Danny came inside, of course, and Rusty didn't give it a second thought until he was standing next to the bed, and Danny said, "Uh--y'know--maybe some wine," from about five feet further away than Rusty would have expected him to be.
Rusty looked over his shoulder at Danny, grinning, about to say they were long past the flowers and wooing stage and anyway.. But Danny was standing there, hands at his sides, face turned away from Rusty, drawn up tighter than five cups of espresso could explain. He still had his jacket on, and Rusty had been about to say ...anyway, I'm not your girlfriend, but Danny didn't have a girlfriend anymore. He had a wife. He had Tess.
"Yeah," Rusty said, turning toward the nightstand, looking at anything but Danny, "Call for something, I'm just checking my alarm." He picked it up and stood staring at the numbers, clicking the buttons randomly, while Danny walked over to the phone on the opposite side of the room and ordered a bottle. Rusty's alarm was correctly set to five AM, five and a half hours away; he set down the clock as Danny set down the phone, perfectly synched. Rusty didn't look at Danny or the bed, turned his back on both and headed into the bathroom, not quite shutting the door behind him.
He turned the tap on and splashed water on his face. He really had to wake up, because Danny wasn't playing according to the standard old script for the night before (and sometimes the night after, and the afternoon three days before, and whenever else they had time and space) and Rusty was going to have to pay attention. Drowning five espressos in red wine six hours before a job--even this job--wasn't exactly a plan worthy of Danny, but Rusty was prepared to cut him some slack for improvising. Danny hadn't expected this; he'd never been alone with Rusty except out in the street. That must have been Danny's plan: don't let this happen, don't get to the point of it happening or not happening, just--what had Rusty's Sunday school teacher always said? Avoid the near occasion. Coming inside had been a lapse, a spur-of-the-moment thing--who could know Toulour would be that mean?--and now Danny was doing what he could to salvage his plan.
Rusty would play along. He always had, for Danny. He grabbed a robe, shrugging into it before he shut off the water and went to the bathroom door. Danny was already sitting on the couch with the TV on and his coat off, an open bottle of wine and a full glass beside him. Rusty walked over--look at me, all covered up, following your new stupid plan--and picked up the glass. Danny had his own in his hand, nearly empty, and when Rusty checked the level of the bottle, he realized it probably wasn't Danny's first.
Chugging red wine wasn't quite Danny's style either; it suggested a certain potential for flexibility in the plan. Rusty carefully didn't smile, just took his glass and crossed in front of Danny to sit down and wait.
Near the bottom of Rusty's third glass--Danny's fifth, he thought, but he'd gotten distracted by the TV during his second glass and lost count--when his mouth was tingling with the wine and he was mellowed out nearly into a coma and he didn't give a fuck, Rusty started talking. He talked about Isabel, because he had to talk about her--he had Isabel, maybe, just like Danny had Tess, and that was why they were sitting here a foot apart, that was why Rusty had this bathrobe on and Danny had barely unbuttoned his shirt. That was the plan. It was strange to finish sentences, talking to Danny. Even stranger to have Danny not say a word back when he'd finished them. Anyone else might have thought Danny was watching the TV, but Danny, even addled by caffeine and alcohol and lack of sleep, couldn't possibly be this fascinated by Happy Days dubbed into Italian. No, Danny was thinking, and Rusty just had to keep talking, to prod him into motion.
Rusty held out his glass, just to see what would happen--if Danny filled it up again, it would mean Danny wanted another glass's worth of time to think. But Danny poured the wine on the floor, and, oh, oh, that was a crack. That was a definite crack in the Ocean resolve.
Rusty didn't look over, didn't move, didn't ask Danny to change the plan. He started talking about the tattoo. Danny knew which tattoo, Danny had seen that tattoo, Danny had licked that tattoo. When Rusty paused to take a sip of his wine, Danny took a gulp. Yeah, this was progress, all right. Rusty went on a little longer about the tattoo--it felt like fucking forever, finishing a thought when he knew Danny knew what he was going to say, when Danny stayed silent beside him--and then he waited. Eventually, Danny said, "That guy doing Potsie's unbelievable."
Rusty held perfectly still. It was the first thing Danny had said since he'd asked for wine, and if Rusty wasn't mistaken--and when it came to Danny, Rusty was rarely mistaken--it meant, "Shut up about Isabel already, Isabel's not here, I am."
"You know," Rusty said, with no idea of what he was going to say next; it didn't matter, because Danny leaned forward and set his wine glass on the table with a definite thump. Rusty thought about leaning forward, thought about how he'd been asleep before Danny woke him up to go three rounds with a really, really nice red, and stayed still. Danny took the glass from his hand.
