#love u kerry | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ezlebe · 1 year

Note

prompt: either of them mistakenly & flippantly says “love u bye” out of habit b4 hanging up the phone (i’ve done this b4 when talking to a random old lady) & chaos ensues

“– and the time slot cannot be changed, but you can give her the contact to Ubon to buy another one,” Tom says, emphasizing the last words, making it easy to tell he’s probably gesturing in that little pinch. “You get all that?”

“Yeah, I… yeah, I can do it,” Greg says, flipping through the day planner with a peek at the corners. He pauses at the sight of a fluorescent orange sticky with a relieved sigh.

“Seriously, do I hear the paper planner?” Tom says, voice pitching bright with mocking amusement. “How old are you – seventy-five?”

“I got it, Tom,” Greg says, again, fully flipping open the planner.

“Good,” Tom says, voice fading on the other end of the line. “Shit. Kerry. I got to go. Bye-bye!”

Greg nods absently, tugging the note out of the edge of the planner, so it peeks through the pages. “Ye-yeah, bye. Love you.”

Tom sputters across the line. “What?”

“What?” Greg echoes, then his own words catch up, and he hurriedly hangs up the phone with a slip of his thumb across the screen. He stares at it in his hand, as his heart thuds, face flashing cold, then hot, as a tingle rushes in a wave across his skin down to his fingertips. He stiffly loosens his grip on the planner to cover his face, bending across his knees.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck, fuck.

Greg is at least is relieved to be out on assignment, as it were; he can’t get cornered in his office with heckles when he’s out here in California. He could, in theory, not even go back… but Tom would come looking, if it came to that, probably? It’s not a real option, either way. He might, at most, push it back a day or two.

It’s especially fucked because Greg has been like so fucking careful, too. He doesn’t touch too much, he’s pretty sure, and he hardly starts up anything himself. He’s been like a total… bro, or whatever, since stumbling into finding out Tom is less conflicted on the rules of it’s-not-gay-if-it’s-a-devil’s-three-way than anything else they could do. He’s like pretty sure, though, Tom has some idea that Greg… prefers him to be there for like completion’s sake? But also that he thinks Greg just gets nervous.

Tom’s always telling him not to get too nervous…

Fuck. Greg is thinking about that now, somehow even less appropriate for his upcoming meeting. It’s a thought that does calm him down in a way, Tom's low voice in his ear, which is nice... though, when taken apart and isolated, it’s just as much of a problem.

Greg looks up with a start at a bell at the opposite end of the hall, straightening his back, as a woman in a bright white power suit exits the nearby elevator. He stands when she closes in on the seating area, and knows he has to bury all this for the next hour, at least, because this is the hard ass ad exec who Tom has had him doing background on the last two days.

“Mr Hirsch?” She says, pasting in on bright, toothy smile while sticking out her hand. “I’m Crista Ball. Welcome to NoHo.”

“Nice to meet you,” Greg says, then clears his throat, forcibly brightening his voice while reaching out to take Crista’s hand. “Call me Greg.”

“Hey,” Tom says, looking up, as Greg enters his office. “Good flight?”

“Um… cramped,” Greg says, as he looks toward the window and the grey sky framing the skyscrapers, and realizes he’s having a little trouble remembering the actual flight. It must have been boring. “Not that, like… eventful, I guess, which makes it good?”

“No news is good news,” Tom says, standing up from his desk with an exaggerated oof. He walks around it, the fingers of one hand lingering on the desk, while the other sweeps out in a gesture toward the floor outside the hall with an upturned palm. “Unless you work here, obviously.”

Greg huffs with an assenting lift of his shoulder. He shifts his bag behind him, when Tom gets close, opening his arms to reciprocate Tom folding him into a loose hug.

“But hey,” Tom says, quietly, turning his head to the side with a press of lips under Greg’s ear. “Welcome back, baby.”

Greg tightens his fingers in Tom’s shirt, trying to pull him closer, but the shirt slips from his grasp. He looks down, furrowing his brow as he realizes Tom’s actually only in a white tee, worn thin and loose around the collarbones. He exhales a low mumble of confusion, looking at Tom, “Did you wear this to the office?”

Tom raises an eyebrow, from where he stands in the middle of his penthouse bedroom. “The office?”

Greg looks over his shoulder at the door, a dark, narrow hall beyond it. “I – I mean –?”

Tom leans in Greg’s face with a smirk and a with a pair of tuts, hands settling wide along Greg’s pelvis. “We couldn’t do this at the office.”

Greg shakes his head to agree, but he’s… He’s still having trouble really holding on. It’s like the fabric and Tom are no more solid than sand.

“Got you all to myself,” Tom continues, wagging his brows, having no trouble on his part for tugging at Greg’s belt. “No one else in the way. Just like I like it.”

“Yo-you do?” Greg asks, hearing his voice lift in a fluster.

Tom laughs under his breath, leaning in, sliding both hands up Greg’s torso, his chest, then curving across his lower jaw. He stares for a few beats, then his mouth curves into an ugly sneer. “No.”

