Title: Precipe
By: Emily Brunson
Pairing: Gil/Nick
Rating: NC-17
Note: 4th story in The Swishverse series
Sequal to: Mask, Front & Shelter

You sleep very late, and when you finally wake up again, Nick hasn’t budged from his place at your side. His dark eyes regard you calmly, wide awake.

"Want some coffee?" he asks.

You clear your throat and say, "Yes, please."

He nods and rolls to a seated position, standing up with a sigh. Your dick is morning-hard, and gets harder, watching. Unapologetically nude, Nick pads out of the room, and you follow much less gracefully, tugging up your pants, hyper-aware of being in someone else's house. Even if Teddy is long gone, it still feels awkward.

Nick makes coffee in Teddy’s comfortable kitchen, and perches still naked on one of the wooden chairs, watching you sip your drink but not touching his own.

"What time did Teddy leave?" you ask, flailing for something to say, anything.

"Early." Nick shrugs. "He’s got an engagement. Vienna, I think."

"He mentioned that. Das Rheingold."

"You should hear him sing. Amazing. He has some recordings. Want to hear?"

You nod. "Sure."

You take your coffee into the living room, and try to pretend your hard cock isn’t a throbbing misery while Nick bends over and sorts through CDs, the muscles in his white perfect ass bunching and flexing. He’s doing it on purpose, you think, and then, but what if he isn’t? What other reason could there be for him to prance around in his birthday suit?

Nick finally settles on something, a moment or two before you decide to simply rape him where he stands, and the room fills with Mozart, Zauberflöte, "O Isis und Osiris." Not your favorite aria on the planet – you prefer tenors, although you’ll never admit it within shouting range of Teddy’s house – and its slow, measured cadences are at odds with Nick’s nakedness, his odd quenched silence. You wonder if Teddy ever sang Leporello, and think, No, that isn’t the right timbre. You can imagine him singing Wotan, easily. The voice is huge, colored steely-black, the kind that cuts through an orchestra like a gorgeous buzz-saw. Very Wagnerian. Mozart is a poor choice overall, although he can get away with Sarastro.

"He’s good, isn’t he?" Nick asks next to you.

You nod. "Very. I didn’t know you liked opera."

Nick wrinkles his nose prettily. "Kinda boring. Except when Teddy does it."

You have no idea what to say to that – boring? Are you kidding? – and then Nick slings a leg over your thighs and straddles you, nestling his bare crotch against your clothed one and leaning forward to kiss your mouth.

You think, Aha, and then, oh, but the couch, and then you stop thinking and focus on the feel of his tongue slipping between your lips, his sleek warm skin under your hands.

He makes love to you while the music plays, certainly nothing you’ve ever imagined doing to the accompaniment of this particular aria. You aren’t doing it; he’s doing it to you, silent and leisurely and expert, and all you have to do is lean back and enjoy it. Nothing like a couple of weeks ago, both of you so frantic that after it was over you could barely remember how you got there. No, this is gentle, and Nick’s doing all the work, fucking himself on you, stopping your mouth with kisses the couple of times you try to speak.

The music changes, the dark, palpable strains of Wagner finally, and your orgasm builds, your heart thumping in a jarring rhythm. He’s staring down at you, unsmiling, drinking in your expressions while he speeds up, until you can’t stand it, you have to groan, clench your teeth, dig your fingers into his silky skin and push up just as hard as he’s pressing down, deeper, you want deeper inside him, you want to own him, possess him, and it’s not possible, he shows you that in the twitch of a smile, the squeeze of his talented muscles.

You lose the thread of the music moments before you actually come, and Verdi’s playing when you can hear again.

Nick leans forward, hands braced on your shoulders, and kisses you softly. "I’m hungry," he says pleasantly. "Want something to eat?"

Dazed, you nod, and get another brief kiss before Nick’s climbing off you. His cock is hard, he hasn’t come, and it makes you half-angry and half-forlorn, lost, you don’t understand him, and you doubt you ever will.

He makes breakfast, dressed now in a fantastically loud robe he occasionally touches, as if he simply likes the way it feels. You watch while both of you eat, and in the middle of thinking that he is a startlingly fine cook, you say, "I want this to work."

He doesn’t blink, doesn’t look up from his migas. "Do you?" he asks.

"Very much."

Chewing, he gazes at you. There’s a flicker of old mistrust in his eyes, but he nods and wipes his mouth on a napkin. "Okay."

