wouldbedorothy | Only Too Familiar, G/R, part 2/3

Disclaimer: I don't own or know Gale or Randy or anyone who might show up... These are my own characterizations... None of this is based on actual events... It's *fiction* baby!

Title: Only Too Familiar, part 2
Author: AHS
Pairing: G/R
Rating: PG-13/R
Series/Sequel: 2/3
Summary: AU, but not really that AU. They meet in '98 is all. Now it's 2000. Do not be afraid, lol. 3180 words in this part.

Part 2: Screen Test

2000, Los Angeles

“Randy, this is Gale Harold. He’s testing for Brian. Gale, this is Randy Harrison, your Justin.”

Randy felt his brain implode and time stop and he did his best to keep breathing. He hadn’t even heard what Ron… or maybe it was Dan… said to introduce them. He had seen Gale and then he was just gone. Into memories of flirting and turbulence, of falling asleep on shoulders. Flashbacks of drinking and talking, confessions, and bodies pushing and accepting. Sweet realization and bitter disappointment.

He was shocked out of it by Gale’s hand grabbing his for a handshake which was strong but generic, like you would share with anyone you just met. So it would appear to CowLip, at least. But Randy could feel the way Gale’s touch sparked his skin and burned. He looked down at his hand as Gale released it to see if smoke was coming off it.

“I know, he’s fabulous, isn’t he?” gushed Ron, taking Randy’s stunned reaction for something a little simpler than it was. “And he can act! Now… let’s see what kind of chemistry you two have to work with. I‘m getting a good vibe already…”

Randy was watching Gale’s eyes, and for the first time since he walked in the room he saw some of Gale’s sureness falter. Just for a second. Randy had already concluded that Gale must have known beforehand that he would be there… maybe Dan and Ron told him who had already been cast, or at least the name of the actor he would be testing with… so steeled he seemed, rather than appropriately shocked. But before the moment’s slip could make Randy feel any better, Gale had become Brian and they were doing the scene.

Randy had to hand it to him. For someone who hadn’t even purported to be an actor, Gale was good. Really good. Much better than the others he’d had to read with. Randy found himself regarding Gale with awe, which helped him fall into his role of Justin, the lovestruck teenager who worshipped Brian like a god. Dan and Ron made positive murmurs afterwards, while Randy stood there in disbelief, not only that this man had appeared in his life again, but that the two of them were reading scenes, pretending to be strangers playing at being lovers, like this was all completely normal.

And they were good together.

Then the producers wanted to see the scene ending with the big kiss. The Justin character was supposed to be scared, nervous, trying to prove he wasn’t… almost prove his worth. Randy didn’t have to stretch too far for that. The worry was, would it be too good? Would it be obvious they had done this before? And, if it was like before, would he be able to handle it? He felt like he was on a rollercoaster nearing the very top of a hill, and he was torn between wanting the ride to stop and wanting to throw his arms up and give in to the free fall that awaited.

Gale moved in slowly, determined, then stopped, making Randy close the distance. Once their mouths came together, they challenged each other for control, neither sure whether it was their characters or themselves trying to prove something. But there was a tenderness in the kiss, and most definitely a heat. This was no kind of stage kiss. They ended with their foreheads resting roughly against each other’s, and even out of the corners of their eyes, they could see CowLip drooling.

“Wow,” said Dan. “That was… all we could have dreamed, really.”

“And even if we weren’t so desperate to cast Brian,” Ron winked, thinking he was amusing, “we would still be saying… the part is yours, if you want it.”

“Please want it,” added Dan.

As Randy backed away, he didn’t even have time to think about what the possibility of doing this show with Gale meant. He was just glad to see Gale looked as shaken by the kiss as he was.

“Thank you,” Gale said, clearing his throat. “I’ll think it over and get back to you.” And he turned and strode out.

Randy rattled off some excuse to Dan and Ron about running late for an appointment and hurried out of there, knowing he had to talk to Gale. He caught up with him in the parking lot.

“Hey!” he yelled. Gale froze, hand on the door of his truck, and turned around.

