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It had been a while since the last time Ax had called Dustin. Desdemona's introduction into his life, along with awakening as a page of Mercury, had taken up the vast majority of the young man's free time. The rest, as it always had, went to school, homework, his part time job, and his family(and even that was slipping a bit...).. Really, he wasn't entirely sure why he was calling now, but he'd gotten the itch to, the need to reach out, and it might have had something to do with the sudden and unexplained disappearance of his room mate.

A desire to reach out, maybe. To make sure the people he knew were still around, even if he didn't see them half as much as he used to.

Regardless, He had the phone in his hand, and he could hear the ring tone in the speaker as he brought it up to his ear.

Axton was just on the verge of accepting that Dustin wasn't answering, when someone on the other end picked up. Instead if a freeting, however, the blonde was met with an incredulous question. Ax snorted, rolling his eyes, though the other man wouldn't see it. "Plenty of people." Texting was all fine and good, but for an actual conversation, a phone call worked better.

Still, he sounded faintly amused. "Making sure you were still alive." Dustin had sort of dropped off the face of the earth, though Axton's recent fixation on a certain someone had made him little better at keeping in touch with anyone but her.

"My roommate disappeared." It was said devoid of any emotion, mostly because he wasn't sure what to think about it. It wasn't as if he and Archer had been close. They'd gotten along, sure, but he wouldn't have counted the stoic man as a friend.

Wait, what?. Axton blinked, half a syllable into verbalizing his confusion, but the call ended, and the blond was left staring at his phone. He was fairly certain Dustin had just completely misconstrued the point of his call, and he found himself mostly through a text to clarify, before just deleting it and setting the phone down.

Well, regardless. Over the phone or in person, it made little difference, he supposed. Granted, his goal hadn't been to call the other man over, merely to make sure he was still there(and why did he care, again?).

Forty five minutes later he was answering the door, expression nonplussed. "Little warm for a coat, don't you think?"

Silver eyes followed the descent of the coat as it fell to pool around Dustin's feet on the floor. He blinked once, lips twitching in what might have been a small sign of amusement, and slowly lifted his gaze again. Oh yea, Dustin had definitely misconstrued the point of that phone call. Ax wasn't entirely sure he could fault him, considering the primary nature of their calls and meetings on every other occasion one had reached out to the other. Still, this had not been what he had in mind.

Not that it wasn't a nice view. It was.

His throat worked as he swallowed, and Ax reached through the door to wrap a hand around Dustin's arm, pulling him into the apartment and out of the openness of the hallway. In the dorm it wouldn't have mattered, a bare a** wasn't really all that rare a sight there. Here, well, his neighbors didn't need to be subjected to it, and Ax didn't want to be asked to move. He liked it here just fine.

The coat was scooped up and tossed on the counter. Ax closed to the door behind him, turned, and found himself met with a bit of a dilemma. Take advantage of the situation, or try to steer things back the way he'd originally intended them to go before Dustin had hung up on him and turned up very nearly gift wrapped on his door step.

He at least tried for the latter. "This wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I called you." Which was certainly true enough, though if his gaze seemed to drit a little, well, Dustin was distracting.

Snorting, Ax moved to stand between Dustin's knees, hands settling on the counter just outside his thighs. Not touching, but there, familiar and comfortable.

"My roommate disappeared." It was easier to just dive right in. "He left a note saying he was leaving and that anything still in the apartment after a few days was mine, but it was really abrupt and weird."

He tipped his head towards the living room, the big screen tv that was still there on the wall, the entertainment center with the gaming systems, dvds, and blurays. He'd contributed an x-box to the equation, but most of it wasn't his. Same with the kitchen. "That's a lot of stuff to just leave behind." A lot of money invested, just to up and walk away from it.

"Seems off." Which still didn't explain why he'd called Dustin.

He did think something had happened to him, but not in the way Dustin was implying. The note had been in Archer's handwriting, the words seemed in the sort of tone the other man would have used. He could have actually just picked up and left everything behind, it just seemed so weird.

Pale eyes widened a touch at the offer to help, and he laughed, shaking his head. "That wasn't why I called you. Really, I was just making sure you were still there." Which could have been taken in many ways, but he hoped the casualness of their interactions would keep the other man from putting weight on the comment that wasn't meant to be there.

Something about an abrupt change of such nature had made him want to check on on the people he spent the most time with.

"Not logically." Which was true. Calling Desdemona just to hear her voice after he'd found the note, that wasn't rational. Checking in with his parents, his little brother, that wasn't rational either. Neither was this.

There was a lot in his life these days that just didn't make a whole lot of sense. A lot of question and doubts. Axton wanted to hold onto the things that were consistent and easy. The things that didn't change, that weren't demanding, and that didn't leave him more confused. Dustin had been one of the later before, but he wasn't now.


He smirked up at the other man, the sides of his thumbs shifting to drag along the outside of his thighs.

Ax let himself be drawn in closer, shifting his hands so they rested on Dustin's thighs where thumbs had just previously been teasing over. "Maybe you shouldn't sit bare-assed on cold granite, then," he teased back, held it place between the taller man's knees, keeping him from moving, at least not easily.

"Where would you suggest?" The tips of his fingers had found the straps of the jock strap, and they lingered there, slipping beneath them to toy against tanned skin.