Chapter Text
“Hold still.”
Lawrence obeys, quiet and pliant under Adam’s hands as the damp washcloth scrubs briskly and efficiently over his eyelids. The washcloth isn’t exactly clean but it beats having jizz in your eyes, and Adam is feeling generous. Getting your dick sucked for thirty minutes while you do nothing but lay back and smoke a joint is a real mood-booster.
Lawrence hadn’t even complained when Adam pulled out at the end and finished on his face. He’d just kneeled there passively, one hand still anchored on the end of the bed for balance. Then he’d been helpless, because finding your way to the bathroom sink with semen pooling over your closed eyes is hard enough when you have two feet. Adam had surveyed him for a few long, cruel seconds, reflecting on how Lawrence’s face was even more handsome now it was decorated with those milky lines. Fighting back a grimace, patiently waiting for mercy. For a split second Adam had been tempted to clean Lawrence’s face with his own tongue, but instead he’d just murmured, “wait here,” and grabbed the crutch and made his way to the bathroom to fetch the washcloth.
Adam cups Lawrence’s cheek as he cleans him and feels the older man instinctively lean into his hand. Sometimes that obvious, pathetic craving for tenderness is irritating to Adam – because this thing that they have, it’s not about that. Adam certainly doesn’t need it. He gets his fill of sweetness and tenderness with Heather. His cup of affection is practically overflowing. What he has here, with Lawrence, is supposed to be about all the other stuff. The stuff Heather can never see: the ugliness and depravity and irreparable damage.
And yet… Adam can’t deny that there’s a sick thrill in having this much power over someone. He doesn’t think Lawrence is in love with him, not really. But Lawrence is so clearly deprived of love that he’ll fall on anything that remotely resembles it, like a starving man eating his own boot leather. So Adam cleans his face and looks down into Lawrence’s eyes when they finally reappear (pupils blown large with only a slim outer ring of cornflower blue iris), and then he leans down and kisses him slow and sweet, tasting his own salt on Lawrence’s lips and feeling like a god.
“Come on, get up here,” he says, pulling Lawrence up onto the bed. “Your knee’s gotta be killing you.”
There’s a melancholic tinge to the gratitude in Lawrence’s eyes as Adam massages the knee to get the blood flowing again. Boot leather can’t taste good, after all. But Adam doesn’t mind doing this. He knows from experience how nice it feels, and his head is fuzzy enough from the weed to make the simple action of rubbing his thumbs into pale skin and wasted muscle mildly fascinating.
“Thank you,” Lawrence says politely, like Adam just opened a door for him. It strikes Adam as very funny, and he catches Lawrence’s eye as he chuckles, and Lawrence grins back and for a moment there’s no ugliness between them at all. Just warmth and intimacy, and…
The sound of a key turning in the door.
They both freeze, stop breathing, even as the sound is followed a second later by the clatter of the chain and the dull thud of the door’s progress being halted by the latch. Adam hears Heather’s familiar groan of exasperation, and then, “Adam, the chain is on again.”
She hates that he does this, even though she says she understands why. She doesn’t get it, not really. She doesn’t get it.
Lawrence gets it, even though he’s an idiot, lying on Adam’s bed wide-eyed and frozen, waiting to be told what to do. All of a sudden Adam despises him, is utterly repulsed by him, wishes he could snap his fingers and erase Lawrence Gordon from existence. Fuck.
Bathroom, he mouths furiously, shoving Lawrence’s leg away and jabbing his finger at the ensuite – which, thank god, has a second door that opens out into the main living space. Adam’s never been so glad to only have enough money for a place with one bathroom. He racks his weed-addled brain frantically as he pulls his underwear back on.
“I’m getting a divorce,” Lawrences hisses under his breath. Adam blinks over at him blearily and sees that he’s somehow already got the liner back on his stump and is fixing his prosthesis into place.
“What?” Adam whispers back.
Lawrence rolls his eyes. “My wife just served me divorce papers. I came over here because I needed a shoulder to cry on. Got it?”
Adam nods slowly. “Got it. Wow, you are so much better at cheating than me.”
That earns him a pained look as Lawrence hurries stiffly into the bathroom, still half-naked, his clothes bundled in his arms.
