Work Text:
“You’re in the way.” The monotony of the other’s voice startled Kaveh out of his hypnotized state by the swirling of his coffee inside its cup. His spoon clinks gratingly against the ceramic as it’s jolted to a halt.
He glanced up to find an unfamiliar face greeting him; dark skin and silvered hair, with bright teal eyes that surveyed Kaveh like he imagined he did to his architectural projects. It was intense, yet neither soft nor pointed, just overwhelmingly inquisitive like he’d never forget what’d seen. He saw something shift in them the moment their gazes met – something almost imperceptible, small and sudden.
“Sorry.” Kaveh murmurs his apology softly, lifting his mug and shifting to the side with a subtle, careful slide of feet before the idea of conforming to the bluntness of a stranger whips up a gentle anger inside him. He responds, instead, with his own curtness this time. “And who, exactly, are you?”
The other man reaches for the coffee pot, pouring the dark contents of the jug into his own mug – seemingly brought from home since Kaveh doesn’t recognize the shape nor design, and he should, given he’d sourced all the ones in the office’s cupboards himself. There’s a brief silence as he seems to inspect what he’d poured, swirling the half filled mug before sniffing lightly at its contents.
“Alhaitham.” He murmurs, taking a long, steady sip of the caffeinated beverage until he seems satisfied by the burning cascade of it into his belly. Kaveh feels something similar, he notes with a shameful kind of clarity, as he watches the man’s throat bob with every gulp. “I’m new. I work in admin. Resources, planning, that sort of thing.”
Kaveh knew little of it, truthfully. He knew its members, because he knew everyone, but he wasn’t entirely certain of all of the job’s little intricacies. He’d never thought to read up on it, honestly, always too busy crunching numbers and drawing thin, sharp lines until his eyes crossed and his brain ached with elongated equations and impossible angles to bother.
“Kaveh.” He says, as if it’s response enough. Alhaitham nods once, digesting the name, and Kaveh resents the way he wishes he’d repeated it back to him, if only to hear how it might sound with that unaffected tone he seemed to use for everything. “I work with the architectural department, well, engineering too. Architectural engineering.”
Kaveh blustered his way through the words, confused by this flustered state he found himself in, and inwardly he cursed the way his teeth caught on his tongue like a fool.
Over the rim of the ceramic mug that Alhaitham’s fingers cup carefully, he sees the barest hint of a smile - calm, collected, handsomely confident. Something flutters in the pit of Kaveh's belly for just a fleeting moment. Dangerous, he muses, too damn dangerous.
In the span of the next two weeks, Kaveh sees more admin at his desk than he has in years of continuous work. Alhaitham, who seemed to never appear elsewhere, would saunter to the door of his small office, leaning on its thin frame with arms full of paperwork Kaveh had never heard of – and he’d heard of everything by now.
Still, he indulged it. He felt he should, given the nature of the work, and he found he enjoyed glancing up from a puzzling amalgamation of technical drawings to a calmer expression than the one he imagined he wore himself. Perhaps it wasn’t only the work that had him waiting daily for soft raps of knuckles to his door frame.
If they weren’t poring over documents that needed reading or signing, they found themselves drawn together at lunch instead. Alhaitham with his same mug from home every day, and Kaveh with his carefully stacked lunchboxes, carefully crafted by hands that knew how to make the most of what they had.
Kaveh found Alhaitham the type to say little, yet pack a veritable punch into whatever short syllables did find their way free. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming, yet he kept no secrets either, Kaveh just needed to find the right path of questioning, and so he did, because he had always been good at getting the best out of people.
He found his newest coworker was younger than him – an easy twenty-eight to his anxious thirty. He had studied various languages, and still spoke most of them with an ease that was impressive, even to him and his own learned tongue. He liked his coffee dark and rich, and his documents ordered with colorfully coded post-its slipped between the slim stacks. He lived alone, like Kaveh, and made no real mention of family, like Kaveh. Perhaps they could understand each other, then? Or perhaps they were the meager hopes of a man burned plenty a time before.
Through questions and observations he learned more and more, watching how Alhaitham flicked through the pages of books with a specific kind of grace, finger and thumb working in easy, quick tandem. He watched, too, how his hands – broad palmed and long fingered and yet never clumsy for even a moment – took care with each thing he handled around the office as if it were all made of glass.
And sometimes, when Kaveh sipped his own caffeinated pick-me-up, his eyes lingered for just a little too long on the way Alhaitham’s lips curled around the edge of his cup, soft and plush and bitterly sublime with coffee.
It was something of an odd friendship – Kaveh for a start wasn’t even sure he’d call it such a thing. They’d hardly made a step beyond coworkers, let alone a leap to something as solid as friendship. Still, they were occasional companions who, despite their similarities in some things, spent their precious free time on too short breaks arguing over the right way to organize your collection of non-fiction academia. Kaveh believed in the power of aesthetic vision mixed with logical placement; colors should compliment, and sizes too, and all of this depends entirely on which kind of shelving you’ve employed to begin with. Alhaitham, on the other hand, couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t simply alphabetize them for ease of finding what he needed. At the very least you could organize by genre, he complained, as Kaveh made a face full of profound disagreement.
Slowly, Alhaitham ran out of paperwork to manifest and soon Kaveh was interrupted from measuring weights and lengths in imaginative, intuitive ways, by Alhaitham asking him for an eraser, or a ruler, or a very specific color of pen it was unlikely anyone in the building would possess. Still, Kaveh shuffled his fingers through his drawers and over his desks, as Alhaitham listened to him ramble his way through the list of that day's events like that had been the question on his coworker’s lips instead.
He found that by the time a month had passed it felt as though he’d seen more of Alhaitham than the man’s own department had. A fact that amused and confused him at once. He’d learned, half against his will through gentle teasing and whispered banter, that Alhaitham’s work days were spent minimizing his workload, not overloading it with minutiae that didn’t matter.
“He’s efficient,” He’d been told, “Not a hard worker, per se, though undeniably good at what he does.”
