Archive of Our Own

Gaara lurches into the living room on Tuesday morning, bleary eyed and shoulders sagging. Well, technically it’s closer to noon than morning, but Gaara’s Tuesday classes start late, so he just woke up. He’s just poured a black coffee into his thermos and is shotgunning it in the kitchen when he realizes Lee is in the living room.

There’s a video playing on Lee’s laptop that he’s got propped up on the coffee table. Gaara didn’t even register the noise at first in his sleep-fog. Lee’s speakers are so shitty that it takes him a minute to even distinguish the sound. He’s no connoisseur, but based on what he can hear, he guesses the title of the video is probably something like Synth Pop Jams to Work Out and Sweat To. Lee’s on the floor, shirtless, mid-way through a crunch, and his face is screwed up as he exhales at the apex of his motion, breathing out, “One hundred and three.”

Gaara’s brain stutters over that information, skips, rewinds, replays. Lee is shirtless. On the floor. In their living room. In the middle of the day. Sunlight is coming through the window and making the sweat on his torso shine. The hems of his shorts have fallen up around his hips, and Gaara can see the long line of his muscled thighs almost all the way to where they join his body.

Gaara subtly adjusts the front of his pants, facing the kitchen counter, and tries not to be caught staring. One of the few blessings of having a ridiculously hot fitness obsessive for a roommate is that Lee is almost never in the apartment when Gaara is. He leaves the house at five or six in the morning for his runs, returns mid-day to shower and change for work when Gaara’s already at class, and by the time Gaara gets home (late, after too many hours in the library or doing field work), Lee is usually already getting his beauty rest, snoring faithfully behind his closed door. It’s a routine that works perfectly for Gaara, who can hardly tolerate the sight of Lee on a good day without getting flustered and overwhelmed.

It’s not just that Lee is so goddamn hot that it makes Gaara’s mouth dry, he’s also so sweet it makes Gaara’s teeth hurt sometimes. He turns the coffee pot on every morning before Gaara gets up, even though he doesn’t even drink coffee. He leaves leftovers for Gaara whenever he cooks, a little tupperware of whatever he made himself for dinner in the fridge every night with a post-it note with Gaara’s name on it, because he worries that Gaara doesn’t eat properly. When Gaara forgets his clothes in the dryer on Lee’s laundry day, Lee folds them and leaves them in a hamper outside his door.

Gaara is sure that Lee must think Gaara doesn’t like him very much. He usually avoids Lee, and when they do happen to cross paths, Gaara hardly talks. He makes up excuses like homework that doesn’t exist or headaches he doesn’t have. He sequesters himself in the bedroom when Lee’s boisterous friends are over, even after Lee shows up at his bedroom door with an Ibuprofen and a glass of water, all apologetic and scolding his friends over his shoulder for being too loud.

It’s not that Gaara doesn’t like Lee, though, it’s that he worries he won’t be able to control himself if he’s around Lee too long. He’s worried he’ll say something stupid about his shiny hair or his bright smile or his thick biceps, or he’ll--god forbid--try to touch him or something, which would certainly end in disaster.

It’s better that he keep his distance and long after Lee from afar. Anything more would be too mortifying to even consider.

And Lee is basically the perfect roommate: tidy to a fault, courteous, respectful. Never makes any noise after lights-out other than his perpetual snoring. Always unloads the dishwasher as soon as the dishes are done and never leaves so much as a dirty spoon in the sink. He even has a set of fancy guest hand towels for their shared bathroom that he puts out when company is coming over. Gaara couldn’t have asked for better after Naruto moved out to be with his boyfriend, and Lee took over subletting from him. Not that Gaara didn’t enjoy living with Naruto (because he did, almost too much), but Lee as a roommate is a clear upgrade from the guy who used his own dirty underwear as a bathmat. The last thing Gaara wants to do is make him uncomfortable and ruin their very functional coexistence.

“Lee,” Gaara greets his roommate as he crosses the living room, nodding tersely.

Lee, at the apex of his hundred-and-twenty-fifth crunch, brushes hair out of his eyes and looks up at Gaara. Gaara catches a glimpse of his rarely-seen forehead. It’s one of his secret favorite Lee-features. Lee always wears his bangs down, so getting to see his forehead feels like a small, private treat.

Lee’s eyebrows furrow. “Where are you going?”

Gaara looks down at the thermos in his hand, the messenger bag strap across his chest, his ID badge hanging from his belt. “Campus?” he says. He has a sudden brief, panicked feeling that he’s slept for five days. That it’s actually Saturday and he’s missed four days’ worth of lectures. “It’s Tuesday … isn’t it?”

Lee shakes his head. “It is, but Neji said- I don’t think … I think your classes are all cancelled.”

“What?”

“You haven’t checked your email this morning?” Lee rolls over onto his knees, and Gaara silently mourns the loss of the sight of his thighs as his shorts’ hems fall back down. He pauses the video on his computer, then grabs his phone off the coffee table and checks something Gaara can’t see. “Yeah, Neji said they’re closing everything because of the virus.”

Neji is Lee’s friend, and a doctoral student like Gaara, though he’s in some branch of research chemistry that Gaara has absolutely no interest in. Lee often speaks of him with a reserved sort of awe that makes Gaara’s stomach do little jealous flips, but Gaara’s met the guy once or twice when he’s been over to hang out with Lee, and he’s an unremitting asshole. Frankly, Gaara has no idea what someone like Lee sees in someone like Neji, who can’t even muster up a smile when meeting someone new. Not that Gaara’s the smiliest guy ever, either, and Lee seems to like him well enough, but … well. Hypocrisy isn’t a virtue, exactly, but Gaara isn’t going to beat himself up over it. The point is, Neji’s a dick, and Lee could do better in a so-called best friend.

Gaara fumbles his phone out of his bag and palms it warily. Sure enough, he has ten unread email notifications. At the very top of his inbox is an email from the Dean of Students, followed by an email from his advisor, both highlighted with red exclamation marks. He taps on the first one and feels his eyes widen as he reads.

Out of an abundance of caution … All classes and campus activities suspended until further notice … Please practice social distancing …

“That’s fine, I’ll just go to the librar- ” he starts to say.

All campus facilities including dining halls, libraries, and labs are closed effective immediately … Students will be moved out of the dorms starting this week … End-of-semester exams are temporarily postponed …

He blinks, and blinks, and blinks. The email from his advisor tells him that if he left anything in the office, he’ll have to wait until they get formal approval for him to go get it. There’s nothing on Gaara’s desk on campus but library books, but he needs those for his dissertation … well, if his dissertation even matters anymore, with campus shut down for what looks like the rest of the semester. Did the email say what was happening with graduation? If it did, he didn’t even register it. He briefly worries about late fees, but his next email is from the public and campus libraries saying they’re waiving those. His options for the day narrow further as he scrolls: The public library is closed until further notice. The bookstore café where he bartends on weekends to make rent is going pick-up only, and his boss has emailed to tell him not to bother coming in, since they won’t have customers anyway. Parks and Rec has emailed to say they’re shuttering the Botanical Gardens to all but essential staff, which means he can’t even touch his field samples until god-knows-when. Everywhere he looks, it’s the same thing: Closed. Delivery only. All employees working from home. Services temporarily suspended. Shelter in place.

“I … I need to call my sister.” Gaara’s fingers feel numb on his phone screen as he presses her contact.

“Hey, Gaara.” Temari’s voice on the other end of the line sounds tense. “I guess you saw, huh? Some kind of order from the mayor, so I guess we’re all stuck in the house for now. Shikamaru’s already pissing me off about it, can you believe it? I’m trying to get him to help me with spring cleaning, since we don’t have anything better to do, but he just rolled over and went back to sleep.” There’s a pause, and Gaara can hear Temari’s sharp nails tapping on something, a nervous habit of hers ever since they were kids. ”You’re not feeling sick, are you?”

“Not- ” Gaara’s voice comes out hoarse, and he clears his throat. “No. I’m not sick. I’m fine.”

”Yeah, I was pretty shell-shocked too.” Temari’s voice goes oddly soft. ”You’ll be okay. Just hang in there. Play with your plants or something. Edit your paper. I talked to Kankuro already, he said he’s going to teach himself to brew mead? Don’t do that.” More restless, muffled clicking. “Do you have enough meds to get you through? I think the pharmacy’s still open, but I’d feel better if you just stayed home. Maybe you can mail order them?”

Gaara nods, then remembers she can’t see him. “I’ve got plenty.” There’s a ninety day supply of everything in the back of his drawer, one of the benefits of being a neurotic, type-A pre-planner with a penchant for panic attacks.