“Hey,” he said calmly. “Good scene.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“… Nice to meet you?”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Randy went off. “Wow, you really are a jack of all trades… carpenter, photographer… actor… liar.”

“Same difference,” Gale muttered.

“I should have known, being that good-looking and from LA, you had to be an actor. You seemed so different, though.” His voice got quieter. “I thought maybe the photography… By the way, thanks for my pictures.”

Gale had tracked down the name of Randy’s agent and sent the headshots with no note or return address right after… that night. They had arrived on July 25, 1998, and Randy thought of them as a sad and wrong but fucking gorgeous wedding present from the groom to him.

“They were amazing,” Randy said to Gale’s silence. “I wasn’t sure I should use them, but they were too good not to. I still am. I haven’t changed much… I’m playing a seventeen year old, for Christ’s sake. And your pictures got me my audition for this show.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly irony, but it was fucking weird.

Gale remained quiet, looking down and dragging his foot over the asphalt. But then he said, “Shirt or no shirt?”, in his first real acknowledgment of the past.

Randy let himself smile a little. “Both. To show the double whammy of innocence and sex appeal that is Justin.”

“That’s good.”

Awkward. The air was heavy and awkward and sad, and both were looking at the ground. Until Randy raised his head and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Gale shrugged. “I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself an actor yet. I hadn’t even been doing it a year at that point, and… Why the fuck am I explaining myself to you?” His face went from blank and controlled to angry.

But Randy hadn’t meant the acting thing. He had meant why hadn’t Gale told him he was engaged before they…

“Speaking of explaining yourself, how’s the wife?”

“What?”

Randy caught Gale’s left hand and held it before his face, inspecting it. “Where’s your ring?”

Finding no golden band on Gale’s left ring finger confused Randy, and he grabbed lamely at the right hand. He found no ring, but he spotted something marking the inside of his middle finger. Looking closely, it was a tattoo… a word… RESIST.

“You didn’t have this before,” Randy pointed out, running a fingertip over the letters. “Resist… me?”

Gale thought that needle should have deadened the skin pretty well, but fuck if it wasn’t more sensitive than ever. Or maybe it was just Randy. He was barely touching him, his mouth was nowhere near, but Gale would swear he could feel Randy sucking his finger. He yanked his hand away.

“What did you tell your wife it meant?”

“Would you shut up?” Gale yelled, fed up. “I’m not fucking married!”

Gale watched Randy react, watched him blink, genuinely thrown… thought back two years… and he realized what had happened. What Randy had thought.

“Shit… I wondered where that newspaper announcement went.”

“I found it on the floor.” Randy remembered how hurt he’d felt, and his next words came out with a little extra attitude. “I figured we’d gotten your pre-wedding fling out of the way, so I might as well be on my way.”

Gale took that in for a beat, nodded, and as he turned said simply, “I didn’t get married.” Then he got into his truck.

“You didn’t?” Randy squeaked, hoping Gale could only read his lips through the glass. Gale rolled the window down.

“See you at work, I guess.”

“Wait! You’re taking the part?”

“It’s a good part. It pays. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Uh…” Randy thought of the pilot script, and of how daring this show planned to get on a regular basis when it came to sex scenes. How Brian and Justin were going to set the standard. “There’s a lot of… closeness between our characters.”

“Won’t be a problem for me.”

“Oh… good. Me neither.”

****************

Toronto

Randy had never felt his life in this much upheaval. Not only was he picking up and moving to Canada, where he knew no one… to work on his first TV show, one that he just couldn’t see realistically making it to air at all, even on cable… but the most confusing and disconcerting part of his life was the part that was only too familiar.

Gale.

Filming the pilot was… interesting. Gale was very professional, and he was never angry, or even cold, with Randy anymore. He’d returned to that friendly but tight stranger smile from the plane, before they got to know each other. Because they didn’t know each other anymore, apparently, and some days that just made Randy want to weep.

But their bodies knew each other well. And responded to each other as such.

