Finding A Cure In You

471

The second time they sleep together, Hutch asks, “What do you want from me?”

The third time they sleep together, something is wrong.

Hutch takes something Starsky says the wrong way. It works out badly for both of them, until it doesn’t.

 

Author’s Notes: *lets out a relieved sigh that lasts for about three weeks* I have been sitting with this fic for so fucking long, progressing so slowly but! she is done! finally! If you’d like to properly shame me on ‘so fucking long’, this was started as a ‘wait my brain isn’t done with this theme’ after writing To Love (Verb, Transitive) with the intention of finishing it in a couple weeks and. well. yeah.

So. I genuinely didn’t know this was even going to have a proper sex scene when I started writing it, and then it turned out to be three-quarters sex scene, hence the ‘so slowly’. On the one hand, this came as something of a surprise given I don’t actually write a lot of sex, but on the other hand… this is a complex h/c and the sex is the comfort, so I absolutely should have predicted it.

lowkey inspired by acl’s The Ballad of Handsome Hutch, and title is from Mercy by Melissa Etheridge, which was the rest of the inspiration.

 

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 The second time they sleep together, Hutch asks, “What do you want from me?”

Starsky’s tipsy on cheap beer and the taste of Hutch’s lips and the way he looks lying next to him, gold hair tousled and blue eyes wide, the perfect kind of sun and sky drawn by a kid with crayons that never exists in the real world. He doesn’t want to drift out of this, so he says, “What you just did was pretty good.”

Hutch blinks, and Starsky’s gaze is drawn to the crease between his eyebrows. So he leans over and kisses it, then Hutch rests a hand against Starsky’s hip so Starsky reaches across Hutch’s chest to pet his shoulder, and then he’s more or less sprawled over Hutch again anyway, so he throws a leg over Hutch’s hips. Straddling him, looking down at the sunset of pink-flushed cheeks, he’s feeling greedy, so he adds, “I want you.”

The flush of exertion deepens to a blush, and he protests, “That’s not–”

“No?” Starsky asks, brushing his cheek lightly and watching the colour follow in the wake of his fingers. “What I want from you is you.”

Hutch quiets, grows solemn, and says, “Oh.” Then he pulls Starsky down and kisses him with an intensity that tumbles them into a dedicated recap of what they’d just been doing, and Starsky forgets the conversation entirely.

The third time they sleep together, something is wrong. But they’re both adrenaline-high and Starsky is horny out of his mind from watching Hutch conquer the obstacle course in regulation shorts he’s sure have never looked that indecent on anyone else, and Hutch is the one who initiates it anyway, on his knees the second their dorm door shuts behind them, so Starsky doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the way Hutch rests his forearm across Starsky’s hips only to immediately drop it, or how he too-carefully arranges himself under Starsky when they finally make it to the bed.

It’s not like he’s all that familiar with this side of Hutch yet; maybe that’s just what he’s like in bed.

There’s a lot of Hutch that’s still a mystery to him, one way or another, so he doesn’t question it the fourth, frenzied, time, or the fifth time that happens in fits and starts in bar bathrooms and under the table and in the front seat of Starsky’s car until Starsky is strung tight and strangled and so close to the edge that his refusal to risk marring his brand-new leather seats is the only thing stopping him from jumping Hutch right there and then and damned who could see them. But damned is what they would be, so Starsky’s in no state to notice anything by the time they’re safe behind closed doors.

The sixth time is slow, and sweet, and private. Hutch has been in his own head all day, flinching when Starsky reaches for him, and now that the option is open to him Starsky doesn’t know a better way to deal with that than to consciously touch him, to make him remember there can be a peace in it.

He starts cautious, a hand on Hutch’s arm as they sit side-by-side on the too-small-anyway sofa pretending to study; moves it to his knee when he finally, for the first time today, accepts the touch; moves to his thigh, and Hutch puts the textbook down and turns to him.

Starsky undresses him in degrees, resting kisses below each button he undoes, then pulls his own shirt over his head and throws it behind him as he steers Hutch from the sofa to the bed.

