Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/5956498.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Aristotle_and_Dante_Discover_the_Secrets_of_the_Universe_-_Benjamin_Alire
      Sáenz
  Relationship:
      Aristotle_Mendoza/Dante_Quintana
  Character:
      Dante_Quintana, Aristotle_Mendoza
  Additional Tags:
      Porn_with_Feelings, Fluff, POV_First_Person
  Stats:
      Published: 2016-02-09 Words: 2572
****** Palette ******
by Kisatsel
Summary
     Longing is a whole-body experience.
Notes
     The underage tag refers to consensual sex between two seventeen year-
     olds. I started this like a month ago and seem to have accidentally
     anticipated the deep sea/deep space bisexual meme on tumblr, except
     these guys are gay. Anyway! Here is my try at a porn epilogue to the
     book, basically.
It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and I, Dante Quintana, was daydreaming about
my boyfriend Ari, who I was expecting over at mine any minute.
I was thinking about what we might do once he arrived, but alongside these
speculations I was also thinking about art. About how I wanted to start
painting.
And, okay, about nudes, which I was also into nowadays. I was thinking about
these things because now that I got to see Ari naked, pencil sketches just
weren’t cutting it: he was on my mind all the damn time, and Ari’s body
demanded colour and texture. Not just brown, black and pink, but green and
purple and white and yellow, and red for his cheeks when he got flushed.
When I was younger I had found it weird that there were so many pictures of
naked people in art books, but now I was all about that. See, what the artists
I loved most understood was that the body was the arena where all the great
dramas of life played out. Life provided a hell of a lot more questions than it
did answers, but what I knew to be true was that you needed a mouth to smile
and hands to touch, and I had learned the urgency of physicality the hard way.
Longing is a whole-body experience.
I learned something else when my ribs cracked, which was that the body will
knit itself back together if you give it enough time, but fractures to the soul
feel permanent.
Sometimes I felt like I would never escape those memories of the alley, like
weeds choking a pool, but most of the time if I started getting gloomy I could
keep it at bay by focusing on my favorite distraction. Yup, you guessed it -
Ari again.
See, my goal was this: I was going to give Ari’s body to him. That sounded kind
of arrogant even in my head, but I didn’t care.
In order to achieve this, I had formulated a relatively simple two pronged
plan: I was going to learn how to paint properly, and then I was going to paint
him (naked) and give him the picture so that he would see what he really looked
like and know exactly how much I loved him. In addition, we would continue to
have a lot of sex. Okay, the portrait was the main part but sex was absolutely
going to be a contributing element, even though we would hopefully be having a
lot of sex anyway regardless of what I drew or painted.
There were three reasons why I wanted to do this for him.
Firstly, once upon a time Ari had almost killed himself saving my life and I
would never ever stop owing him for that, and since we had both survived I
didn’t want us to waste any time hiding from what was important.
Secondly, love is real if you feel it and it gets realer if you say it but if
you capture it on a piece of paper or a canvas then it’ll always be there, and
even if our love changed and evolved or his feelings went away, some day far
from now Ari would be able to hold up my painting and say “That’s how he loved
me when we were seventeen. Just like that.” Or he could keep it secret - it was
very hard to imagine Ari ever showing anyone a painting of himself naked - but
it would exist all the same. Bright and solid and real.
Thirdly, he was so so beautiful, and I was hopeless at keeping secrets. Even
though it was a good secret, one that thrilled me every day, I just couldn’t
keep it inside of me.
I was reflecting with pleasure on my plan in all its elegant simplicity when I
heard a knock on my door and the cheerful voices of my parents drifted up the
stairs. Ari! It was Ari, finally. About time.
I leaned out of my bedroom door and waved at him as he came up the stairs.
Are smiled broadly and took my hand on his way in. He leaned in and kissed my
cheek. That was sweet, so I did the same back to him. Then we looked at each
other and he pulled a face and we both laughed.
“Wait,” I said. “Is that our thing now? Is that weird? Are we turning into my
parents?”
“Noooo.” Ari drew out the sound. “Why would you say that?”
