Summary: Tim tastes like Pringles and Dr. Pepper and something bittersweet, like hope just out of Sean's reach. Notes: Thanks go to Heph for beta and Betty for additional readthrough. Warning: Sexual activity under 18.

The McManus house is slightly less shabby in its blue-collar gentility, and there aren't any spare kids running around - Sean's heard his ma sniff about birth control and Church teaching often enough to know she doesn't really approve of Tim's parents - but the real reason they come to Tim's after school is because Sean's dad is on graveyard shift up at the prison this week, and he'll still be home and might be asleep.

He also might not be asleep.

They sprawl on Tim's rumpled bed in the bloody light of an early-winter afternoon - Sean tired of homework first but Tim didn't last much longer, talk of homecoming football scores and bonfires and dancing tempting him from his books. Marianne Calamy's got a friend, Deirdre, who apparently thinks Sean is hot, and Tim might be able to hook him up. Sean couldn't care less about that, and he's pretty sure Tim knows it by now.

He turns his head from blank contemplation of the books on Tim's nightstand - "On The Road" stacked atop a well-thumbed version of "To Kill a Mockingbird," which they had to read back in ninth grade, and Sean's already lost his own copy - to watch Tim playing with his basketball as they lie there. He's tossing it up and catching it with his fingertips, and Sean's pretty sure he's going to drop it on his own face soon, anyway, so he reaches over and bats at it. It goes careening off into a corner of the room, and Tim grabs for him with a sharp bark of laughter and a challenging grin, and they wrestle.

"Oh yeah?" Sean finally says mockingly, collapsing on top of Tim, pinning him, and Tim makes a pained sound.

"You should be on the wrestling team, not the track team," Tim says, and Sean smirks until Tim shoves at his shoulder and then starts poking and finally surrenders all dignity and tickles until Sean squirms.

"Stop. That." he says, and they go over in a breathless tangle of scrambling limbs, reminding Sean of nothing so much as being 11 years old and touch football and the scrubby grass in the park staining his elbows and getting in his hair.

They end up facing each other on the pillow, Tim fetched up against the wall. Sean's room at home is papered with posters of Rocky Balboa and Tony Manero, Page and Plant onstage with Robert's threadbare jeans slung low and clinging like a second skin, but here they're under the eye of a tattered John Lennon, of Farrah and of Logan 5. Logan is kind of creeping Sean out from over Tim's shoulder, so he studies Tim's face, instead. He suddenly doesn't feel 11 years old at all as Tim hesitantly slides a hand up his side, under his T-shirt. The touch against bare skin clenches Sean's breath in his throat like a fist.

This doesn't happen all the time, but there's always the chance that it might.

"You OK?" Tim asks, his eyes searching Sean's face, and Sean knows he means more than the playful scuffle.

Sean rolls over on top of him and settles between his thighs again. They've already kicked their geometry books off the end of the bed, and Tim's chemistry text gives a sold thunk hitting the floor as the bed shifts again under Sean's knees. Rod Stewart's on the radio, telling him that tonight's the night, that everything's gonna be all right, and Sean almost laughs ... or maybe he almost cries. He's not sure.

Tim tastes of Pringles and Dr. Pepper and something bittersweet, like hope just out of Sean's reach. He's long and gangly under Sean, although sometimes Sean thinks he can see the loping grace lying in wait in the muscles beneath Tim's skin, the lean sensuality under the awkwardness as Tim draws up one of his knees, bracing it against Sean's left hip, caging him between the wall and Tim's denim-clad thigh. But it doesn't really matter that Tim still doesn't have the coordination to lay-up a basketball more than six times out of ten without tripping over his feet, because Tim's smart, the kind of brilliance that lights up in flashes like the heat lightning Sean can see when they're out past the prison, further south, on down at Crow Creek on muggy summer nights. Tim's the kind of smart they give you scholarships for. He's going to leave Attica, and it probably won't be long from now, either, so Sean's trying to burn the memory of the sharp angles of Tim's hipbones into his fingertips and the sound of Tim's contented hums into his brain so he'll still have something left when Tim's gone.

Tim's moving under him now, sharp little jerks of his hips against Sean, and Sean shoves Tim's T-shirt further up, pulling away from his mouth and sliding down to breathe in Tim's musky smell mixed with the scent of Brut still lingering in the hollows of his body. He can see shivers chase across Tim's skin, and he rests his forehead against Tim's stomach, waits until he feels long fingers comb through his hair. Committed to action now, the hands touching him hold no hesitation.

I want to suck you. Sean doesn't say it out loud. He doesn't ask permission - they don't talk about this. They just do it, a handful of times, usually in Tim's room, one time in Sean's, quick and furtive, almost as dangerous - with all the people who come tromping through the Murphy house - as the time they'd done it in Tim's rattletrap Nova, fumbling through layers of clothes, Tim's fingers chilly and shockingly intimate against the warm skin of Sean's lower belly as he slipped his hand inside Sean's pants, Sean blind and gasping with his head back on Tim's shoulder, feeling Tim's curious gaze on his face almost tangibly, like the press of fingertips, but too gone to care what he might be exposing.

He can feel himself turn red with embarrassment sometimes, when he's alone and he thinks about some of the things he's done. While it's happening, he'd crawl, or beg, he feels ... wanton, is the word he's looking for, maybe, even though it feels too much like a word in one of those romance novels his ma sneaks into the house and tries to hide so no one will know she reads such things. But Sean wonders if there's anything he wouldn't do, and it scares him when he thinks about it later.

He never feels that at the time.

He feels breathless and out-of-control but also powerful and ... and hungry. The hiss of Tim's indrawn breath echoes the sound of his zipper as Sean pulls it down. He slides lower to breathe on Tim's cock through his underwear.

