Come Take The Wheel (don’t you wanna save me? don’t you wanna own me?)

175

“Thanks for calling me, Hug.”

“Eh, he’s the one who told me to. ‘Call Hutch,’ he told me, distinct pleadingly. Told me to ‘tell you,’ too, although when I came back he was all-a-sudden very eager that I not have told you. Didn’t much matter, since I had no idea what I was supposed to be telling in the first place.”

Sometimes the only available solution to being wildly in love with your partner is to get equally wildly drunk. At least, that’s how it seems to Starsky.

 

A/N: I honestly thought this fic was going to be max 3k when I started. the entire fic takes place over the course of about 5 and a half hours, with like, two and a half of them time-skipped. and yet. the full thing is over 12k.

Title is from (three separate parts of) Wild And Lonely by Melissa Etheridge, which kicks off the fic playlist. Unusually for me, this one’s very much In An Order; Paradise and Fearless are the bridge between chapters. (Me, physically restraining myself from making any pining-esque fic playlist 95% Melissa Etheridge while my psyche snaps at my hands:)

Note about layout: girls….. I spent SO much time trying to reconcile Ridgeway and the treehouse into the same place before I realised we see the exteriors of both so he had to have moved. This will teach me to go insane about layouts by myself instead of just looking things up to check if maybe someone else has figured this out in a fandom with almost 50 years’ collective knowledge. (Mortmere I owe you my life). The point of this is that I wrote the vast majority of this fic before coming to this realisation so Starsky’s house here is a fun chimera of both his places with: the exterior of the treehouse; the treehouse apartment as the downstairs, accessible from under the stairs at the head of the parking space; and the Ridgeway interior (my beloved) as the upstairs. Yes, I’d gone specifically insane over the two (2) instances which show us the treehouse interior is upstairs. I’m fine. This is not TERRIBLY important to the fic, but I couldn’t be bothered to edit it all into the treehouse interior (being as it’s set post-Starsky’s Lady), and also adore the Ridgeway interior too much to let go of it that easily, so. that’s why the carousel horse is here.

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Chapter 1

Huggy, with a towel thrown over his shoulder and as harried an expression as he ever got, met Hutch at the door to the Pits. Raising his eyebrows, he jerked his head inside at a barstool doing its perilous best to keep a morose-looking Starsky upright. “There’s your better half,” he told Hutch, “Although he’s looking distinctly worser right now.”

“Thanks for calling me, Hug.”

“Eh, he’s the one who told me to. ‘Call Hutch,’ he told me, distinct pleadingly. Told me to ‘tell you,’ too, although when I came back he was all-a-sudden very eager that I not have told you. Didn’t much matter, since I had no idea what I was supposed to be telling in the first place. Suppose you don’t know?”

“No, or-”

“Or the Bear wouldn’t have had to tell ya. Yeah,” Huggy agreed, then gestured widely towards the bar. “Lead the way, o saviour of pickled Starskies.”

Huggy had slipped back behind the bar and Hutch was standing next to Starsky’s barstool before any sign of life emerged from him. When he finally turned his head, resting on arms folded atop the bar, enough to notice Hutch, he blinked at him for a moment. Once the sight had sunk into his brain, he moved like he was about to lean into Hutch, which probably would have just led to him sliding off the stool. Luckily, he seemed to change his mind at the last moment, leaning back and greeting, “Hey, Hut. Tuch. Chu- Huttttttsch.”

“You’re drunk.”

Starsky lifted his head enough to point waveringly at Hutch, then made rather a production of shifting his arms around until they were returned to their previous position. “Thi- this is why they made you a detective, baby.”

Hutch cast a look at Huggy, who shrugged. “Do I look like I got the time to be psych-oh-analyzing him? I’d’a cut him off earlier, but I’ve been run off my extremely swift and stable feet here, and new bartender Daisy’s a little too obligin’ on the liquor front. Talked to him and called you soon as I saw the state he’d got himself in.”

“Hey.”

Ignoring the slight protest from the boneless form approximating Starsky-ness, Hutch sighed and asked Huggy, “How much do we owe you?”

“Hey.”

Huggy waved a loose hand at him. “Eh, Daisy said he settled up for most of it at the start, seems he came in looking to get like this. The rest, I figure he’ll be paying for enough tomorrow. You too, probably, havin’ to ride with him. I’ll put it on his tab.”

“Hey,” Starsky repeated for the third time, and followed it up with the marginally more eloquent, “Hey, Hutch.”

“Yes, Starsky?” Hutch replied, pondering the logistics of pulling him off the barstool without ending up with both of them sprawled across the floor.

Starsky stared at him for a moment, moving his jaw like he was chewing non-existent gum, then visibly clammed up, glancing slightly away and down to the bar. “Nothin’,” he muttered.

“Nothing,” Hutch repeated. “Okay. You think you can stand up?”

“Sure,” Starsky said, and didn’t move an inch.

“You wanna try that out?”

“Mm-hmm,” Starsky agreed, still not moving.

“Yeah.” Hutch put an arm around Starsky’s back, using gentle pushes to encourage him into resting his own over Hutch’s shoulders. “C’mon.”

Through some great feat of athleticism, Starsky managed to get his feet under him. Hutch waved at Huggy, who was already heading back towards the kitchen with empty glasses in one hand and the other gesturing emphatically as he explained something to the customer at the far end of the bar. He spared the two of them a nod, and as Hutch manoeuvred them outside, Starsky called, “Bye, Huggy!” over his shoulder.

“Stars are out,” Starsky said once they were clear of the doorway.

Hutch paused in dragging him along the pavement, and followed his partner’s gaze up to the night sky. They were indeed, the night clear enough to showcase more glowing points of light than were usually ever visible through the light pollution of Bay City.

“What’s that- the polar bear one?” Starsky asked, and Hutch sighed and readjusted the arm around Starsky’s waist. Starsky leaned slightly more into him, stabilizing enough to let Hutch raise his other arm and point to the North Star, shining bright.

“Polaris,” he said, far from the first time he’d told Starsky this. He was still vaguely impressed Starsky had remembered as much as ‘the polar bear one’, especially when this comprehensively plastered. “If you’re lost, you can always use it-”

“To guide you home,” Starsky whispered, finishing the sentence. When Hutch turned his head, deep blue eyes were looking not at the sky, but directly into his.

“You’re never gonna learn your constellations looking at me,” Hutch chided lightly, and pushed his shoulder enough into Starsky to get him upright and moving towards the car again.

“What, blintz, you never had stars in your eyes?”

“No, that’s you.” The night air had apparently cleared Starsky’s head at least enough for his vocabulary to come back.

“What, what’ve you got in your eyes, then?” Starsky asked, then stopped walking before Hutch could answer, pulling them both to a stop. When Hutch looked over at him, he had the kind of dopey grin that usually preceded a ridiculous suggestion, so Hutch wasn’t entirely surprised when he said, “Hey, Hutch. Dance with me.”

Hutch shook his head despairingly. “I am not dancing with you in the middle of a parking lot.”

“Why not? The stars are pretty, no-one’s around. It’s r-”

“For one thing,” Hutch said, cutting him off before that sentence could go anywhere. He wasn’t sure what direction would’ve been worst, but the point was, “You’d definitely step on my feet right now.”

Starsky followed along when Hutch dragged him back into motion, but also made his best attempt at looking offended and adopted his terrible pseudo-South American accent to object, “What are you talking about? Ramòn never lacks co-ornidation.”

Hutch huffed out a breath, mostly covering up his laugh. Not completely, because Starsky’s smile suddenly looked even fonder and significantly more proud of himself. “Okay, Ramòn,” Hutch said as they reached the Torino. “You think you got the co-ornidation to make it into the car?”

