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You talk me up. You fill my cup and you drink it slow, my one and my only.

Ship: Cashton Hoodwin (Calum Hood × Ashton Irwin)

Synopsis: Calum Hood receives a message from an unknown number by mistake. The person on the screen seems so disappointed that he can't resist calling them to have a drink... Also known as the one where Ashton Irwin picks up the pieces of Calum and glues them back together with his own blood

Words: 2,491

Author's note: also posted on AO3!! I have other works there, my username is @/solovely_lilli. Thank you for stopping a bit and read what I wrote. Also, I'm sorry if something is miswritten; English isn't my first language and I'm not interested in studying it.

Calum’s phone vibrates on the table. His coffee’s spilled now, staining all the papers. So many days working on new lyrics for nothing.

Messages don't stop to arrive. He could put the cellphone in his underwear and use it as a vibrator. He tries to clean the sheets using more sheets and the table towel, but the phrases written in Indian ink have already been thrown away.

He counts ten, eleven messages. Calum gave up ignoring them. After crumpling the wet papers, he picks the phone up and starts to read all the shit.

Unknown number

Hey!!

Ash here

Is ur date on Saturday still on??

Srry for not calling u earlier

Yk, studio stuff

U here??

And a lot of question marks and emojis with confused faces. His lyrics were ruined by some Ash guy he didn't even know? Calum might even forgive him if it was Luke, because he would have made a backup of everything they'd ever written.

He didn't even know a guy named Ash. Or he wanted to forget it. Calum's fingers typed a quick reply.

Sup

Dude, I think you got the number wrong

Who were u trying to talk to?

The earlier messages were deleted, but Calum won't forget them. Ash took a long time to respond; it seemed like they were erasing and rewriting several times.

Unknown number

Shit

I'm so sorry for bother u

Don't u know any Ophelia?

Just the Shakespeare one

And the Taylor Swift’s as well

I think that girl stood u up, bro

The other answer didn't come immediately. Calum waited for some minutes until Ash’s next message.

Deep down, really deep down, he even felt sorry for that person. Calum had also been deceived by someone before.

Unknown number

Yeah, maybe u r right

Sorry for that, dude

Calum's fingers typed a quick answer with no thought.

RU free on Saturday?

I’m not Ophelia but we can drink a beer

Before he could erase the messages and not put his life in some risk because of an unknown stranger, Ash typed a thumbs up and a purple heart emoji.

They spend all the week talking. They talked so much that Luke got annoyed when he realized Calum had made little progress writing lyrics in his phone's notepad because he was always texting Ash.

They should have messaged a Tinder contact, not Calum. Ophelia probably dialed the wrong number on purpose, just to avoid meeting up.

Ash said that they were a music teacher at a children’s art school. They even played drums and shared an apartment with an emo friend and his girlfriend. Calum also talked about his life as a songwriter for a major record label (without receiving credit for it) and how the meager earnings forced him to borrow money from Luke almost every month.

Calum couldn't sleep on Friday night. He was up, waiting for some message from Ash about cancelling the date. Meanwhile, Luke was crazy on the cellphone, buzzing in his head about the risks of drinking a beer with a stranger.

At 9pm, Calum waited all dressed up and wearing his best perfume to meet Ash. Luke's green button-down shirt and trousers fit him perfectly, the borrowed chunky shoes from some friend of Hemmings called Michael made him look even taller.

It was the first time Calum stepped out of the house for anything other than work since he came back from Australia. Luke was very, very proud of him for not giving up.

Every minute, Calum checked his breath and the front door, hoping that some girl named Ashley would show up asking for the reserved table.

At 9:15pm, a guy smaller than him, with lovely dark honey curls, nudged his shoulder.

“Hey, dude, what’s up?” The young man said, kindly.

Calum looked around, trying to find someone else the handsome boy could talk to, but he was the only one there, along with a few girls at a table away from the others.

“Sorry, I can’t remember who you are…”

“Oh, we've never seen each other's faces, have we?” The man extended his hand to greet him. “I'm Ashton. And you’re Calum, aren’t you?”

Calum wanted to bury his face in the large beer mug in his hands. How could he not have imagined that Ash might not be a girl, but a boy?

