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A loud, almost urgent knocking on the door of his hotel room rouses detective Alec Hardy from the weird state between delirious awareness and the deep darkness of a dreamless sleep he's been in since he got to bed somewhere around midnight.
Instantly aware of his surroundings, he lies stiffly on his covers, listening to the noise coming from outside his door. Suddenly on high alert, he can hear something heavy dropping against the wall, then some muffled cursing.
Then the knocking returns, seemingly even more urgent now, almost violent in the quiet of the night. He grits his teeth, considers ignoring whatever’s happening, considers trying to go back to sleep. He's tired, and he can feel the familiar ache settling deep inside his bones, his heart slowly but surely giving up on him. Despite it all and, most of all, despite himself, he gets up, shuffling slowly towards the door.
“Who's this?” His voice scratches his throat, any attempts at annoyance hidden by how rough he sounds.
The knocking suddenly stops and, “It's me,” comes an equally rough voice from the hallway.
Hardy could swear that his heart skipped a beat just then, because he would recognise that voice in a crowd of a thousand strangers. He almost yanks the handle in his rush to open the door as quickly as possible.
“What the hell, Masters?” The familiar, sturdy figure hunches on the doorframe and Alec swallows the initial giddiness of seeing his only friend in this lousy town, buries it deep down behind his ribs and lets the familiar, cold claws of worry and irritation get a hold over him. “Do you realize what time it is?” he asks harshly, and before he catches himself, the next question stumbles out of his mouth, bites hard where he wouldn't dare to reach any other time, “Are you drunk?”
Bill's head snaps up at that and Hardy sucks in a shocked breath. There's a big cut on the side of the doctor's cheek and Alec knows it must've been bleeding profusely quite recently, because he sees the smears of red on Bill's jaw, notices a few drops of crimson on the white collar of his shirt and right below his ear. Masters' lip is split and there's a dark bruise forming under his right eye.
“No," Bill's cold voice startles him out of his stupor. “I'm not. ‘M sorry. I shouldn't have come.” He starts to retreat back into the hallway, but Hardy’s hand catches his wrist, pulls him back into the confined space of his room. Before he can consider what he's doing, he's leading Bill towards his bed. He makes him sit on the edge of it and leaves the doctor there, taut as a string and cautious as ever, to rummage through his suitcase in search of an antiseptic.
When he turns back, Bill's wriggling his hands on his lap, looking so lost and uncertain, that Alec almost lets out a nervous laugh. A lost and uncertain Bill Masters. In his room, on his bed. That's a new one for sure.
“What happened?” he asks instead, settling himself next to Bill and trying to ignore the warm brush of their thighs. He reaches up to carefully disinfect the cut on Bill's cheek and the man hisses instantly. “Stay still and answer," he can't help but scold him softly.
“I was in a fight," comes a reluctant answer.
“Yeah, I can tell," snickers Alec, but the dark look Bill shoots him shuts him up instantly. “Fine. Don't say anything if that's what you want. Just don't bloody move if you want your stupid face in one piece.”
He works in silence, cleaning his face meticulously, while simultaneously trying to keep his questions at bay. He hasn’t known Bill for long. It has only been a couple of months since the doctor, haunted by his morally doubtful past, came to work at the Wessex Hospital’s Maternity Ward, but Hardy feels like he has already figured him out. Bill Masters wasn’t a simple man — he was easy to anger, but hard to win over, and yet befriending him was as easy to Alec as deciding how long to microwave his tea in the morning. It was intuitional. It was also dangerous, because Hardy’s traitorous heart didn’t care about keeping it friendly even for one moment.
He’s startled from his thoughts when warm fingers wrap themselves around his wrist, stilling his hand against Bill’s face. Alec sends him a confused look, but before he gets to even formulate a question, he’s being pulled down on the mattress.
For a moment they just lie next to each other and Hardy holds his breath, stunned silent by the sudden intimacy of their position. He watches Bill’s features darken, and suddenly he feels like he’s seeing him clearly for the first time, with all his worries and troubles weighing down his shoulders.
"Why did you do it?" the question he finally asks is whispered, because disrupting the silence that surrounded them feels sacrilegious.