Tim's already hard, and there's a damp spot where he's leaking precome, and his hips jerk again, almost in time with Sean's panting breaths. He makes a strangled sound as Sean pulls down his briefs and touches him. The head of his cock is red and glistening, and the skin of the shaft is tender under Sean's fingers, and Sean can't resist, he just can't. He ducks his head and sucks in the tip, playing with it with his tongue. His scalp stings as Tim's fingers clench in his hair, pulling strands tight.

"OW," Sean says, pulling off, and Tim's a little frantic, a little glazed. Sean can almost hear him thinking - Oh my God, get back here! - but politeness holds and "Sorry, I'm sorry," is what comes out of his mouth, even if it is a little breathless. He runs his fingers along Sean's jaw, pats his cheek, and Sean's struck by a wild desire to turn his face into Tim's hand, to nuzzle the curve of his fingers and lay a kiss in his palm.

They don't talk about this, and it's separate from what goes on out there, outside the bedroom door, and Sean is just beginning to resign himself to the knowledge that an awful lot of the rest of his life will be lived in stolen moments behind closed doors. Tim will walk out of the room and go back to the girls, but what they're doing has changed Sean forever, he knows it, he can feel it.

He takes Tim's hand and presses it into the bed, running a finger under Tim's metal watchband, and he has a sudden terrible thought of tying Tim up, locking him down, finding the spare set of his dad's handcuffs in his parents' bedroom and clicking them shut around Tim's wrists. He settles for pressing his thumb into the hollow of Tim's wrist, hard, feeling the tendons shift as Tim arches and hisses again, a pained, avid sound.

Sean hooks his other arm under Tim's knee, getting a shoulder under Tim's thigh and snaking up a hand to hook Tim's leg over his back, and he clenches his fingers into heavy denim as he nuzzles into the open fly in front of him, letting the scent fill his head. He's got Tim spread out, laid open, and even though all he has left to use is his mouth, he's getting better at that. He may not be Marianne Calamy, but he can still make Tim squirm.

The cock feels thick in his mouth, heavy on his tongue, and his lips stretch taut as he works his way down. Tim's saying things like "God, yeah," and "there" and "Sean," a litany of low broken sounds that fall apart even as they pass his lips. Sean's hard inside his own jeans, twisting against the painful press of his zipper, feeling the seam of his pants against his aching balls. He thinks he might come just from listening to Tim, just from tasting him, from feeling Tim sticky against his lips, but it doesn't take long for his jaw to start aching, and he's afraid now of hurting Tim. He lets go of Tim's wrist and finishes him by hand, jerking him expertly and watching his hips corkscrew frantically.

Sean looks up through his eyelashes to watch Tim's face as Tim comes over Sean's fingers and his own stomach, and he raises his hand to his mouth to taste, salt and faintly bleachy, before dragging the back of his wrist across his lips to wipe his mouth. He feels a tug on a lock of his hair and looks up again to find Tim watching him, eyes half-closed, lips red where he's been worrying them with his own teeth.

"What?" Sean asks.

"C'mere," Tim says.

Tim will do stupid things if it means helping someone. He always wants to fix everybody, even though he doesn't always know how. Sean knows this. He also cares just enough and just little enough to let Tim do what he's going to do, to grab this while he still has the chance. He remembers his dad's story about the black Irish, the Spanish armada washing up on the shores of Ireland and learning to survive in a foreign land, taking up a foreign tongue. Survival is in Sean's blood, and he'll grab this lifeline and hold on for as long as it will tow him, even if it doesn't take him all the way to shore.

Sean's finally started to fill out - it seems like his shirts are always just a little too tight across the shoulders - but he's afraid it's going to be too little and too late to be the kind of football player he'd need to be, and he still doesn't have quite the burst of speed he needs to propel him over the finish line first, and he's beginning to believe he's going to be here, in Attica, forever. He's not dumb, he knows he's not - he's smarter than Tim in some ways, because Tim's got no common sense. Sean's ma always says Tim would go out in the rain without a hat, and he would, if Sean didn't look out for him. But Sean's not the kind of smart you need to be to get money for college. Tim talks about community college and getting jobs and renting a place together, but Sean can see his future, and a lot of it is right here, in this town where his parents and his parents' parents live, where they've earned a living from the immovable stone structure of the prison with its funhouse Magic Kingdom gate and from the endless stretch of timberlands before that, sugar maple and black cherry and red oak that put down the same kind of roots as Sean's family.

They're an awkward fumbling tangle of elbows and knees in all the wrong places until Sean gets himself sorted out, and then he presses his face into the curve of Tim's neck and gives himself up to Tim's hand, coming quickly and quietly, making stifled little sounds into the heat of Tim's thin chest and the soft cotton of his T-shirt that's maybe a little damp with Sean's tears. He's too used to having too many people and not enough privacy around him during stolen moments, and he's unwilling or unable to cry out even though they're alone in the house.

It's always fast, and Sean wonders sometimes what it would be like to be able to curl up and fall asleep afterward, Tim's lanky form wrapped around him and pressed against his back. But he can't stay - Tim's mother would invite him to eat here when she gets in from work, he knows, but he needs to get home. Ma will be getting dinner ready soon, and she'll need help with the youngest boys. As soon as he thinks he can bear it, he'll sit up and put himself together, take the tissue Tim hands him, arrange himself inside his jeans.

But for now, he can steal just a minute longer to lie here, feeling Tim's breath against his cheek, looking out of Tim's window at the skeletal fingers of the bare trees in the back yard, stark against the sky. He thinks he has to.