Current music:	The Taylor Hanson Band - Hey (From Underneath Acoustic)
Entry tags:	happiness is

Chapter Thirty - Planning and Piercing

Plaything

Title: Planning and Piercing (30/??)
Author: so_jayded
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2100
Genre: Hancest



Taylor

Color me pathetic, but I was already thinking about how I was going to decorate the house before we'd even pulled out of the driveway. It was just perfect for us. Between being really, really private and just absolutely gorgeous and built exactly for the family we wanted to start, I didn't care about the price or the fact that it would probably look really strange for me and Zac to be moving into a house together. At least to the fans.

I leaned my head against the window, making a list in my head of things we would need right away. Our bedroom set was nice, and we had two pieces still in storage, so we didn't have to worry about that. The couch would have to be replaced. Maybe with a leather one. I liked leather.

"Taylor? Are you daydreaming?"

I glanced over at Zac. "Yes," I admitted. "About how perfect that house was and how I'm going to fill it up with nice things when we buy it. Oh! I want to go home and make a quilt. We need a quilt."

Zac's brows furrowed. "Why on Earth do we need a quilt?"

"I don't know," I replied, shrugging. "It just seems like something you should have when you've got a proper house. A nice quilt for the couch or the bed or the rocking chair."

"...What rocking chair is this?"

"The one we're going to buy," I told him, staring down at my fingernails and picking at a hangnail. "We need a rocking chair, too, just like we need a quilt."

He laughed at me and shook his head. "Sometimes you're ridiculous, you know."

I shrugged one shoulder and looked back out the window. "I can't help it. It's how my brain works."

He reached over and squeezed my knee briefly. "Hey, I don't mean it."

Smiling, I pinched his side. "I know. I'm just saying. I'm wired a little weird up here. I guess I'd have to be."

"For what?"

I wanted to give him a straight answer, but there was no nice way to phrase 'because I'm totally in love with my little brother and that's just not normal', so I stayed quiet and just closed my eyes with a smile still on my face. "We need to talk about tattoos," I reminded him after a few moments had passed. "I think I decided what I want."

"Yeah?"

I nodded and opened my eyes. "I want to get a key. Right here." I pressed my hand over my heart and Zac smiled when he glanced over.

"Really? You don't think that's... too obvious?"

I shook my head. "I could always say it has a super-secret meaning that I don't want to reveal, which would be true."

He looked deep in thought for a second - so deep that he almost went through a red light, but he caught himself just in time. "Do you want me to get the same thing?"

I offered him a smile and sat up straight in my seat, then I put my hand on top of his on the gear shift. "If you want to, I'd like that a lot. No pressure, though."

"Do you still want to do it tomorrow?"

Nodding I slid down my seat and sighed. "Yeah. Definitely. I want to have them for our anniversary, not after. And... I think I want to get a piercing."

I'd done a lot of things in my life that were brow-raising for Zac - bringing the cat to the theater, kissing him in the back of a New York club on New Year's Eve one year, giving him a blow job in the living room of our parents' house ten minutes before they were due home - but I don't think I'd ever seen his eyebrows go up quite that fast. "What... exactly... are you going to get pierced?" he asked, looking over at me like I'd grown another head.

"My belly button, I think," I told him, lifting up my shirt and inspecting it. "It'd look nice, don't you think?"

He shook his head, still looking somewhere between shocked and confused. "I... guess? I never really thought about it before." He looked over at me and offered me a little smile. "As long as it's not, like, your dick, I don't care."

I shot him a weird look and shook my head. "Why would that even matter?" I asked, laughing.

"My luck? I'd chip my teeth."

* * *

After we got home, I called Gabe and Charlie - our only two friends that I knew had gotten tattoos in Tulsa - and asked for information. Gabe recommended this place not far from the apartment, Bodyworks, where he got his crazy lizard tattoo done.

"Why are you looking, anyway?" he asked, after he'd stopped ranting about his artist, Steve, who was apparently the coolest guy ever, if Gabe was to be believed.

"Zac and I are getting something done tomorrow," I said, lifting Princess up into my lap. "We want it to be done well, you know? Didn't want to just walk into a random shop."

He laughed. "Are you finally getting Zac's name tattooed on your ass? We've only been saying it's inevitable for, what, nine or ten years?"

I frowned. "No," I replied. "What if my pants fall down or something and I have Zac's name tattooed on me?"

There was a beat of silence and then Gabe started laughing hysterically. "You considered it! Long enough to know that you-" he started laughing again and I pouted, looking over at Zac as he hummed and flipped burgers at the stove.

"Zac," I whined. "He's making fun of me."

Zac chuckled and shook his head. "You just gave him enough ammo for him to make fun of you forever, Tay."