Hutch lets himself be steered, be lowered onto the bed, and initially, as Hutch shifts into a more comfortable position beneath him, Starsky takes it as an acquiescence to care in a state where his mind and body won’t let him do more. But he’s watching Hutch close this time, deliberately tracking every movement without the desperate rush clouding him.

So when Hutch reaches for Starsky’s arm then pulls away, seconds-fast, Starsky stops.

Freezes. Immediately, pulling a grinding halt to the proceedings.

“Hutch, what’s wrong?”

Hutch blinks up at him. “Nothing. It was just a bad day.”

“Not that,” Starsky says, and waves a hand between them, then at Hutch’s hand, lying empty on the bed. “This. Why did you pull away?”

“I–” Hutch frowns, pushes himself up on his elbows as if getting closer to Starsky is going to stop his words. “It’s–”

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing. You said–”

Starsky hears urgency as he asks, “What did I say?” There’s nothing Hutch has yet said or done to warrant the urgency, but the edge of something wrong that’s hung over them for weeks is building, driving to a peak in the way Hutch turns his wrist to lay his palm flat down against the sheet.

“You said you wanted me,” Hutch says, and it doesn’t sink in at first. Starsky has time to blink, to open his mouth on a question, before realisation hits him.

A sharp jolt of horror drags in its wake, leaving him shuddering. The sharpness is in his voice as he says, “Don’t do that to me. Don’t cast me as your abuser.”

They’re the wrong words, but at least he didn’t shout them, but he’s still over Hutch, sitting on his legs, and as something like his pulse or a desperate caged prisoner or a man strapped into a rollercoaster against his will thuds and lurches in his stomach, he scrambles off.

He ends up in a pile of limbs on the floor, as Hutch says, “Starsky?”

He turns away and curls into himself, flooded with childhood images he hasn’t thought about in years, things no child should ever see but were unavoidable in a backstreets Brooklyn suburb with too much family in the shady corners and a cop father who sometimes came home too drunk and shouting too loud. He drops his head between his knees and breathes, until there’s a light touch to his back.

“Starsky?” Hutch repeats, and Starsky fights the already deep-ground urge to turn and cling to him. Instead he says, “Why?”

There’s a brief silence from behind him, then Hutch says, revelatory and a little self-deprecating, “I suppose it was stupid.”

“Why?”

“People don’t stay unless they want something.”

“That’s–” true, kind of, but– “Why would you think I meant it like that? That’s not you.” He’s still not saying the right things, or saying them the right way.

“Depends on your point of view,” Hutch says, and Starsky has to repress another full-body shudder at the thought of Hutch being told he is only what his body can be used for, one way or another, over and over until he believes it enough to hear it in Starsky’s words.

Finally, Starsky turns back around. He folds his legs beneath him and stays on the ground, looking up at Hutch looking down. “I meant you,” he says. “Not your muscles or your eyes or your insane blowjob skills.”

Hutch snorts a shocked laugh, and Starsky relaxes fractionally. “I meant… that…” he continues, searching for words that can’t be misinterpreted again. “That the reason I do anything with you is because I want to be doing it with you. I want to eat dinner with you to eat it with you, to see you poke at hamburgers like they might leap up and attack you and try to make me eat salad and then steal half my chips anyway. I want to go to the movies with you to hear you complain about the unrealistic action sequences and pretend like you’re not bawling your eyes out at the romance scenes. I want to go to classes with you – if you can believe it – so I can watch you chew pencils and scrunch up your forehead like the world’s gonna end if you don’t know the entire handbook off by heart at the end of classes, then completely lose your focus when I show you a note, then pretend like you’re mad at me for making you lose focus.”

“I am mad at you,” Hutch mutters. “I just never manage to hang onto it when you start grinning and joking around.”

Starsky leans forward, grabbing onto the bottom of the bed-frame, pushing his fingers down between the wood and the mattress. “That! I want to talk to you because I want to know stuff like that. About you. The real you. And I want to fuck you, or do whatever – sleep with you – to do it with you.”

