Warning: No lube.

Thanks to Nik and Verlaine for excellent edits, and to Kat for reading the before and after, and for her terrific insights and suggestions.

Point Value

by Rae 4/07

Eleven days into their new relationship, Starsky blows a gasket over some work thing that Hutch doesn't even know about. He uses some swear words Hutch hasn't heard in a while.

He puts on a show that's almost as good as some of the fireworks Hutch remembers from Fourth of Julys in the park behind the high school football field. Which reminds Hutch of a certain first kiss way back behind the field house with—what was her name? Oh, Darlene something. She'd had brown wavy hair worn long, and pulled back with a flimsy yellow bow. He'd pulled on the bow until her hair had tumbled all over her shoulders and his . . .

"Are you even listening to me?" Starsky shouts from less than a foot away.

"Of course," Hutch says. "Pigs will never fly, though."

That first kiss, his first first kiss. He rests his butt against the edge of the sink and tries to remember the rest of them, starting in chronological order, and then, as Starsky's voice gets louder still, by location, and in alphabetical order. Then, when Starsky begins pacing, he thinks of his old rating system, long unused: how many points per attribute on a value scale of one to five—eyes, ass, breasts, hair, leg length, stamina, words uttered in the throes of orgasm . . .

"Fuck fuck fuck," Starsky says.

"Good word choice."

Starsky turns back toward him so fast that his sneakers make a fingernails-on-the-blackboard sound on the kitchen linoleum.

"What? What did you just say?"

"Uh, good strong voice, I said."

Starsky takes up his furious pacing again. He's wearing the pattern off the floor. Hutch figures that his stride, when perturbed, might be as much as three feet or more, and the kitchen is really only maybe eight feet across by five at the most. Too bad the floor isn't tiled—he'd be able to estimate more accurately if there were tiles. Tiles, at twelve inches by twelve inches, and Starsky pounding on one and then another, and all Hutch would have to do would be to count the number of squares he didn't hit at each step, probably at least two, maybe even four, considering . . .

"Well?" Starsky's voice has skittered up into the octaves usually reserved for extreme situations, and his fists are opening and closing, sort of the way they do when he has Hutch's . . . "Huh? So?"

"Sure, Starsk. Good plan."

When Starsky's incensed, his speech always gets garbled, and his eyes go all flat and glittery. And he seems taller and stronger, actually pretty damn scary if you're a bad guy, which luckily Hutch isn't, because . . .

"You . . . you . . . if I have to . . . I'm gonna . . ." He takes one long step and one short one, and gets right inside Hutch's space, and begins to describe in lurid detail exactly what he plans to do as soon as he gets his hands on that son of a bitch of a fucking govahment jerkoff . . .

Hutch feels the warm spray of Starsky's fury on his own nose and chin, on his lips.

"Want my advice?" he asks. He's being reckless, but it doesn't matter anyway.

"No, I don't want your advice, you—"

Hutch raises his hand and pokes Starsky's shoulder with his finger.

"Okay." He pokes him again for emphasis. "You know what your problem is?"

Starsky's eyes get hot and dark, and the small lines around them grow deeper. He doesn't move back, but that isn't Hutch's goal, anyway.

"I suppose you're about to tell me."

Hutch had planned to, but instead finds that his hands have moved off on their own mission, and are assessing the point value of the flatness of Starsky's chest, and of the curve of his collar bone under the smooth cotton of his t-shirt, and how easy it would be to push up under the shoulders of his jacket and slide it right off the back of him. If Starsky would stop flailing his fists around, that would make it a lot easier . . .

"Well, Starsk . . ."

"Don't you 'Starsk' me, you—

"No? Why not, Starsk?" He slides his forefinger up under Starsky's gun, the heaviness of it hard on the back of his hand. The heat from underneath Starsky's arm has made the straps and the metal warm.

"What the hell are you doing?" Starsky latches onto Hutch's roving fingers with his left hand.

"Sorry!" Hutch withdraws his itchy fingers and instead shoves them at Starsky's shoulder again. There isn't much room to maneuver, but he gets himself extricated from between Starsky and the sink. "I'll leave you alone then. Work it out amongst yourself."

Navigating the Straits of Starsky used to be a simple matter of floating along in the same sturdy cutter, or sliding around on rolling decks, or maybe just trailing along in Starsky's wake in a small and tippy dinghy. Now, eleven days into this new . . . cruise, the tether connecting them seems shorter and made of some mysterious substance that Hutch has no idea how to grasp.

Behind him, Starsky's gone silent. Playing the game Starsky's way takes some finesse, some patience, so Hutch keeps walking.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" Starsky says from less than a foot behind him.