“I suppose,” Starsky agreed, and followed Hutch’s slight push to collapse into the passenger seat. Hutch’s car would survive the night out back of Huggy’s, but Starsky might murder him in the morning if he left the Torino here to be stolen by a car thief with no sense of style. Not that any thief working their area would be that stupid, which Starsky well knew—hence why he left it unlocked—but Hutch still wasn’t going to take the chance of grumpy hangover Starsky getting the opportunity to let it out on him.

Sliding into the driver’s side, he held a hand out to Starsky. Starsky looked at it oddly for a moment before bringing his own hand down on top of it in a clumsy low-five, and then just left it there so he was loosely holding hands with Hutch. Hutch exhaled on something halfway between a sigh and a laugh. “Keys, Starsk,” he clarified.

“Oh!” Starsky waggled his eyebrows. “Come and get ‘em, big man.”

“I am not sticking my hands in your pockets,” Hutch told him, feeling vaguely, stupidly guilty about turning down the second weird request in as many minutes.

“Not even if I ask real nice?”

Hutch frowned at him, which evidently hadn’t been the response he was looking for. His face collapsed and he pulled his hand back, digging around in his jeans.

Hutch accepted the keys, dropped into his hand from a conspicuous distance, and started the engine as he asked, “What’s gotten into you tonight?” He followed it up by stretching his leg out and gently kicking Starsky’s ankle, wishing he could actually slide over the seat and nudge him properly. Like that’d shove some kind of real response out of him.

Staring out the side window, Starsky muttered, “No-one.”

Which was a weird way to answer that question, but not, given the amount of alcohol in Starsky’s system, one Hutch was going to waste his time attempting to make sense of. Instead, he took one last look over at the curled-up Starsky puddle on the other seat. As he pulled out onto the street, in a vain attempt to lift him out of it, he said, “As to the original question, I have retinas, pigment, and lenses in my eyes. Along with a dozen other things any ophthalmologist could probably tell you better than me. Why, what do you think I’ve got in my eyes?”

“I don’t know,” Starsky said, looking an inch off from kicking the dash like a toddler, but at least that was some kind of action. “The road. The ground. Wheatgerm.”

Hutch couldn’t help but chuckle. “Having wheatgerm in my eyes sounds painful.”

“Yeah, well, so does having stars.”

Hutch frowned at the road. He couldn’t look properly over at Starsky, not now he was driving, but he took one hand off the wheel to gently shove at his shoulder. “Hey, I love that you still get starry-eyed. Metaphorically.”

“Which one?”

“Hm?”

“You metaphorically love me or I get metaphorically stierry-ard? Starry-eyed?”

That did make Hutch risk a glance over, for all the good it did. Starsky was still staring steadfast out the side window, meaning all Hutch saw was a streetlamp-lit flash of dark curls. The change from ‘love that’ to ‘love me’ hadn’t escaped his notice, but he replied, “…the latter,” anyway. This was shaping up to be a very strange conversation.

Starsky was still and silent for a moment, which could have been him attempting to remember which one ‘the latter’ was, processing the statement, or thinking about something else entirely. Hutch had a better handle on reading Starsky than anyone else he knew of, but that didn’t mean it was foolproof. Especially when he couldn’t see his face.

Starsky had been off kilter all afternoon, jumpy and withdrawn ever since they spotted their guy on the way out of that pushy psychic’s and started getting actually close to busting the drug ring of the week, but that hadn’t been- well, completely unexpected. Hutch knew he got tense himself around H cases, and whether it was Starsky’s own memories of the room above Huggy’s or whether he was just feeding off Hutch’s, it wasn’t unusual to have him shifty and nervy the entire time. He reminded Hutch, some of those times, of his grandfather’s horse when she’d got wound up, shifting on her hooves and tossing her mane. Starsky’s hair may have been darker and curlier, but the energy could get uncannily similar.

Although, now that he thought about it, the H brand of anxiety usually came with an increased closeness, almost clinginess, from Starsky—he’d more than once had to tell him to back off for fear that the arm around his shoulders or waist or the hand gripping his bicep was going to send Hutch straight back into memories of being held by him when- then. Today, he hadn’t even had to think about warning Starsky. In fact, he’d seemed to assiduously avoid touching Hutch. Maybe he’d finally processed the previous warnings, but that didn’t seem likely—not that he’d done it so completely, so suddenly.

His musings were interrupted by Starsky sniffing and asking, “What time’s it?”

Too early for Starsky to be this drunk unless he’d gone straight to Huggy’s from work, was what time it was. “Not sure. Can’t be much past six-thirty.”

“Oh.”

“Why?”

“I gotta have a reason for everything I say?” Starsky snapped.

Hutch bit the inside of his lip. “No.”

There was a moment of tense silence, the cold of the night outside seeping in through the cracks around the closed windows, before Starsky shifted slightly in his seat. “Sorry,” he said, and the tension drained from the air like sand through a torn sieve. Hutch didn’t bother to respond, confident that Starsky had felt it too.

Starsky slipped to the side slightly, laying his head against the spot where the window met the door and looking back towards Hutch. “Glad you came.”

Hutch glanced over at him. The curl over his left temple that never followed the line of the others had slipped free, was sticking out and shaded paler by the starlight, moonlight, store light streaming through it in its solitude. “Of course I came.”

“Didn’t have to. Huggy coulda called me a cab.”

Hutch couldn’t shake the feeling there was some second conversation going on here, written into the words they were saying using one of those cereal box decoder rings Starsky collected in his kitchen drawers. “You told him to call me,” he said, and hoped that didn’t come out as anything terrible on Starsky’s end.

“I did?”

“Buddy, we have got to get you home.”

“You’re here,” Starsky replied.

Hutch assumed that was a reminder that getting him home was precisely what they were currently engaged in doing. Either that, or Starsky had been reduced to stating trivial truths. “So are you,” he said, keeping a close watch on his own tone to make sure it came out as a gentle jibe at the obviousness of the statement rather than anything confrontational.

“Both here. In the clear. Like a… deer.”

Hutch laughed, gaze drifting off the empty road and back onto Starsky for a moment. He was watching Hutch with a laughing smile and a soft, deep expression that was very hard to put any words to. Well, any words other than-

“Yeah, okay, maybe I’ll leave the songwriting to you,” Starsky agreed.

“Might be best. At least leave off till you’ve had a gallon of water and a good night’s sleep.”

“Haven’t sung to me a while.”

Hutch took pains, most times, to at least give himself plausible deniability on the matter of singing to Starsky rather than just in his presence, but it still came as no kind of shock to hear Starsky phrase it that way. Even if he had been missing a few words from the sentence. “Haven’t had the chance.” Not strictly true, since he technically had the chance any time Starsky was at his place, but true enough. They’d been busy, and most of the time spent at Hutch’s had been eating or going over case details or watching Starsky’s terrible b-movies that required no mental effort. “You want me to sing you to sleep tonight, huh?”

Even Hutch wasn’t sure how much of a joke that had been—liar, he told himself, he knew perfectly well that whether it was a joke or a genuine offer depended entirely on Starsky’s response—but Starsky huffed out a quiet, almost resigned laugh.

“That’s above and beyond the call, buddy,” he said, and Hutch was tossed right back into confusion, because that wasn’t a statement that made any sense in any part of their relationship. For one thing, it implied duty, and nothing Hutch had done for Starsky had ever been out of a sense of duty, unless you could apply the term to a tearing knowledge that anything offered would be reciprocated and the urgent need to ensure that knowledge was mutual. More importantly, though, the thought of anything being ‘above and beyond’ was patently absurd when they’d spent so many of their days throwing themselves in front of literal or metaphorical bullets for each other and then hunched in hospital or dining room chairs guiding the other through the aftermath of those bullets. Singing a lullaby would seem too weak a gesture if it weren’t for the way Hutch’s—oh, he’d tripped over it enough times in his own head tonight, he knew what he was determinedly not thinking and in the end wasn’t that as good as thinking it?—Hutch’s love for Starsky unfurled its tendrils into everything he did, every move he made. If it weren’t for the fact that he could feel just as strongly about making sure Starsky could go to sleep easy and without that vaguely distant look in his eye as about pulling him out of danger and into an ambulance. Sure, the panic was there in one and not the other, but the underlying pull, the certainty that nothing would be right in the world until Starsky was safe and happy, that was identical.

