Moments of Haven Part 62
Just Right
Heero woke with a muzzy, pleased feeling clouding his mind. Cracking an eye open to inspect the light level in the room, he decided he still had a little bit of time before he felt obliged to get out of bed, so he let the eye fall shut again and indulged in the lovely feeling of warmth and comfort.
There was another pillow snuggled up next to his. Duo was likewise in a state of intimacy with his cuddlebuddy, his head right up beside Heero's shoulder. He traced a line of heat down Heero's left side. His left knee rested atop Heero's left leg. His left hand was... oh. Heero's lips curved upwards in amusement as he told himself to snatch a few more minutes of contented rest.
Duo stirred slowly, each part of him shifting lazily in a minute stretch before waking up for the day. His head slid a little farther up his pillow. His knee bent and unbent just enough for him to rub a foot across a few centimeters of Heero's leg. His hand flexed lightly, waiting for its strength to return from its slumber. His nose wrinkled in mild interest. Everything else seemed to make sense, only what was that his hand was resting on? It didn't seem shaped right for anything. He shifted his sleepy fingers again in thoughtful contemplation before the answer struck him and the sleep dissolved into full wakefulness.
Heero felt the moment of realization hit, and he chuckled silently.
"Um. G'morning," Duo ventured, clearing his throat.
"Good morning." And it was.
"And... good morning to you, too." Duo caressed Heero's crotch in greeting. It was still sleeping, however, so it didn't respond. "Um. Tell me that button was unbuttoned when you went to bed."
"I don't remember." It was possible he had forgotten to button up his fly, but even easy access didn't really negate the humor of waking up to find one's groin quite possessively clutched by another.
Well, Duo consoled himself, at least his adventurous hand had decided to worm its way inside Heero's pajama pants only, and not the briefs as well. If it was going to do that, the least it could do was wait for Duo to be awake. Or maybe it knew best. Duo was still never quite certain what to do with his hand once it found its way to its target. It wasn't a matter of being in unfamiliar territory so much as not quite knowing what it was he wanted to do. What did he want to happen? Where did he want to go with this? How far did he want to push things? How far could it go before there was no turning back?
And let him not forget the other side of this equation. Heero was difficult to read, and the cues he sent out were sometimes distressing neutral. Like now. There he was, simply lying there, looking content, and not any much more or less so than any other occasion lying there by Duo's side. Now what was that supposed to mean?
"You've never--" The realization burst into the air without his willing it, but upon noticing, he swiftly cut it off at the pass, not yet certain whether or not he wanted to speak it.
Now that it had been started, however, Heero quite naturally wanted to hear the finish. "I've never what?"
Duo gave it a moment or two of thought before shaking his head and removing his hand from Heero's pants. "Nothing."
If it was nothing, it would never have been brought up. "Duo..."
"Really. It was probably more of a 'haven't yet' sort of thing than a 'never will', anyway." He sat up, rolled his shoulders in a bit of a stretch, and slid out from underneath the covers.
"Well, is it a good thing or a bad thing, at least?" Heero insisted, pulling himself upright with a faint wince. A good thing could have provoked that fleeting look of consternation, but so could a bad thing. Duo expected bad things to happen, and became mildly disturbed when they didn't.
Catching the wince when he turned to look over his shoulder, Duo stopped and turned completely, studying Heero with a critical eye. Another realization fell from the sky and hit him squarely on the head. "You... This mattress isn't the most comfortable for you, is it?"
Heero rarely felt guilty about things, per se, but he was not particularly shameless when someone caught him at something. His hesitant pause was as good as a blush. "By far, not the worst bed I've slept in."
Duo knew exactly what that meant and punched him lightly on the arm. "Dammit, Heero, why didn't you say something?"
"It's just a bed, Duo."
"Just a..." Now what was it about that statement that bothered him so? Oh, yes. "I thought you of all people would go off on something about how a bed isn't just a bed, or some such other shit."
A little bit of defensiveness kicked in until he realized he agreed. "Well, yes, it isn't just a bed, which means that I can ignore the mattress in favor of its other highlights."
He had an answer for everything, didn't he? One of his less charming traits. Some of the time, anyway. "But you're-- Ugh." Duo rubbed at his eyes with his hand. This was Heero's job, dammit, not his. "You're... I mean, we are talking about a long time, right?"