Hutch has an answer ready for that, and for a few alternate questions he might have had to answer, but before he can offer it up he finds himself shoved tight between the cold door and the heat of Starsky's body. He just has time to turn his head to the left before it gets smashed between the fancy window and Starsky's outraged hand.

"Uh," is all he can get out of his mouth. All he can think is, the hell with bows and long straight hair and breasts.

"You got something to say, Hutchinson, say it now." Starsky's left hand snakes around between Hutch and the door, and finds enough space to push the leather of Hutch's belt out of its buckle.

Something's happening to the fronts of Hutch's thighs—like they've been attached to some kind of electric current. The frames of the decorative panels on the door press rivulets of pain into them, straight to his groin. It doesn't matter, though—all he cares about are the hard bones of Starsky's fingers against his scalp, of the ridges of his ribs pressed against his spine, and the feel of Starsky's—

"Uh."

"That's what I thought. You got nothin. Right?"

Hutch tries to shake his head no, but there's no way to turn it. He blinks twice instead.

"Oh, so you do have something after all." Starsky leans himself into Hutch's shoulders, lifts himself up somehow an inch or two, and puts his ear right up near Hutch's mouth. The nerve endings in Hutch's scalp respond, and so do the ones in his . . . "Go ahead then. Say it."

Instead, Hutch twists his head sideways another fraction, hurting his own neck, and grabs Starsky's earlobe, teeth bared, any thought of caution lost under the haze of Starsky's breath and his sweat. He bites down, not as hard as he wants to, but hard enough. Starsky squawks, and shoves on his head, smashing it against the door. It hurts, and Hutch tries to push himself backward. He can't get any leverage, and instead finds himself pressed forward even more, his left arm now powerless and digging in against his stomach, and with one of Starsky's knees shoved against the back of his right leg.

"Son of a bitch," Starsky says. "You—"

He takes his hand out of Hutch's hair without letting go of it, and pulled back like that, Hutch has to let go of the ear. He licks his lips, hoping for the taste of iron, of salt. He tries to turn his head so he can see Starsky's face, but all that happens is that Starsky pulls harder on his hair, and all he can see is the top half of the door. There's dust on the ridge of the fancy window frame. He can smell it. He can hear the blood in the large vessels of his neck just below his ear. His scalp begins to protest Starsky's drag on it, and the front of his face feels impossibly hot.

He tries to shove himself back again, but Starsky's had way too much practice keeping bad guys pinned against walls. It's like trying to shove himself out from between a rock and a hard place.

Hard place . . . he makes a sound in his throat that he hopes doesn't sound like the laugh it is. Maybe he is going insane, because what kind of a person gets all hot and useless just because his partner has shoved him against the door like he's any old sick bastard they run into every day on the street? The laugh catches itself somewhere at the back of his tongue.

What's next? Handcuffs?

His mouth goes dry, and then floods itself the way it does when he's hungry and his dinner is almost ready and he can smell it and almost taste it . . .

"Think you're so tough, don't ya, big guy?" Starsky's voice is tight, and against his back, Hutch can feel the breaths he takes, hard short breaths, like he does when they're . . . "Think you're so tough and strong, don't you?"

What the hell is this? What the hell is Starsky doing? Is he even . . .

The release of pressure on his skin when Starsky steps back is almost as painful as the pressure itself had been. He can almost hear the veins in the back of his left arm sighing in relief, can feel them fill back up as his arm drops. Can feel his pants tighten as his . . .

"Starsk . . ." He tries to turn around.

"Shut up. Just shut up."

Hutch nearly drips down the door when Starsky lets him go.

"What . . ."

"Turn around."

Hutch is sure he's never moved faster. He turns, hands ready—for what he doesn't know, doesn't care, ready for . . .

Maybe not that, though. Not ready for that look on Starsky's face. What is that? Surely not . . . fear?

Starsky drops his hands, letting them hang at his sides. He looks down and away, and Hutch feels blind.

"I'm sorry," Starsky says, voice flat.

"Oh, God, Starsk." He can't think of anything else to say. So he points down, instead. "See that? That what you're so sorry for?"

Starsky doesn't look, so Hutch stretches forward and takes his left hand, pulling on it until Starsky yields. He puts it where he wants it, has wanted it every second of the past eleven days.

"No," Starsky says.

"'No'?" What does that mean? Does he mean no, don't do that? Hutch's brain rushes backward, checking for a reason. There isn't one. Couldn't be. He needs to see Starsky's eyes. "'No' what?" He presses himself forward. Starsky doesn't budge. "What does that mean, 'no'?"

