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ifeelbetterTitle: Leave Behind My Wuthering, Wuthering Heights
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ifeelbetter
Warning: I think Arthur is a little OOC in this but...it's the traditional TA/student thing. I kinda think that has to be OOC.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value besides one truly awesome ukulele.
Word Count: 2,442
Summary: Arthur's the TA for Professor Cobb's Victorian Lit class. Eames is annoyingly personable with the cashier at the bookstore and may or may not be trying to sleep with Arthur for an A.
Notes: Prompt from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
inception_kink meme: Eames is currently a student enrolled in Cobb's class, ____ (you pick, something intelligent, please). He's also got this embarrassingly-huge crush on this guy he met at the bookstore (twice) who wore a three-piece suit. That's all fine and dandy, until he finds out that his crush, Arthur, is Cobb's new teaching assistant.
The title comes from--and if you don't already know this, BE SCHOOLED--Kate Bush's song, Wuthering Heights. I am putting the video behind the cut cuz I know some people are deeply offended by the awesomeness of the dance. So, be warned. Kate Bush is waiting behind the cut.
Also. Extra credit for anyone who spots the History Boys ref. Alsoalso. This is, like, an old man by Inception fandom standards. I wrote it about a month ago.
Arthur held up the copy of the book and refrained from pushing it into the cashier's face. He pointed to it instead, trying to express his annoyance solely through his eyebrows.
"This book. It's a Penguin, for god's sake," he said.
The girl looked at him and her eyebrows were giving him a very accurate idea of the ratio of annoyance to indifference she was feeling. "I can see that, sir," she said and 'sir' sounded a little like 'idiot' when she dripped her annoyance all over it like that, "but that doesn't mean it's not out of print. It's out of print."
"You can't just not supply the students with a pivotal text," he said. "Professor Cobb said you've never done anything like this to his book requests before."
"Well, obviously he never requested an out of print book before."
"But you're a used bookstore. You're supposed to have out of print books." He felt a migraine beginning.
"Look, sir--" she started to say but was unable to finish what was promising to be a very tart reply because they were interrupted.
"Cheers, mate," a young man said, edging around Arthur, "won't be but a moment." The guy patted him on the shoulder and turned to the cashier. "Alice back there says you're the one to speak to about the fact that there's a text missing from Victorian Imperialist Fiction."
The girl looked like she was adding "Alice back there" to a list of people who would be discovered mysteriously dead in the river in the morning. "As I was just telling this gentleman, that text is out of print. Hence, we don't have it."
"Oh, come on, love," the guy said, leaning against the counter and propping his head up on his hand. He looked down at her name tag quickly, almost too quickly for her to notice. "Marjory. You look like you've been working here ages. You're probably the Queen Bee in all the employee poker games, aren't you? I can tell a winner when I see one."
Arthur rolled his eyes, expecting the guy to get a slap for his absurdity. Marjory surprised him, though. She blushed slightly.
"It's out of print--" she began but the guy grinned cockily at her.
"You and me, Marjory. We could move mountains. Your brains and--well, your looks too, I don't know if I could compete with that," the guy said as he ducked under the counter. He moved Marjory's screen to face him and typed rapidly.
"You can't be back here," Marjory said but it was in the conspiratorial whisper of someone who has no trouble whatsoever with beautiful men popping up from under their counter.
"Oh, but I can," the guy said. There was a little ding sound from the computer. "There, now," the guy said, smug with his success, "how many copies do you need?"
"At least forty," said Arthur who had been watching the scene unfold before him in perplexed annoyance.
The guy looked at him directly for the first time. He looked him in the eye first and then, shamelessly, he covered Arthur head to toe and back in a long calculating look. When his eyes found their way back to Arthur's face, Arthur was scowling.
"So sorry, I don't think I caught your name?" the guy asked, obviously certain that his attentions were never unwanted.
"No, you didn't. Forty copies," Arthur said, the latter half directed at Marjory, who had begun to glower again when Arthur spoke.
"I'll see what we can do," she said, begrudgingly willing to be of assistance.
Arthur nodded briskly and turned to leave, mission accomplished. He checked his watch as he made his way down the spindly staircase, past the queue of undergraduates. If he hurried, he could probably still find Dom in his office.
A hand on his arm stopped him as he stepped out into the bright afternoon sunshine. Arthur stopped, tensed, and turned slowly. Everyone he knew would have known better than to touch him. Anyone who didn't know him well enough to know that didn't know him well enough to touch him. It was a personal Catch-22 that he thoroughly enjoyed.
