The most endlessly amusing thing about wireless in the classrooms was the many and various ways Rodney's students abused the privilege: chatting during class, doing homework for other courses during his lectures, watching YouTube clips on low volume. Rodney didn't even particularly care if they paid attention--their effort was pointless anyway, he'd already decided to fail all of them--but the least they could do would be to pick a non-disruptive abuse of free internet services, like quietly downloading porn.
Instead, he got punks writing poorly-punctuated RateMyProfessor reviews dedicated to blatant character defamation and the occasional fake Livejournal account created by an especially-bitter student. He didn't know whether to be concerned for his safety or terribly flattered that somebody had taken the time to create a fake mad diary for him, complete with musical selections from Whitesnake and Prince and moods reading: wrathful, extra wrathful, wrathful to the power of the largest known prime.
It was all, admittedly, entertaining--at least until John had dropped into the seat opposite Rodney at Caribou one afternoon and asked, "So tell me: this GaySugarDaddy.com service. How is that working for you?"
Rodney choked on his mocha. "Excuse me?" he wheezed.
John raised his eyebrows, eyes bright in the atmospheric lighting. He took his sweet time setting down a small mountain of term papers before he tipped his glasses further up his nose and repeated, "GaySugarDaddy.com. How's it working for you?"
"It wasn't--I would never --" Rodney yelped, knee-jerk, until the warmly amused expression on John's face registered. Rodney stared at him for a long moment. "You've got to be kidding," he moaned.
"I wish," John said, sounding torn between genuine pity and amusement. "Somebody wrote it on my Facebook wall to check it out."
Rodney put his face in his grad student's latest draft--another pitiful waste of paper but at least he'd corrected all of his grotesque run-on sentences--and hated his entire life.
"I hate my entire life," he told John, muffled by laserjet paper.
"I think you're looking at this in entirely the wrong way," John said, sounding distracted already, pawing through his stack of papers and retrieving one with a signature in purple ink on the back of the last page, an honor pledge written in bubbly letters. "Despite your tyranny, your students think you're amusing enough to dedicate their free hours to you--I'd be flattered."
"Your students created a Facebook group for you," Rodney said, trying not to sound bitter.
"I thought you thought Facebook was a plague upon society," John murmured, eyes flicking up to catch Rodney's for a minute and then turning back to the page. Rodney knew that indulgent look from a mile away: everyone played favorites with their students and John was no exception.
"And it is," Rodney snapped back. "But I also recognize that the simpering fools who write you love ballads on your Facebook wall aren't doing it for the same reasons my bastard students are signing me up for GaySugarDaddy.com." He put his face in his hands. "Oh my God. They really signed me up for GaySugarDaddy.com?"
"I confirmed," John answered apologetically. "They made your username 'hottmadscientist.'" He held up two fingers. "Two ts."
"Of course," Rodney said bitterly.
"It could be worse," John soothed. "The picture they posted is very flattering."
Rodney kicked him under the table and tried once again to focus on shredding Sumeet's paper--but as usual with John around, it took approximately twelve seconds for a small cloud of waiflike undergraduate English majors to collect around him.
By the time the second Rory came up to John gushing about how he'd never really understood the depth and beauty of French existentialism before he'd taken John's Lit302 class Rodney slammed down his red Fineliner and snarled, "Do you mind? "
John--who had no soul--only bit his lip, trying not to laugh, and told Rory the second, "I'm sorry about Rodney, he's got an awfully catty streak in him."
After Tiny Metrosexual Undergrad fluttered off, Rodney glowered silently at John until he caved and said, "Well, you do ."
Rodney had met John in the madding line at the campus coffee shop--a hole-in-the-wall establishment roughly the size of Rodney's bedroom closet that churned out the most amazing extra-dry cappuccinos. Milk so perfectly foamed and sweet it brought tears to his eyes.
