Chapter 10 #2
Movement precedes words. Fabric dragging over a microphone. The give of a mattress under weight, and breathing that doesn't belong to one person. Or maybe I’m imagining things.
But then, there’s Theo, somewhere past the phone, ragged and impatient. "If you don't hurry up I'm calling the league office."
"Put me on speaker," Patrick says, close and calm.
Fabric shifts. Theo again, nearer, all the impatience gone somewhere else. "He's here?"
"Ask him."
"Are you—" a sharp inhale bends the sentence in the middle "—you here, big red?"
My mouth has gone dry. Two words in, and I already need a rulebook nobody issued. Am I supposed to talk? Stay quiet? Sit in the dark and be an ear? My request bought me a ticket without a seat number.
"I'm here."
"Oh, fuck." Reverent. Not a joke, nowhere near one. He says it like something arriving, and the sound of it lands directly below my navel.
"Speaker," Patrick says again.
I set the phone on the pillow beside my head, screen up, and lie back into the dark. "Done."
"Good."
The single word registers and my cock starts filling against my briefs. My body keeps its own records.
A soft thump. Phone landing on the mattress, maybe. Patrick's breathing organizes itself just above the microphone, close enough that every exhale arrives with weight.
Then, a click. Plastic. A cap.
A slick sound follows, lazily, and Theo sucks in a breath. "Cold," he accuses.
"You'll live."
"You did that on purp—" The sentence loses its footing. "Oh. Oh. Okay."
I stare at the dark, and the sounds starts building an image of a room for me. Theo on the bed. Knees in the sheets. Patrick behind him, wearing—
I stop myself there, because imagining what Patrick is wearing feels somehow more explicit than the rest of it.
"Knees wider," Patrick says.
Sheets rasp. Theo's next breath punches out of him, and my imagination doesn't need the diagram.
"How many is—" Theo starts.
"Two."
The answer isn't for Theo. Theo can count. The word is aimed at the phone, at the dark on my end of it, flat information in that even voice for the benefit of a man many miles away who asked not to be warned.
Patrick's narrating. For me.
Heat rolls down my stomach in a slow tide.
My hand is already resting on my abs, and I leave it there, because their room has rules and I don't know mine yet.
There's a version of this where I'm an ear in the dark and nothing else, and if that's my seat, I'll take it.
I asked for exactly this blindness. My cock, fully hard now and tenting the briefs, has no interest in seating charts.
"He spread before I asked," Patrick reports.
"Snitch," Theo breathes.
"Wider."
The mattress complains. Theo's answer comes out as vowels.
Sounds resume and they’re wet now, deeper, and Theo’s breathing goes ragged around them. He keeps starting sentences and Patrick keeps taking the ends of them away. "You're— ah— you're showing off for— fuck. Yeah, there—"
"Three," Patrick says.
Theo's vocabulary reduces to one high, helpless sound, and my cock jerks against cotton, untouched.
Three. My brain supplies the image. Three thick fingers, slick past the knuckle, and Theo pushing back onto them, because Theo doesn’t wait for anything.
My palm settles over my cock through the briefs. Slow pressure, nothing anyone could hear. My hips have other ideas and I hold them down by force of will, barely, and being this careful about silence while two men take each other apart on my pillow speaker is its own insanity.
"Tell him," Theo pants suddenly. "Tell him how— you have the voice for it—"
"He can hear you."
"That's not the same and you know it, you—" A moan swallows the insult whole.
The crack of a palm on skin comes through sharp enough that my whole body flinches. Theo groans, long and shameless, not a molecule of pain in it.
"Fuck you," he manages, wobbly.
"Not yet."
Not yet. The two of them, casually scheduling, while I hold my own cock through cotton in the dark like contraband. The certainty in it, that there's a later, that this is one night in a series, that the series now includes me, pulls a sound up my throat that I barely trap.
Patrick's voice comes closer, directly over the phone now, low, aimed into my bedroom.
"You asked to be here."
My heart hits once, hard, off schedule.
"So be here."
Whatever was still holding me to protocol lets go. I shove the briefs down my thighs, my cock landing hot against my stomach, and the first bare stroke drags pre-cum from the head down the shaft, and a breath out of me that's too loud. Way too loud.
I don't take it back.
For one second, everything north of the state line pauses.
Then Patrick inhales, close to his phone. "Good."
The praise goes through me like current. My next stroke is rougher for it, my hips lifting into my fist, and from farther away Theo makes a sound that starts as a laugh and dies as a moan.
