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Their kisses are choreographed. Like a fight scene or a dance. The physicality is the intimacy is the lust is the connection between them, a series of steps. When Jacob’s in it, his body’s just a tool he’s using, and he thinks of Sam’s the same way, and the scene is a piece of art that they’re making together.
Sometimes that art is their bodies pressed together or their hands entwined or a sinking of teeth into flesh.
The most erotic thing—the most awkward thing—was biting into Sam’s wrist and the next day there’s a stark purple bruise on it. He’s never left a hickey on someone’s wrist before. When Sam wears long sleeves, it just barely peeks out, barely visible, sometimes when he gestures or moves. And then it’s all Jacob can look at, wondering if anyone else will notice.
The aftermath of the choreography. That’s what he holds with him sometimes, and it’s the more embarrassing thing, because he’s an actor and when the scene’s done and the robes are on and they’re laughing and shaking it off, it’s supposed to be finished. But it only mostly is.
Yes, he’s kissed his friend, his best friend, tongue-first. But the truly exciting thing was talking about it beforehand. Breaking down what it means, the emotions, the moment: swaying back and forth in each other’s space as they build ideas on top of ideas. For a time, he is separated entirely from his body, from what he will ask his body to do. He’s all brain and all imagination. Sam grabs him by the forearms and says, “Yes, Jake, that’s it!” like they’ve hit some sort of gold, close enough to share breath. They’re in the zone together. They’ve got it.
And something in his body knows it.
Something in his body knows it, the first time they meet in person, when Sam is close, when soon Sam will be so near. Sam as a physical body and not just words on a screen. He’s been words on a screen for so long that sometimes it feels like Jacob has always known him. He’s been conversations that last all day and into the night, across time zones, Jacob waiting for the new message notification on his phone with this unaccountable nervous, excited energy—sometimes he’d put it on silent and play a game with himself: how long can he wait before he looks at the screen again? Sam’s been a pixilated face on Zoom, on FaceTime, a deep voice over the phone. He’s been honest and intimate but always mediated by distance and by the technology that links them—when Jacob sets the phone down, bleary-eyed, he’s alone in the room.
His stomach’s coiling up with those familiar jitters, not like that sick twist of anxiety but like first-date butterflies. As exciting as that. As buoyant as that.
They meet in the lobby of the hotel in New Orleans, on the night that Sam’s flight gets in. The place is dark and velvet-red, new tile floor that gleams under elaborate chandeliers but the softness of the furniture has become threadbare at its most worn spots—not just at the arm of the chair where Jacob has been rubbing his thumb back and forth, waiting for his phone to buzz again. Sam texted him from the terminal, and Jacob expects he’ll text again, when he’s closer. Instead, he just barges through the door, weighted down with his bags, letting in a soft Louisiana twilight and distant shouts from the street.
Jacob jumps up, rushes to take Sam’s backpack from him, and all of a sudden they’re close, talking over each other, hands brushing against arms and arm against arm. Sam’s hair is pulled back but it’s barely long enough for it and strands have escaped and wafted around his face. Jacob accidentally steps on his foot. They’re both laughing at their own ungainly, awkward dance, and Jacob has the stray thought, clear like a shot through his head, that Sam’s laughter sounds so different in the flesh.
When his bags are on the floor and their giggles have died out, and the moment has just barely settled, the physical reality of it, Sam grabs him by the forearms and just looks at him.
(They’d joked, over the phone, about doing something dramatic and over the top when they met, something befitting their dramatic vampire characters. Running across the airport to jump into each other’s arms at the terminal, Sam suggested.
Well do I jump into yours or you into mine?
I think we do what feels right in the moment.
We’re not going to choreograph the scene?
He waited a bit for an answer. He’d expected one right away. Thought Sam was maybe busy, distracted or something.)
“It’s really you, huh?” Sam asks. The question was probably supposed to be louder, normal-volume, not awed, because his already heat-pink cheeks grow a darker red after he says it.
Jacob nods. He’s got his hands up on Sam’s shoulders. He feels so solid and broad. “And it’s really you.”
(Not this one.)
