I Backward Cast My E'e Part 17
"Oh, hell," Heero said suddenly in the middle of their poker game. "I forgot to give you your Christmas present!"
Duo blinked, then looked pointedly at his watch. "A whole week? It's New Year's already. You forgot by a whole week?"
"Well, it's really more like Quatre's Christmas present to me. But that took a few extra days--"
"Sooooooo not my fault!" Quatre inserted with a sing-song tone. "Places are closed this time of year, yanno."
Trowa surreptitiously maneuvered a few of Quatre's chips around a beer bottle and into his own stack. "Heero asked late."
Quatre nodded judiciously. "So late. You owe me." He reached across the table to snag a few of Heero's closest chips.
Heero smacked his knuckles and retrieved the stolen property. "What do you mean, I owe you? It was a Christmas present."
"Only because I've already exhausted most of my usual sources of grumpiness. I need to expand my search."
Duo snorted. "Try looking right under your nose, Blondie." Quatre had certainly grumped enough when failing to be fast enough on the draw to get the last slice of pizza, and that had been before most of the alcohol had been consumed.
"Maybe I need to start getting you other stuff...," he continued to muse.
Heero nodded. "Exactly why I had you do me a favor this year."
"It wasn't a favor. It was a gift."
"Aha! So I don't owe you."
"I..." Quatre frowned.
"But more importantly," Duo whined. "What did you get me? I don't care who got it for me. What did I get? What did I get?"
"You got..." Heero trailed off with a perplexed look. It wasn't as if he had forgotten in his light buzz, but suddenly he found himself devoid of the words to make a properly dramatic presentation of it. He leaned around his chair to dig through his backpack and pull out some printouts. "We're going here."
"Here?" Duo had barely given them a glance before he returned his focus to Heero. "Wait... like... we're going somewhere? On vacation?"
"Yup."
"We're actually gonna... you actually did it?"
"Next week. Just a few days, but..."
Duo looked back at the papers. "Oh my god. We're actually... how did you...? I always wanted to... I swear, I never talked about this. Did I?"
Heero shrugged. "I'm psychic. Some little voice inside me told me to ask Howard, so I did."
He laughed, perhaps a little too loudly for polite company, but a group of four young men teetering on the edge of sobriety was hardly polite, and fortunately, the rest of the household was out. "Oh man, I could just..." And why not? He nearly leapt out of his seat to give Heero a good kiss, but stopped just short of Heero's lips and gave Quatre an awkward glance. "Wait, what does Quatre have to do with this?"
Heero wrapped his arms around Duo's waist and pulled him close. "He's got connections to corporate discounts, VIP upgrades, and all that stuff. He had to book things for me for it to all work out."
"I don't have to kiss him, do I?"
"No," both Trowa and Heero answered firmly.
"Good." He finished what he'd been about to start and kissed Heero affectionately.
"I want a kiss," Quatre pouted. Trowa leaned over to peck him on the cheek.
It wasn't long before Duo released his boyfriend's mouth to sort through the printouts again. Heero kept him close as he elaborated on the plans. "Didn't get too fancy, if you don't mind. Just a few days, middle of the week. Fewer people, cheaper rooms. Cheaper to stay outside the city, too. Already cleared it with Howard. This is just a couple hours drive, so it seemed perfect."
"Anywhere would be perfect," Duo murmured absently.
Heero smirked smugly before carrying on. "Got a sweet deal on one of those trendy 'eco-friendly' places they have out there. It's not super luxury, but I thought your inner engineer would get a kick out of all the green tech they've got."
"Ha, my outer engineer will get a kick out of that. My inner engineer will be busy calculating the spring forces in the mattresses."
Quatre shuddered. "Ugh, I don't know how you can go to an engineering school, Heero."
"At least when I get stabbed in the back by one of my classmates, I know he'll do it right. And quite possibly creatively."
"Unfair," Trowa protested. "I could stab someone correctly, too."
"That's only because of Cathy's thing for knives."
"So?"
Duo laughed suddenly, the force of it unbalancing him and landing him in Heero's lap. "Oh my god, I just thought of the funniest thing. What if it was Quatre who was afraid of clowns?" It was only a few seconds later that he remembered to wince at having to speak the name of his nemesis.