"No, I'm not sorry." Finally he looks up, and Hutch watches him try not to grin. "Not if that's what it got me." He squeezes Hutch's cock twice, and when Hutch pushes harder against him, Starsky shoves him back again, harder than before, stronger than before.

Starsky's eyes have lost that cold angry glare, and now they take hold of Hutch like they have hands of their own. His mind begins to splinter, his thoughts floating off like little toy boats in a stream, down and away and lost . . .

He brings his hands up and takes hold of Starsky's face between them, pulling him in, turning him, pressing him backward until the door now holds Starsky trapped and helpless. He tries to say something, but since he can't think of anything coherent, nothing coherent comes out.

Starsky makes a sound at the back of his throat like he wants to say something, but he's lost the ability, too. In some backwater of Hutch's brain, he understands that trying to speak is, from now on, a nonissue, that neither of them has to concern himself ever again with saying the right words, or with making sure of performing the right actions in the right places, or for taking care to modulate the strength of his grip, or even to distract—or maybe focus—himself with some stupid point value system.

So he does what he's wanted to do, has always wanted to do, always since that first first kiss, the real first first, the one Starsky had launched at him like a grenade, the one he'd thrown himself on willingly, the one that had torn them both apart, startled and suddenly frozen like two deer in the headlights or maybe a couple of too-evenly-matched and punchdrunk boxers or—he can't think of anything but clichés to define what had happened—and then had drawn them together like magnets or homing pigeons or black holes or universes expanding and then contracting—hell, surely he could think of some better simile . . . if he could still think . . . if he would just stop thinking . . .

He lets himself fall away, out of his own head, into his own body, remembering the feel of that first unexpected explosion, the way his mind had fragmented, and then his body. He's never let himself go before, has never dared. But now . . .

Starsky holds him steady with his hands, with his eyes.

"Do it," Starsky says.

Hutch wonders for a second how he ended up on his knees, hands getting in the way of Starsky's, trying to get the damn belt undone, get the zipper pulled down. It would be easier if Starsky would just move his hands and let him get it done, but the push and bump of Starsky's fingers is dragging him farther down into himself and he can't think of a way to get at the zipper on his own. He ends up with his hands on his own zipper—if he doesn't free himself first he'll never be able to think of anything else—and by the time that's taken care of, Starsky's gotten his own cock free and is poking it into Hutch's right eye.

"Shit," Hutch says, though he hadn't meant to.

"Jesus, Hutch, just do it," Starsky says. He grabs Hutch's hair again, both hands in hard fists in his hair.

It hurts, and Hutch tries not to groan, but he can't help it, he can't really help anything he does anymore. So he opens his mouth meaning to complain, but with Starsky's cock in it before he can make the sound, all he can do is gulp and gag a little.

"Oh, fuck," Starsky says. "Oh, fuck."

He sags down against the door, and Hutch has to follow him down, bending lower, until his back protests. He puts his hands on Starsky's hips, right at the curve, right where they fit perfectly against the curve at the top of his thighs, and lifts, pressing his thumbs in hard, pushing up. Starsky stands a little straighter, and Hutch's back shuts up.

He slides his hands around to the front, still holding tight, still digging in, and hears the sound he's waiting for, that gasping yelp that he's been hearing in his head day and night for the past eleven days. He likes the sound of it, and so does his cock, and so do his fingers, which on their own have found the skin underneath and behind the balls, the good spot where he likes to put his tongue, but he can't reach there right now. Fingers will have to do. Starsky pulls his head in and Hutch moves with him, letting him do the work, make the moves, set the rhythm, so he can just listen and feel, and smell and taste.

He pushes his fingers back a little farther, hears that sound he wants, feels the ridge he wants, and he begins to tap on it. He's thinking, let me in let me in let me in but he's having a hard time staying in himself, and he doesn't want to lose it, doesn't want to bite, doesn't want to come, not yet . . .

"Stop," Starsky says. Or that's what Hutch thinks he said, but his brain can't figure out what it means, so he doesn't stop, can't stop.

"Wait," Starsky says. "Wait."

It sounds like the strangled plea of man with a gun to his head, not of a man with his cock in another guy's mouth. Hutch still has one working brain cell, the one with the big Stop Button, so he freezes in place, tongue pressed tight against the end of Starsky's cock, where it's round and salty and feels like . . .

Starsky, hands still locked in his hair, pushes him back. Hutch lets him push, and starts listing in his brain possible reasons why. Too hard, too soft. Too fast. Not fast enough. I hurt him. I should have . . .

