Chapter Text
This, this right here? Is why Saxon doesn’t do drugs.
This weighty, uncontrolled feeling, like he’s floating outside himself, like he has to actively fire synapses to lift a hand, to push, to pull.
He never did drugs in high school, afraid of being singled out for the random drug testing his private school was permitted to do, and being kicked off the lacrosse team. He had smoked weed a handful of times in college, culminating in a painfully embarrassing event where he smoked out of a bong for the first time, hit it too hard, and had to spend the rest of the party being babysat by his pledge son because he was incapable of forming a complete sentence.
So yeah. Him, Drugs? Not a good combination. And now he gets to add tonight to his ever-growing list of examples as to why.
He’s on his back on the bed, some bed, somewhere in Thailand, the gentle bobbing of the hull nearly unnoticeable on a craft this size but in his current state, he feels like his brain is sliding with each gentle keel.
He’s aware, pretty concretely, of his brother next to him, panting and writhing on top of that Canadian model—or was she French? How the fuck is he supposed to remember, honestly.
He’s happy, in some present, protected part of his brain, that Lochy’s about to score, but also a little jealous. He was the one that had originally scoped Chloe, and he had only been diverted by her pretty friend, that mean blonde British girl with the cute teeth who wanted nothing to do with him. So he hadn’t been too mad when Chloe went for Lochy, back when he wasn’t an option. Wanting the best but settling for the imitation—he didn’t blame her.
But once Chelsea had made it clear that she wasn’t interested and went off to bed, he kinda expected Chloe’s interest in Lochlan to fade, once he was available. But it didn’t, her keen, dark eyes still all on Lochy and his long, gangly limbs, his bashful dimple. And that was new, that was different. Lochy showing him up.
He didn’t know how he felt about it, not yet. It was a question for tomorrow, for next week, once he was back in Durham amongst his apartment, his friends, his life. For now, here, all he can do is lie there, watching through the slits of his eyes as Loch maneuvers himself on top of Chloe, cursing a little. Something’s going wrong.
Chloe has a hand between Lochlan’s legs, working, and Lochy screws his eyes shut, teeth digging into his bottom lip, brow furrowed. Chloe hums in disappointment.
“It’s alright, little magician.” she finally relents, both hands coming back to the bed to brace herself up. “We all run out of tricks eventually.”
She casts a look over to Saxon, bolted to the bed next to them. He feels completely divorced from his body, his limbs heavy in the soft sheets. It takes a moment of hard concentration to pick his head up.
Chloe looks him up and down once, takes in his glassy eyes, his cock half-hard between his legs.
“I don’t suppose you could—” she twirls her hand, fingers flicking between their bodies. And no, Saxon couldn’t. Humiliatingly, uncharacteristically—he couldn’t. He shakes his head faintly before crashing back against the pillows.
He’s usually never not aware of his dick, whether it was soft or hard, where it was leading him to. But now, here, with whatever the fuck it is coursing through his veins, he’s got nothing. The thought of turning onto his forearms and thrusting into her, having to kiss her neck and make sounds and come—it’s so out of his reach that he can’t believe it’s something he’s ever been capable of.
And then there’s—there’s Loch. Sitting back on his knees now, hands knitted in his naked lap below his dick, laying soft and useless between his thighs.
This is why we don’t do drugs, Lochy. Saxon wants to chide. They fuck you up, break your concentration, divert your attention. Eyes on the prize, always, always.
But even if he could get fully hard, even if the thought of humping and sucking and spilling didn’t make his stomach turn, he wouldn’t do that to his brother. Wouldn’t humiliate him more than Lochlan is now, pale and blushing and shy, little body trembling, gaze hazy and drooping.
Chloe sighs, rolling her eyes, that bitch. She untangles her long legs from between Lochlan’s own and gets up, grasping at the side of the bed for her bikini top and shorts, pulling them on with leonine grace.
Lochlan watches her, panting faintly, eyes darting from her to Saxon beside him. Once she’s clothed again, she leans forward, kissing Lochy softly on the cheek. Something in Saxon’s chest hums, protective and angry, but he can’t move.
“Come find me, if you get a second wind.” she tells Lochlan, before kissing him again, this time on the mouth. Lochy tilts his head into it, but not like he likes it. Like he’s confused, questioning what’s happening to him. Saxon can relate.
Chloe’s eyes flit to Saxon, then.
“You, too.” she winks, pretty mouth twisted into a taunting smile, and then she’s gone, the cabin door shutting behind her with a loud click.
Lochlan sits a minute more, his fussy little mouth working, hands still wringing between his knees.
‘I’m sorry.” he finally says, eyes downcast. “Please don’t be mad.”