Randy knew it shouldn’t be arousing, when there’s a handful of people watching you, and you’ve been directed as to just how to move, and no that didn’t help, but he was naked with Gale. Gale, looking even more beautiful than he remembered, even with that stupid cocksock they made them wear. Every time their skin touched, Randy felt his dick grow impossibly harder.

He couldn’t help but identify with Justin in that scene where Brian is straddling him and he’s trying not to come. God, that was a particularly embarrassing one to do. But, hard or not, at least he fared better on that point than Justin did. And Gale was actually very considerate, very sweet. They didn’t say anything about it, but Gale would kind of keep himself between Randy and those on the other side of the camera as much as possible to keep them from getting a peek.

When Gale got hard, he didn’t seem to care who saw. Except maybe Randy, who, when he could, pretended not to notice.

It was shooting the main love scene, sex scene, whatever, that changed Gale and Randy’s relationship… again. Although Randy didn’t really get it at the time, Gale being allowed to be Brian and be the one in control… the one doing the teaching… the one fucking Justin, even if only fake fucking Randy… the one giving reassurances about the pain… and the one who cared less of the two, flipped something back into balance that had been left out of whack when Randy left.

When it was all finished, Gale knocked on his dressing room door.

“Just a sec.”

Randy unlocked and opened the door a minute later, Gale’s quirked eyebrow making him wonder if Gale knew he’d been jerking off.

“Let’s go get a drink,” was what Gale said.

“Really?”

“We should talk.” He even smiled. “I mean talk. Like, not in a hotel room.”

Randy’s heart soared, catching a glimpse of his friend. “Okay.”

****************

“So… you didn’t get married.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Beers first. You order.”

“Why me?”

“I just want to see you get carded and actually have legal ID to show.”

“Haha,” said Randy, but he did it… “Okay, now tell me.”

Gale sighed into his beer. “I’d been having doubts for a long time. I didn’t even propose, you know, she did. I was visiting my family to let them down easy. Let them know I was thinking about calling it off.”

“Just thinking about it?” Randy said casually. So you were still engaged.

“Well, after… that night… I was sure.” Gale sipped, measuring his words. “And, no, it wasn’t a matter of realizing I was gay or anything like that. It was just… realizing I could feel more than I did for Ash.”

“Ash?” Randy couldn’t explain the knot that formed in his stomach at Gale’s use of the affectionate nickname for his ex-fiancée.

“Ashley, yeah. She’s a good girl.”

“No, I’m sure she’s wonder-… You felt more?” Randy could talk very fast, but sometimes he was slow at listening. He scooted his bar stool a little closer to Gale’s and ran a hand along his arm. Gale seemed to wince.

“Then I woke up alone. And I felt left, and then I felt used… then I felt like a fucking fool, and then I felt nothing.”

Randy recoiled at Gale’s words. More at the matter-of-fact, faux cheery tone with which he ended his statement. Randy took a shaky step away from the bar and started to leave, feeling Gale must want him gone. Gale caught his arm.

“I’m sensing a pattern with you, Randy. But you don’t get to leave this time. Fucking talk to me.”

Randy nodded, swallowing his fear. “Okay. We’ll talk. Can we move to one of those booths over there?”

They moved to a dark booth, and Randy chose to sit not across from Gale but right next to him. Gale started to say something about it, but Randy just smiled.

“This is me not leaving.”

“Nice. So…”

“So… how did you feel used? I mean, whether you were probably calling it off or not, you were still the one testing yourself out with me to see if what you really wanted was the girl in the poufy white dress.”

“Whether that’s true or not, bottom line is, I’m the one who got fucked and I’m the one who got left.”

When Gale put it like that, Randy didn’t have much to say in his own defense.

“You should have told me, though,” was all he could come up with.

“Yeah, maybe. But, you know, you could have woken me up. Woken me up, thrown something at me, I don’t care. Said, ‘What the hell is this?’ and let me explain.”

“And maybe you would have explained, and maybe I would have understood… Then what? Self-identified straight man who was two seconds from being Mr. and Mrs.? You think we would have gone steady?”

