"Firsts"

Written By: Waterlilylf

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing. All rights remain with Bandai, Sotsu and associated parties. No profit being made here.

Rating: R

Warnings: Yaoi, Post Cannon, sap, angst

Pairings: 3x2

Summary: How do you get past losing the love of your life, the person you fell in love with when you were just fifteen? Trowa desperately needs someone special in his life, even if he hasn't quite realised it yet..

"Firsts"

 

Chapter 2 - First Date?:

He'd been on dates before. Actual dates with drinks and dinner as opposed to cruising some guy in a bar. Most of them had been pleasant enough, and a couple of the more successful ones had ended up in sex, which was clearly considered the grand prize of the dating thing, and he'd never once had any desire to see any of the men again.

Anyway. The point was that he'd done it; gone and sat with total strangers, most of whom had been introduced to him by Cathy, or sometimes friends or colleagues, and eaten some fairly good meals, and made small talk about food or films or travel, and tried to sound interested in other people's holiday stories or childhood anecdotes or whatever.

It wasn't all that hard. And it wasn't as if Duo was a total stranger. If they ran out of things to talk about, there was always work and Wufei, and any hobbies Duo had which didn't involve Heero.

He'd been out with Duo before, plenty of times. Never just the two of them, but still. He had a fairish idea what sort of food Duo liked - anything, really - and the sort of places he enjoyed going to, so he'd selected a little Italian restaurant in the city centre where he went fairly regularly. It was casually cosy without being over-the-top romantic, and the food was good.

Really, it was just dinner with a guy he knew fairly well; a guy he'd fucked at work.

Duo Maxwell.

Shit.

Duo had rung him two days ago - ostensibly over a work thing - and in the course of the determinedly work-themed conversation which followed, he'd mentioned that he had to be out of the house on Thursday night because 'Fei was having Zechs over. Trowa had obligingly taken the hint and suggested going out for dinner and Duo had faffed a bit and then said a bit grudgingly that he didn't have anything else on, so he might as well.

Trowa got to the restaurant first, and had five minutes to browse the menu before Duo turned up.

Heads turned as he walked through the door, acquiring a bit of a swagger on the way for his appreciative public, and clearly loving the attention. He'd dressed up too. His clothes normally fell into two very distinct categories; baggy hoodies and sweaters a couple of sizes too big for him, or else the sort of spray-on, strategically-ripped jeans and skimpy tops that most people considered were Saturday night, heavy-duty cruising gear. Whatever he wore was usually a fairly effective barometer of how his relationship with Heero happened to be going at any given time.

Trowa wasn't sure where tailored dark slacks and a silky purple shirt fit into the equation.

He considered getting up and pulling Duo's chair out, since it was an official date, after all, and decided Duo would probably thump him for trying. He settled for telling him how good he looked.

Duo looked taken aback for a second as he sat down, and then recovered his equilibrium with a flick of his ponytail. 'I always look good. So,' he picked up his menu, and regarded Trowa over the top of it, eyes dancing. 'Is this the sort of date where we suck each other off under the table before we get our entrées, or the sort where we spend the whole night making up cutesy anecdotes about pets we had when we were kids?'

'I had a horse,' Trowa said at once. 'For three days. Rosie, I called her. She pulled one of our supply carts. Then she slipped in the mud one day and broke her leg. Had to be shot. We boiled her up to make soup.'

'I had rats,' Duo whipped back. 'Not much meat on 'em, but a nice crunch to the bones. Interesting flavour, sometimes,' he added reminiscently, 'depending on what garbage they'd been eating.'

'And the tails,' Trowa deadpanned. 'Chewy. You could get an hour out of a good tail.'

'For real?' Duo pressed, obviously thinking Trowa was sending him up.

Trowa just shrugged, and let him work it out. He knew Duo hadn't had it easy growing up on L2, but it hadn't exactly been a cakewalk for him either.

'Wow. Hope you never told Quat any of that.'

'How much of an idiot do you think I am?'

'Good call, probably. He'd have seriously freaked. And he'd never have let your mouth go anywhere near him if he thought you'd actually eaten rats. So, you ready to order now? I'm starving.'

'Sure.' He beckoned a waiter over; a guy he knew slightly from coming here, and had once known pretty well for about ten minutes in the little delivery yard outside. Bruno managed to take their orders while simultaneously staring at Duo and muttering comments under his breath about Duo's looks, hotness and general perfection.

Duo was seemingly absorbed in studying the wine list, but his colour had heightened, just a little. He gave his order with unusual crispness and there was a grim set to his mouth as Bruno walked off. 'So, good to have options, right?' he remarked tightly. 'If it doesn't wash out with you tonight, I've got myself a Plan B right there.'

'Definitely. Wait. You can speak Italian?'

