Chapter Twenty-Four
Giles
The shower isn’t hot enough and yet I can’t turn the temperature up any higher. My skin is on fire, turning bright pink under the spray, and yet it’s not enough pain. It’s not enough discomfort to pull me away from my unstoppable endless monologue.
No strings attached.
No strings attached.
No strings attached.
I repeat it three times. I have to.
What we’re doing is no strings attached. For Marcello, it means nothing.
And yet for me… For me it feels like whatever happened at my flat on Sunday very much attached me to Marcello.
I’ve felt a pull to him all week, as if an invisible thread, a string, for fuck’s sake, connects us.
Sometimes it pulls me back to the memory of his body under mine.
Other times, I replay his voice calling me baby.
Baby, baby, baby. And on more than a few occasions, I touch myself – one hand on my cock and the other pinching my nipple just like he did – and I come almost as hard as I did when I was in his arms.
But that interaction with Tony was like Marcello took a pair of scissors and neatly cut the thread in two, separating himself very deliberately from me.
And I feel like a fool. A fool for thinking maybe he felt the pull, the string connecting us too. A fool for hoping that if I just waited, spent more time with him, maybe he would also develop feelings for me. A fool for hoping when I am too old for hope.
As the hot water continues to scald my skin, I hear shuffling outside my door and then the click of the cubicle next to me being closed.
“Giles?” Marcello calls out.
I set my jaw and close my eyes as I lean my hands against the tiled wall. “Yeah?”
“Are we… Did I really fuck up that badly? With Tony, I mean?”
Yes, you did, I want to say, but that’s not true. I’m the one who fucked up. I’m the one who thought we were more than we were.
No strings attached.
No strings attached.
No strings attached.
“No,” I answer eventually. “I just… I’m tired.”
“Nah, man, don’t do that,” Marcello says and I realise he still hasn’t turned his water on.
“Do what?”
“Make excuses. Be honest with me. What did I do? Was it that I made you give him your number because the more I think about that now, the more I realise that was fucking stupid. You did say that you weren’t interested in him.
It was part of the reason you wanted to start training with me but I just forgot in that moment.
My brain does that sometimes. It jumps to conclusions without fact-checking. It’s not an excuse, but I just…”
I pull in a breath and then let it go, slowly. “Yeah, that did piss me off,” I say finally. “I get that you forgot – that’s human, we all make mistakes – but I really am not interested in Tony.”
There’s a pause long enough to make me move my head further away from the water so I ensure I don’t miss what he’s saying because of the noise.
“I get that now. And I’m sorry. I fucked up, and I’m sorry.”
I want to hug him. I want to charge into his cubicle and wrap my arms around him.
“Thanks,” I say instead.
His water turns on and I watch as steam starts to emerge from the top of the cubicle next to me.
When I smell his shower gel – something creamy and earthy rather than spiced or floral – I reach for my own and finally start to soap down my body.
When I turn the heat down a little I realise that it helped.
Hearing Marcello apologise helped, even if his error wasn’t the main reason I felt so distressed as we both pounded the treadmill in silence.
“You want to know why I did it?” Marcello asks after more than a few minutes have gone by.
“Did what?” I ask.
“Made you swap numbers with Tony.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because I… I felt jealous.”
I switch my water off. I was finished anyway but suddenly the rush of water in my ears is too much. I desperately need to hear Marcello’s answer to my next question.
“You felt jealous? Of what?”
His water is still running when he replies, “I felt a bit… territorial of you. After what happened on Sunday. I had all these stupid fucking thoughts about how only I’m allowed to get sucked off by you and I realised how idiotic that was.
So I figured the best way to get those thoughts out of my brain now was to watch you swap numbers with Tony, to make myself get the message that you’re very much free to do whatever you want, with whoever you want. ”
“But…” I begin but close my mouth a beat later.
“I would never have done it if I had known it would backfire like it just did.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re cool.”
I know I should say more after he just shared so much with me, but I’m still processing. I’m still wrapping my head around what he just said.
Jealous?
Jealous.
Jealous!
After wrapping my towel around my waist, my hand then hovers over the door.
