Chapter Text
“So. Huckleberry. Is it a guy or a girl?”
“It was a… Oh, huh, yeah, I remember. It was none of your business, actually.”
Robby’s lips twitch but he doesn’t let the smile show – all day, Santos has been trying to catch him out, asking him all kinds of fucking questions, and apparently, she was asking him variations of the same question all last night, asking him if it was a girl or a guy, asking if it was somebody from work.
She’d grabbed him just as he was going into the bathroom to ask if he topped or bottomed, and then had just started laughing instead of waiting for an answer, which had earned her a flat look and a nasty mutter under the breath before Dennis had gone for his piss.
“She picking you up after work?”
“Why, you want me to ask if she can pick up some of your charting for you first?”
Santos’ amused expression drops into a completely serious and utterly foul one, and she turns on her heel and stalks toward a computer to try to get on top of her charting. Dennis looks like he feels a little bad about that, and maybe it is a slightly low blow, but she is behind, and it saves Robby having to say it.
He’d been painfully aware, last night, of wanting the kid back in his bed, in his apartment – once he’d gotten home, he had spent a great hour looking at the pictures and then videos Dennis was sending him, of his ass, of his hand around his cock, of his body tipped forward on the bed and the breathless little gasps he was giving as he humped a pillow and fingered himself.
Every instruction, every request, that Robby texted, Dennis had obeyed immediately, eagerly, and it wasn’t the same as having the kid right in front of him, but it was still good, still satisfying, still felt so fucking powerful. He’s never had a relationship with a woman that would be like this, where she’d be so fucking eager to do what he was telling her – maybe if he paid her.
Dennis Whitaker doesn’t want tips, isn’t doing this for cash or sugar: he does it because it’s hot in itself, satisfying in itself, because he’s just so fucking eager to please, and yeah, maybe he’s so eager to please because Robby’s so much older than he is, but nonetheless, it’s…
Robby’s never had much of an interest in drones before, remembers getting a mini one for Jake’s birthday a few years back, and he’d supervised him flying it, made sure he wasn’t being a nuisance or anything, honestly had lectured him a lot about making sure he wasn’t causing problems or potentially hurting anybody – God knows he’s seen way too many fucking drone-related accidents – but he’d never, you know, particularly seen the appeal in it beyond in any other random gadget.
For this, though?
Yeah.
He’d been antsy even with his hand around his cock, watching the arch and shudder of Dennis’ back, watching the movement of his wrist as he fucked himself with his fingers, watched his ass jump, wishing he could move the camera around instead of it being stuck in place, wishing he could pilot a drone around his little bedroom at Santos’ so he could see every angle, see his face, see the planes of his shoulders, see his chest pressed against the bed, see the work of his jaw, the flutter of his eyelashes.
He wishes he’d been able to fucking talk him through it, to be able to be on call so that he could watch him while he was getting himself off, so that he could tell him exactly what to do, how to touch himself, make him tease himself, edge himself more.
Even after Robby had gotten himself off and Dennis had said he had to go cook dinner, Robby had spent a little while going back through the pictures and the videos, taking in the details of his room he could see in the background.
They’d been sexting for maybe an hour, and Robby doesn’t know how many times he even watched that four-minute-twenty-two video of Dennis rutting himself to orgasm into one of his pillows, because he watched it all the way though at least twice, and then he kept rewinding and watching specific clips again and again – the bit of Dennis fumbling and looking uncertain and shy about what he was doing before he finally got his first grind against the pillow and then suddenly locked in and flattened his body forward, lowly moaned and extended his neck and parted his lips and squeezed his highs shut; midway through, when he first put his finger between his asscheeks, not even pressing inside, but just massaging his perineum and making himself gasp and shove back into it; when he finally came, how wide his eyes went, how his lips quivered, how his whole body went completely stiff before he melted onto the bed.
He’d exited out of the video to see that Dennis had texted him that he was going off to cook for Garcia and Santos, mentioned that Garcia was mad about him not being there to cook for them before – and he’d laugh-reacted, and said she should pay him if she wanted his services as personal chef, and Dennis had seen it, but hadn’t reacted, and that had made him prickly, and frustrated, and he knows exactly how fucking hypocritical that is.
So he hadn’t kept messaging, hadn’t tried to call him, hadn’t kept bothering him and trying to distract him – he’d looked at all the pictures he could and zoomed in on background details, not the bathroom, but Dennis’ bedroom. At the plain sheets that look pretty thin and threadbare, plain white that’s stained in parts from repeated washes with coloured clothes, and he has two pillows that look pretty fucking lumpy and cheap, although he supposes he should just be pleased he even has two pillows in that fucking bed, because he doesn’t even have a mattress, it doesn’t seem to Robby. From what he can tell from the corner of the bed, what he can see, he’s just got a queen size mattress topper tenuously balanced on top of a single size divan frame that’s got tattered fabric on the side and a broken drawer and no headboard.
