Eames laughed like a bell, high and bright, the kind of laugh you can't manufacture, the kind that only appeared with genuine amusement at someone else's expense.
His smile was fat and unashamed, his roommate infuriated by it.
"Relax, it was twenty dollars. I'll make up for the whole half tank of gas you weren't able to put in your car, right?"
"It is not just twenty dollars, it is not," he insisted, smacking the flat of his hand against the marble counter. "It's twenty dollars here and twenty dollars there, it's wet towels on my floor and food on my fucking counter, it's people I don't know sitting right there, on my sofa, when I come home. It's you always being here. Why are you always here?"
The blonde was unsympathetic, though whether it was because he'd heard the speech before or because he was embarrassed by its honesty was impossible to determine.
"I live here," he said simply, as if Arthur had forgotten.
"You do not live here, you are staying here. Staying. It was a temporary solution, and it's time you look for something more permanent."
Eames curled up the corners of his mouth, cracking the smile open like an egg, oozing mockery and malice, then comfort and affection. Silly old boy, strung so tight. He needed to get laid.
"You want me to leave?"
"Oh, is that the impression you've been getting? Yes, I want you to leave. You're unbearable."
He nodded, taking in the information, looking every bit a chemist testing the properties of some vital new drug he'd discovered, then stood up.
"'Right, then. Right. But, let's first take a look at some of your little eccentricities, yeah? Let's see what Arthur is like to live with, if I'm unbearable."
Arthur folded his arms across his chest, an exercise in holding frustrations inside. If he let them go, god knows where they'd end up. He said nothing, only shook his head, and Eames continued.
"You alphabetize everything, to start. Everything! Books, DVDs, cleaning products - look, here." He strode forward from the sofa and pulled a red-spined novel from the open shelves that dominated Arthur's living room, still the same unflappable bum he'd been a moment ago; argument changed nothing for him. It appeared that he'd forgotten how to frown.
"We have the red shelf," Eames continued, "A-Z. The orange shelf, A-Z. The blue shelf . . . I can't imagine what your pornography collection must look like. But what's this?" His eyes widened, pretending terror.
The comfort with which he handled objects that did not belong to him made Arthur want to act, but he knew it would've meant a loss. The vagrant wanted to get a rise out of him, and he wasn't offering up the satisfaction that easily.
Eames intentionally took this for permissiveness. He flipped the burgundy book upside down, title upended, and placed it in the middle of the blue shelf. A blue-spined book found its way to a gathering of yellow. Yellow joined white, and white filled the empty space in red. Arthur chewed, chewed his tongue, his teeth, his words.
"Oh, fuck me, the books are out of order! How will we ever read anything again?" He laughed without restraint, delighted by what would have been an awkward spot for anybody else. Arthur tensed in turn.
"And how about these religious retreats you make out of every blasted book you read, that obnoxious little hand gesture you use when I'm breathing too loud for you to concentrate?"
Arthur broke, there, a snap of glass on concrete.
"Breathing? When you breathe too loud? In what universe--"
Eames cut him off and advanced, striding cooly but quickly forward, then leaned into his precious private space with a presence some might have called crowding, but that Arthur stared into with hot, undaunted defiance. He'd neutralized stronger men, somewhere else.
"Your hair," said Eames, playfully, boyishly separating one slick piece from its brothers and snapping it down. "Always stuck to your head like you bathe in the glue it's been stuck with. I want to turn you upside down and shake you to see if any of it moves."
"Don't touch me," Arthur spat.
Eames opened his mouth, showed all his teeth, was overcome with affectionate, childlike hostility and glee. He pulled the same strand again, harder, jerked the smaller man's head back. "Stop me," he challenged.
Arthur flattened both hands and shoved them against the unguarded space at the ends of Eames's collarbone, where the arm was connected by but a thread of vulnerable muscle. He was slim, he was not weak. It earned him a shocked moment apart from the blonde as a result.
But the aloof, uncultured robe Eames wore had been dropped; he was awakened by their standoff, charged and heavy with a bully's boyish storm of confidence.
He closed the space between them a second time and returned Arthur his shove, but did not let stay separated from him, fastening all five fingers from one hand at the back of his slick, shining head and gripping as if to remove him of it.
A pull of that arm put Arthur's face beside his, a breath away.
"Stop me."
That smug, self-satisfied smile ate Arthur up from the inside out. You can get him out of here, he thought, just a closed-fisted crack or two and he'll back off, then be out the door, and you can have a shower and a nap.
He waited one second too long for the right moment to hit him, and in that wasted space, their teeth crashed together, and that mouth, that fat, fat mouth, was sucked like a candy into his own.