“Alright, alright, whatever, come on.” I sat myself down on my bed, arranged
the pillows comfortably, and stared at him expectantly. When Ari sat down next
to me I tucked myself into his side and rested my head on his shoulder,
inhaling his sweat and shampoo scent. He had been lifting weights and then
taken a shower before he came over.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you think the next great frontier of discovery is?”
Ari hmm-ed quietly so that I could feel it vibrating in his throat.
“Space, right?” he said. “We’ve crossed all over the world, so now it’s gotta
be the stars. The places you can just barely see through a telescope.”
“See, I thought that too. But!” I turned to grin at him, because this was
really great and I couldn’t wait to hear what he thought. “What if it’s the
ocean.”
Ari raised an eyebrow at me, a “go on then, tell me more” gesture.
“Okay. As you know, the ocean makes up most of our planet but there are parts
that are so deep no one’s ever been there. And it’s pitch black, just like
space, except it’s teeming with life, we just don’t know what kind of life.”
“Plankton.”
“Or sea monsters. But the point is, there could be anything down there. Amazing
creatures that have existed for millions of years.”
“Huh,” Ari said. “So you’re saying never mind aliens, the world we live in
already has monsters lurking under the bed and we’ll never even know until we
poke them.”
“I’m talking about exciting future scientific discoveries, actually.”
“Same thing, right?” Ari poked me gently.
“I don’t buy your tragic gloom, you know,” I said. “Don’t try and persuade me
that you’re sad about giant squid now alongside all your other melancholy.”
Ari gave me a smile that was somehow very serious. “Never said I was sad,” he
said. Then he ruined the effect by saying: “Just as long as you don’t leave me
for a sentient fish, you weirdo.”
“Ha. Human-fish relations had never even occurred to me, so who’s the weird one
now?”
“Alright, sure. If you say so."
I bit his jaw in retaliation for that. Ari made a very satisfying noise of
surprise, and the question was thankfully set aside for the time being.
---
Twenty minutes of kissing later the bed was a mess, the covers shoved to the
side, and so were we. My clothes were scattered all over the floor and I had
manage to get Ari’s jacket, t-shirt and pants off of him, and would have been
feeling very pleased with myself except that he had decided to drive me crazy.
He was lying comfortably between my legs, kissing my stomach just next to where
my cock was straining upwards. I was taking short, shallow breaths, trying to
keep it down because I wanted to at least maintain the illusion that my parents
didn’t know what was going on in here.
“Ari,” I gasped. He raised his head and met my eyes.
I had always envied Ari because he was brave without even having to think about
it. He got this look in his eyes and stood calmly, blazing, one step in front
of me, and people knew not to mess with him. He was just like that.
But now I’d got to know him more fully, I had started noticing that sometimes
when we were touching each other, he would get this little crease between his
eyes and start to scowl. Eventually I realized that this was what Ari looked
like when he was scared, and that he didn’t just fight other people: he fought
himself too. He was the strongest person I knew though, so he nearly always
won.
That was the look he got just before he put his mouth on my dick and I loved
him for it, so much that I could hardly breathe. His hair wasn’t tied up so it
was falling all around his face. Ari slid down a bit further, slowly, and
closed his eyes. I trembled.
He pulled off. “You’re not crying are you?”
“Do that again.” I felt hot all over.
“Feels good, huh?” Ari smirked.
“Uh, yeah!” I ran my fingers through his hair, hoping I could urge him in a
certain direction without being too pushy. “How’s it feel for you?”
“Do you want me to tell you, or do you want me to suck you off some more?” Ari
said, staring pointedly at my dick. Intently.
“Okay, okay!” I said, high-pitched. He cupped me gently. “Please, Ari!”
He took me in his mouth and sucked carefully. Ari had strong arms, big, elegant
hands, and it took just one, pressing down firmly, to still my juddering hips
so that he could take his time, moving his head up and down with lowered
eyelashes, making quiet noises and loving my cock with his mouth and his hand.
His name spilled out of my mouth over and over as I drew closer; I was
babbling, telling him that I loved him, kicking my legs helplessly because my
hips were trapped beneath his weight, stroking his hair frantically. Ari
groaned and sucked harder. It was nearly more than I could take.