He has a bunch of beer crates piled up beside his bed instead of a real nightstand, a battered and dented reading lamp on top of it with his phone charger and a few books – and, amusingly, a little coaster underneath his glass of water, Robby guesses from force of habit rather than because he’s worried about rings of condensation damaging the red plastic of the empty Amstel Light crate. Apart from that, he’s got a tiny little desk with a sloping surface that looks seconds away from breaking apart; a little black metal stool that’s lost the supportive back panel of the seat; a chest of drawers that looks much better than everything else in the room, looks almost new, probably a hand-me-down from Santos, or maybe it was just in the place when he took the room.
He knows that Dennis’ phone is only as good as it is ‘cause Santos gave him hers after her phone plan offered her an early upgrade, and he supposes he should be grateful for that, or the camera quality wouldn’t be as good as it is, wouldn’t let him pause clips of video or particular selfies so that he could see the background of the room.
It’s decently painted, the room – it’s a basic bland colour, that kind of pale yellow that’s got just enough colour in it to distinguish it from landlord white. He knows that Janey will paint some rooms after a renovation pale yellows or blues or greens so that they’re not quite as aggressively neutral as the whites and beiges, make it easier for people to imagine a room as a children’s bedroom or a nursery or playroom.
It’s a pretty small fucking bedroom, so small that it’s barely justifiable that Santos’ place was sold to her as a two-bed – it’s got a fucking window, at least, although it’s facing the wrong way for him to get much decent sun.
It’s stupid, he knows that. It’s stupid – and it’s not just stupid, it’s controlling, he knows it’s controlling, Janey used to tell him off for wanting to buy Jake too much, to buy him more than he needed – she’d laughed her fucking head off at the drone, her head in her hands, and said, well, at least he wasn’t overfilling Jake’s clothes drawers again.
He used to come home after every shift, and whenever he couldn’t fucking sleep at night, he’d place an order – toys, when he was a kid, sometimes, but he always had it nailed into him to get useful stuff as gifts, so he mostly bought clothes or school stuff, books about what he was interested in, a new razor with some different blades for doing his own hair at home, extra chargers, power banks.
He’d limit himself to one thing a month, and put some stuff aside for birthdays or Christmas – everything else, he’d surreptitiously drop into the lost and found, either in the ER or in the ones on other floors in the hospital, so it wasn’t as obvious that it was him.
Adamson had clocked it when he and Janey were still together, because he’d asked gently if he thought that he needed to buy the kid’s love, and Robby had kind of panicked, at the time, because that wasn’t, genuinely, what he’d been trying to fucking do – he’d just been excited to spend money on somebody.
He rarely got stuff for Monty outside of the occasional birthday, because it felt weird, like he was crossing a line, somehow; Jack is hard to buy for, because half of what he wants is crazy trauma kits or for-fun medical supplies that Robby wouldn’t buy for anybody as a gift, and he otherwise lives a pretty minimalistic life; Dana enjoys the flowers he sends her at holidays, and every five birthdays he gets her a piece of jewellery like a nice bracelet or a set of earrings, which she tells him off for doing unless he’s gonna buy her a ring, but she always wears them, after, a lot, and she always likes it, what he picks.
He’s good at picking jewellery, seeing what someone likes – it’s why he never gets jewellery for girlfriends, they think that it’s a sign of something, of him knowing them, of him committing to them, rather than a sign that he’s a shrewd son of a bitch that can see the kind of jewellery a woman likes to wear.
He gets a meal for the shift once or twice a month, after a particularly bad day; he donates to different funds, different medical charities and causes; he pays the double rate for his membership at Rodef Shalom even now, though he hasn’t even taken tickets for High Holy Days since his grandmother was still alive, and even then, when he moved back, he begged out of everything, made excuses, except for Yom Kippur.
Adamson had known it pretty early on, after Robby and Janey broke up, that he was still buying stuff, that he was still doing it, and he’d known that he was dropping stuff off in the different departments.
“Anybody tell you your approach to tzedakah is a little unusual?” was the most he’d ever said about it after he’d noticed it – he’d said it quietly, almost kind of gently, after seeing him up on the paeds floor, seen the box he was dropping off of games and cards and shit.
“Anyone ever tell you you look even older than you are?” Robby had retorted, and Monty had laughed, and Robby knows, looking back, that he was being really fucking gentle, because he hadn’t made a jab back at Robby’s own age.
