Breaking by lamardeuse

Written for the Sentinel Thursday Last Straw challenge

When Blair thought about it, he was sure Jim would be the one to break.

Maybe because Blair tended to think of himself as the laid-back one, the one in touch with his emotions and content with his place in the universe. Jim was the guy with the lid screwed on so tight it would take an H-bomb to pop the sucker off. It only made sense that the added pressure would lead someday to a massive explosion, hopefully subsequently leading to hot, hungry, really nasty sex.

Because you’d have to be blind not to realize that’s where the two of them were headed. Blair wasn’t sure if they’d fuck in the next five minutes or twenty years from now, but it was certain to happen eventually. Since Blair loved the guy to distraction as things were, and he was getting some on a regular basis anyway, it didn’t bother him too much that he had no definite notion of the timing of this event. What the hell, he’d always enjoyed surprises.

And then Alex happened, and the fiasco with the dissertation, and the next thing Blair knew he’d somehow transformed from this child-of-flower-child Zen master into a parody of the angry young man, only he didn’t know what the hell he was angry about. Oh sure, he had theories: he was mad at himself for being so damned stupid about the diss, at Jim for not trusting him, at whichever god was sitting up there and laughing Her ass off at the irony of Naomi Sandburg’s little boy packing a nine mil and genuflecting before the Police State. It took him a while to sort through all of that and figure out where the anger was really coming from.

He was pissed because he hadn’t been laid since Alex Barnes—well, since he’d died. He could have told himself he was having sexual, ah, difficulties because of the traumatic nature of the event, but that wasn’t it. Arousal was not a problem for Blair Sandburg, and god willing it never would be. The problem was that his current fantasies, waking and sleeping, day in and night out, involved wolves and panthers…

…and Jim. Oh my.

Celibacy made you mean, and death, it would seem, made him horny. So basically his natural state since becoming Jim’s official partner was to be red of face and blue of ball, and since he lived with a detective and a Sentinel at that, it was inevitable that this colour combination would garner attention.

They were sitting there on Saturday night watching a Jags game, yet another Saturday night when Blair was not getting out and enjoying his newfound paycheque and his newfound status as a macho cop-type guy with more muscles than he’d ever owned in his life. No, instead he was sitting on the couch with Jim, plowing his way through a huge bowl of Cheetos. He was deliberately being a slob, because the couch was new and beige and the fluorescent orange crap that was beginning to dust his immediate vicinity never failed to piss Jim off.

Might as well be two of them in on this.

But even after he let a couple of brightly-coloured missiles fall directly onto the sacred couch cushions, he still didn’t get any more than a “careful, Sandburg, or some of that will actually get in your mouth.” Jim hadn’t even had the grace to be snarky about it; hell, his tone was almost affectionate.

So as the evening wore on, Blair progressively got more and more agitated, and Jim got more and more relaxed, until finally when there were thirty seconds left in the fourth quarter Blair turned to him and snapped, “Have you been taken over by space aliens, for chrissakes? I’m making a mess here.”

The mischievous curl to Jim’s lip sent Blair’s pulse skyrocketing. And then the big man threw a casual arm over the back of the couch and looked Blair over from head to toe with those piercing blue eyes and said softly, “What do you want me to do about it? Lick you clean?”

Blair stared at him, mouth hanging open, because his brain had suddenly melted.

Apparently interpreting silence as assent, Jim took one of Blair’s hands in his and proceeded to suck every last trace of fluorescent Cheeto-crap off Blair’s fingers. Then he performed the same service for the other hand.

Blair’s brain dribbled happily out of his ears and puddled on the semi-clean beige cushions.

The upshot of it was that when Jim finally kissed him, Blair couldn’t tell the difference between Jim’s flavour and his own, because Jim already tasted like simulated cheese powder and maltase and lactase and Red Dye Number 9 and Blair’s fingers and—jesus, his brain really had departed his body—

However, there was enough gray matter remaining for Blair to notice that the hot, hungry and nasty sex he’d been expecting was in fact tender, deep and devastating. And if Blair hadn’t already been convinced of the transcendent nature of certain human experiences, he would have been converted by the way Jim moved inside him, so slowly and completely he was sure there was no longer any room left in him for emptiness.

But that was okay. He figured he could get used to that feeling, with a little practice.

“Knew you’d be the first to break,” Blair murmured into Jim’s neck later, when the two of them lay tangled up in Jim’s bed, Jim’s own fingers stroking gently over Blair’s hair.

“You got me, Chief,” Jim husked, the fingers never slowing in their rhythm. “Those Cheetos were the last straw.”

“Mm-hmm,” Blair agreed, drifting into sleep. “Knew I could do it.”

“Knew you could, too,” Jim whispered.

The last sensations Blair registered before he lost consciousness were the press of warm lips against his temple and the faint scent of simulated cheese.

End

June 2004