“...yeah. Last I heard the courts were siding with them, but it’s still not certain.” Damon let out a frustrated sound and shut the water off, hitting the lever with the heel of his palm. “It doesn’t even affect me. Like, those are my damned people, aren’t they? But I have this whole life separate from them, until I don’t even know them and I’m standing on the outside watching while they could lose everything, and it doesn’t even have any impact on me. I don’t even know enough to know what it means to them. I can’t even feel right saying I’m Indigenous, just...of Indigenous descent. Do you know what that’s like?”
“No,” Rian admitted—and yet that honesty was better than any false platitudes he could have trotted out, pretending someone like him could have any idea what left Damon feeling so...so...
Lost.
But he still wasn’t expecting the touch of cool, damp fingertips to his forearm, just barely resting to his skin, butterfly-light and yet narrowing every perception down to those four tiny points against his arm. Damon turned his head, his chest pounding as he looked down at that thin, long white hand against the dark skin of his arm, before lifting his head to find Rian looking up at him with his hazel eyes warm, liquid-thick honey so very soft.
“But I know that’s not your fault,” Rian said, quiet and thrumming. “We don’t choose the lives we’re born into. We just choose the lives we make from that.”
“Yeah,” Damon said numbly.
But he wasn’t thinking about that, right now.
He was thinking about Rian so close—looking up at him like that, in that searching, quiet way that seemed to offer some kind of understanding, acceptance. When he still had the pepper clutched in his other hand, held against his chest, he looked like Eve in the garden of Eden, offering an apple of temptation that Damon wasn’t about to damned well take a bite out of when he didn’t need to be getting his head all tangled up over someone like Rian.
Someone from a world so completely different from Damon’s own, to the point there was just...no way they could ever really see eye to eye, or even see the same colors.
What was that saying? Someone else’s blue might be your pink, or something like that—and neither of you would ever know the difference, but that disconnect would always be there.
Right. Dinner.
And Damon made himself breathe in, made himself pointedly move away, slipping out of Rian’s reach and instead focusing on turning on the stove to preheat the wok. “You seem to be getting pretty attached to that pepper,” he said.
Rian blinked, then looked down at the pepper clutched against his chest, the water beading on it soaking in damp spots into his little knitted top. “...oh. I, um, I should probably cut these, shouldn’t I?”
“Finish washing them, and yeah. And break the broccoli up a bit, and slice the carrots into medallions. Better if you cut them at an angle, slicing away from you.”
“O-oh. Yes. I’m going to pretend I know exactly what that means.”
Damon held back his smile, and just settled in to work.
By the time Damon sliced the last of the beef, covered it in a mixture of pepper and salt, and lashed peanut oil—after a murmured exchange about possible allergies—into the heating wok, Rian had managed to at least break the broccoli apart into clumsy clumps, and cut the carrots into little irregular nubby discs that would probably burn too fast if Damon wasn’t careful, but he’d make do. The peppers, though, Rian seemed to be having trouble with, and Damon tried not to be obvious about watching as Rian sawed a little circle around the stem of the yellow pepper, handling it awkwardly and managing to sort of cut the pepper into a ragged cup before letting out a dismayed sound as he peered inside it.
“Oh,” he said plaintively. “It’s full of seeds and...like...this pulpy white fleshy stuff.”
It took everything in Damon not to laugh.
But he stepped in quickly as Rian tried to poke the knife into the yellow pepper cup, angling it to try to scrape at the inner pulp—and nearly jabbing the point at the base toward his face, as he leaned in close to squint into the opening.
“Okay then, enough of that.” Damon reached around Rian to either side from behind to pluck the knife away with one hand and the pepper with the other. “How have you not lost a finger by now?”
Rian sniffed, tilting his head back to look up at Damon upside down. “A cooking knife is very different from an X-Acto knife, thank you, Mr. Louis.”
“Damon. But don’t say it the way you did before.”
With mock innocence, Rian rounded his eyes, the eyeliner ringing them turning that hazel into stark, liquid gold. “How did I say it before? Damon.”
Like that.
Just like that, rolling and whispering and sighing as if he was wrapping that pale, soft mouth over the arches and curves and points of every letter, tonguing their corners and caressing their peaks and long straight lines.
Only this time, Damon still stood against Rian’s back, his body heat close enough to brush that slender frame caged between Damon’s arms as he held the knife and the bell pepper out away from Rian’s body.
And with that scent drifting up into Damon to absorb into him in an intoxicating rush...
This time, when Rian purred Damon, there was no denying how that shot right to his gut.
Lower.
A tightening, a pulling between his thighs, that made him feel like every muscle in his body was connected through that one point, and every time he breathed it just dragged deep and hot and tense and low, slinking through his flesh like caramel and pouring over his aching, rousing cock.
What the fuck.
The fuck is wrong with you, Louis?
He jerked back, breathing in shakily, drawing his arms back and just staring at Rian. He...fuck. Maybe Rian was pretty, wild and wispy and Bohemian and ethereal, this trailing slip of a thing who looked like the last lingering ghost of some deathly, quiet beauty...
But Damon wasn’t going there.
No mixing business with pleasure or...or...something.
He couldn’t explain it.
He just knew he kept getting himself so twisted up over Rian, and anything that made him that messy was something he didn’t need to get involved with.
So while Rian watched him with a confused tilt of his head, Damon focused his attention firmly on snapping the sink back on, and dipping the pepper under the water. “Most of the seeds just rinse out,” he muttered; talking was hard, his voice thick and grinding out of his throat. He set the knife aside on the cutting board. “And you can just scrape the pulp out with your fingers.” He did just that, dipping two fingers into the inner heart of the hollowed-out bell pepper and curving them to stroke along the wet insides, and—fuck. Deep breaths. “Go ahead and cut the stem out of the other pepper, and wash it just like this. Then cut them in half and slice them.”