SEX AND VIOLENCE
Leo's first book promotion is in winter.
Blaine knows he will remember this detail forever not because this is Leo's first book and it's important, but because the curve of his husband's hips in those jeans under the sweater he's wearing is making him crazy and there's no way Blaine is going to forget the way it's making him feel as he sits down, waiting for the reading to begin. Mark – precious, know-it-all Mark, the editor – wanted Leo to look professional, so he has begged him not to wear his usual combo of teen t-shirt and sneakers. Except that Mark doesn't beg, he suggests in a way that Leo can't say no to him, which never fails to make Blaine wonder if something happens that he should be worrying about when he can't see those two.
So now, Leo is wearing a light gray shirt on his usual jeans and a black open sweater that makes him look the young writer he is without taking away years to his current age. He looks smart, fresh but not too childish, no matter how youngish is face still is. He looks exactly like Mark. As they sit next to each other behind the table, the similarity in their age, style and way to move is so painfully clear that Blaine almost growls out aloud.
“He looks gorgeous,” Sam says, joining him. She sits down next to him, bestowing effusive apologies to the people around her, who were forced to move aside to let her and her frilly skirt pass.
“That douche bag made a copy of himself out of him,” Blaine grumbles. His eyes never leave Leo, as if something inappropriate could happen in front of the hundreds of people present.
Sam smooths her skirt and places her tiny bag on her lap, smiling. “I thought we were here to support Leo and cheer for him, not to hate on Mark. I'm not properly dressed for that.”
Blaine turns to glare at her, but she's still smiling. “Come on, B. Look at him.”
“I'm looking at him,” Blaine says. “That's not him. What with the Diesel sweater? And he's wearing Armani shoes. Black, leather shoes, Sam. He has brainwashed him and Leo let him, because whatever that man says he does.”
Sam chuckles, and the curls of her lilac wig moves with her. “I think he looks gorgeous. And cute. As he always does,” she says. “He wanted to look the part, you can't blame him for that.”
“He writes YA novels, he doesn't need to look like an hipster, pseudo-intellectual idiot,” Blaine grumbles again, barely managing to keep his voice low.
Sam ignores him as she's been doing for the past few months, basically since the day Blaine found out about the promotional tour and what it implied, that is Leo being busy and traveling with Mark through the whole country for over two months. “Oh, look how nervous he is!” She squeaks. “He's doing that thing with his hair.”
When Leo is too nervous, he starts messing with the hair at the base of his neck. He wraps one single curl around his finger over and over, most of the time without even noticing it. Blaine knows that gesture comes from a very bad place in time and doesn't find it so cute, even though he knows the reason why Leo is doing that now has nothing to do with the past.
Blaine looks at him insistently, hoping for Leo to stare back but he never does. He looks down at the pages of his book or in the general direction of the crowd but never at him. Rationally, Blaine knows why. He knows Leo well enough to understand what would happen if Leo looked at him. He would freeze and get confused, and that's the last thing he needs now. Leo is aware Blaine is there, in the first row, supporting him and that's enough for him. Blaine knows that. He is there for that very reason, after all. Still, when he sees Leo searching Mark's eyes for support or approval at whatever he's saying to the crowd, Blaine's blood starts boiling and only his trained self-control and Sam's gloved hand on his thigh stops him from standing up and dragging his husband away.
Actually, he realizes he was lost in a fantasy where he was beating Mark to death for God knows how long, because Leo has stopped reading and he's now answering questions.
“What about Liam's obsession with candies and sweets?” A young girl in the third row asks, blushing furiously as she looks at him. Leo must be confusing to look at if you're thirteen, you like his book a lot and you really want to ask him a real question. “Is it metaphorical or something?”
Mark leans in on the mike and smiles. “Oh no, that's just Leo,” he answers before Leo can say anything. “He's munching candies all the time. I actually spend more for him on candies than on promotion. He just gave that trait to his main character because he couldn't help it.”
Leo looks over to him and smirks. “Now, that's not true. I'm not like that.”
“And he is a liar too,” Mark nods to the girl. Then he turns to Leo, smirking as well. “So you don't have a bowl filled with red vines on your desk in the office?”
“Yes, I do. But as much as I remember, it has never gone empty.”
“That's because you never come to the office!” Mark says.
The crowd laughs, and Blaine sulks even more. He hates the way they interact with each other or even the way they smirk like they have inside jokes to share, which they probably have since they work together and that makes him mad.
“So, what other characteristic of yourself did you give to Liam?” Someone else asks.
“Not many,” Leo shakes his head. “He doesn't look like me at all. He's friendly, very positive...”