"A long time...? Oh." He smiled with a faint chagrin. "Perhaps you're right. The mattress is obviously affecting my ability to think with my normal levels of sap. Or maybe it all just dripped onto your side of the bed."
"No one said the mattress was uneven. It's just a little soft and squishy. Unlike me."
"So what do you propose?"
"Well..." Duo ruminated on the state of their finances, the progress of their renovations, their schedule for the day, and the efficacy of the latest dampening materials being tested in shuttles out at Baringer Base. "It is the mattress that came with the house. And it seems like it should take priority over, say, changing the door to the water heater closet. And I don't want to hear that, like ten years from now, you have problems getting out of bed."
"If anything causes that, it'll be you."
He clutched his hand dramatically to his heart. "Oooh, the Yuy strikes again. Guess you're all warmed up now. Or wait, were you actually implying something else?"
Heero glossed over the details with a brief smile. "Do you think they deliver mattresses?"
*****
He wasn't certain what he expected. Mattresses came in four, no, five different sizes at the least, right? What other choices were there to make?
Apparently, quite a few. He poked his finger into the cushy pillowtop, and lost sight of half his finger. "I dunno, man. It's sorta..."
"Just like the name makes it sound?" Heero finished dryly, also eyeing the mattress dubiously. He scooted himself up onto the heavily cushioned top and bounced on it experimentally for mere curiosity's sake.
Duo followed, going so far as to lie down on it for a moment. "Hmmm. Sorta comfy." He wiggled down into it a bit more. "But I could see it being nice on some nights, but not really what you might want on others."
Heero simply hummed his concurrence before sliding off to reach for the mattress' label, interested in the specs. Being a typical retail product, it provided little information, but he added what little there was to his mental database for later comparison.
They proceeded to the next mattress in the long line of mattresses, and after bouncing up and down on it a bit, Duo laughed softly. "Feels kinda like Goldilocks."
"Goldilocks," Heero repeated, searching through his memory for the reference. "I'm not familiar with that one."
"You know, and the three bears?"
"Bears?" Sounding slightly more familiar, and yet frustratingly incomprehensible.
Duo bounced off the bed and onto the one across from them. "She breaks into their house, eats all their food, complains when she doesn't like it. Goes upstairs, sleeps in all their beds, complains again. The punchline of it all is something like, 'This one's too hard, this one's too soft, but this one's just right."
"Hm. I don't think I like this Goldilocks."
"Yeah, neither do I. I can't remember what happened when the bears came home. Maybe they ate her."
Heero nodded sagely. "That would only be fair. This one's too hard."
"Yeah, I know. And this one's..." He bounced contemplatively again. It was like a kid's dream, all this being able to bounce on beds as much as one liked. "This one's unremarkable. Where's the next one?"
Heero tagged along dutifully to the one down the line. "'Unremarkable'? Just what are you expecting out of your mattress, Duo? Something that will be just so great that you'll know it immediately?"
"Hey, you never know. You tell me, man. You're the one with the creaky joints."
"Is there something I can help you with today?" a man asked, and they turned towards him. His name tag had an anemic-looking sheep affixed to it.
Duo blinked at him for a moment before the social part of his mind kicked in. "I guess we're just looking around today."
"Are you looking for anything in particular?"
"We don't know yet."
"Well, we have plenty of mattresses to choose from, and don't forget that if you buy today, we're throwing in a box frame for free. Take your time and have a look around." There was a moment of silence during which Duo thought for sure that the salesman would leave them in peace, but alas, he was proven mistaken. "The mattress you're sitting on now is in the Royal line. It's one of our best selling mattress lines. The springs are heavy duty eight and three quarter gauge, rather than the usual nine and a half gauge wire. That makes for stronger support. See, this mattress is only the nine and a half gauge wire." He walked over to the mattress diagonal from them and pressed down on it. "See, you can feel the difference."
Duo smiled politely with an open, but not very interested, expression, but the salesman was not deterred.
"Come on, check it out."
With a silent sigh, and a concealed smirk from Heero, he went over and obediently sat down on the mattress. The salesman quickly re-engaged his pitch. "See how this mattress has more give to it? It still does a good job of support, but it's not as firm as the Royal mattress over there. Can you feel the difference?"
