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Arthur is drunk.
Not ‘tipsy’, not ‘merry’. Arthur is blind-assed, roaring, wrecked. The world swims around him in confusing lurches. The air is deafening with white noise. Putting one foot in front of the other takes every drop of his concentration. He has not been such a mess since his college days in London.
This regrettable situation is entirely Dom’s fault.
There had been a ridiculous job, because wasn’t there always a ridiculous job? Dom had called and Arthur had agreed, because it was the first work which Dom had commissioned for himself in months and Arthur wanted to be encouraging.
Some small measure of residual guilt was also involved, seeing as how on their last job together, instead of taking the kind of comprehensive notes he was known for, Arthur had spent most of the night letting Eames feel him up on the dance floor and slam him against walls. That had been unprofessional. It had been a friendship failure.
More than anything, Arthur hates to fail.
So, that afternoon, he had arrived as promised at UCLA and found Dom and Yusuf both grinning at him over the vials and bottles they had already been using in their study of how alcohol affects the functions of Somnacin.
Arthur is a point man; it’s his job to be first to test the waters. Yusuf had already been preparing a careful measure of ethanol as Arthur had sat down and begun to roll his sleeve up over his forearm.
“This is payback. Isn’t it?” Arthur had said, looking up.
“Arthur. You know I’m not the vengeful type.” Dom had said, with a little push against his shoulder. “Now lie back and think of England.”
Thus, Arthur is drunk. He had waved Dom off at the bottom of the path, after vehemently misrepresenting his own ability to walk to the front door, and had then spent what felt like an hour navigating his way through the front yard.
Now he is standing on the front step, clattering with a bunch of keys, all of which seem to be useless, and is just beginning to hatch dark suspicions that the locks to his house have been changed, when, as if by magic, the door swings open.
Arthur hadn’t realised he had been relying on the closed door to hold him up, until he is falling through the space where it used to be.
“Alright?” Eames asks, in amusement. His thickly muscled arms are all that is keeping Arthur’s face from becoming intimately acquainted with the floor.
That’s hot. Eames is hot.
“I’m going to ravish you,” Arthur tells him, and then pushes his mouth against Eames’s in a way that is undoubtedly very sexy because Arthur is a master of seduction.
When Eames pulls back to breathe, his eyes look all smirky and he’s licking his lips. As Arthur leans in again, to catch that tongue with his own, Eames hold him back by the shoulders.
“You taste like a night out back home.”
Arthur presses his body against Eames’s in all the right places, delighting in the way that it makes Eames’s mouth drop open on a moan. “What? Like Aftershock and cigarettes?”
Eames slides his palms down from the small of Arthur’s back, to squeeze both hands hard around his ass.
“Like a slutty drunk.”
Arthur isn’t sure if it is the creeping of Eames’s thumbs under the waistband of his pants, or the way that Eames’s accent swallows up the ‘t’s in the word ‘slutty’, but something makes Arthur shove Eames back against the door with the full force of his drunk strength. The locks rattle, Jay-Z come waddling sleepily from the kitchen, to see what is going on, and Eames says, “Easy, tiger.”
It is a moment of comic genius.
“What?” Eames asks, through the grin which Arthur’s laughter has infected him with.
Arthur can’t think straight enough to articulate exactly what is suddenly so funny about the word ‘tiger’, but he curls his fingers like claws against Eames’s collar bone and growls loudly.
Jay-Z startles and scuttles backwards, into his safe place under the hall table, because dogs do not appreciate humour. But the joke is not lost on Eames, who snorts with laughter, and takes Arthur’s face in his hands.
“You’re adorable,” he says.
“Don’t call me adorable when I am about to rock your world.”
Arthur kisses him with a bite, a gentle close of his teeth around Eames’s top lip. He holds on tight, intending to make the kiss filthy, but then gets stuck like that, with just the simple press of Eames’s mouth against his own.
“I thought you were rocking my world, pengting?” Eames says, as he pulls away. His eyes are lovely. Arthur lifts a careful fingertip, to feel the brush of those long eyelashes.
“I’m going to,” he says. “But you have to help me find where the bedroom is first.”
For once, Arthur is glad that Eames always wears disgusting sweatpants, because elastic is a far more manageable obstacle than some mad combination of buttons and zippers.
“Elastic is good shit,” Arthur says, as he presses Eames’s hips into the mattress, and eagerly frees his cock from the layers of clothing.
Eames’s breath is already rushing with arousal, but he ruffles Arthur’s hair with his big palm, and says, “You sure that you don’t just want to have a glass of water and a good old kip?”
“I hate that suggestion with all of my parts,” Arthur says, with the disdain that such an idea deserves.
“Isit? Can’t have that, then, can we?”
“I want to taste your cock.”
“Be my guest.”
Arthur’s tongue feels clumsy and sloppy in his mouth. When he tries to go down, smooth as normal, it makes him gag and he has to pull back, inelegantly trailing saliva.