It'd been a Thursday and cold and wretched, and he'd been giving serious consideration to shoving away some of the shorter and more feeble roadblocks to his morning caffeine fix when he'd heard tall, dark, and unfamiliar saying to the university provost, "Who knows where I'd be if somebody hadn't pointed out that my entire theory on Reinman had been flawed from the beginning."
And Rodney, probably driven partly mad by lack of coffee and his most recent run-in with Sam Carter (who still hadn't wanted to sleep with him) had felt a flutter in his chest that had nothing to do with his incipient heart condition.
"Elizabeth," Rodney interrupted, sidling up to them and--conveniently--skipping ahead of a few people in line. "You didn't tell me you'd hired another sheep."
And Elizabeth, who'd been apple-cheeked and bright-eyed, laughed, put a gloved hand on tall, dark, and terribly handsome's arm, saying, "See, I told you a low profile would be impossible. Rodney McKay--" she smiled at him indulgently "--meet John Sheppard, we've been lucky enough to lure him away from Sarah Lawrence."
"Nice to meet you," Sheppard said pleasantly, taking Rodney's hand in his own: warm and calloused and nice. Rodney felt himself flush mildly at the very hazel of John's eyes, the sweetness of his mouth, and damned Elizabeth for only hiring from the Ford Modeling Catalogue of Educators.
"Sarah Lawrence?" he asked finally, making a doubtful face. "I haven't heard a lot about their math departments."
"Oh, no," John said, still smiling lazily, an oasis of preternatural calm in the midst of the coffee shop chaos, the banging and grinding and hissing of machinery and hum of voices. "I was just telling Elizabeth how my undergraduate thesis was what made me decide to get my doctorate in literature instead."
Rodney gaped in open horror and said, "That's a travesty."
"Rodney!" Elizabeth had said, equal parts laughing and scandalized.
"Oh, man," John had laughed, "I'm going to like you."
"I sincerely doubt it," Rodney had argued, but he'd sounded uncertain even to his own ears--helplessly charmed despite John's grievous academic missteps.
"John's office."
"Cadman," Rodney hissed. "Stop answering his phone!"
"Why?" she asked, gleeful. "Did you want to leave him an X-rated voicemail? I could hang up. You could call again and do your heavy breathing and one-handed typing noises."
"My hate for you is unparalleled," Rodney promised her. "It's true proof of how perverse John is that he keeps you on as an assistant."
"Despite how much you hate me?" she laughed. "I just interpret that as his being a good judge of character--did you have a message or did you seriously want me to hang up so you could do the nasty with his answering machine?"
Rodney had been intending to leave John a message about how they were running low on milk and could he buy some more vodka sauce at the market while he was there? but he wasn't going to be caught dead telling Laura Cadman that. He'd met her for the first time when John had invited all his TAs--all four of them--to their house for dinner before the beginning of the semester, an event which had destroyed nearly all of Rodney's street cred in the English department. Thankfully, students preoccupied with the ascendant and Earthbound natures of British Naturalism and American Transcendentalism weren't generally found rubbing shoulders with any of Rodney's students--which he saw as one of those small blessings.
"...No," Rodney muttered darkly, picking at the overflowing piles of paper on his desk. He wasn't sure how or when it had happened, but somewhere between that first time he'd met John in the coffee shop and now, four years later, they'd ended up sharing bills and rent and toothpaste and everything in between--including one another's annoying teaching assistants.
"Right," Cadman said, disbelieving. "I'll just write down 'soppy domestic issue' here on his While You Were Away pad--sound good?"
"Fine," Rodney sighed.
"Oh, and by the way, Dr. McKay?" Cadman added. "The English department? Loves your listing on GaySugarDaddy.com."
" Excuse me? " Rodney choked.
"All I'm saying," Cadman went on, "is to keep in mind that you already have one hot guy in your life--and you probably can't afford to financially sustain two."
Rodney waited a long moment before he asked, "All right, be honest. How many people on campus do you think know about this?"
