Unspoken
by Helen

They don't say anything about it when they do it; that's the only rule. They're together almost all day and they talk for most of that time, and they talk more now, as if to make up for the time when they can't.

It isn't because there's nothing to say.

Casey usually goes home with Dan; it's easier for him to leave in the morning, and, as if to make up for that, as if to counterbalance the way Dan sometimes clutches at his arm in bed in the morning, the stricken look on his face while Casey dresses, Casey usually starts it, touching Dan on the back of the neck, or the waist, a little too high, a little too low. He usually starts it when they go home together as well, once pinning Dan up against the wall of the elevator and kissing him, once ripping his shirt, trying to get it off before Dan can even close the door.

They don't talk, but Dan tends to moan, to bury his breathless mouth against Casey's shoulder and Casey says things like "ohgod justlikethat," but it doesn't count as talking, just like it didn't count when he said "I—," and Dan shoved his tongue ruthlessly into his mouth before he could finish.

The first time it happened they were drunk. The same for the second and third and fourth and the time after that until the night that Casey hadn't had time to buy any beer but still felt like sliding his hand down the back of Dan's pants.

The first time it happened, Danny pinned his arms down until he realized Casey was kissing him back

When they first started, they fucked, plain and simple. They avoided the bed, tending towards more exotic locales: kitchen counters, foyers, armchairs, as if that made it less real. They did it fast and dirty, didn't usually bother to take off any more clothes than necessary. After, they usually ordered a pizza.

After six months of this, they forgot themselves a little, they ordered a pizza one night not meaning to fuck at all, but Dan got tomato sauce on his shirt and his mouth and Casey's sofa and Casey tugged his shirt off and, unthinking, kissed his nipples. He'd never done it before, but it made Dan tense underneath him, rest tentative hands on his neck and shoulders and things changed in fits and starts after that, a shirt here, an extra hour there, until it seemed absurd that he'd never bothered to undress Dan, to stay in his arms afterward, stay until dawn anyway.

He knows as much about Dan's body as he ever knew about Lisa's. Dan's skin, especially along his ribs and spine, is surprisingly soft. He doesn't like having his nipples bitten except sometimes.

Sometimes he wakes up before it is light, and then it is fair enough to wake Dan up too, wake him up by kissing him, or once, by sliding his legs apart, over his shoulders and licking his cock. It takes a fair amount of kissing to wake Dan up, sometimes Casey realizes that he's playing possum, which only makes him kiss more extravagantly: kiss Dan's jaw and neck and sternum, but always come back to his mouth, until Dan can't help kissing back, wakes up laughing and moaning at once, arching under Casey, sometimes rolling him over and pinning his arms above his head.

When Dan fucks him, Casey sometimes can't shut up, muttering, moaning "Dan. Danny. Danny." until Dan shoves his fingers into his mouth. They do it with him on his stomach because he's nowhere near as flexible as Dan, who likes it on his back, one hand clutching the headboard, one leg over Casey's shoulder.

They keep each other to the same bargain, fingers and tongues in mouths. The weekend after Danny gets back from two weeks of college basketball coverage, Casey takes one look at him, drags him over to the couch and forces him into a kneeling position, opening his pants with one hand and pulling Dan's head towards his cock with the other.

When Dan starts dating a new woman, it drops off for a while, but it always ends up the same, Dan knocking wearily at his door, late at night, and no matter how careful Casey tries to be, he always ends up being a little rough, pulling Dan's clothes off, holding him down and Danny seems to want it that way, pressing himself up against Casey and opening his mouth.

Casey doesn't date anyone, glad for the excuse: his divorce, Dana, it doesn't matter.

The lies he tells himself have changed since they started. He used to tell himself it wasn't real, that it would pass, that it didn't mean anything, that he cared for Danny but not that way. That it wouldn't change anything, that it was neither stupid nor selfish. Lately, he tells himself only one lie: no one ever has to know.

Dan loves his job, loves it more than anything. Being at work makes him happy and he's good at it, good at what he does. Every time Casey is tempted to open his mouth, lying half underneath Dan, both of them damp and breathless or when he sneaks a look at Dan's rapt face as they're kissing, he reminds himself: Dan loves his job.

It wouldn't happen all at once, he knows this, but it would happen eventually. A profile on them in The New Yorker if they were lucky, grainy pictures of them smeared across tabloids if they were not. Annie Liebowitz could do wonderful things with the wary shadows in Dan's face, his big gentle hands. They wouldn't be fired, but ratings would drop. They wouldn't be able to get the interviews they once had, or rather, they wouldn't be able to do the interviews they once had in the same way. They'd be split up. Dan would get hate mail. The Log Cabin Republicans might call. Dan's father. Not even worth finishing that thought.

They've been going out together less lately, mostly because both of them would rather spend what free time they have in bed, but partly because Casey doesn't like to think how easy it would be to make a photograph of them, laughing over a small table in a small chic restaurant, could be made to look like a photograph of one of them leaning in for a kiss. He knows they look like this sometimes, knows because he's been fooled a few times himself, Dan leaning forward earnestly to give him a punchline, sly smile, mouth slightly opened.

They never went out much in the first place.

Dan would pretend not to hate him for it, he knows, because he would pretend not to hate Danny, but eventually he would. Both of them with ruined careers, the pity of their friends and Casey stopped thinking you could live on love alone after the second year of his marriage.

He doesn't want to be courageous. He doesn't want to be a human interest story or an activist or the plaintiff in a civil rights suit or get the shit beat out of him, thinks he might vomit on Barbara Walters if he had to appear, holding Danny's hand, on 20/20, and all this scares him because he thinks Danny might do it. Probably not Barbara Walters, but everything else. For him. Or maybe not, of course, since they've never talked about it. All he has for proof is how eager Danny is for him, how he smiles when Casey tucks the tag in on his t-shirt.

Paranoid: some of it's paranoid, he knows. But when In Style calls while he's eating breakfast and wants to photograph his bedroom, he knows he is right. Talking to the style editor on the phone, he is distracted, since that particular morning, Danny is still asleep in his bed, an irregular line of hickeys from his shoulder to the small of his back.

They should stop. He knows this. They should go back to what they were before, but to stop it will entail talking about it and he's afraid to say anything, afraid of the things that might come out if he opens his mouth.

And it's strange, it's so strange to be in Danny's company without talking, without words wrapping them up and holding them together. It's strange to be able to hear the hum of the refrigerator in Dan's apartment. Against the soft whine of pure silence, he sometimes thinks he can hear Danny's heart and those are the worst times of all, because it is then that he knows that nothing he could say would change anything.

There's nothing to say.

(end)