It was the guy again. Arthur looked down at the hand on his arm until he removed it.
"I'm Eames," he said, holding a hand out.
Arthur raised an eyebrow. "That's a surname," he said.
"Yes. And you're supposed to tell me your name now," Eames said. "Then we shake on it. It's this thing called an introduction."
Arthur rolled his eyes. He started to walk away, unwilling to waste anymore time here when he had places to be.
"I'm just going to have to make up a name for you, you realize," Eames called after him.
Arthur looked back over his shoulder. "Go away, Mr. Eames," he said.
If he had hoped that would be the moment when Eames would give up and go away, he would have been disappointed. Eames grinned widely.
Arthur didn't look over his shoulder again for the rest of the block.
Eames was obviously in the class and it didn't take a genius to make the intuitive leap from Arthur's knowledge of the roster to the fact that he was the TA. Eames looked like the type who kept a tally of the professors and teacher's assistants he slept with and maybe ran a betting pool with all his other rank friends who did the same.
That sort of thing hadn't happened to Arthur before. Even his silliest students, the girls who signed up for courses based on the chili peppers on ratemyprofessor.com, got silent and twitchy around him. Dom once had to interrupt a lecture to explain that Arthur was actually available to them for advice if they needed it. Arthur had tried to scowl hard enough to discourage any of them that were stupid enough to take him literally.
It generally worked out exactly the way Arthur wanted it to: the only students who were brave enough to come to his office hours were serious about the work and didn't bother him with trifles.
Dom only gave the speech that one time because he ended up with all the trifles. He thought that was unfair.
"I'm the professor. TAs are supposed to be the friendly ones. I'm supposed to be sardonic and aloof," he told Arthur when he entered. Dom didn't really do pre-ambles very well.
Arthur handed him a coffee from the grad lounge--it was just shy of utter shit but it was free and close--and shrugged. "We have to play to our strengths."
Dom sighed. "Did you work everything out with the Phillip Meadows Taylor text?"
"They're working on it," Arthur said. "Apparently, it's out of print."
Dom looked confused. "But they do used books. I thought that wouldn't matter."
"That's what I said. It was all a bit of a mess," said Arthur, sinking into the chair across from Dom.
They both took a sip of their coffees at the same moment. Both of them spit it back into the cup.
"This is disgusting," Dom said, looking into the cup.
"It's worse than last semester," Arthur agreed.
They both gingerly placed the cups on the desk. Dom gave Arthur one of those looks, the kind that Mal told Arthur had made her marry him. It usually just made Arthur's nose wrinkle in disgust but his nose was pre-wrinkled by the coffee.
"I am the professor here," Dom reminded him. "Lowly TAs are supposed to go for the coffee."
"You're too concerned with appearances," said Arthur but Dom had a point. It would be ridiculous to send a professor out for the coffee. "Fine."
Dom punched the air victoriously.
Arthur went to Starbucks just to annoy him. He flipped through his copy of Wuthering Heights while he waited, skimming through the passages about gypsies that Dom would be lecturing on in the second week of class.
"I didn't take you for a Heathcliff sort of fellow," said a voice by his shoulder.
Arthur didn't look up. He decided this was his new policy. "It's for the class, Mr. Eames," he said.
"Is that your name? Heathcliff?" Eames asked.
"No."
"Is it Linton?"
Arthur glanced up then. "You've read it, then," he said. He tried not to sound surprised.
Eames grinned. "Oh, yes," he said and Arthur could tell by the depth of his tone that this was a book that was important to him in some way. Probably his mother read it to him. Or an ex-girlfriend.
Arthur couldn't help the way he scrutinized Eames, then. Wondering who it was who put the novel in his hands the first time, why it would be important.
"How can I help you?" said the cashier. Arthur blinked. The line had moved faster than he'd expected and he was trailing behind, leaving a wide gap.
"Two coffees," he told the cashier, frowning.
"Room for cream?" she asked.
"No."
"Black, huh?" said Eames thoughtfully. "I would have thought you'd get it with soy milk."
"Based on our long and intimate acquaintance?" said Arthur.
"You can tell a lot about a person by their coffee," Eames said, looking at the cashier. He did the thing again, where his eyes flicked between her name tag and her face. "Lucy, here, she knows what I'm talking about."