He's back in his head, where he doesn't want to be. Hadn't ever wanted to be again. He feels his balls drop as his cock lets the blood out of itself. He sits back. He doesn't want to look up.

He wouldn't have had time to, anyway. Starsky shoves him over, so he topples onto his still-aching left arm, face down, legs sprawled and tangled behind him.

Now what? is all he has time to think. Then he's on his back, so fast he doesn't remember feeling himself turn, shoulders bruising on the floor. Starsky's trying to yank down Hutch's pants, grunting like those muscle guys at the beach who bench press too much weight . . .

"I'm gonna come in there," Starsky says without looking up. He can't get Hutch's pants off over his sneakers. "Fuck," he says. "I want to come in there."

Hutch's cock refills itself, fast, and his legs try to move away from each other. They're hobbled by the pants around his ankles and Hutch feels close to kicking like a mule to get them off get them off, but Starsky says, "Wait."

So he puts his hands down on the floor, and his head back down on the floor and he waits, thinking about racehorses in gates, and starter pistols, while Starsky fumbles off the offending pants, both pairs.

Hutch wonders if he's going to take off the leather, too, and the gun, hopes he does, then hopes he doesn't—

"Do it," is all he says.

This time it's much easier to shut off his brain, he just stops paying attention to it. Can't pay attention to it. Other things are much more interesting. Like the way Starsky's hoisted up his legs and shoved them back, the way he's trying to find the right angle, the right position, the sounds he makes in frustration, the way he looks—like he looks when he's furious, when he has only one thought, one need . . . when he needs to save a life, save Hutch's life . . .

That unexpected burn that feels like—Hutch almost laughs—like fire in the hole, a new kind of grenade, and he's going to have to say stop and wait himself in another second but not for the same reason . . . Before he has time to decide to say it, the burn is gone, and he's wondering who's saying let me in let me in. Is it still himself, or is it Starsky? He can't tell. It doesn't matter.

Let him in let him let him in . . .

"Oh fuck oh jeezus," he hears. He doesn't know who said it. Or if anyone even did.

There's an alien thing like a buzz in his belly and he puts a hand over the place where it is. It spreads itself out inside him, melts his muscles and then torches them, so they feel like sweet liquid fire and he begins to move in some kind of ancient rhythm in time with Starsky's beat. He lifts his head and looks down at himself, himself with his knees in the air and Starsky's cock sliding in and out of his ass and he says something, and knows it isn't a word, but Starsky looks at him, straight into his eyes, like he knows what it means.

He puts a hand on top of Starsky's head, into his hair, makes a fist, hears him groan. His other hand has wrapped itself tight around his own cock, which feels different now, like it's not really his anymore and Starsky's in his eyes and his belly and his ass . . .

He shouts something, or Starsky does, and then he's somewhere else, nowhere near his brain, where the only thing his knows is Starsky's hair in his hand and Starsky's cock in his ass and the hard floor under his shoulders disappearing and he floats into himself and stays there where Starsky is, where he thinks he'll stay oh please let me stay here let me stay . . .

Starsky makes a sound that makes Hutch think indistinctly of that time in the canyon when the Torino had no brakes, but he loses the image, loses everything but the sound Starsky makes when he shoves hard once and holds himself still, frozen in time, or welded in place, or like he plans to stay there let him stay there . . . and then collapses, heavy on Hutch's chest, Hutch's left hand still in his hair and right hand still around his own . . .

"First and ten," Hutch says, each word between its own two breaths.

Starsky's still blowing, his chest moving like a ragged sail at half mast in full wind, and looks like he wants to know what Hutch is talking about, but can't quite get in touch with the part of his brain that cares enough to try.

"Football? You're thinking about football?"

"No, idiot. First and ten."

Starsky drags in a breath and moves himself down . . . and out, slow and careful. He flops over onto his back and pulls Hutch's hand out of his hair, and holds it tight in his own hand instead.

"First time doing . . . uh . . . that." Hutch says, and waggles his fingers inside Starsky's hand. "And ten on the scale of one to five." He looks sideways at Starsky's face.

Starsky lifts the corner of his mouth, and squints his right eye just a little.

"Want to go for double or nothing?" But he doesn't move.

"Think you can take me? Double or nothing."

"Twenty points. I'll take the double."

Hutch waits until he thinks he can move, until he can breathe, until Starsky has stopped gasping like a beached fish.

"Not counting anymore," he says. "Done with that."

He knows Starsky has no idea what he's talking about. Maybe someday he'll tell him about the abandoned point value system, but not right now.

Right now he's got some points to score.

---

Feedback/comments/critiques are welcome: sevencatday@gmail.com

Home

GameCube