Into You
By Kay
Disclaimer: Whee, EW... watch its ownership fly away out of my hands.
Author's Notes: AU piece with Christopher/Jalil SLASH. I enjoyed writing this short thing way too much, and may possibly continue it out of pure love.
Thank you so much for reading. (clings to other EW fans)
Jalil Sherman is the strangest guy that Christopher ever had the misfortune to meet.
They don't really meet so much as collide-- on the steps of the University's library, which Christopher had stormed out of with every intention of tracking down his history professor and demanding a new evaluation of a rather poor (and undeserved) project grade, and where Jalil deemed it necessary to sit on the second to last stair, long legs spread across its entire length to soak in the sun, and read a slim volume of Nietzsche that had seen better days. The collision had not been altogether painful, just embarrassing; by the time Christopher had picked himself up, sputtering curses and face flushed in anger, they'd both decided to hate each other on sight no matter what.
Well, Christopher had decided that. Jalil had been more worried about whether he'd creased any pages.
Funny how life's a bitch. Things get messed up along the way-- people are sneaky, even manipulative, and the next thing Christopher had known they were sleeping together. Not just sleeping, as in sharing Jalil's piss-poor excuse for a mattress in the single dorm room he has (it's no wonder the guy acts like he has a stick up his ass-- Christopher's back feels broken after three hours of sleep on that torture device). Not sleeping, or even just meeting up and fucking off the stress of too many finals and not enough human touch-- because Christopher understands that, knows the comfort of furious and fast hands in the dark, a quick crash unexpected but not unwelcome. But sleeping together, like they can't keep their goddamn fingers off each other, can't stay away because it burns like the sun staring into his eyes even after it's gone. Constant need, this sharp ache that burrows deep and bites with malice-pointed teeth.
"This is a bad idea," Jalil had muttered the first time, back when Christopher didn't even know his last name, much less that the coffee grounds were hidden in the top shelf behind the baking soda (never used), or that Jalil talked in his sleep but never said anything interesting. It had been a very bad idea. The worst.
Christopher's never been able to turn down a bad idea. It's one of his more consequential habits. Hard to break, like smoking. Except smoking has got to be less dangerous than screwing around with Jalil Sherman.
They don't fit together at all. It's like trying to slip two jigsaw puzzle pieces from different sets together-- the corner of a boat doesn't belong alongside the entablature of a bank façade. Angles and circles. Jalil's sharp elbows digging into his sides when he wakes up. Christopher is speaking slurs and trash talk, the news on Channel 8 and Amanda Chesovek's transparent shirt in class. He eats I Love Lucy for breakfast and can't fix a tire to save his life. Jalil breathes binary pulsars and Einstein's relativity, murmuring the Law of Conservation against Christopher's neck when on the verse of sleep and the haze of waking. Equal gain for equal loss, inch for an inch, step for a step.
"Don't make excuses to me for coming here and I won't ask you why," he'd said, too, in the beginning, pressing oddly light kisses to the line of Christopher's jaw. "Stay until morning and I won't ask you to return, ever. Equal opportunity benefits. It can't work unless we use each other, a two-way Chinese finger trap."
Christopher doesn't understand half of what the fuck Jalil is talking about. When he does, it's always an insult.
He kind of likes it that way.
Jalil tells him to buy his own goddamn alarm clock if he wants to stay the night, because Christopher keeps getting to class late. He also tells him that his room's not a hotel, and Christopher sure as hell isn't paying him for using it. But he doesn't kick him out, and doesn't protest when Christopher slowly starts sinking into the space, stashing a favorite blue mug in the sink or stocking the shower with fluffy white towels he secretly indulges in. And when Christopher catches Jalil actually using one of them-- well, they were both late that day, and Jalil never complained about not charging rent again.
"This sharing shit is pretty sexy," Christopher had muttered, and Jalil huffed indignantly in a half-asleep sound and jabbed him in the head.
It is a bad idea. The worst. It's fucked up several times over, the way Christopher gets off on pissing this stranger off, and how Jalil just lets him keep doing it. Over and over. They play routine records in their arguments, always saying the same things, until the words aren't sharp enough to hurt anymore and Christopher can trace each syllable on Jalil's back with his tongue; it's ingrained in his skin. Lust and an equally well-stocked supply of fury are their morning coffee.
The way Christopher figures, by now? He's fucked sideways either way. He can live without this kind of shit, but the idea seems kind of hollow. He could get a normal job in an office pushing papers, flirting with women with nametags, get a white fucking picket fence and a white fucking dog and Jalil Sherman could just be the mistake of a fling he entertained in those "wild days of youth."
Then again, Christopher's always hated the color white. There's nothing there to look at, nothing to see.
So maybe he sees how far he can take this. Once the harsh words run dry and the desire stales, maybe he'll change his mind. Except there's something sort of-- off and worthwhile-- about the way Jalil makes him do half the laundry and scoffs at all his bad jokes. Or how he actually knows Christopher's mother's name, like it should have been obvious all along he'd talk to her eventually. And that sort of-- not tenderness, because Jalil is not a soft person, he's contrary and irritable and bites without barking in warning-- but a sort of fondness that makes the edges of his smirk dissolve, makes Christopher's world just a little shuttered, makes up the moments where Jalil comes home late from the lab and the first thing he does is tuck his fingers into Christopher's hair and pulls him down and connects.
So Christopher drinks. Not like before, because the buzz is more pleasurable than the oblivion. He drinks and watches television and his own bed, far on the other side of campus, is untouched and eventually abandoned. And Jalil reads his wordy books and buys the orange juice, and sometimes even drifts out of his own head once in a while to share a grin across the table.
It occurs to Christopher, on a very ordinary day, that he's never been happier than this.
He remarks on this during the evening, sprawled out on the sofa with an ugly beige afghan draped over his stomach, hair spiked out around his head in a mess. Jalil sits next to him correcting a paper on the intrinsic spin of a neutrino, and doesn't even look down when Christopher squirms until his head rests on Jalil's thigh. Just adjusts his arm so it won't rest on Christopher's face.
When he doesn't answer, Christopher prods him in the knee. "Well? What are you thinking about?"
"I think no one cares about some dried up fossil like Reines. Screw neutrinos, we should be looking at the string theory."
He scowls. "I was being serious, you bastard."
Jalil sighs. Puts down his pen. "I think you shouldn't think," he says simply, and presses a funny half-open kiss to Christopher's forehead. It feels hot and warm. "And if you're looking for some kind of love confession, hold your breath. It's enough, like this, if you're… into me. That's all."
Christopher looks up at him, lips parted. He swallows. The damp spot on his skin is tingling.
"Yeah," he finally says, and it clicks into place, a sense of everything all at once. "I guess I am."
The End