Chapter Text
Hal laced his fingers behind his head and studied the ceiling tiles above his bed. He should get up, shower, change the sheets. He should do something so he wouldn’t wake up in the morning, alone but still smelling like Bruce and sex. He should find someone to fuck who didn’t leave him more coiled up and on edge than he’d been before he’d come, someone who wasn’t quite so beautiful or quite so brilliant or quite such a bastard.
Next time, he thought. Next time he’d say no. Next time he’d say stay. Next time he’d say not like this.
It was always next time, with Bruce. Hal rolled over and shoved his face against the still-warm pillow on the other side of the bed.
It wasn’t that he was expecting chocolates and flowers and an early movie to leave plenty of time for tender lovemaking afterwards. Hal wasn’t sure he’d know what to do with that if he got it. But he had, he realized now, somehow expected that fucking Bruce would eventually stop being an endurance course. That the razor’s edge would give way to safer ground once they’d felt each other out. That it would stop being a strangely high-stakes game with ever-changing rules.
He’d somehow expected it to stop being too exciting to pass up in favor of having a conversation which might not go his way. He’d expected having that gigawatt intensity all focused on him to be something he could habituate to. He’d expected, when he got right down to it, that there would be a point where fucking Bruce became a routine thing that he could think about rationally.
It had happened before, with previous fuckbuddies. Maybe half of his relationships had started out the normal way, dates that kept happening, conversations about where it was going, an official declaration of coupledom. Everything else had been friends who’d fallen into his bed, then kept falling into his bed, until their hands knew where to go and their mouths knew where to kiss and they knew which breaths meant ‘slow down’ and which noises meant ‘harder’ and one of them asked, “Are we a thing, now?” and the other said, “Sure.”
With Bruce, it was different. The first time had almost been an extension of an argument, or maybe the fight they’d almost lost to Brainiac right after the argument, or maybe both all wrapped up together. It had been rough and fast, a quickie in Hal’s quarters on the Watchtower with both of them only half out of their suits, Hal’s moans muffled around the teeth he’d sunk into Bruce’s shoulder and Bruce barely seeming surprised at being bitten.
The second time had been the next day, in the showers after Hal had noticed the bruise his teeth had left. He hadn’t meant to, or maybe just didn’t want to cop to it, but there was no denying how hard his cock had been at the sight of his mark staining Bruce’s skin. Bruce had taken his time, then, torturing Hal with the need for quiet and the thought that someone could walk in and they’d have to stop, and when Hal finally came he hadn’t been able to stand on his own for a full ten minutes afterwards. It had been three months between then and the next time, for no reason that Hal could understand but he assumed made perfect sense to Bruce.
It had been that time that he’d first realized the potential of sleeping with a guy who could slide into a persona as easily as a coat. He’d been joking--or, more accurately, grousing--when he’d said, “At least act like you’re trying to impress me.”
But then Bruce had, a pitch-perfect performance of a rich man trying to impress a date that ended in a jaw-droppingly posh hotel room and Bruce leaving as soon as he’d gotten what he wanted on the strength of an obviously, painfully fake early-morning meeting and a casual invitation to charge breakfast to his black card.
In retrospect, his own confidence that Bruce couldn’t possibly think less of him and so there couldn’t be any harm in asking for exactly what he wanted was mildly terrifying. The time after that, “Act like we don’t know each other.” had led to borderline-anonymous sex in a men’s room in a sleazy club.
He still wasn’t sure what had possessed him to ask Bruce to pretend to be bored, or what it said about him that it had been one of the most satisfying encounters he’d had in the past two years. It was the only time they’d done it that Bruce had shown a crack in the facade. Hairline fissures, but still there. The one thing Bruce hadn’t been able to convincingly pretend to be was not interested in what Hal was doing to him. And Hal figured it probably helped that the next time they fucked, Bruce had been damn near insatiable, like he was trying to wring two nights’ worth of screwing out of the two hours they had.
What Hal knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that there was a crushing ache in his chest every time he thought of Bruce in someone else’s bed, and that whenever he tried making it with anybody else he couldn’t stop comparing them to Bruce, and that if this went on much longer he might lose his damn mind.
It didn’t help that it was business as usual whenever they saw each other in uniform, with Bruce sniping at him like Hal didn’t know precisely what he was doing when he drew fire or created a diversion and him sniping back at Bruce over his disappearing acts and unnecessarily withheld information. Last time things had gone south during a fight, Bruce had stitched up Hal’s arm in the Watchtower’s med bay like he’d been repairing a sofa cushion, his lips going thin and tight when Hal had made a joke about chicks digging scars, then beamed out before Hal had even gotten his uniform back on. Again, it wasn’t that Hal expected get-well cards and balloons. It was just difficult to look up expecting to see Bruce and find everyone but him.
Hal had meant to bring it up tonight, meant to talk about it, meant to say, “I need more than this.”
He’d meant to ask if it was really so hard for Bruce to at least act like he gave a damn.
He’d meant to do a lot of things, except that he’d barely gotten the door open before Bruce’s tongue had been in his mouth and Bruce’s hands had been on his ass and Bruce had been shoving him against the counter like they were going to fuck right there on the faded formica. Hal still wasn’t entirely sure if he was grateful or disappointed that they’d made it into the bedroom, just that it hadn’t occurred to him to say anything beyond “more” and “harder” and “now” until Bruce was walking back out the door.
Hal sighed and flipped the blinds closed, blotting out the light from the streetlamps. Next time. He’d say something next time.