Lucy blushed and laughed. More of a giggle, actually. Arthur wondered whether his eyes would, as his mother had often warned him, get stuck that way if he rolled them too often.
"I bet you drink something sweet," Eames was saying to Lucy. She giggled again. He leaned closer to her and said, in a stage whisper, "Don't you need his name for his coffee?"
"Not when it's just--" she began to say.
"For me?" Eames asked, pouting. "Honestly, pet, I don't know how else to go about finding out what his name is."
"I suppose I could..." she started to say, her eyes darting between Arthur's frown and Eames's tiger-grin.
"It's Arthur," said Arthur. It would have been ridiculous to draw it out anymore. Lucy put the two coffees onto the counter.
"Arthur," Eames repeated, drawing the word out luxuriously. "Fancy a drink, Arthur?"
Arthur held up one of the coffees. "Got that one covered," he said. He turned to leave and Eames fell into step beside him.
"It was a euphemism, darling," he said easily. "Except it's not really a euphemism, is it? You use euphemisms for things that aren't nice. I can be very nice."
Arthur stopped walking and turned to Eames. "I don't want to have a drink, euphemistic or otherwise, with a student, Mr. Eames. And I certainly don't want to have a euphemism with a grade-grubbing weasel."
Eames blinked at him. "Weasel?" he repeated, finally.
"Yes."
"You think I'm one of your students, don't you?" asked Eames, amusement glittering in his eyes.
"Why else would you be asking about the assigned texts--" Arthur started to say.
"Because I'm auditing. I'm transferring into the grad program. The school is making me sit in on lectures in my weaker areas."
Arthur found himself a bit lost for words. His forehead wrinkled as he tried to overlap this new information with his pre-existing data.
"So why would you..." he began to ask but lost the specific words in his embarrassment. Instead, he drew a circle in the air between them with his free hand.
"Why would I what?" Eames asked, confused.
Arthur found himself reddening like a stupid teenager and forced to put into words a thing that he had let sit at the back of his mind, nameless, his whole life.
"You're, you know," he started to say but thought better of it. He tried again, "I'm not...friendly. Or. Well." He focused, trying to find the right word, seeing Eames's lack of understanding. "I'm not...appealing, I suppose." He coughed, ducking his face to avoid Eames's focus. "And you..." again, the word was stupidly obvious and still eluding him, "you know."
"I'm afraid you'll have to spit it out," said Eames. He didn't look like he didn't understand, though, not anymore. He looked like he was teasing information out of Arthur just for the fun of it.
"You're a flirt," said Arthur. "A very good flirt. And...appealing. Why would you bother with...with me?" He tried heroically to make it sound like neutral curiosity.
"So you're under the impression that you're unappealing," said Eames, slowly, like this was the lead-in to a fantastic joke, "but I am and so it's strange I would bother to flirt with you."
"You've flirted with everyone today," Arthur pointed out. "But you only asked me out."
"Do you even know what 'appealing' means?" Eames asked.
Arthur thought that was a bit of a tangential leap. "Of course."
"And you've been near a mirror at some point in your life?"
Arthur frowned. "I take great care to be impeccably well-groomed."
"If I told you you re-defined the term 'appealing,' would you go for a drink with me?" Eames asked, taking the cardboard tray of coffees out of Arthur's hand carefully and sliding his other hands around his waist, pulling him towards him.
"I'd be concerned for your grasp on the English language," Arthur said, finding that he rather enjoyed having a hand around his waist and it only helped that it was someone who annoyed him as much as he intrigued him.
"Your condescension is appreciated," said Eames, leaning even closer. Arthur wouldn't have thought that it was possible to drag out such a small distance. It seemed that Eames just functioned at a languorous pace. "Answer the question."
"Are we still in euphemisms?" asked Arthur. Eames was slowing down even more.
"You have to say 'yes' at this point," Eames said. He was paused, hovering his lips just over Arthur's.
"I have to?" Arthur asked, their lips brushing against each other.
"I suppose you have other options," Eames conceded.
Arthur ran his tongue across the back of his teeth, trying not to smile. To not punch to air victoriously.
"I barely know you," he pointed out. "I don't even know your first name."
"Over-rated," Eames breathed. It sounded like he was struggling with even the one word.
Arthur decided he liked the hand on his back, the voice being breathed into his mouth, and the ridiculous hair he was suddenly running a hand through. This hadn't been how he intended to spend his first day back on campus but, really, he'd done more drastic things in an afternoon.