“Everything’s about getting home on time.” Another had explained, or perhaps complained, about him. “Yet lately his work seems to increase more than it decreases – he keeps asking for extra documents, apparently he’s taken a real interest in the architectural department.”
Kaveh’s ears had gone red, he knows, because he’d felt the burn of them as he pulled the pencil out from behind his ear that kept his hair tucked back, hoping the blond locks would fall across the evidence of his embarrassment.
It was later then, perhaps five weeks after meeting, that Kaveh started bringing in an extra lunch.
“For me?” Alhaitham had questioned with a slightly incredulous feeling to his words, brows rising then furrowing as the slim box had been slid across the table to him.
Kaveh took a seat and hummed his confirmation, popping open the lid of his own matching set of goodies. “I’ve had enough of watching you eat nothing, or something it’s clear you don’t enjoy purely because it’s convenient.” He hopes he sounds as nonchalant as he’d intended to. The truth was he’d felt a twinge of something like duty, or care, watching Alhaitham pick at beige sandwiches and unappealing ready-made bowls of salads as if they physically offended him – because they most likely did.
Food, Kaveh had often heard, was many people’s love language. He wasn’t sure he’d call it such a thing between the two of them but it felt an awful lot like getting tongue tied when he had to present the meal to the other so suddenly.
“I’m picky.” The other notes, carefully lifting the lid after looking away from Kaveh’s own lunch that he’d been eyeing for a moment now, afraid he might be about to receive the same cheesy snack and soup combination.
“I know.” Kaveh states in return, busying himself with undoing the cap of his thermos, sipping at the still warm soup inside. He dabs at the corner of his slim but plush lips with the back of his hand as he continues, “I’m a good listener.”
Alhaitham seems to agree, for once not begrudgingly, as he stares down into what echoes his own wants back at him, and not Kaveh’s. Inside there’s a neatly partitioned offering of a quiche slice, separated from a selection of roasted vegetables, and then delicately cut fruit – tart and crisp, rather than soft and sweet. He lifts a slice of cucumber from where it was set beside his quiche, cut now into a flower-like shape, and the architect knows Alhaitham is wondering why he’d put in the effort to do such a thing, something that seems so entirely without purpose.
Kaveh smiles, easy and light, a chuckle drifting into the air between them as Alhaitham tilts his head as if inspecting the fanciful design. “Stop trying to solve a riddle that doesn’t exist,” He berates with humor, stealing the refreshing bite from his fingers with his own dexterous hands and swallowing it down himself with a satisfying crunch. “It simply looks nice, that’s all, and it’s calming to do something with my hands so early in the morning. It’s like crafting.”
There’s a quiet then in the otherwise empty kitchen of their office. Alhaitham sits neatly, hands set either side of this gifted lunchbox, as he stares down into its contents that Kaveh had toiled over that morning. Back and forth he’d gone, was it too much or too little? Was it far too strange to offer such a thing without warning of any kind? Would Alhaitham sneer or frown, push it back towards him as if it were poisoned –
“Do you not like it?” He ventures quickly to interrupt his own rampaging thoughts.
Alhaitham shakes his head and a nostalgic look glitters in the sea-foam of his eyes that makes Kaveh grateful, for once, to his own good natured interference.
“I like it.” Alhaitham murmurs, before gently – tenderly, like it was a precious thing and not a simple recipe come to life – he feeds himself what Kaveh had prepared methodically, portion to portion, until there’s nothing left. Kaveh thinks he might be more satisfied than the other, simply by the sight.
Next week Kaveh finds himself sitting at his desk under the light of the sun that pours in through the wide windows of his office, chewing on the end of a pencil already roughened with a month’s worth of bitten frustration.
The paper on his slanted desk, tauntingly empty, feels like an impossible hurdle to leap over. A mountain somehow fitted into his moderate generous room, silently laughing at him as he squeezed his eyes shut to the sight of swarming equations and conundrums.
This entire project was an unsolvable mess.
It hadn’t been meant for him in the first place, not really. It had trickled down from hand to hand, each adding their own more complicated twist they could find no real way to summon to life. Now, Kaveh held the fledgling idea in his hands, desperately trying to breathe life into something so unstable, that had the potential to be so thoroughly great. He felt a kinship, then, when he thought of it like that. He imagined one or more of his professors might have described him in the exact same way.
A knock on his door as he slips his pencil behind his ear brings already tired eyes darting to the always open entryway.
“Knock knock.” Alhaitham says, as if the tapping of his knuckles hadn’t been enough to alert Kaveh’s rabbit-like nervous nature to his presence.
“What is it?” Kaveh’s voice left him like his soul had followed, a slow stream of air within the syllables deflating him all the while.
A stack of papers is shaken as Alhaitham steps into the room, sliding the door shut behind him. They find their way to Kaveh’s desk, then his hands, too, as he flips through them.
“I found the permissions you were looking for, and the blueprints that were originally used to pitch the ideas giving you trouble.” Alhaitham perches on the firm but comfortable curved arm of the couch that sat against one of the heavily decorated walls of Kaveh’s office. It faced the sun during the day, the deep maroon of its cushions growing vibrant in the light, and he found himself sitting lazily upon its softness to brainstorm, or simply dissociate, more often than not these days.
A finger taps one paper in particular, Alhaitham leaning across the space to reach and point so that Kaveh might follow his words with ease. “And I went looking for this – Budgets and success rates of recent pitches, and older ones that seemed relevant. That and the set of tried and tested measurements from other companies for the materials they’re forcing on you should make this easier, no?”
Kaveh’s muscles feel tense, then soft, and perhaps not all but a good portion of his anxieties lift momentarily as he closes his eyes and brings the papers to his face, as if they were a cooling balm to soothe him. He had no idea how Alhaitham had gotten these – some he’d been asking for for weeks himself, lamenting all the emails left unanswered and calls being forwarded to nowhere. He decided not to question the work, and only to gratefully accept it instead.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, eyes fluttering open above the paper so that he could watch the way Alhaitham shrugs with indifference that Kaveh could never decide was faux or not. “You really saved me here.”
