#the a is a prefix you idiot. <-tattooing this on my forehead

[coquelicoq]

en aval (downstream), avaler (to swallow), avalanche (avalanche), and vallée (valley) all come from the same root...

[clumsyclifford]

i typed out a Whole thing and then changed my mind but how about like lazy sunday in before the work week w t-shirt verse jalex? ily bye x

omg hello this got (1) away from me and (2) so ridiculously romantic i have no excuse. there’s just something about t-shirt jalex. also i am currently taking suggestions for what color alex’s hair should be in this ‘verse bc as of now it is unspecified. okay hope you like it x

read here on ao3

Alex is at the stove. Jack’s barely awake and this is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“Morning,” he croaks, slumping forward to affix himself to Alex’s back. Alex staggers, laughing quietly.

“Good morning, my love,” he says. The kitchen always feels somehow both bigger and cozier with Alex in it, spacious but flooded with love. Love, Jack finds, smells like pancakes and tastes like Alex’s toothpaste and feels like sunlight and the cotton of Alex’s shirt under his fingers. It fits nicely into Jack’s kitchen. Their kitchen. 

Their kitchen. Jack is still having a hard time getting used to that.

“You didn’t have to get up,” he mumbles against Alex’s shoulders. “Coulda slept in.”

Alex shrugs. “Was up anyway. Thought it’d be nice to make breakfast.”

“But it’s nice to cuddle,” Jack points out, eyes still closed. He presses his nose into Alex’s neck, inhaling deeply. “Mm, you’re warm.”

Alex’s deep, gentle laugh fills the air. “You’re clingy.”

“It’s cold,” Jack slurs. Slowly but surely, the atmosphere is seeping into his senses, pleasantly waking him up. “I love you for making pancakes.”

“I know you do.”

“Gonna make tea.”

“I prepared your mug and boiled the water already. You just need to pour it.”

“Have I mentioned lately that you’re the love of my life?” Jack presses his lips to the tattoo behind Alex’s ear, lingering a moment.

“Doesn’t hurt to hear,” Alex says happily. Jack reluctantly detaches himself from his boyfriend’s body to go and make himself some tea. 

Tea is a weekend drink. Jack drinks coffee to get through the mind-numbing work days, but tea is for Sundays like this one. It’s nine in the morning and Jack can already feel the laziness of the day settling over their shoulders; they’re going nowhere today, doing nothing. It’s not often a perfect Sunday comes along, but Jack clings to the opportunity whenever it does. Like today.

Dust hovers in the beams of light stretching through the room and the apartment feels alight with a glittering January. Unlikely warmth starts in Jack’s chest and spreads outwards, something he can’t even attribute to the tea since he hasn’t begun to drink it yet.

Glancing over at Alex, humming to himself as he flips the pancakes, the warmth intensifies. Oh, Jack thinks, not particularly surprised.

It stands to reason that the love filling the kitchen would saturate his body as well.

-

Light spills over Alex, highlighting strands of hair and shining on his skin, brown eyes glowing almost as golden as the sunlight. It makes Jack wonder why he’s not a poet or something, except there aren’t words for this image, and Jack would be hard-pressed to come up with an original way to phrase what thousands of artists have already expressed.

He takes a picture. They’re worth a thousand words, if what they say is true, and that’s close enough.

Alex looks up at the movement. Jack just smiles and shamelessly takes another, catching the fond look on Alex’s face before setting his phone face-down on the table again.

“Stop it, you creep,” he says. “Help me with this.”

“Alex, I’m so fucking bad at crosswords,” Jack says, shifting his chair around the table anyway. “You know this.”

“But you know things that I don’t! Together we can solve it.”

“You could also solve it on your own.”

Alex shakes his head. “You’re overestimating my skills. I don’t think I’ve completed a Sunday puzzle in, uh, my entire life.”

“Well, I hate to break it to you,” Jack says wryly, “but I am not your secret weapon.”

Alex reaches for Jack’s hand and brings it to his lips, brushing a kiss over Jack’s knuckles. “Yes you are.”

Jack sighs. He’s a sucker for Alex and he doesn’t see that trend slowing anytime soon. “Fine. Give me one.”

