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"How long is this going to take?" Arthur demands, setting his feet obstinately apart, not three seconds after closing the hotel room door.
He can't have plans at this time of night. It's information he's grabbing for, as if he could plant facts like stakes in the ground around him and win back control.
"That depends," Eames says. "How good are you?"
"If you wanted quality, you would have paid for a professional. Let's get this over with. I've got a lot to take care of tomorrow."
Arthur's face is hard, his right hand curled as if in a dream where guns could be drawn at any moment. He has all the erotic welcome of a wooden chair. It occurs to Eames again that he'll come out the loser here if, having brought them to this pass, he can't get it up.
"Ditch the jacket then," Eames tells him. "And the shoes. You look like you should be selling me a piece of beachfront real estate."
When he's standing barefoot on the hotel carpet, Arthur still hasn't quite let go of that air of imminent violence.
Eames likes a fuck that breaks a few rules. And he likes the muscular rush of beating an adversary, too. But the two propositions are like fire and water in his mind right now: they're not the explosive combination he expected. The physical reality of having Arthur at his disposal isn't as heady as he imagined, from an abstract distance, it could be. Arthur's feet are pallid and damp from his shoes. The shape of the coat hanger it dried on stands out faintly on the pale blue check of his shirt. Apruptly, Arthur flicks off his watch and lays it on the table by the telephone and the hotel branded ballpoint. Is it sentimental, Eames wonders. Too sentimental for this?
Arthur rubs the blank space on his wrist.
"Any beer in there?" Eames gestures to the bar fridge beside the wardrobe.
"No," Arthur tells him curtly.
He stands there pointedly uncommunicative, as if Eames were wasting time they could ill afford. As if hospitality would be the more unbearable indignity. The mulish silence stretches on.
Finally, Arthur says, "There's soda."
In the fridge, Eames finds a water bottle, cracks it open. Thumbs at the loose plastic ring around the neck while the first chilled gulps go down.
Arthur blinks as if he'd lost his place in their dealings.
"Eames."
He can't fake cordiality when his heart isn't in it, but this neutral tone is what he approximates when he's making an effort not to fray tempers even further. Eames waits for him to put a another counter-offer on the table, and thinks if it's good enough, he'll push it up ten percent for kicks and then take it.
"Jesus, I don't want to be here all night," Arthur bites out. "A bit of efficiency isn't too much to ask. Even for you."
Taking a long, casual drink to keep his temper under control, Eames can finally recollect why he brought them down this path. He comes back to Arthur with a puzzled look.
"I thought you'd have your kit off by now. Sinced we're on a schedule."
Arthur attacks his buttons, fingers snapping the first one one open with the grim finality of an axe blade.
"Thank you," Arthur says like a reprimand. His eyes fix on Eames's in his usual firm, man-to-man gaze. It's as if the switch into action has put him back on balance and swept away his uncertainty. He could be about to reel off an incisive list of Eames's shortcomings in a trial run. The swift flex of his wrist is all business - as far as you could get from the blatant invitation of a vest tugged off on a pulsating night-club floor. So there's no explaining the momentary flush of interest that runs through him like a wave.
Without pausing, Arthur shrugs off his shirt.
And yeah, he's skinny across the shoulders – not helpless, not weedy, but you can see from the way his arms hang away from his torso that he knows how to hold himself to give the impression of being broader than he is. He thinks of Arthur's wardrobe, made up of all those carefully chosen vertical sections of ties, lapels and waistcoats – the myriad variations in colour and texture that distract the eye from clocking the simple, narrow distance from shoulder to shoulder.
Eames is never oblivious to the advantage he gets from the implied menace of his bulk. In every forgery, he has to find new tactics to compensate for the loss of it. In the circles Arthur moves in, scoping out shady deals, he must feel the handicap. Half naked, there's nothing about him that sets off Eames's instincts as a threat. It's only with his layers on, clad in all those neat pockets that might conceal a stiletto or a damaging scrap of information, that he takes on the appearance of danger. He's got a sniper's build, Eames thinks, and the deadly mien to go with it.
"Keep going," he says abruptly, nodding to Arthur's lower half, and squares his shoulders to force down his unease.