“Ad, take the chain off or I’m going to start making weird sex noises in the hallway,” Heather calls sweetly.
“Just a sec,” Adam calls back in a high, strangled voice that makes him wince. He yanks his jeans up over his legs, throws the disgusting washcloth into the trash can, wrestles into his T-shirt, then realizes it’s somehow both inside-out and back-to-front. He briefly contemplates the option of just walking out there and saying, Sorry, babe, I was getting my dick sucked by another guy. Which is something that I’m into, by the way. Dealing with the fallout might be easier than getting speed-dressed while high.
When his T-shirt is finally on the right way round, Adam runs a hand through his hair, hoping the sweat will tidy it into something presentable. He can hear water running in the bathroom. He grabs the crutch and takes a stabilizing breath, then goes out to face his girlfriend, feeling like the biggest piece of shit in the world.
Heather is leaning up against the door, eyes closed, fake-snoring dramatically. He has to lever the door closed against her weight to get the chain off. She stumbles in and grins knowingly at his rumpled appearance, heavy breathing, and bloodshot eyes. “Did I interrupt something?” she asks innocently.
“Kind of,” Adam answers honestly, his voice strained. “I didn’t know you were coming over. Why didn’t you text me?”
“I did. Try looking at your phone once in a while.” Heather saunters past him, plastic takeout bag hanging from her hand. They’ve been together long enough that she knows all his regular orders. “If I’d known you were getting high and jerking off, I’d have gotten here sooner and joined you.”
“I wasn’t jerking off,” Adam whines, and that part is actually true, except for that bit at the very end where he- don’t think about it, Jesus Christ, don’t think about it with Heather here.
He realizes, detachedly, that he’s on the verge of a panic attack. His heart is pounding out of his chest. He wants to clamp his hands over Heather’s eyes and ears to protect her. He wants to shove Lawrence out of a window. Anything to keep the quarantine from being breached.
The water turns off in the bathroom, and the sudden vacuum of sound attracts Heather’s attention. She looks up sharply at the bathroom door, and then back at Adam, visibly reassessing his appearance and piecing together a different conclusion. There’s a look of disgust forming on her face, dulled by a lack of surprise. She dumps the takeout bag on the kitchen counter and leans back, arms folded.
“Who’s that, Adam?” Heather asks, a sarcastic edge to her voice.
“It’s not a great time,” he blurts out – and damn, that’s true too. For a cheater, Adam is surprisingly honest. “I’ve got a friend over.” (He doesn’t even know if that’s true.)
“A friend.” The echo is dripping with skepticism.
“Yeah, he’s had kind of a rough day.”
A hand fisted in Lawrence’s hair, holding him down as Adam curls his hips and pushes all the way into that hot, tight throat, groaning at the way it spasms and convulses when Lawrence chokes on him. He wonders if he could actually kill Lawrence like this: pinch his nose to stop him drawing breath, feel the death rattle in the most intimate way…
Heather’s brow softens and then furrows at the use of “he.” Then, blessedly, Lawrence steps out of the bathroom looking like the very picture of a man who’s been recently sobbing into someone’s shoulder: red eyes from the second-hand weed smoke; hangdog expression; puffy features. Any post-coital glow has been thoroughly scrubbed off in the bathroom. He looks like a middle-aged sadsack, not a hot sidepiece.
“Ah. Hello, again. Nice to, ah… I really ought to be…” His voice is hoarse from having his throat fucked, but it really does sound like he’s just been crying. Jesus Christ, we might just get away with this, Adam thinks deliriously.
The euphoria of it helps his acting abilities. “Wait, Lawrence, it’s fine,” Adam insists. “Stay, have some food. The Chinese place always serves huge portions. You’ll save me from eating leftovers for the rest of the week.”
“That’s very generous, but I really should get back…” Lawrence cuts himself off before the word ‘home’ with a desolate look. Damn, he’s good.
“You can crash here,’” Adam offers, riffing off the still-unspoken divorced-guy cover story. “Couch is all yours if you want it.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Lawrence croaks with a weak smile. “But I’m already checked into a hotel.”
