Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/2791592.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      AFI
  Relationship:
      Davey_Havok/Jade_Puget
  Additional Tags:
      highschool_fic, college_fic, Ukiah, Pre-band_days, pop_punk_-_Freeform,
      angsty_teenagers
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-12-17 Words: 2706
****** A Dime a Dozen ******
by orphan_account
Summary
     Jade visits Ukiah on a break and Davey gets grass stains on his knees
Notes
     This is loosely inspired by the Taking Back Sunday song "You're so
     Last Summer." I started it a long time ago and there's almost nothing
     salvaged from that original attempt, but you can still see the song
     in it if you squint. Also, this isn't a Halloween fic exactly, but
     it's certainly seasonal in an intentional way. I was inspired to
     complete this for a friend. M, I don't think you wanted/expected
     something sad given the prompt, but I'm presently incapable of
     writing javey happily, so this is what came out. It's also heavily
     influenced by the last HS javey I wrote, so I apologize if this seems
     redundant. It wouldn't be the first time I repeated myself, and it
     certainly wont be the last ;) I don't own them and this never
     happened. Also, Cal doesn't have a fall break. Oops.
Davey crouches in Jade’s shadow with a spinning head. The world smells like
P.E. A decoupage of teenage sweat and pesticide and humiliation, and it’s with
a deep, shuddering inhalation of it that Davey drops his hands from Jade’s
hips. His jaw is sore. His mouth tastes sour and electric. He’s probably in
love but he doesn’t know what love is, he does know this college kid he’s
kneeling in front of is probably just as scared-stupid as he is.
Jade’s sprawled out on the bleachers in all his clothes, in his dumbass Cal
hoodie which makes him look like a jock. Davey’s hard in his board shorts,
shivery and still inches away from Jade’s twitching dick. He watches it shrink,
glistening with his spit and the remnants of the load he just choked on.
It’s after midnight and they’re on the football field at Ukiah High, where no
golf, dogs, or alcohol are allowed at any time. If he listens hard, he can hear
muffled rustling noises coming from the Cemetery which flanks the field’s right
touchdown zone, probably deer or something picking their way around the
headstones like ghosts. Jade tucks himself back into his boxers with shaking
hands. Davey stops listening hard.
He brushes grass from his knees, and stands with stars in his eyes, stars above
his head like stadium lights. He wipes his lips off with the hem of his
stupidly huge S.O.A shirt.If you weren’t wearing pants that thing would be a
dress on you, Jade told him earlier that night, when they were flirting in that
way Davey thought was one sided, self-deprecating, but in retrospect probably
wasn’t considering that three hours later he had Jade’s dick in his mouth.
Are you telling me to take my pants off? He’d joked, and Jade’s eyes had
dropped, his cheeks flushing the color the sky turned as the sun dropped into
the horizon in Ukiah’s mid-Octobers, Mcintosh red. Because of the beer, Davey
had rationalized, wanting to be disgusted by the fact that Jade was drinking,
wanting to be outraged that this thing he hated was in such close proximity to
the mouth of someone he probably loved. The whole attempt was a failure.
He looks at Jade, whose eyes are closed, whose holding his face in his hands.
Blocking out the stars, the stadium lights. He looks like a wreck, like he’s
just heard the saddest song in the whole world, like he just let something
unthinkable happen in this unthinkable place. Davey is pretty sure this is not
what Jade expected he’d be doing on his last night of fall break.
Eventually, Jade sits up, face still covered. He props his elbows on his knees
and sits there on the bleachers. Davey shivers, losing his boner now that
reality is closing in on him like a fist, now that gusty autumn night is making
his hands cold, now that it smells like woodsmoke and cow shit outside instead
of the skin between Jade’s thighs. He so badly wants Jade to say something.
Almost as badly as he wants this to turn into kissing. His sweaty mess of hand
in Jade’s palm. Confessions spanning the last two years, everything he’s ever
wanted to hear out Jade’s mouth. Everything he knows is impossible, can’t
happen in this lifetime, this October.
Jade is silent. His shoulders are very still. He looks like a headstone. Davey
feels like the deer. The ghost. Finally, he makes his mouth move, “Well,” he
says stupidly.
Jade inhales, a ragged catch of breath in this throat. “Well,” he echoes. He
finally looks up at Davey, and his eyes are red-rimmed. Davey thinks it’s from
the blunt he watche Jade smoke while they drove over here, the windows rolled
down in Jade’s car that smells like ash and spearmint gum. The blunt Jade had
finished leaning up against the chain link fence surrounding the field while he
said, I don’t miss a fucking thing about this school and Davey’s insides stung,
even though he knew it wasn’t about him. He didn’t want his dick to twitch at
the way Jade’s mouth looked around the tendrils of smoke, so soft and wet, but
it did. His insides curl and fight the feeling now as he remembers it. “I can’t
really believe that happened,” Jade tells him.