“Perhaps, and this is simply a theory I’ve been mulling over, if you negotiated better conditions and deadlines you might have to struggle just a little less.”
“Not everything can be negotiated.” Kaveh slaps the papers on to his desk, already familiar with this path of conversation.
“Did you try? Did you ask for help – real help? From your own department?” The questions go unanswered, Kaveh turning himself with a gentle spin of his chair to stare at his blank work rather than sizzle in the hot seat under Alhaitham’s seemingly all-knowing gaze. “Saying nothing is an answer in itself.”
“The project would be rotting on the floor of some poor intern’s shared office, never to be completed, if I hadn’t picked it up as is.” Kaveh reasons, though he’s assured Alhaitham wouldn’t see whatever reason he pleaded might reside in the logic presented.
“And is the construction of this project worth keeling over dead in your office from exhaustion?”
Kaveh’s tongue clicks against his teeth as he sighs, glancing over his shoulder with forced disdain. “You’re obscenely dramatic.”
“Or concerningly, consistently correct?”
“Heinously proud.” He counters again, turning his head quickly, blonde hair whipping at his cheek as he sets his gaze upon his desk again, Alhaitham’s intense stare far too much to take still on such a warm afternoon. “Arrogant, even.”
“Better proud and alive than murdered by the weight of my own benevolence.”
Alhaitham’s feet, clad in their smart, black shoes, tap as they hit the floor with irritated beats. He stands, eventually, as Kaveh lets silence invade the tenderness that had existed momentarily between them before their familiar spat had begun.
With a hand poised on the door’s handle, Alhaitham’s eyes land on him and Kaveh understands the kind of weight he talked of then.
“If you need any more help, you only need to ask. I’d rather spend an extra day at the office than see you burnt out like a cheap candle before the first brick is ever laid.” The creak of the door, a thump of Kaveh’s suddenly restless heart, Alhaitham’s voice coming like a sweet treat again even when his words are so sour. “If you’re going to work your bones to dust for it, you might as well get to see the ugly thing.”
Kaveh snaps to look at him then, offense clear on his face, eyes bright with his bitterness and brows furrowed with his eagerness to refute the claim.
“I have never made an ugly thing in my life –”
“You’ve never made an ugly thing in your life.”
They speak at the same time, almost scarily so, and Kaveh snaps his lips shut to interrupt the flow of what he might have continued. Alhaitham smiles, easy and slow, and it’s such a rare sight Kaveh can feel the way he stares, how captivated he becomes, so obviously enthralled by the warmth of it and yet uncaring of the bashfulness it might usually conjure in him to be caught like that.
“I know, but you never say goodbye without watching me go, either. I like my routines, senior, and I respectfully decline to give this one up.”
Heat on his cheeks, then, a redness that spreads across the deep honey tone of his skin until he’s sick of the feeling. He’d fallen so easily for such a simple sting of barbed words, one Alhaitham would never really say, nor mean, that much had been obvious since their first week of meeting. Petulance overtakes him somewhat then, and he’s certain to glue his eyes to the other’s form as it leaves. He wonders if Alhaitham might count this as what he’d desired, or some subtle form of malicious compliance, as Kaveh frowns at him with continued intensity.
Kaveh made sure to stare, and keep staring, as Alhaitham walked backwards through the doorway and slid the glass door closed as it rarely was behind him. He kept waving nonchalantly through the sheer pane until he was out of sight. I hate him, Kaveh whispers silently, even in the secret confines of his mind, because he still knew it was a lie.
A few days later he finds himself staying late, later than even he might usually let himself. The building is undoubtedly empty besides himself – he’d seen the cleaners once or twice on his routine visits to the bathroom, or the kitchen when he needed caffeine, or actual sustenance. He’d scared a few, he thinks, like an architecturally inclined ghost here to rip up failed petitions and cry in the meeting room.
This time though, it’s a broad back he sees facing him in the dimly lit kitchen. Kaveh swallows the startled scream his body so desperately wanted to let out at first, instead opting for a choked kind of surprised greeting. Alhaitham turns, lifting a cup to his lips to sip the coffee he’d just made. A double is sat in his other hand and before Kaveh can even proffer a question, it’s handed to him.
“You didn’t seem the type to let work keep you after hours.” Kaveh ventures after a moment of silent sipping, the two of them standing beside each other, shoulder to shoulder. “Things must be pretty terrible in your department, hm?”
Silence, again. Kaveh has to look up now, curious as to what held Alhaitham’s tongue so still. He finds him staring off at the kitchen door, a warm cup nestled between both hands. When he finally glances Kaveh’s way it’s with an expression distinctly unreadable – and as yet unseen. Kaveh’s shoulders tense, just a little, his heart rapid without reason in his chest.
“...Mhm.” Alhaitham hums. It might have been an agreement, or something substantially more noncommittal, the architect can’t tell, so he decides to let it go. At least for time. Truthfully he imagines it as agreement, in the end, so as not to need to delve any deeper into what other reason Alhaitham might have for forcing himself into spending an evening at the office.
They spend their time there like this – silent. Kaveh clears his throat once or twice, glancing his coworkers way, but eventually he gives up on initiating anything beyond a genial kind of shared quiet.
Suddenly Alhaitham spins to stand ahead of him. The movement is slow, in reality, careful and calculated, yet in Kaveh’s mind it was like it happened in fast forward. For so long he sees nothing but the drab kitchen door, then suddenly, a broad, strong chest clad in a dark teal shirt, two buttons subtly popped, and tie long forgotten.
Alhaitham doesn’t look down at him, though, Kaveh left to stare up all by himself. The man reaches, fingers hooking into the lower rim of the kitchen cupboard above Kaveh’s head. He’s searching for something, pushing cups and boxes to one side then another. All Kaveh can think of though is how his scent, lived in all day, wafts delicately into his senses.
He keeps his coffee cup close to his lips as if he might drown out Alhaitham’s tempting aroma, focusing – or trying to – on the delicious subtle bitterness that smokes out of the mug instead. His eyes, though, take a journey along Alhaitham’s barely visible collarbone where it’s peeking out from his shirt’s collar that shifts to the side with the action of his arm. His skin, dark as it was, glistens with even the barest hint of sweat. The office grew warm during the day after all, and at night that humidity still lingered at times.