Hutch raises his eyebrows, and questions, “Just to do it with me?”

“I mean, yeah.” Starsky looks at Hutch’s face, and tries that again. “I mean, it’s like, I’d want to eat anyway, but like I said, I want to do it with you to do it with you. I’d want to have sex anyway, but I want to do it with you to do it with you. To– well–” He curls his fingers against the inner bed-frame, the scrape of the rough wood combating the nausea as he realises, “I don’t know. I don’t know, because you’ve been stopping yourself. Whatever you want to do, whatever you do when you’re just being you.”

“This feels like a lot of pressure,” Hutch says, in a tone that would be joking if his expression wasn’t dead serious. “I don’t know if I know how to just be me.”

This – Starsky’s on slightly firmer ground here. If there’s anything he’s spent his whole life doing, it’s learning how to be him. He pushes up onto his knees, leaning in until he’s between Hutch’s legs, even as he keeps his hands firmly jammed where they can’t do anything Hutch might not say no to quick enough. “How about we start here, huh? What do you want?”

Hutch huffs out a half-chuckle. “If you’re planning to keep that up, I’m gonna start feeling real silly real soon.”

“There, that’s something about you. You get embarrassed about showing yourself to other people. But I’m not going to stop asking. Ever.”

Hutch just looks at him, so Starsky continues, abandoning the unrealistically long-term for the immediate present, “I can just go to my bed, or go out somewhere, and leave you alone. Or we can go to the communal kitchen and make your silly herbal tea where we can’t touch too much–” and suddenly Starsky is wondering if or how often Hutch has used that fact of external sight to cover over a genuine desire to keep Starsky at arm’s length. He squashes that thought down to deal with later and keeps going, jerking his chin towards the door of the bedroom. “Or we can go out there and watch TV, or look at textbooks and you can explain the bits I can’t focus on. I know you like doing that.”

Hutch’s expression has barely shifted at any of these options. Starsky recalls what it was that started off this whole thing, and blinks once, twice, before he adds, “Or… you could touch me.”

There’s the barest brush of movement before Hutch’s palm is curving against Starsky’s cheek. The pressure in the touch is so light Starsky might be imagining it, but he closes his eyes and follows it anyway, turning his head to Hutch’s thigh, pressing a kiss over the inside seam. Hutch sucks in a breath, and the pads of his fingers press hard, briefly, against Starsky’s jaw. Starsky pauses and draws back ever so slightly, an eighth of an inch, back into Hutch’s touch. Mouth suddenly dry, he wets his lips.

“Starsky…” Hutch whispers above him. “Your mouth.” It’s less a request, more evocation, but Starsky will work with what he’s given. He pushes further up, nosing at bare skin just above worn denim, not kissing so much as running his lips along it, before he pulls back slightly. He’s never tried precisely this move, but – he had decided at the end of high school that being able to undo bras one-handed was passé and overdone, and had spent a dedicated amount of time with an equally dedicated girlfriend learning to do it with his mouth. He’d achieved about a 60% success rate on that, so this shouldn’t be difficult. He bites down on the corner of the denim, pushes at the button with the flat of his tongue. Briefly wonders if the words ‘Levi-Strauss’ would be branded on it if he stayed like this long enough, and why he likes that thought, before he realises it’s just about the permanent imprint of Hutch and the button slips free.

He catches the zipper in his teeth, and looks up. Hutch is staring, wide-eyed, at him, as if Starsky on his knees with his mouth on Hutch’s dick is some long-buried fantasy, a glimpse of a kingdom of heaven he wasn’t sure existed. It’s encouraging, not to mention a little flattering, but Starsky stays motionless until Hutch registers his lack of movement and nods faintly.