"Probably everybody," Cadman admitted. "It's cool though. You're a pretty hot piece on that website."
His eyes widened in surprise, and Rodney tucked the phone between his ear and his shoulder, saying, "Yeah?"
" Duh ," Cadman said, as if it was obvious.
In the background, Rodney could hear shuffling paper, the dull clacking of keys. John's office on the fifth floor of Cloud Hall was larger than most but labyrinthine, created by knocking out the walls between two former offices and a broom closet, filled with nooks and crannies perfect for bookshelves and tiny desks, all jammed together in a riot of battered Russian tragedy and young adult novels, literary criticisms and a copy of Bloom's The Western Canon Rodney had bought John as a gag gift.
"I mean, most of the guys listed on this site are total rapists," Cadman confided, "or seem like members of the some Eastern European mob trolling for underaged ass. Yours is one of the few profiles that doesn't make my skin crawl--you're getting a ton of hits."
"Really," Rodney purred, pulling up the website and doing a quick membersearch, trying desperately to ignore the horrifying logo that beamed GAYSUGARDADDY.COM - FOR ALL YOUR GAY SUGAR DADDY NEEDS at him in neon text.
Rodney rode his smug satisfaction at having twenty--and counting!--hot young twinks vying for his affections (and, all right, his pocketbook) until he got back to his house to find it (a) dark (b) nearly glacial and (c) bereft of John getting his ass handed to him playing Guitar Hero on the PS2.
John wasn't in the kitchen or library or even the basement, where John had gone through a Bob Villa phase and tried to build a wine cellar, and when Rodney did find him, it was on the widow's walk--reading.
"You realize how dangerous it is out here?" he demanded, struggling to get out of the window slash doorway to the narrow ledge, roofed and railed, thank God, but still too exposed to a great height for Rodney's comfort.
John made a noncommittal noise, glasses sliding down his nose as he flipped another page in his nearly disintegrated copy of Farmer Boy, reading light clipped on the pages. "It's fine," he said dismissively, voice tight, sliding over automatically to make room for Rodney, who settled down with the creaking of his knees, feeling John's thigh warm against his own.
Feeling irrationally annoyed, Rodney said, "You're going to go blind reading out here."
Giving him a sideways look that was utterly, utterly flat, John said, "Perfect," and pushed up to his feet, stepping over and round and behind Rodney to climb back into the house, saying, "It'll give you the perfect excuse to upgrade," before he stomped out of the guest room and down the hall, footsteps fading.
Rodney stared out--baffled--into the roofline of their neighborhood for a long, long, long time before he felt himself waving his hands, without words to understand what had just happened.
Two days later, he still didn't know, which really, Rodney thought bitterly, was par for the course in this relationship, where he spent most of it baffled and then sometimes was baffled while naked.
John had starting using email as his primary mode of communication with Rodney and Rodney was starting to get just crazy enough to consider calling one of John's deranged friends in the English department, or--God forbid--ask one of his grad students just what the hell was happening. Their house was starting to feel a little like a war zone and Rodney had privately started referring to their bed as the Iron Curtain. John had actually become deliberately mean around the house--eating all but the last quarter-bowl of Lucky Charms and leaving Rodney the bread ends and reprising his role as a famished waif, ignoring all the food Rodney put on the dinner table in favor of picking at his abused copy of The Stranger .
Rodney was starting to get nervous; he felt a little bit like the Arab on the beach.
Then, on Friday, right before a long weekend where Rodney was planning some sort of strategic apology--the type made when one had no idea what one was apologizing for--he idly logged onto http://community.livejournal.com/mcsatan --moderated by somebody clearly invested in failing out of the physics program spectacularly--and found at the end of the 345 and counting comments regarding his brand new internet alter ego as hottmadscientist (with two 't's) an anonymous comment from his own home IP address reading:
dick.
He reached for his desk phone, and when John picked up sulkily on the tenth ring in his office, Rodney said, "Did you just flame me on my fake livejournal? "
"No," John said sullenly.