Once again, the words ring with the sound of truth, and a troubling thought occurs to Adam. He’d assumed the ‘my wife just served me divorce papers’ thing was just a cover story but… what if it’s not? Adam’s desperate to ask, but he can’t, not with Heather here. Instead he just opens the door again for Lawrence to leave, looking up into his face searchingly as he passes and finding no clues, just an embarrassed smile and some more bumbling formalities to Heather.
Once he’s gone, Adam is torn between disgust at himself and the lingering holy-shit thrill that he might actually have pulled this off. But the thrill dissipates when he finally looks back at Heather and finds a hard, calculating expression on her face. He shrugs sheepishly, hoping to chase it away.
“Sorry,” Adam says. “He’s really going through it.”
“And you’re the person he decided to talk to about it,” Heather says in clipped, disbelieving tones.
Adam shrugs. “Hey, I’m cheaper than therapy.”
“He doesn’t look like a guy who needs to worry about price tags.”
Shit. Adam may not, in fact, have gotten away with this. He’s not proud of it, but he resorts to gaslighting, throwing Heather a quizzical look as he levers himself over to the kitchen counter and starts pawing through the takeout bags with one hand. “What’s with the third degree? He just needed a friend.”
“Oh, you’re friends now? Because at the show last year he said you were just ‘acquaintances.’” She delivers the last word in a crude mimicry of Lawrence’s straight-laced tones, and Adam is surprised to find that he kind of hates her for mocking him.
“What are you accusing me of, Heather?” he snaps, throwing a bag of prawn crackers onter the counter with a little too much force. “Please, just tell me, because I’m pretty fucking confused right now.”
“I don’t know, Adam. What aren’t you telling me?”
There’s a dangerous familiarity about the conversation that conjures up white tiles and cold lighting and the chill of water-soaked clothing. Adam can hear his own heartbeat in his ears. He doesn’t know what his face is doing, but it must be bad, because he sees Heather’s expression soften guiltily.
“Baby, it’s OK,” she murmurs, moving closer and pressing her hand against his chest, touching his face with her other hand. “I know.”
Adam stares at her, his body tensed up like a feral cat. His voice sticks in his throat.
“I put it together the night I met him," she continues. "His foot… and I knew the name sounded familiar, so I checked online. I know he was the guy that you were locked up with. The one Jigsaw…”
“Don’t,” Adam interrupts. He can’t stand to hear her say that name. He’s shaking his head violently, shaking her hand loose. “Just, don’t.”
“Adam…” Her voice is still gentle, but now it’s edged with frustration. “You can talk to me.”
“No.”
He’s drawn a hard line on this ever since the start of their relationship. She had known about the Jigsaw incident even before they met. In fact, Adam’s pretty sure it’s why their manager hired him. What’s more punk rock than hiring a photographer who pulverized his own foot to escape a notorious serial killer? Even the lead singer of the band, Liza – a gold-star lesbian who looked at most men like they were shit on her shoe – had regarded Adam with morbid fascination when he was first introduced to them. Heather had tried to play it cool, but she’d been hooked from day one. And Adam wasn’t exactly comfortable with the reasons why, but she was pretty and funny, and she had a sweetness to her that punk chicks were usually self-conscious about avoiding. He liked her. And she liked him. What did it matter if she only took an interest in him because he was a victim of something truly fucked up?
Every now and then, though – and especially since Lawrence came back into his life as a much-needed pressure valve – Adam had felt a nagging suspicion that Heather was disappointed by how normal he was. He thought it was a good thing that he was able to keep his fucked-upness in check, but maybe without it he was just kind of… boring. He tried to be a good boyfriend to Heather (aside from, y’know, regularly cheating on her), but maybe ‘good’ wasn’t what she wanted. Maybe she didn’t want the guy who remembered her birthday without prompting, and helped her mom with the dishes when they went over for dinner. Maybe she wanted the guy who had caved a man’s skull in with a toilet lid. Maybe she wanted the guy who had watched the metal edge of the shackle peel a thick roll of flesh away from his shattered heelbone as he tore his way free like an animal, blood slicking the way…
“Adam, look at me.” There’s a sick kind of hunger in Heather’s voice as she watches him fight off the panic attack. “I’m right here, baby…”
“Fucking drop it, Heather,” Adam snaps. He’s a little surprised by the harshness in his own voice. But hell, if she wants a bad boy, she can have one. He can be- ah, shit she’s crying.