"Not really." He tried to make it sound apologetic, and not like he thought the salesguy was on crack.
A split second's annoyance at him for not following the script was quickly smoothed over with another plastic smile. "Do you have requirements? Soft or firm, for instance?"
"Not especially. Something not too extreme, I guess." Too soft was just... a little too weird. And too firm, well, just a bit too utilitarian. They were shopping for an indulgent dream of the future, after all. "Something that's good for your back, maybe. But I guess it's not like there's going to be anything here that says it's bad for your back or something."
The salesman pounced on the opening. "Alright, that's a good start. Over here, we have the latest in sleep technology..."
As the man led them to another corner of the store, Heero mouthed to his partner, "Sleep technology?"
Duo shrugged. Wasn't nearly as strange as that toilet they saw the other day, which supposedly reflected the awesome rushing whitewater power of the mighty river after which it was named.
"...the latest foam, developed by Verden for use in their space shuttles. Go on, give it a try."
"Foam, huh?" Duo poked it tentatively before sitting down on the edge. Assured that the assembly would not collapse beneath him, he edged in a bit further. "It's... foamy."
"But notice the way that it doesn't sink beneath you. It molds itself to the contours of your body to give you maximum support. And it doesn't translate movement. See?" He walked over to the other side of the bed and pounded on the foam mattress a bit. "You didn't feel that, right? You are completely shielded from the restless movements of your partner."
"Rather unfriendly, don't you think?" Heero murmured, finally participating verbally in the retail experience.
The salesman paused for a second before politely inquiring whether the statement had been directed at him.
It hardly mattered. The salesman could have been trying to frantically divert their attention to the next slew of sales for all he cared. It was the tilt of Duo's head that caused him to continue. "You go through all the trouble to share a bed with someone, only to pretend that they're not there."
The salesman laughed uneasily, uncertain if there had been a joke in there or not, but Duo snickered knowingly. He hopped backwards on the bed and flopped himself down on it for the experience. "You can love someone without wanting to know when they get out of bed to go take a leak."
Heero laid down halfheartedly on the bed next to him. "My partner shouldn't worry about waking me up in the middle of the night. It'd be alright."
"Oh, man," he sighed, knowing how pathetically true it was. Heero had never had the same trouble falling and then staying asleep that he had. "What do you think?"
"Hm. Not really."
He popped back upright. "I think we'll stick with springs," he announced to their patiently hovering attendant, but play time was over now. "So I guess we'll just take a look around and take our time trying things out." It was clearly a dismissal, and the man took the opportunity to move on to greener pastures.
Once he was gone, Duo saw Heero relax slightly into the mattress, and he grinned. "What, you really like it?"
After a contemplative pause, Heero shook his head. "Not really. It's different. But... it reminds me a bit of the bunks they have on ships these days. Higher quality, of course."
Duo made an amused sound. "Well, it was developed by Verden for use in their shuttles, after all."
"Then let's leave the foam for extra-terrestrial flight, shall we?"
"Aw, you mean you don't think I'll be able to provide you with an out of this world experience?" he joked softly.
Heero left his reply at an eyeroll on top of a tiny smile and got up. Surveying the field before them, he headed off decisively towards an unexplored sector of the store.
Joining him half a minute later, Duo jumped onto the mattress currently under inspection. "I heard from these people over there that most of the mattresses are probably made by the same manufacturers, just released under different names. I'm not sure I get the logic behind that. Oooh, this one is nice."
"Really." Heero leaned over the bed to look at the label.
"Well, maybe. Sorta. Kinda. Dammit, these all really do feel the same to me. Are you sure you aren't the one that should be trying all these things out? You seem to be all 'princess and the pea', and all."
He paused in the act of climbing on the bed. "Excuse me?"
"You know, the one about, um, something about how only a true princess could feel even a small pea hidden underneath her mattress or something. I don't really remember the plot. Just the punchline."
"Well, I hope it was a dried pea or something at the very least. Because I don't think a cooked pea would do very much."
Trust Heero to think logically about his fairy tales. Enough so that he didn't even blink twice at being called a princess. "Well, if it was cooked, then you'd know she was really something, I guess."
"How about, 'Heero and the springs'?"
"Huh?"