Now, that was a problem. He couldn't be attracted to Ash if they were a girl, but since he was a boy, his mind had already started racing, thinking of ways to fall in love with him.

“Oh, of course. I'm Calum. Calum Hood.”

Like the fearless man he was, Calum buried his face in his beer mug. Ashton pulled out the chair in front to sit down, and soon the waiter also served a mug of draft beer and some snacks.

Calum couldn't understand how Ashton smelled so good if he ate slices of salami and onion rings like he was starving. He only took it when the man offered the snacks.

It was too early for Calum to start inventing metaphors about how Ashton's mouth moved while he ate. How he wanted Ashton to devour his entrails with the same intensity.

With each bite of salami that Ashton brought to his lips, Calum wondered if he would make the same satisfied face while eating pieces of his skin.

The two didn't speak a word for long minutes. The only sounds at the table were the long gulps of beer and the occasional hiccup from drinking too quickly. When Calum was drunk enough to loosen up, he started asking Ashton things he would forget the next morning.

“You're not afraid, are you?”

Calum noticed that Ashton's eyes always wandered to the Maori boy's lips, gleaming golden from the beer. Despite this, he held back, knowing the other was drunk. They both were.

“Afraid of what?” He asked.

“Afraid of having a date with a stranger… You have nothing to lose, right?”

Ashton pondered for a few seconds. Calum's flushed cheeks continued to distract him.

“No. Do you have something to lose?”

“Only life. But I don't think I'd mind losing it either.”

Things didn't escalate. Calum and Ashton continued talking about work and music, without the exaggerated touching they dreamed of giving and receiving. Just like two friends.

Ashton was also Australian, and Calum discovered he was a big fan of his band when he was in high school. They played at a school festival together: Ashton was the headliner, but Calum's band had the tiny letters on the footnote.

He's always been in love with the drummer from Swallow the Goldfish.

“Oh, dude, you and your friend made such a cool sound! What was his name? Luka?” Ashton asked.

“Luke. He still works with music. He's a producer at the record label where I write… Please don't say we were good. That will exaggerate his ego too much.”

“I think I still have your CD at my house, I must have brought it with me when I moved. Want to come over to listen to it sometime?”

Calum shouldn't have agreed. Damn it, it was just a casual date so Ashton wouldn't be alone that Saturday... But Calum loved secondhand embarrassment.

On Tuesday, he brought tacos and more beer to Ashton's small, tidy apartment. The young man, sweaty from playing drums, greeted him with a cat in his arms and glasses on his face.

There was a metallic green drum set in the corner of the room, a small area full of CDs and vinyl records, and two poufs in the middle of the room. There was no television or fan, just an old vaporizer on top of some cardboard boxes. It was a tidy apartment, just like Ashton could make it, for someone who had moved in recently.

Calum had lived in Los Angeles for years and had never managed to leave the studio apartment, which cost a fortune to rent and consisted of a double bed and two crates as a coffee table.

The CD wasn't bad. It was awful, terrible, it made Calum's stomach churn.

The cover was handmade with felt-tip pens, somewhat smudged by time, two poorly done autographs meant to look like they were made with a thousand others; perhaps they made ten or fifteen copies of that thing. The music was so bad that Luke's mother's computer caught fire while they were burning the CDs, so they had to do it at an internet café.

The songs were nothing more than a series of melancholic phrases they ripped from Tumblr with weak drum beats (they used an app for that) and catchy choruses. He had to admit that some of the bass lines were brilliant for a fifteen-year-old boy.

Calum's cheeks, even rounder and redder with embarrassment, burned. Ashton seemed to like the sound, running his fingers along the spine of the CD's paper sleeve.

“I've always liked your sound. Sometimes, when I want to feel at home, I listen to this CD,” said Ashton, taking a sip of his beer. He was already drunk. “It's like flying back to Australia without jet lag.”

That was, without a doubt, the best compliment Calum could receive. He didn't get many compliments for his music because nobody knew that what those famous singers sang was written by him.

“Why don't you sing anymore?” Also drunk, Calum couldn't help but ask. He closely observed Ashton's glowing skin, his caramel-colored eyes, Ashton's strong drummer's arms peeked out from the holes in his tank top. He was gorgeous, truly a sight, a sight Calum would like to admire and admire as much as he wanted.