Starsky pulls down slowly, taking as sharp a notice of Hutch’s reactions as he can with the hard bulge in soft cotton briefs pressing against his cheek. He’s hardly unfamiliar with, uh, Little Hutch by now – not that anyone could call it little – but it’s strange approaching the whole thing from this new angle, like watching a favourite tape in reverse or doing an obstacle course upside down, like Mary Poppins on the ceiling. He’s enjoying the feeling of placing himself in Hutch’s hands more than he might’ve thought.

Well, not literally in his hands, because they’ve been clenched on his thighs since leaving Starsky’s face, and Starsky’s starting to miss them. He can’t do this next part by himself, anyway, so first he turns, presses his tongue against the covered bulge, curves briefly against moistened fabric, revelling in the slight friction drag as he pulls off. He could say it’s to give Hutch a chance to check that this is what he wants before they go any further, and that wouldn’t even be a lie; but it’s as much if not more a selfish urge to feel, even if he doesn’t get to taste, and to hear Hutch’s pronounced inhale above him.

Pulling away, he nods towards Hutch’s waistband and says, “I can’t…” He almost follows it up with ‘please’, but stops himself at the last second, not wanting to risk the push of his own desires over Hutch’s.

Hutch hasn’t taken his eyes off him, and he looks soft, nervous, and almost resigned as he says, “You don’t… have to.”

Starsky exhales, lets his eyelids fall, and breathes, now, “Please.”

There’s a brief stutter in Hutch’s movement, but he lifts his hips and pushes briefs and jeans down below his knees. Starsky moves without fully opening his eyes, relying on a still-developing sense of Hutch’s body as if it’s his own, an automatic knowledge of where Hutch’s hands will land – one on his thigh, one on the sheet outside – and how his legs will spread – barely, cautiously at first, then when Starsky licks up the underside of his cock, falling open sharp and sudden, drawing the denim taut under Starsky’s chest.

There’s an accompanying gasp, and it’s an odd kind of rush, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Starsky’s no stranger to the thrill of visibly, audibly pleasing a partner, but there’s something more here.

Nosing into blonde curls, he tilts his head to the side and wraps his lips across the base of Hutch’s cock, sliding his tongue along warm ridges and veins, then moves up slightly and repeats the movement. He’s slipping into a singular kind of focus, but there’s something missing, keeping him on the edge of distraction searching for it.

Pulling back, he nudges at Hutch’s hand, aware he probably looks like a pushy cat demanding to be pet and beyond caring. It’s close enough to the truth, and when Hutch’s fingers dance across his hair and drop away, Starsky sighs and looks up at him. Fine eyebrows knit, blue eyes unsure. Starsky rests his head back against Hutch’s thigh, just under his hand, and points out, “I’m asking. Insane blowjob skills, remember? Maybe I need the guidance.”

That gets a huffed chuckle. “Starsk, your mouth should be registered in seven states. You don’t need guidance.”

“Well, maybe I just want to feel you.” It’s a request that maybe doesn’t make a lot of sense given what they’re discussing – given that Starsky is already penned in by Hutch’s legs, and doesn’t even need to lean so much as vaguely tilt his body either direction to feel him that way. He means it anyway, and, “And to feel what you want.”

He still doesn’t quite realise why or how much he meant it until Hutch lets out a held breath and slides a hand into Starsky’s curls, resting gentle against the back of his head.

It’s a sense of being tethered and untethered simultaneously, of being freed at the same time as he’s grounded and completed. He leans forwards and takes Hutch into his mouth, properly this time, and there’s a sigh and the barest tightening of his hair.

The worry, the fear, the remnant unease loitering in the pit of his stomach and centre of his chest all flock into a distant corner, squirrelled away of their own accord with a door firmly shut on them until all that matters is Hutch.

He moves slow, taking the time to follow the tentative and, Starsky thinks, mostly unconscious guidance of Hutch’s touch, and the sharply restrained jerk of his hips when Starsky sinks down as far as he can and swallows around him. The hand on Starsky’s head moves down to knead the nape of his neck, then rubs slowly down to his shoulders, reminding Starsky that his hands are still jammed between bedframe and mattress. He’d forgotten, too swarmed by other sensation to consider it; there’s a strange eroticism to the self-imposed restriction on touch, as if his other senses have tuned in exclusively to Hutch Channel in response.