"You liar! " Rodney snapped, and out of the corner of his eye he saw all of his TAs scurry away, as if that'd get them out of the blast radius of his temper. "This comment was made from our house ."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," John told him.
Rodney had a rage blackout. "This--this stupid comment is left from our house IP address! Do you know what that means? An IP address?"
"No," John told him snottily. "Maybe you should go find somebody who knows about IP addresses. I'm sure you'll be very happy together." And then he hung up.
That afternoon, between his 3:30 class and his 5:00 graduate seminar, he got exactly 36 emails from Cadman, ranging from "Subject: [none]" to "Subject: We may have underestimated how much this was bothering him" to "Subject: OKAY THIS ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE HE THINKS YOU'RE CHEATING ON HIM WITH SOME BENDY SLUTTY 17 YEAR OLD, MCKAY!!!!!"
How Rodney went from yelling, "What! What? Who the hell would I cheat on him with? Everybody's less hot than he is!" and terrifying all the passers-by in the hall to being crammed into a closet with Cadman on the fifth floor of Cloud Hall discussing his man-wife, Rodney would never know. It was just one of those things that had started happening to him after John had insinuated himself into Rodney's once orderly life.
"What the fuck?" Rodney demanded, scowling at her earnest, perturbed expression.
"I don't know!" Cadman said, genuinely flustered, trying to wave her hands and smacking her knuckles on industrial-sized bottles of cleaner instead. "I don't know! Like, the first day the story went live, John thought it was funny--"
"Stop calling him John," Rodney snapped.
"--And now, he's moping around the office! I swear to God, Rodney, before lunch today, he was checking your member page on that stupid site and thought he was going to actually talk about his feelings or something," she finished, horrified.
Rodney gaped. "Oh shit ."
"I know," Cadman said, solemn. "What are we going to do?"
"Okay, firstly, you are going to stop rubbing it in his face that I have a GaySugarDaddy.com account," Rodney said angrily, and when Cadman opened her mouth to voice a protest--which would probably be some kind of lie like, "I would never!"--he cut her off and added, "And then I'm going to go--I don't know disable it or something. Then presto! It's fine!"
She glared at him. "It is not fine! " she hissed at him. "He thinks you're trying to replace him with a younger, prettier model! He was looking at an SQL tutorial today! He doesn't even know what SQL is! "
"Oh my God," Rodney moaned, covering his face. "How--this isn't even my fault! I found out about it from him! How can this be my fault? "
Laura put a comforting hand on Rodney's shoulder, which was--of course--exactly when the janitor opened the door to the closet and found them. He blinked at them twice and pointed over Rodney's shoulder, saying, "Can you pass me the glass cleaner?"
"Uh, sure," Rodney agreed, and reached for the blue jug, handing it over as the janitor stopped to add:
"Hey, look, buddy, I know it's none of my business, but Professor Sheppard's a good guy; you really ought to do right by him."
"I am not trying to replace him!" Rodney protested futilely.
"Sure, sure," the janitor said, rolling his eyes, and shut the door on them again.
The emails Rodney got after 6 p.m. were largely "Subject: if John develops anorexia when he sees that all the guys cyber-hitting on you weigh 170 or less, I'm going to kill you" and "Subject: he's ordering a book on C++, it's the end of the world" oriented. And after the third update Rodney got on John's adventures flipping through Amazon's top 10 most useful programming guides he started laughing, helplessly and totally inappropriately.
He realized--tinged with a slight hysteria--that really, nothing was more telling of how John felt about him and this--that he'd be willing to learn Borland, that he'd be willing to learn database management, that somebody who'd always been the most loved and the most well-liked, would worry that Rodney would stray from him at all.