“Ari, Ari, you look-- I’m gonna--” I choked out. With this, as with most
things, Ari had his pride. He eased his grip on my hips so that I could push up
into his mouth a little, just as far as he would allow me, and I came like that
into his mouth, my heart thudding in my chest. Ari swallowed and then pulled
back, coughed, scraped a hand through his hair, and rested his chin on my
stomach. His hair was a tangled mess, his sticky lips gleaming in the bedroom
light, and he wore an expression of utter smugness.
I sighed softly. Ari hadn’t even come yet and he looked sated from the taste of
me. His chin was a sharp weight on my belly. I felt drowsy, unable to summon
the energy to squirm out from under him but I didn’t want to move anyway. I
could have spent days, weeks like this in bed with Ari, the slight ache in my
legs and the bright gleam of the ceiling light reminding me that this was
really real. He was here with me.
“Okay,” Ari said after a few more seconds of peaceful stillness. “Me now.”
“Yeah,” I said fervently.
Ari rolled off and slid up to sit next to me. I wrapped a hand around his neck
and kissed him, teased him until I got his tongue in my mouth, and then snuck a
hand down between us to wrap around the warm length of him. He jerked against
me.
I reached up to grab Ari’s hand and pulled it down to his cock so that we could
move our hands over him together. Ari began to rock upwards, gasping, and I
drew back. His flush had spread to his chest.
“Can I watch?” I said, and barreled on hastily when he shot me a dubious look.
“I wanna see how you do it so I know how to do it the way you like doing it.”
“I - that’s private,” Ari said, slowing his hand but still moving.
“Private?!”
“Yeah.” Ari pressed his lips together. I leaned in to kiss him there until he
opened them a little.
“Ari,” I said chidingly into his mouth, “sometimes I think I’m better friends
with little Ari than you are yourself.”
He pulled away and glared at me.
I had suspected for a while that Ari would absolutely hate it if I came up with
a nickname for his penis. Had I considered in advance how to use this as a
possible sex strategy? Sure, I don’t mind admitting that it had crossed my
mind.
Sure enough he had a thunderous look on his face, which was kind of scary but
also great, because when Ari was pissed off he acted instinctively and the guy
had great instincts, especially when it came to matters concerning Dante.
“You wish that was true,” he said, and pushed me down so that he could loom
over me and rub off against my stomach, propped up on his elbows.
“I don’t care if the rule is that there’s no rules except for the obvious ones
in the bedroom,” Ari said, his cock sliding over my skin. “You’re never allowed
to say ‘little Ari’ ever again, Dante.”
“Payback’s a bitch,” I said. “That’s what you get for making me pine for you
for months on end.”
He didn’t like being reminded of that, but I thought that he did like it when I
teased him. Ari was moving faster now, rutting against me.
“Dante,” he said, low, like it was forced out of him. “I’ll make up for it, I
promise, I’ll--”
I felt him spill hot over my stomach, and my cock twitched at the sight of him
gasping through it, the grunt he made when he tipped over onto his side and
stroked himself through the rest of his orgasm. Afterwards Ari spread out
luxuriously, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
I was sticky and half-hard, wanted to sneak into the bathroom and jerk off
again staring at my torso with his come spread over it in the mirror, but, like
I said, parents. And my boyfriend was beside me, nudging me in towards his his
chest, so I scrabbled around until I found a shirt, wiped us down as best I
could, and settled in with my face tucked against his neck.
I couldn’t have said that the cuddling was better than the sex, because, hello.
The sex was amazing. But now I got to bask in him, feel him strong and muscled
and content against me, and I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
Can I paint you like this some day? I felt the words waiting in my throat,
imagined whispering them into his ear, but I didn’t say them. Ari was drifting
off towards sleep; I had no idea what was going on in his head but he seemed
pretty at home there.
Anyway, we had more days spooling out in front of us. There were times when I
burned to see right inside him, unravel his remaining mysteries, but other
times I heard him murmur my name in his sleep and thought I would never need to
ask for anything else.
“Loving you is like breathing,” Ari had once whispered into my chest as we lay
on the back of his truck on a cool, star-brushed night. “I don’t ever remember
not knowing how to.”
Now, he was snoring gently in my arms. I would lie awake, planning and dreaming
and watching over him, even though Ari didn’t need anyone to protect him. It
didn’t matter. I was there for good.
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