Starsky didn’t seem to expect any response, luckily, because Hutch didn’t think there was anything he could say without it being- too much. Not in this space, with the headlights steadily painting the road ahead of them and leaving them cloaked in intermittent darkness behind; with Starsky’s movements slow and his breathing steady and too much of Hutch’s attention pinned on those details. He could still feel Starsky’s gaze on him, feather-light but undeniable, the way he had of looking that made Hutch feel settled and comfortable in his own skin. Completely foreign to Hutch otherwise, given that most times people were looking at him—were looking at him, like they saw Hutch—made him freeze and stutter and wish he were anywhere but his own body. Starsky was definitely seeing Hutch, but somehow in this one case, he made that into a good thing. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that he hadn’t turned away from any of Hutch’s ugly parts yet, and he’d seen some of the ugliest; maybe it was so complex there was no chance of Hutch ever untangling the reasons and he should just accept it. He’d never been terribly good at that, but, well, if there was ever going to be a first time for anything, it would belong to Starsky and his sapphire eyes.

The road turned ahead of them, and Hutch realised he was driving up the short street to the treehouse, having navigated there almost entirely on instinct. Some nights he did that more naturally to Starsky’s place than to his own. Starsky himself didn’t seem to notice anything until Hutch was shifting the car into park and turning it off, when he blinked and stretched, long lines of denim-clad legs and broad shoulders sliding indecently against the soft black vinyl- Hutch wrenched his gaze away.

“Oh,” Starsky said, “it’s over,” as Hutch struggled to push the image of a heavy-lidded Starsky stretching out across the Torino’s bench seats into the box in his head kept specifically for these moments, slam the top down, turn the solid iron key and lock it in.

“Hm?” he responded, when that had been more or less successfully accomplished, and Starsky shrugged and waved a languid hand out the window.

“Home,” he explained.

Hutch nodded and opened his door. By the time he’d walked around to the passenger side, Starsky had gotten as far as staring down at the door handle, like he had some kind of vague idea he should probably be doing something with it. Hutch put him out of his misery and opened it from the outside.

“Capable of walking yet?” Hutch asked, not hugely keen on the idea of having to manhandle him out of the car with that locked box still squirming and jumping in the back of his head.

Rather than answering, Starsky turned, the same enviably loose, easy grace always present in his movements somehow only exaggerated by drunkenness, and ended up with his feet hanging over the edge of the seat, bumping against Hutch’s legs. Shaking his head, suppressing laughter at the mildly confused expression Starsky had gained when that move didn’t get him out of the car, Hutch gave in. He raised one leg, resting his shin across Starsky’s ankles and pushing down and in, reaching out to grab his hands and haul him up as the leverage brought him closer.

What he hadn’t been counting on was Starsky following the movement so willingly that his momentum brought him straight into Hutch, their joined hands held in-between the only thing stopping Starsky’s chest from plastering against Hutch’s.

“Ooh, macho wrestler moves,” Starsky teased, voice far too quiet. The dark settled around them, their mouths inches apart. Hutch couldn’t bring himself to point out that they probably looked the furthest thing from macho right now—it was the realisation of what they would look like to any passer-by that stirred him into dropping Starsky’s hands and backing away. He’d swear they’d only stood like that a few seconds, but as they parted the night air swept a chilling blast along every nerve Starsky’s warmth had been protecting. Starsky clearly felt the same, because he shivered suddenly, then swayed like he was about to fall back against the Torino. Hutch reached out an arm again, against his better judgement—well, that was a lie, every layer of his judgement was always going to tell him to help Starsky, no matter what the situation was. No matter if he sometimes misinterpreted what help looked like.

Starsky grabbed onto him with an immediacy that seemed far greater than his mild unsteadiness warranted, climbing his grip hand-over-hand up from Hutch’s forearm to his shoulder. Shutting the car door with the hand that hadn’t settled against Starsky’s waist, Hutch warned himself firmly against misinterpretation tonight.

He stepped out, settling Starsky in a mostly upright position against his side—or maybe Starsky settled himself into it; sometimes when they were this in sync, it got nigh on impossible to tell who had started a movement and who was following it. Odd, to be so in sync with him while at the same time struggling to tell what was going on in his head.

Hutch turned them towards the stairs, then hesitated, looking down at where Starsky’s hands were still clamped firm onto his shoulder. Clearly reading his thoughts, Starsky muttered, “I’m fine. Take me up, macho man.”

Obediently, Hutch guided them towards the stairs. Starsky was probably telling the truth about being fine, given how little of his weight Hutch was actually supporting. He seemed to be functioning more as a way for Starsky to keep his balance, an external centre of gravity. “Are you calling me randy or savage?” he asked in response to the nickname, and was rewarded with Starsky’s head tilting back to look up at him and a wide, goofy smile.

“Take a guess.”

Hutch shook his head, prompting Starsky to tighten his grip in a way that probably would have become him teasingly shaking Hutch’s shoulder if he’d had enough confidence in his step to risk shaking either of them. Instead, it just steadied him as they reached the bottom of the stairs and Hutch forsook the idea of holding Starsky with both hands in favour of reaching for the rail, balancing himself for the sake of balancing Starsky.

They made it up the stairs without incident, which gave Hutch a little more confidence in letting go of Starsky entirely at the top so he could either find his house keys or tell Hutch to just use his spare. Being trained up in downtown Brooklyn rather than suburban Minnesota, he’d poked fun at Hutch many times for keeping his key over his door, and made almost as many serious attempts to convince him to stop. Hutch had never quite managed to explain that it was some last final guard against cynicism—a symbol that he didn’t believe everyone was just out to get each other, that he still had a sense of innate human friendliness despite everything the world had shown him. And the bad guys tended to just break in anyway, so. There was that.

After a repeat of the evening’s earlier car keys performance, Starsky triumphantly pulled out his keyring. He looked between his hand and the door, then seemed to think better of it and held the keys out to Hutch. Shaking his head, Hutch took them and opened the door, pushing Starsky inside with a gentle hand on his back before he followed.

Hutch dropped the keys on the shelves beside the door, and watched Starsky wend his way expertly, if a little unsteadily, through the collection of things he had strewn around in a pattern that only made sense to him. He patted the head of the carousel horse as he passed, then turned around at the far end of the couch and looked back at Hutch, as though surprised that he was still standing all the way over there.

“I should- go,” Hutch said, waving behind himself at the open doorway.

“Oh,” Starsky replied, and nodded minutely. “Yeah.”

“You want me to stay?” Hutch still had no idea what it was that had dropped Starsky into these alcohol-infused mood swings, but he had no real desire to leave him alone with them.

Starsky shook his head, anyway, then winced at the movement, taking a moment to resteady himself before he said, “Didn’t you have a date tonight?”

“Yeah, but I can cancel.”

“Don’t go disappointing your dates like that. Bad practice.”

“It’s only a second date, I don’t think he’s gonna go hurling himself off a cliff or anything.”

Starsky blinked at him a couple times, which could have been a reaction to the male pronoun—not that he hadn’t known that already, but it still, sometimes, seemed to strike him off-guard—but could just as easily have been his brain processing Hutch’s sentence, or just a distracted attempt to focus his eyes. Which was to say, Hutch was not going to read into it.

“No,” Starsky said eventually. “Go.”

“You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“I’ve been drunk before, Hutch. I can handle myself.”

That hadn’t exactly been Hutch’s worry, but he nodded anyway. “Okay,” he agreed. “Alright.”

When he still didn’t move, Starsky flapped a hand at him. “Go, go. Go have your date.”