"That’s all? Okay?"

"What do you want me to say?" He takes up his fork again, but doesn’t eat. "We’ll live happily ever after? That only happens in the movies, honey."

He’s smiling when he says it, and your blip of anger recedes fast. You give a short nod. "I realize that, Nick. Can we please – please get on the same page now?"

That makes him laugh. It sounds odd, and it takes you a second to realize you haven’t heard THIS laugh in a very long time. This easy laugh. Unfettered, untrammeled. It actually sounds familiar.

"Here." He picks up his napkin and stands, reaching across the table. "You have salsa on your lip."

You’re smiling, awkwardly, while he wipes your mouth. "Better?" you ask, staring into his inky eyes.

His lips quirk. "It’s an improvement."

"Thank you."

"Don’t mention it."

You can’t stop smiling, while Nick gathers up his things and flutters around, spending more time talking about packing than actually doing it. It’s a metamorphosis, seeing him relax by increments, leaving the stiff Perfect-Nick icon behind and settling into something that’s both strange and familiar. This is who he really is, you think, and then snort when he catches you watching and swings his hips extravagantly.

"You do that on purpose."

He rolls his eyes. "And you’re just now noticing? Some criminalist YOU are."

Finally Nick is dressed and packed. He’s wearing a shirt you’ve never seen before, soft blue cotton, with loose khaki pants and the same beat-up sandals. You squint at him. "Where’s your car?"

"I didn’t drive. Ugh."

"You flew?"

"Fairy dust, darling."

"Ah."

His three suitcases stowed in the trunk, you remind him to lock up, and then there’s the street and looking for the signs for the interstate. And you’re still smiling.


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You wait for the other shoe to drop. In the truck, driving back to Vegas, you gather yourself just in case there’s a display, or a return to the moodiness you indelibly associate with Nick these days.

It doesn’t happen. Nick’s not particularly talkative, but his occasional dry comments make you grin, and really the entire experience is like bracing yourself for a hard punch to the jaw, and having your opponent lick your chin instead. You’re off-balance, but it doesn’t feel bad. A little nervous, a bit uncertain, but mostly just…good.

It’s long after dark before you arrive back in Vegas. You drive to your own house, and Nick doesn’t object. Just grabs a suitcase and agreeably follows you inside.

That night, in your bed, you say, "You’re different. You – changed."

His eyes are dark spots in his murky face. "I told you," he says softly, breath warm against your lips. "Just needed some time to think."

That isn’t it, you think of saying, but it’s much easier to kiss him instead.

The following afternoon, at his apartment, you find him standing in front of his closet. He’s gnawing his lower lip, brow furrowed in thought, and he barely flinches when you walk up behind him and slide your arms around his waist, peering over his shoulder.

"What is it?" you ask softly.

"I don’t know what to wear."

It would be so easy to make a light comment, tell him it doesn’t matter, he looks edible in anything. But that isn’t what he’s saying, and you know it.

Instead you ask, "What do you want to wear?"

He sighs. "This." He touches a paisley nightmare of a shirt, mostly pink with curlicues of purple and red and lemon yellow. It’s a shirt you wouldn’t miss a beat seeing on Greg, but the problem is immediately obvious: It’s not part of Nick’s self-inflicted work uniform. It’s not a garment anyone would imagine Nick wearing. Not the Nick they think they know.

"Then wear it," you say.

He snorts. "Right."

You can feel his body tightening against your own, muscles contracting, spine stiffening. He’s putting himself back into the box, before your eyes. His fingers drop the paisley sleeve, prowl past the vivid colors and luxe fabrics that crowd the closet and hover over something beige.

"Don’t," you whisper.

His hand freezes.

"Wear what you want to wear, Nicky. No one will mind. No one will care. I swear it."

His arms hang loosely at his sides. "Someone will," he tells you dully.

"Maybe so. But you can’t do anything about that. And is it really your problem?"

"I don’t know."

You take a step back and pull at his shoulders until he’s facing you. His face is flushed and deeply unhappy, and he won’t look directly at you.

"Do you really care?" you ask him. "Is it that important?"

"I don’t know," he repeats.

You reach past him and yank the paisley shirt off the hanger. "Put it on."

He doesn’t move.

"Let me see what you look like in it."

After a moment he sighs, and takes the shirt.