“Shit,” Greg croaks, blinking at the creased pillow under his head. He’s not in New York, at all; he never even got on the plane. He maybe on purpose let his meeting run long, asked the car to take a detour for dinner, and then had them take him back to the hotel once it was solidly two hours after the flight.

He turns over into the pillow with a groan, entertaining the idea of suffocating himself against the cotton and fiber. He slowly continues to roll entirely to the opposite side that he woke up on, grimacing at the way his feet miss against the edge of the mattress, and determinedly counts various light across the city while trying to forget the dream. He feels winded, and too hot, like he’s been out in a run, or something, though the only thing racing is his mind.

It was just a dream. Greg like really doesn’t even… care, because it – It would be sort of a pointless, painful waste of energy. The way it is just is how it is, and he has known that for months.

He’s known since he awkwardly tried to remind Tom he had a lot of life ahead of him, only to get too tipsy, go a little too far, and be drawn into some loosely-labeled fun. It had actually only been a little awkward, at first, until it got very awkward when Tom admitted that he’d partly done it because of Shiv, as he was apparently carrying some kind of bizarre spite that he hadn’t really explained. He then joked it made him disgusting, because he was still married to her, but it felt heavily implied that also was because Greg was Greg, and they were disgusting together.

It gets harder to remember why that’s really so bad every time the situation repeats itself. It doesn’t recur exactly like the first time, but they’ll get just as drunk, and Tom will become especially evocative, settling on a wall or a lounger like it’s a throne, and throw an arm around Greg, squeezing his hip, his ribs, his thighs, and tugging his clothes, while he tells him in sly detail how they might sweet talk someone that Greg’s really only been looking at just to keep from looking at Tom. And then never, ever talk about it. It’s like they both become different people, entirely separate from who they are when they’re sober in daylight.

Greg thinks that he might actually hate drunk-Greg, who is so desperate, though not as much as he hates drunk-Tom, who treats Greg with the possessiveness and condescension of an especially posable doll. Truthfully, though, nothing can really top the hate for how much he still keeps going along knowing it leads exactly nowhere. It leads nowhere, except here, laying in the dark and wishing he had never told Tom that a woman at the bar was looking at them those months ago. He’s a bigger liar than he’s ever been, and the real truth is that he’s always been too good at faking it. His parents must be so proud, all considered.

The train of thought is jarringly interrupted by a sharp thwack hitting the door. Then another. And Greg reaches out to tap the lamp, squinting towards it, and then back to the door. He stumbles up, once he fully grasps it’s knocking, and that it’s getting louder by the second.

“Just a – One, uh – one moment, please,” he says, clearing his throat, and he nearly falls across the table alongside the suite sofa. He fumbles at the door, thankful that it makes the knocking stop, and slowly peeks out a narrow crack.

He quickly opens the door wider, squinting blearily down at Tom, who’s standing in the harsh light of the hotel hallway. He’s in shirtsleeves with a wrinkled jacket over his arm, has sunglasses on his head, and he… He didn’t even wait a day to fly out. He didn’t even wait half a day – is he tracking Greg, in a very literal sense?

“You skipped out on your flight,” Tom says, rather than any sort of greeting. He shoves past Greg, though the door and scratching at his brow while moving across the suite. “Very mature.”

“It was a-a meeting conflict issue, I didn’t – ” Greg shakes his head once with a hard swallow. “It like wasn’t a deliberate skipping.”

“Uh-huh,” Tom says, now scrubbing a hand entirely across his face. He settles in front of the window, chin resting on a fist. “Whatever you say.”

Greg lifts his hands slowly across his elbows, squeezing into the joints.

“Look, bud, it was just a little faux pas, you –”

“Can we not – ” Greg inhales tight, as the words rasp from his throat, “Not talk about it?”

Tom peeks over his shoulder, mouth flattening, as his eyes gradually narrow over a count of seconds. He clicks his tongue, as he looks back toward the city outside the window.

Greg has gone through a lot of… phases when it comes to Tom, all shifting blends of attracted, and agitated, and attached, and ambivalent, and altogether it’s the most keyed-up he’s felt about anyone. He doesn’t like getting forced into thinking directly about it, and he especially doesn’t want Tom thinking about it.

Mostly.

A tiny, impetuous part of Greg wishes that he would just say something.

Tom turns around entirely, dropping his hands with a shake that goes through to his fingertips. He steps in closer, making some face that’s probably condescending, but too shadowed against the dim bedside lamp to really tell. “Your call.”

Greg agrees with a hard swallow and a jerky drop of his chin.

Tom stands silently for another beat, then abruptly leans up to slip a hand around Greg, tugging him into one-armed slap on the back. “Hey, buck up.”

Greg suddenly can't help the way his shoulders immediately roll forward and hunch, his hands pushing weakly at the loose wrinkles of Tom’s shirt. It feels too much like the dream, of something under his hands and with soft whispered affection, only now it’s solid, and he literally chokes at the thought, breath trapped at the back of his throat.

