have you been thinking about this?” he asks, slowly. “Looking into it?”
“Kind of.” Jay slides closer until they’re pressed hip to hip. “I mean, I started looking last September. I knew I didn’t wanna go back to Albuquerque once I graduated, and I didn’t really wanna stay in Colorado, either. So I was thinking either here or New York, but I fucking hate the weather in Colorado, and the East Coast probably isn't any better. And -” He taps one finger on his knee. It’s a nervous gesture. “I mean. You like it here, right? After we got out here last month, I thought maybe, if you wanted to move out here for good and you couldn’t afford a place - and we could -” The tapping gets faster. Finn puts a hand out, covers Jay's hand and knee. Holds on tight. "I mean. I can't afford a place either, on my own. So, if you wanted -"
Finn can feel the tremors running through his body, just from the way they're pressed so close. His expression doesn't change, he looks as calm as ever. But it's been eight months, and Finn knows how to read him a little better, now. It's been eight months. That's not a lot of time, in the grand scheme. But it feels like longer. Maybe that's what happens, when you meet someone: time collapses, folds in on itself, because this is where you were supposed to be, and the universe is finally settling now that you're in the right place. He doesn't trust the feeling, really. Hasn't had a lot of practice trusting anything. And it could be that they'll hate each other two years from now and their plans will fall through and then - ? Then they'll be back where they started. It's not risking that much, just agreeing to this right now. But it feels like it is. Feels like he's making a promise, even if it's just to wait and see.
He hasn't made a lot of promises in his life. Never feels like he'll actually be able to keep them. This one feels different.
"Where would you want to get a place?" he asks, which is not saying yes out loud, but it's as close as he can get. "The Castro? Are there houses there?"
He feels the moment Jay absorbs what he's saying: the tremors speed up, then wind back down until they're barely there. The shaky aftershocks of fear, when your body hasn't quite caught up to the fact that the danger has passed. He knows the feeling very well. "Probably," Jay says, breathless. "But a house is - it's gotta be what, three hundred thousand? We can't afford that right after we graduate. We'd have to look for an apartment first." He pauses. "Have you ever lived in an apartment?"
Finn shrugs. "I live in a dorm." At least an apartment wouldn't involve a shared bathroom.
"Huh. Yeah. Good point." The tremors have just about stopped, a shy smile stealing over his face. "Can you cook?"
"Can you?" It's a redundant question, he knows Jay can. He's eaten his cooking before, on weekends when his roommates had all gone home and they'd had the house to themselves. He's not Julia Child, but he can make spaghetti and meatballs without killing anyone. And they can eat it on the couch in front of the TV, watching old movies and arguing about whether Night of the Living Dead is better than The Crazies. Split a carton of ice cream afterwards, eat it straight out of the box.
In their own apartment, Finn thinks, they won't have to wait for anyone to go home to have the place to themselves. They can just do that whenever they want. Fall asleep in front of the tv, curled up on the couch together, and not worry about anyone coming home early and catching them.
Jay wedges himself even closer to Finn, until Finn has to wrap an arm over his shoulders to keep them both from overbalancing and falling over. Buries his face in Jay's hair, which smells like salt and seawater. He laughs a little, and doesn't even know what he's laughing at.
"I can learn," he says. "I've got two years. We've got two years." What a strange thought, that this is something they're sharing. Maybe time goes faster, split in two like this. "And we can save up and - I don't know. Buy furniture?" He's not actually sure what goes into getting your own place. Well, neither of them have ever done it before, so they'll have to figure it out together. They have time.
"Yeah," Jay says. His voice is a little muffled: his face is smushed against Finn's shirt. He wriggles, and Finn eases his hold so that Jay can sit up. They're still a tangle of limbs, but both their heads are free. "We can start planning tomorrow, while we're driving."
Finn holds on tighter. "Right," he says. Closes his eyes, presses his nose to Jay's cheek. It's like kissing, but not quite. It's the thing that you do when you're not kissing, you're not trying to really do anything besides be close. The thing you do when you love someone, maybe. That still seems to fragile to say out loud, too embarrassing. But also, they just agreed to move in together. Does it even need saying?
Two years, he thinks. Two years to plan, two years to say what they need to say. Two years to learn how to say it. They have nothing but time.