Ugh, how disgusting. He sounded like Luke talking about how beautiful Sierra looked on their first date.

The scene at Ashton was that of a lion and a fawn. Calum was the fawn being completely torn apart by the lion, who cared little about the meters of stomach spilling out and the fawn so helplessly, so open. He probably just wanted the meat and horns to pick his teeth with.

“And what am I going to sing? I have nothing else to sing.” He brought the last piece of the taco to his mouth. "I don't know how to write anymore. I don't know how to write letters, ABC... I only know clefs.”

Summoning courage from somewhere deep within his liver, Calum touched Ashton's greasy hands. They were cold too, even though the man seemed as warm as a teddy bear.

“I no longer know how to write or read clefs. Can you teach me?”

Gradually, Luke was no longer in charge of producing new music at the record label. Calum, who until a few days ago had been silently entering and leaving work, was beginning to spread his wings. Everything he touched, whether on the synthesizer or on the out-of-tune bass, turned into magic.

Luke realized Calum was in love when the lyrics he delivered went from limping melodies to baroque poems with intense metaphors and difficult words. When Hood started talking about guts, he was falling in love with someone. Metaphors about cannibalism were part of his vocabulary.

When Ashton would teach him to read sheet music, Calum would throw all the mess under a sheet and sit on it like a beanbag. With his savings, he went with Ashton to buy new furniture for the shack.

Ashton's cupboard now had a new toothbrush, because sometimes it rained and Calum couldn't go home after teaching him literature and English. While trying to sleep in the living room, with thunder pounding against the window and rumbling in his heart, Calum heard the homeowner touching himself in the room while murmuring his name.

They kissed for the first time on a Thursday, under an awning.

Calum asked Ashton to pick him up from the record label.

Ash

Please

Can you pick me up?

Ash S2

What happened, Cal?

You only write without

abbreviations when something is wrong

I'm going. Don't leave from inside there

It's raining cats and dogs out here

He didn't feel up to another meeting. It was yet another meeting about how his work was too deep and personal, even though major music magazines were praising the lyrics and composition. Calum was putting blood, sweat, and tears into his work, and all he received was criticism about how heavy it was for teenage singers.

Ashton's old convertible pulled up in front of the record label a few minutes after Calum called him. He was under the awning of a nearby restaurant, completely soaked, his curls disheveled and wet.

“You fool, I told you not to leave!” Ashton took off his slightly damp coat, wrapping it around the taller man's body. Calum could smell him up close. “Come on, let's go home.”

Before Ashton could turn to lead him to the car, Calum pulled him into a kiss. Irwin's body enveloped him, his broad, warm arms enveloping him, Calum's icy skin returning to normal. It was as if they had already been kissing every day for many years in a row.

This time, it was Calum who felt like he was devouring Ashton. As he continued the kiss, hungry for Ashton and with his teeth occasionally chattering, turning almost like dust, Calum felt his tissues and organs dissolving onto his tongue, as if Ashton's taste buds had transferred to his own, revealing all the flavors more intensely.

He had drunk coffee before picking Calum up. He brushed his teeth in a hurry, which didn't completely get rid of the strong, bitter taste. It was as if he were drinking the bitter drink from inside Ashton's own stomach, mixed with bile.

The person who started the kiss also broke it off, taking two steps back. Calum was certain Ashton hated him now. Their continued relationship was merely a matter of convenience after a misfortune. Ashton and Calum were lonely, so they took out their lack of friends on each other.

“You need to go home... I'm sorry for calling you here, I just—I just needed to do this.” Calum pressed the messenger bag against his body, trying to find in it the same warmth that Ashton possessed.

“No, no, no—” Ashton ran after him, grabbing his wrist. “Calum, hey, come back here. I'm going to take you home. I said I would, and that's what I'm going to do.”

Calum had a bed now. A bed he'd bought the day he went out with Ashton, with a soft mattress they'd both chosen, cotton sheets, and feather pillows. He didn't have blankets, but he didn't need them when he had Ashton as a source of warmth by his side.

That night, and every night that followed, Calum let Ashton drink from his fountain, the place where he kept all the little that was important to him. Calum let him taste the water from his spring.

#fanfic #5 seconds of summer #5sos #ao3 #cashton #5 seconds of summer imagine #Spotify