”Okay.” He hears Temari’s back-to-business clap through the phone’s tinny speaker. He can almost see her brushing her hands together, all brusque efficiency. “I’m gonna get back to cleaning the kitchen. These burners won’t scrub themselves. Call me if you start feeling bad. Sick or upset, either one.”

“Okay,” Gaara says hollowly.

“I love you! Be safe. Text me if you need anything. Don’t leave the house.”

“Love you,” he echoes.

When he looks up from the phone, Lee is watching him with a look of sympathy, still crouched on his exercise mat in the middle of the living room floor.

“Do you want me to make some tea?” Lee braces his hands on his knees and goes to stand, calves flexing. “Or, well- ” He pauses, mid-motion, halfway to a squat. “I guess you should probably make your own tea. Social distancing and everything.”

“Huh?” To tell the truth, Gaara hasn’t been paying attention to the news at all, as much as he can manage it. The bubbling uncertainty causes him nothing but unremitting anxiety, so he’s been retreated into his little turtle-shell of routine, carefully avoiding noticing the students on campus walking around with masks on and the newspaper headlines at the bus stop. He hates going to the grocery store in the best of times, the crush of people overwhelming on a normal day, much less when there are runs on bread and hand sanitizer, so he’s just been avoiding going to the store entirely.

“We’re supposed to stay at least six feet apart from other people. I know it will be difficult with us both living here, and with the one bathroom, but we should try to be as careful as we can anyway. I bought some wipes so we can sanitize the common surfaces after we use them …” The Cupid’s bow of Lee’s mouth drops into a frown. “I suppose that means I won’t be able to cook for you, either.”

“You’re not sick, right?” Gaara takes a half-step backwards, as if that would protect him from whatever germs are poised to leap off Lee’s body with their teeth bared.

“No, no!” Lee holds up his hands. “I am fine! But they closed my gym as well … someone there got sick. And the schools are closed, of course. But with your asthma and everything … we just need to be careful. Better safe than sorry, right?”

“Careful,” Gaara repeats. “Right.” The idea of being trapped in the apartment with Lee for an undetermined amount of time, with no place to escape to when his nervousness overtakes him is already sending him spiraling. His fist clenches on his messenger bag strap. “I’m going to … go to my room.”

Lee stands up fully, hands out and mouth open like he’s going to say something, but all he says is, “Oh! Okay then. If you need anything, I’ll … be here! Obviously. Ha-ha.” He says the words rather than actually laughing, his usually chipper grin a bit strained.

Once Gaara has his bedroom door closed, collapsed on the bed and staring at the ceiling and trying to regulate his breathing, he hears Lee’s crappy workout music start back up.

Everything is fine, for a while. The plants on Gaara’s windowsill and balcony get the best attention they have in months. He eats almost three meals a day, even if they’re mostly microwaved. He works on his dissertation as much as he can, though he has to leave big swathes of [CITATION NEEDED] in the margins like an overzealous Wikipedia editor. He sleeps, sometimes, and when he doesn’t he thinks about Lee, one wall away, snoring happily in his turtle-print blanket.

Gaara has been doing okay tamping down his anxiety about finishing out the semester, since he’s far from the only student nationwide dealing with the issue, so he’s sure someone, somewhere, who isn’t him, is going to be responsible for sorting out that whole mess. The plot of rare cacti over at the Botanical Gardens that he’s been observing are probably okay. He’s been keeping a close eye on the weather conditions, and fortunately they’ve been perfectly arid. It hasn’t rained in the past two weeks, which is both rare and fortunate for this time of spring, although he’s sure the conservators are panicking about water loss in the marsh plants in the meantime.

He actually feels almost relaxed at times, without the additional stress of social interaction everywhere from the bus to the dining hall, free of the burden of lesson planning for the undergraduate botany classes, and liberated from the responsibility of spending every weekend cutting off people who are far too drunk to be manhandling the books at the bookshop. He’s fielded a couple of frantic emails from his more scrupulous and/or panic-stricken students about their exams and grades, but for the most part … everyone just seems to be keeping calm and carrying on.

Lee is really the biggest problem. He’s just there. In the apartment. All the time. Mostly shirtless. Gaara knows he has nowhere to go--nobody does, right now--but Lee is just so … energetic. And handsome. And sweaty.

At first, Gaara tries avoiding Lee as he usually does. But there are only so many places to go in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. And the longer he’s off his routine, the more disrupted Gaara’s sleep schedule becomes. Which means he runs into Lee more and more.

It’s five in the morning, and Gaara is fumbling into the kitchen, eyes puffy and swollen after a sleepless night of fruitlessly watching fast-motion videos of plants growing set to plinking instrumental songs. The videos were heralded as “soothing”, but after about four defiantly wakeful hours, Gaara found himself more irritated with the tinkling piano notes than anything, scrutinizing and critiquing the care and keeping of the plants on his dim screen. They left scales on that orchid leaf for days, he thinks bitterly as he wrestles with the fridge door, squinting in the artificial light.

He’s rooting in the fridge for a tupperware--Lee’s insistence that it was a violation of social distancing for him to continue cooking for them both only lasted through the third time he saw Gaara making himself a bowl of plain microwave ramen without the seasoning packet, though he made Gaara promise to wipe the containers down with Lysol wipes before he eats out of them--and debating whether it’s too early or too late to put the coffee on when the door opens.

Lee’s standing there in the doorway, shimmering with sweat, headphones in his ears. He must have just come back from his run, if the length of his shorts is anything to judge by. He’s grinning at something on his phone screen, and he doesn’t seem to notice Gaara standing in the kitchen at all. Lee lifts the hem of his shirt to wipe sweat from his forehead, and six careful feet of distance are far too few for Gaara to avoid catching a whiff of the sweat on him as taut abs are exposed. Lee smells like salt and musk, heady and masculine. Gaara’s hand clenches into a clawed fist on the tupperware container.

The creak of the plastic or the light coming from the fridge must finally catch Lee’s attention--either that, or he gets that prickling feeling that means he’s being stared at--because he lifts his head and catches Gaara’s eye, and his startled expression breaks into a wide smile.

“Oh, good morning, Gaara!” he says, waving. “You’re up early!”

And then he pulls his shirt off over his head and crumples it in one broad hand.

Gaara’s whole body goes suddenly hot. Blood rushes in his ears.

Which leads to Gaara’s second biggest problem: there’s no safe time or place for him to jerk off.

The wall that separates Gaara’s bedroom from Lee’s is terrifyingly thin, and Gaara has never been particularly good at, well, muffling his pleasure, so to speak. And Gaara’s tried-and-true strategy of waiting until Lee is asleep is only effective insofar as Gaara can predict when Lee will be asleep, which he increasingly can’t, as Lee’s lack of all-day exercise seems to lead to him stewing in something like cabin fever, except that it involves way more push-ups in the living room at midnight.

There’s always the bathroom, but they share that. And while Gaara’s sure Lee would never say anything about it, he has a bone-deep fear that Lee will somehow notice if Gaara spends more than his traditional fifteen-minute shower time in there. And Gaara already feels self-conscious enough about his long showers, because Lee’s often looking in the direction of the bathroom door when he comes out, as if judging him for wasting water.

This confluence of factors means that, on the morning that Gaara comes out of his bedroom, sleep-rumpled, to find Lee swaying to slow jams in the kitchen while he makes oatmeal in his boxer shorts, he finds himself a few minutes later, face-down on his bed with his ass in the air and his dick in his hand, suffocating on his pillow.

His pillowcase has bite marks in it now, dented lines of torn and stretched threads from his incisors. He can almost map them: that one from the day Lee forgot he left the kettle on while he was showering and came charging into the living room when it started to whistle with just a towel clutched haphazardly over his crotch; another from the day Lee proudly announced he was the featured trainer of the week on his gym’s Instagram, and Gaara spent the morning frantically Googling how to download photos from an album post, beset by images of Lee’s bright white teeth and flexed bicep hoisting an improbably heavy weight; yet a third from the first Wednesday that Lee taught his yoga class remotely, and Gaara discovered Lee can lift his legs all the way over his head.

Gaara’s hesitance to make a move isn’t based in a fear that Lee might not be gay--or at least bi. One look at Lee’s choice of decor--roughly three shirtless martial arts posters per square foot of wall--and the smattering of frankly contradictory pride pins on the fanny pack he wears to go running could give anyone a rough approximation of where his proclivities lie. (And, yes, Gaara has come to terms with the fact that he’s absurdly attracted to a man who wears a fanny pack. One look at Lee’s smile tells him it’s worth it. Fanny pack and all.)

