Title: Philosophy Takes Its Toll
By: Read 300300
Nick/Greg
NC-17
Disclaimer: Don't own
Summary: Greg reads too much philosophy. Once again, basically an excuse for a little smut.
A/N: Yes, crack!fic again. Blame this one on Shacky20, who encouraged the rabid bunny. I love you, girl!

"Nick?"

"Yeah, what is it?" Nick rolled over, unconsciously bringing his pillow with him, a half-asleep look in his eye.

"Can we talk?" Greg bit his lip, having finally gotten the courage to say what he had been trying to voice for the past few weeks.

"Go back to sleep, G! We'll talk later... like, when I'm awake," the older man closed his eyes again and was back in the haze of near-sleep mere seconds later.

"Idon'tthinkIwantustohavesexanymore!" His voice was rushed and loud.

Nick was instantly awake, hoping against hope that he had not heard what he thought he had. "Come again?"

"I don't think I want us to have sex anymore, okay? You can go back to sleep now. Good night," Greg rolled over and quickly feigned sleep.

The older man was nonplussed, however, and sat up, running a hand through his hair. His attention had been gotten, and he was not going to be able to get back to sleep until he knew what this was about. "Are you-" he bit back the word insane, knowing that there was nothing Greg hated more. "Are you sure?"

"Um, kind of," came the muffled reply.

"Are you- what?- having questions about our relationship now?" He felt he had to ask, had to know if he was what wasn't working for the younger man. "Am I doing something wrong?"

"N-no... I just- well, I've been reading A Course in Miracles-"

Nick bit back a groan; that was really never a good thing to hear from Greg's mouth.

"-and it said that giving yourself what you want is the same as not having it because either way you're just validating the world to yourself."

"That's way too deep for nine in the morning," Stokes muttered after checking the clock. "So this relates to us not having sex anymore how, precisely?"

"Well, I've never really done, you know, without sex of some sort since I hit puberty and I just want to know what it's like." Greg added quickly, "People also say that going without makes it that much better when you finally get back in the swing of things."

"And this is the same book that says the universe doesn't actually exist?"

"Right! That we're really just separated from God and dreaming about being alive but we really don't exist at all. We just think we do, and only by forsaking everything will we realize that nothing actually exists."

"And you choose to do this now?" Nick knew he was being a bit insensitive, but his dick was involved in this argument as well. "Now, when we are in a happy, healthy, committed relationship with lots of great mind-blowing sex? You choose now?"

"Yeah, actually. It just kind of happened that way."

Nick sighed, wondering what in God's name was going on; he couldn't see any way out of this. The only thing that he could really do would be to either argue some more and risk not being up in time for work or accept it and pray that this was just a spur-of-the-moment decision. He opted for the latter; surely, Greg would come around in a few days once he had been given a taste of how horrible living without sexual gratification was.

~*~*~

Nick groaned in frustration; by now, just the sight of Greg's ass was making him nearly dizzy, and it was all he could do to stay concentrated on the matter at hand. Right, hands. That was the only thing his dick had been getting for the past two weeks ever since Greg decided to become celibate- his own hand. Stokes knew that his work was suffering from it, and his attitude was feeling the effects as well. Being deprived of the one thing that served to lower his stress levels the most was really getting to him, so much so that he had inadvertently snapped at Grissom's spider a few moments ago.

He felt like a pathetic loser; his life had come down to seeing if he could win an insult contest with a tarantula, and it was all Greg's fault!

Sitting down in the break room, Nick thought over the past few weeks at work. Not only had his strain begun to show after the first five days or so, but Greg had been getting into trouble too. The younger man was angry, constantly snapping at people, getting evidenced processed slower than what he normally could do... Oh, and the icing on the top of the cake: he had begun playing his music so loudly that people were scared to walk into his lab, much less risk destroying their hearing in the five seconds it would take them to walk over to the stereo and unplug it.

And home was no better. He had tried being nice, tried sweet-talking, wining and dining, the works, but to no avail. Nick had done every that he could to get Greg in the mood short of jumping him. The tension between them had skyrocketed, leading to more arguments that winded up with Nick deciding to sleep on the couch. It was easier that way; now he didn't have to deal with a Greg that was giving into stupid displays of anger which he knew were due to the extra testosterone running around his lover's system and his body wasn't yelling at him that he needed Greg.

Over the first few days, he had stuck it out, not even going so far as to touch himself because he thought that his lover would rid himself of the weird ideas and decide that he had been wrong all along. After that, though... he couldn't stand it anymore. He knew that he could be a pretty selfish person sometimes, but damn it if Greg wasn't taking the cake on this one! He couldn't count how many times over the past ten days that he had resorted to jerking off, but even that didn't make him feel as good as when he and his lover were together. There was just something about having another person there, someone with whom he really connected, that made the experience the joy that it was.

He sighed, knowing that if he didn't get Greg to come to his senses soon, he could possibly be stuck just jerking off for the rest of his life. God knew he would never give up Greg now that he had found him.

"Something wrong?" Catherine looked over at him and asked.

Shaking his head, he turned back to staring into the swill the department passed off as coffee; the drink was so weak that it was like colored water.

"Really? You've seemed... off."

"It's nothing," he lied, taking another sip from the chipped mug.

"Doesn't seem like nothing. Did you and Greg get into a fight?" She was persistent, and her gaze told him that she was not going to back off.

"Something like that," Nick wanted to see if he could get away with not revealing anything.

