"What I don't get," Blair said, each word enunciated with the biting clarity of the truly pissed off man, "is how it could have ever seemed like a good idea."

"Well, it did," Jim muttered, more from automatic self-defense than conviction, the doubt showing in his voice.

"And, what, now you've seen the error of your ways?"

Wait. Had Blair just switched sides on him? Jim frowned, picking through a mental box of labels in the hope of finding one that matched Blair's tone of voice, now somewhere between insulted and aggrieved.

Yeah. That one would do. It was a twin for the time he'd cooked supper for Blair and a vegan friend and used a pan to cook in that had held ground beef an hour before. She'd sworn she could taste it -- hell, unless she was some super-Sentinel, no way, lady, no freaking way; that pan had been scoured, he wasn't insensitive -- and she'd gone on and on and on about tainted tofu until even Blair's eyes had glazed over, his tolerance in the face of potential sex sapped and drained by her whining.

Which hadn't stopped him blaming Jim for his lack of an orgasm when she'd gone home alone, leaving Blair and his already packed toothbrush and spare shorts to sulk in his room for hours.

"My ways weren't in error -- shit." Jim took a deep breath. "Blair -- if you want an apology --"

"Yes, I do. Asshole."

"Muttering insults under your breath only works if you're not a foot away and I'm stone-deaf," Jim pointed out.

"You hearing it is the whole point of saying it." Blair paused and then very deliberately shaped the word 'dickhead' with the provocative pink push and pout of his lips that had started this whole thing off.

Jim breathed out hard, taunted and tempted beyond endurance. "I'm not sorry, okay? I wanted to and I thought you wanted it, too, and I still think that." Caution and a sense of fair play compelled him to add, "And I'm going to do it again, unless you want to prove me wrong by walking away. That enough of a warning for you?"

"Oh, bring it on," Blair said, the speculative, amused gleam in his eyes at odds with the studied sarcasm in his voice. "I like the pain. I live for icepacks making my face go numb, I love it when I get blood all down my favorite shirt…"

This time, he didn't bang Blair's nose with his forehead -- apparently when you kissed Blair mid-sentence and the topic of conversation had been the mildew on the bathroom tiles, he had a tendency to make sudden, unpredictable movements. Who knew?

This time, Blair, after one final huff of annoyance that warmed Jim's lips pleasantly, kissed him back forgivingly, and his arms didn't flail wildly but wrapped themselves around Jim's body and hauled him closer.

Not a bad idea, that kiss out of nowhere then, ending months of half-assed flirting and sidelong glances. Definitely not. A very good idea, in fact. And if Blair's nose hadn't started to drip again, dramatic scarlet splats of blood going everywhere, he'd have made Blair take it back and apologize to him.

In fact, he planned to say those three little traditional words, 'told you so'.

Quietly, later, under his breath, when Blair was asleep.

And he was on that stakeout on the other side of town.



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