His gaze drifts higher, following the stretched column of Alhaitham’s neck, the slight bump of his adam’s apple, and the curving, striking structure of his jaw –
A box is lightly dropped onto the counter, and the door of the cupboard above him is left to slam by itself. Kaveh’s shoulders jolt, and within a moment he’s face to face with who he had been bashfully leering at all the while.
Alhaitham leans lower than he needed to, so low their foreheads almost touch and Kaveh is left to wonder of the purpose of such proximity. His heart rate quickens, and he wishes he might somehow pull the reflection of himself from the window nearby only so he might kick his own shins for being so childishly giddy. Still, he decided not to blame himself fully, not when poised as they were, he could feel the very air Alhaitham breathed ticklishly drifting across his own lips. He hazards a glance, swallowing the lump that forms in his throat at the sight of perfectly plump, firmly set lips.
A hand, warm and wide, slips over his forehead suddenly, making a mess of his golden, silken bangs in the process. Kaveh’s eyes flick back up to staring into his companion’s. Alhaitham acts as if he’s checking the architect’s temperature, and Kaveh is uncertain of the truth of the movement, but he remains obediently still regardless. The hand shifts, fingertips now stroking down the slight curve of his cheek, cupping his chin after, before letting him go entirely as Alhaitham steps back. The distance between them now is normal, expected – an appropriately co-workerly length.
“You look tired.” Alhaitham states, and Kaveh feels a rush of heat at his ears. What had he expected? Remarkable? Radiant? Ravishing? He glanced at his reflection in that window once more, bickering with himself in his mind as embarrassment settles like a lead weight in his gut. “Remember to eat.”
It’s all he says, then, gesturing to the small box he’d taken from the shelving above, just a vessel for some uninspiring breakfast bars Kaveh had never felt desperate enough to indulge in. He nods, though, as if he might, and Alhaitham nods too, as if he believed him.
He’s left alone then, dangerously so, only his thoughts and his work and his overzealous heart to occupy him.
The gift of eloquently layered paragraphs and seemingly unending tables, graphs and budgets did make a world of difference, and yet Kaveh still found himself slogging through a swamp-like muddle of ideas, promises, and genuine possibilities. The work only seemed to slow again immediately after whenever he found something like a breakthrough, a steady course of ups and downs where the only certainty was the uncertainty of it all.
He’s staying late again, when he shouldn’t, when he knew the disappointment it might curate within his friendships. His heads in his hands and his shoulders are slumped and he’s been so engrossed in his work he hasn’t even shifted the blinds to block the light of his desk lamp from the dark that crept in from the outside now.
Distantly he can feel that familiar ache in his back and the strain in his fingers, yet he can’t help bending ever forward over his work station and scribbling a few more notes, a few more lines, a few more this and a few more that. He needed a few more lifetimes to understand what his higher ups wanted him to build here.
With his hands guarding his face as they did in this cruel cycle of work induced madness, Kaveh doesn’t sense the others presence until a warm cup of coffee – takeout this time, its papery outer layer beige and rigid – is placed just within his peripheral vision.
Kaveh all but jumps out of his skin, shoulders tensing painfully with the fright and he spins in his chair that should be comfortable, and might have been, if he didn’t spend the majority of his life in it molding its ergonomic form to his own.
“You have got to stop creeping up on me like that.” The words hiss through the grit of his teeth, the heaviness moment passing just moments after, drifting into some distant kind of comfort instead, along with the slowing beat of his heart. Fright gives way to gratitude, as his fingers ease their way around that familiar heat that radiates against his palm now.
“Perhaps it’s you who needs to improve their ability to perceive their own surroundings, or to simply stop spending every night in this building being miserably overworked.” Alhaitham offers, and on any other day Kaveh might have accepted the useless fight, but he’s tired and he’s fought enough with paper and pen, he feels no need to do it with words today.
Alhaitham must have sensed the lack of agile sharpness in him. His hand, large and heavy, sets against Kaveh’s shoulder and squeezes just once, light and kind, before he wanders to that couch he’d perched on days ago, too.
“Take a break.” He – asks? Commands? Kaveh’s not certain. There’s no gentle rise in the tone of his voice, but it’s so calm, so gentle, it hardly feels like an order, either.
Kaveh glances at the messily stacked documents Alhaitham had brought to him those days ago, strewn across his desk now like the end of a shoddy card trick. He sips from his cup, basks in the warmth of the coffee that seems to penetrate even into his bones, and hums his words morosely against the papery rim. “I can’t.”
Alhaitham seems to follow his gaze, looking towards the papers too; his gaze remains unchanged as it glosses over blank white, and then other pages overflowing with smudged ink and gritty pencil. He takes it all in, yet his expression doesn’t change again until it lands on Kaveh. The architect stiffens under the pointed intensity, his rapid heartbeats growing tighter within his rib cage, fluttering like a captured hummingbird.
“The work will still be there in a few hours, in the morning even.”
Kaveh grimaces, cup set down on his desk again now, his thoughts uncaring for how it might stain a diluted ring of brown into the expensive wood. “Was that meant to be comforting?”
Alhaitham laughs, quiet and short, just a snippet of affection leaking into the sound for Kaveh to hear, alone as they were. He shakes his head and with his own coffee deposited on to the side table nearby he pats the couch beside him. Kaveh remains unmoved, shaped brows furrowing above the scarlet of his determined gaze. He couldn’t, he still thought, feeling the imaginary chains of his work holding him here.
He thinks he hears the metal snap within his rattled mind when Alhaitham tries a different approach; the broad width of his palm shifts, slipping up from the admittedly already inviting couch and instead patting once, then twice at his own thigh.
They stare at each other, Alhaitham steadfast and unashamed, Kaveh flustered and pink, no doubt, from his toes to his ears.
It doesn’t feel real, and after he’d wonder if that’s why he stood so easily then. If he believed it were just a dream – the manically pleasant hallucinations of a man who had done nothing but work, work, work for the last year, or ten of them, straight.