Saxon snorts then, to hide the soft ache in his chest. As though he could ever be mad at his brother.
“It happens, Lochy. What a way to learn your fucking lesson.” and then he reaches a leaden arm out, grasping at Lochlan’s knee. “Let’s go to bed.”
Lochlan sighs, deflating, all the air coming out of him at once like he’s relieved, like he’s been let off the hook.
The protected part of Saxon’s brain, the one still capable of noticing and analyzing, clocks this. Shouldn’t he be upset? If Saxon had had the opportunity to lose his virginity to a fucking model on a yacht and he blew it because of whiskey dick, he’d have punched a wall.
But Lochy just flops forward onto the bed and clumsily pulls the top sheet over the small of his back, the curve of his bare ass exposed to the open air. Saxon thinks to slap it, tell Loch to cover up, but what was the point? They’re both already half asleep.
-
The hangover is agony on a cosmic level, both of them waking into the hot humid hell of the cabin minutes apart. They take turns in the bathroom, running the sink to mask the sound. Preserving some kind of dignity after the night (morning?) they just had, the afternoon they’re having now, after they woke up naked and sweating side by side, staring at each other with blurry, miserable eyes as the pieces clicked into place.
“I’m going to kill myself.” Saxon announces as he comes out of the cabin bathroom for the second time, hands covering his eyes. The entire room reeks of vomit and body odor. It’s disgusting.
“Okay,” Lochlan agrees from his position on the bed, his voice muffled by the pillow he has over his face. He’s got Saxon’s swim shorts on, his skinny chicken thighs swimming in the fabric, his bare chest mottled red and purple around the collarbone with hickies from Chloe. Damn, she got him good. “But only if you kill me first.”
“Deal.” Saxon agrees. He thinks about yelling at Loch to get out of his swim trunks, but he doesn’t think he can keep his mouth open that long without hurling, so he just looks for Lochy’s trunks on the floor, pulling them on.
Holy fuck, what the fuck did Chloe give them?
They get a tuktuk back to the resort from the dock, both of them sitting in quesy silence, white knuckling the canopy supports as the rickety bike bounces over rocks and pot holes. Saxon shoves a handful of bills at the driver as they disembark outside the resort and waves him off. He has no idea how cash works here, so he probably just gave the cabbie the best tip of his life.
None of that matters, though, because Lochlan is doubled over in front of the pristine curved driveway, heaving, hot, thin liquid coming out of him in shuddering waves, his little hands braced on his knees. Two resort workers in their neat khaki uniforms watch from the bellhop stand, mouths worked into polite smiles around their grimaces.
Saxon stands next to him and pets his back, kneads the nape of his neck. He keeps his own head turned up towards the sky so he doesn’t start sympathy puking, willing his own stomach to settle long enough to get back to their villa.
They make it, trying to blow past Piper in the living room where she sits with her book and her headphones. She picks her head up as they enter, her wide eyes startling in a way that makes Saxon think they must look even worse than they feel, which is terrifying.
It’s his turn to barf, so he shoves Lochy aside to get to the bathroom off of the main room. Between his gags, he can hear Lochlan’s little voice, lying, covering.
“Yeah, we just—we just drank a lot.”
Piper’s judgmental scoff in return, tongue clicking. “Yeah, I can tell.”
Shut up. Saxon thinks hatefully. Shut up, just fucking shut up. You’re the reason we’re all here in the first place. And then he heaves again, his stomach only bringing up bile and water now, acidic liquid trickling out of his nose.
There’s some more discussion that Saxon can’t hear over the deafening ceramic acoustics, and then the sound of the front door closing. Lochlan appears at the doorway of the bathroom, ashen and tired.
“She left.” he tells Saxon, hovering in the doorway. “She’s going to the monastery with Mom and Dad.”
They kissed last night, Saxon’s now remembered. Twice, maybe more. It’s all a little fuzzy. He’s done some weird shit on dares but that’s—that’s pretty bad. He’s almost grateful for the misery of his body because it’s an unavoidable distraction from whatever sick, horrible feeling that realization brings up in him. It’s a tomorrow problem. A problem for when he doesn’t feel like his insides are trying to claw their way up through his esophagus.
He nods, his forehead against the circle of his arms around the toilet seat. His breath in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl is so loud in his ears, grating.
Lochy lingers at the door, chest shuddering. It occurs to Saxon, then, that this is probably Lochlan’s first time hungover. Certainly hungover like this. He’s waiting for instruction.
“Uh.” Saxon starts, unwinding one arm to gesture blindly towards the kitchen. “Call up for, like, six bottles of water, and Advil. Adjust the air conditioning in our room. Make it, like, 72 degrees. And see if there’s extra blankets anywhere. I’ll be there in a second.”