“Do you still feel the same way?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“About Tony coming onto me? Do you still feel… jealous?”
There is no noise but the hiss of Marcello’s shower spray for many long seconds.
“Yeah, I do,” Marcello eventually admits.
I open the door and step outside. I knock on his door but it opens before my hand’s made contact for the second time.
He stands in front of me, completely naked, the hair on his body all pressed close to his olive skin. I take in his soft pecs, his full belly and that long, thick dick of his. When my eyes are finally back on his face he smiles like he was waiting for me.
“What’s up? What’s going on?”
I step inside the cubicle and close the door behind me. “This is lesson number three,” I say before I move close enough that mist from his shower kisses the skin on my chest.
“Oh?” He arches an eyebrow that pulls up one side of his mouth. “What’s lesson three?”
“How to take full advantage of being the same gender to have queer sex in public.” I close the distance and push up so I can kiss him, hard.
There is only a millisecond of hesitation before Marcello wraps his wet arms around me and kisses me back.
He brings me under the spray with him and water falls into my eyes, down my nose and into our locked mouths.
I taste it along with coffee and butter pastry and him.
Eventually there’s too much water and too much kissing and I can’t breathe so I pull back, keeping my hands on his hips.
He steps towards me, taking us out of the shower’s reach and gives me only the briefest, hungriest look and then he presses me up against the cubicle wall, which wobbles from the impact, and then he starts kissing me again.
It’s his turn to pull back a moment later and I am physically aggrieved when he does, but when I look up at him, he’s smiling down at me, his wild honey eyes twinkling.
“You’ve got to be quiet,” he tells me.
I didn’t even know I was making a noise. But it makes sense because I am so turned on. So desperate for Marcello. And yet Marcello’s gentle warning has me waking up and stepping out of my horny fog for a second.
We’re in a shower cubicle. In the gym. All anyone would have to do was look down and see two feet and they’d know exactly what was happening in here. And this place is not one of those gyms.
“Yes,” I say in a hushed voice. “We have to be quiet.”
“So go on.” He bends down and kisses a droplet of water off the tip of my nose. “Teach me.”
“I’m not sure you need my instruction,” I whisper as I bite at his collar bone and he rewards me by shivering. “You seem to know more than me.”
“I just don’t want us to get interrupted.” He reaches around my body and grabs my arse
My breath hitches with the force of his hold.
“Is that okay?” he asks.
I nod but then bring my hand between us. I loosen the towel and let it fall to the ground. “But this is better.”
Marcello looks down. “That’s going to get soaked.”
“I don’t care,” I say. And I actually don’t. I’ll dry off eventually. And back at home later, I can wash it with a little bleach to make sure it’s really clean. Three times if I need to.
But I’m not thinking about doing anything in threes right now. I’m thinking about how good it feels when my hard length brushes up against Marcello’s thigh and I feel his erection press against my stomach.
“Fuck, I wish I was taller,” I say as I bury my face in his neck, baring my teeth against his skin.
“Why?” He lifts his chin, giving me more space.
“Because then I could grab both our dicks in my hand and get us off together,” I say and Marcello stills.
And then he shifts, bending his legs and tilting his pelvis so his cock makes contact with mine.
I hiss out a curse and he groans, loudly.
“Ssh,” I warn and bring my hand to his mouth.
He smiles around my fingers and I see his brown eyes spark to life. I take a brief moment to listen out for anybody else in the showers or close by, but I can’t make out any noise other than the shower spray and our rough breaths as I slide a hand down and grip our cocks together.
It’s impossible to wrap my hand the whole way around both of them but it’s enough. I think it’s enough.
“Can you hold this position?” I look down at his bent legs, his quads round and hard.
He nods against my hand.
“Good,” I say and I start to stroke us together. “We can call it resistance training.”
I’m right to keep my hand on his mouth because he moans into it, making the skin on my fingers vibrate.
“You like that?”
He nods again, with a lot more enthusiasm this time.
“You’re so big,” I say when I notice his fat head extends beyond mine, but I like it. It means I can run my fingers over the sensitive skin there and each time his eyelids flutter.