Kaveh’s feet stop just a few inches short of Alhaitham’s, or they do for a moment that is, until Alhaitham’s heavier, thicker set thighs swing slightly open like an invitation. Without thought Kaveh immediately accepts, stepping forward until Alhaitham brings his legs subtly together again, letting his knees knock gently into the sides of Kaveh’s own.
His hands – those hands Kaveh had all but obsessed over for weeks now, with their strength matched only by their gentleness – settled at the sharpness of the architect’s hips. They don’t pull and they don’t squeeze, they merely guide him slightly forwards so that Kaveh has to reach his hands towards the wall for support, lest he fall right into it, or onto Alhaitham below.
He was poised, far more so than Kaveh felt he was now. He was leaning back into the plush set cushioning of the couch like not a single thing was out of place, like it was all as it was meant to be. All the while the careful pads of his thumbs rubbed up underneath the loose fit of Kaveh’s crisp, cream shirt.
“You deserve a break.” He insists and Kaveh, under the thrall of that low, vibrating tone, almost begins to agree with him. “Even I can see you work like it’s a punishment you need to carry, like you enjoy the weight of all that stress –”
Alhaitham pauses, Kaveh hears the exact moment the cogs start whirring violently in his mind, tapping and clicking their devilish little notches until it all fits into place. If Kaveh was any better at managing his expressions, it might never have.
“Is that it?” The words are whispered, Alhaitham draped as he was over the couch behind him, head tilted back so that he could stare up into the way Kaveh was forced to arch over him, surveying his face for any hint of emotional giveaway. “You want to succeed, but you also want it to hurt – just a little bit?”
“You’re getting a little carried away, aren’t you?” Kaveh tries to counter his words with a practiced ease, but he hears the stutter of his own voice, the tension taut within the syllables.
He can hear, too, the shaking sound of the breath he sucks in when he feels the wandering slip of Alhaitham’s hands. They move down at first, falling from the safety of his hips to the subtle swell of his thighs. Eager yet careful fingers curve around the backs of his legs, gliding upwards now over the thin, soft material of his trousers. They stop only when they’re cupping just underneath the sloped rise of his ass and Alhaitham squeezes him now, the sensation forcing Kaveh to jolt forwards just a little, an embarrassing admission on his lips in the form of an exhilarated gasp.
“Alhaitham –” Kaveh attempts to bargain – for his sanity, for his life, for both? He’s not sure.
“Relax.” Comes the easy reply, strong fingers massaging into plush, clothed flesh.
“We’re at work.”
The reasoning has little to no effect on his coworker, Alhaitham merely raising a brow as he leans his head back further again to watch the delightful struggle caressing Kaveh’s features now.
“I’m not. Besides, you’re entitled to a break – as I keep reminding you – and we’re the only ones here. Unless you’re expecting company.”
A pause, long and quiet, as Kaveh feels the proverbial fence digging into him as he sits so neatly upon it. On one hand, he’s decided he wants this; Alhaitham’s hands on him, Alhaitham’s eyes on him, Alhaitham speaking directly to his very thoughts as he trembles where he stands. For just one time or forever, he can figure that out later, but part of him needs whatever this is right here on this complimentary company couch.
The other half of him, of course, is thinking of the inevitable embarrassment, the idea of walking back into this room tomorrow, when the halls are full and loud, and being able to think only of what had been done here. The horror of humiliation if Alhaitham never looks his way again, unlikely as it felt.
For once his need might outweigh his shame.
Kaveh closes his eyes to the world for just a moment, a second of peace before a storm.
He climbs now into Alhaitham’s waiting lap, legs bent either side of his sturdy thighs. It’s admittance enough of his intentions, and Alhaitham’s hands lift from where they had settled low, reaching high now to cup his face instead. He pulls him in and Kaveh’s left wondering how the inevitability of this hadn’t hit him sooner. All those hours drifting closer, seeking out one another when they had never really needed to – watching each other do the mundane like it was the most interesting thing in the world.
Lips brush against his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, and Kaveh lets them drag sweetly, softly, slowly against his own, at last.
Alhaitham tastes like coffee, earthy and rich, the taste overwhelming yet never quite enough. Kaveh wonders if he does too, or if the fruit of his lip balm was more ostentatious, or perhaps there was nothing but the flavorless chill of his water. Whatever it was it hardly mattered as Alhaitham’s hands pulled him close, fingers settling into the waves of gold that sat over Kaveh’s nape. They twirl into the soft locks, tangling their way through to hold him steady as blunt teeth draw over the swell of his lower lip, replaced quickly by the draw of a tender tongue.
Kaveh loses track of time, and space too, as Alhaitham’s orchestrates the rhythm of their mouths. Sensual and slow, they glide together with gradually charging desperation. An intensity has brewed between them, left untamed for too long now, heavy enough that Kaveh could feel the thing pressing down on them from all angles, warm and sticky and inescapable.
A sigh he lets out between the parting shapes of their mouths is hitched suddenly into a gasp when the rumbling vibration of his phone against hard glass startles him into sudden clarity. The architect leans back, wiping at the shimmering moisture that coated his lips now courtesy of Alhaitham, and with a flustered kind of grace he leans to the side.
Kaveh reaches his phone with a groan of exertion, arm outstretched to the side table where the interruption was placed. The placement had been meant to provide his work day with the peace of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, he of course had not accounted for ending up straddled across a man’s lap right beside it.
“Sorry.” He murmurs, as the thing keeps shaking in his palm. Messages poured in as they did, and always would do, as long as he kept this job. New data, new budgets, new clients – all things he’d forgotten to worry about for a sweet, short second.