He doesn’t want Jade to freak out. He doesn’t want Jade to wake up tomorrow and
head to East Bay and leave him here. He doesn’t want Jade to think this was a
big deal, even though it was, is, an enormous deal, something come alive from
nights spent with his own dick in his fist and his mind latched onto all the
times he skated with Jade last sumer, all the nights they stayed up talking
about dreams and music and the future in their separate sleeping bags on
Davey’s floor, faces inches apart. All the loaded moments when their eyes would
lock and heat would spike in Davey’s gut like a sun flare and he’d think, he’d
beg alone to himself, this can’t be just me.
Jade can’t freak out. It will ruin everything, the careful web of tension and
distance that’s their friendship. But Davey’s standing there staring at him
like he doesn’t know now to live in a world where he’s seen what Jade looks
like when he comes. He crosses his arms in front of him. “Don’t let it go to
your head,” he says, shrugging. It’s the most non-committal thing he could
thing to say. It’s a lie.
Jade doesn’t meet his eyes. He’s kind of staring at a piece of gum stuck to the
bleachers beside him, one that’s shaped vaguely like Alaska. Davey knows
because he’s sat in that exact spot before. He’ll probably have to sit there
again, during the next pep rally he can’t get out of because of detention
accumulations, and he’ll sit hunched over, mired in self-loathing, imagining
the shape of Jade’s lips around smoke he hates.
“Okay,” Jade mumbles. “I won’t.”
They’re quiet for a long time. Davey finally, tentatively, sits down next to
Jade. He wishes he was wearing a sweatshirt, one with a hood so he didn’t have
to be aware of Jade’s silhouette in his peripheral vision like something
haunting him. He picks at the Alaska gum, then stops, because he doesn’t
actually want to forget where this happened, even though he wants to want it.
“Have you ever done that before?” Jade asks eventually in a low voice. He
sounds very sober.
Before this evening, Davey has never had someone’s dick in his mouth, sliding
between his lips, making him gag. He’s never swallowed someone’s come. He
hasn’t done shit, only thought about it so intently he’s half ashamed of
himself for it. He feels like Jade might freak out if he hears that, so he
lies. It seems easier that way. “Yeah. A few times.”
It sounds like bullshit coming out, but he can tell by the way Jade’s body
tenses next to him that he believes it. Crickets sing, an eerie chorus
witnessing Davey’s snowballing lie, witnessing it growing limbs and a beating
heart. He swallows thickly, and Jade says, “Oh. Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Who...who else?” Jade asks. “I mean, if you’re cool. With telling me.”
Davey answers automatically. He’s always been a good liar, good at coming up
with the kind of lies people swallow without hesitation. It scares him
sometimes, makes him wonder if people actually like him, or if they just like
to be lied to. He’s hardly ever lied to Jade, so this feels like inching his
way into cold water, rather than just jumping in and getting it over with. His
skin prickles into goosebumps, and his face colors, hot and itchy under the
collar of his shirt. “Lots of guys. You’d be surprised, dude. There are so many
guys who say they’re straight, guys who’re on school teams and guys with
girlfriends. Who will just.”
“Let you?” Jade breathes.
“Yeah,” Davey says. As easy as bleeding. “Or ask me to.”
“Wow, Jade says again. He shakes his head, rubs his face with his palms. “I
never would have thought...you just. I don’t know.” The line of his shoulders,
formerly so still and straight, has a tremor to it. Davey wants badly to reach
out and smooth it with his palm. He wishes with a frantic helplessness that he
could tell Jade the truth, but he knows with an instinctual knowing that it
will only scare Jade, push him away. Davey swallows, and his throat stings from
Jade’s come, the left corner of his lower lip numb and tingly where some
drooled out.
“There are guys like you, too. Guys who graduated. Who come back from college,”
he says, his pulse quickening. “That’s the easiest.” He looks at Jade,
directly, and smirks. It feels fake and absurd on his lips, the pantomime of
confidence, but it works. Jade looks down, huge dark eyes drilling Alaska.
Davey doesn’t even know why he’s saying this shit anymore. Why he’s working to
hard to make this incident one in one million meaningless encounters, when in
reality its something huge, a point at which so many lonely nights of missing
Jade have converged. His heart races, trying to outrun his disgust.
“Okay,” Jade says thickly. His voice is muffled from his hands.
Davey leans forward and tears out fistful after fistful of grass from the
field. He piles the uprooted blades next to his shoe, and Jade watches him
solemnly. “Why are you doing this?”
Davey knows Jade isn’t talking about the destruction of school property. “Doing
what? Telling you? You asked me.”
“No,” Jade says. “Like, blowing guys. You could...you should. I don’t know,
wait? Until you’re older? Or with someone you actually like and who actually
cares about you, not just some dumb closeted jock who’s using--”
Davey barks out a laugh, something sharp and scared and hurt and hungry. It
feels too big for his skin, splitting him open under the stars, the stadium
lights. He’s pissed, at himself, at Jade, both of them for being used and for
using, for being terrified and for terrorizing. For this being impossible
circumstances to breed anything other than a mess, Jade’s fall break, his own
school night, the worst fucking timing ever for him to realize that maybe,
maybe he was wrong about this thing.