They pick the same moment to pull each other into a hug. And it is the fiercest, strongest hug of Jacob’s life, every bit of distance and every conversation that bridged it poured in, a hug he can feel aching at his back and his ribs. He doesn’t pull away for a long time. He just wants to live in this moment for a little while longer: Sam, a real body against his, smelling of sweat, and sweat against his skin.
They joked, too, about enacting a passionate reunion kiss at the airport, then decided it was maybe too much. Better to save that for rehearsals, Sam wrote, and Jacob sent back a laughing face.
Save it for the screen.
People who aren’t actors ask is it awkward?
Yes, in a way.
But it’s also a dance.
Their first kiss is in preparation for the scene in which Lestat turns Louis, at the altar of a church. They’re running the lines alone this time, in private at the hotel, so that they’ll have something coherent to bring to the official rehearsals in the morning. “It’s their wedding night,” Sam says, and Jacob looks up from the script in his hand and sees Sam looking right at him. His voice a moment before had been the deep thrum of Lestat’s voice. When their eyes meet, Jacob’s heart jumps a beat.
“Yeah,” he agrees, and doesn’t break eye contact as he throws the pages in the vague direction of the table. “Exactly. It’s the whole show. It’s the thesis of the whole show.”
What he means is it’s the make-or-break moment of the pilot, it’s everything, it’s the two of them carrying everything, and they can only run it through so many times before they cannot skip the kiss. And it can’t be a stage kiss. And it can’t be half-done. It’s acting; it’s a craft and an art; but it cannot be pretend.
It’s the kiss of two people who mean eternity for real when they say I’ll love you forever, that implicit wedding night promise, and he feels it. He feels it in the way Sam breathes him in, he feels it in the shudder of his body, and the grasp of his hand. The hot press of his mouth, the desperation, and the gentleness.
Oh, they’ve got something really good going here.
Something really fucking good.
“Something I think is important,” Jacob says, when they’re sitting next to each other on the floor, backs up against the side of the bed, “is that they’re extremely attracted to each other, and those first times, like the first time they kiss in the threesome, they have this exciting energy to them. You know? It’s an exciting new thing, a new relationship with a lot of potential.”
“Something they never thought they’d have,” Sam says. “Lestat after Nicky, and Louis being so deeply closeted.”
“Right, exactly. It’s electric and intense and, yeah, a little rough, because they’ve waited so long, but it’s also tender and beautiful in its own way. Because they both feel this natural connection with each other, and it has all this… promise in it. That’s really it, the promise. It’s their awareness of every good thing they could be.”
Sam thinks on this for a long moment. Jacob watches him, how he’s got his feet planted on the floor, one knee moving back and forth idly; how he’s biting the inside of his cheek with his teeth.
“The most erotic thing,” he says at last, “should be the way they look at each other.” And for the last words, he turns his head, and he does look at Jacob—just looks at him, unflinching and patient.
Jacob realizes he’d been leaning forward, and he lets himself fall back again. They aren’t touching. But he feels that gaze and all its unhurried simplicity as if it were a touch. As if it were a finger trailing down his spine.
“Utterly obscene,” he says.
And he doesn’t realize he’s murmured it low under his breath, or even said it out, until Sam’s grin splits open and he agrees.
Intimacy is built up in the small moments.
And the big ones: long nights shooting, bleary and exhausted and spent, drawing up those emotions that should wreck him but it feels like catharsis, throwing himself across the set in every way he can, and just knowing Sam will catch him. Sometimes half-naked and filthy with sticky fake-blood, and Sam’s hand wrapped up in his like art. And when the scene cuts, they break, and they sit down together and if he’s shaking, Sam holds his hand again.
But aside from all that, it’s just normal. Taking walks through the city. Eating ice cream. Texting each other through the wall that separates their trailers, as if they were two kids with a couple of tin cans and a string.
Holding hands on set after a tough scene becomes holding hands all the time, out of habit. Don’t want to lose you on the other side of the craft services table, Jacob jokes. The others get used to it. They keep their fingers entwined sometimes out in the city, too; they’re not so recognizable that it’s a risk.
Just part of the purity of their friendship, the childlike wonder of it.
Bailey loves it. She thinks it’s cute.