This wasn’t supposed to be about Starsky, but his body was never going to get that message, not with Hutch heavy in his mouth, deep musk and slightly bitter precome all he can smell or taste.

Above him, Hutch is making small mewling sounds in the back of his throat, each one quickly broken off. When the next one comes, Hutch’s hand slipping back up to twist into Starsky’s curls, Starsky hums encouragingly. The only response is a gasp, muffled and silenced before its time, so Starsky draws back slowly, dragging his tongue against the leaking slit as he pulls off. The muscles pressing against either side of Starsky’s shoulders shake slightly, and Starsky tucks that knowledge away. He stays close, chin resting on the edge of the bed, close enough for Hutch’s hand to stay in his hair, as he entreats, “Don’t stop yourself,” then turns to kiss the soft skin of Hutch’s inner thigh, adds, “Please,” moves higher; drops kisses at random until he reaches the crease between thigh and groin; rests there and repeats, “Please,” murmured into warm silk. He’s never realised how much of Hutch is true silk; skin to hair to heart, smooth and soft, incredibly durable and accessible only to a few.

“Starsky,” Hutch breathes, and reaches for Starsky’s shoulders again. Starsky rolls them under, into, Hutch’s palms, feeling the stiffness inevitable in this position that he’s been too immersed in Hutch to notice until now. But when Hutch rests his hands on the outside of Starsky’s arms and tugs upwards, Starsky tilts back to look up at him and shakes his head. “No.”

“Starsk,” Hutch says, the edge of a plea in it. “I want…”

By his own rules, he’s powerless to that.

And since his hesitance is borne from fear of overstepping Hutch’s boundaries, of doing anything to provoke that sick sense of intrusion – Hutch asking should erase it.

It doesn’t, quite, but Hutch adds, “Please don’t hurt yourself. I want you to touch me,” and it’s near enough. Rising to his knees, he pulls his hands slowly out, wincing as half-numbness is replaced by burning pins and needles. Then Hutch reaches down, covers Starsky’s hands with his own and lifts them to press them against his stomach, and oh. oh.

Whatever positive thing he’d been thinking about the absence of touch, scratch that. This was so much better. With every nerve, every sense, already opened wide, the slide of smooth muscle beneath his palms and Hutch’s grasping, searching fingers down his shoulders and arms floods him, an overload of information that blanks it all out until there’s nothing left but Hutch. Hutch. Hutch.

He presses his face into Hutch, fitting right into the indent of his sternum above the gentle rise and fall of his stomach. He’s still too thin, the kind of thin that makes Starsky feel like he’s turning into his own mother as he chides him to eat more, and the sudden drawn connection between that and this revealed view of his body as material for the use of others almost jolts Starsky out of his dreamy, drifting state. But then Hutch takes hold of his hands, thumbs brushing over his palms, and breathes, “Starsky,” and balance is restored.

“Starsky,” he repeats, a little stronger. “Your hands…”

Starsky looks up, then, because Hutch doesn’t move after he trails off, just keeps up that gentle metronome back-and-forth feather-light against Starsky’s hands. He opens them to Starsky’s view, fingers echoing the same movement against the back.

There’s already-fading red lines across the heel of both palms, where they’d been pressed against the top of the bedframe, but that’s not what Hutch is looking at; that’s the fine scratches running criss-cross higher up. Academy dorm beds aren’t exactly built to the highest standard of carpentry, and below the shiny top, the inside is unsanded and a little splintery. The scrape of it had grounded Starsky at first, and then he’d simply forgotten about it.

He hums, absently, then sees the concern in Hutch’s eyes and pulls the scattered clouds of his mind back down to earth enough to say, “It’s fine,” and, “They’ll be gone tomorrow. It doesn’t hurt.” That’s not a hundred percent true, but the sting is faint and distant, and more important is that they came about through Starsky’s choice. Free, unpressured choice.

