Chapter 7
Miles
When you’re this fried, time stops being a straight line.
I’ve been camped in this corner for—Uh. I don’t know, a minute.
The stack of thermodynamics textbooks jabbing my spine is actually pretty comfortable.
Someone put on a playlist that’s half hyperpop and half ambient drone.
It should be a total trash fire, but it kinda works. I’ve been analyzing that for—a minute?
I’m also hard.
That started—man, I don’t even know. It might’ve been the playlist. It might’ve been the couple going at it lazy-slow over by the couch. I checked them out like fifteen minutes ago and they were still at it. Might’ve been that.
Or it might’ve been that I started thinking about my doll, which I do sometimes.
Which I’ve been doing more and more these days.
Daydreaming about using him on that couch again.
Or slipping it in slow while he’s asleep.
Or shoving my cock in his mouth every time I see him putting something in it. Or sucking those delicious nips.
I’ve been fixating on that hard.
No, more like—yeah.
That’s probably why I pitched a tent.
I look around, trying to kill the boner.
At this point of the night, our department parties usually look like a trap house.
There’s a girl on a beanbag who checked out before I even sat down.
There’s a guy near the door who fell asleep holding his solo cup.
He hasn’t spilled it yet, which is genuinely impressive.
I’ve been watching it tilt for a while and it never goes.
The couple is still going. A few people are on the floor, too high to move.
Somebody cracked a window at some point, and the air is this weird mix of cold outside and warm inside, smelling like drugs and alcohol and—what the fuck, candle wax?
Well, it smells like a 2 AM life choice, I guess.
I lean my head back against the textbooks.
And then Kit’s right in front of me.
I blink.
He’s crouched down, forearms braced on his knees, looking at me with that steady look he has. Hair’s messed up, jacket on. He looks real. He looks very real.
I process this slowly, the way you process things at 47%.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say back.
He looks at my eyes. “How bad?”
“I’m good.”
“Dude, every time—”
“I’m good.”
He scans my eyes, then my hands, then the general disaster zone around me, which, yeah, isn’t a great advertisement for “fine”.
He tilts his head. “What did you take?”
I think about that. I think about the timeline of tonight, but that’s not fully available to me. Dunno why.
There was the thing someone handed me that I assumed was just a normal brownie, but maybe I should’ve known better. And then the shots, and then—
“Weed.”
“Obviously. What else?”
“There were—” I gesture vaguely at the kitchen. “Someone had pills. Mystery flavor.”
Was that what made my dick rock-hard? I think about that for a second. I think about it very carefully.
Kit puts two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “That’s all?”
I try to locate a specific memory. It’s not locating.
“I think I did a line of something. Around like one.” I chuckle. “Dude, that was not coke.”
Kit stares at me.
“That was—I only did a little bump of that. I’m pretty sure it was fine,” I add.
“You’re pretty sure, huh?” he says, looking at me like I’m weird for partying at a party.
“Eighty percent.”
“Eighty percent sure you didn’t snort bath salts at a rando’s house.”
“I know the guy,” I say. “We have a seminar together.”
“Okay,” he says, rubbing his face. “Okay. Let’s go.” He stands up and holds out a hand.
I look at his hand. Then at him. Then back at the very comfortable thermodynamics textbooks behind me. They’ve been there for me all night, physically and emotionally.
“Let’s go,” he repeats.
“Gimme a minute.”
“Dude— “
“The music is good right now.”
He looks at the ceiling and sighs, then back down at me. “The music is crap.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “I know, right? It works though. Like, the contrast—”
“Bro.” He gets a grip under my arm. “Come on, man. Get up.”
I think about that. I think about what that means. What going home looks like right now: dodging the bodies on the floor, locating one of my Vans, then facing the freezing-ass wind outside, and the car and then—no. No, that sounds like a lot.
“Nah,” I say.
He makes a face, and crouches back down to my level, which I appreciate, really. Eye contact is easier when there’s not a height differential. Honestly, I don’t know how people deal with having to look up at someone all the time; it’s exhausting.
“If you don’t get your ass up, I’m calling Walker to fireman-carry you out of here.”
“He’d just start doing keg stands.”
“Then I’ll get Grant.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
I let him pull me halfway up before my legs just say nope. I drop back down. His hand slides off my arm.
“Why are you even here?” I ask when my brain finally loads another 1%.