They’re standing outside the door of Jacob’s trailer, gray pre-dawn hour, still in costume, and for some reason that Jacob has already forgotten, they’re holding each other’s hands—both at once, face to face—and swaying back and forth, not quite in sync. It’s some sort of joke, or something. His mind’s fuzzy with fatigue. They were probably talking, and Sam started fidgeting, and Jacob grabbed on to his hands to take himself along for the ride and now it’s as if they were dancing.
“You look mighty fine in that suit,” Jacob tells him, in his Louis in Louisiana accent, and Sam breaks out in a grin that is pure Sam Reid, not a trace of Lestat about it except for the makeup still on his face.
“Mighty fine?”
“Yeah.” His smile half-fades, buoyed again by hysterical laughter. “Hey, what are we even doing right now?”
“Rubbing our last two brain cells together?”
If it weren’t so silly, it would sound actually obscene. Jacob forces himself to stop the swaying movement, even though without it, he feels the exhaustion all the way down to his bones. But he doesn’t let go of Sam’s hands. “I gotta get out of these clothes before I fall asleep in them.”
“Me too.” He steps back and his fingers slip from Jacob’s fingers. “Good night, Jake.” Then, as they always do, they sway forward one more time for a hug, tight and strong, as if they weren’t going to see each other for months instead of just a few hours. He grabs on to him hard. He feels Sam in his ribs.
Parting, feeling the chill of a fall morning not yet broken, feeling the hazy aftermath of a long night of filming, undercuts with melancholy the quiet satisfaction he feels. Without thinking, he leans in again and presses a kiss to Sam’s mouth. It’s closed-mouth and chaste, like the simplest parting, and though afterwards he pauses a moment and blinks, uncertain, Sam just smiles at him like it’s all right. He’d kissed back. And it hadn’t felt like anything extraordinary, really. Just like them. Part of them.
Sam kisses him again but on the side of the mouth and then disappears into his trailer.
The kisses are like their hugs, like holding hands, like how sometimes, when they’re tired, Sam will lean against him while they’re talking. He knows this man as if he’s always known him. He knows his body—as an instrument, as a vessel, but also as flesh and blood and bone—the close heat of him, beneath the stage lights, skin to skin; the gentle slump of his weight when, after another long night, they find themselves on the couch of Jacob’s trailer, in the quiet and alone. Maybe it’s some sort of confusion between their characters and real life, he thinks. But that’s a weak excuse. He knows there’s no Lestat and Louis here, only Sam and Jacob, when he pushes back a strand of Sam’s hair and tells him, it’s all right, he can just lay his head on Jacob’s lap a while and rest.
Kissing when they meet, when they part, sometimes at random moments when they’re talking, feels so natural and normal that he never overthinks it. The only rule is they don’t do it when anyone can see. That would cause too many complications, and the possibility of confrontation, never mind rumors they could never control. The kisses aren’t romantic. Just affection, a part of their friendship; just something natural to them.
But most people wouldn’t get that.
“You know what’s interesting about us?” Jacob asks. He’s lying on his back on the couch in his trailer, flipping through a paperback he isn’t really reading, leaning against Sam’s arm. Sam is browsing the latest script, a scene he’s already memorized. Hours still till filming starts; a lazy afternoon, warm inside to the point of coziness. But maybe that’s just their shared body heat.
Sam laughs. “Where to begin?”
“Naw, I’m serious. It’s that… we just are important to each other. I love you, you know? And we start from that, not from… what a friendship is supposed to look like.”
“Are you saying our friendship is weird?” He means it as a joke, an obvious deflection.
Jacob tilts his head back and looks up at Sam’s face, meets his eye as well as he can at this angle. “It’s a little weird,” he says. “What I’m saying is I don’t care. I’ve never cared. I just like being around you.”
Sam pulls his arm out and wraps it, somewhat awkwardly, around Jacob’s torso, his hand resting right at the center of Jacob’s chest. He doesn’t speak for a while, and Jacob knows him well enough to know that it’s because he can’t.
“You’re my favorite person to be around,” he answers, finally. So incredibly even and controlled. So honest, in the simplest way he can be.
Jacob picks up his hand and kisses his palm. That feels right, too. Then he curls Sam’s arm around him again and for a while longer, in the unhurried and uninterrupted quiet, they simply enjoy each other’s company.