Chapter 6 #2
The room goes unbearably sharp. Just the wet rhythm of his mouth and my pulse slamming in my throat and behind my zipper at once.
I'm not touching either of them, and somehow I'm inside the circuit anyway, pleasure climbing my spine with fear packed in right beside it, and I can't find the seam where one ends.
My body picks pleasure. It's been picking pleasure all night.
Patrick pulls off, slow, lips dragging to the tip, a strand of saliva stretching between them until it breaks. His fist takes over, slick and unhurried, while Theo swears at the ceiling in two languages. Then, still looking at me, in the same even tone he used against my ear downstairs:
"You can come now."
I don't know who he's talking to.
The sentence hangs in the lamplight, his eyes on me and his hand on Theo, and both possibilities go off in my body at once.
Theo answers first. Patrick's mouth closes back over him and he comes on the spot, spine bowing, a cry tearing loose past every ration he's kept all night.
And even now, even mid-orgasm, his eyes find me again, glazed and half-open, watching me watch him finish.
Patrick's cheeks hollow. He swallows. He doesn't stop looking at me while he does it.
And I'm right behind them. My hand has gone still, just pressure now, and it doesn't matter.
The heat is already gathering at the base of my spine, my balls drawn tight, the edge rushing up to meet me, and the next thought lands like a hit from behind: I am about to come in my pants.
Standing in a doorway, watched by both of them.
Because of both of them, and that can't be explained away, ever.
There's no version of me that survives it becoming a fact.
My legs decide before I finish deciding.
I spin around and run.
My shoulder takes a piece of the doorframe with it.
Three strides down the hall, hand fumbling the bathroom door because my fingers have resigned.
Somewhere behind me Theo's still coming, another broken sound with something low and satisfied underneath it that I refuse to identify as Patrick, and then I'm inside, the lock clicks, and I grab the sink with both hands.
I hold on to it like it’s a railing on a sinking ship.
My cock is trapped hard against my zipper, throbbing on every heartbeat, briefs damp where the head's been leaking.
Coming would take five seconds. Maybe three.
The door is locked, the privacy is total, and my hand already knows the rhythm because it spent five minutes learning it from Patrick's mouth.
You can come now.
He might have meant me.
He looked at me and said it and he might have meant me.
My right hand leaves the porcelain, drops to my fly, and I catch it at the button.
No.
Because if I unzip, this becomes intentional. The last ten minutes I can still write off as an ambush. Wrong door, high adrenaline, a body in an unregulated environment. But locking myself in a bathroom and coming into my fist over the specific memory of Patrick's throat and Theo's eyes—
No. We are not entering that into evidence.
I put the hand back on the sink.
In the mirror: a flushed lunatic with fading red hair, wet at the collar, pupils blown. I look deranged.
Water. Water will fix me. I run the tap, shove my hand under it and splash my face until my shirt is spotted dark. Cold water turns out to be medical propaganda. My breathing settles inside two minutes. My hard-on treats the entire intervention as background noise.
Mounted beside the mirror is a soap dispenser. FOAMING HAND WASH. CITRUS. I read the label eleven times. Citrus carries no dangerous associations. Foaming is questionable after what I just watched, but I breathe through it.
At some point, the sounds from the office stopped. I don't know when. I was busy standing over a sink with both hands displayed like a suspect proving he's unarmed, actively not jerking off, waiting out the single hardest thing I have ever done sexually.
Which is nothing. Doing nothing. Somebody strike me a medal.
Footsteps cross the landing.
Every muscle in my back goes rigid. The steps slow, then pause right outside the door. I have no plan, no exit, and a face that would confess everything to a knock—
They move on. Down the stairs. Gone.
Relief empties my lungs, and right behind it, close enough to be incriminating, comes a flicker of disappointment.
"No," I tell the mirror.
The mirror has seen too much tonight to respect me.
By degrees, the situation in my jeans stands down. I count sixty after it stops being a medical concern, then open the door. Empty landing. The office door is shut now.
I look at it for under a second. Two minutes, tops.
Then I go downstairs.
***
THE BAR SWALLOWS me whole—heat, noise, donation bell ringing a foot from my ear—and I walk straight into Becker.
Fuck.
He catches my shoulders before we both go down. The grin drops off his face the moment he takes in mine. "You look like Petrov's word of the day."
From the bar, Petrov raises his phone. "Agog."
"I'm fine."
"You're wet."
I glance down at my shirt. "Sink."
"You fought a sink?" His eyes narrow, tick toward the staircase, come back to me. This is the design flaw in observant friends. Eventually they observe you. "Where were you?"
"Sponsor numbers," I mumble.
"And the numbers attacked?"
"Aggressively."
Petrov arrives and studies my face with interest. "Agog is adjective. Means filled with wonder or amazement." A pause, while he consults my shirt. "Also can be horror, maybe."
"Thank you, Petrov."
"You are welcome."
Somewhere behind me, Theo laughs.
I don't turn around. I don't need to. My body triangulates the sound instantly, twenty feet back and to the right, near the dartboard, and adds that Patrick will be close. That's a sense I did not possess last week.
I would like to return it.
"I'm leaving," I tell Becker. "Campaign's over target and I have an early skate."
The narrowed eyes follow me all the way to the door.
Outside, cold air hits my face, and I make it to my car without running.
Barely.
The drive home takes forty-three minutes. I remember roughly six of them. The other thirty-seven belong to Patrick's voice, playing on a loop that no red light interrupts.
You can come now.
By the highway, my grip is hurting the wheel.
He planned it. All of it. The soda, the ear, the office, the door. And Theo held my eyes and got louder. There is no version of tonight where I stumbled into anything.
There's an invitation.
And there's me, climbing eleven stairs to accept it and then sprinting out on the bill.
My garage swallows the car. Engine off. One fluorescent tube buzzing by the elevator, concrete and silence everywhere else. I stay in the driver's seat, because the apartment upstairs contains a bed and I don't trust myself around it right now.
What am I doing?
The answer arrives in form of a phantom voice in my head. I want to watch them again.
I shove it away. In a dark, silent car it has nowhere to go, so it circles back and sits there, patient, like it knows something I'm still pretending not to.
My phone buzzes in the cup holder.
I stare at it until the screen starts to dim. Then I pick it up.
P.G.: You left before the numbers.
I stare at it for a long moment.
I'm still composing my seventh unsendable reply when the phone buzzes again.
Unknown: he's never going to admit he wanted you to stay so i will: come to milwaukee :smiling_face_with_horns_emoji:
I read it once. Then again.
The emoji makes direct eye contact with me.
Theo.
Patrick gave him my number—or, more likely, Theo stole it—and either way, the math changed while I wasn't looking: I now have both of theirs.
More to the point, they both have mine.