Chapter 3
I wake up face-down.
My ass is a wreck.
Not injured or anything. More like the specific ache of muscles that got used in ways they weren’t trained for. I stay still, just taking stock of the situation. Bed. Pillow. Blanket that I definitely didn’t pull over myself. Saturday morning light filtering through the curtains.
My ass hurts, and I’m grinning like an idiot.
I remember fragments of the aftermath. Everything went soft and buzzy from the weed until I was a pile of bones on the couch.
I remember Grant’s voice saying something about getting me cleaned up.
I remember him hoisting me over his shoulder—which, again, does something to my brain.
Then he and Miles basically pressure-washed the evidence off me while I leaned against the bathroom tile, too gone to feel anything but the warm water.
I remember that Grant’s hands, the ones white-knuckling my throat minutes before, were oddly careful.
I remember being deposited in my bed, and then Walker showing up with his professional athlete massage oils.
He gave me a technical lecture on lactic acid and muscle fatigue while kneading the tension out of my thighs.
I remember thinking that Walker is actually a great guy, Walker is genuinely one of the best people I know.
I crashed before he left the room.
And now I’m lying here, grinning.
I get up, wince, take a leak, and go back to sleep for two more hours because it’s Saturday and my body is filing a formal protest.
* * *
I get up eventually, pulling on sweats and a shirt, and then I shuffle downstairs looking exactly like someone who got railed by four guys and slept like a corpse afterward.
The kitchen smells like coffee and bacon.
Grant is at the stove, clearing his throat every forty seconds for no reason. Walker is at the table and doesn’t look up from his phone. He’s been on the same screen since I walked in. Finn is eating cereal with his head down. Chew. Stare at the bowl. Repeat. He has not blinked.
Miles looks up, nudges his glasses, and raises an eyebrow like “you good?”
I give him a nod.
He goes back to his laptop.
I grab a mug, pour some coffee, and lean against the counter to watch the four of them being the most awkward they’ve ever been in the two years we’ve lived together.
Grant clears his throat again.
“Okay,” I say. Finn’s spoon stops mid-air. “You guys are being weird. It was a dare. It’s fine.”
Nobody says anything.
Silence. Walker looks at the wall. I walk over and thump his shoulder. He flinches, then looks up.
“It’s fine, man,” I say again. Then I reach across Finn and swipe two strips of bacon he didn’t even start eating yet.
“Hey—”
“Bacon tax,” I say, with a smirk. “You owe me a lot of bacon, man.”
Finn looks up with the most hand-on-the-already-empty-cookie-jar face ever. Miles snorts, and that breaks Walker, who laughs and shakes his head, and Grant makes a noise at the stove that’s almost a laugh.
Miles closes his laptop, and just like that we’re all sitting in the kitchen being normal again.
Walker starts trashing Grant’s cooking, Miles argues about butter versus oil for frying eggs, Finn talks about a new game, and I sit here eating stolen bacon and letting it all wash back to normal around me.
It’s fine.
It’s almost completely normal.
Except at some point, I scratch the back of my neck and Grant’s eyes track the movement. I see his jaw tighten before he looks away, suddenly fascinated by his spatula.
I touch the skin
There’s a bruise there in the shape of his hand. I saw it in the mirror earlier.
I drink my coffee and don’t say anything about it. Neither does he. And that’s fine. That’s completely fine.
I go back to sleep after breakfast and don’t wake up until two in the afternoon. By this point the house is empty and quiet. I lie in bed for a while doing absolutely nothing, which feels incredible.
My ass still aches.
I think about it. What it felt like. Walker’s cock splitting me open for the first time, the burn of it, the way my body had rioted and then just decided it was fine, actually.
Good, actually. Delicious, actually. Miles’ precise strokes that found my new best friend inside me.
Grant picking me up, sitting me on his cock, and using me like I was a cocksleeve.
Even Finn’s desperate, virgin-ass thrusts were good.
I’m hard.
I roll over and take care of it in about forty seconds because my brain has a lot of material to work with now.
Then I just stare at the ceiling wondering what that says about me.
I don’t come up with an answer.
I fall asleep instead.
* * *
Three weeks pass.