He had since finished his ascent, and now knelt on the mattress beside his partner. "These springs," he repeated, exerting a downward force that pressed his knees further into the mattress. It definitely didn't absorb the force like the foam. "You can't feel the springs?"
"What, you mean you can feel the springs against your knees?" Duo frowned, wiggling around a bit trying to get a feel for things. "No, I don't feel anything, but maybe 'cuz I'm all lying down and force distributed and stuff. Which I guess is normally the case with people on beds. I mean, are there mattresses where you can't feel them all?"
"I don't know. Let's find out. This is unacceptable."
"But how often are you in a position to... oh."
"Oh?" Heero blinked at him.
"Yeah, oh." Sitting up, Duo blinked back at him. "Oh, you mean you weren't... 'oh'?"
"Oh... what exactly?"
"...Oh." Duo's eyes darted around the store before returning. "Never mind. Well, how about this one?"
Heero let him make his way to the next mattress before catching up. "Duo..."
"Maybe there isn't a good way to tell if a mattress is right or not. You basically just find out ten years down the line, I guess. Or sooner, maybe," he added with just a touch of sorrow, thinking about Heero's current state of affairs. "Maybe we should just compare the specs and try to weigh things that way."
"Duo... Why do I feel like... we're not on the same page here?"
He stared blankly past Heero before focusing again on him with a fleeting smile. "Forget it, man. You don't always have to get what I'm saying. I hardly do, sometimes."
"Well, yes, but... that should be because I just don't get it. Not because... I'm not getting all the information I need."
"Man, you don't need the shit that goes on in my head. But anyway, it wasn't a big deal or anything. Just one of those random little thoughts that benefit from there being a second thought on the matter. Like the first little thought's big brother, come along to slap it on the back of the head and tell it what an idiot it's being."
"Duo..."
Geez, how many different tones could a guy attach to a single word? He picked up the label lying on the bed next to him. "See, this says it's got triple the number of springs in the middle third of the mattress for extra support. That's gotta be a good thing, right?"
*****
Their mattress was delivered late that afternoon. It was dressed and adorned with all the old fixings, which was a little depressing in the sense that it looked exactly the same as it used to. They had both admitted to being able to feel only a small difference, and it was disappointing to know that the disparity would show mainly through what it did not do.
But there was no use creating self-fulfilling prophecies. If they approached the bed with negative attitudes, it would fail to impress, so they headed towards their room that night with a tempered excitement for one more new purchase in the gradual evolution of their home, and left it at that.
At the bottom of the stairs, Heero caught Duo around the waist and pulled him close. "Duo."
Somehow, that didn't sound like a low, sexy purring of his name so much as a slightly tired sigh of his name. Damn. He decided to pretend it was a purr anyway and stole a preemptive kiss.
Heero met it evenly, but did not allow himself to be distracted by it. "Duo," he sighed again. "What haven't you been telling me?"
"Hm?" Heero attempted to will him into compliance, but the effect was ruined when Duo laughed. "Loooo~ok into my eyessssss."
"Duo."
The half exasperated, half petulant tone usually made him laugh to himself. This time, he just felt a little guilty. But at least it wasn't angry. He tried to smooth it over with a bright smile. "What?"
"There's something wrong here."
"Such as?"
"I don't know, Duo. You tell me. What was it I did?"
"Oh, don't be like that, Heero. You're not going to guilt me into anything. You know you didn't do anything wrong."
"I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt, but if you insist. What was it you did?"
Okay, he couldn't really be annoyed since he pretty much asked for it. "Nothing, Heero. There's nothing wrong here. No one's done anything."
Heero lifted a hand to Duo's hair and pushed some of his bangs back. "We can do this all night, you know."
"Yeah?" He got his head situated on Heero's shoulder. "Well, I'm all comfy. Let's go."
They swayed together a little before Heero murmured into his ear. "We'll never get the chance to try out our new bed."
Oh, tempting. But he was fairly certain that he could outlast the challenge. "Mmm, still comfy."
A hand stroked his braid. "I don't like there being something not quite right between us."
With a heavy exhalation, he pushed himself off of Heero, just enough to get a good angle for a soft kiss on the lips. He savored it, and came away with a pleased curve to his lips. It solidified a few things in his head. "Everything's fine between us, Heero."