“Older like you?” he spits out, “closeted guys like you? Dude, at least most of
the other guys I’ve blown weren’t fucking drunk and high when I did it.”
Jade’s eyes flash, his cheeks red, darker than the sunset, angrier. “You said
you didn’t care if I smoked, I wouldn’t have done it if you said no.”
“You know I hate that shit, Jade,” Davey spews, not even sure what he’s doing,
where he’s going. He feels blind, the stumbling deer in the cemetery looking
for ghosts. His throat is thick and his eyes are burning. “It doesn’t even
matter. The point is, don’t use my mouth to come in and then tell me how I
shouldn’t do that. You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
“I didn’t use your mouth to come in!” Jade finally shouts, standing and getting
in Davey’s face, his breath hot and close on his lips, his eyes bloodshot, his
sweatshirt smelling like smoke and dead leaves and dirty laundry. Davey’s heart
thunders against his ribs as Jade uses two open palms to push his shoulders,
making him stumble. “Did you even miss me when I was in school? Did you even
want to hang out with me tonight?”
Davey is stunned by how ripped open and frantic Jade’s voice sounds. He stands,
shivering, arms drawn tight across himself again. “Of course I did. I always
do,” he says stupidly, unable to even muster any fury in his voice he’s so
shaken. The night feels like it’s unraveling, the fabric of the sky opening up
and hailing stars onto the field.
“Really?” Jade snaps. “You didn’t just want my dick?” His eyes are like two
wounds, big and black and bloodshot. He flinches when Davey steps towards him,
then collapses back onto the bleacher bench when Davey halts in his tracks.
Davey is buzzing with adrenaline, heart in his throat, and it feels like he’s
containing an earthquake. He sits down again next to Jade, panting, mind
racing. He’s about to tell him. Back pedal to the truth, that he’s never had a
dick in his mouth, that there were no other guys, no one, nothing, just him and
his terror that Jade would freak out if he thought this meant anything. He’s
about to, when Jade sits up, sets his jaw tight like he’s making up his mind,
and reaches for Davey. He makes one fist in the collar of his shirt and Davey
has just enough time to cringe in fear of getting punched before Jade kisses
him.
Jade tastes like hours-old beer and iron, and Davey can’t breathe. Davey loves
it. Jade pushes him down onto the bleachers, the metal cutting into his back
and their limbs a tangled sprawl, but still, still. Davey has his hands all
over Jade’s neck, under his hoodie, in his hair with its too-much gel. Jade
pulls away breathlessly, eyes all black save for the flash of stars, of stadium
lights. His mouth swollen and wet, and Davey bites for it, blind.
“Do you ever do this with them? Do they kiss you like this?” He asks. Davey
shakes his head no. He’s never been kissed like this. He’s not even sure he’s
been kissed, if his pre-teenage experimentation counts as kissing, or if all
he’s ever done with another human being is give one midnight blow job. He’s
stupid. He’s a liar. He holds onto Jade, and wishes he had the words to confess
all of this.
Tomorrow, Jade is driving back to the East Bay. Tomorrow, Davey will still be
stuck here, next to Alaska, and it will be one of thousands of days he’s wasted
missing Jade.
Jade kisses him once more, closed mouth and rough and searing like he thinks is
might be the last time and he just wants the imprint left on his lips, and then
he gets up. Lets go of Davey. Stands with his back to him, facing the field
where no golf, dogs, or alcohol are allowed at anytime, a field he was once
forced to run laps on in polyester shorts, a field he pushed Davey to his knees
to less than an hour before.
“Maybe I should hate you for this,” he mumbles eventually, glancing over his
shoulder at Davey who sits, staring at the stains on Jade’s sweatshirt and
connecting them with his mind like constellations.
“Do you?” he asks, voice quiet.
The cemetery rustles to the right of them, a faraway sound, and Davey shivers.
“No,” Jade says, scoffing under his breath. “Can’t. Guess I’m stupid.” He
shrugs. Davey feels things unspooling inside of him, leaving him full of untied
threads, a tangled clump of apologies and confessions too tightly wound to ever
extricate from one another and touch the air with. Davey swallows, muted by how
badly he’s fucked up.
“Lemme drive you home,” Jade sighs, turning around. “I have to leave early
tomorrow.”
The words hang between them for a heartbeat, stuck and lonely. Davey feels like
if they leave this field, they will cease existing, that the moment itself is
what’s making them materialize, and the second they step from this grass and
into the parking lot they’ll turn back into specters. He thinks that he’s had
flesh up until now only because he was supposed to kiss Jade. He doesn’t know
what happens now, after. It’s like his left was scripted up until this point,
and now, he’s just lost. There’s a distant crackling noise from the cemetery
and they both jump.
Finally, he can speak. “I know,” is what he says. And he does. It feels like
defeat. It feels like letting something disappear. They walk to the car,
shoulder to shoulder but not touching, lips burning, under stars and stadium
lights.
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