audrarose

wondering aloud when Charlie decided to make avoiding grocery shopping a lifestyle choice.

::laughs:: And I'll just bet Don's the same way.

“You think you’re protecting me,” Charlie says, staring at Don’s profile.

Oh very nice. Not, "you're protecting me" but "you think you're protecting me."

Charlie’s watched Don get drunk before, witnessed the slow slide into melancholy that lets the darkness show, and wonders if he should try to stop him or just give in and join him.

Interesting. I can definitely see Don as that kind of drunk. Intersting that he'd let Charlie see him that way though.

“I was good at it,” Charlie says softly, remembering empty rooms and chalkboards and time measured only by the changing shadows cast by sunlight on the floor. “I saw… connections. Things the people around me didn’t see.”

“Okay, you were brilliant at it. Surprise. So what was the problem?”

“I wanted,” he began, deciding how much truth to tell. “I needed to see the results of my work. All those connections I saw in the purely conceptual sphere… they had no connection to this.” He gestures toward the room, the world. “To something real.”

Poor Charlie. I can see him getting lost so easily.

Hurt, swift and searing, and maybe he shouldn’t have expected Don to understand. Probably visible on his face, impossible to hide,

I like that. Poor, poor Charlie. All he wants is to be understood, even if only a little bit.

Because the places Charlie goes in his head are real, too. Sometimes he feels like he could get lost there, with ideas like exploding suns that swallow him up and the bridge that takes him there too fragile to hold. He wants to tell Don that sometimes he’s afraid; that he wonders if someday the bridge will break apart and maybe there won’t be any way to get back.

Very eloquent and the image is just lovely.

It turns out that Don answers questions with kisses, too; his hands cradling Charlie’s face, tracing over the shape of Charlie’s cheekbone with his thumb before following the same path with his mouth. Every shift of Don’s lips, every new angle, gives Charlie new places to taste, too – Don’s jaw, his cheek, his temple. Slow exploration, sweet and mind-melting – so very different from the desperation of last night and somehow more intimate than anything else they’ve done.

And that section, really, just lovely. I especially like that first part, about Don answering question with kisses, too. It does feel wonderfully intimate.

Don makes a sound like Charlie’s hurt him

Why the hurt? It does seem like Don is hurt and maybe a little scared by what Charlie said.
and every touch of lips or tongue just scatters Charlie further.

Another lovely phrase.

Don’s low laughter tickles the hollow of his throat. “God, Charlie, what do you need to think about?”

That may be my favorite line. Don's gentle laughter and of course Charlie's still trying to think.

“My turn?” Gasped out, and that’s so Don, Charlie thinks, always bigger, always stronger, always…

“Always telling me what to do,” Charlie says, laughing between each touch that makes him moan and shift and hitch his breath.

Aw, I love it! And it is so very Don.

“Give you anything you want,” Don whispers against his skin, and there’s something in his voice that Charlie should answer

Something to be explored later maybe? Pretty please?

he’s knowing and thorough and perfect and Charlie wonders who Don learned this with, who else Don has touched this way.

Cooper.

The thought of someone else beneath Don’s mouth makes Charlie feel fierce.

Lovely line, and so true, too. So fierce in everything they feel about each other.

“Charlie?” he asks. Uncertainty in his voice, and possibility, but sounding so unsure, where Don is never unsure, that Charlie has to pull him up, pull him close.

“Please,” Charlie whispers, kissing Don’s swollen, beautiful mouth and willing to beg

I love that, I really do. I love Don open and vulnerable, like Charlie could shatter him with a word.