Hutch took one last look at Starsky, standing with his back to the darkened kitchen so the places where his hair ended and the shadows began became indefinable, pale where he wasn’t slightly alcohol-flushed, but unarguably standing by himself and instructing Hutch to leave. Hutch moved to follow that instruction, and was half-turned out the doorway when Starsky added, “Thank you. For coming to get me.”

Hutch shook his head minutely. The expressed gratitude was still strange, unbidden, for something Hutch would never consider not doing for Starsky—and was at least reasonably assured of the reverse also being true. “You’re welcome,” he replied anyway, back still turned to Starsky, and received no response. Shutting the door behind him, he already knew tonight’s date was going to be a disaster, as he spent the rest of the night turning over every word exchanged in the last half hour and attempting to read some sense into them.

Chapter 2

Starsky was placing the blame for this squarely on that psychic. And a little bit on Hutch’s anonymous male date. 80% psychic 20% date. Well, no, that was probably unfair to the date, who hadn’t done anything but agree to go out with a beautiful 6-foot Viking, and who could say no to that when it was waved in front of their face? Which, of course, was Starsky’s problem. Maybe it was Hutch’s fault, except he didn’t want to blame Hutch. Which, again, was his problem. Dammit. He was going back to the psychic. Not like that, he was absolutely not going back to the psychic like that. No, he was going back to it being all her fault.

The world was spinning slightly, but Starsky was unsure how much of that was inebriation and how much was going straight from having Hutch pressed against him shoulder to hip to watching him walk out the door without doing a thing to stop him. No reason to stop him. None that he could give without Hutch getting suspicious. He was already suspicious. Oy.

Water. Coffee. Coffee. Water. Maybe if he drank enough of both, he’d stand a chance at not ripping Hutch’s head off tomorrow. Head-ripping probably wasn’t the way to convince anyone they should be dating you instead of anonymous men. Not that he was probably anonymous to Hutch. Given that it was a second date. And what, exactly, had been so good about the first date to merit a second one? No, stop that. Stop it. Hutch didn’t talk about his dates half the time anyway unless pressed into it, and especially not when they’d been with guys and he couldn’t talk about them in the middle of the precinct, which was where they usually got bored enough to start jokingly pulling out the rulers. No reason to think this date had been any different to normal, and the complete lack of information Starsky had about it was on his own head for not asking.

He’d been standing in front of the coffee corner for probably a full minute by now, staring blankly and thinking about dates and Hutch and Hutch-on-dates, which was all a delightfully abstract way of not dealing with his very concrete desire to kiss Hutch and hold him and buy a house and 2.5 golden retrievers with him, as well a decent variety of other less family-friendly activities, and the fact that said desire had driven him to Huggy’s at four in the afternoon to pickle himself like a sardine. Did sardines get pickled? Or was that anchovies. No, it was herring. Pickle himself like a herring.

He flipped the kettle on and went to down a glass of water while it bubbled.

~

Slouching on the couch with water on the coffee table and coffee in his hands, which seemed like it should be the other way around, there were very few paths Starsky’s brain was offering to go down. Which was annoying, because usually it offered at least five possible paths at any given time. With a disgruntled sigh, he settled into reliving the Psychic Incident, as the least worst option.

Madame Fortuna, as it turned out, hadn’t even been particularly helpful to the case, which Starsky felt was really just adding insult to injury. But they’d had to go talk to her about the guy running the charming locally-owned dope business out of the building across the street, and when she’d flirtily offered to read his palm, he’d played along. Mostly because Hutch had been in the kind of mood where it was fun to rile him up, and he’d already been glaring at her. When she’d started tracing Starsky’s palm, though, Hutch’d cracked a smile, kinda, and asked mockingly, “Any ‘tall, dark, and handsomes’ in his future?”

To which she’d chuckled, and said, “Not other than the one in the mirror,” and Starsky had grinned at her, knowing Hutch was rolling his eyes without even looking over. The problems had started when she’d got a little crease between her eyes and said, “There is someone, though. Hm. Fair, not dark. Tall.”

She’d stopped there, even though it had seemed like she was just starting a list. Starsky had already kinda frozen, and was hoping neither of them had noticed, but her eyes had widened and she’d glanced over at Hutch, just for a second. Starsky had snatched his hand back like he’d been burnt, rubbed it awkwardly on his shirt, and tried to laugh it off. He thought he’d said something inane about keeping some secrets, or surprises, or something—something that would hopefully convince Hutch that he was acting weird because he was harbouring a crush on anyone other than Hutch himself, or even better that he wasn’t acting weird at all. It had seemed to have worked, because Hutch had let it go with nothing more than one jibe about secret girlfriends.

Not that that had made Starsky feel any better about the whole affair, especially when he’d remembered Hutch had a date that night. With a guy. Which shouldn’t have made any difference, it was stupid, but somehow, when it was a girl, it wasn’t like Starsky could picture himself in her place. Not properly, not completely. When it was a guy, he couldn’t help it. When it was a guy, he lost the weak panacea of the knowledge that he and Hutch couldn’t be like that in public, not the way he wanted to with the way they were seen—because that was still true, but whatever Hutch was doing with his date right now, they could do that. And he was not going to torment himself imagining what that was, because he wasn’t into masochism, thanks very much. Certainly not by himself in his living room.

Instead, he was going to torment himself by replaying the feeling of Hutch pulling Starsky up from the Torino and straight into warm, hard muscle, their hands folded together; the way standing that close made Starsky raise his gaze just slightly in order to see those bright blue eyes and the too-often-present creases above them smoothing out as he looked at Starsky; how every minute change was clearly visible even in the darkness, because Hutch was his own renewable light source. Least that held some kind of pleasure, even if it was one that twisted his guts into knots and made him feel like someone had a clamp around his ribcage that they were having a real fun time pulling tighter and tighter. He vaguely thought he’d asked Hutch to dance with him in the parking lot back at Huggy’s, if he hadn’t just been thinking that really loud, but he’d gladly take just standing like that in the driveway with Hutch for the rest of his life.

He finally raised the mug to his mouth, and was met with coffee just barely warm enough to be drinkable. Sighing, he gulped it down before it could cool any further, then exchanged it for the water and leant back. Why he was working so hard to bring himself back to sobriety, he had no idea. Except that as the completely irrational fog of morose melancholy cleared slightly, he could hold onto the fact that he was, at least, in no imminent danger of losing Hutch. If he could actually deal with just watching Hutch’s face for the rest of their lives, well, that was anywhere from plausible to assured. The problem lay in the wanting to kiss said face, the extreme probability of that wanting persisting for said rest of life, and Starsky’s historic inability to ignore his own desires.

~

If Starsky had actually processed the sound of keys turning in the lock with any speed, he’d have known who was on the other side—there were only two people in town with a key to his place, and the odds lay against it being Huggy at this time of night. Unfortunately, coffee and water and a few hours could only go so far to clearing one’s system, so he didn’t get a chance to prepare himself before the door had opened and Hutch was standing in the doorway. Hutch blinked at him, looking faintly surprised.

Starsky blinked back for a moment before he sighed and waved him inside with the currently half-full coffee mug. “What’re you doing here?”

Hutch lifted his shoulders slightly in what probably would have been a shrug if he’d put any more effort into it, then shut the door behind him. “I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t succumbed to alcohol poisoning. Or suffocated on your own puke.”

“Gee, thanks, partner,” Starsky grumbled. “Your sympathy and understanding in these trying times is greatly appreciated.”

“Mm-hmm,” was the extent of the response he got before Hutch walked in to sit next to him. At a respectable distance for them, really, which didn’t stop a radiant heat that Starsky wasn’t even sure he wasn’t imagining from burning the length of his side. He lifted the mug to his mouth and exhaled into it for a moment, steadying his breaths, before he managed, “You telling me you came all the way over here just to, what, hover over me like my Ma, check I was breathing, and go back home?”