"I thought so," she folded her arms, a satisfied look on her face. "So did Grissom. He told me to tell you to work past it, whatever it was."

"Really?" He couldn't stop the acid from creeping into his tone.

"Yes, it's more than starting to affect the way that the team works. Everyone has noticed that you two are basically avoiding each other here, and it's starting to hurt the cases. He would have talked to you about it himself, but-"

Nick nodded, knowing that Grissom was out working a complicated case that looked as though it would take hours more just to collect the evidence.

"Well, what am I supposed to do, Catherine? Tie him up and make him listen to me?" He asked in frustration.

"If it gets the job done."

He stared at her for a second, trying to determine if she were being serious or not, and then looked at his watch.

"You know that you were off an hour ago, right?" She filled in for him.

"Yeah, I just..." He tried to come up with a plausible answer for why he was still there, but as he had wrapped up his last case a few hours ago and finished all of the necessary forms, there really wasn't any reason for him to stay.

"Go! Get some sleep!" Catherine shooed him out, putting the first real smile on his face in days. "You two are best friends, Nick. Don't let anything come between that."

He nodded, a bit distracted by an idea he had in mind. If he worked it right, he could have everything resolved by the next afternoon.

~*~*~

"Nick?" Greg jumped, half asleep, his arms instinctively pulling against the handcuffs.

"Hmmm?"

"What's going on?" His eyes fluttered open sleepily, taking in the sight before him: Nick, clad only in black boxers, erection clearly visible, staring at him in a way that made him gulp with nervous anticipation.

"I guess it's an intervention. Grissom wants us to work this out," Nick climbed onto the bed with him, sitting on the foot of the bed and facing his lover.

"Grissom knows?" Greg's eyebrows shot to the top of his head and he tried to bring a hand up to run it through his mussed hair, only then consciously realizing that he was handcuffed to the bed. He began in a dangerous tone, "Nick-"

"I wanted to make sure that you would listen to me," he explained easily, turning on a good, healthy dose of his Texan charm. "Seemed like a good idea, one that Catherine seconded."

"Catherine told you it was okay to tie me to a bed, and do what?"

"She said anything that gets the job done, as long as we talked it out. So, let's talk." Nick swung his legs over the bed and moved so that he was standing at a forty-five degree angle to his lover, facing Greg as he took his boxers off. He brought his hand up to wrap around his erection, concentrating on the way that lust sparked in Greg's eyes. "Tell me more about this... philosophy thing."

"Um, right... ACIM is a..." Greg couldn't seem to turn his gaze off Nick; he bit back a slight moan when he saw the way that Nick's hips thrust lightly as his hand ran up and down his shaft.

"ACIM is a philosophy." Nick supplied, his voice catching a bit at the end as he brought his other hand to play with his sac.

"Right, a philosophy that teaches-" he broke off after stumbling over those first words for some time, unable to remember anything about what he'd been reading over the past few weeks. "Nick! I can't concentrate with you doing that! And besides, isn't this like-"

"Only if you say no," he responded, having anticipated the question before it was asked. "Are you saying no?"

Greg shook his head wordlessly and licked his lips, which had suddenly become very dry.

"You want this, don't you?"

He nodded, never taking his eyes off his lover's cock.

"Good. You know, G, by the time this is over, you're either going to make me give you what you want or your balls will turn blue and fall off," Nick joked, leaning backwards against the wall as he sped his hands up. After a few minutes, he continued, "So, let's talk. What have you been doing in your hours of free time since this thing began?"

"F-free time?"

"You know, time that we normally would have spent together, doing things." He moaned at the last part when his brain happily supplied him with images of the things that they could have been doing over the past two weeks. "I've spent my time jerking off, just like this, to you. Those little jeans, the ones that hug your ass like there's no tomorrow, nearly sent me to a storage closet so that I could fuck my fist and pretend it was your ass."

"You have?" Greg was clearly shocked, his eyes turning upwards from the show he had been watching to look at Nick's face.

Their eyes locked for a second before Nick threw his head back and thrust harder into his waiting hand, the friction threatening to send him over the edge.

"Yeah, haven't you?" He managed to get out in response.

"No," He began but then found himself unable to stop the words pouring out of his mouth at his lover's hurt look, "but I've wanted to, Nick. God, I've wanted to jump you so many times this week. At work, on cases, the other day I just wanted to throw you over that table in the lab when you came by to pick up those results. Just wanted to bury my cock so deep in you..."

"Oh, god," Nick cried out, his hand pumping furiously as he came.

When he finally came down off of his high, he realized that Greg had been speaking to him for some time, begging him to do something to relieve his aching cock.

"Come on, Nick, please!" The sweat stood out on his brow, "You can't just leave me like this! Forget everything I ever said about not doing this and just get me off! Please, please, please, you have to!"

Nick nodded and made his way shakily towards the bed, kind of tripping onto it. He pulled back the covers and clumsily took Greg's boxers off, his coordination a bit off.

Still, he managed to work his mouth around his lover's cock, his head bobbing up and down quickly. He circled his tongue around the ridge of the head before bringing it to lightly lap at the slit, applying pressure to the heated organ as a counterpoint to the pulse he could feel from the engorged vein on the underside of the cock. Within minutes, he was swallowing quickly as Greg came, Nick's name on his lips as he rode out the waves of pleasure.

Nick smirked to himself when he saw the happy expression on his lover's face, knowing that Greg would never pull something like this again.