"Twice today you've gotten that look on your face. Both times when you were talking to me, and I'm sure I was missing something. You don't have to tell me what, but I don't want to do them again."
Denial was always an option, but sometimes he could be nice and play along, too. "It's nothing you did, Heero," he insisted.
"Then it's something I didn't do, isn't it?" He had pretty much said as much that morning.
"You wanna know, don't you?" A smirk warred with a pout.
"I said you didn't have to tell me."
"Ah, but now you're regretting it, aren't you?"
"No... I'm just seeing the unfortunate down side to such generosity."
He snorted. "And such generosity should be rewarded, I suppose."
"If it was nothing, then it was nothing. That's fine. I just don't want you to feel like you can't tell me."
"That's not it at all, Heero. I can't tell you because then that would be defeating the whole point. I mean, you didn't do something, right? And if I told you what it was, then you'd do it, but it would be for completely different reasons. Kinda like going back in time and doing things that result in you going back in time in the first place. It just doesn't work."
"That's... not really like anything at all."
"Shut up." He got a kiss on his cheek for his troubles.
While they could easily have stood there all night discussing the matter, perhaps such a pastime could be better enjoyed in a horizontal position. It was inevitable that they continue their slow drift towards their new purchase. When they were back on level ground at the top of the stairs, Duo spied a thoughtful look on Heero's face and frowned. "God, Heero, now you're obsessing over it, aren't you?"
"I can't help it." The statement was both calm and defensive.
Duo stopped in his tracks and pouted, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned against the hallway wall. "I swear, sometimes you are just so bloody... ooooh, detail oriented!" he huffed, using a euphemism to encompass any number of less complimentary things he might have said.
As this was not a flaw in Heero's eyes, he was not bothered in the least. "You would be, too, if you were in my shoes. How could you leave me this big puzzle and not expect me to try and solve it?"
The fault was really Duo's own for leaving the clues to such a big puzzle lying around in the first place. "Well, stop it."
"You started it."
Oh lord, there was that phrase, that phrase that Heero would never have used until Duo introduced him to it, and now he was reminded of those circumstances, of those times, and he couldn't help the little laugh that spilled out of him. "Here, let me distract you."
Two sneaky little hands reached out to seize Heero by the beltloops and tug him close. Lips were joined soon after. When Heero made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere, the hands unhooked themselves from the beltloops to splay across his hips, where they lingered briefly before sliding back to wander possessively over denim-covered buttocks. The back pockets were interfering with the feel of things. How bothersome. How much sweeter without pockets, and even denim?
Something in him snorted at his own thoughts. Yeah, yeah, it grumbled. All talk and no action so far. When we gonna move things along?
When... He allowed himself to be sidetracked from answering by the first shiny thing that wandered across his path. It occurred to him that the soft sound he heard was not really a moan so much as perhaps a contemplative sigh, and his eyes snapped open. His focus was placed conveniently enough to see the signs he needed to see, and he ordered his hands to climb, latch on to the back of Yuy's jeans, and pull back. When their lips were clear, he pouted. "You're doing it again. Damn, I must suck."
Heero was not nearly as repentant as he could have been. "If anything, you just thrust me right into the middle of the situation. I know it has to have something to do with this. Can you really fault me for wanting to figure it out and do something about it?"
Not really. Great. He knew how Heero was. It wasn't laziness or complacence that got him through the war. When he went after something, he really went at it. "You're going to be thinking about this forever and ever now."
"Well, hopefully I figure it out before forever rolls around."
Visions of a short eternity of distraction danced in his head. He growled, whipped out a mental shotgun, and blew them all away. "Fine! You know what you never did? You never...," he paused for a moment, trying to find the right word, "...touched me!"
"I... huh?"
"You've never touched me," he repeated irritably. "'There'. So there." He stuck out his tongue for good measure.
"...?" A lightbulb shined its light on the early morning encounter that had sparked his conversation. "Oh."
"Which is nothing, like I said. Because we said time was nothing in our relationship, right? Whether you do or you don't, you do or you don't and that's the end of the story. Only now it's not because now you know what I'm talking about and what happens from now on is totally going to be skewed and this is all your fault."