“Are you quite alright down there, darling?” Eames asks, from where he is propped up against the pillows. Arthur turns his head and spits onto the floor, before he realises that it is his own carpet he is spitting onto.
“Fuck,” Arthur says.
“Had enough, tiger?”
“No. I won’t let it beat me.”
Arthur wraps his hand around most of the length and just closes his mouth around the first couple of inches. He works on tonguing the head and pushing into each sensitive groove and crease. If Eames notices that it’s not up to the usual standard, he gives no indication. He has one hand tangled in Arthur’s hair and keeps tugging back whenever he bumps too close to the opening of Arthur’s throat, which is kind of unnecessary, because Arthur isn’t a baby. He knows what he’s doing.
There is a sudden tight curl of pain at the back of Arthur’s skull, before Eames is jerking Arthur’s mouth away, and coming all over his face.
“I would have swallowed that,” Arthur says.
Panting, Eames grabs a tissue from the box beside the bed. He wipes away the worst of the mess from Arthur’s face and uses his tongue to get the rest.
“You know how it is when you is proper rat-arsed, bruv. It only takes that one shot too many to push everything back up again. Sex is always better when nobody chucks up.”
He lays a gentle hand on Arthur’s stomach, which is perfectly steady.
“It went in my veins,” Arthur explains, holding up his wrist to Eames’s face, as if for proof. Eames kisses the soft skin, where the IV was connected, and slides his hand down from Arthur’s stomach, to rub at the front of his pants.
“Do you want me to return the favour? Think you can stay awake that long? You look well bleary.”
Arthur’s eyelids are drooping, and Eames’s body is enticingly warm. But he says, “I can stay awake forever, if I want to. Charlie fucking Sheen eat your fucking heart out.”
“Man, what you chattin’?”
“Because I got all the tiger blood, yo.”
This is the last thing that Arthur says, before he passes out against the heat of Eames’s chest.
*
When Arthur wakes up, it is dark and he has a splitting headache. He can hear the muted hum of the radio, and the sizzle of a frying pan, from the other end of the house. Jay-Z is draped across Arthur’s feet. On the beside cabinet there is a pint glass of water and two aspirin, perched on top of a post-it not, which reads: They’re grrrreat!
Arthur takes the Aspirin, doesn’t bother to try to understand the note, and goes back to sleep.
*
A week later, in a sweaty bar in Goa, Arthur and Dom are on a very serious mission, scouting out ‘exotic’ beachfront locations for Dom’s ongoing contract with the travel company. It is particularly serious because this is the first time that Dom has been out of the country since the Fischer job. Arthur’s presence here is a bit superfluous, but Dom had looked so tense as he was booking his ticket that Arthur had strongly advised him to take somebody else along in the interest of efficiency.
“If there’s someone to share the workload, you’ll be able to cut your stay there in half. It’s the only sensible way to go about it.”
“Pretty short notice for most people, though, don’t you think?” Dom had said. He had looked up at Arthur, whilst tapping a finger against the edge of his laptop.
“I have a window coming up,” Arthur had said, planner open, as he put a neat strike through the three consultations he already had booked across those days.
Eames is spending the entire week drawing up calligraphy for the signs of a tattoo parlour downtown. The money is appalling, but it’s “mate’s rates”, according to Eames. The owner hails from Scunthorpe, and Arthur strongly suspects that Eames is well on the way to building up a whole new crew of bredren, right here in Los Angeles. He has not tried to discourage it.
Saying goodbye to Eames in the doorway of their house, Arthur had told him, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
That had only made Eames grin and say, “Safe, man. That gives me a lot to work with.” He’d handed Arthur his bag, even though Arthur had been just about to bend down and pick it up for himself.
“This relationship is going nowhere,” Arthur had told him.
“See ya, Tiger,” Eames had said, and had left Arthur with the tingling imprint of his mouth.
Being away from Eames is still horrible. It reminds Arthur too much of those months on the run. To make matters worse, he and Dom have somehow ended up stuck with a honeymoon suite here and Dom snores like a beast.
Arthur is already irritable as they sit with bottles of Singah beer, trying to blend in amongst the legitimate vacationers for the last night of their stay. They are at a table where the sand of the beach is just starting to edge onto the concrete. Arthur does not appreciate the way that Dom keeps frowning at nothing and picking at the label on his beer bottle with his bitten fingernails.
“Stop that. It’s a sign of sexual frustration,” Arthur says. “What wrong?”
Dom’s fingers still.
“There’s not really an easy way to say it.”
“So say it the hard way. You know I don’t like bullshit.”
“I got a message from Guillaume a couple of hours ago. He’s got a contact who is part of Cobol’s security for the whole of North Africa. Seems like they’ve got a hold of our addresses, Arthur. Guillaume thinks they could be in Los Angeles within a week.”