He lifts his head, sees Lochy nodding, big eyes shining, curls bouncing with the movement of his head, so serious.
Don't worry, Lochy. Saxon thinks as another wave of nausea seizes in his gut and he has to turn his head back down. I’m gonna take care of you. Don’t worry about a thing.
-
He makes Lochy chug a bottle and a half of water with him alongside two Advil each, and then they sleep like they’re dead, side by side in the arctic room under piles of blankets. Saxon’s done this before, he knows how to treat it. Once they wake up, they’ll need food—plain American shit, buttered toast and eggs and French fries--but that’s a problem for another hour, another life.
But when he wakes up, it’s not into another life, unfortunately. It’s just back into this room, their twin beds side by side, the flimsy canopies above them fluttering in the draft of the air conditioning. He palms for his phone before he remembers that it’s locked away in some safe in the main reception area, god fucking dammit, so he settles for wrenching the digital clock towards him, squinting to make out the numbers.
Just after midnight. Christ, they slept all day. Piper and their parents must be home from the monastery by now—he holds his breath and listens, but the house is silent.
Mostly silent. Because now he hears it, what maybe woke him up. Lochlan in the bed next to him, tossing and turning, faint little moans coming from his side of the room.
At first, he thinks for one sick moment that Lochy might be jerking off which—okay, fair. Cranking one out always helped Saxon’s hangovers too. But once he concentrates—his ability to do so finally restored after six hours of REM—he can tell it’s not that. It’s worse. It’s—it’s pained.
“Loch?” he says aloud into the dark, squinting across the room as his vision adjusts. The first thing he can clock is that all of Lochlan’s sheets are off—top sheet and quilt and the second quilt Saxon had piled on him to cuddle under, a standard hangover triage.
Loch’s kicked them all to the floor, his body moving bare along the fitted sheet, only in a t-shirt and the new sleep shorts he had changed into before they had gone back to bed. Moonlight cuts in through the slatted windows, and Saxon can see that Lochy’s got his arms wound around himself, moving from one side to the other, head mussing against the pillow.
“Lochy?” he repeats, and Lochy moans again, but it’s not remotely sexy. Not that Saxon would ever think a moan from his brother could ever be sexy but this one—this one was certainly not. “You okay?”
“No.” comes Lochlan’s response, and Saxon watches as Lochy flops onto his back, shivering. Oh, shit.
“Okay, okay.” Saxon gets up and moves to Lochlan’s bedside, flicking the bedside lamp on and illuminating their immediate vicinity in a soft, muted glow. He can see, right away, that Lochlan’s sweating, the sheen across his chest glistening in the light. “Oh, wow, okay—Loch?”
Lochlan’s eyes are closed, his mouth screwed up in one of his little pouts, and his hand comes up to push his damp curls out of his eyes.
“Hot.” is all he says, whining. “’m so hot.”
And he looks it, face flushed uncomfortably, spreading down his neck across the top of his chest. Saxon puts a hand on the pillow next to Lochlan’s head and yeah—it’s damp.
“Okay, Lochy, okay, one second—” he soothes. He puts a hand to Lochlan’s forehead and nearly has to jerk it back. His brow is a million degrees beneath the back of Saxon’s hand.
“Oh, my god, Loch—”
Lochlan whines pitifully, tugging at the hem of his t-shirt.
“I know, I know—”
“Okay, I’m going to go wake up Mom—” Saxon says, moving away, but Lochlan grabs his hand, his fingers circling tight around Saxon’s wrist.
“No, no—” he moans, wriggling against the sheets. In the dim light, Saxon can see the sweat glistening at his hairline, one lone tear of it dripping down his temple. “No, don’t get Mom, please—”
“Dude, you’re burning up. You need Tylenol or—or a doctor, or something.”
Lochlan opens his eyes, fever bright and pupils blown. “No, no, please. We’ll be in so much trouble.”
And—yeah. He’s right. The reality of it, what that would entail, hits Saxon all at once. Having to tell their parents exactly what’s going on. His father’s voice in his ear last night, when he told their parents that they were going back to the boat—You take care of your brother. And this is what Saxon did, let Loch do drugs, mystery drugs with these two strange women, trying to get Lochlan laid.
But he took the drugs first, something petty and mean in the back of his brain says. And he made you take them too.
But Saxon feels fine. He puts a hand to his own cheek to check and yes—aside from the flop sweat starting to collect on his skin and the general flush they all constantly have from the oppressive heat, he feels fine.
Whatever they took, Lochlan’s responding differently. And watching his skinny body expand and retract, groaning, hand across his flat stomach, in his hair, it dawns very rapidly on Saxon that that difference may be in fact very, very, very serious.