An Erotic Crashers Short: Bridger Levi and Adam Harlow

A quiet interlude between The Soldier and The Oracle as seen in The Crashers.

The boarding house was empty by the time Adam pulled Betty up to the curb outside and killed the engine. Everyone else had gone out for the day, disappearing in opposite directions across the city. He was grateful to have the house to themselves, even for just a moment before Kyle’s heavy booted footsteps thundered up the stairs, and Clara’s voice filled every room once again.

Beside him, Bridger was as silent as he had been on the ride back from Camden. He sat turned sideways in his seat to play with the hair at Adam’s temple and behind his ear. Adam found himself shivering just a little at the touch, now as he had before, the tremor coming over him in a warm current rather than a cold snap.

Bridger’s fingers were long and delicate compared to Adam’s. Their pads were flat and soft from decades of crunching numbers at a desk, while Adam worked with his hands. They felt ghostly in his hair, weightless over his scalp as they traced the structure of his skull underneath. At stoplights, Adam gave himself permission to look. Sometimes he might catch Bridger staring at him, his eyes almost black where the afternoon sun didn’t reach them. They were filled with Adam’s presence in the driver’s seat, darting from his eyes to his mouth and back up to take in each dark eyelash and every tan freckle, cataloged for future reference.

Bridger didn’t look any different to Adam than he did twenty minutes earlier. Adam’s body reacted the way it always did when Bridger was so close, but Adam must have looked so different to him now. So alien and new, like Bridger knew something he didn’t. For it, Adam wanted to kiss him, to pry the secrets from his lips and swallow them whole. In his seat, the swarm of insects roaring in his belly kept him rooted in place, his fingers restless at the thought. Instead, he smiled before the light turned green and averted his eyes again.

As the engine cooled outside the boarding house, they unbuckled their seatbelts. Bridger turned to Adam with a brush of his fingertips across Adam’s cheekbone. The touch made Adam fidget, smiling despite himself.

“What?” he asked, unsure of the answer he could expect.

“Nothing.” Bridger shook his head. “You want to know something stupid?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ve thought about touching you since the time we first went drinking together. You know, when I followed you to work like a weirdo?” Bridger shrugged. “I mean, we’ve lived together for months and, yeah, we’ve touched, but the idea of touching you – really touching you – just kind of never went away.”

Adam swallowed. “Why would I think that’s stupid?”

“Because I’ve wasted a lot of time, you know?” Regret made Bridger look meek. It didn’t suit him. “You told me you loved me, and I pushed you away.”

“You’re here now.”

“Yeah.”

After a moment, Adam pressed his lips together to wet them, his stomach tightening. “Do you…want to go upstairs?”

Bridger smiled this time. “You mean to our apartment?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I figured that was the plan.”

Out of the car, they followed the concrete walkway to the front door. Bridger was the one who laced their fingers together when they walked upstairs, the one who led Adam to their door and locked it behind them. Their jackets were quickly forgotten, tossed to the nearby armchair as Adam brought Bridger to his bedroom doorway to kiss twice. Once softly when Adam put his hands on Bridger’s chest, then again firmly when Bridger’s hands came up to hold Adam’s face. The full head’s height difference between them made itself apparent as Adam found himself stooping to meet Bridger’s mouth, Bridger pulling him down to keep him there, laughing softly at the lengths they had to go to compensate.

It was the first time they kissed since the night in the car outside Bridger’s old townhouse when Adam told Bridger the truth about Caitlin. Bridger had leaned across the space between their seats to place a soft, dry kiss on Adam’s mouth. Then Bridger wiped the tears from Adam’s cheeks and told him they couldn’t be together. It wasn’t so much a kiss as an act of finality, the artificial ending to something that had not yet had the chance to begin.

They kissed once more for lost time before Bridger pulled away to murmur, “Come to bed.”  Adam knew it was meant to be a question by the way Bridger swallowed when he said it, his eyes flicking down to Adam’s lips as he ran his fingers through Adam’s straw-colored hair. The earnestness of the gesture seemed wholly out of character for Bridger and his sharp tongue, a sweetness underscoring the words that only Adam knew him well enough to hear.

Adam smirked at that, his defense mechanisms rising against the flutter in his stomach and the heat in his face.

“But I’m not tired.”

“I didn’t say anything about being tired,” said Bridger, kissing Adam’s smile until it spread.

The laughter that followed made it easier to touch and be touched. Hands moving under clothes and through hair, pulling shirts off and belts open. Pressed into the bedroom wall by the warm insistence of Bridger’s body, Adam consented with a sigh. There was no fear left in them now, no sadness to weigh Adam down as Bridger undressed him with a sure, thorough touch, examining every inch and scar and jut of bone. His mouth on Adam’s neck, hands fanned across bare skin, the room was silent but for their shared breathing, the house below disappearing into space behind Adam’s closed eyes.

Bridger’s thinner frame felt fragile under Adam’s hands as he gripped Bridger to himself, held close at all the places their bodies met. The angles of Bridger’s body came together in the beautiful intersection of slender bones and refined musculature, peaking under skin darker than Adam’s own Irish complexion and blossoming with bruises when Adam wasn’t careful. But Adam was always so careful where Bridger was concerned, mindful of his disease, his seizures, and the way he barked but rarely ever tried to bite. Adam didn’t need to be strong now, his fingers lost between the salt and pepper at Bridger’s temple, his head lulled back to expose his throat because Bridger was steel enough for both of them as he worked down the length of Adam’s body to teethe semi-circles into his hipbone.