'Hardly needed to, considering the guy was practically drooling over me,' Duo said tartly. 'But, yeah, I speak it a bit. I did my Masters in Rome. Can't live somewhere for a year and not pick up some of the lingo. You knew that, right?'

'I guess I must have.' He had known it. Surely. Someone must have mentioned it. Except he would have been at Oxford that year, with Quat, and the rest of the world could have evaporated for all he cared.

Duo grinned. 'No biggie. Not like I'd have known anything about what you were up to, except you were always with Quatre.'

'Yeah. So, Rome. How was that?'

'Pretty cool, actually. I mean, you've been there, so you know.' He started to talk about places he'd visited, and then Bruno drifted back over with their drinks.

Trowa gave him a good, hard stare that made him tear his eyes off Duo - God, had the asshole been looking at him like that the whole time? - and rush off.

'Are you, like, defending my honour or something?' Duo asked disbelievingly. ''Cause I'm pretty sure I don't have any, and I'm pretty capable of looking after myself. You didn't have to give the poor guy filthies on my account.'

'If you want, I can call him back over and introduce you.'

'Yeah, I really get attracted to guys who stare at me like I'm a piece of meat laid out on a slab. Who wouldn't?'

Trowa lifted his glass and took a swallow of beer. 'I invited you here. You shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable.'

Duo's expression suddenly softened. 'It's OK. Not like it doesn't happen all the time. I'd have handled it, except he seemed to know you pretty well, and I'm on my best behaviour anyway.'

'Are you really?'

Duo picked up his glass, clinked it against Trowa's. 'Maybe you'll get to find out.' He kept his eyes on Trowa's as he drank, making a damn performance of it, sighing appreciatively as he breathed in the wine and then swallowing, those long fingers wrapped around the stem. His lips were stained a darker red when he put the glass down.

Best behaviour, right.

'No more pet stories?' Duo teased. 'Does this mean you're ready to skip straight to getting down and dirty?'

'We had a lion at the circus,' Trowa said evenly. 'This new guy, total idiot, thought it'd be fun to go into his cage. I think his whole head got bitten off, pretty much. I've never seen so much blood.'

'Ouch. That's some passion killer. You know, you might possibly want to start working on your sweet nothings, Barton.'

Trowa shrugged. 'I was going for the passion-killing.'

'Seriously?' Duo wrinkled his nose in distaste, and pulled a strand of hair free and twirled it around one finger, clearly aiming for winsome and adorable and just about pulling it off. 'Sure you're not just turned on by people getting their heads torn off by giant kitties?'

'Pretty sure.'

'Okey dokey,' Duo said brightly. 'So, back to my first question of the night. What's it going to be?'

It took Trowa a second to catch up. 'You always end up doing one or the other on your dates?'

'Me? Nope. Don't do the whole dating thing. This is the first time, pretty much. But I hear people talking. Seems like it only goes two ways. You either skip the whole dinner thing, and go straight to the end game, or you sit for two hours wishing you could, and having to outdo each other with cutesy little stories or shit. Or if you're Wufei, you get whisked off to Venice in a private jet. That'd be kind of nice, actually.'

'Yeah, well, sorry I don't measure up to Zechs.'

Duo grinned. 'You measure up all right in other ways.'

'Is that from personal experience?'

'Hell, no. How much of a death wish do you think I have?'

'Wow. I didn't know you had any instincts of self-preservation at all.'

'I don't have a whole lot,' Duo owned. 'But I do have some limits as to how dumb I can be. Heero'd have eviscerated me with one fingernail.'

'Do I have that to look forward to?'

'Nah. It would've been the whole Zechs thing. He doesn't really care about whatever else I do.' He picked up his wine glass again, and swirled the contents around, bending slightly to breathe in. 'So, no more dinky little anecdotes about circus animals eating people? Come on, entertain me, why don't you?'

Everyone always said Duo was so charming. Trowa had never entirely got it. Yeah, he'd seen Duo turning on the charm when he wanted something, and people always fell for it. Just another tool in the Maxwell arsenal. He'd wondered how people could be such idiots, but somehow he got people to spill whatever he wanted, even knowing he was in I.A., that he was investigating them.

But then he'd never had Duo alone in a restaurant, gazing at him with his chin propped in one hand, and the candle flame reflected in those amazing eyes, and Duo fully focused on him. God, it was beyond intoxicating.

At some point, their food arrived, and the empty plates were taken away after, so he'd presumably eaten something, but he couldn't have said what it was, how it had tasted. He'd been bloody bewitched.

'Duo. What are we doing?'

'Uh. Eating pasta?' Duo looked down at the table, apparently surprised to see tiramisu instead of the lasagne he'd ordered for his main course. 'Dessert.'

'Seriously?'

'Seriously, you're asking me?' Duo shook his head, ponytail swinging. God, if he didn't get to let Duo's hair loose, to touch it, he'd go crazy. 'What do you want?'