Gaara supposes it’s possible that Lee’s just a fitness nut and an especially enthusiastic ally. (He has both designs of the lesbian pride flag in his collection of badges. Gaara’s been gay his whole life, and he doesn’t even know where he would begin looking for those.) But there’s also the small matter of the time that Gaara is pretty sure he caught Lee looking at gay porn on his phone. Lee is proprietous enough that he’s not the sort to look at anything untoward in a common area, but Gaara is very quiet when he walks (had to be, growing up in Rasa’s house). It wasn’t even that raunchy: nobody was barebacking or anything; it was just a series of tasteful nudes, but based on the way Lee’s face went slowly red and how long it took for him to scroll past them as Gaara walked up behind him on the couch, waiting to ask if it was okay if he turned the A/C on … well. Gaara has a good idea of what side (or sides) Lee’s bread is buttered on.

So it’s not that he’s worried Lee might not be into guys. It’s that he’s sure Lee wouldn’t be into him. And what reason would Lee have to be into someone like Gaara? Gaara’s a scrawny, shut-in academic with chronic coffee breath who spends more time talking to plants than to people. Lee has the entire world to choose from (or, well, roughly 60% of the population, Gaara estimates; he’s not exactly what the undergrads would call ‘a math gay’). Not to mention that most of Lee’s friends seem to work at the gym with him--or at least, work out there--because they’re all as fit and tanned and sunshiney as Lee is.

Gaara met Lee through Naruto in the first place, and every friend of theirs he’s met since seems to have the same ability to run tirelessly and bench press a human being over their heads. (And, as he now thinks on it, Gaara begins to wonder whether it’s possible he just has a roommate fetish. Or maybe he simply has excellent taste in roommates. At least, excellent on the eyes. Terrible on the dick-chafing.)

When Lee has his gathering of friends over the apartment fills up with light and laughter, and no amount of Lee beseechingly inviting Gaara to join the festivities has ever even come close to giving Gaara the notion that he belongs as some part of that. That a crowd of beautiful people like that might ever want anything to do with him. That a group of friends that shriek with laughter and wrestle on the carpet when they lose at Mario Kart might be something he could even begin to want, much less deserve.

Before he met Naruto, Gaara was perfectly content friendless, with just his siblings for company, even if he wouldn’t characterize himself as happy, exactly. And he’s still … fine. Naruto is still a good friend, even if most of their conversations these days are three- or four-text exchanges that mostly center around Naruto’s boyfriend. He’s busy. Gaara gets it. And Lee’s amazing, obviously, brightening up Gaara’s day even when Gaara retreats into the shadows of his bedroom, but he’s also decidedly off-limits. Even if there weren’t a mental roadblock Gaara had erected around Lee ten feet tall, wrapped in caution tape and blaring klaxons that blaze: DO NOT TOUCH, Lee would never go for Gaara. He just wouldn’t. It’s an impossibility, and so it’s not even worth thinking about.

So that’s that. The world is Lee’s oyster, and Gaara’s just a crabby bit of sand gumming up the works.

Lee finds Gaara stock-still on the loveseat, staring at the blank TV screen.

“Um, Gaara?” he prods gently. “My 2 o’clock class starts in fifteen-- Are you okay?”

Gaara feels like he’s listening to Lee’s words from the other side of a swimming pool underwater, everything chlorine-blurry, sounds muffled and indistinct. If he were to look up right now, he’s sure he’d see bubbles coming out of Lee’s mouth.

Or maybe that’s just the anxiolytics talking. He dry-swallowed twice his normal dose, chalky and chemical-bitter, almost the moment he put the phone down. And while they seem to have done the job of staving off his impending panic attack, they’ve left him disoriented. The TV screen seems to loom in his vision, large and then small and then large again.

“Kankuro’s sick,” says a voice that rumbles like tectonic plates drifting apart, the low, groaning growl a mountain makes when it moves. Gaara doesn’t recognize it as his own until Lee’s responding to him.

“Your brother? Sick like … sick? Has he been working?”

“No,” Gaara says slowly. Kankuro works at a theater as an usher and does objectively terrible improv shows with a troupe of all-ventriloquist comedians on his nights off, but everything in the arts district has been closed for weeks. “But he has a roommate …”

“What does his roommate do?” Lee’s voice is very soft. In his periphery, Gaara sees that he’s taken a tentative perch on the far end of the couch, a respectful six feet away.

Gaara blinks; his eyelids feel impossibly heavy. Lifting them feels like hoisting an immense weight.

“He’s a … dog … ” For the life of him, he cannot bring to mind what it is that Kankuro’s roommate actually does. Gaara has never met the guy, but he knows he has a massive white dog, and that the dog is tangentially related to his work. Kankuro is always complaining about finding long white hairs on his black work uniform.

“His roommate’s a dog?”

“No.” Gaara’s pretty sure the dog is a Great Pyrenees. Or a Samoyed. Or a Chow-chow. The dander on Kankuro’s clothes makes Gaara sneeze. None of this is relevant to Lee’s question. “He works with dogs.”

“Oh.”

Gaara pivots his head slowly. It seems to take an unreasonable amount of time. The corners of Lee’s mouth are drawn down into a pout, and he’s fidgeting with his phone.

“Is he, like … a vet?”

Gaara shakes his head roughly. His brain feels like it’s sloshing back and forth between his ears. A faint, cathode-ray-tube ringing like an old television just turned off buzzes behind his eyes. “No, he’s too stupid.”

There’s an expression on Lee’s face, the look of stifled amusement that he wears when Gaara has said something particularly mean-spirited, but he doesn’t want to encourage it. He chokes down a surprised laugh. “I see. So … do you know if he’s been working? Could he have brought germs back to their house?”

Gaara shrugs. His shoulders feel like he imagines Atlas’ must have felt: heavy with the weight of the world. He has no idea whether whatever it is that Kankuro’s roommate--Kiba, he remembers suddenly, with a flat, dull snap of his clumsy fingers, more a graze of skin than a crack of displaced air--actually does for a living, and whether or not it might be considered essential.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Lee says, his voice still very soft, careful like he’s talking down a wild animal.

When Gaara looks up, Lee’s set his phone aside on the couch, and his long fingers are fisted in the fabric of his sweatpants. They’re the soft grey ones, Gaara’s favorites, because the fabric is thin and well-worn, and because they hide very little about the shape of Lee beneath them.

Absently, he realizes he’s been staring at Lee’s lap for longer than is reasonably excusable by even a heavily drugged state, and he tears his eyes up to Lee’s face. Lee’s thick eyebrows are lifted in concern.

“I’m so sorry,” Lee says. “I wish-- ” His hands fall from his knees to the couch cushions, fingers flexing. “I wish I could give you a hug right now.”

Gaara’s gaze catches on Lee’s fingertips, his square, neatly trimmed fingernails. He can imagine what it would be like, to be hugged by Lee. His eyes trail up the bulge of Lee’s knuckles, past the bones of his wrist to the corded muscles of his forearms, the swell of his biceps. It would be warm, he thinks. He can almost feel the phantom pressure of those strong arms around his shoulders. He thinks he would feel safe there. Secure.

“Lee,” he says, tongue thick in his mouth. “Your class.”

“I cancelled it,” Lee almost whispers. “Please don’t worry about it. Is there anything I can do for you right now? Coffee? Tea?”

Gaara’s phone buzzes.

Gaara deadens his phone screen and sets it down. It continues to buzz its way across the arm of the loveseat, Temari’s irate messages flooding his notification tray.

“Do we have beer?” he asks, meeting Lee’s concerned gaze.

“It’s two PM.” Lee’s eyebrows draw together in the middle of his forehead. “And didn’t you take--?”

Gaara exhales sharply through his nose. His whole body is tingling with an adrenaline rush, blood singing menthol-hot in his veins. “Fine. Coffee, then?”

Lee jumps to his feet. “Sure!” He pauses, halfway to the kitchen. “Um, is everything--?”

“Kankuro’s fine.” Gaara recites dully. “It was just allergies.”

Lee almost folds in half, his shoulders sag so hard in relief. “Oh, thank goodness! I’m so glad to hear that!” As Gaara eyes his phone, the rapidly scrolling bickering of his siblings causing it to jitter uncontrollably, he hears Lee clattering with the coffee maker. “I’ll make us celebratory coffees!”

Gaara gets an email from the Botanical Gardens. One of the cacti he’s been studying has died. He doesn’t have favorite cacti--they’re plants, after all; they don’t have personalities--but he had liked that plant, and it was important to his research.