Without missing a beat, Arthur unbuttons his trousers and steps out of them. He stands very still, those jerky signs of discomfort subdued now. His unflinching look conveys not that he is uncomfortable standing there almost naked, but how poorly it reflects upon Eames to have asked for this. Eames curls up his mouth very slightly, reminds himself that detached amusement is the best mask for pretty much anything.
When Eames gestures to the floor in front of him, Arthur doesn't bother pretending to misunderstand. He sinks to his knees, making the action look stiff and unaccustomed.
Eames pauses with his hand on the hem of his shirt. He likes being naked - never minds the chance to let a new audience appreciate what a semi-regular routine with weights and a natural affinity for the punching bag can do. But this is Arthur, and Eames has let too many defences down on his account already.
He's looking at the shape of Eames's package, on eye level, with the same dispassionate attention he might train on a mark's credit card statements. Then his steady upturned gaze lands on Eames's face. Arthur's wide mouth was made for this expression – utterly flat, utterly unimpressed, and determinedly stripped of any more revealing emotion. Arthur could be a projection of himself, present in body but not in spirit.
"Do you need instructions?"
"You want me to blow you," Arthur surmises matter-of-factly, unblinking. "Is that all?"
Eames changes his mind and sits down on the bed.
"Any infections I should know about?" Arthur asks, taking his time to shuffle over. "Think carefully about this one." The threat is all implied, no trace of it present in his businesslike enquiry.
"Nothing germane to your activities."
Arthur nods once and goes to work on the tie of Eames's shorts. The speed he wields could be a mark of experience in getting other men out of their clothes, or just Arthur's big-headed insistence on doing a thing deftly if he has to do it at all. He's barely got Eames's clothes down to mid-thigh when he's reaching in to take Eames in hand and tug him into a state he can work with. And Eames, who hasn't had any hand but his own for nearly two months, responds. It's not long before Arthur's bending down, and Eames is leaning back to make space.
Their position conveniently hides his first helpless reaction to the sheer heat of Arthur's mouth taking him in. That moment never fails to buzz him, but on Arthur- who'd have thought that tidy, killjoy Arthur had a mouth that felt a volcanic mineral spa? The indecently hot clutch of it shocks him as Arthur shifts around to refine the angle he's working on. Almost instantly, he's at full mast, breath catching in his open mouth.
At first it's the sort of intense pleasure that's so good it's practically torture. Until he opens his eyes to see the cupboard door with Arthur's jacket neatly hung on its hanger and falls out of the moment. The slippery sounds of each stroke start to penetrate the fog of arousal. He notices the gap between cornice and ceiling on the wall opposite; the shadowy corners where the weak bulb can't reach.
As Arthur's lips cinch tight under the head, three swift times, and glide back down, it occurs to him how intimate this is on his side as well. If their positions were reversed, he'd be using the vantage point for experimentation, hoover up every telling reaction and fit them all together into the jigsaw that revealed a better picture of the man's weaknesses.
He makes a discouraging sound when Arthur goes to use his hand.
"No need for that. Take a break if you need to."
Arthur doesn't.
He wears a frown, as if at the tricky end of a precariously balanced job. His eyes don't close. He doesn't appear humbled by this any more than he would by a hundred page audit report that had to be examined, row by tedious row, for background on a mark. He sucks in a brisk, unfaltering rhythm as if it's work of another kind.
There's a lot of work still to do.
"That's it, Arthur," he says lazily, just using his voice to hook Arthur into the present moment and make sure he isn't imagining someone more appealling at the end of his mouthful.
He gets a dark flash of a glare through Arthur's damp eyelashes.
The rhythm steps up a notch, grip of Arthur's lips tightening as if he'd honed his technique via a textbook, scheduled the process of fellatio into delineated phases, and calculated the exact number of tugs a man like Eames was likely to need to get from here to there. Is he counting in his head – two hundred and ten, two hundred and eleven?