Wasn't that the question?

'I don't just want a fling,' he said finally. 'I've done that. I want more. Someone who's not just with me for sex.' There, that was perfectly honest. He'd done the screwing-around thing after Quatre, for long enough to know that it wasn't for him.

Duo's eyes gleamed. 'But you do want the sex too, right?'

'Well, of course. Not on the first date,' he added hurriedly.

'Hardly the first date,' Duo mused. 'Second, no? Or third?'

'What, you're counting that time in the locker room as an actual date?'

'Hell, yeah.' His mouth curled. 'Ooops. Silly me. You're the one who forgot about it, right?'

'Back to that?' Trowa wondered. 'Duo, listen. I shouldn't have said that. I was just pissed off at you. I didn't mean you were forgettable. I'm sure you're amazing in bed.'

'Got that right.'

He was like a little kid sometimes, preening at a compliment. Like one of Cathy's daughters. 'Let's say the ... situation wasn't optimal,' Trowa said carefully. 'I was wrecked, and come on, the locker room's hardly the best place. Anyone could've come in.'

'Whatevs. For someone who's not into sex on the actual first date, you've kind of missed the boat.'

'First official date,' Trowa said hurriedly. 'Duo, this is ... going to be complicated. There's Heero for a start. He's a friend of mine. I don't want to do anything to hurt him.'

'I told you, we're over. What, you didn't believe me?'

'I do, honestly. But, God, we all work together. We're friends. I don't want to do anything to hurt him.'

Duo shrugged. 'Didn't seem too worried about that a week ago, were you? Not like I drugged you or something. You were into it. And you're hardly in any position to take the moral high ground.'

'What the hell is that supposed to mean?'

'What the hell it means,' Duo snapped back, 'is that I exactly how long you were fucking your ex. Your ex who just happened to be married. Didn't care too much about hurting his wife, did you? Or didn't she count?'

Shit.

No one, no one, was supposed to know about that.

'It's over,' Trowa grated. 'Two years ago. You know so much about me, I'm sure you know that. '

Duo gave him a look of pure scepticism. Quatre's best friend. Fuck. Of course he knew. Knew far too bloody much, clearly.

'You threw yourself at me, if you remember,' he snapped, going on the attack. 'You didn't seem to care all that much about your boyfriend either.'

'He wasn't my boyfriend. His go-to guy when he needed to get laid, maybe.'

'You were with him for ten years.'

'I was not!'

'I can count, Duo. I was there, remember?' Trowa said. 'That safe house in France, during the war? That was the first time, right?''

Duo laughed suddenly. ''God, yeah. The time Wufei walked in on us. I think he's still not right, the poor guy. But yeah, that was the first time. OK, we hooked up a couple times during the war. So what? It's not like we screwed our way through the whole thing. Hey, you were there; it wasn't exactly like there were a whole lot of opportunities and you have actually met Heero, right? You get where his focus was, and I swear, it wasn't on my ass.'

'He's an idiot,' Trowa said huskily.

'Yeah, totes,' Duo said, reaching behind with one hand and giving his backside a complacent pat. 'Seriously, it's stellar, right? Like, it could be a porn star in its own right. So, anyway, yeah, he did me a few times, once he figured out where to stick it 'cause, like, the poor guy was totally clueless but after that, hell, I hardly saw him for about four years. We were on different continents most of the time, studying at different universities.'

'You've been living together since you came back to Sanc.'

'Sharing a house,' Duo retorted. 'Very occasionally, bodily fluids. Look, there was never that much between us, and whatever there was is over, and that's all there is to it.'

Not remotely that simple, Trowa thought. Duo could make light of it all he wanted, but they'd lived together or shared a house or whatever he called it for four years, and for Duo, who could have had anyone he wanted by lifting a finger - hell, just by giving someone one look from those amazing eyes - that damn well meant something.

'So, what do you want from me?'

'Who says I want anything from you?'

Trowa grinned. 'Well. You're the one who called me.'

'Maybe I just wanted someone to eat dinner with.'

'Fair enough,' Trowa said calmly. 'Except you've finished eating and you're still here.'

'Still have to settle the bill,' Duo retorted. 'They usually like you to do that before you leave. Although I could probably get a free dinner if I asked that waiter to leave with me, d'you reckon?'

'Oh, absolutely. You going to do that?'

'Nah. He's not so hot. Plus, it'd be kind of tacky to come here with you and go home with someone else.'

'It would, yeah.'

'So.' Duo pulled a couple of strands free from his ponytail, and twirled them idly around one finger. 'You asked what I wanted. How about you invite me home and I'll do a show and tell?'

'You weren't listening to all the stuff I said about not having sex on a first date?'