It’s been a wet April week, the sun dull behind rolling grey clouds every morning, and the afternoon sun not nearly enough to dry the damp earth. The wet, rhythmic patter outside the window makes Gaara want to do nothing so much as sleep.

A muffled surge of panic drives him to roll out of bed and tote his laptop into the living room.

He crafts an email to his advisor, lying horizontal on the couch with his laptop pulled up his chest to just beneath his chin, but still, arguably, ‘up for the day’.

It reads, paraphrased: ‘What will happen if I don’t have any endpoint data for my project because all the plants I’m studying fucking die.’

Professor Yamato--”Call me Tenzo,” he said, with a very severe expression, the day he elected to become Gaara’s faculty advisor; and Gaara never has--emails him back almost immediately.

“Let’s wait and see,” the email says.

It’s signed with a kaomoji that Gaara is pretty certain is meant to represent the haunted expression Professor Yamato dons to intimidate the undergraduates into completing their labs on time. Nobody ever asks for an extension from Professor Yamato. Gaara aspires to one day be so terrifying that undergrads jump to do his bidding with just a look.

Gaara sinks further into the couch and opens YouTube. There’s a channel he follows that’s doing a series on fertilizers for indoor succulents, and the narrator’s voice is low and soothing.

He’s half-dozing when Lee comes into the living room mid-afternoon, leaving a wide berth around Gaara’s sprawled form on the couch. The rain has abated as he’s been lying there, and the late afternoon sunlight casts buttery-yellow shapes on the walls and carpet. Though he can hear the air conditioner hum faintly, the room feels very warm, Gaara’s eyes heavy.

“It’s beautiful out today!” Lee says cheerily. There’s a rumpled paperback clutched in one of his long-fingered hands. “Do you mind if I open the window?

Gaara gestures him on with a lazy flick of his wrist, not really awake enough to form words.

Lee cracks the windows and sprawls out on the carpet, directly in the middle of the largest sunbeam, lazing like a cat. He tips back on one elbow, book in one hand, flipping the pages idly. Gaara mutes his video, in case Lee prefers to read in silence, but mostly because this way he can hear Lee’s breathing, slow and steady.

“You don’t have to do that,” Lee murmurs. “It wasn’t bothering me.”

“It was over,” Gaara lies.

He basks in Lee’s hum of response, a low, atonal sound that vibrates through the room. Gaara tilts his laptop screen part of the way closed, just enough that he can watch Lee from overtop the shiny black plastic. He’s suddenly very awake, hyper-aware of all of Lee’s little sounds and motions: a snort exhaled through his nose at a passage that he must find funny, the gentle scratching of his fingernails at his lower stomach. He’s not shirtless for once--a small blessing--but his shirt is a dark forest green that brings out the golden undertones of his skin. The fabric looks impossibly soft, the shirt just this side of too-tight around his lean shoulders and across his chest. It’s rucked up over Lee’s flat stomach, held in place by the weight of his back against the carpet fibers.

The book Lee is reading looks like a novel--a romance, maybe, or an adventure story, the cover an oil painting of a man with a sword clutching a busty woman around the waist. It’s not the sort of thing Gaara would expect Lee to be reading, but maybe he’s run out of nutritionist-developed cookbooks and exercise manuals, or whatever it is that gym rats read in their free time. Lee doesn’t seem to be paying it much attention either way, eyelids fluttering as his gaze drifts out the window, to the trees lit up green-gold and swaying in the breeze outside. His fingers slow to stillness, resting on his bare stomach.

Gaara’s somnolence must be catching, because in short order Lee is asleep, soft snores escaping his mouth. Gaara can see in stark relief the dark trail of hair thickening towards Lee’s waistband, where his hand has fallen to rest, the sun-drenched skin of his fingers making the hair between look all the darker. The air feels thin in Gaara’s lungs.

Lee mumbles something in his sleep--nothing close to real words, just formless sounds--and his lips shift to a soft pout. His fingers tense and relax in his stomach in an idle scratch.

Gaara’s hand weighs the lid of his laptop down, pressing it until it closes silently. He’s frozen, barely propped up by the pillow behind his neck, unable to tear his eyes away from Lee’s sleeping body.

He wonders what it would be like to be allowed to touch Lee like this, his body lazy and his skin sun-warmed. What it would feel like to climb on top of him, to rub his body along the muscled expanse of Lee’s torso, hot skin beneath him. He imagines batting Lee’s hand aside, so that his own hand could drag through the coarse hair on Lee’s stomach, crawling towards Lee’s waistband. He imagines pressing his nose to the place where Lee’s neck meets his shoulder, nosing the soft fabric of his shirt aside to smell the faint haze of sweat the mid-afternoon sun has left on his skin, to lick at the salt of it. He wonders what the muscles of Lee’s thighs and hips would feel like under his legs if Gaara straddled him--would Lee tense, shift Gaara to where he wanted him? Would those broad hands meet around Gaara’s waist and tug him closer? Would he let Gaara slide his hands up his face and into the silky locks of Lee’s hair? If he let Gaara smell him, taste him … then would he let him bite? Let him get a mouthful of that warm, salt-damp skin and suck a bruise into Lee’s neck, to leave evidence of where Gaara had been? So that when the collar of his shirt slipped down when he did his stretches, all his students in the video call would know Gaara had been there?

Gaara sits up. He has to leave. Immediately. Before Lee wakes up and sees the state he’s in just from watching Lee sleeping. Moving as slowly and quietly as he can, he tucks his dick up under the waistband of his pajama pants, tightening the drawstring punishingly to hold it in place. Then he stands, silent in his stocking feet, and pads from the living room.

Gaara shuts his bedroom door with nothing but a whisper of wood against carpet and a click of the latch, back pressed up against it to catch his breath. His hips leave the wood only long enough for him to wriggle the waistband of his pants down, just enough so he can rub at himself more freely. He breathes out through his nose, sighing as relief washes through him at the pressure. He palms himself slowly through his underwear, picturing Lee beneath him, on top of him, all around him. He inhales slow and pretends he can smell sweat other than his own, that the hard wood against his back is because Lee pushed him there.

He can picture Lee’s smile, several feet too close for social distance, can imagine the gust of Lee’s warm breath against his cheek. He imagines Lee braced with those broad palms on either side of Gaara’s head, pinning him against the door. He thinks about Lee’s mouth, how soft his lips looked while he was sleeping. Would Lee move in close? Would Lee let him …

Gaara shakes his head, stumbles with weak knees to his bed. Even in his fantasy, the idea that Lee--that anyone--would kiss him is a bridge too far.

Instead he lets his eyes sink closed and squirms on the covers until his pajama pants and underwear are down around his knees, dick exposed to the cool circulating air. The air conditioner thrums. If he strains his ears, he can pretend he hears Lee’s faint snores, all the way from the living room. He can be quiet, he thinks, and Lee’s as far away as he can be in their shared apartment. Gaara won’t be heard.

His free hand gropes for the pillow and presses it over his mouth just in case.

He’s softened, a little bit, while he was deep inside his head. He moves his hand smoothly now, steady strokes, working himself back up just the way he likes. He uses his forearm to ruck his shirt up, so the precum leaking from his tip doesn’t make a mess. He rubs a thumb around the head of his dick, slicking himself up, strokes down and sets a rhythm that’s just right.

With his eyes closed, the pillow pressed against his face a familiar weight, it’s easy to slip back into the fantasy.

He imagines himself turning the tables, being the one to push Lee down to the bed. He can see in his mind’s eye the way Lee would fall back on Gaara’s wrinkled sheets: warm, tanned skin against the rumpled grey fabric. The way his heels would come up, knees splaying wide, inviting Gaara to crawl between them. Lee’s flexible--Gaara’s seen it, in his yoga classes and morning stretches--so he imagines Lee’s knees coming up, hips tilting, urging Gaara: take me.

And Gaara would, he’d take whatever Lee offered him. He’d pull the shirt up over Lee’s head, so he could properly appreciate Lee’s bare torso. Maybe the collar would get stuck on his ear--his ears stick out just-so, though he keeps them covered by his bowl cut--and they’d laugh. Lee has a beautiful laugh, and Gaara would drink it in, get as close to that smiling mouth as Lee would let him. He would kiss Lee’s neck, nip at the shell of one of those protruding ears, see if that changed the tenor of it, the pitch.

Gaara bites his lip, catches a bit of pillowcase in between his teeth. The noise from his throat is strangled, muffled: “Ngh,” he pants, sighs, “aah.”