“He wakes up way before lunch in the morning,” Mark adds. Blaine is so fed up with his stupid sense of humor, that he's hating even the way he needs to lean closer to the mike to speak or the way he sits on his chair next to Leo. Mark's very own existence bothers him.
Leo chuckles. “Excuse me if I work late at night,” he says, playing along. He surely got the hand of entertaining the crowd.
“Leo's night starts at five pm,” Mark says to the crowd. “So when you call him at seven, he's been working past his scheduled hours for ages already. Still, ten in the morning is dawn for him. I swear to God, I don't know when to call him most of the times.”
“But you call at every fucking hours nonetheless,” Blaine grumbles in a whisper. Mark has the most inappropriate timing, always calling Leo when they're having dinner, when they're playing with the twins and most of all when they're about to have sex.
“I have a perfectly working voice mail,” Leo says.
“I know. I'm on a first name basis with it,” Mark says, triggering the next roar of laughs from the crowd. “I speak with it more than I speak with you.”
By the time the interview ends and Mark lets the people stand in line to get their copy of the book signed, Blaine is beyond rage. From his point of view he was forced to witness the indisputable evidence of Mark and Leo getting too much along for their own good, which fueled Blaine jealousy to the point of madness. So, when people start standing up to go to the table, he walks in the opposite direction.
“Are you gonna sulk like that the whole evening?” Sam asks him, following him.
“I'm not sulking,” he says.
“I see. That's totally why your face doesn't look like a prune right now,” she nods. “Listen, I have to go now. I work at the Bubble Shower tonight, but if Leo tells me you threw a jealous fit at him, you're gonna answer to me. Are we clear?”
Blaine doesn't answer because a jealous fit is exactly what he wanted to throw, except for Mark out of a window.
“Are we clear?” Sam repeats, gently beating him on his head with her cherry-red fan.
“Yes, we are,” Blaine sighs in resignation.
“Good. Bye bye, sweety pie,” she trills, leaving a kiss on Blaine's cheek. “Say hi to Leo for me. I'll call him tomorrow.”
Blaine watches her leave, swinging on her 6” heels. He ponders over staying there till the end of the signing section, but when he looks over Mark is talking with some man from the publishing house, a hand resting on Leo's shoulder. So he storms out, before he can kill someone.
It takes Leo three more fucking hours to get back to the hotel room they share in New York, and Blaine makes sure to be found very well sulking on the couch in the sitting room of the suite.
“Honey, I'm home!” Leo chirps, playfully. He throws his room keys on the table, where tons of flowers with cute little notes have been waiting for him. “Are these for me?”
Blaine doesn't even bother to move. “A floor boy brought them in. I bet your editor couldn't wait to tell you how much money are you making for him.”
Leo is too happy and too excited to get mad at him right away. “Only the first two bunches are Mark's” he says, reading a note after the other. “The others are from real fans!”
Blaine didn't bother to check who sent the flowers, so knowing Mark actually sent some makes him furious. “Only two? Didn't you sell enough?” He asks.
Leo sighs and leaves the flowers. He walks to the couch and leans on it to kiss Blaine on his cheek. “Are you angry?” He asks.
“Shouldn't I?”
Leo shakes his head. “No. But you are.”
Blaine doesn't turn to him, nor he reacts to Leo's cuddling. “I think I have every reason to be,” he says, stubbornly.
Leo snorts tiredly. He lets him go and stand up again. “Can you be happy for me just once?” He asks as he opens the minibar and gets a coke. “I don't think this is too much to ask.”
“I am happy for you. This is not the point.”
Leo takes a sip and shrugs. “If you ask me, this is very much the point,” he says. “You say you are happy for me, but when I come back from my very first promotional signing session, I find you sulking on the couch, let alone that I'd have loved to come back to the hotel with you instead of looking at you go in the middle of it.”
Blaine snorts, sarcastically. “That wasn't really a signing session.”
Leo frowns at the loud volume of the TV that barely let him hear Blaine speak. “Do you mind turning it off?”
“Yes, I do.”
Leo closes his fists and counts to ten, trying to stay calm. But staying calm is not his strongest point. “Fine. So if that wasn't a signing section, what was it then?” He asks, raising his voice.
“Actually, you tell me,” Blaine turns to him and frowns. “The only thing I saw was you two laughing at each other like sweethearts. Is that how you sell a book these days? Flirting with your editor?”
Leo would gladly tell him that yes, sometimes a little flirting – however fake – takes you a long way but he doesn't. “It was not flirting, Blaine!” He says, instead. “Mark knows I get nervous when I have to talk about what I write in front of people, so we planned to have some sort of little show during the interview to make everything easier for me!”