It’s distracting. All encompassing in a way Alhaitham wasn’t for now. It makes his chest tight in uncomfortable ways, his mind heavy in his skull, all he hadn’t done standing like a daunting statue in the hazy distance of his future. What was he doing relaxing like this, being foolish like this, there was so much he needed to do, so much to –
A dull slap snaps the silence into something unknown, a kind of restless quiet Kaveh had no words for. There was the slap, sudden and clear like the crack of thunder, and then there was the gasp he realized had slipped from his own mouth in reply, high and clamoring for something. A thud, his phone hitting the carpeted floor as his fingers had jolted away from its cool, slippery exterior as the strike had shocked him. Now there’s only the rushed sound of his own breathing, unsteady and staggered as he tries to gather even a single thought to his tongue.
Kaveh’s fingers grip into the curve of the couch’s arm, short blunt nails dragging and catching across the plush fabric. “What are you –”
Another strike, a little harsher this time, a little more purposeful in the way it lands firm and heavy on the supple curves of him.
“You’re on a break.” Alhaitham’s voice comes easy, like it always seemed to, as if nothing had changed. A stalwart soldier in the face of this madness he created within Kaveh’s synapses.
His coworker’s hand is gentle now when he speaks, slipping in smooth circular motions around the cheek it had spanked only a moment before, like a salve to a burn he comforts the skin beneath his clothing. Kaveh shudders, and flexes his own fingers where they hold him as steady as they could.
“It might have been important, just one –” Another, harder still, and he’s slipping over the arm slightly where he had begun to try and reach for his lost phone. A gasp, and a yelp, high and keening in his throat as a pulse of something heated floods his veins.
“Are you doing this on purpose, senior?” Alhaitham asks, and Kaveh wishes he had an answer that might satisfy them both.
No? Not a lie entirely, but certainly something like it, something indistinguishable. Maybe? Noncommittal, embarrassingly coy. Yes? He couldn’t say it, couldn’t own the honesty of the admission with how he shook beneath the tenderness of Alhaitham’s wandering hand now.
Kaveh didn’t know entirely if he really had been testing the mettle of Alhaitham’s plan here, but he knew what he’d found in himself along the way, what poured like molten metal into his tightened core now. So he remains silent, turning his head to glance back over his shoulder with eyes that pleaded silently, glossy as water and red like jewels.
Alhaitham says nothing now, too. His head tilts though, subtly, grey toned strands falling across his face as his ferociously affectionate eyes drift down from the ask of Kaveh’s eyes, to the promise of his lips, then low, and lower still, to the temptation of his hips.
There are no words still as he shifts his body, and Kaveh lets him. Alhaitham’s hands tug at him, push at him, gentle and slow, until Kaveh’s exactly where he wants, or needs, him. He finds himself still on his knees but in a markedly different way, arms folded slightly under his own head as he’s kept folded over Alhaitham’s lap now, ass high in the air.
“If you’re going to torture yourself, Kaveh, there needs to be control. There has to be an end to it.” His voice travels across Kaveh’s form in the air, heavy and warm and delightfully rumbling through its low tones until Kaveh can barely understand him. “Someone to take care of you through the ache, hm?”
It’s hard to do much but agree vaguely, head lolling with what felt like a nod to him, and he hoped looked like one to his companion now, too.
Kaveh adjusted his position, feeling how Alhaitham’s knees subtly dig into the hard curve of his ribs and the contrasting softness of his stomach where he was laid across them. The shifting makes his back arch and his ass rise subtly higher into the air of his darkened office, like he’s chasing a breeze from his ceiling fan that felt cool in comparison to the heat radiating off of Alhaitham’s form.
That warmth traveled all the way to Alhaitham’s hand, fingers that were long and heated and so achingly familiar to him now it burned to feel them draw along the back of his thigh. From his bent knee to the dip just below the curve of his ass cheek, Alhaitham draws firm fingers up and down, and then inwards. Kaveh gasps as the ticklishly light feeling drifts over the already bulging shape at his crotch, cock jumping under thin layers of fabric when Alhaitham cups him momentarily before returning to soothing, smooth splays of his hands over trembling limbs.
“I’ll stop,” He starts before pausing, the deep timbre of his voice rumbling from his chest, from somewhere Kaveh can no longer see, that honeyed, calm tone making his own stomach twist and flip with desire. “If you ask me to.”
He wishes he could form a sentence so coherent, short as it may be Kaveh envied the structure, the normalcy. He could offer only a grunt and a hum, acceptance and understanding in their purest, simplest forms.
There’s little time to think on it for much longer, not when Alhaitham’s hand comes down against him with a firm, sudden swing.
Kaveh hadn’t expected to be so exhilarated by the feeling. The sharp sting against him, the throb that follows – like pain but different. Better.
He lurches slightly, gasping sweetly into the air when Alhaitham’s hand follows up with a quicker, lighter slap just to exacerbate the sensation of the first. It works wonders on him; Kaveh’s skin tingles, little bumps forming across the tanned flesh that make his form shiver continuously. All that heat that pooled in his core spread out along the width and breadth of him, trickling down into his limbs like the warming lick of flames.
There are words after. Alhaitham’s asking him something, it’s so distant he can barely register the sound, all of it engulfed by the thumping beat of his own heart within his ears. Kaveh feels the slip of fabric around his hips, air against his thighs and a tautness of rolled clothing around his knees.
“Good boy.” Alhaitham soothes, sudden and sweet, and Kaveh feels a little knocked off his axis by it – had he always liked those words so much? Had he always wanted to hear them this badly?
He buries his face into the cushion below it and a quiet whimper of acceptance is his only acknowledgment of the praise, for now.
It was an oversight on his part, perhaps, not to think of just how different it might feel to have Alhaitham’s soft palm caressing his bare skin now. But it is, it’s so entirely different. Exquisitely excruciatingly so. His warmth mirrors Kaveh’s as he cups what was likely turning a subtle shade of red atop honeyed tan. His thumb, tender and light, brushes a slow circle into the softness of him.
“Ready?” He calls, and Kaveh answers with a quick nod and an unashamed wriggle of his hips, as if he were finding a steadier position to take before he met that palm again.
Alhaitham hums an appreciative noise, then once more begins this little routine they’ve started.