"Yeah, alright," he said, pulling Eames towards him, finishing the millimeters between them.
Author:
ifeelbetterWarning: I think Arthur is a little OOC in this but...it's the traditional TA/student thing. I kinda think that has to be OOC.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value besides one truly awesome ukulele.
Word Count: 2,442
Summary: Arthur's the TA for Professor Cobb's Victorian Lit class. Eames is annoyingly personable with the cashier at the bookstore and may or may not be trying to sleep with Arthur for an A.
Notes: Prompt from
inception_kink meme: Eames is currently a student enrolled in Cobb's class, ____ (you pick, something intelligent, please). He's also got this embarrassingly-huge crush on this guy he met at the bookstore (twice) who wore a three-piece suit. That's all fine and dandy, until he finds out that his crush, Arthur, is Cobb's new teaching assistant. The title comes from--and if you don't already know this, BE SCHOOLED--Kate Bush's song, Wuthering Heights. I am putting the video behind the cut cuz I know some people are deeply offended by the awesomeness of the dance. So, be warned. Kate Bush is waiting behind the cut.
Also. Extra credit for anyone who spots the History Boys ref. Alsoalso. This is, like, an old man by Inception fandom standards. I wrote it about a month ago.
Arthur held up the copy of the book and refrained from pushing it into the cashier's face. He pointed to it instead, trying to express his annoyance solely through his eyebrows.
"This book. It's a Penguin, for god's sake," he said.
The girl looked at him and her eyebrows were giving him a very accurate idea of the ratio of annoyance to indifference she was feeling. "I can see that, sir," she said and 'sir' sounded a little like 'idiot' when she dripped her annoyance all over it like that, "but that doesn't mean it's not out of print. It's out of print."
"You can't just not supply the students with a pivotal text," he said. "Professor Cobb said you've never done anything like this to his book requests before."
"Well, obviously he never requested an out of print book before."
"But you're a used bookstore. You're supposed to have out of print books." He felt a migraine beginning.
"Look, sir--" she started to say but was unable to finish what was promising to be a very tart reply because they were interrupted.
"Cheers, mate," a young man said, edging around Arthur, "won't be but a moment." The guy patted him on the shoulder and turned to the cashier. "Alice back there says you're the one to speak to about the fact that there's a text missing from Victorian Imperialist Fiction."
The girl looked like she was adding "Alice back there" to a list of people who would be discovered mysteriously dead in the river in the morning. "As I was just telling this gentleman, that text is out of print. Hence, we don't have it."
"Oh, come on, love," the guy said, leaning against the counter and propping his head up on his hand. He looked down at her name tag quickly, almost too quickly for her to notice. "Marjory. You look like you've been working here ages. You're probably the Queen Bee in all the employee poker games, aren't you? I can tell a winner when I see one."
Arthur rolled his eyes, expecting the guy to get a slap for his absurdity. Marjory surprised him, though. She blushed slightly.
"It's out of print--" she began but the guy grinned cockily at her.
"You and me, Marjory. We could move mountains. Your brains and--well, your looks too, I don't know if I could compete with that," the guy said as he ducked under the counter. He moved Marjory's screen to face him and typed rapidly.
"You can't be back here," Marjory said but it was in the conspiratorial whisper of someone who has no trouble whatsoever with beautiful men popping up from under their counter.
"Oh, but I can," the guy said. There was a little ding sound from the computer. "There, now," the guy said, smug with his success, "how many copies do you need?"
"At least forty," said Arthur who had been watching the scene unfold before him in perplexed annoyance.
The guy looked at him directly for the first time. He looked him in the eye first and then, shamelessly, he covered Arthur head to toe and back in a long calculating look. When his eyes found their way back to Arthur's face, Arthur was scowling.
"So sorry, I don't think I caught your name?" the guy asked, obviously certain that his attentions were never unwanted.
"No, you didn't. Forty copies," Arthur said, the latter half directed at Marjory, who had begun to glower again when Arthur spoke.
"I'll see what we can do," she said, begrudgingly willing to be of assistance.
Arthur nodded briskly and turned to leave, mission accomplished. He checked his watch as he made his way down the spindly staircase, past the queue of undergraduates. If he hurried, he could probably still find Dom in his office.
A hand on his arm stopped him as he stepped out into the bright afternoon sunshine. Arthur stopped, tensed, and turned slowly. Everyone he knew would have known better than to touch him. Anyone who didn't know him well enough to know that didn't know him well enough to touch him. It was a personal Catch-22 that he thoroughly enjoyed.