If Leo had hoped this answer would have explained everything, he was wrong.
“So you planned it?” Blaine says, nodding as he had understood some deeper meaning in Leo's words.
“Yes!” Leo sighs, tiredly. “Yes, we did. But it was all to help me! What's wrong in that?”
Blaine stands up and turns the TV off, shrugging. “Nothing. What can be wrong in Mark's doing? He's perfect, is he not? So if he decides that you should be flirting with him, then you do it and absolutely nothing is wrong with it. You're not married after all.”
“For the last time, it wasn't flirting. We were just telling jokes.”
Blaine nods, mockingly. “Of course, those were jokes,” he says. “And looking and smiling at him that way was part of the jokes too?”
“What?” Leo frowns at him, now. He doesn't like where this discussion is going. At all. “What do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don't, Blaine. You're just being silly.”
Blaine knows he can't really think straight when Mark is involved, but for once his lack of reasoning doesn't bother him at all because he believes deep inside himself that he's right, that Mark is really trying to take him away one step at a time, it is an ancient feeling. So he doesn't need real evidence. What he feels is just plain truth. “Of course I'm being silly. Is this what he tells you about me?”
“He doesn't tell me anything because we only talk about work,” Leo says. He has the feeling of telling these exact words since the first fight they had over Mark. “He is not interested in me that way and I'm not in him. Can you please put it in your mind that it's possible for me not to like him, even if he's my age?”
“How can I believe that when you behave like that?”
“Like what, Blaine? I was just answering questions.”
Blaine takes a couple of steps towards him, like he usually does when he wants to look threatening. It worked better when Leo was younger and way much smaller than him. Now that he is as tall as Blaine is, Blaine has lost part of his towering effect, but somehow his angry face is still enough to make Leo take a step back, even if he moves nonchalantly as Blaine so angry and so close to him had no effect on him at all. “I know you well enough to see when you like something or someone.”
“So you are able to see when I smile?” Leo mocks him. “That's impressive.”
“I'm able to see when you make yourself available.”
Leo eyes grow wide. “So first it was just him flirting, then I was flirting back and now I was openly inviting him to fuck me?”
Blaine shrugs. “You said that.”
“I want to believe you didn't mean that, Blaine. Not only it's madness, but it's also offensive,” Leo's face tenses.
“If there's someone who should be offended, that's me, Leo,” Blaine insists.
“By what? Me doing my job?”
“Your job is writing books!” Blaine raises his voice.
“And selling them!”
“Exactly!” Blaine says, getting closer. “You should selling your books, not yourself.”
Leo covers his eyes and just breathes for a moment, probably keeping him out of his view and outside his personal space as much as he can. “Can we not have this conversation again, please?” He says after a while.
“No, we're gonna have it because I want to,” Blaine says. He doesn't tell him to look at him, but the tone of his voice is enough to make Leo drop his arms. “You said you are not trying to please him, but look at how you dressed.”
“What about my clothes, now?”
“You look like him, Leo.” Blaine pulls violently at his sweater and t-shirt. “I tried to make you dress like that your whole life. But no, you were waiting for Mark, of course.”
Leo snorts. “Blaine, this makes no sense. He just wanted me to look professional.”
“He did?”
“I was presenting a book! I don't like this clothes but I wanted to be credible! It's not like I dressed like that to impress him.”
“So you would have dressed like this if I had told you to?”
“Yes.”
Blaine smirks, meanly. “You're lying.”
Leo blushes a little and looks away because that's probably true. He felt compelled to believe Mark when he suggested he needed to dress up differently for the promotion. Blaine's suggestion would never have had the same power over him, this time. “Are you going to do like this every time? 'Cause, you know, there are at least fifty other dates to go, some of them very far away from home.”
Blaine's expression changes. It becomes darker and angrier. Leo tries to stand still but he can't help the shiver that runs through him. “What if I don't want you to go anymore?” He says, his voice low.
“What if I tell you that you can't decide for me?”
Blaine laughs and the sound he makes is so mean and amused that Leo takes another step back, but he doesn't go too far before Blaine pushes him against a wall. “I decide for you as much as I want if you force me to,” he whispers on his lips, and then forces them open. He invades his mouth angrily, biting at his lips and sucking at his tongue, muffling Leo's protests until they become moans as he knows they would.
Blaine keeps him pinned against the wall for a long time, just kissing him and biting down his neck. He doesn't allow Leo to respond, he doesn't allow Leo to move. Every time Leo tries to free himself, Blaine pushes him harder against the wall. His grip around Leo's wrists gets stronger until he whines.
