Only If For a Night(MxM)

Shopping

"We could have just called a grocer," Zuko wrinkled his nose, staring at the shelf of processed cheese.

"That would have taken forever; we were driving passed, I just have to grab a few things," Jet hovered close to him, purposefully bumping him with his chest as he leaned over to grab at a head of cabbage.

Zuko sighed but stopped complaining. The little bodega was on their way home, the transition of a week in the silent woods all alone to being surrounded by millions of people was jarring, to say the least.

Zuko had shed his suit jacket and tie in the car, leaving him in his white button-up and slacks. Even under the flickering fluorescent lights of the rundown shop, glancing at him from the corner of his eye made Jet's stomach flip-flop. They had kept his first day back at work entirely professional, breaking it only once when Jet had, under the guise of camaraderie, clapped Zuko on the shoulder, and pressed his thumb into the dip of his shoulder where he had left a bit of an overzealous mark two days earlier.

Zuko had batted his hand away but chewed on his lips for a few minutes after, lost in thought.

"My mom wants to see you again, says she needs to cook a good proper dinner some night; apparently she thinks I'm not feeding you enough," Jet commented, purposefully not looking at Zuko's reaction.

He tensed, just the barest of movements, but Jet caught it from the corner of his eye.

He knew how much this sounded like he wanted to bring him home to his parents to meet, and even though that is what he wanted badly, he knew how slippery this slope was. They had just become something, it didn't even have a name yet, and suddenly his hands were a little sweaty.

Zuko's mind flew a thousand miles a minute, calculating and overprocessing the data roiling in his mind, attacking the situation at all angles, mentally going through every possible outcome of how seeing his mom again could go, and he played out every answer to every conversation in his head. This was all carefully and neatly boiled down into a curt nod and a "Yeah, that sounds nice."

"Yeah?" Jet realized how stupid he looked, standing in a haberdashery, holding a wilting cabbage next to a millionaire that he had thoroughly debauched forty-eight hours earlier, butterflies thudding in his chest at the thought of having him again. And again.

"Yeah," Zuko affirmed, a little firmer. "But maybe just your mom? And not the entire herd of nieces and nephews and sisters?"

Jet laughed. "You scared of my sisters or somethin'?"

"No," Zuko lied, a little sulkily.

Happy happy happy fluttered up in the both of them, warm and light and exciting, and they stood grinning at each other like two idiots for longer than they should have.