Samba

by Julia

Inspired by the January 26 Tania Maria concert I attended. I also listened to a little too much Paul Simon, Rhythm of the Saints, while writing this.

Huge thanks to Sai for the incredible beta. Punctuation is my friend.

JC watches the singer, lips and hips and wild woman hair, and has to close his eyes so that it is the rhythm that he feels and nothing less or more. The rhythm and Justin, he realizes, when their perfect mixture is disrupted, point and counterpoint no longer. Not suddenly, nothing is sudden in the damp dark, but organically, Justin's arm pulsing less in muscular reponse to the tap of his fingers against the black pants hanging from his hips, and sliding away more.

He feels his eyelids flicker open again at the loss, and sees a beautiful brown-skinned girl approach, long curves generously elegant. He feels like he remembers this from somewhere. Blinks and watches the girl drag long fingers along either side of Justin's jaw, notes the way Justin reponds involuntarily, shifting forward. Almost but not quite the way he had done the night before when lips were pressed in sheer irreverence to that softness or lack of bone just beneath his chin.

Her head cocks and lips turn up at his easy acceptance, she had thought perhaps a little persuasion might be necessary. Not tonight. People are already swaying and moving and praying to forgotten Gods in the place where she is leading Justin. He watches instead, the insistent way her hips coax Justin's into unfamiliar patterns like coming home to someplace you have never before been. Someplace hot.

Too long ago when they arrived, Justin complained in that way he did, his whole face involved, why, why couldn't they stay in the air-conditioned Ritz the Four Seasons the fucking Meridien (which, JC happened to know, was the only one he mentioned in his tirade with a location in Rio). It wasn't that they couldn't, obviously, but that he wouldn't. It was no use trying to tell Justin that. Time and again it proved wiser to kiss the bead of sweat traveling lazily along Justin's temple and strip him of his damp, useless clothes. It wasn't that it made things cooler, but that the man was young and easily distracted.

Not now though, even glancing backwards in question as he pulls the girl close, the patterns becoming his own, moving and hypnotic. JC nods slowly in response, his gaze dark and appreciative. Their contrast is gorgeous, Justin's hard lines against her softness, her skin a luminous blue in the shadows, his a stark red in the spotlights that tend to follow him across the floor, try as they might to avoid them. Even, perhaps especially, in a place where he is beyond recognition, a devious smile and a careless turn of his hips put Justin once more at the center of attention.

Watching is endlessly good, JC thinks. But as the tempo of the enthusiastic percussion section begins to slow, and Justin comes back towards him, he knows what is better. The younger man settles the vee of his legs somewhere over JC's thighs, and slides warm fingers up the length of JC's arms to curve around his neck.

JC pulls himself more completely upright and leans to Justin's ear. "I want to write music that makes you move like that." Then a breath, and he pushes his face into the crook of Justin's neck. There are times when he says things, and maybe it is just too much, not quite right.

"You. You already do." And there it is, the reason why being pressed up against Justin in a little known Samba club in the back alleyways of Brazil is the best reason to breathe he's come across to date.

He presses his lips to Justin's, glad that in the haze of sometime before Justin had discovered exactly what he liked, as he flicks his tongue at JC's lower lip before bending to suckle at it, gently and carefully. The boy moves to his jawline and JC's head tilts off to one side as he mutters hoarsely, baby, baby and rolls his hips without meaning to, feeling Justin nip at him in response and suck again at his neck.

Justin sighs the words, low and sexy, "Quero…"

JC likes it when Justin tries to wrap his mouth around, among other things, the unfamiliar intonations, the unnaturally husky sounds of the Portuguese tongue. One night Justin discovered this as JC appeared close behind him, unbidden but welcome, when he had thanked the appealingly unsophisticated housemaid with a blithe "Obrigado." He isn't ashamed of using the knowledge, here and now, whenever.

"Por favor…"

JC waits for the answer, wait, waiting is the game one plays when fucking Justin, and one is always, always rewarded. "Quero," and this time JC can feel the chuckle near his ear, "serviço de quarto." Now, now, repeating words from a tourist's dictionary, the boy is asking for it if he hadn't been before, asking for what JC loves to give him, warm all over.

He doesn't notice Justin pulling the scrap of paper from the small square wall calendar as they leave the club, noone bothers him about it, because the day had long since wilted and formed a new bud, straining and beyond ready to burst (or was that him?), and the well stirred fusion of Samba and Cachaça is far more engrossing to the people anyhow.

It had taken them both a while to get used to a bed that was old and wooden and more than ready to groan along with them. JC sometimes thought that Justin consciously or unconsciously made rhythms of the sounds, of the bed's groans and JC's gasps and moans.

This night Justin is scrabbling and incoherent, the rhythms his whimpers make anything but intentional. It is longer than usual before JC lifts his sweat-dampened brow from under Justin's chin, drags lips across collarbone before shifting away. Justin does not rouse, but stirs and mutters something deliciously incomprehensible until JC splays a comforting hand across his belly. JC props himself up on one elbow, hand in his own loose curls as he traces fingers along the blue veins beneath the skin of Justin's wrist, a small part of him that is still pale and young.

The boy's long, half-fisted fingers twitch, revealing the scrap of paper crumpled inside. JC pulls at the edges, sees the white with industrial print, 31 janeiro, stark and honest and utterly forgotten.

But not, and time has passed and the boy is not a boy but a man. And suddenly the ache and harsh lights and lack of sleep and painful glory of exposure are behind each of the walls and the watch that Justin never wears anymore ticks loudly on the bedside table.

He is not a boy, but he wakes as silently as one very young, and lets the hand open and the crumpled paper fall between them. As he pulls JC close and beneath him, the harshness of stubble replaces the harshness of the threatening memory. They taste each other and it is not the first or last time and it does not take more than the smallest effort for that to be enough. Justin's thumbs brush beneath JC's lower eyelashes and JC knows his secret crisis is no longer secret, and has been averted.

"I was remembering," Justin says, and stops, but that part he knew, that part was predictable. "I was remembering things, but not anymore."

JC wants to tell him not to forget, to keep it all in the small little overheated pocket of warm air between them on the bed, above the relative cool of the clean sheets (not anymore, not anymore) and below the breeze disturbing the translucent curtains and the fine hairs on Justin's arm. It's a pretty phrase in Portuguese, a line in a Samba song, "não se esqueça," which soon becomes "não se esqueça de me."

The phrase is repeated and Justin complies with the curve of his waist and the goosebumps on his freckled shoulder that fade when JC runs a palm across them. It is all irresistible compliance, but JC wasn't trying that hard to resist anyhow.

They are back asleep in seconds, and JC wonders in his last moments of wakefulness if the whispering beat he hears is the coming rain or a remnant of light drums from the clubs just fading at dawn.