It was the guy again. Arthur looked down at the hand on his arm until he removed it.
"I'm Eames," he said, holding a hand out.
Arthur raised an eyebrow. "That's a surname," he said.
"Yes. And you're supposed to tell me your name now," Eames said. "Then we shake on it. It's this thing called an introduction."
Arthur rolled his eyes. He started to walk away, unwilling to waste anymore time here when he had places to be.
"I'm just going to have to make up a name for you, you realize," Eames called after him.
Arthur looked back over his shoulder. "Go away, Mr. Eames," he said.
If he had hoped that would be the moment when Eames would give up and go away, he would have been disappointed. Eames grinned widely.
Arthur didn't look over his shoulder again for the rest of the block.
Eames was obviously in the class and it didn't take a genius to make the intuitive leap from Arthur's knowledge of the roster to the fact that he was the TA. Eames looked like the type who kept a tally of the professors and teacher's assistants he slept with and maybe ran a betting pool with all his other rank friends who did the same.
That sort of thing hadn't happened to Arthur before. Even his silliest students, the girls who signed up for courses based on the chili peppers on ratemyprofessor.com, got silent and twitchy around him. Dom once had to interrupt a lecture to explain that Arthur was actually available to them for advice if they needed it. Arthur had tried to scowl hard enough to discourage any of them that were stupid enough to take him literally.
It generally worked out exactly the way Arthur wanted it to: the only students who were brave enough to come to his office hours were serious about the work and didn't bother him with trifles.
Dom only gave the speech that one time because he ended up with all the trifles. He thought that was unfair.
"I'm the professor. TAs are supposed to be the friendly ones. I'm supposed to be sardonic and aloof," he told Arthur when he entered. Dom didn't really do pre-ambles very well.
Arthur handed him a coffee from the grad lounge--it was just shy of utter shit but it was free and close--and shrugged. "We have to play to our strengths."
Dom sighed. "Did you work everything out with the Phillip Meadows Taylor text?"
"They're working on it," Arthur said. "Apparently, it's out of print."
Dom looked confused. "But they do used books. I thought that wouldn't matter."
"That's what I said. It was all a bit of a mess," said Arthur, sinking into the chair across from Dom.
They both took a sip of their coffees at the same moment. Both of them spit it back into the cup.
"This is disgusting," Dom said, looking into the cup.
"It's worse than last semester," Arthur agreed.
They both gingerly placed the cups on the desk. Dom gave Arthur one of those looks, the kind that Mal told Arthur had made her marry him. It usually just made Arthur's nose wrinkle in disgust but his nose was pre-wrinkled by the coffee.
"I am the professor here," Dom reminded him. "Lowly TAs are supposed to go for the coffee."
"You're too concerned with appearances," said Arthur but Dom had a point. It would be ridiculous to send a professor out for the coffee. "Fine."
Dom punched the air victoriously.
Arthur went to Starbucks just to annoy him. He flipped through his copy of Wuthering Heights while he waited, skimming through the passages about gypsies that Dom would be lecturing on in the second week of class.
"I didn't take you for a Heathcliff sort of fellow," said a voice by his shoulder.
Arthur didn't look up. He decided this was his new policy. "It's for the class, Mr. Eames," he said.
"Is that your name? Heathcliff?" Eames asked.
"No."
"Is it Linton?"
Arthur glanced up then. "You've read it, then," he said. He tried not to sound surprised.
Eames grinned. "Oh, yes," he said and Arthur could tell by the depth of his tone that this was a book that was important to him in some way. Probably his mother read it to him. Or an ex-girlfriend.
Arthur couldn't help the way he scrutinized Eames, then. Wondering who it was who put the novel in his hands the first time, why it would be important.
"How can I help you?" said the cashier. Arthur blinked. The line had moved faster than he'd expected and he was trailing behind, leaving a wide gap.
"Two coffees," he told the cashier, frowning.
"Room for cream?" she asked.
"No."
"Black, huh?" said Eames thoughtfully. "I would have thought you'd get it with soy milk."
"Based on our long and intimate acquaintance?" said Arthur.
"You can tell a lot about a person by their coffee," Eames said, looking at the cashier. He did the thing again, where his eyes flicked between her name tag and her face. "Lucy, here, she knows what I'm talking about."
Lucy blushed and laughed. More of a giggle, actually. Arthur wondered whether his eyes would, as his mother had often warned him, get stuck that way if he rolled them too often.
