"Hold it!" Rodney says. "I've got a rock in my shoe."
John waves Teyla and Ronon ahead and waits while Rodney hops around on one foot and shakes the gravel out of his shoe.
"I shouldn't have worn these runners," Rodney says, jamming his sneaker back on his foot. "I didn't know there were going to be so many tiny rocks here. The boots would have been better."
John shrugs. "You were the one concerned they might make you look like a soldier."
"Teyla said these people react badly to uniforms! I didn't want to get mistaken for military," Rodney says, gesturing at himself emphatically. He's wearing a grey t-shirt, baggy khakis, sneakers, and has a hooded sweatshirt tied around his waist. He looks like a tourist, and John says so.
"In that outfit you could be carrying an assault rifle and still not look like a threat," he adds.
Rodney ties his sneaker and stomps off. "As least I don't look like rough trade."
"I knew the studded belt was taking it too far," John says. His jeans were a little loose and he needed something to hold them up, but all his other belts had knives and guns attached to them. Weapons are something else the Mayuni don't like, which is the reason why the team's unarmed (except for Ronon, but Ronon doesn't even shower without a knife handy) and why they're being followed by a cloaked jumper filled with Marines.
Rodney climbs up the trail and John lags behind, enjoying the scenery. The weight of the sweatshirt is dragging Rodney's pants down, exposing a patch of skin that John doesn't normally get to see. He wants to dip his fingers in there, slide them under Rodney's shirt, his waistband. And then there's Rodney's ass, a perennial favorite. The sweatshirt hides it from view, but the sway of Rodney's hips is hypnotic and John zones out a little, watching the sweatshirt as it twitches back and forth while Rodney walks.
They reach the top of the outlook and stand around, looking out, waiting for their Mayuni guide. Ronon and Teyla are several paces away, sharing a fruit that no one from Earth can stand to be near. Rodney's bent over next to John, emptying his shoes of rocks again, and John has to shove his hands in his pockets so he doesn't reach out and grope him inappropriately. The thought of the invisible Marines hovering over them also helps to curb the impulse. It doesn't stop John from staring though.
Rodney straightens and gives him a weird look. "Are you cold?"
"No," John says, denying it on reflex, but then he realizes that the hair on his arms is standing up, and for once it's his nipples that are poking out like the world owes them a favor. With his hands still jammed in his pockets he probably looks like he's freezing. "Oh," he says.
"You've been staring at my sweatshirt for close to an hour but you didn't know you were cold? Idiot."
John decides that playing dumb is the lesser evil and says, "I'm fine."
"Here," Rodney says, busily untying the sweatshirt from around his waist. He shoves it at John. "Now you can stop suffering in manly silence."
John takes it. He hadn't expected Rodney to just hand over his sweatshirt like that, but John can't exactly turn it down or he'll be caught out for the big ass pervert he is.
"Uh, thanks," he says, pulling it over his head. It's warm from having been wrapped around Rodney's hips all day and even though John's never seen Rodney wear it, it smells like him, like ozone and late nights. He burrows into it under the guise of adjusting the neck.
Rodney's watching him avidly. "You'll have to give it back, of course, later, when I get cold, as I'm bound to and which I actually prepared for, unlike certain colonels I could mention."
"Sure," John says, stuffing his hands in the front pocket.
"Good," Rodney says, a weird little gleam in his eye.
Their guide finally shows up and they all troop back down the other side of the ridge where they meet the Mayuni and Teyla makes friends with the tribal leaders. Rodney keeps shooting John these looks like he's going to ask for his sweatshirt back at any second, but their audience with the Mayuni expires and they're told it's time to go home. So they go. The Marines pick them up in their invisible spaceship and five minutes later John's slinking off to his room, still wearing Rodney's sweatshirt.
John's weighing the depravity of jerking off while wearing the sweatshirt versus jerking off while not wearing the sweatshirt, but pushing his face into it and wishing he was wearing it, when the door chimes.
It's Rodney, of course. "I see you're still wearing my sweatshirt."
"Yeah," John says, feeling suddenly guilty. He pulls it off and shoves it at Rodney in a big ball. "Here."
Rodney's got his hands up like he's scared to touch it.
"Oh," John says, "I guess I could wash it first, if you --"
"No!" Rodney says, springing into action, grabbing the sweatshirt away from him. "That's fine. This is fine."
Rodney puts it on right there in the hall, tucks his nose into the neck and inhales, and that is not the action of a man making sure his clothes aren't too smelly to wear, that is a guy with a perverse fascination with the way his best friend smells. John knows. It's the same trick he pulled earlier.
John hooks his finger in the neck of the sweatshirt and slowly draws Rodney into his room. It looks like he won't be jerking off alone tonight.