Trowa shook his head. "What is up with you and clowns, anyway?"
"Uh. Well. When I was... argh, not thinking about them. Not thinking about them!" He snuggled closer to Heero for protection, and Heero obligingly stroked his back comfortingly, though not without rolling his eyes.
"You brought them up."
Duo pointed an accusing finger that came dangerously close to knocking over a bottle on the tabletop. "You bring them up just by sitting there, clown-boy."
"Let's get together for Halloween next year. I think I've got a good costume."
"You are a sick, sick bastard."
"What if I really were afraid of clowns?" Quatre asked. He turned big puppy-dog eyes on his boyfriend. "Would you give them up for me?"
"No."
"What? Didn't even have to think about it? Hmpf."
"Would you even be my boyfriend if you were afraid of clowns? You found out pretty early on."
"Uh, well, I guess if I'd known..."
"So no, I wouldn't need to give them up for you, because this hypothetical situation would never exist."
Heero silently held his fist out. Trowa accepted the respectful knuckle-bump with a stately air.
Duo put his hands on Heero's cheeks and pulled their faces eye-crossingly close. "Would you give them up for me?"
"Yes."
He pressed their lips together quickly before turning to blow a raspberry at Quatre.
Heero shrugged unapologetically at his oldest friend. "Clowns don't mean anything to me. The person behind the mask is another thing altogether."
Trowa weighed this in his mind and judged it fair. He conceded the point with the tilt of a beer bottle.
Duo once more commanded Heero's attention with another personal-space-invading close-up look. "Have I told you lately how adorable you are?" He kissed him somewhat adorably before pulling back to admire his work and ponder it some more. "And how thoughtful you are?" He kissed him again, somewhat thoughtfully, if he was thinking with his mind in his pants. "And how unbelievafuckably hot you are?" The third kiss involved very little thought and very much heat.
"Well," Trowa declared, eyebrows raised. He could really only see the back of Duo's head, but it would seem Heero was in no way putting up a protest. "I guess that's it for tonight." He reached out a hand and snagged a scoop of Heero's chips. "I win."
Quatre appropriated one of those chips and flicked it at Duo's back. "Is this the part where I remind you that you've got a room upstairs?"
Duo broke things off so suddenly that it took Heero a few rapid heartbeats to realize he was gone. "Yes! That's a great idea!" He slid off of Heero's lap and tugged his boyfriend to his feet. "Let's go!"
Given no other choice, Heero stumbled after him. After a few lurching steps, he pulled Duo back to use as a crutch. "Have I told you lately how heavy you are?"
Duo laughed loudly even as he punched him in the arm. "Geez, see if you get any tonight!"
"If he's not getting any," Quatre called after them, "then come back here so we can finish this game. I'm almost-- Hey, waitaminute, what happened to all my chips?"
Trowa threw a few of Duo's into his pile.
Quatre chortled. "Trowa! That's cheating."
He cocked his head toward the stairs, where they could hear Duo trying to remember where in the large Winner house their guest bedroom was. Having been up there earlier in the evening to drop off their overnight bags did not seem to improve his recall, so it was up to Heero, despite being distracted by Duo's wandering hands, to get them pointed in the right direction. "I don't think he needs them anymore since he's about to score."
Quatre looked at the chips, looked back to his boyfriend, looked up the stairs, then back to Trowa with an arch look and quite deliberately shoved his chips with both hands into the middle of the table. "Then I don't think I need them, either."
~*~
Trowa met Heero in the kitchen the next morning. "Good morning."
Heero gave him a nod and eyed the burbling coffee maker. "Enough in there for everyone?"
"Of course."
He stared at it some more before deciding Trowa wasn't lying. "Think we should clean up out there?"
Trowa looked in the direction of where they'd held their New Year's merrymaking. "Nah. No reason why Quatre and Duo get to skip out on the fun."
"Point. No one's due home for a bit anyway, right?"
"Right." As fascinating as percolation was, Trowa had already spent a few minutes studying it. With something else now to attract his interest, his gaze occasionally flickered over to his long-time friend. At length, he chuckled. "So you did get some last night."