He hits hard for the first, then softer the second, but this time he doesn’t end it there. He keeps a steady pace, hard, soft, hard, soft – eventually Kaveh forgets which is which and feels only the same deliciously sharp stinging with each fresh contact. Alhaitham alternates cheeks, too, not focusing too eagerly on either and Kaveh can only imagine with shuddering breaths how the flush of scarlet must be blooming all the way across him now.
Alhaitham’s other hand was free to roam as the other was busy with each calculated spank. It starts by slipping against his newly nude hip, easing against the bone that jutted out beneath unblemished skin, tempting and sharp and shifting under his touch with needy little shakes and thrusts when the sensations drive Kaveh to move beneath them.
The touch moves – though he can barely register it beyond the rest. Alhaitham walks his fingers up along Kaveh’s still clothed back, enjoying the slip then climb he has to take along the arching curve of his spine. Eventually he finds the architect’s nape. Kaveh thinks at first that the touch is gentle, innocent and ticklish even as blunt fingernails scrape lightly against the sensitive skin forcing goosebumps to rise along his skin again.
Soon, long fingers slip to cup around the pretty, slim cylinder and Kaveh finds himself pressed firmly down into the seat. He can feel the fabric’s weave dragging against his cheek almost uncomfortably but he can’t lift away to escape it. He doesn’t think he’d try, really, beyond the first sudden thought to push back against the hold, rebellion always a little fresh in his blood. Within a moment he succumbs to it, that comforting grip, going limp beneath the carefully tight hold of the other man’s larger palm.
The next slap of palm to ass makes Kaveh whimper, unable to throw his head back into the air because of Alhaitham’s hold upon him, and instead settling for letting his open mouth draw along the couch beneath it. He can feel, as he shifts his body to push back into the soothing caress of a hand, how he’s drooled on to the plush cushioning. It’s slightly wet, feeling momentarily slick against his cheek as he turns his head, hazy eyes unfocused as they stare off at his desk; it had consumed so much of him, that thing, and yet now when he looks at it, just for this moment, he hardly recognizes its existence.
Kaveh sways forward then back with every hit now, distantly chasing the high of the sting, and how his cock – free from the constraints of his clothing as it had become – just barely grazes against Alhaitham’s thighs when he does. Just the tip, sensitive and blushed red with arousal, draws across them, light as a feather and maddening as anything has ever been. Kaveh can barely keep his eyes open, nor his mouth closed, with every tantalizing brush of fabric to him.
“You’re being so good for me.” Alhaitham murmurs, and Kaveh’s lost track of if the words are really for him, or whether Alhaitham really meant them. All that mattered now was the way they made him feel. The excitement that burned its way through him at the mere hint of his coworkers erotic praise. “You like this?”
Alhaitham’s hand comes down with a strike so sudden and sharp Kaveh’s certain his vision blurs, darkening for a moment and returning more vivid than ever. He makes no real sound in reply at first, whatever might’ve occurred stuck almost painfully in his throat before he chokes around it, moaning after as he ruts into the gradually warming air.
“Words.” Alhaitham states, his hand slipping down between Kaveh’s stinging, bruised cheeks. His fingertips are soft, almost silky like Kaveh’s own skin, as they slip over his hole, then his balls, finally brushing along the twitching hardness of his shaft. “Please.”
They’re muffled, of course, those words he asks for, by the way Alhaitham’s hand still keeps his face pressed light but firm to the couch, but he tries – how could he deny such a polite request?
“Yes.” The word is elongated by the way he stutters around it, the sounds blending together with the difficulty of talking with his cheek flattened as it was. He completes the whisper as he shifts his hips, subtle and slow, chasing just a moment more of friction with Alhaitham’s sweet fingers. “I like it.”
There’s a rustling sound then, a zipper and fabric shifting, and Kaveh would look if he could so he can only guess as he feels a kind of heat emanating against his stomach. The sensation that follows almost knocks the breath out of him.
Alhaitham holds them both in one hand, his palm and fingers heated and almost slick with beading sweat. Kaveh’s cock jumps with the thrill, pre dripping down the side of Alhaitham’s own length where they touch now. It’s scooped up quickly by pragmatic, eager fingers and slicked around the two of them. The glide, then, is enough to make Kaveh’s very bones ache with the force of his need.
With each stroke – Alhaitham’s hand moves steady and quick, a stark comparison to the gradual pace of the spanking Kaveh had received – Kaveh feels a little more lightheaded, a little more removed from reality as heat and desire both swirled in the pit of his belly. He feels how his hips move without his thought, stomach caving in subtly as pleasure fizzes in the tips of his fingers and toes. He feels mad with it, wanting and desperate in ways he’d forgotten he could be.
He gets so close, tasting the static rush of his orgasm on his nerves, gasping into the fabric that was damp with his spit now, before the sensation simply… Stops, cruelly absent all of a sudden.
Alhaitham’s hand disappears and Kaveh is left whimpering at its loss. He’s moaning and shivering his way along the edge of that precipice he so longed for now, desperately trying not to lose what he had accumulated to get there. He felt a little adrift, waiting for this touch that eluded him, fleeing from his wanton state.
“Not like this.” Alhaitham attempts to clarify.
Just as Kaveh’s about to turn his head to try and look to Alhaitham, to understand his words better, that palm he’d grown so familiar with meets his still aching, stinging skin with a force that makes his mind throb and his cock jolt. Precum is dripping in such heavy droplets now it’s leaving a myriad of wet marks along Alhaitham’s clothed thighs.
“Like this.” He’s told, and only now, at almost the end of this so-called break of theirs, can Kaveh hear the same mirrored want reflected back at him in the deep reverberation of Alhaitham’s voice.
Kaveh doesn’t know if he can, if it’s even possible, but he can’t shake his head no, nor voice his doubts. Instead he’s able only to moan with each subsequent slap of hand to ass that finds him now. He’s arching up into it, searching for the sting that comes like clockwork now. His back aches with the curve he holds it in, and his cheek is irritated by the slide of the couch to it whenever he moves, but he dislikes those feelings so little in comparison to how much he adores the rest.