"Yeah," Danny said, pushing Rusty sideways so he was leaning back against the arm of the couch, his bathrobe falling open on his boxers and t-shirt. "I know." He met Rusty's eyes for the first time since he'd come inside, and Rusty grinned. When Danny smiled back, he looked just as good as he ever had, even though his eyes weren't focusing quite right and he looked kind of like he'd had forty-five minutes of sleep before some mean bastard woke him up. He was the same Danny Rusty had always known and always wanted.
Danny's ability to recognize when a plan was going to end in disaster and adjust accordingly was one of the things Rusty liked best about him; it was one of the things which had kept Rusty out of jail in the past, and he certainly appreciated that, even if his streak was about to end. Rusty lifted an arm and hooked it over Danny's neck, pulling Danny down to him, spreading his legs so Danny could rest between them. Danny smiled wider and settled into place like he'd never been gone, like he'd never imagined not doing this. Maybe he hadn't; maybe this had always been the plan. It was hard to tell sometimes, with Danny.
Rusty let his arm weigh heavier on Danny's neck, and Danny finally leaned down and kissed him. First time in three years and two weeks, and maybe it was strange to be thinking about Danny and Tess's second third anniversary when Danny's tongue was in his mouth, but what was three years, counting from zero? They'd started over from scratch after the Benedict job, but Rusty and Danny had fifteen years by now, and every day of it had counted.
Rusty settled his hand on Danny's shoulder and closed his eyes, kissing him slow, tasting the wine and Danny, dizzy with both. Danny's weight rested on him, hardly moving; both of them knew how to focus on the necessities, conserving energy for the jobs that mattered. Tasting each other, tongues slicking across and in and out, lips brushing and catching, breath shared.
Happy Days had ended and Baywatch had started by the time Rusty could spare enough attention from kissing to move his hand across Danny's shoulder to curl on the nape of his neck, sliding under his shirt collar. Danny would have to get his clothes off soon if they were going to do anything; wouldn't want him looking too rumpled when it finally got to be day of.
Danny's hand moved too, from Rusty's shoulder, where he'd pressed Rusty to the couch, down the open front of the bathrobe, shoving his shirt up. Danny's open hand stroked up and down Rusty's stomach, pushing at his boxers but never actually making the leap, but it was Danny's hand on his skin and Rusty's breath caught just like always. He squeezed tighter on Danny's neck, nipping at Danny's lower lip, and Danny groaned softly against his mouth. The vibration against his lips made Rusty shiver, pushing his hips up a little as Danny's hand moved down, and Danny broke away from the kiss, settling his forehead against Rusty's shoulder like he wanted to see what he was doing. He shifted his weight to the side a little, and Rusty squirmed sideways, running his thumb over the clipped edge of Danny's hair, and then all at once Danny was a dead weight on Rusty's left side.
Rusty thought about being annoyed, except his whole plan had been to get Danny to go to sleep, so he could go to sleep, sometime before his alarm went off. Between the wine and the fact that he was two hours and eight time zones past his bedtime, Rusty hadn't exactly been going anywhere anyway, and now he had Danny breathing against his shoulder, Danny's hand heavy and hot on his skin. He brushed his thumb once more across the nape of Danny's neck, tallied up a win for his side, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, it was because his left arm had abruptly gone pins and needles, and Danny was blinking down at him from a distance of six inches. There was morning light creeping in at the edges of the curtains, and Rusty had a hangover that rated about a four on his personal Richter scale. The beeping of the alarm clock beside the bed registered as a distant fifth. Day of. Danny looked horrified about something, and Rusty closed his eyes and waited for Danny to tell him what it was.
"I fell asleep," Danny said, soft and low, on the one frequency that wouldn't make Rusty's skull actually split open.
"Yeah," Rusty muttered without opening his eyes. "That was the plan."
"No," Danny said, urgently. Rusty half-opened one eye, and wiggled the fingers of his left hand. It didn't help. "I fell asleep, I--Rusty, tell me, honestly, if you didn't know me--do I look fifty to you?"
Rusty shut his eyes again. He felt about ninety, and he was actually looking forward to being arrested. Danny, in the early light, with half his face printed with terrycloth and the other half with the couch upholstery, looked like something mad scientists had dragged out of a shallow grave and restarted with jumper cables. The alarm was going off, the sun was coming up, and this was the day of. He and Danny were pulling a job together again, because Danny could never, never resist, not for long, not in all the time Rusty had known him. Rusty opened one eye again, looked Danny up and down--Danny was holding perfectly still, waiting for him to say something--and said, "Not a day over forty-two and a half."
Danny smiled and kissed him one more time, and then pulled away with a grimace. Rusty wrinkled his nose half-heartedly to match. "Shower," Danny said, as Rusty said, "Mouthwash," and then they were rolling off the couch and on their way.
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