He doesn’t look anything like Greg in it. Funny, but you’ve expected him to; now, looking at him, you see the difference. Greg, in his funky clothes and funkier hair, still looks straight. At least to you. Nick does not. Nick’s body language has changed, not any one specific thing but all of them, all of him relaxing into something the tiniest bit languid, a fraction flirty. It’s subtle and glaring at the same time. It’s marvelously, remarkably different.

"It’s just a shirt," you say, but even your own tone says it isn’t. It’s far more than that.

He regards himself in the mirror, and the wistful turn of his lips tells you he likes what he sees. It’s a loud, ridiculous article of clothing, and he looks flagrantly beautiful in it. "Warrick would have an embolism," Nick says, an eyebrow lifting.

"He’s young; he’ll recover."

"Greg will want to know where I got it."

You grin, and after a moment he does, too.


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No one says anything, but they definitely notice. It isn’t just the shirt. Or the pants, drapy and loose and un-Nick. It’s Nick inside that clothing, Nick both tense and oddly jovial, an edge to his demeanor like someone who’s just made an incredibly risky stock-market buy and is giddy with the danger of it. The perceived folly.

But he does his work, efficient if obviously nervous at first, and then relaxing in little increments, forgetting for longer and longer periods his personal dress code violation. Just as the others gradually lose sight of it, too, caught up in casework and tests and reports. Such things as what Nick wears to work are a nine-minute wonder, if that.

He goes home with you at sunrise, both of you tired and the clothing issue completely subsumed by the bleak depression of your latest case. Over coffee and good bagels bought on the way to your house, you touch his hand.

"It wasn’t so bad, was it?" you ask.

He nibbles a sesame-encrusted bagel and shrugs. "Just a shirt."

"It was more than that."

He doesn’t say anything, but his quick look is both understanding and pleased.

The following weekend he insists on going shopping. You sigh. "You have plenty of clothes, Nicky. Clothes no one has even seen. What –"

"They’re not right." He bites his lower lip, somehow managing to inject that gesture with what you now believe is unconscious flirtiness. "Too much."

"We’ve been over this."

He shrugs. "You don’t have to go," he says in a tone that communicates the exact opposite.

You smile. "All right. I’ll go."

As you’ve anticipated, he is a ferociously picky shopper. He tries on more clothing than you in ten years, and rejects nearly all of it. Too faggy. Too butch. Too pink, too blue, too white, my GOD, my ass looks like two bowling balls in a sack.

It’s an interesting sociological exercise, although you refrain from sharing that observation. Nick automatically goes for loud, for overtly gender-bending, for bright colors and either skin-tight fit or gorgeously blousy, with nothing in between. But he keeps picking them and discarding them, not quite allowing himself to indulge that clear preference.

But he also avoids the uniforms. In nearly six hours of nonstop shopping you never see him touch a navy garment, or taupe or brown or cream or black. And sometime in the late afternoon, while he models a cardinal-red shirt with French cuffs and frets about what it does to his shoulders, you realize what he’s doing. He’s compromising. He’s finding a new wardrobe. Something that straddles the line between his two increasingly integrated personalities.

You assure him that no, that shirt does not make him look in the slightest bit fat, and it’s not a bad color for him, either, very nice, I promise, and inside you think, Oh Nicky. Yes. Yes.


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He wears his new red shirt the next night to work, and compromises with khakis, and no one bats an eyelash. Nor do they the next night, with the turquoise sweater. In fact you’re pretty sure no one notices at all, except that you catch Sara eyeing the red shirt and giving a short, approving nod.

"She never liked my stuff," Nick confides to you a few minutes later, in passing. "She said my shirts were ugly."

"They were," you tell him, and touch his waist before going to your office.

It’s like watching someone emerge from a cocoon, this gradual sweet unfolding, and it isn’t only wardrobe. It’s body language, Nick allowing himself to relax, assume some of the mannerisms Gil himself had never ever seen until a few months ago. It’s never quite swishy, and it’s definitely not straight. It’s just Nick, the real Nick, slowly blossoming out of his wallflower dowdiness.

One morning, over pasta at the kitchen table, Nick says, "Warrick asked me today if I was queer."

You swallow your food and nod. "And?"

"I said yeah. He said okay." Nick smiles slowly. "That’s all."

You eat more pasta, and feel his bare toes sliding over your ankle.

Later, in bed, you inhale the scent of his hair, feel him breathing deeply against your chest, soundly asleep, and you whisper, "Welcome home, Nicky."

He stirs but doesn’t wake, breath ghosting over your nipple. You smile and close your eyes.

 

END