He could bite down the column of Lee’s corded neck, out over the muscle of his shoulders, down his chest. Are Lee’s nipples sensitive? Gaara wonders. He hopes that they are. In his mind, they would be, and he would tease them red until Lee sobbed for him to move lower. And Gaara would, of course he would--he’d do almost anything Lee asked him, would press kisses to the hard plane of his abdomen, drag his tongue down the V of Lee’s waist, until the hair on his stomach was shiny with Gaara’s spit.

“Fuck,” he huffs into the pillow.

He’d strip the well-worn fabric of those soft grey sweatpants down so slowly that Lee would be begging him for mercy. What would Lee be wearing beneath them? Not the boxers he sleeps in--Gaara knows Lee is more fastidious than that, even as Gaara has gone days in the same pajamas during their quarantine--but maybe another pair. Maybe briefs, fabric clinging to the hard line of his dick. Gaara’s seen almost all of Lee’s wardrobe, neatly folded in the living room after he does his laundry, and even though he tries to hide his underwear at the bottom of his laundry pile, Gaara knows for a fact that he owns both boxers and briefs. He’d pull those down too, maybe use his teeth if he was feeling adventurous (He would be. Lee makes him want to be wild.). His teeth would graze the skin of Lee’s hip.

His hand’s moving fast now, imagining the smell of Lee, salt-sweat-musk like when he comes in from his runs but stronger, closer. The pillow’s falling slightly to the side now, as Gaara’s hand loosens its grasp on it and trails down to cup his balls. He can hear the slick sound his hand is making on his dick, rhythmic and unmistakable. It’s fine though, he reassures himself. It’s fine, and behind his closed eyes, Lee is fine too, is telling him, “It’s fine,” with a smile, spreading his legs wider, his knees higher. Gaara’s knees fall open just the same, hips stuttering.

“God,” he says, “fuck, Lee.” The air in his lungs is cold and clean, pillow just leaning against the side of his face. Lee won’t hear him, he thinks to himself, when he has the focus to care at all. In real life, in their real apartment, Lee is asleep in the living room, probably still snoring with his book fallen from his hand.

Gaara’s eyes roll back behind his squinted-shut eyelids. He imagines what Lee’s dick would look like, when he finally got all the fabric out of the way and revealed it. He has the vaguest notion of what he would see. Lee has long, bony feet and broad hands; he’s all limb and muscle and Gaara thinks this part of him, too, must be big. He can picture how the hair on Lee’s stomach would thicken around it, jutting out and inviting Gaara to touch, to taste. Imagines Lee looking down at him, eyes heavy-lidded but that smile still on his face, nudging his hips upward and breathing, “C’mon.” Would Lee say his name, then? Gaara’s heard Lee say his name plenty of times, but never in the low, sultry voice he imagines now: a pant, a hiss, breathing out: “Gaara, please.”

He would only have to ask once, Gaara thinks, and Gaara would lick him, would suck him. Lee would taste like he smells, hot and sweat-slick. “Can you?” Lee would breathe, and Gaara would understand just what he meant, like he was reading Lee’s mind. He’d slick his fingers--he doesn’t think about how, because it would distract him from Lee, Lee, Lee--and then he would open Lee up, work in him until he was trembling, mouth still on Lee’s cock in a feat of coordination he could never achieve outside of his imagination.

And when Lee was ready, when he was riding the line between comfort and desperation, he’d look at Gaara and nod, and Gaara would know. He’d sit back, and Lee would pull his knees back, legs spread, and Gaara would sink inside him. It would be perfect, Gaara thinks--it’s always perfect, when he’s thinking of Lee like this, because, fuck, Lee is perfect. Lee would be hot and tight inside, Gaara’s body pressed up against the thick muscles of his thighs. He’s never heard Lee swear, not even the time he dropped a full mug of tea on his pinkie toe and broke it, but he likes to think Lee might swear then, might bite his lip and sob out, “Fuck me.”

“Fuck.” Gaara bites his lip, hand moving fast and slick on his shaft, pushing him right up to the edge. He pictures Lee’s body glossy with sweat, that smile inches away from him as he bottoms out inside Lee. “Fuck, Lee.” His body tenses, fuck, he’s so close, he can almost--

There’s a knock on his bedroom door.

“Gaara, are you okay?”

Gaara’s eyes fly wide. He bites his lip to contain a whine.

“Did you need my help? I heard my name…” It’s Lee, the real Lee, not the sex-husky voice Gaara’s been dreaming but the high, concerned tone that he takes when he catches Gaara pouring his fourth cup of coffee before he’s had a glass of water. But that’s impossible, Lee can’t have heard him, Lee is asleep in the living room--

The door handle is turning without waiting for a response, and Gaara’s hand is clamped around his dick, desperate to stave off the orgasm burning at the base of his spine, balls tight against his body. No! Gaara wants to yell. Don’t come in here! But his tongue is numb, a moan stuck halfway in his throat the only noise he’s capable of.

“Are you crying?”

The door creaks away from the jamb. Lee peeks his head into the room.

Gaara scrambles backward, legs wheeling on the sheet and hand groping sightlessly for the blanket to cover himself, but even as his hand leaves his dick, he knows it’s too late. He’s tumbling over the edge, cum splattering his stomach and hand. He bites back a moan as he spills everywhere.

He looks up.

Lee is standing in his doorway with his eyes saucer-wide. And from the way his eyes keep trailing Gaara’s mouth, Gaara knows he heard everything.

Hastily, Gaara pulls the blanket all the way up to his neck. He can see the evidence of the aftermath on his hand, now smearing the covers, shining in the periphery of his vision. He can’t take his eyes off Lee’s tomato-red face.

“We should talk,” Lee says, his voice very high and tight.

“I’ll--” Gaara clears his throat. He lifts his hand like he’s going to wipe it off, but there’s nothing nearby but the soiled blanket. He turns to look at his cum-flecked hand in disgust. His stomach churns. He’s going to be sick, and it won’t even be the pandemic’s fault. “I’ll … go get cleaned up.”

Lee nods, a tight, jerky gesture of his chin. His shoulders are stiff as pine boards, his posture military-straight in the gap of the open door. His knuckles are white on the door handle. “I’ll just!” His throat seems to close around a squeak, voice cracking. “Um. I’ll go. Be in the living room! Whenever you’re ready!” His mouth is a narrow, panicked line. He looks as horrified as Gaara feels.

Gaara nods slowly. His hands tighten on the blanket, clutched against his chest like a modest woman from one of Lee’s favorite horrible sitcoms.

Lee steps backwards, eyes never leaving Gaara.

He shuts the door behind him.

Gaara stumbles out of the bathroom a few minutes later, skin clammy from the worst shower of his life. He gets dressed--properly dressed--for the first time in weeks. The clothes he was wearing before he let his dick get ahead of his brain and make the worst mistake of his life are hardly appropriate now. He doubts Lee wants to see him at all, much less in a threadbare middle school science fair t-shirt, two sizes too small, and his pajama pants with the broken drawstring that he has to hold up with one hand. His face is still burning as he makes the walk of shame to the living room.

At first he doesn’t see Lee anywhere. He assumes Lee’s left, and it would serve him right, for Lee to flee their apartment after Gaara’s frankly shameful display, even if it does make him worry for Lee’s health. There aren’t many places to go that are safe right now.

He realizes belatedly that Lee is sitting in the chair in the corner, the one that nobody uses because it faces away from the television. His ankles are crossed primly and his hands are in his lap. His mouth is drawn down at the corners, and his eyes look very serious indeed.

Gaara perches on the far edge of the couch, making sure to stay six feet away. The impulse is to hide his eyes in embarrassment, to stare at the floor and let Lee dress him down the way he knows he deserves, but he fights his instincts. This is the bed he’s made; now he has to lie in it. He meets Lee’s gaze straight-on.

Lee’s cheeks are still a high, flushed pink. Beneath the tight fabric of his t-shirt, Gaara can see a muscle twitching in his shoulder. He’s still wearing those grey sweatpants, the lines of his thigh muscles obvious, and Gaara hates himself a little bit for still finding Lee so attractive, when he’s clearly furious and mortified, when Gaara’s so clearly violated his boundaries.

“I’m sorry,” Gaara says, “for making you uncomfortable.”

Lee’s frown deepens. Gaara’s chest goes tight.

“I’m the one who should be apologizing!” Lee bursts out with suddenly, leaning forward, hands on his spread knees. “I shouldn’t have walked in on you like that!”