OK, not crying, but her face is all screwed up and she’s turned away from him and started opening up takeout cartons and splitting chopsticks like she needs to keep herself busy so she won’t cry. And Adam… Adam’s such a nasty little cockroach of a boyfriend. In the last half-hour he’s cheated on her, lied to her, gaslit her, and now he has the nerve to act like she’s being unreasonable just for wanting to know him better.
Adam can give her something. He can do that. He can be careful, make sure it’s not too much.
He leans his crutch against the counter and then wraps his arms around Heather from behind, letting her take some of his weight and keep him balanced. He buries his face in her hair and inhales the smell of hairspray and rehearsal sweat. He loves her, he really does, as much as Adam is capable of loving anyone. He can still love in the same way he can still walk: awkwardly, and in need of regular breaks, but enough to get by. He can give her this, if it’s what she needs.
“Sometimes I feel like part of me’s still back there,” he whispers. “Like someone swept up all the blood I left behind there and put it into a voodoo doll, and chained it to that pipe. Like I never really got out. The chain just got longer.”
There. Is that enough? It’s true, and it’s more than he’s ever said to anyone other than Lawrence. Only he’d never need to say it to Lawrence, because Lawrence knows…
“You talk to him about this stuff?” Heather asks, and Adam jumps, suddenly terrified that she read his mind. “Your doctor friend?”
“Sometimes,” Adam hedges, wondering where she’s going with this. To his relief, he feels her body relax a little.
“That’s good,” she says, threading her fingers through his. “I’m glad you have someone to talk to.”
The divorce story was real, it turns out, but Lawrence doesn’t seem to have been caught off-guard by it. By the time Adam sees him next, he’s already moved out of the hotel and into a rented apartment. The doorman insists on calling upstairs before he’ll let Adam into the elevator.
It’s the first time they’ve ever met up at Lawrence’s place, for obvious reasons (up until now, “Lawrence’s place” has always been “Lawrence’s family’s place”). Adam feels uneasy and wrongfooted, but he supposes it’ll be easier to end things if he can just walk out afterwards, rather than persuading Lawrence to leave.
Another weird thing about meeting on Lawrence’s home turf is seeing Lawrence in casual wear. Adam’s seen him naked many times, but either side of that he’s always had at least a button-down shirt and suit jacket, and usually a tie as well. He’s a rich guy, of course, so Lawrence’s version of dressing down is brown slacks and a green polo shirt with an embroidered logo. But still, when he opens the door and leads Adam into the apartment, Adam finds himself scandalized by the sight of Lawrence’s naked elbows.
Adam's own body language is tight, guarded: hands shoved into the pocket of his jeans, eyes darting away from every spark of contact. Lawrence perches on a low stool by the marble kitchen island and looks Adam up and down slowly, making a silent diagnosis.
“You didn’t have to come all the way across town,” he says at last. “A text would have been sufficient.”
Adam doesn’t even bother trying to deny the reason he’s here. “Yeah, well, I figured I owed it to you,” he mutters.
The lines around Lawrence’s eyes soften. “You don’t owe me anything, Adam.”
He seems… fine. And that unsettles Adam more than if Lawrence had sobbed and screamed and pleaded with him. He’d been bracing for theatrics the whole ride over, guiltily aware of how fucked up it is to break up with a guy who’s just been served divorce papers. Hell, the divorce was what had hardened Adam’s conviction. He’d imagined Lawrence becoming even lonelier and more desperate for emotional support, trying to cram Adam into the empty slot in his life where a real lover should be: whispering sweet nothings and gazing into his eyes. The mere anticipation of this had made Adam feel like he was sinking into quicksand.
Instead, Lawrence just smiles tolerantly at him, like Adam is a door-to-door salesman who’s fumbling the pitch.
“I have to at least try to make this work,” Adam says, though he isn’t sure which of them he’s trying to convince. “I know how lucky I am to be with Heather. But I’ve never gone all-in with her, not even before you showed up in my life again. I’ve only been giving her an edited version of myself. Like an airplane movie with all the tits and curse words cut out. She deserves the director’s cut, y’know?”
