Warning: Contains slash
Pairing: Ford/Arthur
Words: 595
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Drabble attack! This is really more of an arc than a cohesive story.
First Time They Touched
Touching is all relative. There's a difference between touching and touching.
The first time Arthur touched someone was just a few months before going off to university; a girl he'd been seeing for almost a year and still thought he would marry some day. Lying together on her bed (because the bed was the proper place for these things to happen, wasn't it?), his shirt on the floor, her blouse just a little bit undone, her bra somehow definitely undone, and their hearts beating fast and quick and not quite in time. Every move timid, because they're still figuring out exactly how this is supposed to work.
Then her parents came home, and he was caught fondling their only daughter's nipples, and that was sort of the end of that.
Ford's first touch was… probably not Zaphod Beeblebrox, but… Because when it comes to those kinds of drinking games (which it almost always does) he likes playing to lose. A lot. Not all of it was great (as far as he can remember), very little of it was sweet, and virtually none of it mattered the next morning or a few days later.
Between the two of them, Arthur and Ford have touched each other often – carelessly, to say, "Let's go to the pub now," or, "Maybe you've had enough for one night" (which is never quite true), or, "So this is it, we're going to die" (which is never true either).
Touching is, of course, quite different. This is still so new, and what if Ford moves too fast or Arthur does something stupid and everything gets messed up? But, of course, it happens, and when it does there's so little time to think about it.
Arthur is backed up against a wall – "Zarquon, Arthur, not everything has to happen in bed" – and his hands are in Ford's hair and the whole situation feels so… so fluid. Not natural, exactly, because he feels that the word can't be stretched to include kissing eagerly against a wall with an alien man on a highly improbable spaceship, but everything leading up to this makes a peculiar kind of sense, so this must too. It fits. Like Ford fits against him. Just… does.
And then Ford's hands are in his dressing gown and under his pajama top, and that is a phallus against his thigh, and he can't catch his breath long enough to panic, so he just doesn't.
Ford grins into the kiss, ecstatic that the human is okay with this much. He wants to touch, to possess with his fingers, to go everywhere and explore everything he can on Arthur's body. There doesn't seem to be any sort of time limit for this. He finds that surprisingly liberating.
His mouth slides down to Arthur's neck and he's going to leave a mark there, just above the collar, because he can. The hands in his hair tighten as Arthur gasps – completely unlike any sound Ford has ever head him make before. Do that again, do that again, and he does, and he does.
It's been a while since either of them has touched anyone like this. For Arthur, a while is a year and a bit, and he feels almost nostalgic; for Ford, it's slightly under a month, and he feels almost reborn. A kind of baptism in the corridor.
In retrospect, they probably should have made it as far as one of their rooms. But Zaphod's double-take is epic, and even in retrospect Ford thinks it would have been a shame to miss seeing it.
