Coming Up For Air

3.7

"Backseat serenade

Little hand grenade

Oh god, I'm sick of sleeping alone

You're salty like a summer day

Kiss the pain away

To your radio"

-All Time Low, 'Backseat Serenade'

☂Ashton☂

"I like being here." Luke said after swallowing a mouthful of the takeout Chinese they had ordered for dinner. Ashton was munching through a box of orange chicken and he looked up from his dinner at the blonde boy sitting across from him, a question scrawled across his face in blatant black.

"Why? Your apartment's so much better." Ashton said, looking around at the tiny room with the single bed and the horrifyingly bland white walls that surrounded them so completely sometimes he thought he might drown in the genericness of it all.

"I don't know. It smells like you. And we sleep on the floor together here, and lots of times when you come to mine you just stay on the couch, even though I know you hate sleeping alone." Luke told him matter-of-factly.

Ashton wrinkled his nose. "It smells like me? What do I smell like?"

"Like...um, laundry soap. And that lemon shampoo you use. And vanilla." Luke told Ashton, a tiny smile on his face, one of the first ones that had appeared there since Ashton had found Luke looking shattered outside his door about an hour before.

"I'll sleep with you at your house, Luke. You just have to ask me." Ashton told him, reaching out to take the empty takeout container from Luke to put it in the trash. "I don't always know what you want. You have to tell me sometimes."

"I want you." Luke said."That's all I want."

Ashton's breath was kind of taken away by the way Luke said it, like it was so easy and simple and obvious, but he tried to play it off by by just smiling and swallowing.

"Okay." He said with a rose-colored voice. "I can do that."

They looked at each other and Ashton thought I love you, but he didn't say it.

Luke stood up abruptly. "I'm going to go clean my teeth."

Ashton nodded.

And then he nodded.

"Oh. Oh. Me too."

Luke halfway smiled again and headed out the door, and all of a sudden Ashton was full of anticipatory fire.

x

"Now," Luke said when they were both back in Ashton's room. They had showered and changed into night clothes and Luke was looking adorably clean and sleepy. "I want you to kiss me, please."

Ashton felt two weeks of not enough of Luke's skin against his ignite his torso, spreading like wildfire from his chest to his ribs to his stomach and back up and burning into his fingertips and he needed needed to touch Luke or else he was going to disintegrate. He kissed him, pulling him blindly closer so that their knees knocked together and then their hips and oh, Luke's mouth against his was just everything.

Ashton felt desperate.

Ashton kissed Luke's neck.

Ashton looked at Luke, who's light blue eyes were cloudy with desire and something else as he pulled Ashton's shirt off with the most gentle hands Ashton had ever felt on his body before. He raised his arms over his head and suddenly nothing was desperate and everything was deliberate, from the way Luke's eyes traced over Ashton's newly exposed skin to the way Luke guided him down to the twin bed to the way Luke was hovering over him with an expression of awe and anticipation.