Gaara feels the muscles of his face drawing tight, expression crumpling in confusion.

“I was just so worried!” Lee barrels on. “I thought you might be hurt or-- or upset! I didn’t mean to violate your privacy … but I didn’t realize you felt the same way.”

What?

It’s suddenly very hard to breathe. Gaara isn’t sure if he needs his inhaler or a benzo or both.

“What--” He inhales thinly through his nose. “What way do you think I feel?” He might be wheezing; he isn’t sure.

Lee’s face falls. “I thought-- maybe I misheard, but- I … I thought it meant that you …”

Gaara scoots back a little, retreating into the physical if not emotional safe harbor of the couch cushions, and in so doing he gives himself a fuller view of Lee’s entire body. Craned forward as he is, with his knees wide, eyes earnest, Gaara has a perfect angle on Lee’s crotch. And there’s a telltale bulge there, the outline of an erection in his thin sweatpants.

Gaara has been an academic for the better part of the past decade; he knows an interesting data point when he sees one. And this is a fascinating piece of information. In fact, Gaara could write a whole thesis on the line of Lee’s dick through his sweatpants alone.

He tears his eyes away to focus on Lee’s face.

“You didn’t mishear,” he says, and his voice comes out strained. Not with anxiety, but with arousal.

“Oh,” Lee says, sitting back. The bulge in his sweatpants is all the more obvious now. Gaara wets his lips. “So that means …?”

Gaara nods, and the flush on Lee’s face darkens.

“We could try this,” Gaara offers. “That is, if you want to.”

Lee’s biting his lip, straight white teeth in the plush of his pink skin. Gaara wishes he were six feet closer, wishes he were the one biting Lee’s lip instead. He wonders what Lee would taste like. Health food, probably. Kale smoothies and protein powder. Salty sweat. The square of sunlight on the living room floor.

“I definitely want to!”

Lee’s eyes dance down to Gaara’s hands, up his body, land fluttering on Gaara’s mouth. Gaara’s skin prickles with goosebumps, so heavy and tactile is the weight of Lee’s gaze. Lee’s soft lips drop into a pout. Gaara’s chest seizes up from lack of air.

“I wish I could kiss you right now,” Lee says, and knocks all the remaining air out of Gaara’s lungs. Lee wants to kiss him. It’s like a kick in the chest.

“You could,” Gaara says, and suddenly he knows, in stark relief, what he wants most in the world. He wants it more than he wants his plants to survive the quarantine, more than he wants to successfully defend his thesis, more than he wants oxygen. He licks his lips again, curls his feet up under himself and angles forward, into that six-foot gap between them. His skin, his blood is burning. “What’s stopping us?”

“It’s not safe.” Lee’s hands are clenched on his knees, and the look on his face isn’t concern or distress any longer, it’s desperation. He’s leaning away, hard into the chair back, as if to make up for the space Gaara’s taking up. “Gaara, I want to, but-- I just went out this morning. If I caught something and gave it to you … I’d never forgive myself.”

“Fine,” Gaara huffs, feeling as childish and petulant as he’s ever felt with half an erection. He leans back into the couch and props one knee up, legs apart, hoping Lee can see that he’s equally compromised. “What would you do, then? If it was safe.”

Lee’s eyes trail from between Gaara’s spread legs, drags up across his chest heavy as a handspan to land on his face. Lee’s throat, his cheeks, the tips of his ears jutting from behind his parted hair are all the way red. He must be able to see--he’s biting his lip again, and his knees cant ever so slightly wider--he definitely sees it, the state he’s got Gaara in right now.

“I-- I would,” he stammers, all handsome blush and wide, dark eyes. “I would. I would kiss you.”

“How?” Gaara presses, and hopes the way he drags his hand along the inside of his knee isn’t too much, too fast.

It clearly isn’t, because Lee’s imitating the motion, his hands now drawing slow circles on the inside of his splayed legs. The sound of the fabric scraping skin is the only thing louder than Gaara’s breathing when Lee says, “Hard.”

“If you wanted,” Lee amends, but the word is already racing up Gaara’s spine, making his skin prickle with want. His hand trails further up the inside of his leg, properly on his inner thigh now. The imagined kiss isn’t the only thing that’s hard.

“I would-- I would hold your face,” Lee says, and god, he’s so hesitant, like Gaara isn’t showing him exactly how much he wants him. “And-- and kiss you on the mouth. And ...”

Maybe Gaara needs to show him more, show him better. Erase those doubts and wariness from his mind. In a fit of motion, Gaara shimmies out of his shirt and throws it on the couch beside him.

There’s a beat, Lee staring at him, gaping, and then Lee strips out of his shirt, too.

And fuck, Gaara has never been so hard in his life, staring at the way Lee’s chest is heaving, his eyes wide and wild, gaze raking up and down Gaara’s body. His skin is red all the way down his chest, and he’s sweating, panting hard.

“And?” Gaara asks, out of breath like they’ve really been tumbling around on his bed, like they’re not just sitting in their living room staring at each other.

“I would-- I could-- kiss your neck,” Lee says, eyes on Gaara’s throat, mouth wet like he wishes he were across the room as badly as Gaara does. “And your shoulders. Your-- your chest.”

Gaara can almost feel it: what that soft, damp mouth would feel like, trailing his skin the way Lee’s eyes are.

“Would you-- do you-- ” Lee’s voice drops. The hand on the inside of his thigh has stilled and now it clenches in the heather grey of his sweatpants. “Do you like having your nipples touched?” Lee’s voice is breathy, high. It drops almost to a whisper on the word nipples, like he’s saying something forbidden, something that can’t be overheard. It’s about as distant as it’s possible to be from the voice Gaara imagined for him back in his bedroom, which was husky and seductive, brimming with suave confidence. But this version of Lee is so, so much better than the one he dreamed up, because this Lee is the real thing.

As for the answer: well, Gaara has never really thought about it. He’s always been perfunctory in his self-exploration. He knows he likes touching his dick, his balls. He’ll finger himself if the mood strikes him, though he doesn’t really enjoy the sensation of penetration as much as his horniest imaginings tell him he will. The air conditioner kicks a swirl of ice-cold air down the back of Gaara’s neck, and even though he’s sweating, his nipples are pebbled hard. He thinks on it for a second, then pinches one in his fingers, rolls it.

A rumble of pleasure rolls through him, duller than when he touches his dick but still hotly enticing. Goosebumps race down his stomach. His eyes fall closed as a soft moan escapes him.

That’s a yes, then.

He opens his eyes just in time to see Lee’s dick twitching in his pants. Literally, visibly moving, like the sound Gaara just made grabbed him physically.

Gaara does it again, a small experiment: Tweaks his nipple a second time. Lets out that little, “Nnh.” Watches Lee’s dick move in response.

“You should take those off,” he says, gesturing with his foot to Lee’s pants.

Lee stands up then. Even though he’s across the room, Gaara feels loomed over, with the way Lee’s chest and shoulders heave with every breath, the way his eyes are combing over Gaara like he wants to eat him alive, even as he pulls his sweatpants down, abandons them on the floor.

Gaara needn’t have worried about boxers versus briefs, apparently, because Lee isn’t wearing underwear at all.

And then Lee is standing, naked, in their living room. Gaara’s mouth is bone dry. There’s a high-pitched whistling somewhere, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s his own breath escaping his throat in a wheeze. Gaara thought he had seen almost all of what Lee’s body had to offer, between the frequent shirtless workouts and the criminally tiny shorts Lee wears to go jogging, but the fact that Lee has been hiding this from him seems almost criminal.

Lee’s dick is flushed dark with arousal, so hard it’s practically touching his stomach. It’s not quite the monster Gaara has been imagining, but it’s still on the bigger side of average. He’s uncut, and Gaara wishes Lee would just get on with it, just touch himself, so he can see the whole thing. Gaara has never wanted to put anything in his mouth so badly in his life.

“You, um-- you should too?” Lee hedges, with a sheepish gesture like he’s about to cover himself with his hands.

Gaara shucks his pants before Lee can complete his thought. He feels terrifically inferior, pale and scrawny in the face of Lee’s physical perfection. But he stands there anyway, lets Lee get an eyeful, so he can really see what he’s signing up for.

The blush is spreading down Lee’s chest now, and Gaara follows the tide of it with his eyes. He shuffles on his feet, looking anywhere but Lee’s face, waiting for Lee’s verdict.

“Oh my god,” Lee breathes, so quiet it’s barely audible, and Gaara winces. He’s afraid to see the look on Lee’s face until he hears, “You’re beautiful.”

