George and Sapnap weren't dating.
And they never had been. Sapnap wasn't George's and George wasn't Sapnap's, that was just the way things were. Neither of them wanted to change anything about that, content in their little arrangement that they'd been existing in for the majority of their junior year.
They only had one rule: no feelings. It was something they agreed to way back on day one, when Sapnap realized that George was the hottest guy in his photography class and asked him to be the model in his portrait shots.
At one point, that had been the only exchange: they posed in each other's portrait shots. They were both photography majors, so they both had a lot of portrait shots to be taking—it worked for a while, nothing more than standing in front of a camera and assuming the pose requested of them.
Neither of them acknowledged it when their poses got increasingly more suggestive. Sapnap didn't even realize how strange it had been to ask George to pose with two maraschino cherries in his mouth until he was staring at the picture of his glossed lips after the fact, wondering if he could even turn it in on assignment.
He didn't take his chances. But he certainly kept the photo.
It had been a late night in the darkroom the first time they did anything. Their professor had trusted George enough to give him keys, meaning the two of them could spend as much time as they wanted in the darkroom so long as they locked all the doors behind them.
George had looked far too good that night. He was wearing those skinny jeans that made Sapnap forget how to think, a too-tight shirt that was meant to leave a sliver of his waist exposed, and his hair was all messed up from constantly running his hands through it.
And that didn't even account for the way George looked under the wash of red light, arms stretched up over his head to pin photos to the drying line. Sapnap was getting things done a lot slower than usual; half because he was distracted, half because he wanted to spend more time with George.
They were talking. Then they weren't. And it was silence in the red-lit space, it was silence when they'd stopped everything they were doing to stare at each other across counters covered in soaked photos and cut film.
George was biting his lip. George had always had such nice lips. It was like blinking: only a split second between eye contact and the way George's skin looked bathed in red and the way his pretty lips felt pushed against Sapnap's.
And it wasn't love. Sapnap couldn't feel anything but hot carmine lust between George's lips, and he knew his tasted all the same. They were nothing more than two people who had spent a little too long staring at each other to keep their hands to themselves—Sapnap had taken one too many suggestive images of George to not be manhandling him back into one of those poses.
He thought of a feigned candid shot he'd taken on a lie. Where he made George bend over the counter in his apartment's tiny kitchen, where he'd told him to hold his phone and pretend to be scrolling on it while he angled the shot.
It had looked just as casual as he'd wanted it to when he pulled it up on his monitor the next morning, but he couldn't pretend that his eyes weren't drawn to the curve of George's back or the way he'd positioned his legs. He'd been staring at the same parts of the brunet when he even took the photo in the first place, wondering distantly if George had caught on to what he was trying to do.
In hindsight, none of it mattered. Because Sapnap was bending George over the counter in the unlocked darkroom, the analog clock displayed a time just a little too close to midnight for the two of them to still be there.
But they were still there. And Sapnap was taking George's clothes off when asked to, George was slurring over a promise that there was lube in his camera bag, and Sapnap didn't bother asking why he kept lube in his camera bag because holy shit, he was about to fuck George.