“You texted Finn, and Finn texted me,” he explains, sounding super pressed when we are chilling like this. “It’s 4 AM, you know? I was knocked out.”
Holy fuck, it was 2 AM just now!
I check him out. He’s wearing gray sweatpants, a hoodie, and a jacket. Which means—well, it could mean anything because he always dresses like this. But he came to get me. He got out of his bed to come get me. That sends a really warm, nice wave through my chest.
I really like Kit. I really, really, really like him.
And then my fried-ass brain immediately connects that to the obsessive loop I’ve been stuck in all night.
Click.
There it is.
“Do the thing.”
He frowns. “What thing?”
“You know what thing.”
“I really don’t,” he says, in a tone that means he absolutely does.
“The doll thing.” I reach out and get my fingers around his wrist. My grip is trash right now, clumsy and loose, but I tug him a little closer because he needs to be close for this to make sense. “Please. I want to fuck the doll so bad.”
It comes out way too desperate. I hear it leave my mouth and think: Yeah. Accurate.
“No. Are you crazy?”
“Kit—”
“No, dude. Look at where we are.” He glances over his shoulder at the bodies on the floor, the couple, the comatose girl on the beanbag. “There are like fifteen people in here.”
“None of them are awake.”
“Some of them are.”
“The ones that are awake are too baked to care,” I say, which is a verified fact. “Come on. Please. I’ve been—I was literally just thinking about you when you walked in. That’s why I’m—” I gesture vaguely at my lap.
He doesn’t look. He’s actively avoiding looking at the tent I pitched.
“Miles, bro, I swear—”
“Kit. You drove all the way out here,” I say. “I appreciate that. You’re a good—you’re my good doll. Best doll.”
“Don’t,” he says.
“It’s true, though.” I hold up a finger. “The absolute best doll.”
He closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, he looks like he’s made a decision. Usually, the decision is no.
“I’m not doing this here, I’m getting you home—”
“You’re hard too,” I say, my eyes glued to his very obvious boner.
He stops.
“You’re wearing gray sweats,” I say, stating the obvious. “I can see it.”
A pause.
It’s a veeery long pause.
He looks down at his crotch. Then back up at me. His expression cycles through several stages, like a loading screen, and then settles somewhere around I hate you (I hate that you’re right).
“That doesn’t mean—”
“It means we’re synced up,” I push.
“It doesn’t mean we do this here.”
“The floor is actually fine. I’ve been sitting on it for hours. It’s a good floor.” I pat the rug. “Very solid.”
He snorts a laugh. “When you’re high you talk just like Finn. It’s annoying as hell.”
I want to say Finn talks like me. But then we look at each other for a second that stretches out in the way seconds do when you’re this baked. The bass is doing that thing to my sternum, and he looks flushed in the dim, neon party light. All those pretty colors on his pretty face.
Kit is really beautiful.
He looks around the room. I watch him do the slow scan, cataloging the bodies, the couple, the sleeping girl, the guy with the cup. His face is doing math.
I watch the math happen.
He puts one hand on the floor. Then the other.
And he lowers himself down, flat on his back, right there among the passed-out bodies, arms at his sides, legs together.
Still.
I stare at him.
My brain is at like 52% now, and all 52% is dedicated to Kit lying on the floor like he just turned himself off.
I crawl over.
It takes me a second because my limbs are not responding great, but I get there.
I wedge my knees between his and force his thighs open, settling into the space.
I do all of it and he just lets me move him.
I have to pause and breathe for a second because just manhandling him sends a shockwave straight to my dick.
I shove his shirt up.
There are bruises on his chest. Fading ones, the yellow-green of a few days ago. I stare at them for a second, a little confused, a little—
Someone else put those there.
I don’t have enough brain cells right now to figure out how I feel about that. Is that hot? I think it might be hot.
But also annoying.
Very annoying. I don’t like it at all.
So I put my mouth over one, and suck hard.
I feel him—not move, exactly, but something. A micro-tremor. A fine vibration just under the skin. Like a phone left on silent, buzzing in a drawer far away. He’s shaking in there while showing me nothing on the outside.
His chest is big and juicy, and it looks just as delicious as it tastes.
I work across it—a little too sloppy, but whatever—putting my mouth where I want it, and sucking fresh marks over the old ones.
I get to his nipple and just camp there, because I know what it does to him even if he won’t show me.