Disabling the GaySugarDaddy.com account was mostly a matter of setting a hack program to run until the site let him in, and when Rodney heard the 'ping' signaling completion, he was barely able to repress his eye-roll at seeing the password had been "ieatbabies1!!" He sent his potential toy boys politely worded emails turning down their ass-for-cash affections and wished them the best in finding a dirty old man to pay for their chest waxings in the future--because Rodney was all filled up. Showing up on his Facebook group to write a scathing diatribe about meddling in people's personal lives and the potential dire consequences of such behavior was unnecessary and petty but satisfying nonetheless. He had assurances from Cadman that she put down any talk of gay sugar daddies of any nature in the English department--Rodney didn't doubt her iron fist as he'd lived alone for entire weeks during grading periods while she'd stood over John and his green Sharpie like an avenging angel--and sworn the cooperation of his own graduate assistants, who for the most part were complicit if confused, having missed the worst of the tantrums and sulking.
"Okay now what?" Cadman demanded over the phone, sounding three shades short of McCarthy era paranoia.
"Now," Rodney said proudly, "we wait--it'll all blow over soon."
It didn't blow over, but it didn't get worse, either. Instead, it got weird.
John went from deliberately mean to aloof, and Rodney caught John giving him uncertain glances for the rest of the week, like he had something on the tip of his tongue and was afraid to say it--which was all kinds of ridiculous: John had always said his favorite part of Rodney was never having to be polite, always being able to say just what was on his mind.
Actual conversations were reintroduced into the household and there were entire hours where Rodney felt almost as if things were normal again, but then John would hold back where normally there'd be a scathing comment or act way more interested in Rodney's research than Rodney knew John--or in fact anybody who wasn't Rodney--had a right to be and it just felt weirder . There was the distant possibility that John, despite his many years wasted on European literature, had suddenly discovered an interest in the behavior of matter as it approached the event horizon of a black hole, but Rodney sincerely, sincerely doubted it.
Cadman said all things had returned to the status quo at school, and John had canceled all his tutorials for SQL and Java and PHP--none of which Rodney knew, since had had frightened computer science students for database management and creation, felt Java was the devil, and hadn't worked on a website personally since HTML 3.0 had been the universal language. And when he'd tried to point this out in what he felt was a sensitive, reassuring way, John had only gotten tight around the mouth and excused himself to go stare morosely at Russian tragedy.
It had gotten to the point where Rodney was planning out an intricate, multipart, and possibly violent tantrum when he'd gotten notification that he'd been nominated for the Albert Einstein Award and nearly hemorrhaged something out of sheer smugness.
And then all his problems with John seemed to fade into the nondescript background of being a finalist for the Albert Einstein Award and the many congratulatory and somewhat bitter phone calls he received from colleagues around the world regarding the news. The alumni magazine and development office flooded his voicemail and email inbox and much to the housekeeper's dismay, Rodney invited the small band of local media clamoring for five minutes into the kitchen to get them all out of the way at once. And it was all a lot of hurry up and wait until John shook him awake one morning at 5:30 a.m. and said, "Congratulations, that was the awards committee--you have an Albert Einstein Award waiting for you." Rodney was already halfway through dialing Zelenka's phone number to make an astronomically expensive phone call into Prague to rub his face in the fact that Rodney was clearly the smarter of the two when John said, "Don't get upset, but. I don't think I should go to the awards ceremony."
Prefacing anything with "don't get upset" was like a glowing neon invitation to do just the opposite, and Rodney was not a subtle man.
On what should have been the third happiest day of his life--first being receiving the Nobel Prize and second being Zelenka admitting Rodney was smarter than him--he was instead trailing John around their house in a bathrobe picking a long, unending fight between coffees, around mouthfuls of cereal, dodging the increasingly twitchy housekeeper. He ended up saying a lot of things like, "What the hell?" and "Seriously, what the hell?" and "This is the Albert Einstein Award! You have to be there!" and "Are you aware that there's a considerable sum of money that comes with this prize? And that, if it would help, I could buy you a pony to go with your 13-year-old hissy fit?"