Robby knows it’s stupid – he knows that Caleb is fucking right, that he should have a team of therapists trying to fix his fucking head, and probably be on a bunch of meds, and a lot of other fucking shit besides.
Still.
He gets a lot of his deliveries to the hospital, and Dana always just signs for them when they come in at intake, doesn’t usually even think about it, although she does today when it comes in at around ten.
“What, Robinavitch, you stocking up for the winter?” she asks, raising her eyebrows, and he takes the boxes off the desk to bring them into the locker room. “There better not be anything for me in there – it ain’t my birthday for another six weeks.”
“You don’t need to tell me when your birthday is,” Robby says mildly. “You wanna tell me what number we’re up to though? I don’t know that, I could get your exact age on your card.”
“Oh, walk carefully on that thin ice, tiger, you’ll end up in the ER,” she retorts, half-laughing as he goes away, and he hurriedly stows the parcels away next to his coat before he gets back to work.
He’s fucking careful about not being weird with the kid, making sure he’s not touching him more than usual or less than usual, that he’s not talking to him more or less than usual. It’s like he’s got a fucking stopwatch in his head over Dennis Whitaker’s name, and a bunch of blaring signs on the inside of his head that say BE NORMAL. BE FUCKING NORMAL.
He thinks he’s managing it, or someone would have said something by now.
Dennis doesn’t seem like he’s acting differently at all, not that Robby can see – they’ve had sex before and come to work together, after all, and he’s a good fucking liar. He does a good job of fending Santos off, at least, and during a tib-fib from some poor kid on rollerblades, Garcia even gets in a dig about him choosing a side of the bed, which earns her a pretty nasty look.
Robby does his best not to laugh, but he doesn’t quite manage to stifle his smile.
“On the side of biphobia in the workplace, boss?” Dennis asks.
“Maybe he’s just on the side of lesbians,” Garcia says.
“You look like one!” supplies the patient helpfully – she’s out of her fucking head from pain meds, Robby thinks, because she did have her helmet on and shows no sign of concussion.
She means it as a compliment, he thinks, because she pats Dennis on the hand as she says it, and Dennis looks at her kind of helplessly before saying, “Um… thanks,” as Garcia sniggers.
“For obvious reasons, I’m not going to comment on this, at all,” Robby says. “And since you guys have everything in hand, I’m gonna be in Exam 2.”
Dennis takes the T two stops along the line and Robby picks him up from there, and when he gets into the passenger seat, he says, “I kind of feel like a spy.”
“Well, you just snuck out of work to get into a commie Jew’s car for a secret gay rendezvous,” Robby says. “We’re doing the Lavender Scare sequel right here.”
“… What?”
Jesus, he feels fucking old, making stupid fucking historical references, and he doesn’t know what to make of Dennis’e expression as he glances across at it, at his focused eyes and expression, the way he’s leaning forward to look at Robby attentively. “McCarthy? The Red Scare? Sniffing out Jews, homos, and communists, getting them out of the workplace?”
Dennis asks, “You’re a communist?”
“Uh,” Robby says, “well, maybe not a, um— We work in public healthcare, we’re all… a little communist.”
“Oh,” Dennis says, and Robby glances across at him, because there’s something off about his tone, as he looks forward at the road instead of back at him. “Um, wow, all those books about Marx in your apartment,” he says very quietly, “I didn’t, um…”
Robby feels the fucking base drop out of his stomach, wonders if he got too comfortable, wonders if he shouldn’t have fucking said that, wonders if—
And then he sees Dennis is doing that stupid sly little smile he does normally when he’s just managed to take Santos for a ride, and Robby exhales hard and shoves him in the shoulder, and shakes his head as Dennis starts laughing and kicking his knees a little, although he’s struggling a little with all the packages around his feet.
“You think that’s fucking funny?”
“Robby, I know what the Lavender Scare is, do you think I’m twelve!?”
“I don’t know what they teach in a theology degree!”
“Well, Jesus was kind of the original communist,” Dennis says, and Robby laughs.
“Sorry, kid, Yeshua ben Sirach was ahead of Yeshua ben Yosef by about two centuries.”
“Sirach, like Ecclesiasticus?”
“Uh huh.”
“He’s not in the Tanakh, though, is he?”
Robby feels a little fluttery, all of a sudden, and he laughs, because he’s pretty sure Dennis was only just telling him that his theology course was all Christian literature, and now he’s recognising the Shema when he hears Judd Hirsch struggling through it in a sci-fi movie, and he knows what is and isn’t part of the canon.