To be honest, three weeks is enough for the weirdness to metabolize. For the horniness to level out. For my brain to file the whole night under “wild shit that happened once” and pivot back to robotics labs and the seventeen assignments I have due before the end of term. And pussy too, obviously.
Except that’s not what happens.
What happened is I’ve become a different person.
Outwardly I’m the same. I go to class, do my work, eat Grant’s food, play games with Finn, go to gym with Walker and help Miles debug whatever’s currently breaking his brain. Everything looks normal.
The problem is internal.
Because I’m absolutely losing my mind.
I don’t know how to explain it except that something got switched on that night, and now the toggle is stuck. It’s been two weeks, and I’m running hot so constantly that it’s getting genuinely inconvenient.
I notice the scale of the problem during Control Systems, which is a class I used to like.
Professor Aldridge is writing something on the board, one hand in his pocket, sleeve rolled to the elbow. I wouldn’t be able to stop staring even if I tried, which I didn’t.
He’s got to be pushing fifty, but he’s got this thing about him—salt and pepper beard, white at the temples, nice body. He teaches like he’s doing the class a favor, an air of authority that my body suddenly finds fascinating.
I’ve sat in this man’s class for three months and never thought about him once outside of the educational context.
Week one after the party, I walk in, sit down, and Professor Aldridge starts explaining feedback loops, and somewhere between the introduction and the first equation my brain just completely abandons the mission.
I spend the hour fixated on his hands. They’re big. He talks with them, gestures at the board, and I can’t stop imagining being manhandled by someone who’s been doing this a long time and knows exactly what to do with their hand and their dick.
I’m hard before he even hits the second slide.
By week two, the fantasies get specific.
I imagine him clearing his desk to bend me over it.
Or calling me up to the board and wrecking me in front of everyone.
Or calling me to his office and saying he’ll teach me a few things, and me pretending to be naive about it.
I’ve walked past his office twice for no reason, which is a new low I acknowledge fully.
I even asked about extra credit last week.
I walked up after class with zero plan, and just blurted out, “Is there anything I can do for extra credit? Anything. Anything, really.” He looked at me over his glasses, and said my grade didn’t suggest I needed it.
I said I was just being proactive. He said that was admirable, in a tone that was completely appropriate and that gave me absolutely nothing to work with.
I walked out of that building and stood in the sun for a full minute trying to locate my dignity.
But it’s not just him.
That’s the problem.
There’s a guy in Dynamics with forearms that ruin my focus every time he pushes his sleeves up. I’ve shifted my seat twice for a better angle.
There’s the neighbor across the street, this huge guy who I’d watched carry a full-size fridge by himself one afternoon. I had to go inside to jack off to the fantasy of him holding me down. His cock, in my fantasy, was bigger than Grant’s.
There’s the guy at the library reference desk who I’ve caught looking at me three or four times now. Every time it happens, I almost say something. Then I don’t. Because even if my body is screaming for a repeat of that night, I’m still straight—and that guy definitely isn’t.
And then there’s Eduardo.
Ed is Walker’s gym friend, and he comes around the house sometimes.
He also has this specific habit of just pulling his dick out during trash-talk sessions as a power move.
It’s a “talk to the big guy” thing. And…
Okay. It’s a lot of dick. It’s a genuinely unreasonable amount of dick.
The guys laugh it off every time. Then Ed puts it away, and the conversation moves on.
The last time he did it, I had to leave the room.
I went to the kitchen, got a glass of water, and stood at the sink thinking about the biology of human guts, and making some calculations.
The worst part is that I already know exactly what I want, and exactly where to get it—I’m living in the same house as it—but I can’t figure out how to say hey, so about two weeks ago, any chance we could do that again, like, now? Like, right now? No homo, though.
Yeah, I’m thinking about the best no-homo way to beg for cock. Sue me.
I should be studying.
I’m lying on the living room couch staring at the ceiling, my textbook open on my chest. The Idaho water stain, that I’ve been having feelings about for three weeks, now is kinda making me horny.
The front door opens.
Walker drops his bag. “Professor bailed. Fucking waste of time,” he mutters to the house before heading upstairs.
I look at the ceiling.
We’re the only ones home.
I don’t think about it for long.
I shift into a specific, inviting position on the cushions.
And then I go dead still.