“Here, I bet you know this one.” A tap of the pen against the newspaper next to the clue for 6-Down. “‘For You’ co-singer Rita.”

“Ora,” Jack says immediately. “Everyone knows that song.”

“Ora,” Alex repeats to himself, like something he should have known to know. “Actually, I didn’t. See? Already fulfilling your secret weapon duties.”

The puzzle is sparsely and randomly filled out. “Why don’t you go in order?”

“Because I don’t know 1-Across,” Alex says. “And if I stopped there it’d be a very short puzzle.”

Jack hums, skimming the list of clues for any other answers he might have. Most of the clues he thinks he could get are ones Alex has already filled in. Some are ones Jack would never have known. “What the fuck is a superlative prefix? ‘Most’?”

“Yeah, like…high school superlatives,” Alex says. “Most likely to make it big. Most likely to, uh, go to jail after graduation.”

“What the fuck were your high school superlatives?” Jack says, amused. “I didn’t know that’s what they were called.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is wrong, though,” Alex says, face drawn in thought. He’s doing the hair-twirling thing again so Jack interrupts the motion, linking their fingers together and scratching gently at the nape of Alex’s neck. Alex hardly seems to notice. “Because I’m pretty sure 4-Down is ‘prince’.”

“‘Hamlet, for one,’” Jack reads from the clues list. He shakes his head. “I’m starting to think you’re smarter than me, Al.”

“Starting to?”

Jack scoffs and stabs at the remaining pancake on Alex’s plate, mostly because he knows Alex isn’t going to finish it. “Hey.”

“I’m teasing, completely joking,” Alex says, leaning into Jack and briefly resting his cheek against Jack’s shoulder. “I’m definitely not smarter than you. I teach middle school. If anything, that automatically makes me more of a dumbass.”

“You love doing that, though.”

Alex sighs. “Yeah. You can love something and still be an idiot for doing it, though.”

“Like being in a relationship with you.” Jack giggles. “Joking. Just kidding. I’m just kidding.”

“You better be,” Alex says lightly. “I know a lot of your deepest darkest secrets, Jack Barakat, and I am not afraid to unleash a pack of twelve-year-olds on you.”

Jack would like to argue that a horde of twelve-year-olds doesn’t scare him, but it does. It very much does.

“Fine,” he says. “You win this round.”

Alex kisses his cheek. As he moves away, Jack turns his head and kisses him on the lips. “You taste like pancakes.”

“You taste like you,” Alex replies, and it doesn’t sound sweet, but it really, really is. Jack licks his lips. He’s not sure what exactly he tastes like, but it charms him to think that it’s always more or less the same, or at least that Alex finds something familiar in every kiss he steals off Jack’s lips. 

“Okay,” he says, leaning over the newspaper spread out before them. “We can do this. Who was in The Irishman?”

-

Whoever said that thing about how it’s better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all might have been onto something.

They concede to the crossword puzzle after almost an hour of staring at it. To Jack it seems pathetic, until Alex grins at him and promises that this is rather impressive considering when he tries to do it alone he only ever gets, like, ten answers, and they’re often wrong. 

Half-finished really isn’t so bad.

The rest of the afternoon and evening stretches out before them, in all its unscheduled glory, and Jack, like the mature adult he is, pulls Alex to the couch and insists they spend at least three hours of the day watching TV.

His second mug of tea is sitting, partially drunk, on the coffee table, Alex’s empty mug beside it. Jack’s is going cold but he’s warm with Alex’s head in his lap, eyes closed as Jack pushes a hand through his hair, and he can’t find it in himself to care. As a compromise, they’ve put on Project Runway, something Alex loves Jack enough to sit through but doesn’t care enough about to pay attention to. If Jack were a more petty person, he would be annoyed by this, but he’s not. Having Alex like this is arguably better, essential in the task of keeping Jack’s thighs warm and also giving Jack something to look at when the urge strikes him.

The angles of Alex’s face and the way his hair flops over his forehead are enough to keep Jack mesmerized for hours.