Resting on his knees, Bridger made his way to the tip of Adam’s dick with a closed fist. He thumbed along the underside of the foreskin, his lips busy with the softness of its sheath until it receded, and Adam sighed again with the thrum of blood pulsing in the blue bisecting vein. The length of it curved upwards into Bridger’s waiting mouth, swelling with every leisurely stroke, Adam’s breath quickening as his hands came to cradle Bridger’s head to himself.

Watching the head of his dick disappear between Bridger’s lips, Adam licked his own, heat spreading over his skin in a pink stripe down his chest and belly. Bridger finally let Adam slip from his mouth and rose to his feet to kiss him, slow and deep and full. His hand leisurely stroked the underside of Adam’s dick, keeping him hard.

“I love you,” Adam said before he could catch himself. “I mean, I know that’s kind of a stupid thing to say right now, but I just.”

The words spilled out of him and into Bridger’s mouth, filling spaces between them and catching him off-guard. Fight or flight gripped him, but the calming realization that Bridger already knew, that Adam had told him so before, followed. Adam had rarely ever said such things in the correct order. In his youth, he always found himself naked with another boy before he found the courage to tell him that he loved him, so fearful of rejection he would sooner settle for silence than risk the loss.

But this time, Bridger held him tighter and kissed him deeper than Adam had been in years. He pulled Adam to the bed to lay him out across the mattress, sliding himself over Adam to rest where their bodies meet in complementing angles.

“Why is that stupid?” Bridger asked, the words broken up between open-mouthed kisses. He took Adam by the face to thumb fondly over the edge of his mouth and down to his jaw.

Adam shook his head and felt a little stupid, despite the sweetness of the gesture. “It’s just, it’s been a while,” he admitted. “I don’t want you to think I’m clingy about it.”

Bridger tried not to laugh but failed in a soft snort. “Maybe I’m into clingy.”

“Nobody’s into clingy.”

“Maybe I’ll make an exception.”

Moving away, Bridger sat back to run his palms over the tops of Adam’s thighs, down to his knees and up again. With a cant of his head, he eased Adam’s legs back to open to him, studying the length of Adam’s body stretched out beneath him, watching the expansion of his ribcage with every breath. Adam licked his lips and felt truly naked for the first time under the older man’s tender gaze, letting Bridger open his legs to stroke his inner thighs, the floor of his pelvis, and the crest of his hipbones. He swallowed and tried not to let the tension in his muscles betray him, tried to relax to the touch no matter how tightly wound he was, how hungry.

“What do you want?” Bridger asked, bending forward to trace Adam’s navel with his lips and tongue.

“I want you,” Adam breathed out.

“How?” Bridger’s voice was hot against his skin, dark and full of promises. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

Adam closed his eyes with a sigh. “I want you inside of me.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s how I always imagined it.”

At that, Bridger sat up again, something like humor curving the corner of his mouth. “You imagined it?”

“Sometimes.” Often would have been a more apt description, but Adam didn’t want to give all his secrets away in one afternoon. “I mean, not all the time.”

“Wow.”

“Wow, what?”

“You’re just so…innocent.”

Adam laughed at that. “I’m cute, not dead.”

“Did you ever touch yourself?”

Adam’s face suddenly felt hot. “Well, I mean – yeah.”

“Right here?” Bridger asked. “With me in the next room?”

Groaning, Adam rolled away and hid his face in the pillow. “Yes.”

With a chuckle, Bridger crawled over to press himself to Adam’s back, kissing a long line from Adam’s neck to his shoulder blade. “You should’ve told me. I would’ve come running.”

“Are you into that, too?”

“I’m into you,” Bridger said between kisses. “And your taste. And your smell.” Circling his arms around Adam, he pulled him up to hands and elbows, pressing himself to Adam’s back to bring their hips flush together. He rocked forward gently, his dick slotting in the cleft of Adam’s ass, rubbing the head of it against Adam’s entrance. “And the way you feel.”

Adam let out a sigh and squeezed the arm holding him, closing his eyes. “I want you to fuck me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Just like this.”

“Is that how you imagined it?”

Nodding, Adam bit his lip. He told Bridger about the condoms and the bottle of lubricant in the box under the bed and gripped the sheets when Bridger rubbed two slick digits over his hole, relaxing to the touch. Bridger was good at it in a way most guys weren’t, working Adam open onto his hand and twisting his fingers to find the angle that made Adam moan the most. Most guys didn’t know how to use their fingers, just their tongues and dicks, licking and sucking and fucking their way home. Once Adam was open and wet for him, Bridger guided himself into Adam until their bodies connected again, settling in to close his arms around Adam and hold him.

Adam couldn’t help the whine that escaped him when Bridger was inside him, thrusting slowly, surely, filling him with the kind of slow sex Adam remembered having when he was in love. Because Bridger really did love him; it was scary and hard to think of before, but now Adam was certain. Sure, Bridger had said it, but Adam could feel it, too, like he rarely felt it before. He could feel it in the way Bridger pet his throat with fond fingers and murmured into his hair, his voice wet and dripping with words like you’re so fucking beautiful and you feel so fucking good.

And Adam believed it, every saliva-damp syllable, gripping the hand that held them up to lace their fingers together again.

“I love you,” Bridger breathed, when he was inside of Adam and afterward, over and over into Adam’s cheek and his hair and his mouth. “I was wrong before, and you’re mine now, and I love you.”

Making love in a tiny bedroom in a silent boarding house, Adam believed that, too, and felt no fear.