Title: Desert Rain
By: dothefandango
Pairing: Nick/Greg
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 317
Author's Note/Description: During the one day I was in Vegas, it rained. The image sticks with me because rain in Vegas is so weird and unexpected. Nick and Greg share a first kiss in a sudden downpour.

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Desert rain was better than any other kind of rain in the world. It wasn’t vastly different than most rain, really. Particles of desert dust and sand swooped up in convective lifts of air, got chilled up in the puffy cumulus clouds, and the water molecules of two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen just huddled up around said particles until they got heavy enough that gravity felt they should come down. In Florida, they’d have beach sand maybe, or in the Appalachian trail, there could be dust and little granules of boulders that used to be gigantic once upon a time. But everything else would be about the same.

Greg, however, didn’t care because it was desert rain that was best. Lazy, bloated clouds would just erupt and drench a bunch of tourists who had been told Las Vegas was a desert and had made the awful assumption that in five two day stay it wouldn’t rain. It wouldn’t darken over in Vegas, either. There wasn’t any warning except for that rain cloud just looming in the air, like a little kid with a water gun just waiting for the perfect target. Desert rain made people crazy, and that’s why he loved it almost as much as he completely without a doubt loved Nick Stokes, coworker and perhaps most perfect man in existence.

He was under one of those bloated cumulus clouds right now, one shaped like a squirrel holding an acorn to his greedy little chest, kissing Nick Stokes for the first time while splatters of desert sand and two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen peppered their bodies. Greg wondered if maybe this special cloud that was a witness to their first kiss had sucked up some kind of exotic salt water, off the coasts of Zanzibar, maybe. Because as mouths opened wider and tongues danced frantically, everything tasted like ocean water, only much, much sweeter.

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