Tom goes markedly still for a pair of tense beats, then exhales lengthy and low between them. “Okay,” he murmurs, palm settling warm and heavy across the back of Greg’s head. “Okay.”

Greg gradually presses his face entirely across Tom’s shoulder. “I’m like…” He says, voice barely above a murmur. “Tired, Tom.”

Tom is quiet for a few long seconds, then gives a jerky nod against the side of Greg’s head. “It’s… It is the ass of dawn.”

“Yeah, um – wh-why are you here?” Greg asks, and maybe that’s not what he meant, but it is a little more crazy. He’s aware enough that, between the traffic and the air time, Tom must have gotten a flight at like the minute Greg didn’t step off his own, so it’s almost 7AM for both of them, only Tom probably hasn’t had any sleep. “I was like scheduled for tomorrow?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Tom says, rubbing his thumb hard and distracting into the curve of Greg’s scalp.

“It does, though,” Greg insists, grudgingly pulling back, forcing himself to release Tom’s shirt from his stiff grip. He looks down into what he can see of Tom’s face, but it’s just the slope of his nose and the upturn of his lashes, too shadowed to read. “You have like stuff to do.”

“I was… concerned,” Tom says, briefly wringing his hands, then again dropping them to his sides in loose fists. “That you may have overcorrected in some way.”

Greg shakes his head, as he rubs deep into one of his eyes with the heel of a hand. He can’t really guess what that could mean, and decides not to try – he overcorrected? He didn’t take a six hour red-eye.

“Can I, like… just go back to bed?” he mutters, into the curve of his own palm, attempting not to look directly at Tom while his stomach threatens to tighten in upset. “If we apparently don’t have anything to talk about?”

Tom exhales a harsh, predictably irked breath that’s close to a scoff.

“I know you… uh, you have trouble sleeping a lot, anyway?” Greg says, carefully, as he manages to pull away entirely from Tom to take a few steps toward the bed on what feel like lead feet. He had piled the more… decorative pillows on the side he wasn’t using, but now he starts to move them toward the sofa. “But you need like a couple hours, Tom.”

Tom makes a soft, pitchy noise, entirely unfamiliar, so somewhat worrying.

Greg looks back, and it’s easier to see Tom’s face from this angle of the lamp; he’s got his sunglasses in his hands, flipping at the arms, and is staring at the pillows like he’s never seen one. Greg realizes with a discomforting yank under his sternum that he’s assuming way too much, Tom probably wants and should get his own room, and that’s even in some way why they’re both even standing here, as he squeezes at the last pillow he’s got in his hand.

Tom drops the sunglasses with a clack to the coffee table. “You know… how much I hate to admit when you’ve got a point.”

Greg manages a nod, as he swallows thickly, throwing that last pillow to the pile. He wets his lips, as he turns his head back down at the bed, anxiously listening to Tom undress behind him. He hears the clatter of a belt joining the sunglasses, then a thunk that’s probably a watch, while heat flares unbidden across his nape and the backs of his ears.

He tries to seem unbothered, as he tucks himself away best he can back under the too-thin blanket while keeping his breath in even, conscious counts. He stays stiffly on his side, listening to a pad of footsteps around the bed, then feels Tom slip in beside with a barely there displacement of the mattress and the bedclothes. He does peek open his eyes for a split second, catching that Tom is entirely down to his boxers, and his undershirt nowhere to be seen.

Tom unceremoniously leans over Greg, across the mattress, and it takes both forever and a split second to realize he’s tapping the light. It goes brighter, then brighter, prompting grumbles, until finally the room is dark. He doesn’t actually move away, once he’s finished, but stays pressed close to Greg on his side, too, settling his reaching arm lightly across Greg’s shoulder with an unintelligible murmur under his breath.

Greg carefully rests his nose into the hollow of Tom’s shoulder, warm and solid, inhaling against the bare skin. He tries but can’t think of a time they’ve just laid together. He’s then struck unwelcomingly with the memory of the Tom in the dream, pretending at being fond, before sharply becoming mocking; it makes Greg turn his head away, trying to pretend he didn’t do anything at all, even though he knows the dream was less real than anything else – particularly, how Tom is in bed with him, and just him, even if it’s only because he’s such a… a control freak that he’ll take a whole cross-country flight.

They lay there for a long while, until the principal concern keeping Greg awake is the low buzz of the fridge in the kitchenette. He’s less hyper aware of Tom, mostly comfortable, exhaustion bringing him near to dozing across the arm under his chin.

Tom abruptly exhales a loud, shuddering breath, breaking the quiet, as his chest deflates against Greg. “You, too.”

Greg peeks open his eyes, glancing up the bed, then hurriedly squeezes them shut.

“That’s what I should’ve said,” Tom continues, in a voice barely above a murmur.

#tomgreg #sort of a S4E1 speculation so there's not any actual solid spoilers but there is talk of encounters with nameless women #nameless because none actually appear not because greg never remembers their names to be clear #could in a super loose sense count toward another prompt i have with jealous greg but this is more melancholic than active jealous so

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