flick of a wrist (and you're dead baby)

i. set me on fire

It was past midnight and Jason found himself in James' hotel room holding his breath. With his heartbeat in his ears and the outlines of things softly blurred out by the beer, the skin underneath his jeans tickled when James' sweaty palm fell on his knee. His body turned stiff and his movements abruptly became clumsy and lumbering.

James was too caught up within his story to notice how close he had moved and how intimate the touch truly was. He was still describing a story of a riveting character whom he had named 'Timmy the Trucker', and the great adventures of Timmy the Trucker and himself in nineteen-eighty-one.

Jason chewed on his bottom lip and prudently turned his head to the side to peer at James through thick eyelashes. They were sat on the couch of James' hotel room—how had they ended up here, Jason didn't recall. It was one of those lazy, casual nights where James was in a peculiarly good mood and wasn't grilling the living hell out of Jason every chance he got. After three years it was safe to say: James was finally warming up to him.

His cheeks were flaming when James' hand traveled up—now resting on his inner thigh. The air was no longer relaxed and laid-back but strained and filled with untamed lust. He didn't notice at first when James had ended his story about Timmy the Trucker, not that he had been listening much, anyway.

Jason gulped, gaze flickering around on aimless objects around the hotel room to avoid mistakenly catching James' eye. He breathed heavily, air feeling like grains of sand rattling through his nostrils and clattering down his windpipe all the way to his lungs. When their gazes met, Jason let his fingers twitch and his body unthinkingly stir.

His mistake number one.

Right from the early days, he was quick to learn that showing fear and weakness of any kind, would get him killed in this band. To show the effects of hazing would be social suicide. He kept his feelings under the wraps, and now that he made the mistake of reflecting fear, James was quick to grasp onto it. James drank up the pure terror in his eyes and for some sick, twisted way arousal washed over him like a wave on beach rocks.

Jason wanted to say something. Anything, really. He even opened his mouth to kill the silence because honest to God, he would rather have James taunting and hazing him than spend another second with him in a silence filled with thick ardour. There was no explaining why he chose to stay quiet instead.

His mistake number two.

— ✧ —

James felt it, too. Saw how Jason's muscles tensed, his body flinched away, and how his simple touch had sifted the mood in a matter of seconds. His eyes darted between his hand on Jason's thigh and his face, a pair of cerulean eyes staring right back at him; in the possession of agitation.

Inappropriate and vulgar thoughts downpoured his mind. Imagines he deserved a grand smack on the cheek for. He wanted to spurn those thoughts away. Imaging your bandmate stark naked, underneath you, screaming and crying for your name, wasn't what he would consider an ideal situation to find himself in, to put it frankly.

He blamed the alcohol. He wasn't the first nor the last person to spend his nights in alcohol-driven devotion and it certainly wasn't the first time he was having those tasteless, vile thoughts. Alcohol took away shame when he was jerking off in his hotel room at the thought of his bassist. Humiliation and guilt would drown him in the morning, but those were problems for another day.

Then, there was nothing else left to do than pour all the bent up emotions on Jason in the disguise of anger. Jason wasn't the one to blame for his own crude thoughts and fantasies but he was an easy target. All that tension, bottled up feelings, and late-night frustration had to spill somewhere.