Alhaitham, in comparison, is pressed upwards slightly, shoulder blades digging in to the back of the couch and his heels into the floor, thighs tense from the exertion but Kaveh can feel how this position pushes the tip of his heavy, hard cock into the softness of Kaveh’s stomach, and why he would chase it. On occasion, when the random desperate jolting of Kaveh’s body matches the stubborn positioning of Alhaitham’s, their lengths brush together for a short, sweet second of bliss.
Kaveh’s doubts on the matter are all but quelled at one such moment. The tension he feels, the sudden build of heat at his core that spreads out into every far reaching part of him, is so singular and so tortuously about to be his end he wonders how he ever doubted it to start with.
It’s a moment so perfectly timed it almost feels orchestrated – in some ways he supposes it is. Kaveh tenses, on purpose now, bracing for the next spanking to come and in doing so he winds up every muscle in himself so tightly they can only burst free in the aftermath. He’s biting his own lower lip when it happens, that last hard slap across his behind, and if he’d bitten any harder he might’ve drawn blood.
It stings just so, aches so perfectly he shudders with an intensity that almost crumbles him atop Alhaitham’s lap.
His mouth drops open with an unbidden, unrestrained cry of unmistakable pleasure. The rush of it has his eyes fluttering closed, light erupting in popping, dancing little sparks across his eyelids. His hips buck, his cock twitching as ropes of pearly, sticky release shoot across the dark navy of Alhaitham’s clothed thighs. Kaveh curses in a way he rarely did, though he himself can barely hear the word beyond the sound of his own manic pulse. It’s so loud in his head, thumping through his ears, he fears that Alhaitham might be able to hear it too, though it hardly mattered now.
Kaveh shivers through the whole thing, and after. He shivers until in his daze he feels a hand on his – his head now released from the hold Alhaitham had kept upon him – and how it’s guided to the burning heat of Alhaitham’s own length.
He watches with a bleary scarlet gaze as his hand is curled around his cock, then covered by larger, thicker fingers, and moved in steady, quick strokes. He’s entranced by it, honestly, flickering his exhausted eyes up to see how Alhaitham seems to mutter to himself – Kaveh’s name, he’d realize later, over and over like an odd little prayer – as his head tilts back, further and further still until it’s resting on the back of the seat, eyes closed where they might’ve looked up into the ceiling’s stark white.
He cums with a low, stuttering gasp that filters gradually into a rumbling hum of contentment. Kaveh can feel the heat spilling across their entangled fingers, the slick drip of it over his still tingling skin, but he still doesn’t tear his gaze away from Alhaitham’s flushed face.
Alhaitham glances at him then, their eyes meeting in a way that seemed so familiar and yet so irrevocably changed. He smiles, subtly, and Kaveh finds himself returning the expression with an exhausted, stuttering laugh too.
It takes a little maneuvering, some pained wincing from Kaveh as his bruised, reddened skin flexes and shifts when he moves, and then some good natured back and forth on Alhaitham’s part, but they eventually both get cleaned up. One more than the other.
“I’m sorry, about –” Kaveh gestures from where he stands by his desk chair to Alhaitham’s pants, still damply stained. “That.”
The other picks at the spots he means, then shrugs blandly without any real commitment nor feeling. “I’m not attached to them, it’s fine.” He smiles, that smile he had that was small yet so provoking in such a myriad of ways. “I find the cost worthy of the cause.”
Kaveh’s cheeks are alight with color then, his ruby gaze flitting to the desk he had begun to tidy in an attempt to feel at least marginally accomplished before he fled the scene of their dalliance for the night.
“Ask for help tomorrow.” Alhaitham states suddenly, the words making Kaveh inadvertently shake his head. “Ask.” Alhaitham repeats.
“I really don’t think –”
“Kaveh.”
He sighs, turning again to look at the one who berated him so unashamedly for what was, admittedly, a flaw in his thoughts. He couldn’t do this all himself, that much had become clear, it would do him well to accept it.
“I’ll ask.” He wondered how clear his reluctance was within the words.
“And accept?” Alhaitham questions, knowing the answer before Kaveh has the chance to set his lips into a thin, stubborn line and turn his brows anxiously downward. Kaveh knew his limits, after all, and Alhaitham pushed them here.
“I’ll ask.” Kaveh repeats, softer this time while eyeing the other hopefully. To his delight Alhaitham accepts, for now, what he cannot seem to change.
The newest addition to the company’s administration waits in perfect silence as Kaveh resets his desk to normalcy, all his papers neatly stacked and pens replaced to their specific positions. Only when he’s done does he begin to slip on his jacket.
“Let me take you home.” Alhaitham offers in that way he had that was never really a question at all.
Kaveh deliberates, quite obviously, in a way he’s certain Alhaitham notices, for a good minute or perhaps even two.
Did he want Alhaitham to know where he lived? Of course he didn’t care. So perhaps the better question was: Did he want to know what came after Alhaitham knowing? Could he handle it never being anything at all? Could he handle something so flimsy, something without a name, something based entirely on a passing need – or perhaps he was simply downplaying what had been mounting for weeks, emotions piling on to one another until he couldn’t bear to look at what a startlingly tall stack of feelings he’d created within himself.
“Okay.” He answered eventually, because he wanted to do better. To face things, and best them, rather than letting them settle and mold in the corners of his mind or on the plains of his desk until he was rotten, too.
The very corners of Alhaitham’s lips curve into the slightest, sweetest smile, and Kaveh can’t help beaming in response.
One thing a day, and one day at a time, he thinks, until happy is easy.
While they stand, shoulder to shoulder in silence as they often did, in the elevator that rumbled downwards, Kaveh feels a brush of something against his fingers. Alhaitham’s hand shifts, gliding against the warmth of Kaveh’s palm. Skin on skin, finger to finger, pulse to pulse as their wrists brush, too.
Their fingers intertwine, intimate and slow, grasping tightly at one another, and Kaveh takes this sudden, careful confirmation of something while staring dumbfoundedly at their blurred reflections in the metal doors.
Eventually, he looks up into Alhaitham’s waiting softened gaze and finds easy happiness might be closer than he’d thought; just one borrowed pen and a kindly brewed coffee away all along.