I held out the phone. "You ask him questions, then. I'll cook."

"You'll cook the day I want the house to burn down."

I frowned. "I can so cook! I used to cook all the time when mom made me!"

Zac shook his head. "Tay, I've never seen you make a burger in your life. You can cook, sure, but it's all stuff you really like. Like salmon. And baked shrimp."

I wanted to drool a little at the mention of baked shrimp, but Gabe was yammering on the phone and I figured it would be better to talk to him then let him hang up and tell everyone that I'd honestly considered getting Zac's name inked onto me somewhere. "What?" I asked, putting the phone back to my ear. "I was busy arguing with my favourite idiot."

"I heard," Gabe replied. "I was just gonna hang up and let you two resolve it... uh, however it is you resolve your problems. Which, from the way Zac's been talking, seems like a whole lot of kinky sex."

I blushed and glared over at Zac. "I don't know what Zac is telling you about our sex life." I stabbed my pen down into my sudoku book hard enough to rip through a few pages. "Whatever he's been saying is all lies."

"So you don't like being tied up with silk-"

I pulled the phone away from my ear, muttered a quick goodbye, and hung up. "Zachary..."

He turned away from the stove. "What? What was he going on about?"

"Did you tell him about the scarves?!" Even though it was just me and Zac, my face was hot and probably bright red. The very idea that Zac was telling Gabe about what we did once (ok, maybe it was a few more times than once, but that was beside the point) in bed was... embarrassing.

"I swear I didn't tell him! He guessed and I apparently turned bright red and, damn. Tay, you know I'm bad at lying about stuff like that." He took the pan off the burner and came over to me, wrapping his arms around me. "Just thinking about being with you is so distracting, I can't even think up a good lie."

I shook my head against his chest. "You're a big ball of cheese, did you know that?" I mumbled.

He chuckled and nodded, kissing my hair before pulling away. "Yeah, I had a clue. You ready for lunch?"

Groaning, I watched as he put the burger on a bun and plated it. "No," I said, making a face. "I ate a huge breakfast, do I really have to eat lunch?"

He crossed his arms after he set the plate down in front of me. "You're the one who said you wanted to be on a schedule."

"I didn't say we had to start today."

Grinning, he leaned on the table and kissed my cheek. "Remember what you said about a system of rewards?"

I nodded, looking over at him through the corner of my eye. "Yes..."

"Eat it and there might be something in it for you."

I picked up the burger and examined it. It wasn't too big, not like the double-decker monster Zac had made for himself. "What, exactly, is in it for me?"

He pinched my butt and laughed, going back to the counter to get his own plate. "Depends on how much of that you finish."

***

Afterward, we were wrapped up around each other on top of the comforter. Zac was drawing a lazy pattern on my back and I was half asleep on his chest when he said, "We need to make an appointment for the tattoos and your, uh, piercing, right?"

I nodded. "I wrote the number down in my sudoku book. Page sixty," I mumbled.

"You want me to do it?" he asked. "You look wiped out."

I nodded against his chest and sighed when he let go of me to crawl out of bed. "Don't be gone long," I called after him. "I want my pillow back."

I must've dozed off while he was gone, because I woke back up to him slipping into bed next to me again - this time with sweatpants on, which just wasn't fair at all. "So we've got appointments," he whispered. "At three."

He kissed my hair and I mumbled a tired 'cool' into the crook of his neck and he laughed, pulling me back into his arms. "I think I should make you do all the work more often," he said. "You'll know what it's like to be the tired one."

I pinched his stomach and let my eyes fall closed again. "I like it better when you do all the work, honestly. Or when we share the work."

"Or when I tie you up with scarves?"

I bit down on his chest at that and he jumped. "Yes," I admitted. "I do like that. But stop telling our friends about it, please..."

"Do you think..." He trailed off and fell silent and we stayed that way for a long time. I was starting to drift back off when he started talking again. "Do you think we'll get like Ike and Linds did?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like... they never had time to just... be intimate, you know? After Tabby was born?"

I shook my head. "We're different," I told him, and I meant it. I couldn't imagine not finding time to be intimate with him. "We might slow down a little. We'll have a lot more responsibility. But I can't imagine ever not finding the time to drag you off to bed."

I felt him smile against my hair. "I'm glad. I was. Sort of worried about that, you know?"

"Yeah," I mumbled. "But I don't think you have a reason to. I mean. If we haven't gotten tired of sex in ten years, I really doubt we'll be able to just... not."

He chuckled. "We have so not been having sex for ten years."

"Seven, then."

"Six."

"Seven."

"Six."

"Seven years, four months, and six days. Shut up," I replied, biting him again.

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