"Duo, I--"
"I don't really care why, Heero. It doesn't matter. It's not important. We go at our own arbitrary pace, right? And if you're just not--"
A hand was planted firmly on the wall next to his head. Not a sign of frustration or anger in any sense, but a warning of imminent seriousness enough to make him fall silent. He got a close up look at the top of Heero's head as it hung before him, Heero staring down into the space between them for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. At length, his head rose and he met Duo's eyes. "No, Duo, I'm not 'not'... something. I'm not not ready, and I don't not find you attractive, or something equally inane." He winced, though mostly it was because of the inelegant double negatives.
That Heero loved him was a truth beyond doubt. Perhaps the question was then what the meaning or the consequence of that love was. "You don't have to tell me," he said, his tone both conciliatory and peevish. "You have good reasons for everything."
Not telling him would be absurd, and Heero let a little bit of that show in his wry look. It hung there for a while as he considered his next words. "This has been a learning experience, Duo, and I don't just mean that in an educational sense." He let his hand fall from its place on the wall, brushing over Duo's shoulder and down his arm as it did. "I've learnt about things, learnt to think and do things I would never have thought or done before. It doesn't mean that I do things artificially, or that I do things I don't really want to do. I've learnt to lean into you when I want to be reminded of your presence. I've learnt to kiss you to demonstrate my affection for you. And now, well, I guess I'll just have to learn to think about the penis as an object of sexual attraction."
Duo laughed, and he knew that Heero intended for him to, dammit. "Have you ever thought of anything as an object of sexual attraction?" Heero kissed him several times in that special way of his, and Duo elected not to think too hard about how that answered the question. He was fairly certain he didn't need to realize it. He sighed, letting his hands play first with the hem of Heero's shirt before they just snuck underneath and caressed the warm skin hidden therein. "How can you not think of it that way? What the hell else is your dick good for?"
"Taking a piss? And I hope you're not interested in mixing the two, because I'm not too keen on that."
Alright, he had sort of walked into that one, too. "Isn't there some sort of biological mechanism that ought to prevent--? Never mind. Okay, I admit that, if I'm horny, I'm much more likely to go for my own dick than someone else's. That part, I'll agree, not so natural for me. I guess that's something I'm learning, too. But come on. I know you're repressed, babe, but seriously. You can't tell me you've never ever played with yourself?"
"I rarely play with anything, Duo. Except maybe you, these days," Heero added with a smile.
There was a promise somewhere in there that sent a tingle down his spine. He had to withdraw his hands and press them flat against the wall behind him to make sure they didn't do something without his permission. "Never touched yourself once? Never ever? Ever? Ever at all?"
"I didn't say that. I know how it works. It's... done its thing before." Duo snickered. Heero let him. "But I've sort of had greater priorities on my mind."
"You know, most guys would say that they don't wanna die a virgin."
"And I'm going to say, I'm going to be dead. What do I care?" Heero backed off to lean against the wall opposite him. "Caught between double checking my equipment, and masturbating somewhere, I hope the choice is obvious. One might save lives or accomplish goals far beyond my death, and the other gives a few fleeting moments of enjoyment."
"Heh, if it's really that fleeting, you're doing it wrong."
"It's nothing to linger over when there are no emotions attached to it. If I want to perform a mechanical process, I'll go clean my gun."
Duo swallowed full-blown laughter, though not without a muffled guffaw. Heero considered asking, but decided against it. Most of the time, he was content in his own little oblivious world. Which unfortunately was sometimes the problem. Duo started to speak before the last of his amusement had faded away. "Am I--?" He paused, caution stepping in to stop him a bit belatedly. After a brief stint of uncertainty, he booted the caution back into a corner of his mind and let the rest of the spontaneous thought out. "Am I worth lingering over?"
Heero closed the distance between them again and brushed his partner's cheek with the back of his hand. "Without a doubt." The words lingered in the air in appreciation for a few seconds before their lips lingered in communion. One of Heero's hands lingered against Duo's side. One of Duo's hands slid up to linger in Heero's hair. All in all, there was much lingering going on.
During the post-kiss linger, Heero chuckled softly. "Damn. You were right."
"Hm?" Duo was feeling a little too lazy for anything more than that.
"I think we're going to have to wait a little for my motives to clear up before I touch anything." He didn't like muddying things up when he didn't have to.
Duo laughed in triumph. "Aha! Told ya so."
OWARI
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