Notes: In which Spock is a tricky bastard.
Arc One, Part Eight
The problem was...
Well.
McCoy had absolutely no fucking clue what happened next. He wasn't eighteen anymore. Spock wasn't a drop-dead gorgeous redhead in a blue dress at the school dance. (Well, not the redhead in a blue dress at the school dance part, anyway.) There wasn't a manual for a man approaching thirty asking another man, also approaching thirty, on a...drinks thing together. Date. What-the-fuck-ever.
This was what happened when his mouth engaged before his brain had time to catch up. Half the time, he said something hurtful and hateful and had to handle the fallout from being a grumpy bastard. The other half, he walked himself into situations he would have been better off leaving alone.
And somehow – somehow, by some God-given miracle – Jim hadn't realised.
He'd been out of earshot when McCoy had asked, and neither of them had further discussed it in range of him, and hell, McCoy hadn't even realised that Spock had passed his number until he'd gotten home that Monday night to find a piece of paper slipped into his jacket pocket and a string of numbers. Spock had surprisingly messy handwriting.
On Tuesday afternoon, in the middle of his break and tiring of Boyle's mutterings about 'that bloody woman!' (some new intern McCoy had never heard of) McCoy thumbed out a brief text asking whether Spock was free Friday night (it wasn't his weekend for Jo) and spent the latter half of his shift wondering what in the hell he was actually going to suggest. He didn't dare ask any of his colleagues, or the whole hospital would know in under half an hour, and he was pretty sure Jim was banging one of the nurses in the sexual health clinic. Hell, maybe he should just let his mouth talk him out of it without any input from his brain.
He didn't have the chance; Spock called, not five minutes after the end of his shift, and by the echoing, from a bathroom.
"Where in the hell are you?" McCoy blurted out.
Spock paused. "Is that relevent?"
"Probably not."
"Regarding Friday night," Spock cut across him smoothly, "there is a reputable bar across the park behind the courthouse that offers alcohol that is not contaminated, and food which meets FSA standards."
"So – not Jim's kind of dive, then?"
"Indeed not."
"Sounds fine to me," McCoy agreed. "Say, eight?"
"Very well. I will send directions."
"Should I prepare to get a cab after?" McCoy dared, and there a brief pause.
"That depends entirely on how much you intend to imbibe – however," Spock paused again, "they do not have a parking lot, and a taxi could be hailed from the street in front of my apartment."
It was so close to being a hint, and yet far enough not to be certainty, that McCoy felt the beginnings of a buzz from it.
"I'll bear that in mind," he said, his drawl lengthening fractionally. "Eight on Friday. I'm lookin' forward to it already."
"As am I," Spock said, unexpectedly, before ringing off without so much as a goodbye.
McCoy didn't stop grinning the whole way home.
Soare was closer to Spock's apartment than Harry's – a cut through three backstreets and alleys and across a main thoroughfare into the vaguely dimmed lights of the legal downtown. Surrounded by courthouses, custody suites and offices, Soare thus had itself a reputation as safe, secure – and quick to sue. Much, Spock reflected with gallows humour, like his first tentative forays into bars at university, in the company of other young, impressionable, and occasionally downright stupid people.
Its proximity meant that Spock did not leave his apartment until a quarter to eight, with one last glance in the mirror in some sense of futile hope that the mirror would give him some insight into what, exactly, he was doing, before adjusting his sleeves and opening the front door.
To find an envelope taped to the knocker.
His heart rate...jumped.
There had been nothing upon his arrival home from work, and there was no other evidence that anyone had been here; tonight, it seemed, he had some small reprieve from that critical stare and cold tone. A small blessing, but one all the same, and now the exchange had occurred, they should not need (although that was no guarantee) to cross paths again for some time.
He breathed, and his heart rate began to drop again.
He unstuck it carefully, running his nails under the tape to loosen it and not peel away the paint, before ripping into the envelope without any of the care of removing it from the door. The handwriting was immediately familiar – that elegant, looping script with the tall ls and the squat, fat es and ps that he had spent the better part of four years watching weave itself across documents and postcards and old-fashioned letters that apparently some people still sent to one another.
He took another breath. Calm. The cheque had been anticipated; the amount was correct, and the note...the note was sharp, crisp. Spock had difficulty, sometimes, even after all these years of life, at reading the tones and inflections in people's voices. He had no such difficulty with words – they were clinical, detached, almost cold.
Definitely cold. Cold words from a...a firebrand, his mother would have said.
Your half of the deposit. N.
There was so much more to be said. There had always been more to say.
Spock collected himself, taking a deep breath before folding the cheque back into the envelope and placing it on the phone table, shutting and locking his door with unnecessary force behind him, and blocking it from his mind. It was unimportant. He would ignore it, and continue with his plans, and he would process the cheque tomorrow, and that would be all. It was done; they were done.
Tonight was not the night for familiar handwriting.
McCoy was just a little bit dizzy.
He wasn't totally sure of the source of it. The cook had been liberal with the amount of red wine in the sauce of his meal, and the bartender's recommended cocktail, while not tasting a bit like the promised mint julep, was stronger than your average British ale. The music, dulled but creeping in from a party in a back room, was of the obnoxious thumping type that got the alcohol in your system in time with it and dragged your heartbeat along for the ride. And then – damn, but if Spock had looked hot in his leathers, he looked a lot better now, the night balmy enough to allow for a tight shirt and some definitely tighter-than-strictly-necessary slacks. McCoy's blood was thumping, alright, but nowhere near his head.