"They were talking shit about you.” Bill's eyes meet his at last, his eyebrows narrowed and lips pursed almost in a pout. He doesn't clarify who they are, but Hardy doesn’t need him to.
"This entire bloody town does, Bill. You can't fight them all”. He surprises himself with how gentle his voice sounds, how out of breath he is. He never had anyone stand up for him. He doesn’t need anyone to stand up for him, and yet he finds himself oddly touched.
Bill huffs, the noise full of arrogance, and Alec is suddenly highly aware of how close they are.
“I can and I will.”
“Bill—”
But before he can say anything, Bill closes the short distance between them and kisses him. It makes Hardy's brain short-circuit, because Bill kisses him. Bill kisses him. Bill is kissing him right now and that realisation hits Alec like a speeding train. A traitorous groan leaves his throat, before he finally reciprocates the kiss.
They move slowly against each other and Bill is like a starving man, nipping at Hardy's bottom lip, pushing his tongue inside his mouth, letting low, content sounds from the bottom of his throat, almost like he wants to devour Alec at once and whole.
When they separate to catch their breaths, Masters doesn't waste any time attacking Hardy's neck with heated kisses and oh, suddenly there's a warm, firm thigh making its way between Alec's legs, and he realizes with a giddy startle how hard he is, how hard Bill is against his hip and how hot and intense and good it feels to shamelessly rut against each other.
They move together with a newfound force, Bill marking every uncovered part of Alec's skin with his teeth and Hardy happily allowing him to do so. He doesn't let himself think more about what's happening or about the consequences it will irrevocably bring on their relationship. There's going to be a time and place for it, but for now, the only thing he cares about is how every part of his body feels as if it's been set on fire and how impossibly closer he wants to pull Bill, to feel him both outside and inside himself, how desperate he is to be wanted and possessed by this man and how real fulfilling that desire is.
He pulls at Bill's hair and gets rewarded with a deep, delicious moan and a particularly uncontrolled shove of strong hips, which, in turn, sends an even stronger surge of pleasure from his rock-hard cock through his entire body. Encouraged, he lets his hands wander, threading through Bill’s curly hair, moving delicately over his closed eyes down to his cheeks and… he hears a groan. A particularly distraught one, and suddenly Bill's biting painfully at his collarbone and Alec realises with a startle that he must have grazed the bleeding cut on Bill's cheek with his wandering hand. But before he considers feeling even remotely bad about it, he feels Bill's cock positively throb against his thigh.
“Pervert,” he mutters without any bite behind his words. Masters smiles against his skin without even a hint of shame, takes Alec's palm into his own and turns his head to examine it in the dim light of the room. Hardy's fingers are sticky, covered in splashes of red. The sight makes something dark and decadently dirty stir in the bottom of his stomach as his hips speed up in their movements, his breath leaving his mouth in short, hot puffs.
Without any warning, Bill puts his fingers in his mouth, swirls his scalding hot tongue around every digit, licking the blood off of them, sucking on them lightly. Alec's eyes widen at the sight and if that doesn't kill him on the spot—
“Fuck,”, he groans desperately, “fuck.” And that's all it takes for him to come in is pants like a fucking teenager, to reach an orgasm so intense it makes him stop breathing for a moment, makes his toes curl and his hips push into Bill's warmth with a crushing force.
When he comes back to his senses, he keeps his eyes closed, expecting the well-known feeling of shame to settle back in his bones. He braces himself, hiding his face in the crook of Bill's neck as if he can stall reality from throwing a bucket of icy cold water on him. But the dreaded moment doesn't come. Instead, it's a warm, intense emotion that spreads like molasses in his chest when he feels Bill's fingers threading his hair. That's when he realizes his friend… his lover must have come with him, because his breathing is much steadier now, his hold on Alec firm and unmoving. And that he's not going anywhere anytime soon.
“Bloody hell.” He feels laughter bubbling up against his aching ribs. “You can't just get yourself into stupid fights and then expect me to fuck it better for you.”
A cocky grin is spreading itself on Bill's bruised lips when Alec finally lifts his eyes to look at him properly.
“I can. I can and I will.”
“Bastard.”
And then he kisses him, rough and without any pretense of shame. Just because he can.