He tries to call to mind a memory to shock his system back into action – something edgy and rough, out of the ordinary. That job in Lille, his heart still thudding from the getaway and his right hand in bandages, two women at once in the back seat of the van with the late night traffic shooting like comets across the highway overpass up above. But he can't hold the scene together. The scent of perfume off hot skin gives way to the masculine, woody fragrance from Arthur's bathroom, left over from recent bathing and shaving. Every strained breath sucked in through his nose has Arthur's quiet efficiency in it.
Arthur's slowing down again, fatigued. There's the unwelcome touch of dry air as he straightens up, flexing his neck from side to side in quick, impatient jerks. He shoots Eames a square look, as if accusing him of holding out. Letting out a deep breath, he clenches his shoulders and lets them go.
Eames's gaze is drawn to the glossy smudge clinging to his bottom lip, too sticky to be spit. He dwells on it, wills it to trickle down over Arthur's chin and mess him up. Then in one private, hungry instant, Arthur's tongue slides out to swipe it away, darts back into his mouth, vanishes. The clench in his balls takes him by surprise. Shit – that's lit the spark at last, that of all things.
This time when Arthur leans down, he has to stop his hips from rising up to meet him. There's no need, as it turns out. Arthur sinks down in a tight, velvety slide, sure of his way now, nudging Eames's cockhead into the pillowy clench of his soft palate. He holds it for a long moment, until the all-pervading heat seems to climb right up Eames's chest, and then he pulls back in a brutally firm jerk that makes Eames's hair stand on end. He goes on like that - a leisurely downstroke and an upstroke like a punch in the gut - over and over in a determined rhythm that speeds up ever so slightly as Eames hurtles closer to the edge.
Eames's body co-operates blindly as each stroke builds electrically on the last. Arthur's bare shoulders are starting to flush with the effort. There's the subtle clump of sweat in his slicked back hair, but his hands are very still where they steady him on the bed covers. Out of nowhere, Eames looks down at the gymnastically neat curve of his legs and back and imagines what he'd look like with his thighs apart, with a finger in him, with hips opening right up for more.
And just like that, he comes, and his eyes slam shut, and then it's over.
After it, Arthur wipes his mouth with the heel of his hand and doesn't try to make a point by spitting. He waits on the floor, getting his breath back. He is visibly aroused, the line of his dick gently weighing down the grey cotton over the leg of his underpants. Eames's spent system gives an unexpected jolt at that, the slightly innocent shape of part-way-there, somehow more striking than the slick, obvious cocks he's stroked in nightclubs or gym showers. The naked potential makes his mouth flex involuntarily. He starts to speculate, theoretically, on what it might do to the dynamic of their deal if he put his hands on Arthur, here and now. Threw the advantage he's negotiated out the window, stripped him out of his neat designer underpants and found out what it took to make him lose his cool.
"We're done." Arthur sweeps his clothes into his arms and disappears into the ensuite. The lock turns, followed a couple of seconds later by the shower.
The water has been running for a while before he stands up and puts his clothes to rights. The deeply hidden muscles in his back and thighs that have been knotted incessantly with pain since Macau have finally unlatched themselves. Even the stitches have loosened their cruel pull on the skin over his ribs. He flexes both fists, just to feel the blood pump up his arms.
The curative powers of orgasm work their magic. He thinks about staying. Wonders whether the aftermath of this will leave Arthur frazzled and off his guard, how hard it would be to provoke him out of his calm indifference.
On the way out, for reasons he doesn't try to explain to himself, he rifles through Arthur's jacket. There's a couple of crisply folded notes, low denominations, a neatly folded ticket for the air force museum, and a knife. The leather is cool, the body warmth seeped away already. He slips the ticket into his pocket and forgets about it.
Despite not having a key to his room, Miriam has pointedly left one of the new bowls on the table by his bed, with the white base already layered on, along with brushes, paints and (in his locked suitcase) the original antique. He squeezes out some paint, using a brochure about Halong Bay cruises for a palette. The blues of the original are elusive, subtle, serene, and everything he mixes tonight looks like a child's brash colours. He keeps overdoing the drop of yellow he needs to get the faint greenish tint where the dragon's wing meets its body.
In the end, he chucks the paint in the bathroom sink and collapses stiffly onto the bed. If he sets his alarm for 5am, a taxi will get him back to the Metropole before sun-up.