John ignored him through the stomping, through two cups of coffee and scrambled eggs, ignored him while paging through the morning paper and while shucking out of his t-shirt and boxers and changing into jeans and a pullover for class that day. He ignored Rodney's yelling and rolled his eyes at the pony comment and said, finally, grabbing his car keys on the way out the door, "It's just that I don't think I'd fit in there." His mouth had gotten tight and unhappy and he'd added, "I don't fit in a lot of places where you go," and left.
"Okay, but what does that even mean? " Rodney yelled into his cell phone a few hours later, after his afternoon class, storming across campus toward Cloud Hall.
"How the hell should I know?" Cadman demanded. "You were the one who said you'd just delete everything and it would blow over." There was the distant, shuffling sound of students and the clack of keyboards, the soft hum of a university office, and sighing, Cadman said, "Look, I'll have to talk to you about this later--we do actually teach classes and stuff."
Which left Rodney in the unenviable position of squatting in the English department, scowling at all the hipster passers-by and liberal arts students on their iPods and talking to people of the opposite gender about talking epic poetry and other, equally useless things. Cadman and the other rabidly flighty TAs John collected like pennies were nowhere to be found, which meant that one of the downstairs lecture halls was probably packed to max capacity for some sort of intro lit course that was heavy on John lecturing about the symbolic meaning of Prometheus' liver being pecked away every day and light on actual content. John had once conned the department chair to approve of a class entirely on the psychosexual underpinnings of Khubla Khan, but luckily for everybody involved nobody had signed up for it. John hated classes where he talked more than the student, part inertia and part genuine interest in his pupils, which was a concept that completely evaded Rodney's considerable scope of understanding--and Rodney tried to imagine why John would rather sit in a musty lecture hall than go to a cocktail reception and awards gala, to be wined and dined on Rodney's genius and smile beautifully at everybody else, who were sure to have far uglier significant others.
"English majors," Rodney said to himself in disgust, slumping down on a beat-up couch in the hallway.
"Careful, Rodney," John warned, strolling up and looking ironic. "You're outnumbered here."
Scowling, Rodney noted the sudden influx of people into the building--a few trailing students with papers clutched in their hands, Cadman and John's small army of sycophants flanking him on the left, giving Rodney meaningful looks.
"Guys?" John asked graciously, pulling out his office key. "Can I have a minute?"
"Take as long as you need," Cadman said firmly, herding away a few particularly persistent-looking girls in pastel tennis shirts. "We'll be down in the 3rd floor lounge if you need us."
"But," one of the girls said, "I had a question about my test paper."
"Kid," Cadman told her, their voices fading down the hallway, "it's really not worth it. For one, you'd have to fight that guy you just saw in the hall."
Following John into his office, hush-dark with evening light and gilded orange around the edges from the street lamps, coming on in a slow wave outside the window, Rodney said, "I can't tell if I'm touched or insulted by that comment."
"Be touched," John told him, throwing aside a Moleskin notebook and settling into his desk chair--an old fashioned wood and metal wheels affair that creaked constantly. "She likes you."
Rolling his eyes, Rodney sat down in the padded visitor's seat, hands on his knees, feeling the irritation and panic roll up his throat. "At least somebody does.""Nice, we're taking cheap shots now," John sighed.
"See how you feel if you win a Nobel Prize for Literature and I refuse to go on--hell, I don't even know what grounds," Rodney retorted.
John rubbed his face and his shoulders slumped. He looked like he'd been waiting for this fight all day. "That's just the point: there's no vice versa here."
Rodney stared at John for a long time, trying to process what that could possibly mean, but he was a genius and a physicist and he had no idea how the hamster-on-wheel circuits in the gray matter of liberal arts students functioned. "I'm sorry--what?" he said finally.
"I mean," John groaned, looking at Rodney from underneath his lashes, "I'm never going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature."
Rodney stared at him some more. "Well, that's fair, considering you don't like writing books," he said uncertainly. "Or poems. Which--thank God."
