Coming Home - R (ish) - 816 words
The coffee table is overflowing with takeout containers and boxes, sprinkled with empty soda cans and dotted with dirty napkins. The culprit is fast asleep on the couch, mouth slightly open and one leg pulled up to rest along the couch back. It's hard to tell (what with the cat obscuring most of his midsection) but his stomach looks slightly extended.
There's a small pile of menus on the floor before the table, as if maybe they've been tipped to the floor by a stray container and Jesse bends down to pick them up, running his eyes over the topmost one. It's for an Indian place and the vegetarian section is full of Andrew's near unintelligible scribbles. (The same scribbles he left all over Jesse's book manuscript, but then it was mostly exclamations of love and lopsided hearts.)
Jesse reads through them carefully with his lower lip stuck between his teeth and once he's done with the first one he goes through the others only to find more of the same. ('Looks foul. Tastes delish.' 'Jesse would love this.' 'Yuck.' 'Actually better than the place down the street that we don't talk about.')
I love you so much it might actually kill me, he thinks. Out loud he says, "I go away for one week and this is what you turn into?"
Andrew stirs, blinking his eyes open with a smile already breaking over his face. "Jesse," he says, gently pushing Koala out of the way to clamber off the couch. "You're home."
Jesse finds himself swept up in Andrew's arms and kissed breathless. He can't say he minds.
It takes a while before Jesse's able to bring up the menus because he's busy being kissed and then undressed and then quite thoroughly fucked and then, because there needs to be a symmetry to these things, fucking, but eventually he does bring them up.
"So what's this then?" he asks, spreading the greasy, wrinkled papers out over the blankets. "Did you get a new role that requires a twenty pound weight gain?"
Andrew snakes a hand around Jesse's waist and presses a kiss to his lower back. "Would you still love me if I got fat?" he asks.
"Obviously," Jesse answers, rolling his eyes. "How much you weigh have absolutely nothing to do with how much I love you." He considers this for a moment, his brain going off on a tangent. "Actually you should gain weight to give me a better return on my emotional investment."
Andrew hazards a guess. "Because there'd be more of me to love?"
"Yes, at your current weight the pound to love ratio is frankly abysmal."
Andrew laughs and bites lightly at the fleshy part of Jesse's right buttock. "I love you, you know that right?"
"I was hoping," Jesse deadpans and Andrew bites him again.
"So about the menus," Jesse tries again, much much later.
"What about them?" Andrew asks drowsily.
"What were you doing with them? Other than eating your body weight in Indian food?"
"What do you think I was doing?" Andrew counter asks, shifting so that Jesse can feel him shape the words against his skin.
Jesse bites down on his lower lip, even after all this time almost too shy to voice the assumption he made the moment he started reading Andrew's comments.
"I think," he says, curling his fingers into the blankets. "That you were trying to find us a new Indian place."
"Correct," Andrew murmurs, kissing Jesse's shoulder. "Because?"
Jesse takes a deep breath. "Because you know how much I miss our old one."
Jesse can feel Andrew smile against his skin; it takes the awkwardness out of the unwanted blush staining Jesse's cheeks.
Jesse turns around in his arms, shifting until he can hide his face against Andrew's neck. "Because you love me very much," he mutters.
They used to do this a lot in the beginning, as a part of Andrew's grand plan to make Jesse accept his love as something solid and tangible and not a fleeting affection to be taken away at a whim. Weirdly enough, it's still embarrassing to be the one putting those words in Andrew's mouth.
Jesse trails his hand down Andrew's side, putting his hand over the mouse tattoo on Andrew's hip. For their one year anniversary Andrew added a small heart to his tattoo and for their two year anniversary Jesse got a small matching giraffe. When they kiss standing up their tattoos are at the exact location to have the mouse and the giraffe kissing too, it took Jesse months to figure that one out without Andrew getting suspicious but he thinks it's a nice touch.
"I do love you very much," Andrew says, curling a proprietary hand around Jesse's hip.
"Same," Jesse murmurs sleepily, breathing in the much missed scent of Andrew's skin. "So very very much."
Happy Valentine's Day! <3
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