"He's— Patrick, he's—" His voice climbs. "Hi. Hi. Salut. Don't stop, why would you— fuck—"
Whatever Patrick does next takes the rest of the sentence, and their end finds a rhythm, liquid and steady.
Slick fingers working, mattress springs keeping time.
Theo's mouth produces sounds that used to be words.
And underneath all of it, Patrick's breathing, composure with a strain running through it now.
My fist matches their pace. I’ve not consciously decided on that. The darkness is total and it makes everything closer. Theo's sounds arrive against my ear like he's on the next pillow, the wet rhythm sitting low in my stomach. When their bed knocks the wall once, I feel it in my teeth.
"He's dripping on the sheets," Patrick says, conversational with fraying edges. "He keeps reaching for himself."
"Because somebody has a policy—"
"Hands."
There’s a short scuffle, then a wounded noise of compliance. In my head, Theo's fists close around the headboard, knuckles pale, cock heavy and ignored between his thighs, and he does it because Patrick asked. The obedience does something strange to me. Someday I'll ask someone why.
But not today.
"Please." Theo's voice has changed now. Lower. Stripped of performance. "Please, I've been so— tell him how good I'm— Tell him."
"You tell him." Patrick's voice drops another floor. "Tell him what you're taking."
"Three of his fingers, and he's being so slow about it, I'm going to die on this bed and my ghost is going to sue—"
The cap clicks again. A drawer moves. Theo's breath goes shallow and fast, and the change reads clearly from miles away. Fingers gone now. Something else coming.
My grip tightens at the base of my cock and I force myself slower, because the edge has already entered the room and we are nowhere near done.
And I want all of it. Every second, at full attention.
"Say it," Theo whispers, urgent, barely catching the mic. "Say what you're—"
"I think he knows." A pause stretches. When Patrick speaks again it's rougher, aimed at me, the closest to a crack I've heard from him tonight. Or ever. "Slow. So he can hear all of it."
The push, when it comes, is one long sound.
Sheets pulling tight. Patrick's breath breaking off mid-inhale.
And Theo… Theo opens around a note I've never heard from him, low, cracked and grateful, lasting the whole length of the slide, and my hand forgets its speed limit.
Pre-cum slicks my fist. The darkness in my bedroom has a temperature now.
"Thank you— Fuck— Merci—"
Thanking him. In two languages, completely sincere. Nobody is performing anymore, and knowing that does more to me than the performance ever did.
The first thrust makes their phone tremble against the mattress.
The second lands deeper and drags a wrecked sound out of Theo.
By the fourth they've found it, a pace with weight behind it, skin against skin, the bed frame counting against the wall, and I fuck my fist to it in the dark. Wet sounds on both ends of the line now, and there’s no telling whose breathing is whose.
"He gets tighter when he hears you," Patrick says.
My rhythm stumbles.
"Don't tell him that—" Theo's protest dissolves before it finishes landing.
"Make the sound again," Patrick says.
To me. That one is mine. An instruction, sent south across space, and I don't even know which sound he means. Then I do, because my next stroke pulls it out on its own. Low, and rough. Embarrassing, and so fucking real.
Theo's voice jumps an octave. The bed surges. And Patrick exhales something in Polish, quiet, the same word that escaped him the last time.
I file it away again. Spelling unknown, meaning unknown. Effect catastrophic.
"Feel what he does to you?" Patrick asks. "And he's not even in the room."
"Then get him in the room," Theo wails. It's a demand, ragged and sincere, and it detonates somewhere under my ribs. "Next time I want— I want— fuck—"
Next time.
Patrick slows. I hear it happen, the whole rhythm banking into a hold, dragging a sob of pure frustration out of Theo, and when Patrick speaks again, the register has dropped to the one that ends arguments. "Tell him what you want."
Everything in me pulls tight.
Theo tries. What comes out is air, a broken laugh, half a word. Patrick pushes deep and stays there, pinning him on it, patient and unyielding as gravity.
"Use your words."
"I want—" Theo's breath shudders in. The mattress creaks under some small desperate movement, a body trying to ride what it's been given. "Patrick, please."
"Not my name."
One heartbeat. Two.
The dark above my bed starts spinning. My fist has stopped. Everything has stopped except my heart, which is trying to leave through my throat, because I know what I want to find on the other end of this silence, and I don't believe it, both at once.
Theo drags in a breath that shakes the whole speaker. "Wall."
My name. Ruined. Wanted. Said like it's the thing being kept from him.