Arthur hopes that his expression does not betray the way that he feels as if the bottom of his stomach has just dropped out.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he says.
“I’m going to take the kids to Paris. You should probably get out of the country too. For a few months at least. I’ll call Saito in the meantime, see if he won’t pull a few strings to make this go away.”
Arthur breathes in deep through his nose and resists the urge to swipe everything vertical off the table. Back home, they have finally hired another cleaner who gets along with Jay-Z and Arthur has only just gotten all of the furniture in the living room arranged exactly the way that he wants it.
“Of course, Eames isn’t mixed up in this one,” Dom says. “Cobol’s guys probably won’t have his name. I can’t see any reason why he couldn’t just stay put if he wanted to-”
“I’d die before I let anyone split us up again.”
Arthur wants to take back those words as soon as they are out of his mouth, but of course it is too late for that. Cobb has already heard and now the air around them feels all awkward. Arthur scowls down at the plastic tablecloth. A fly has just settled in the middle of it. For a moment, he is about to lift his hand and squash it, but something stops him, and then it flies away.
Dom drops a hand onto Arthur’s shoulder and squeezes it as he stands up.
“I’m going to get you another beer,” he says.
Arthur stares blankly out towards the beach, while Dom is at the bar. His mind is already clicking through potential destinations and compiling lists of priorities, but the shouting tourists with armfuls of kids are distracting, and the unfamiliar smells of this place are making him feel sick. Arthur definitely needs another drink.
He is grateful for the damp bottle which Dom sets down in front of him. The label is blue, and when Arthur turns it towards him, there is a golden tiger roaring at him from above the name ‘Tiger’.
“They were out of Singah,” Dom says, putting his own bottle to his lips.
*
It is early evening when they arrive at LAX, and dusk by the time they reach Arthur’s house. Dom walks with him to the front door, although he really has no reason to.
“I’ll call you first thing in the morning so that we can co-ordinate,” he says, sliding his hands into his pockets. Arthur nods. He is about to say something important about work visas, when the front door opens a little, and one of Eames’s bare arms pokes through the gap.
Sprawling over the flesh is a huge new tattoo. It is a yellow tiger, with sleek limbs and slanting eyes. Its powerful body is fitted snug around the contours of Eames’s muscles. Dom and Arthur both stare at the image, until the door creaks open further, and Eames’s grinning face is revealed.
“Welcome home, bruv. Alright, Domsky?”
“What the hell is that?” Arthur says.
“It’s a present for you. His name is Arthur. He’s going to ravish you.” Eames flexes his muscle, making the tiger’s body jump, growling low in his throat as he does so.
Arthur is quite appalled, but Dom looks entirely too pleased with this turn of events. He nudges an elbow against Arthur’s ribs. “What’s the matter? It’s a good likeness,” he says.
*
That night Arthur and Eames eat takeout on the sofa, while watching some shitty action movie. The new tattoo keeps catching Arthur’s eye.
They have not yet talked properly about what they are going to do next.
“Do you think it’d be totally out of the question for me to be let back into the UK?” Eames asks, as an explosion is ripping apart a building on the television screen. He is trying for casual, staring down into his noodles, digging around in them with his fork, but there is a raw note of hope in his suddenly muddled accent.
“No. I’m sure we could sort something out.” Arthur says, pretending not to notice the way it makes Eames’s eyes light up. He licks his lips, casually, and touches the line of script which he has just spotted curving along the line of the tiger’s belly. “What’s this?”
Eames looks down and uses his fingertips to carefully pull the skin tauter. “It says ‘burning bright’. Ain’t as clear as it will be. It’s off that poem.”
“Blake.”
“Yeah. We had to learn that fucker word for word in school. Funny, how shit like that stays with you, innit?”
“I can still name all fifty states in alphabetical order because we learnt a song about it in elementary.” Arthur strokes his fingers over the tiger’s warm flank, petting it. He likes the bold shape of its stripes. Eames is watching him.
“I’ve immortalised you,” he says.
Arthur keeps stroking. “Hate to break it to you, but your arm is not immortal.”
“I almost chose the words ‘fearful symmetry’ instead, because you is well fearful.” Eames thumbs at Arthur’s cheekbone. “And well symmetrical.”
“You’re a jackass,” Arthur says.
“You should be glad it ain’t a picture of your face.”
“Why? Because that would be tacky and embarrassing?”
They are already close together, but Eames lifts his tiger arm and drops it around Arthur’s shoulders, tugging him even nearer. He nuzzles his rough face against Arthur’s throat.
“Pengting,” he says.
Arthur cannot resist craning his neck, so that he can nip the pink tip of Eames’s ear.
*
They go back to London.
Stepping off the plane at Heathrow, the sky is grey, and there is drizzle in the air. Right away, the cold seeps through the seams of Arthur’s clothing, prickling at his skin. It might feel miserable, were it not for the weight of Eames’s arm around him, chasing the cold away.