'Heard all the words,' Duo confirmed, a sneaky little smile on his lips. 'Thing is, I also saw the way you've been looking at me. I'm getting kind of mixed signals here, Trowa. Like, you think I'm off limits 'cause of Heero, or 'cause you have all this dumb ideas about romancing me, or 'cause you want to get to know me better, or whatever, but at the same time it's not what you really want, is it?'

'I told you what I want,' Trowa said stiffly, beckoning a waiter over and asking for the bill. If there was someone else around, he was maybe less likely to drag Duo under the table. Possibly. He dug his credit card out of his wallet. 'Let me get this?'

'If you let me make it up to you,' Duo breathed.

'Sure. You can pay next time.'

'Hmm. Not exactly what I meant.'

Shit. Double buggering shit. Duo had his head tilted just a little, so his shining ponytail fell over one shoulder, and Trowa didn't know if he was wearing lip gloss or what, but his mouth looked irresistibly soft and warm and pink and he knew how it tasted even, and there was challenge in those dark eyes, and something else as well. Glimmering amusement and very definite sparks of arousal.

'We'd better go.' He scrawled his name on the flimsy little credit card slip, not bothering to add a tip. Bloody Bruno, staring at Duo like that. 'We're the last ones here.'

'Shit, so we are.' Duo looked around in surprise as he got up, darting Bruno a languishing smile that made the waiter stumble over a chair, and made Trowa want to hit someone. Instead, he grabbed Duo's hand and pulled him outside. Duo went, his hand warm and firm in Trowa's.

'Where are you parked?'

'Over there.' Duo jerked his chin; he'd got a great parking spot just outside the restaurant door. 'So, your car or mine?'

'I thought you were on your best behaviour.'

'Oh, I am,' Duo assured him airily. 'Or else we'd be under our table right now. Or on it. Whichever you fancied.'

'Classic rule of dating; no sex on the first night.'

The very tip of Duo's tongue slipped out, teasing. 'I don't believe in rules. Never read a rule book in my whole life.'

'It shows.'

'Mmm.' He slipped his hand free, and hopped into his jeep, winding the window down a few inches. 'So, this is me. You in or out? Up to you.'

'Out, by the looks of it.' He had a logical, orderly list in his head of reasons why it would be a bad, very bad, idea just to get in the jeep. Duo was on the rebound. There was almost certainly still something between him and Heero. Heero was a close friend and Duo slept with other people just to piss him off, or get his attention. Trowa wasn't into the whole one-night thing. He'd been there, done that, got past it. He definitely wasn't into one night stands with people he knew; way too complicated.

He had Duo looking at him.

'What the fuck do you actually want from me, Barton? Just level with me, OK? Maybe it's just that I'm not so bright, but you're totally wrecking my head here. And I know damn well what I want. You, in me, balls-deep and going like an express train.'

Trowa took a very deliberate, measured step backwards. 'Duo, I do want that. You know damn well I do. I just want more than sex.'

'You actually want to date me?' Duo asked, sounding bemused. He shook his head. 'Do I get any say in this?'

'I'm asking you.'

'So, that's your idea of dating? Eating crappy pasta and then going home with a serious case of blue balls? I could probably pass on that.'

'The food wasn't that bad,' Trowa argued. 'But yeah, something like that. And I was hoping for a good night kiss maybe?' he suggested, and watched Duo's expression wobble, going from seriously brassed-off when he realised that Trowa was serious about turning him down to uncertainty and finally amusement. He looked at Trowa and plastered on one of those big shit-eating grins of his. The ones that usually got brought out as an accompaniment to an explosion.

'You think I'm the kind of guy who kisses on the first date?' he teased.

'I was hoping.'

'Live in hope, die in despair,' Duo said smartly. He did lower the window properly though, and leaned out. 'I dunno, Trowa. If I did put out a bit, would you respect me after? I'm a good Catholic boy, y'know.'

'No, you're not.'

'Lucky for you.'

It wasn't all that easy, kissing someone through a window. They managed though, if Trowa stooped a bit, and Duo leaned out further. It was just as good as the first time, in his office. He managed to get a hand around Duo's shoulders and slide it through his hair, and that was sinfully good, even if Duo did toss his head free when Trowa tied to pull the hair tie off.

'Don't get fresh, Barton. You like rules so much, there's one for you. No hair-touching on the first date.'

'On the second?'

'You'd better ask me and you'll find out.'

Trowa grinned. 'Want to do this again sometime?'

'Define this.' Duo leaned back out the window. 'Dinner? Necking in a car park?'

'Both of the above?' Trowa suggested. 'Or pick one.'

Duo turned the key in the ignition. 'I'm going to Russia for ten days. I'll think about it when I'm away. Maybe if nothing better comes up, I'll give you a call.' He was laughing, looking Trowa over. 'Go home, Trowa. Maybe take a cold shower or something.'

~ * ~

Chapter 3

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