Hutch lifts Starsky’s hands anyway, pressing a kiss to one, then keeps pulling. “Come up here?”

Starsky obeys the request, hesitant but direct as it was. Of course he does. The muscles running down the backs of his legs are stiff, reluctant to move, and there’s a faint pins-and-needles rush in his ankles as he pushes himself up, and Hutch slides his grip up Starsky’s arms as he comes closer, until his hands are wrapped firm under his biceps. As Starsky raises up, Hutch falls back, flat onto the mattress and keeps pulling until Starsky’s braced on forearms above him. He brushes Hutch’s shoulders with both hands, and his skin is smooth and warm, and it’s almost enough, but–

It’s not. Starsky’s in that position, back on top of Hutch, for the barest moment before the sick thud drops somewhere behind his sternum. His hands slip to the sheets and he says, “I can’t. Hutch, I–”

Hutch rolls them immediately, until they’re side by side, facing each other. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Starsky shakes his head.

“No, I just– can’t, not yet.”

“Okay.” Hutch looks at him for a moment, gaze heavy and contemplative, then says, “I can’t either.”

“That’s all good. It’s good,” Starsky says, not sure whether Hutch meant having Starsky on top of him or the possibility of being on top of Starsky himself, but either way, “This is good.”

“Yeah,” Hutch agrees, and brushes down Starsky’s side. A little of that husk layers across his voice again as his eyes track his hand’s path and he repeats, “Yeah.”

Sudden focus sharpens on his face, and he pulls back slightly, just enough that he can watch as he splays his hand deliberate across the bottom of Starsky’s ribcage. Starsky’s breathless even before he drags his palm up, pausing to scratch through the thick patch of wiry hair at the centre of his chest. Starsky arches into the touch, letting his head fall back when Hutch’s thumb rubs, seemingly absentminded, across his nipple. He might be exaggerating his reactions a little, but he doesn’t want to risk the chance of not encouraging Hutch to continue.

Then Hutch bends to kiss against Starsky’s bared throat and, while he’s distracted by that, pushes his idling hand down to cup Starsky through his jeans, and he loses the capacity to exaggerate at the same time as the need to. On a gasp, he bucks into Hutch, who makes a pleased hum of his own.

Starsky’s fly was already unzipped, which is the only reason he hasn’t yet been strangled to the point of saying bye-bye to any future little Starskys, and the heel of Hutch’s hand is pressing off and on the base of Starsky’s cock with each minuscule shift of his touch. He reaches for Hutch, any part of him, on instinct, but stops himself an instant before making contact. “Ca–” He swallows, feeling his throat move beneath Hutch’s lips, and manages, “Can I?”

Hutch doesn’t say no, but he doesn’t say yes either, just draws back and looks silently at Starsky’s raised hand. When Starsky drops it, fisting the sheet instead, that sharp focus sands down, not softening but solidifying, like jagged rock blown by winds to a smooth plane. A noise comes from the back of his throat on an exhaled breath, somewhere between a hum and a grunt, and he slips past Starsky’s zipper to wrap fully around Starsky’s cock and pull it out, his fingers the only barrier between sensitive skin and sharp metal. Starsky makes a choked noise, and his eyes screw shut of their own accord.

When he remembers to reopen them, when Hutch hasn’t moved his hand, he’s looking straight at Hutch. That’s the moment Hutch chooses to twist his grip, looking straight back, and there’s a surety to his movements and a strength to his expression and it strikes him. This is Hutch. This is what he asked for, and he can debate the intricacies of Hutch still giving him what he asked for later, because right now the skimming touch of his fingers and the clear blue of his eyes and the slide of his palm is overwhelming to the point of incomprehensibility, to the point of–

On a forced-out exhale, Hutch rests his other hand on Starsky’s hip and curls fingers under his waistband, raising his eyebrows at Starsky, who nods frantically and lifts his hips. As he reaches down, his hand knocks against Hutch’s, and as soon as they, together, have got Starsky’s jeans low enough that he doesn’t care anymore, because they’re on a part of his body Hutch isn’t touching, Hutch takes hold of his hand, intertwining their fingers and bringing them back up to rest against Starsky’s stomach.