Marcello mumbles something in Italian that I’m sure wouldn’t be taught on Duolingo. At least not after a learning streak of several decades.
I’m so busy watching him, studying his reaction, feeling his lips move against the back of my fingers, that I’m almost surprised when I feel my balls tighten and an all too familiar tingling sensation light up the base of my spine.
It feels so good, so grounding, so right that I groan, arguably louder than Marcello did before I silenced him.
As if he’s in perfect agreement, I feel Marcello’s hand land on my mouth, shutting off the noise.
We stare at each other, each of our mouths covered by the other’s hand, and I continue to squeeze and stroke and play with our dicks.
It could be my imagination but I think I can feel one of those wandering veins on his dick against mine and I look down, seeing our foreskins move over two very red, very swollen heads.
I hum out another satisfied noise and yet I’m far from satisfied. I’m itching to come, and to make Marcello come with me, or failing that before me.
Looking back up at him, I raise an eyebrow at him and I’m partly amazed, partly not at all surprised when he understands immediately. He gives me another enthusiastic nod and I watch his Adam’s apple bounce as he swallows.
His hands come round to grip my backside, pulling me closer to him, or maybe he’s holding on for dear life because his legs are starting to shake, and I realise how strenuous this is for him to do after not only leg day but also a two-mile run.
But he doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he’s throwing his head back, his breathing is shallow and fast, and I feel his dick harden in my grip.
“Yes, Marcello,” I mumble against his fingers and who knows if he understands.
I doubt even without his hand muffling my voice, he would be aware of what I just said, because he’s grunting and thrusting and coming.
He’s coming all over my cock and I immediately scoop up the wet liquid and rub it all over the heads of our dicks, catching each following jet as it comes, still pumping my fist.
My forehead comes to rest against his and that contact takes my breath away almost as much as my orgasm does as it crashes into me, barely seconds after Marcello has stopped ejaculating.
I feel his eyes on me as I shudder through my climax, every muscle in me tensing then relaxing, tensing, relaxing, until I feel completely spent and floppy and like I’m the one about to collapse.
And I do, almost. I fall forward onto Marcello’s chest and rest my head against his shoulder.
He straightens up and his hands move to hold my body against him and I bring mine up to steady myself against the cubicle wall and yet they don’t quite make it.
Instead, I end up gripping his upper arms to steady myself.
Despite being pressed up close together, water manages to squeeze between our bodies and washes away the mess.
I don’t know how long we stay like that but it’s long enough for somebody else to make their presence known in the shower area.
They’ve moved into the cubicle I recently occupied and they turn the spray on.
Whoever it is starts humming a song I half-recognise but can’t name and the weird niggling urge to place it has me lifting my head up off Marcello’s chest.
“You okay?” He mouths down at me.
I nod and only manage to stop the smile that pulls at my lips when it’s already half there. “You?” I point at him.
He takes his hands off me to give me two very enthusiastic thumbs up, his smile completely unrestrained.
“That was a fun lesson,” he whispers, turning off the water.
It’s sobering, hearing what we just did described as a lesson, even though that’s how it started, how I started it. But it doesn’t completely crash my high. In fact, I still feel like I’m floating as I reach for his towel and hand it to him.
“You first,” he says and nods down at my towel which is a wet puddle near our feet.
I towel myself off and then hand it back to him before gingerly bending down to pick up the sodden material.
“Gonna make a run for it,” I say.
“Okay, shall I wait a few minutes?” he asks and starts drying the back of his neck.
I don’t know why but in that moment I realise I’ve still not seen Marcello with his hair down. Even when he showers, he keeps it tied up in that knot at the back of his head. I’m drifting away, wondering again what he looks like with his hair down when he nudges me.
“Shall I wait?”
“Yeah, give me two minutes,” I say, shaking my head to get me back in the room, or rather the shower cubicle.
“Okay.” He nods and there’s that smile again.
And it makes mine return. It makes my heart soar and my feet feel like they’re floating on air as I open the door, step out and butt naked, I walk to my locker.