Making a frustrated noise, John said, "Rodney, you're at the top of your game. Your name comes up and people who I know can't even add know who you are. And once you get this award, and after you get the Nobel--"
Rodney tried not to look too ridiculously pleased at John's matter-of-fact pronouncement, like it was only a matter of time, and obviously it should be, but it was nice that somebody acknowledged it other than himself.
"--it's going to be even worse," John finished, running a hand through his hair. "Come on, Rodney--I don't even really know what a black hole is."
"Of course you know what a black hole is, Rodney said automatically, frowning. "I've explained it to you a dozen times."
John raised his eyebrows skeptically. "What's the plot of War and Peace? "
"There's some war," Rodney said uncertainly. "And then there's some peace. It's all very Russian and tragic."
"Right, just like I know that there's a hole in space, and that it's black," John continued, smiling ruefully. "But come on, Rodney--you had like, 26 bendy 19-year-olds offering to sleep with you on a website with a really pretty unflattering picture of you uploaded from the faculty newsletter, and half of them talked about seeing you on NOVA."
Rodney tried not to preen. "Well," he said diplomatically. "It was an excellent NOVA episode."
Pursing his lips, John said, "That's exactly my point. I don't exactly compete."
Rodney went right back to staring at him, mouth opening and closing like a fish, pieces slotting into place with a click click click, like when all the math and theory fit together perfectly and not unlike a puzzle, or music, everything falling into harmony and he finally, finally understood what this stupid fight had been about since the beginning.
"Oh my God--you actually needed me to articulate this for you?" But before John managed to finish his confused expression, Rodney waved his arms and steamrolled him, saying, "No, you don't get to talk anymore. Every time you talk, I just get more confused." He held up a finger:
"One: I do not want the idiot twinks on GaySugarDaddy.com. They all seem like they might snap in half and none of them knows what a black hole is either, and if I asked they'd probably make some sort of sexual comment that would horrify me on so many levels."
A grin started to creep over John's face, reluctant but there.
"Two: I can't believe I'm saying this and I'm swearing you to secrecy but I don't care if you know what black holes are, either. I don't care if you don't know how to add. I don't care that you almost slept through my NOVA special because you stayed up the night before re-reading your entire collection of My Teacher is an Alien books."
The smile reached John's eyes this time, and Rodney couldn't help but grin back.
"And three: I want you to come to this award ceremony with me. Because you're hotter than all the other academic spouses and I want to show off and because it's you, and it's about me, and I want you to be there because I just want you to be there." Rodney flushed at that, embarrassed, and asked, "Okay?"
It was getting too dark to see much more than the faint curve of John's mouth, the gleam in his eye, but it said everything, so it was like cherries or sprinkles when John finally said, in a huff of laughter, "Okay--okay. I'll go."
"I just have to say though," Rodney told him, two months later, tugging at his bow tie again, "jealousy is a good look on you."
"Don't start with me--I can still leave," John warned, smiling, and slapped Rodney's hands away. "Stop that, it looks fine."
"You can't leave," Rodney protested, snagging another two glasses of champagne and smiling smugly at the rest of the room, filled to brimming with awkward-looking academics in tuxedos and evening gowns--many of whom were, as predicted, staring at John with some amazement. Rodney didn't really blame them, since he'd bullied John into a tuxedo and then shoved him into the wall of their hotel suite for some groping right before they came down to the reception, so now he looked more like the cover of a particularly trashy Harlequin than an English professor--or rather, an English professor out of a particularly trashy Harlequin.
"Yeah?" John asked, grinning as the house lights dimmed and Rodney led him toward their seats at the table of honor--a plume of roses at the center, glasswear sparkling in the candlelight, the room hushing as the presenter stepped up to the podium. "Why not?" he whispered.
And Rodney leaned over so he could stroke a thumb behind the shell of John's ear--his favorite patch of skin. "You're in my speech," he murmured, and grinning, added, "it'll be all over Facebook."