Starsky lets himself be guided, leaves his other hand twisted into cotton, and it’s a heady rush. He can feel the rise and fall of Hutch’s hand pressed over his own as he breathes, could swear he feels Hutch’s body more than his own. The hand on his cock is somehow the least forceful of these sensations, falling beneath the rhythm of panting and low wordless murmurs and the vision of blue eyes against flushed skin against blonde hair, all uniquely Hutch, all directed at him with a focus that feels like desire instead of accommodation, and Starsky has no idea how he could ever have mistaken one for the other.

Then Hutch tightens his grip and Starsky jerks towards him, sharply drawn back to that point of contact. “Look at me?” he asks, question tangled up with request with demand in the uptick at the end.

“I am. God, Hutch, I am.”

“No. Look at me,” Hutch says, and Starsky draws in a breath and stops focusing on details, traits and glints and movement, and makes himself just look at Hutch. Whole picture, whole person, whole lover breathing into him and shifting closer, until their foreheads rest together and Hutch’s hard-on presses firm on Starsky’s hip. And he realises why he wasn’t doing that, because this is overwhelming when it isn’t broken down into points of sensation, when it’s just one rush of feeling. It’s blinding, drowning, but it’s being blinded by and drowning in Hutch, so he lets himself be dragged under. Keeps his eyes open past his body’s best attempts to close them because visual is a crucial part of that sensation, because that’s the part Hutch asked him for. And because when Starsky’s breath shudders through him, Hutch’s eyes darken, and a frantic edge braids together with command to gird his voice as he says, “Come for me.”

Starsky makes some kind of noise, he can feel it in the vibration against his hand where Hutch still holds it to the bottom of his ribs, but he barely hears whatever it is.

“Please. I want to watch you,” Hutch says, and twists on an upward stroke. “Just like this. I do want to see you come for me.”

It’s the voice and the words that push Starsky over the edge, not the touch. The need to watch Hutch’s face is overpowered by the swell of quiet, urgent thunder in his nerves and muscles and blood, as every part of him rushes to answer Hutch’s request.

It swamps him, rolling him in a surf that crystallises the whole world down to his body and the pulsing warmth pouring through him, removes him from his body entirely, leaves him floating somewhere above it in a foaming wave of sensation.

When the wave subsides, casts him back onto the beach, Hutch has turned onto his back but is still watching him.

Once Starsky’s gaze is drawn away from blown pupils in penetratingly blue eyes, it’s to the thick erection straining against Hutch’s stomach.

“Can I touch you?” he asks softly.

Hutch fleetingly captures his lower lip between his teeth, seems to give it serious consideration, and decides, “Yes.”

Before Starsky can move, Hutch guides the hand he’s still holding over, wrapping them both around himself. The interplay between heat and silk and the relative cool roughness of Hutch’s fingers against his distracts Starsky for a moment before he realises Hutch has directed them no further; has relaxed his grip just enough to let Starsky move.

There’s a brief moment where Starsky’s terrified by that allowance, but then he recovers himself. This is Hutch asking for him – for him to do this, itself a perilous offer of trust right now, but also a reminder that Hutch is asking for him. That whatever else has happened, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re here for each other. He pushes himself up on one elbow, watching as much of Hutch as he can as close as he can.

And it’s not like he hasn’t done this before. He knows – at least, he thinks he knows what Hutch likes. He remembers there’s a twist at the top that made him gasp once, that lightly tracing down the vein along the underside had stilled him as he fought not to show his reaction. There’s a moment now where he does that again, holding himself back, tight. Then he turns his head towards Starsky, looks at him, blinks. Relaxes.