Hutch shifted slightly, and Starsky’s side of the cushion moved in response. “I was driving home. You were on the way.”

For Starsky’s place to be on his way home he would’ve had to have been in a part of town unsuited for any date that didn’t involve money changing hands, but Starsky let it slide. He turned the mug around in his hands, wishing it was a beer or a soda bottle just so he could have the distraction of picking the label off as he asked, “How was the date?” The length of time told him it hadn’t been either fantastic or awful, but it was the expected thing to ask.

Sure enough, Hutch’s response was, “It was fine.”

Ignoring the guilty breath of relief pushing through him at the lack of enthusiasm in that, Starsky cracked, “Just fine, huh? You must be losing your touch.”

Starsky deliberately wasn’t looking at Hutch, but he still, out of the corner of his eye, thanks to a long-established need to track every movement he made, saw him look towards Starsky and away before he said, “I was thinking about my partner.”

“Yeah, that does tend to fuck with dates,” Starsky agreed before he’d really thought it through.

He almost thought he caught a hitch in Hutch’s next inhale, but it was covered immediately with, “Mostly, I was worried about the impending alcohol poisoning. And having to deal with his hangover tomorrow.”

“Aw, fuck off.”

“Drunkenness makes you foul-mouthed.”

Starsky snorted. “I haven’t been drunk for at least an hour. You make me foul-mouthed.” He was telling the truth about the drunkenness, but the remnants combined with the deep exhaustion that was pushing him down into the sofa were setting all his not-that-powerful-to-begin-with filters to half strength. He could just picture the little dial in his head, slowly and inexorably clicking down. But he couldn’t bring himself to push or even hint Hutch out the door. Partially because the big blintz would take it to heart like it was some kinda deep dismissal, but mostly just because he didn’t want to. He wanted Hutch to stay. So instead, he offered, “There’s beer in the fridge.”

Hutch shook his head. Starsky shrugged and stretched out the leg he’d had hanging over the arm of the couch, nudging the recently refilled glass of water over the table towards Hutch. Hutch shot a pointed look at Starsky’s foot, which was entirely unjustified—he’d barely touched just the bottom of the glass with the top of his socks, which were clean out of the wash. Hutch picked it up anyway, though, turning it around once in his hands before taking a sip. Starsky felt instantly, stupidly relieved, like they’d just signed some kinda contract that would keep Hutch here, at least for a while.

The record Starsky had put on not long before Hutch arrived, having finally gotten sick of moping in silence, finished a song and ran a few seconds of silence before a long intro began playing. Eventually, it started singing memories of a lost best friend called Terry over the still silence of the room, and Starsky dropped his gaze to the gaps between the wooden floorboards, feeling his shoulders hunch forward. So maybe he should have thought better of picking this album, but it was okay, because he wasn’t alone after all. And when he looked up, he wasn’t at all surprised to find Hutch’s close gaze on him. Hutch didn’t say anything about it, though, just took another sip of water.

When he lowered the glass again, he asked, “Why?”

Starsky knew what the question was and knew Hutch probably wouldn’t give up, but he obfuscated anyway, trying to remember the last thing they’d said out loud so he could reply, “You expect me to know why you’re not drinking?”

Hutch’s gaze scraped over him, up and down like he was performing some kinda diagnostic tricorder scan with just his eyes. Starsky was just glad tricorders couldn’t read thoughts. He didn’t think. “I accidentally spilled a glass of water on Ollie the other day, from my bedside table,” Hutch said, as the record sang about broken promises and trying to walk like heroes. “Had to wash him and sit him out on the porch to dry.”

And he’d hit somewhere near the right point with entirely the wrong aim. Would’ve been too much to hope for him to miss the point entirely, not Hutch, not reading Starsky. Not that Starsky was really sure he would’ve wanted him to.

Well, his aim wasn’t entirely wrong, but Starsky’s reaction to mentions of Ollie right now actually had a lot less to do with the mere reminder of Terry’s death than it did her post-death instructions, and the implicit permissions delivered with them. Fat lot of good permissions did when they were one-sided. When it was only one person who’d seen they were there. Unfair, maybe, because it wasn’t as if Terry hadn’t broached the topic with Starsky while she was alive, so maybe he’d had a head start. Those conversations, no doubt, were half the reason she’d addressed the message to Hutch, a move made in death that she’d always left up to Starsky to make in life, and he never had, because what they were, all three of them- he couldn’t risk that, not even on the chance of making it more. On the chance of making it better.

Starsky realised there’d been too long a pause, that Hutch was still waiting for him to respond. “M’sure he appreciated the excursion. View out there leaves something to be lacked, though.”

“Leaves something to-” Hutch started correcting. Starsky didn’t bother to retrace what had been wrong with his sentence, and Hutch cut himself off before he finished. “What, you think we should take him on a scenic tour of Bay City?” he asked instead.

Starsky recognised that for what it was—a further attempt at talking around this, at trying to prod at whatever Hutch knew Starsky wasn’t talking about and then leap back before it could bite. This was what they did. Round and round and round they went, ring a ring of roses, until they fell down. Prodded and jumped and danced around the edges of the problem until they’d mapped it out by the parts they’d bumped into. Hutch had bumped into so many edges of this, and he still hadn’t mapped it. Tonight, suddenly, Starsky was sick of the dance. “Just ask me what you want to know,” he said, exhaustion seeping into his voice.

“Will you answer me?” was the question Hutch asked instead.

“Always,” Starsky promised, then acknowledged with a sweep of his eyes, before Hutch could tilt his head just so to point it out, that true as that was it wasn’t the answer to the question asked. That answer was, “If you just ask me, I’ll tell you.”

Hutch nodded, and didn’t ask. Instead, he left it hanging over their heads as the record ended with a few seconds of static. He looked over at the player, and put his glass down, getting up to flip it to the b-side. Apparently he was as unwilling to sit in true silence right now as Starsky was. Back turned to Starsky, he said, lowering the needle, “He’s back by the bed now.”

It took Starsky a moment to trace that back and realise he was talking about Ollie. “It’s where he belongs,” he replied, and tried not to sound too loudly as if he were talking about himself in Hutch’s bed. The problem was that in the rare event of Starsky’s mind sticking on one topic in the first place, it then took a decent-sized army, preferably with an attendant elephant or two, to tear it away. And Hutch wasn’t even trying very hard. Not that there was any forgetting about this now, not with Starsky’s promise and Hutch’s silence in the background of every move they made, like two anvils just waiting for Wile E. Coyote to come along and drop them. The Acme corporation had a lot to answer for.

Hutch, at least, wasn’t blind to the anvils—if they went out that way, they’d go together—as evidenced by the caution in his movements as he sat back down and took another drink of water. The time he took to swallow seemed outlandishly long, lengthened by the same cartoon logic the rest of Starsky’s world was operating on right now. Then came another shift closer to the topic in question; Starsky wasn’t quite sure whether to characterise it as a sliding loss of grip, dropping them further down the cliffside, or whether it was an inch grabbed and gained towards the top.

“Huggy said you wanted to tell me something. Or didn’t want him to tell me there was something to tell, but there was something to tell me.” It was movement, whether it was up or down. Hutch frowned after it, clearly trying to parse his own sentences, and Starsky forced himself to chuckle.

“And I thought I was the drunk one.”

Hutch looked like he now regretted not having taken up Starsky on the beer for almost the same reasons Starsky had earlier regretted not having one. Except in Hutch’s case he’d’ve been holding it loosely by the neck and twisting it round and smoothing his thumb over the top and around the rim in that way that always drove Starsky kinda out of his mind. Only Starsky was now considering whether it had never been the, whatsit, the phallic imagery that had gotten to him about that, because what Hutch was doing instead was running the pads of his fingers around the top of the water glass, just inside, and Starsky still couldn’t tear his gaze away.

