Dissasembly
It might have been the way the light struck the pavement, how its sharp symmetry bleached asphalt to bone, a blinding him to the details of the surface beneath his feet. Maybe he just wasn't looking.
When he thinks back on it, when he lifts his eyes from the lenses and away from the insect corpses he studies, Hodgins wonders if it happened at all.
A small thing, certainly. A hand on his shoulder, pulling him back to the sidewalk. Booth, anger and humor flashing in his eyes, holding the sleeve of his jacket for much longer than required.
"You got a death wish there, pal?"
It sounded like something Booth would have said to his son, and it pissed him off.
Lifted from beneath the streetlight and he resented Booth's bulk, his size, his immediacy and shrugged him off. Didn't look, didn't speak, just kept moving. Crossed the street as he intended to the first time.
They'd already said goodnight once, in the doorway of the diner. Thanks for dinner. See you later.
Finished. Done. Perfectly companionable.
Footsteps echoed in time with his and suddenly Booth was asking what the problem was. When Jack hears Booth's question in his mind now, it sounds friendly. Concerned.
"One second it's all good, and then…?"
The scrape of shoe leather scuffed through islands of sand and street dirt and echoed in the silence as they walked beneath the railroad underpass. It seems louder in retrospect.
Jack damns whatever impulse led him to speak.
"Just don't fucking manhandle me. I'm not a kid."
Booth backed away, head turned, palms up.
"Whoa, sorry."
Hodgins has studied the next moment almost more than any other. He wonders when the center let loose and spun him out of himself, out of propriety. Out of the reality that he'd been flirting and coming on to Angela for months, wheedling and stopping short of begging her for attention, for a date, for a kiss, for something, anything to lose himself in that wasn't…
That wasn't this:
"Shut up," he said, and there shouldn't have been vibrato in those words, or trembling in his hands and the cold clutch of anticipation in his chest. And there wasn't for long, not when Booth didn't slap him away, didn't shove him away, didn't backhand him and threaten to kill him. Not when Booth kissed him back and drew the air out of his body.
Jack wanted blood, wanted bone against bone and split lips, but that's not the way it played out. Booth was loose and warm, his mouth slack and lazy with greed. The moan drifting from the back of his throat echoed off the curved tunnel walls and to passersby might have sounded like the satisfied tremor of a sleepy, sated gourmand.
Or the sound of a man who loved to kiss, to fuck, to devour every inch of flesh only to come back to the beginning, ravenous and eager for more.
"C'mon…" Booth muttered as he slid his lips across Jack's jaw, scooping mouthfuls of beard and skin as though he knew Jack, inside and out, and had always known him. "Let's get out of here."
He wanted Booth to pin him, to grind his hips against him until he saw stars, until he could feel the shape and size of his cock through the barrier of their clothes, but instead, Booth kissed him and pulled back, smiling.
Smiling. Open-faced and boyish and it was nothing Jack would have expected. They could have been in the lab, or at Wong Foo's instead of in a stinking underpass on the way to the parking lot.
"Tuesday night. Nothin' going on. Come back to my place and we'll go over the details of this manhandling thing."
Booth cocked his head and stepped away, beckoning toward the cars shining at the end of the archway.
And this is where Jack stops analyzing, stops taking every single second apart and reassembling it.
Because this is the part where Jack smiles, shakes his head, and refuses. Tells Booth he's got the wrong idea and that while it's intriguing, he's dating someone else.
Angela.
As often as he's thought of this moment, as many times as he's reconstructed the scene of this crime, he can't bear to review his own actions, or listen to the hollow sound of his own lies.
end