“Yes, I think I understand,” Lawrence replies, with maddening calm.
Adam feels cheated. He just spilled his guts. He doesn’t want understanding, he wants Lawrence to fall to his knees and tear out his hair and beg Adam to stay. He wants Lawrence on the floor, in agony, pleading. And then Adam wants to ignore those pleas and walk out without so much as glancing back. But the pleas aren’t forthcoming, so he resigns himself to being blue-balled. “Guess I’ll go, then.”
He’s halfway to the door, fuming, when he hears the step-thump-step-thump-step-thump of Lawrence’s approach. “Adam, wait.”
Adam pauses, wavering between the temptation to speed up and having the thrill of Lawrence trying to chase him, and his vain curiosity about what Lawrence has to say. The curiosity wins out, and he reluctantly turns back to find the older man approaching with a conflicted expression. He looks into Adam’s face for the briefest of moments, but his gaze bounces off, darts away into the corners of the room. His jowls quiver minutely with the effort to hold his mask in place. Then he steps closer and pulls Adam into an embrace.
It’s not remotely sexual. It’s a warm, fatherly hug with Lawrence’s hands high on Adam’s back and their faces not quite touching. Lawrence starts to speak, and with rapidly escalating horror Adam realizes that this is no ordinary hug. This is an ‘I can’t say any of this while making eye contact with you’ hug.
“I don’t want to leave anything unsaid, in case this is the last time we see each other,” Lawrence begins in a steady, determined voice. “So I’ll just say that you are a wonderful person, Adam. You’re one of the best people I have ever known. Anyone would be lucky to have you – to have any version of you. The… the airplane version, or the director’s cut.”
Adam has frozen up in the grip of something that feels like terror. It’s too big, what Lawrence is saying. It’s too much. It’s too sincere. It’s too out of character. He wishes Lawrence had hugged him just to call him a worthless waste of space. He could have handled that. He can’t handle this.
“You should tell her everything,” Lawrence persists ruthlessly. “You didn’t do anything in that room that you should be ashamed of. You saved my life, and then you saved your own life, and then you made something of your life. You did that, no one did it for you – not me, not John Kramer. Everything that you have, you’ve earned.”
Adam starts writhing in Lawrence’s grasp, snarling and shoving at him. “Get off me!”
For a second Lawrence clings to him desperately, just like Adam wanted. Then he allows himself to be pushed away, staggering backwards on his prosthetic leg and crying out in pain as his back connects with the sharp corner of a sideboard. He grips the wood for stability and locks eyes with Adam, determined to finish his speech.
“I wish you every happiness in the world,” Lawrence continues with excruciating earnestness. “You deserve it.”
Adam is wild-eyed, cornered, scrabbling for the door handle behind him. “Stay the fuck away from me,” he spits.
Lawrence just nods, understanding. And then he opens his mouth, but Adam is spared from hearing anything else by the door handle finally presenting itself, and the racket of the door opening and then slamming shut behind his fleeing form.
Adam presses the elevator button and waits for about half a second before deciding it’s taking too long. He doesn’t want to risk being trapped here if Lawrence decides to follow him out. He veers towards the stairwell instead, bursting through the door and clinging to the railing as he stumps awkwardly down the carpeted stairs, past tasteful lighting sconces and other fripperies that don’t belong in any self-respecting stairwell. He’s about halfway down when his prosthetic foot clips a stair instead of catching it and Adam falls, skidding and thudding painfully down the remaining steps in that flight.
He curls up in a corner and screams, telling himself it’s because of the pain from the fall. He screams until saliva drools from his mouth, bangs his head back against the wall and feels cold, filthy tiles cracking under his skull, feels his stomach starting to digest itself, feels his mind unravel until it starts to tear his body apart…
Eventually the snooty doorman comes to see what all the noise is about. He looks mortified when he finds Adam and sees the prosthesis lying at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, where he'd kicked it after ripping it off. Maybe the doorman is just worried about the building’s owners getting sued and himself getting fired, but he’s all courtesy now: clumsily attempting to help while Adam reattaches the prosthesis, then slinging Adam’s arm around his own shoulder to help him down the rest of the stairs.
The kindness is like salt on a still-bloody wound. Adam grits his teeth and bears it.