And then there was the arguing.
McCoy was the youngest of four kids, and by a long way. He'd grown up in a world where shouting your mouth off, loudly and viciously and making someone listen to you, was the only way to get anything at all. And so he was an argumentative son-of-a-bitch; he was just wired to poke and prod and ruffle feathers. It earned him more enemies than friends, and more compliant patients than stubborn ones, and while Jocelyn had found it endearing and even funny for a while, she hadn't really liked it toward the end, and had outright told him that if he didn't change his stubborn, mule-headed ways, he'd never find someone willing to put up with it.
Only Spock really, really didn't seem to care.
McCoy had found himself picking at the vegetarianism, at the bike (again), at the music in the next room, at the obnoxiously gay bartender (twice), at the absent Jim (of course) and at the entire state of California (literally) for allowing on the roads such suicidal maniacs as the one that had tried to rear-end him the day before.
And Spock, far from politely nodding, tolerating it, or diverting the conversation, had given as good as he'd gotten.
By the time they had finished eating, McCoy knew six new phrases for 'you have no idea what you're talking about, so shut up', two for 'you're an idiot' and three for 'I don't know why we're arguing this, but you're not winning.' He had learned that Spock's way of saying 'really?' or 'are you even listening to yourself?' was not rasped in a shrill voice, but to merely raise an eyebrow and use about fifty words to call him a fuckwit. And hell, perhaps he should have gotten mad about that, but – fuck, it was more than a little hot.
McCoy was abrasive. He knew himself well enough to know that. He knew that he liked the clash and parry of verbal sparring, as much as he abhorred actual physical fighting between people most of the time. It was – it was a challenge. It was an outright challenge to prove yourself to the other, like a game of pulling pigtails to impress the little girls, parrying back and forth and hoping they would understand – and to find someone that would hold the sword firm and not give way to his attack...
Perhaps it was bad of him – his momma had told him off enough times for pullin' girls' pigtails by picking on 'em – but more of him had definitely decided that that cool expression and dry response was...
Well, no wonder he was goddamn dizzy.
He couldn't remember what they talked about – perhaps he never would – but last orders rang out before he really noticed, and he had a fair amount of alcohol in his system, and Spock had some twisted utilitarianism system of ethics goin' down that invited freakin' communism into the damn country under a Chinese flag, but everything in him was humming with contentment, and he'd never had a first date where he'd just argued before.
"You're just about as argumentative as I am," McCoy accused, as Spock gathered his coat.
Spock paused, and tilted his head. "Perhaps, albeit in a different manner."
"What manner's that, then?"
Spock tilted his head. "I am correct."
McCoy was laughing when he followed Spock out of the bar into a heavy, smog-dank night. The man's ability to shoot Jim down wasn't a localised thing, then, and thank Christ – it would make him difficult. It would make him a challenge, and the hardheaded southerner in McCoy couldn't help but like a challenge, especially one so blatantly laid out for him.
The fine ass didn't hurt either.
The night was rank, the air wet and stinking of exhaust fumes and sweat, the warm of spring leaching into the stench of winter in an unpleasant combination. Cities swam in their own filth, and McCoy wrinkled his nose against the smell as they stepped from the lights of the dying into the dim streets, heading back the way they – or at least Spock – had come hours earlier. In the lonely darkness of the narrowing road into which Spock led them, McCoy's arm – more or less of its own volition – ghosted up to wrap his fingers around the jut of the furthest hip, and rest there.
"I believe you are optimistic, Leonard."
"Optimism never hurt nobody."
"Anybody."
"Whatever," he drawled. "So tell me. If universal healthcare's such a damn good idea, why doesn't everybody have it?"
"An extremely illogical argument to use..."
Spock's voice – a low thrum that didn't so much as echo despite the lonely backstreets that swallowed them – was more effective at keeping McCoy's attention than his actual reply, and McCoy's libido opted to use the rest of his brain to construct fantasies of what that deep, calm voice sounded like when it wasn't so damn calm, when he was all riled up and shaken out of this cool, controlled comfort zone of his. And McCoy could do that – oh hell, could he do that...
"This is my building," Spock interrupted the thoughts seamlessly, pausing outside the entrance and shifting just enough to turn to face him. The orange light from the streetlamps looked sickly on his white skin, but the shadows of his eyes were as intense and unreadable as they had been in Harry's that Monday night, and McCoy wanted to prise them back and see what was below.
"I'll hail a cab from the main road," he said genially. He knew a boundary when he saw it, and pushing too fast never got anyone anywhere. "Did I fake being a nice guy long enough to get a kiss?"
Spock raised an eyebrow. "You are a southerner."
"Georgian."
"I believed it was customary to wait, for southern courtships."
McCoy snorted. "Sure, but that's for men and women."
"In which case," Spock leaned in to whisper into McCoy's ear. His breath was hot; the leather of his jacket was cool under McCoy's fingers, "a girl should not kiss on the first date, Leonard."
He moved like a goddamn cat – the kiss that landed on McCoy's cheek was sharp and punctual, and then the slip of a man had gone, the door to the building clanking shut and leaving McCoy standing alone on the sidewalk, hands grasping for that blur of leather that had been swept away.
He laughed.
"Slippery son of a goddamn bitch," he drawled, grinning, and turned away.