Gale knocked back the last of his beer just in time to ignore that question, stand up and say, “I need another one.”

Randy sat, his head in his hands. He contemplated everything from slitting his wrists, to quitting the show, to checking the jukebox to see if it had Mmmbop, to hiding under the table… and maybe blowing Gale as soon as he sat back down. He was seriously leaning towards the last one, but suddenly a beer was being plunked down in front of him and Gale was back.

Randy’s overdramatic fantasies weren’t needed. They seemed to make an unspoken decision to lighten up the discussion from then on. They laughed about Gale having to do that slo-mo, I’m so sexy, pouring the bottle of water over himself shot, and laughed remembering Gale pouring the water over Randy to sex him up when they’d done the pictures. They laughed about Gale’s new trouble with flying… how some asshole had told him to think about the best sex he ever had, and so he’d spent the last two years hogging airplane bathrooms on flights, jacking off while thinking of Randy.

Actually, that wasn’t so funny, and their laughter kind of faded by the end.

“I like your hair,” Gale told him.

“Really?” Randy self-consciously fingered the short strands, the color of which the producers had made him change from his natural light brownish to a bright, shiny blond. “I don’t.”

“You don’t want to look younger is all. But get over it. It’s hot.”

Randy eyed Gale’s beer, thinking how it had only taken three that night for Gale to take him to a hotel and ask to be fucked. Gale caught his eye and smiled knowingly.

“Only two. I’m done.”

“No semi-drunken confessions tonight?”

“Just that you’re a damn good actor. I don’t think I’ve told you that.”

“Thanks. You, too. I mean, you’re putting more into Brian than… I don’t know. I didn’t think much of him from the script. And I didn’t really get why Justin thinks he’s in love with him, except that Brian’s hot and Justin doesn’t know any better. But when we did the scenes, I really felt… I think I get it now.”

Two beers had been the magic number it took to put Gale’s hand on Randy’s knee, and it did its work again. Although this time it landed a little closer to Randy’s thigh.

“You’re just saying that ‘cause I licked your ass today,” Gale murmured in his ear.

The hot breath tickled. “Maybe,” Randy giggled.

Gale’s hand seemed to be sliding higher. Randy watched it in fascination, realizing that he had been keeping such good track of Gale’s alcohol intake, he really wasn’t sure how much he’d had himself.

“Um, Gale… I want to ask you something,” he made himself say, buying time, deciding whether or not he was going to let Gale’s hand reach its eventual destination.

“Mm hmm.”

“Well, because… you saw me at the screen test, I was so… aaahh, so shocked to see you… but you weren’t… So I just wanna know how you… reacted when you found out I was on the show.” Randy leaned back against the wall, tucking himself into the corner as much as he could. “I mean… did you care?”

“Dan called after my audition and said, ‘We want you to come for a screen test with Randy Harrison, who’s playing Justin.’ I was… yeah, I was shocked. I dropped my fucking coffee, nearly burned myself.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I thought no way, can’t be, but… I knew it was you.”

“How?”

“I kind of pictured you already, for my audition… Not that Justin reminded me much of you, but it worked, you know.” Gale’s voice rumbled, deepened. “I picture you for a lot of things.”

If Randy had needed to ask what that meant, he would have swallowed his own voice anyway when Gale’s hand found its goal… his other hand bringing Randy’s hand to close around his cock, straining against worn denim.

In the cab ride to Gale’s, Randy got him to quietly confess that he’d had a couple more experiences with gay sex in the last two years. But there were still a lot of things he hadn’t tried, and Randy was more than happy to fill in all the blanks.

“Have you ever…?” he whispered in Gale’s ear, nibbling his earlobe.

“Nope.”

“Then that’s first on the list.”

“As long as I get to fuck you this time.”

“You’d better.” Randy still felt take after take of their pretending all through his body. “And I won’t… I mean, if you don’t want… I won’t leave.”

“Yeah… that’d be okay.”

Only Too Familiar, G/R, part 2/3

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