That convoluted sentence had been so close to the right question, but not quite there, and Starsky wasn’t going to break the rules of this game now. He could have conceded, given in and cashed out the reward when Hutch had not quite made his move yet, but Hutch wouldn’t want him to. Saying ‘if you ask’ was placing control of the boundary in Hutch’s hands as much as it was setting a rule that would allow Starsky to prompt himself over the edge, and pre-empting the asking would be not only unearned but intrusive, pushing too hard and too fast, Starsky’s specialty. No, he just had to wait this one out.

“He said he didn’t know what it was you were talking about. Huggy. Didn’t know.”

“Well, he’s not quite as omniscient as he’d like everyone to believe,” Starsky replied, aware he had neither denied nor acknowledged there being something to tell and equally aware that Hutch would notice that fact.

“I don’t…” Hutch trailed off, then shook his head. “I should get home,” he said, and was halfway to the end of the couch before Starsky gathered the presence of mind to reach over and grab his wrist.

“Don’t go.” Whether you ask tonight or not, don’t go.

“It’s…” Hutch said, gently breaking Starsky’s grip in order to lift his arm and look at his watch.

“C’mon,” Starsky said, before he could finish. “We’re the grownups, aren’t we?”

Hutch turned an adorably baffled little frown down onto Starsky. Starsky reached up for his arm again, tugging him back. He waited until Hutch was once again sitting next to him, and he had a firm hold on Hutch’s bicep, before he explained, “You know, when you were a kid and you were playing with your best friend, just doing stupid shit but having the time of your life, and then your parents would come over and tell you it was time to go. And you’d hide and run and wheedle and pull out every trick in the book to stay just a little bit longer because the world always shined brighter when you were together, but eventually they’d always drag you away. Because they were the grownups, and they made the rules. Well, we’re the grownups now.”

Hutch was still frowning, and he shook his head slightly when Starsky finished. “I don’t-”

“Don’t tell me you never did that.”

Hutch shrugged.

“You had a fucked up kidhood, blintz. What about with Nancy? Or John?”

He tilted his head to the side slightly, considering, and eventually said, “I mean, I guess, kind of. But I was older then, high school age both of them. And Mrs. Blake never kicked me out, and my parents—either they weren’t around to tell me to go, or if they were and they said it was time to leave, you left. There wasn’t any… wheedling you could do.”

“Fucked up kidhood,” Starsky repeated.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ve just never loved anyone like that before.”

Starsky felt his breath catch on the ache in his throat. There was a real double bind right there in that ‘before’. Hutch wasn’t looking at Starsky, not exactly, but at a point somewhere beyond his left shoulder. Still holding onto his arm, Starsky raised his other hand to Hutch’s face, resting two fingers ever-so-gently against his jawline and guiding his gaze back to Starsky’s. Without breaking eye contact, Starsky scanned him as well as he could, reading resignation and anticipation with a sharp edge of anxiety, all overshadowed by the feeling Starsky could never put a name to but knew so well, that came with the knowledge that power and control could be placed in the other’s hands absolutely and unerringly, that it would be transferred back at the slightest cue but could be safely, completely, surrendered, with all the freedom that entailed. That it could be safely surrendered because it would be so easily returned.

Slowly, Starsky lowered his hand from Hutch’s jaw, and as if responding to his thoughts, the record picked that moment to tell him his feelings weren’t gonna be changed no matter where he sleeps tonight, or how far he runs.

Hutch’s forehead creased, not a frown so much as a tightening around the eyes. For one long moment, he kept looking straight at Starsky, then glanced down and away, towards the coffee table. Starsky wanted, so much, overwhelmingly; to reach out again, to pull Hutch into his lap, wrap arms around his waist, kiss that lined forehead.

Instead, he forced himself to let go of Hutch’s sleeve, uncurling his fingers one by one and watching the fabric fall partially back into place, still creased where he’d gripped it. When he looked up, Hutch was watching the same spot with equal intensity. Slowly, Hutch rolled his shoulder, muscle flexing under cloth, and it smoothed out completely.

“You gonna stay?” Starsky asked quietly.

“If you want me to. Anything you want.”

The gentle sincerity in Hutch’s voice struck another blow to Starsky’s breathing, and heart, generally just everything that went on in the chest area. He watched Hutch as he looked towards the table, then stood up again, reaching for the now-empty mug and glass on it. “Water,” he explained, as though Starsky wouldn’t trust his promise, despite the fact that he was walking in the opposite direction to the door.

The sound of the faucet was over-loud over the soft music, in the quiet otherwise only broken by the slightest rustle of Hutch’s clothes as he moved and Starsky’s own gradually slowing pulse in his ears. Hutch rinsed out the mug before filling both with water, movements careful in the way that meant he was placing deliberate effort into abating the tendency to incoordination that sometimes afflicted him in everyday, off-the-streets life, when he lost the capacity to bury his emotions under the brass shield.

Walking back over, Hutch handed the mug to Starsky. Rather than retaking his spot next to Starsky, he sat on the coffee table directly in front of him, their knees bumping together. His eyes flitted across Starsky’s face, then returned to directly hold his gaze.

“What is it?” he asked quietly, wrapping both hands around the glass he held and lightly tapping broad fingers against the surface in a pattern Starsky would put good money on being entirely unconscious. “What was it?”

And suddenly, now, Starsky was scared. Not that Hutch would turn on him or wholeheartedly reject him, not even really that he would say this was Starsky’s lot alone to bear, because he trusted himself and his ability to read Hutch over the last years in countless quiet moments, loud moments, moments in suffering and, perhaps more soul-baringly honest, in peace. He was scared that uttering these words would cross a line between them that couldn’t be uncrossed, even though he couldn’t identify what was to be feared on the other side of that line. But Hutch was waiting for him, and he’d made a promise. Hutch hadn’t left, he’d followed through on what Starsky had made him swear to; now it was Starsky’s turn. And maybe it was as simple as that. So, “The psychic.”

Hutch frowned, as if that had come entirely out of left field. Which, from his point of view, Starsky supposed it probably had. “The psychic?” he repeated. “Tell me you didn’t take any notice of what she said.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been onto something.”

Hutch quirked an eyebrow. “You’re not that tall, or that dark.”

It took Starsky a second to remember her ‘tall dark and handsomes in the mirror’ crack, and another to realise that Hutch had just obliquely called him handsome. “Not that part,” he said.

“I figured,” Hutch said. Starsky had hoped he’d make some kind of guess then, because it would either be right on the money and Starsky wouldn’t have to say anything, or it would be completely off-base and Starsky would at least have something to bounce off. He didn’t do either, though, just stayed silent and kept waiting.

“Someone in my life, tall and fair. Sound like anyone you know?”

Hutch blinked at him. “Few people. In any case, if we’re pretending she knew what she was talking about, wasn’t she supposed to be reading your future? That’s a pretty generic description, you might not even have met them yet.”

“Oh, I’ve met them.”

No response.

“You gotta help me out here.”

“Starsk, I don’t know how.” That had been said with all appearance of honesty, which Starsky didn’t trust for a second. There was a difference between blindness and willful obliviousness, and Hutch was definitely falling into the latter camp right now. “Besides,” Hutch continued, “you’re the one who said you’d say something first.”

Starsky almost laughed. “You really think now’s the time to be acting like a five-year-old about that?”

Hutch bent his head slightly, dropping his gaze from Starsky’s. Taking one hand off his glass, he let it fall onto Starsky’s leg, just above his knee—a touch that would have been entirely unremarkable between them in any other circumstances. “I think if I try to act like an emotionally grown-up adult right now, I might run screaming out the door,” he said, much more flippant and miles more honest.

“Yeah. I know what you mean. You ever think we’re a coupla idiots?”

“Few times.”