Heero froze for a nervous second before reacting. "I did not."
"You did, too." He laughed again when he caught Heero checking himself self-consciously, as if wondering whether or not there was any evidence on his body. There wasn't, but Trowa didn't need to see a hickie or a suspicious stain to confirm his gut impressions.
"I did not 'get some'."
Trowa inspected his expression with careless ease. "Alright, but you didn't 'not get any'."
"I got... 'some'," Heero admitted, avoiding eye contact for a few seconds before smiling lopsidedly. He knew the average guy would probably not consider whatever base he'd just gotten to to be much of a feat, but he wasn't very average.
"First time?"
"More or less."
"You still okay with everything?"
"Yeah. I'm surprisingly okay with everything." He was trying not to think about it too hard. Not now, not this morning, while it was fresh and fragile. He'd think about it later, when he could not-overanalyze it, and not be torn between blushing in embarrassment and grinning like a loon. He could only hope Duo would have the same approach to it when he finally came downstairs.
"He still okay with everything?"
Heero smiled, thinking briefly back to where they'd been this time last year. "Yeah. He's still surprisingly okay with everything, too."
"He a virgin, too?"
"Yeah." It was only in retrospect that Heero felt he should have blinked at the question, or at least defended Duo's pride and not given the information up so easily, but the moment passed with a mental shrug. "It makes things easier, I think."
"At least you have that going for you."
"What? Quatre can't have...?"
Trowa snickered. "Sorry. I didn't mean that I don't have that going for me, too. I just think, like you said, it makes things easier. Of course, alcohol probably makes things easier, too," he added with a wink.
Heero let the alarm drain out of him. It gave way to thoughtfulness. "Seems like it's a benefit that it's not as easy to just 'accidentally' have sex with someone. With another man, anyway. It requires supplies and preparations. Well, not that you couldn't have sex and forego both of those things. But hopefully not for first times, which was what we were talking about, so..."
"Being gay just means our 'accidents' happen before we get that far."
Heero spied a certain undertone to Trowa's faint smirk. "Ha. You got some last night, too."
The smirk became slightly less faint. "I got a little something-something. Hard not to, with you two setting us such a fine example."
He covered his face with his hand. "Please don't remind me."
Trowa shrugged. "What's a little making out in front of friends?"
"He started it."
"You went along with it."
"Wouldn't you?" They shared the smirk for a few seconds before the coffee machine gurgled its last gasp. "How long before Quatre gets down here?"
"He's taking a shower. Duo?"
"Same. They should be down soon, I guess." They stared at the pot, mutually agreeing to wait until their respective significant others joined them. "If you and Quatre went to the same school, do you think you would have had sex by now?"
Trowa pursed his lips as he bounced the idea around in his head. "Yeah. What's your excuse?"
Heero's laugh was at least half sigh. "Duo says once he starts, he doesn't think he'll be able to stop."
"And that's bad... why?"
"Just want to concentrate on school for these last few months, I guess."
"You don't?"
"Not like I'm going to go out of my way to seduce him or something. But... I think I'm ready for that. I'm in the right headspace now. To start, anyway. Something nice and vanilla, perhaps. Duo's headspace is..."
"How's that whole situation, anyway? The thing with his dad and the wife?"
Heero nodded to confirm its relevance to the topic. "It's going relatively well, actually. Things were pretty tense for a while, but I think he's gotten past most of the rough stuff. Just a smooth glide on to the finish line now." He knocked on the wooden cabinet in front of him. "For a while there, though... I think at least once, we almost went there. He almost pushed it. I... pushed back." He shrugged ruefully. "I don't ask that our first time be 'special' or anything, but I'd kind of like to not look back on it and think, 'wow, that sucked.' That's where the whole vacation thing came from, sort of. Him wanting to get away for a bit. I guess him using me to 'get away for a bit' wouldn't have sucked completely, but... it still kind of would have."
Trowa patted his shoulder. "Nothing a few days in a hotel room can't cure."
Heero blinked. "I... had not thought of that."
"Duo can thank me later."
TBC...
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