It’s in one of these moments of weakness, Jack gazing down at the boy in his lap instead of watching the high-stakes but decidedly less enchanting events unfold on the TV, that Alex opens his eyes. His gaze catches Jack unawares, but Jack doesn’t flinch.

“You’re not even watching,” Alex huffs, smirking. “It was your idea to watch something and you aren’t even watching it.”

“I’ve got a better view right here,” Jack says.

Alex just rolls his eyes. “C’mere,” he says, grabbing clumsily at the front of Jack’s shirt.

“I don’t think I am physically capable of kissing you from this angle.”

“Oh, is that a challenge?” Alex picks his head up and pulls Jack down, and it’s not ideal or particularly attractive, but Jack has to admit that they do, technically, kiss, thus proving Jack wrong, which is probably in Alex’s top ten favorite things to do. Only for a second, though, before Jack pulls away.

“I stand corrected, but I also kind of hated that,” he says.

Alex laughs, musical and bright. “Sorry. Let me try again.” He shifts around, straightening up until his feet are on the floor and his body is upright, and this time Jack has no complaints when Alex curls his fingers around the collar of Jack’s t-shirt and drags him in. 

Project Runway isn’t exactly the ideal soundtrack to making out on the couch, but Jack’s not picky.

A fluttering touch lands on Jack’s hip, sneaking just under the hem of his shirt to rest against his skin. Alex releases Jack’s shirt, sliding his other hand up and around to cradle Jack’s face, thumb brushing his jaw. The show in the background fades to nothing, as so often the world does when Alex’s lips are on his. Everything is Alex and Alex is everything — and maybe that’s always true, but it’s easier to sink into when they’re attached in so many places, lips under teeth and noses brushing cheeks and hands forever tracing skin, clothes, hair, whatever ends up beneath Jack’s fingertips. 

It’s looking more and more like the love in the kitchen hadn’t been confined to the kitchen. Or maybe it had never been about the kitchen, but the company. And maybe Jack has known this all along, and the love he feels for Alex follows him around like a stray dog, like a best friend, like a promise. It bleeds from him, infusing itself into the air without ever lessening in himself. Sometimes it trips off his tongue.

Often it does.

“I love you,” Jack murmurs, like he’s just a ragdoll stuffed with love who’s coming apart at the seams, another stitch undone whenever Alex touches him. He’ll keep spilling this love over them and somehow he’ll never run out, and if that makes him weak then Jack is content to be weak. 

Alex only laughs a little, but it’s not mean-spirited, just sweet. “Would it surprise you to know that I love you, too?”

It wouldn’t. This is the secret to Jack’s never-ending supply: the love he gives is the love he receives.

“I love you for making me breakfast,” Jack whispers, pressing his lips to Alex’s cheek, just outside the corner of his eye. “And for the tea. And for making me do the crossword puzzle with you. And for watching shitty reality TV with me.” With each proclamation he brushes a kiss to Alex’s forehead, his other cheek, the corner of his mouth. Alex’s smile stretches across his face, crinkling his eyes by the time Jack kisses him again, for real, though he still returns it to the best of his ability.

It doesn’t last long. “You don’t play fair, JB,” Alex breathes, then laughs again like he can’t help it. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

“You could start with ‘I love you too,’” Jack suggests, slanting a breezy smile at Alex. “That usually works.”

Alex gathers Jack’s wrists in his hands and kisses his palms, one after the other, before lifting his gaze back to Jack. In the light of the apartment, Jack has never seen anyone more beautiful. The truth of his own earlier words washes over him like a sedative, a comforting tranquilizer. 

“Doesn’t feel like enough,” Alex admits, “but I’m not sure this love can be put into words, you know?”

Jack does know.

“Though it’s worth saying,” Alex continues, sliding his hands into Jack’s until their fingers are interlaced, “that I love you for doing the impossible crossword with me, and I love your half-drunk cups of tea, and I loved you in the morning and I love you right now and when we go to sleep tonight, I’ll love you then, and every night after that for the rest of my life, you know what? I’ll love you for those too.”

Jack understands that these are big, big words, promises that are much easier to make than keep. But with Alex holding his gaze and his hands right now, sheltered from the real world or maybe creating it, he knows that Alex means every word, and Jack does too.