“Hey,” Starsky said, and placed a crooked finger under Hutch’s chin, tilting him back up to look at Starsky. “I love you.” The words were stunningly easy as he said them, and Starsky thought vaguely that maybe they always would have been. Maybe that was just a fact of the universe, and could always have been relayed like one of Starsky’s pieces of trivia Hutch pretended not to be interested in.

He wasn’t feigning disinterest in this one, though. Instead he was staring wide-eyed at Starsky as if in disbelief, as if he had actually had no idea what was coming. “This is the part where you say something,” Starsky reminded him gently. “You know, ‘me too’ or ‘since when’ or ‘what are you talking about’ or ‘I can’t-’”

“Yes,” Hutch interrupted. “I mean, no. Not those. I- I definitely can. Just- give me a minute. I have to unlock something.”

Starsky shook his head slightly, fondly baffled. Hutch put his glass down on the table behind him, but made no attempt to move any more than that, so Starsky was assuming that had been some odd metaphor that made sense in Hutch’s brain. After a moment of silent distance, Hutch blinked, and refocused on Starsky. “You mean it?” he asked. “Like- I should have asked first.”

“Like everything,” Starsky answered, ignoring the question of what exactly it was he should have asked before doing. “Whatever you’re thinking. All of it.”

“I’m thinking about kissing you in the front seat of your car.”

Starsky laughed aloud, swept with sheer love mixed up with a relief that felt like freedom, like being unshackled from a weight that had been chained to him his whole life, like the moment after weeks of heavy, humid heat when the sky finally breaks and washes the whole city clean. “If you make me go all the way downstairs to kiss you, Hutch, we’re gonna have words.”

“No. No,” Hutch said, and took Starsky’s mug from his hands, placing it carefully next to the glass. Starsky had completely forgotten he’d even been holding that. He slid the hand on Starsky’s leg ever so slightly higher, leaning forward onto it, shifting to the edge of the table. He stopped only a few inches away, a mirror of their closeness in Starsky’s driveway, except the height differential of the coffee table and the couch meant Hutch was the one now looking up at Starsky. “I love you,” he breathed, so quiet it would have been inaudible if they’d been any further apart. At least, if Starsky didn’t spend so much of his time making sure he heard every whisper and half-soundless thought that came from Hutch.

There was a force possessed of all the inevitability of a law of physics laced into the space between them, like when a bored Starsky in science class had spent hour after hour seeing how close he could hold two magnets before his strength gave way and they pulled together. “I love you,” Hutch repeated, louder, firmer, and Starsky gave in to the magnetism.

He’d half-expected fireworks to go off over their heads, but instead- Hutch’s lips were soft. Of course Hutch’s lips were soft, was there ever any doubt about that? Not since the first Academy lecture he’d missed all the content of because he was too busy staring at them, slightly parted with a pen stuck in the corner. Not since the first time they were standing too close and smiling too secretly and Starsky had raised his hand and dragged his thumb fleetingly across them, passed it off as teasing instead of the inevitable following of an urge that would have sucked him into a whirlpool if he hadn’t fulfilled it. Hutch’s lips were soft, and his hand was warm where it rested on Starsky’s thigh, the grounding weight of home and safety, a touch that felt like it was anchoring Starsky to himself as much as it was tying him to Hutch. In the end, he thought the two probably amounted to much the same thing.

Those soft lips parted against his, and Hutch’s tongue ran slowly over Starsky’s bottom lip. Every nanometre of skin tingled in its wake, and when Starsky’s mouth opened in response it was on a low, heavy groan. It didn’t deter Hutch, who pressed his advantage, shifting closer and raising his free hand to Starsky’s cheek, only to slide it slowly around to cradle his head. The heel of his hand rested heavy on the nape of Starsky’s neck, but the feeling of his fingers was masked by dense curls. When Starsky automatically pushed backwards into Hutch’s hand, seeking pressure and contact there, Hutch was too slow following him for it not to break the kiss.

“Hutch,” Starsky mumbled, still more moan than word.

In response, Hutch whispered, “Starsky,” like it was a benediction, like this was a dream he still didn’t entirely believe in. Hutch’s fingers curled further into Starsky’s hair, the contact Starsky had been seeking, and Starsky blinked at him once, twice.

“Hutch,” he repeated, firmer, and placed his hands on Hutch’s waist, tugging him closer. Hutch followed Starsky’s lead, because of course he did, because when had he ever not, but there was no ‘closer’ to be had in these positions, with Hutch’s legs already spread wide around Starsky’s and knees pressed against the edge of the couch. Which meant when Hutch pushed his legs up and leant forward, Starsky operated entirely on instinct—following leads went both ways, and he had seven years and more of training behind him to know what Hutch’s body was doing before either of them were aware of it—and used his grip on Hutch’s waist to lift and pull, guiding him forward until he was straddling Starsky’s thighs, heavy and undeniable with his knees either side of Starsky’s hips, tight enough for Starsky to be aware of strong muscle squeezing him in.

Against his own best wishes, despite the urgent need to watch every tiny movement of Hutch’s face, Starsky’s eyes fluttered closed at the pressure, contact, friction, weight—he really would’ve thought the number of drinks in him would’ve stopped any chance of getting hard tonight, but turned out having Hutch in his lap was some kinda magic potion.

When he dragged his eyes open, Hutch was just watching, summer-sky eyes wide, looking down at Starsky like something had hit him hard enough to make him lose his breath and soft enough for him to not want to get it back. Like he’d forgotten the rest of the world existed, and the expression was so familiar and so brand spanking new all at the same time that Starsky reached up and buried both hands in soft hair, pulling him back down. “I know the feeling, baby blue,” he whispered in the moment before their lips met.

It turned out that when Starsky didn’t accidentally break them apart, Hutch was perfectly willing to kiss until it suffocated them both. Which was most definitely a wavelength they were riding together. There was a slight distance to Hutch, like he was still trying to process the night’s events in a part of his brain shut off from what his body was doing, but all that was doing was confirming for Starsky that if Hutch ever kissed him with full focus and intent, he’d probably be left a quivering puddle on the floor. As it was, he was melting under Hutch, all capacity for thought leaving him further and further behind with each sweep of Hutch’s tongue. With one firm press against the back of his head—an urging not to stop, not to leave; Starsky had gone from needing Hutch to stay in the house to needing him to stay in his immediate vicinity to needing him to stay this close, right on top of Starsky, and if this trend kept continuing work was gonna be somewhat of an issue—Starsky let his hands slip down, skimming down Hutch’s sides until they settled over his hips.

A moment later, ignoring Starsky’s unspoken instruction, Hutch backed off. Starsky chased his lips on instinct, a mewling kind of noise he hadn’t even known he could make coming from his own mouth. The sound prompted him into opening his eyes, and Hutch was still right there, just in front of him, a thousand points of contact between their thighs and hips and shivering between their chests with each breath, so Starsky kept just enough control to process Hutch’s distant frown as he said, “I’m going to have to phone Franz.”

Starsky blinked at him. “What?”

“My date,” Hutch explained, still looking like he was inhabiting some kinda Twilight Zone deep inside his own head. “We set another for Saturday when I left early tonight. I’m going to have to cancel on him.”

Starsky threw his head back against the couch, shaking with laughter. He should probably be insulted that Hutch had started thinking about another guy while he was in the middle of kissing Starsky for the first time, but he could just picture the insane, overthinking tracks that had taken Hutch there.

Anyway, Starsky’s laughter had toppled Hutch off-balance, and he was throwing his arms out to either side of Starsky’s shoulders—which left him distracted enough for Starsky to move his hands from Hutch’s hips back to his waist and complete the movement with one sharp tug.

Hutch fell full against his chest, looking wide-eyed up at him, lips parted, as if Starsky had just shorted something in his brain. And it gave him the chance, with Hutch staring at him like that, to growl deliberately low, “You’re damn right you better cancel, blondie,” and see Hutch’s eyes darken, chest jumping against Starsky’s. “There’s no way I’m gonna be letting you out of this house before Saturday.”