“No,” Robby murmurs, trying not to smile too widely, because it’s a stupid thing to smile about, to feel giddy about, to feel nice about. “My grandmother liked Sirach, that’s all. From God a physician gets wisdom; from a king he shall receive gifts. The skill of a physician shall lift up his head; and he shall stand before nobles. God brings out medicines from the earth; and let not any prudent man refuse them.”
Dennis laughs – no, he doesn’t laugh. He almost fucking giggles: it’s a very quiet, breathless noise, and Robby glances across at him again, because his cheeks have darkened a little, and he has his knees pressed together.
“Don’t tell me I should have been quoting Hebrew scholars at you instead of talking dirty,” Robby says, and Dennis chews his lip, rubbing his thighs together.
“No, it’s not, I’m not horny, erm, well, I am, a little, I guess, it’s just… It’s just nice, how easy you… I can follow it better than Hebrew. It sounds nice when you quote stuff, when you recite stuff. Like, poetry and stuff.” He smiles a little, almost shyly, and Robby quietly laughs to himself, and he can’t kiss the kid right now, not when he’s fucking driving. “It’s impressive.”
“Pick, uh… Get that package on the top of the pile, the little one,” Robby says, nodding to the boxes in the footwell in front of Dennis’ knees, and he keeps his eyes on the road as Dennis cuts it open with some kind of multitool scout thing he has on his keys. It’s a battered old thing, well-used – Robby bets Jack probably has one of his own, whatever the fuck it is, or maybe the newest version of it.
Dennis stares down at the little white box, uncomprehending.
“AirPods?”
“You were scared about having your phone on loudspeaker,” Robby says, “in case Santos heard through the wall. With these, you can have me talking right in your ear, and no one’ll be any the wiser.”
“They’re for me?”
“Well, they're not for me. I like wired headphones.” And really, what he likes is his surround sound, so that his records or his movie or whatever TV channel he leaves on for noise at night is everywhere, and feels like it's filling his apartment.
Dennis stares at the box. “I can’t,” he says.
“Sure you can,” says Robby. “Want to open the next one?”
Dennis stares, jaw dropped, at the pile of boxes. “Oh my God, Robby, you can’t just do this—”
“You can show me how grateful you are when we get home.”
“Aren’t you meant to be a communist?”
“I didn’t get you the means of production, kid, it’s just some stuff for you, for your room.”
Holding the headphone box between his knees, Dennis hesitates, and then reaches for the next box.
He’s a little faster, a little more excited, about tearing into this one, Robby thinks. He likes how wide the kid’s smile is, how his hands are trembling as he says, “Robby, I’m not, you can’t just, you— Are these pillows!?” He’s torn into the vacuum-packed bag, and he’s suddenly got the whole thing in his lap, has it hitting him in the face, but he doesn’t seem to mind, is hugging the pillow. “These look expensive, they, they feel really nice, they feel expensive.” He casts a powerless glance across the car, and his eyes are actually a little bit shiny. “You can’t just— Robby…”
Robby’s family was never at the poverty line, but his grandparents remembered it, lived the memory of it every day, and his family shared a lot of stuff – he wore hand-me-downs from cousins unless it was a special occasion that warranted new clothes, a guitar recital as a kid, his Bar Mitzvah, an award he got for an essay contest when he was fifteen; by the time he was a young man, his grandfather had quietly brought out his dad’s clothes from storage, and said he didn’t have to wear them, if he didn’t want, but that they could get them altered, and…
And he had wanted them, and he had worn them. It had felt like suddenly getting a wardrobe’s worth of new clothes at the time, all his own, shared only with one other person, and a person he already shared so much with.
Except time.
Clothes aside, though, which were always expensive and good-looking clothes, even though they had passed through multiple hands, he did get new gifts – he got toys when he was a kid, got books, and always had good, sturdy furniture, had nice bed linen, had good kitchen stuff. Always sensible gifts, once he was older than ten, always good and practical gifts, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t nice, opening them, didn’t mean that he didn’t feel loved, opening them, and not just loved, but special, cared for, doted on.
Youngest of five brothers is a different thing, would be a different thing anyway, even if Dennis hadn’t spent the last fucking decade without a real home, without any money to spare on anything, without—
“Next one is for you too,” Robby says.
Dennis looks at him aghast, like he’s gonna burst into fucking tears, looks utterly humiliated and also overwhelmed, peeking into the footwell around the pillow dominating his lap as he says, “Robby, there’s like six more fucking boxes here.”
“You can open them when we get home,” Robby suggests, and Dennis ignores him, reaching for another one of the smaller packets and making a quiet noise when he opens it up and looks inside.
Robby smiles, and takes the next turn toward home.