Blaine lets him go, just to start pulling at his clothes. “Take them off,” he orders. “Now.”
He stands back and watches as Leo slowly drops his arms and starts undressing himself, his eyes never leaving his husband's. No matter how rough this is now and how rougher it will be in a minute, Leo never stops daring Blaine to go on with his threat. That's why Blaine gets even madder.
“Quicker,” he says. He unceremoniously strips him of the sweater himself and pulls so strongly at his belt that Leo is forced to take a step forward, ending in his arms. The glance they share sets off the lustful, angry kiss that comes after and Blaine's hand moving along Leo's back and under his boxers, where he squeezes his butt. “I don't wanna see them on you one moment more.”
The pants are what take more time. They get stuck as Leo pulls them down. He stumbles in them when Blaine grows impatient and pushes him back against the wall, growling and grinding against him. There's a moment when Leo is still standing only because Blaine's body stops him from falling down. As he holds on to his shoulders, he tries to match Blaine's thrusts that painfully smash him into the wall behind himself. He doesn't beg him to slow down because he knows it would be useless. He feels Blaine's rage hit him like a wave and it's overwhelming. It needs to come out of Blaine's body and it seems that the only place it wants to go is his own.
Blaine licks a wet trail from his shoulder up to his ear and his voice comes out low and hoarse when he finally speaks again. “Turn around,” he orders, but he doesn't give him the time to obey. He grabs him and makes him turn, pushing him against the wall again. Leo hears him unbuckle his belt, he feels his hands brushing roughly against the naked skin of his ass. “I don't want him to touch you,” he hisses to his ear, as he lies against his back. “I don't want him to think he has the slightest right on you at all.”
“He doesn't think he--”
“Yes, he does,” Blaine cuts him off, leaving a kiss on his nape. His fingers prepare him quickly, barely teasing him and opening him up. There's no real need for it, he just wants to be as invasive as he can, as he feels that douche bag of an editor has been.
Leo places his open palms against the wall and breathes heavily, tension making his face cringe in anticipation. He feels Blaine rubbing his cock between his buttocks over and over, so there's no way for him to know when he will stop playing to plunge it in. “You're gorgeous”. The words rain down from Blaine's wet lips and along Leo's back as he kisses it. For a moment his voice is soft and loving again, like what he said wasn't planned and he just couldn't help saying it. Leo's body reacts to that voice, it relaxes under his husband's fingertips. So when Blaine pushes forward and he's inside him in one single thrust, Leo can moan in pleasure, with just the slightest trace of pain that disappears in the back of his mind the moment after.
“And you're mine,” Blaine concludes, biting Leo on his neck, so strongly that there's gonna be a mark in the morning. But Leo doesn't care. He doesn't care when Blaine thrusts faster, opening a way for himself in his body. He doesn't care as Blaine holds him by his hips and keeps him in place to thrust deeper. He doesn't care when Blaine doesn't touch him, leaving him to take care of himself.
Leo strokes himself, following the waves of pleasure as Blaine searches relief in his body, thrust after thrust, always hitting him in that spot inside that makes him scream.
Suddenly the wall is too smooth to get a hold of it. He wants to grab something, bite something, feel something under his fingers. “Let me turn,” he begs.
He feels Blaine's amused smile on his lips when the man kisses his shoulder. “No.”
Leo whines in frustration but doesn't complain anymore. He focus on Blaine's voice, now low and hoarse again, as the man grunts and growls in his ear, chasing his mounting orgasm over his body. Leo reads his tension as it was his own and he knows when Blaine's close. He closes around him, helps him out, and when Blaine comes, Leo focuses on him only and on the feeling of him dripping between his legs. That's when Blaine's hand finally covers his own and strokes him strongly, bringing him to his climax.
A few moments later, Leo collapses but Blaine is ready to catch him. “Are you okay?” He asks, rubbing his nose against his cheek and leaving a tender kiss there.
“Are you?” Leo chuckles out of breath.
Blaine scoffs and drags him into a bear hug, not even bothering to get out of him. “Yes, I think I am, now.”
Leo relaxes and rests his head against Blaine's chest. “You know, you could have asked.”
“What?”
“If you wanted to mark your territory,” Leo explains. “I can understand that. “
Blaine feels a little ashamed now that his action are so clearly exposed, but showing shame is not something he does, so he just hides his face in Leo's neck and chuckles. “I wasn't exactly thinking. I just thought I wanted you.”
“Then, you had me.”
“I have you,” he corrects.
Leo chuckles and turns his head, asking for a kiss. “You have me, yes.”
So Blaine can smile, and then relax.
Until the next time Mark will be too close.