He lets his head fall back without taking his gaze from Starsky’s, meaning they’re only broken when the angle becomes too extreme, when the clinically white pillowcase is depressed by the fall of blonde hair, when Hutch finally, finally, approaches this unclinically. His grip slackens further under Starsky’s, to the point where he’s not just following but being actively guided by Starsky’s movement, and that gives Starsky enough surety to run his other hand along Hutch’s hip, across soft skin to inner thigh, strokes occasionally faltering as he coordinates simultaneous movement but worth it when there’s a jump and a stutter in Hutch’s breath, and a long, easy exhale.

Now, as he tenses again, it’s slow and expected and comes in shaking waves in time with his breathing, pushing through his body and into Starsky’s.

Starsky lets his own eyes close for a moment, then opens them again and looks up. From their entwined hands, purpled tip just visible above, up panes of clenched muscle, smooth chest rising and falling in tight, fast pants, to the arched line of his pale throat, head pushed back against the pillow, pink lips parting on a gasped, “Starsky.”

There’s a perilous line Starsky is vaguely aware he should be walking looking at Hutch’s body like this, but god but he’s beautiful. As he shudders, warm fluid caresses the edge of Starsky’s hand, and as his eyes screw closed and jaw goes slack, every trace of cautious restraint washes out of him for one stunning moment.

Overwhelmed, Starsky drops to rest kisses in the crook of Hutch’s neck. Hutch turns towards him as his breathing slows, tucking his chin over Starsky’s curls.

There’s a long moment where time stills, too foreign to break through to the space shared between them.

Then Starsky flexes his hand, raises it and doesn’t think about what he’s doing when he licks along his fingers as if they’d been left coated in butter or sugar. It’s a faint surprise to his brain when that’s not what he tastes – the taste itself is slightly odd, not unpleasant but peculiar. Peculiar to this, and now, and he may have no real feelings for it in its own right but the way Hutch stares at him as he does it, dark and hungry – that’s intoxicating. That could teach him to love it, he thinks.

He does it again, and when Hutch’s expression doesn’t shift but deepens, he moves his hand to rest against Hutch’s stomach, just above where mingled white from both of them paints his skin, and leans down.

Hutch’s hand runs across the nape of Starsky’s neck, up to pet across his hair, as he murmurs, “Starsk…”

He moves between gentled kisses and broad swipes across warm skin. It’s an inefficient cleaning method – something he’s going to have to remedy soon – but it makes the muscles under Starsky’s mouth twitch and jump and the hand in his hair tighten.

Once Hutch stops trembling, and Starsky is satisfied he’s never going to lose this taste, he smooths a hand over the skin beneath Hutch’s ribcage and drops a kiss there, then rolls out of the bed before his body can stop him. Five steps to their bathroom, and he cleans himself off quickly and efficiently before rinsing out the washcloth and returning to Hutch.

Hutch reaches for the cloth, but Starsky tuts and sits, legs folded underneath him, and finishes cleaning Hutch in careful, gentle swipes.

When he finally looks up, Hutch is watching him with something achingly awed behind wide eyes, something that makes Starsky want to shake or punch or just wipe from existence everyone – including his past self – that might have ever contributed to making him act as though being taken care of was an unprecedented, undeserved miracle.

He rests his hand on Hutch’s shoulder, waits until Hutch brings a hand up to cover it, fingers slipping together. Dropping the cloth on the bedside table, because it was hard enough leaving once, he pulls Hutch down from his half-propped position and stretches alongside him.

“Hi,” Hutch says nonsensically, and brushes at the hair above Starsky’s ear.

Starsky curls around him, head on his chest. The slow pulse of his heart thrums from Starsky’s ears through the rest of his body; combined with solid warmth and soft breathing, it lulls him down to a state where he has to actively fight sleep to ask drowsily, one last time for tonight, “What do you want?”

“Hold me?” Hutch answers, with barely any hesitation. Starsky throws one arm across his chest and tucks the other up under his shoulder. There’s a moment of shared quiet before Hutch says, in the voice of revelation, “I want you.”

In the last seconds before he’s claimed by sleep, Starsky murmurs, “Good. You’ve got me.”