On a sharp exhale, Hutch dropped his head, resting his forehead against Starsky’s shoulder for a moment before propping his chin on it and placing a gentle kiss behind his ear. “Tell me what you want,” he whispered.

Something struck Starsky as—wrong, off, about those words, and it took him a moment to realise it was the dynamic he’d set up himself. The whole night had one way or another been Hutch following Starsky, following his requests, letting him take the lead and taking what Starsky gave him, and Starsky was damned if he was gonna bring that through into whatever it was they were fast heading towards. Definitely not the first time. So, “What do you want?”

Hutch’s chin was still resting on Starsky’s shoulder, so when after a moment’s silence, he said, “I want you to take me to bed,” the words were a physical presence against Starsky’s ear.

Starsky clamped his jaw in an effort to keep from biting his own tongue. Stuff goat’s milk shakes and all those weird erectile dysfunction tricks, drug companies should just start marketing Ken Hutchinson. But the point of that question had been to shift power back to Hutch, and though Starsky had to admit the answer had made him feel like he’d do just about anything Hutch even vaguely suggested wanting him to- he clenched his jaw again, then muttered, “I meant- not-”

Apparently he required significantly more blood in non-erection parts of his body to put words to what he’d been trying to accomplish. Hutch, though, seemed to realise anyway, the way he always knew how to read meaning into Starsky’s flawed words if he actually wanted to, because he huffed out a bemused laugh and said, “Are you kidding? Starsk…”

“What else?” Starsky managed. “What do you want?”

Hutch leant back and looked straight at Starsky. “I want to kiss you. I want to finally get to undress you and just look. I want-” Starsky’s arm was resting over his shoulder, any deliberate movement from Starsky lost around the time Hutch started talking. Hutch reached behind himself and guided Starsky’s hand up, into his hair, until he was cradling Hutch’s head with gold silk threaded between his fingers. “I want this. I want to go on my knees for you, and I want to see you on your knees. I want to touch as much of you as I possibly can. I want to know what every part of you tastes like, and I want to map you until I know exactly what makes you moan at what frequency and twist in what direction. I want you, Starsky, everything, same as I have since the day I met you.” He took a beat, then added, “And, babe—don’t worry about control. If either of us have any by the end of tonight, I’m doing something wrong.”

“Arrogant, huh?” Starsky said, aware any actual meaning to that statement had been robbed by how breathless he sounded.

Rather than replying, Hutch leant back down, pressing soft, scraping kisses into Starsky’s neck, and rolled his hips firmly against Starsky’s. Starsky sucked in a sharp breath.

“I haven’t come in my pants since I was a teenager, Hutch, but if you keep this up we’re gonna be over before we start,” he warned.

“This,” Hutch corrected, suddenly sounding a little out of breath himself. “Not us. This.”

“Not us,” Starsky agreed.

“What about you? What do you want?”

A series of incredibly explicit images flickered through Starsky’s mind like a roll of film, but in the end, all he could settle on was, “I’m going to kiss you until you forget your own name.”

“Yeah? Is that a threat or a challenge?”

“A promise.”

Hutch’s smile rounded his cheeks, crinkled the corners of his eyes, filled his face with the quiet, fond amusement that had always made Starsky think he’d had a sunbeam personally handcrafted and delivered just for him in the form of a bitchy Midwestern blonde. G-d’s delivery methods might be a little unexpected, but Starsky couldn’t argue with results.

“But first,” he said, brushing a hand down Hutch’s face, from temple to jaw, and watching Hutch lean ever so infinitesimally into it, “I’m gonna do you what you said, and take you to bed. Which means you need to stand up, because I don’t think I’d trust myself carrying you right now.”

Hutch hummed. “No?”

Starsky pushed at Hutch’s hips, and followed him as he stood. Standing together in the narrow space between the coffee table and the sofa, Starsky hooked his fingers into Hutch’s belt loops, keeping the connection as he said, “Not tonight. Under current conditions. Some other time.”

“I could carry you in,” Hutch offered, and Starsky tugged him in firmly and kissed him, also firmly.

“Some other time,” he repeated. “We ain’t on the honeymoon yet, blintz.”

“No?” Hutch asked again, a distinctly more mischievous curve to his lips this time, and slid a hand around Starsky’s hip, pushing into the back pocket of Starsky’s jeans as he leant in to kiss Starsky again, licking into his mouth, tasting of the wine he must have drunk at dinner and cinnamon from whatever he’d had for dessert and a dozen other things that were far more interesting because Starsky was pretty sure they made up the stalwarts of Hutch-ness. Starsky guided them out without breaking the kiss from muscle memory alone, around the couch, pausing at the end of the kitchen as Hutch brought his free hand up to tangle in tiny curls at the nape of Starsky’s neck and Starsky briefly lost the necessary coordination. He reached up, hanging onto Hutch’s arm, and Hutch pulled back, frowning slightly as he said, “Are you-”

He’d surely proven well enough by now how he felt about this, so he was going to take the end of that to be some kinda question about whether he was still too drunk to be properly sure. Hutch and his damn chivalry, always coming in at the last minute. He wasn’t even tipsy at this point, shocked out of it far more effectively by the taste of Hutch than he had been by however many gallons of coffee he’d drunk. But he couldn’t find the words for any of that right now with Hutch’s body under his hands, and he didn’t want to waste time convincing Hutch that he could have spent on more worthy pursuits, like stripping him naked and throwing him onto the bed and seeing them together in the mirror he was suddenly extra glad he’d had installed, no matter how many people—mostly Hutch—had given him flak for it over the years. So he closed the distance between them again, placed a hard, chaste kiss on Hutch’s lips, and said, “Yes.” Any further enquiry was shut off, as Starsky steered them into the bedroom, with a series of progressively less chaste kisses.

~

Hutch woke to an impending sense of doom. A deep fear that if he opened his eyes, he’d find out everything had been a dream or some trick of his imagination, that he’d actually dropped Starsky off and gone on his completely fine date and gone straight home. Maybe if he just kept his eyes closed, he could stay in this world-

“I can hear you overthinking, blintz.”

Oh. He carefully opened one eye, and then the other, and sure enough, there was Starsky. Curls sleep-mussed, a red line down one cheek where the pillow had been crushed into it, dark circles under bleary eyes, and the most beautiful thing Hutch had ever seen.

“Quit it,” grumbled the hangover-afflicted angel lying next to him, and it took him a minute to realise that was probably still aimed at the overthinking, not the sappy thoughts Hutch was currently entertaining about the rest of their lives. “C’mere.”

Hutch gladly obliged, shifting closer and throwing one arm over Starsky’s waist before he nudged his nose into dark curls and teased, “I’m not the one who got boneless-drunk trying to ignore their feelings.”

“Wouldn’t have had to if you’d ‘fessed up.”

“Excuse me for having some patience.”

Starsky rubbed a hand over Hutch’s hip, throwing one leg over Hutch’s and tangling them together, then told him, “Patience implies you’d’ve done something at some point. What you had going on was called denial. Repression. Clinical cowardice.”

“Wow. Is that any way to talk to someone who loves you? I could change my mind, you know. Walk out.”

Starsky hummed, pushing his face into Hutch’s shoulder before he mumbled, “No, you couldn’t.”

Hutch looked down at him and tightened the hold on his waist, pulling him in, letting every close, inseparable point of contact between them settle into his bones and finally fill a tidal bed that had been ebbing and flowing inside him for either the last seven years or his entire life. Slowly exhaling, he agreed, “No. I couldn’t.”

---

End notes: Starsky is listening to, for the rare S&H reader who wouldn’t have picked it up, Springsteen’s Born To Run album; the two songs specifically mentioned are Backstreets (‘one soft infested summer me and Terry became friends’) and She’s The One (‘no matter where you sleep tonight, or how far you run / whoa-oh, she’s the one’).