“What.” It doesn’t even come out as a question.

When Gaara finally looks up, Lee’s expression is like nothing he’s ever seen before. His eyes are wide; it looks like he might cry. Gaara has seen Lee cry many times before: after he beats a personal record on his morning runs or during a particularly emotional scene in the romantic comedies he watches on Saturday nights when he’s not out with his friends, but this is … different somehow. It’s not the giant, performative sobs that Gaara’s used to. Lee’s eyes are just barely wet, like he’s about to brim over with tears.

It certainly doesn’t instill Gaara with much confidence.

“Are you … okay? I can--”

“I just--!” Lee gasps down air. “I saw you before, a little bit, I mean, but that was--! And this is-- … ! You’re gorgeous! I just can’t believe you … and with me!”

Lee’s freely crying now. He looks ridiculous, standing there with an erection and tears rolling down his cheeks. He’s hardly making any sense, but Gaara thinks he understands the general message.

“Sit down.”

Lee drops backwards into the chair like all his joints have given out at once. Gaara takes his seat on the couch again, altogether more composed despite the bizarre, out-of-body sensation of having someone as attractive as Lee giving him compliments, even slightly damp ones.

“Take deep breaths,” Gaara coaches him, echoes of his first therapist in his ears.

Lee sniffles, wiping his nose, and chuckles a little ruefully.

“Sorry,” he says wetly. “It’s just … it’s a little overwhelming. I never thought that you--”

“Me?” Gaara cuts him off. “I never thought someone like you would be interested in someone like me at all.”

“Are you kidding?” Lee looks up at Gaara with his eyes shining, wiping at the tear tracks on his face. “But you-- but you’re brilliant, and successful, and-- and so handsome!”

Gaara has to pause at this for a moment to rub the bridge of his nose in disbelief.

“Wait,” he says, voice coming out sharper than intended. Lee sits up straight and claps a hand over his mouth, as if he has to physically prevent himself from continuing. “You. Think all that. About me?”

“Of course I do!” Lee blurts. “You--!”

Gaara holds up a hand to stop Lee before he launches into a further exposition of Gaara’s supposed virtues.

“You’ve … seen yourself, right? We own a mirror. It’s right there in the bathroom.”

Lee’s thick eyebrows crumple in the middle of his forehead, mouth drawn in confusion. “What--?”

Gaara inhales sharply through his nose. “What I’m trying to say is. You’re very--” He swallows, throat dry. “--attractive. Handsome. You’re … kind. A good person.” He cuts himself off before he rambles on too long; he could talk about the things he likes about Lee for days.

When Gaara looks up at Lee, his lower lip is wobbling.

“Don’t start crying again.”

“I won’t!” Lee protests. “I’m sorry, I’m just-- You really like me? That much?”

“You walked in on me saying your name while I was jerking off.”

“I guess I did.” Lee rubs at his eyes, hiccuping back a little laugh. “I, um. I guess I ruined the mood, didn’t I?”

They’ve both gone a bit soft, Gaara notes, in the midst of all the dramatics. But he’s unwilling to give up what he’s still half-convinced is the only shot with Lee he’ll ever get. He breathes in deep.

“It doesn’t have to be ruined,” he says, steels himself.

“It doesn’t?”

“No.” He settles back into the couch cushions, spreads his legs just slightly, playing at a confidence he’s desperate to feel. “Where were we? I think when we stopped, you were right about … here.” His fingers find his nipple, pinch and twist it again. It doesn’t feel as good as it did the first time; he isn’t as worked up as he was before, but his eyelids still flutter at the sensation, his breath hitching.

The blush is back on Lee’s face now. He starts rubbing along the muscled line of his thigh, all tentative, feather-light touch, pacing himself to the rhythm of Gaara’s fingers on his nipple. Gaara can see Lee’s dick starting to swell in interest again.

“What would you do next?” Gaara breathes out, and his voice is like he’s never heard it before, low and rough, more a rasp than words.

“Um, I-- I would. I would touch you,” Lee says, still stammering through it, blush high on his cheeks and his hand skirting further and further up his own thigh.

“Where?” Gaara urges him.

“A-anywhere you want.” Lee’s eyes are heavy on Gaara’s hand, the way it’s moving down his chest to his crotch, pausing to stroke slowly at his lower belly, half teasing and half making sure Lee really, truly wants this.

“Here?” And Gaara cups himself in his hand, strokes slowly until he’s fully hard.

Lee nods frantically. “Yes,” he says, “yes. Anywhere.” His tongue darts out to wet his lips. He’s hard now too, cock bobbing in time with the movement of his throat as he swallows.

“And you,” Gaara insists, with a little nod towards Lee’s own dick, feeling suddenly shy to be the only one touching himself.

“Right.” Lee practically scrambles to seize his own dick in his hand, choking back a little noise as he pulls back the foreskin and exposes the head. The tip of his dick is leaking precum already.

It’s a good thing Gaara just came all over his hand and then took a cold shower, because otherwise he wouldn’t stand a chance against the sight of Lee: the way his eyes are hazed with lust, the way his long eyelashes sweep the peaks of his cheekbones, the way his knees are drifting wide. Gaara wants to hold out, wants Lee to feel good first. He slows the motion of his hand as much as he can bear, watching the way Lee’s hand moves, memorizing it for some future date when he can finally, blissfully touch.

Lee’s hand is moving fast, the rhythm steady, twisting at the top and then sliding back down. The muscle in his forearm bulges at the peak of each stroke.

“Is that how you like it?” Gaara asks, unfettered arousal making him bold.

“Mhm,” Lee grits out. His eyes have fallen shut and he clenches them tight with a particularly fast stroke, hips twitching. “Nn-aah,” he groans.

It might be the most erotic thing Gaara’s ever heard. He grips tight at the base of his dick so he doesn’t come right then and there, but Lee’s eyes fly open. His face darkens with embarrassment. His free hand leaps to his mouth and covers it. His strokes slow, his eyes widening, as if he can’t believe that sound came from his own mouth.

Gaara won’t let him fixate on his own mortification right now.

“What’s next?” he presses. “What would you do?”

Lee parts his fingers barely enough to speak. “I-- I don’t know.” His voice has gone wavery, pleading.

Gaara knows he has to take the reins, before Lee loses his nerve.

“Would you let me fuck you?” he breathes.

He doesn’t really expect Lee to answer in the affirmative, because Lee is altogether bigger than he is, tall and leanly muscled where Gaara is … none of those things, short and scrawny. Unimpressive.

It knocks the breath out of him when Lee bites the heel of his hand and nods frantically, hand speeding on his dick, eyes falling shut again.

“Yesss” Lee pants around the bulk in his mouth, and damned if that doesn’t make Gaara think of a different intrusion he’d like to see Lee try to talk around, “please.”

“I would,” Gaara tells him, and watches Lee’s hand stutter in its stroke. “I could bend you over that chair right there--” And maybe he would have to go up on his tiptoes, or at least Lee would have to spread his legs much wider than they’re currently spread so they would be of a height, but that’s fine. They can worry about the logistics when they can actually touch one another. For now, all Gaara cares about is the way the Adam’s apple bobs in Lee’s throat, the noisy way he’s gulping back air.

It is, easily, the weirdest thing Gaara’s ever done in his life. Like phone sex without the phone, jerking off with someone else in the room and narrating all the filthy things he wants to do to Lee, all the things he wants Lee to do to him.

“I want to make you come,” he says, and Lee outright moans at that, hand speeding up, losing all sense of rhythm to desperation. Gaara tries to match his pace.

“I want to kiss you,” Lee says.

Gaara falls back, gutshot. Lee doesn't slur it, the way anyone else with their hand on their dick would (Gaara wouldn't know, but he can imagine how his own voice would sound, mumbling "I wanna kiss you.”) But no, Lee pronounces every consonant with crisp accuracy, enunciating: "I want to kiss you, and Gaara has to focus on the precision of his diction or else he'll think about the content of Lee's words, and that would kill him, surely.

“You can kiss me,” Gaara tells him, air thin in his lungs. “You can kiss me. Of course you can. As soon as this is all over.”

Lee’s mouth screws up into a little moue. His eyes open for the first time in a long time, wide and dark when they find Gaara’s. And then he’s coming, hard, jizz spattering his hand, his legs and his bare chest. His body almost bows with it, knees snapping shut. The cum clings in the hair trailing down his stomach, shiny white and sticky.

Gaara wants to lick it off him, and it’s that thought and the woozy, blissed-out expression on Lee’s face that sends him toppling over the edge, Lee’s voice on repeat in his mind: “I want to kiss you.” His whole body’s on fire with the feeling, everything white-hot and breathless.