"I bet you drink something sweet," Eames was saying to Lucy. She giggled again. He leaned closer to her and said, in a stage whisper, "Don't you need his name for his coffee?"
"Not when it's just--" she began to say.
"For me?" Eames asked, pouting. "Honestly, pet, I don't know how else to go about finding out what his name is."
"I suppose I could..." she started to say, her eyes darting between Arthur's frown and Eames's tiger-grin.
"It's Arthur," said Arthur. It would have been ridiculous to draw it out anymore. Lucy put the two coffees onto the counter.
"Arthur," Eames repeated, drawing the word out luxuriously. "Fancy a drink, Arthur?"
Arthur held up one of the coffees. "Got that one covered," he said. He turned to leave and Eames fell into step beside him.
"It was a euphemism, darling," he said easily. "Except it's not really a euphemism, is it? You use euphemisms for things that aren't nice. I can be very nice."
Arthur stopped walking and turned to Eames. "I don't want to have a drink, euphemistic or otherwise, with a student, Mr. Eames. And I certainly don't want to have a euphemism with a grade-grubbing weasel."
Eames blinked at him. "Weasel?" he repeated, finally.
"Yes."
"You think I'm one of your students, don't you?" asked Eames, amusement glittering in his eyes.
"Why else would you be asking about the assigned texts--" Arthur started to say.
"Because I'm auditing. I'm transferring into the grad program. The school is making me sit in on lectures in my weaker areas."
Arthur found himself a bit lost for words. His forehead wrinkled as he tried to overlap this new information with his pre-existing data.
"So why would you..." he began to ask but lost the specific words in his embarrassment. Instead, he drew a circle in the air between them with his free hand.
"Why would I what?" Eames asked, confused.
Arthur found himself reddening like a stupid teenager and forced to put into words a thing that he had let sit at the back of his mind, nameless, his whole life.
"You're, you know," he started to say but thought better of it. He tried again, "I'm not...friendly. Or. Well." He focused, trying to find the right word, seeing Eames's lack of understanding. "I'm not...appealing, I suppose." He coughed, ducking his face to avoid Eames's focus. "And you..." again, the word was stupidly obvious and still eluding him, "you know."
"I'm afraid you'll have to spit it out," said Eames. He didn't look like he didn't understand, though, not anymore. He looked like he was teasing information out of Arthur just for the fun of it.
"You're a flirt," said Arthur. "A very good flirt. And...appealing. Why would you bother with...with me?" He tried heroically to make it sound like neutral curiosity.
"So you're under the impression that you're unappealing," said Eames, slowly, like this was the lead-in to a fantastic joke, "but I am and so it's strange I would bother to flirt with you."
"You've flirted with everyone today," Arthur pointed out. "But you only asked me out."
"Do you even know what 'appealing' means?" Eames asked.
Arthur thought that was a bit of a tangential leap. "Of course."
"And you've been near a mirror at some point in your life?"
Arthur frowned. "I take great care to be impeccably well-groomed."
"If I told you you re-defined the term 'appealing,' would you go for a drink with me?" Eames asked, taking the cardboard tray of coffees out of Arthur's hand carefully and sliding his other hands around his waist, pulling him towards him.
"I'd be concerned for your grasp on the English language," Arthur said, finding that he rather enjoyed having a hand around his waist and it only helped that it was someone who annoyed him as much as he intrigued him.
"Your condescension is appreciated," said Eames, leaning even closer. Arthur wouldn't have thought that it was possible to drag out such a small distance. It seemed that Eames just functioned at a languorous pace. "Answer the question."
"Are we still in euphemisms?" asked Arthur. Eames was slowing down even more.
"You have to say 'yes' at this point," Eames said. He was paused, hovering his lips just over Arthur's.
"I have to?" Arthur asked, their lips brushing against each other.
"I suppose you have other options," Eames conceded.
Arthur ran his tongue across the back of his teeth, trying not to smile. To not punch to air victoriously.
"I barely know you," he pointed out. "I don't even know your first name."
"Over-rated," Eames breathed. It sounded like he was struggling with even the one word.
Arthur decided he liked the hand on his back, the voice being breathed into his mouth, and the ridiculous hair he was suddenly running a hand through. This hadn't been how he intended to spend his first day back on campus but, really, he'd done more drastic things in an afternoon.
"Yeah, alright," he said, pulling Eames towards him, finishing the millimeters between them.