He falls back onto the couch cushions, panting, head spinning from oxygen deprivation and the shock of what’s just happened.

“Are you … are you okay?” Lee’s voice sounds like it’s coming from much further than six feet away.

Gaara has enough time to nod and absently suck a fleck of cum off his thumbnail before he realizes that he is, actually, audibly wheezing.

“I might need my inhaler,” he whistles out.

“I’ll get it!” Lee’s on his feet in a flash, his bare ass disappearing down the hallway as he yells over his shoulder, “Stay right there!”

Gaara’s barely lifted his hand to wave him on, every extremity heavy with relaxation even as he struggles to draw breath, when Lee skids back into the room, inhaler brandished triumphantly over his head. He sees the thought cross Lee’s face from the doorway where he’s frozen: He can’t exactly walk up and just hand it to Gaara. His chin wrinkles with indecision.

Then, “Catch!” Lee lobs the inhaler gently underhand towards Gaara.

Gaara fumbles for it and misses by a mile, but at least it bounces safely on the couch cushion beside him.

His discarded pants start vibrating their way across the floor as he puffs the medication into his lungs, sucking down the clouds of vapor under Lee’s worried gaze like some sort of shitty reverse dragon. Lee, charitably, toes the pants in Gaara’s direction.

“I think someone’s trying to reach you.”

The quarantine makes things strange, distance and desperation driving them both wild with want, pushing things further and faster than Gaara thinks they might have moved if they could actually touch one another.

They measure six feet of distance on Lee’s bed, marked out with masking tape. His bed is the bigger of the two, because Lee is taller and because he sleeps all the way spread out, limbs splayed like a starfish, occupying as much space as humanly possible. They pack their bodies in tightly, Lee’s back pressed to the headboard while Gaara huddles at the foot of the bed, eyeing each other as they shed their clothing, Gaara’s mouth already running a mile a minute with every filthy thought he’s had since the last time they played at touching each other with their words.

Lee is careful not to put a toe out of place, but Gaara pushes the limits, an elbow over the masking tape line here, leaning too far forward when Lee whispers, “Six feet apart.”

“Six feet,” Gaara echoes, but he hedges all that much closer, like he’s pressed against an invisible barrier, desperate to be as close to Lee as possible.

And Lee is shy. His face goes bright red every time he touches himself, only ever undressing, exposing himself under Gaara’s direction. His motions are always hesitant, as if to say: Are you sure? You really want this?

It’s unfathomable to Gaara that Lee could be embarrassed, looking the way he does, but he is, despite it all. If anyone, Gaara is the one who should be reticent, he thinks, stomach pouchy where it should be flat and shoulders bony where they could be wide. But when Lee looks at him the way he does--his pupils blown wide and his mouth all parted lips and wet, red tongue--he can’t possibly resist. He spreads his legs wide, tosses his head back, shows Lee everything.

This is what you do to me, he wants to say, hand skipping beats on his dick, eyes raking down the exposed column of Lee’s throat, the dark thatch of hair where his legs meet. But what he says (moans) instead is, “Lee.”

Lee doesn’t own any toys (“I am not very adventurous, he confesses, fingers spread out on the carpet six feet away from Gaara’s outstretched hand while Sleepless in Seattle plays quietly on the television, the quarantine imitation of holding hands.), and Gaara’s always been too cheap to waste his money on them without someone to use them with. But with Lee’s blush as incitement, Gaara researches their options, and they text each other links like excited teenagers sexting for the first time, biting their lips and raising their eyebrows at each other’s suggestions from opposite ends of the couch. Gaara even learns how to use the emoji keyboard for the occasion.

On the day the package arrives, Gaara washes it and his hands twice at Lee’s insistence.

“I don’t think you can get the virus from cardboard,” he tells Lee over the rushing of the water in the sink, counting to twenty in his head.

“But just to be safe,” Lee says, and Gaara does exactly what Lee asks, because of course he does. He would do anything Lee wants, right down to scrubbing under his fingernails when Lee tells him he thinks he missed a spot.

They queue up an instructional video on their phones, counting down 3-2-1 and pressing “play” at the same time, six feet apart on Lee’s bed. Lee’s too nervous to go first, so Gaara shows Lee how to use the thing, feeling modest and overwhelmed by the way Lee’s face heats at the sight, reddening from the chest up, like mercury rising in a thermometer.

Lee ends up liking the toy more than Gaara after all, and Gaara memorizes the shape of it disappearing inside him, the exact pace that Lee sets, so he can mimic it later on.

Gaara has wet dreams where he strokes Lee with gloved hands. He wakes to wet spots in his pajama pants and sense memories of them kissing with their masks on, layers of fabric and filters between their mouths.

He suggests it once, even, after a particularly vivid dream leaves him still half-hard after a shower: “I could put gloves on and touch you.”

Lee gets hard so suddenly that Gaara almost worries for his health, but then he shakes his head and says, “No.” The corners of his mouth are drawn into a pout. “It’s not just the touching that’s the problem.”

And it’s not, Gaara knows it’s not, but somewhere in the desperate corners of his mind he curses the six feet of distance that keeps them both safe. Thinks about how far and how fast breath can travel from one mouth to the vulnerable mucus membranes of another. Thinks about the molecules of air from his lungs and how they must wend their way around the tiny apartment, how they lose their spark before they land on Lee’s lips.

They breathe the same air, six feet apart, like a perpetual blown kiss. They fuck each other with their eyes.

On the day the shelter-in-place order is lifted, Gaara finds out before Lee even wakes up. There’s a series of relieved, enthusiastic messages on his phone from Temari, and several borderline lewd gifs courtesy of Kankuro.

The sun hasn’t quite risen yet, the apartment foggy grey but still bright enough to see by with the blinds all closed as he stumbles into clean clothes and makes his way to the bathroom.

He brushes his teeth and hair with a renewed ferocity, gargles mouthwash until his throat hurts. Then he pads down the hallway to Lee’s room. He raps on the doorframe, smiling when Lee barely stirs. Their sleep cycles have almost fallen into sync since they started this strange dance with one another.

“Lee,” Gaara says softly, crossing the threshold. It feels strange to approach the bed, taboo to get too close to Lee’s sleeping face. He’s acutely aware the moment he crosses that six foot bubble, the closest he’s been to Lee in months. “Lee.”

He can see every hair in Lee’s thick eyebrows, every pore on his face. His fingers twitch in the blankets, but he’s careful not to touch as he sits down by the headboard. The mattress dips under his weight, and Lee’s body lolls towards him.

Wide eyes blink open fuzzily.

“Gaara?” Lee mouths, lips sleep-tacky and tongue dry.

“Gaara!” He sits up all at once, scooting as far away as he can without falling off the bed entirely. “You shouldn’t--! It’s not safe! I just went to the grocery store yesterday … I could be--!”

“It’s fine, Lee.” Gaara holds up his phone, screen brightness turned down low for the grey dim of Lee’s room. Thin bands of early morning sun, still yet blue, are falling through the blinds and striping Lee in the same pattern as the bedcover. “See?”

Lee leans in, squinting at the headline. Understanding dawns slow on his face; his mouth spreads into a broad smile.

Gaara reaches for his hand, and Lee doesn’t pull away. He lets Gaara reel him in by the arm, his body following willingly. His skin is warm, his body slack and pliant as he collides with Gaara’s chest. Every inch of Gaara’s skin feels like a live wire, buzzing with the shock of touch. He can feel the heat of Lee’s skin, the rough texture of his body hair, the cords of muscle beneath his skin. He rubs his hand up and down Lee’s arm just for the sensation of it, tugs him down by the shoulders until they’re face-to-face.

“I haven’t brushed my teeth,” Lee protests, as Gaara cups his chin, tilts his head just so.

“I don’t care,” Gaara tells him. “I’ve waited too long to kiss you.”

Lee’s mouth is stale with sleep when Gaara brushes the soft hair away from his face and finally, finally kisses him. His lips move sloppy, still not all the way awake, but Gaara cannot bring himself to care at all.

“Am I dreaming?” Lee mumbles against Gaara’s open mouth. Gaara licks at the back of his teeth, hauls him closer, wraps an arm around Lee’s waist and pulls their bodies flush.

“No.” It’s not a dream at all. It’s better than a dream, because it’s finally real.

Gaara decides right there, with one hand curled in Lee’s bedhead and the other skating down the waistband of Lee’s boxers, that he’s never going to be more than six feet away from Lee ever again.