Chapter 12
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about having a kink that involves your roommates using you like a shared appliance: the part that actually wrecks your brain isn’t the sex, it’s the morning after.
And the morning after that.
It’s every regular Tuesday where nothing is happening and you’re just living with these guys—eating with them, watching TV with them, getting drunk with them—and the whole thing is just normal. Like nothing shifted. Because technically, nothing did.
Except Grant spends a solid hour calling me a “disgusting house-bitch” while he’s hollowing out my guts, and then, thirty minutes later, asks if I want the last wing with the same “big bro” energy as always.
Except Finn feeds me his load while he’s mid-game, then later asks if I’m hopping in the lobby for the next round.
Except Walker grinds his sweaty asshole into my mouth and forces me to swallow his musk, then one hour later asks for a spot on his max-rep set.
Even Miles nurses on my nipples like a freak until they’re permanently bruised, dumps a load on my chest, and then casually passes me a joint when I come around.
It’s a lot to absorb. You just have to tell yourself this is fine.
I’m a pro at fine, though. I’ve always been a high-level performer in that category.
What I’m less prepared for, it turns out, is whatever’s happening with Reid.
I’m not saying it’s a problem, let me be clear. It’s just something I’m noticing. My brain locks onto it and won’t let go.
Reid’s been here for six weeks. In the grand scheme, that’s nothing. I’ve had situationships last longer where I knew the person less, which says something about me, I guess.
Usually, when you meet someone new, you put on the Premium Edition of yourself—the smoothed-out, easiest-to-consume version. I do it all the time. The guys do it too, except maybe Miles. It’s just what people do when the relationship is new.
Reid doesn’t do that.
He’s the same guy at 8 AM as he is at midnight. Same dry-as-hell humor. Same picky eater regardless of whether someone cooked or bought the food for him. He also moves through the house as if he’s always lived here, which should be annoying, but somehow, it isn’t.
It’s comfortable. Reid is comfortable in a way I deadass can’t explain.
It starts, as with most things, without an announcement.
I’m at my desk at 11 PM, doing that thing where I stare at my robotics project and wait for my brain to stop buffering and actually start processing.
The joint linkage on my current build is wrong.
I’ve known it was wrong for a week. The stress distribution is off by a factor that’s going to cause a cascading failure the second it’s under load.
I’ve been circling the solution without landing on it, and it’s making me lose my fucking mind.
Reid walks in and stays quiet for a beat.
“What’s wrong with it?” he eventually asks.
“Joint linkage,” I mutter. “Stress distribution’s off somewhere, and I can’t find where.”
He moves in to look at the monitor. He doesn’t touch anything, which I appreciate (there’s nothing I hate more than someone reaching for my keyboard without an invitation.)
“Start over,” he says.
I look at him, genuinely salty that I’m taking advice from a pre-law student about a mechatronics problem.
“Bro! Seriously?”
“Some errors can’t be found in the middle of everything that’s right,” he says, sounding as if he didn’t just tell me to torch a month’s worth of work. “You’ll keep looking at the same spot, and your brain will just show you what it expects to see instead of the reality. Start from zero.”
Then he just sits down and opens his book.
I stare at the screen. Then at him. Then back at the screen.
“I’m not starting over, you crazy fuck.”
“Okay.”
I work until 2 AM. Nothing.
I work until 3 AM. Still a dead end.
At 3:17 AM, I’m staring at this linkage with dead-eyed exhaustion. I think about how I’ve been running the same diagnostic loop for seven days. I’m looking at it from the same angle, with the same baked-in assumptions, and the error is hiding in the foundation, not the structure.
I save the file.
Open a new one.
I finish the whole new build in six days. It’s better than the original—cleaner distribution, stronger linkage, an actually elegant solution. I don’t tell Reid he was right.
But I notice that every night he glances at my screen while I’m working, and whatever he sees there makes him go back to his desk without a word. I’m like eighty percent sure the corner of his mouth is doing a thing.
* * *
I figure out Reid’s cigarette schedule pretty early on.
Midnight, always. Sometimes earlier if a study session trashed his brain. Sometimes he’ll do one in the morning off the window ledge—always outside, because Walker asked him to, and Reid, I’ve noticed, always does what Walker asks.
I don’t really smoke unless someone’s passing a bowl, but I start timing my water breaks around midnight—an observation I’m hard-passing on investigating too closely—and sometimes I’ll just hang on my bed while he leans out the window. We’ll talk, or we won’t. Both are fine.
The things I learn about Reid during those nights are:
He grew up in a small town. A place, according to him, that can be wonderful or suffocating depending on who you are, and Reid was clearly the second one.
He had three friends in high school—two he still talks to, one he doesn’t (no explanation offered).
He chose criminal justice because he hates bullies, not because he wants to be a cop.
He says that with a specificity that tells me people have made that assumption before and it pissed him off.
He reads more than anyone I know. He’ll drop a reference casually, and you realize an hour later he just linked your random comment to some heavy-duty 18th-century legal shit.
Okay, fine, you won’t realize that at all, but that’s what he does.
He thinks Miles is smarter than he lets on, and it pisses him off. He thinks Finn is smarter than we give him credit for, which is a deeper observation that took me a minute to process.
He almost ghosted the interview for the room. He tells me this one night, blowing smoke out the window, not looking at me. He’d walked in, saw me, Grant, and Walker, and made a snap judgment.
I get it. Grant is a massive wall of muscle in a jersey.
Walker was shirtless and fresh from a heavy lift.
And I apparently looked exactly like “those guys”—a phrase he says with a flatness that implies some heavy history.
He’d decided we were all the same brand of douche before we’d even opened our mouths.
“Jock house,” he says, shaking his head. “I almost canceled it.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Finn answered the door,” he gives as the full explanation. And actually, yeah. “Then I realized you are all just a bunch of nerds.”
I let a beat pass. Then I say, “I was in my high school’s robotics program... and I was also a star football player.”
Reid looks at me, finally.
“I got offered a sports scholarship,” I continue, fully committed now. “And a merit scholarship. I took just the merit one.”
He stares at me for a long, unreadable moment.
“I don’t know,” he says slowly, “if I should be disgusted or genuinely impressed by that information.”
I snort, and he laughs.
All that doesn’t come out in a straight line.
It comes out in pieces, across weeks, the way things come out when two people are in a room together long enough.
I tell him things, too—about the robotics showcase, the professor who’s out to get me for no reason, and my family.
Just the surface-level stuff, enough to be real without being a lot.
Reid listens quietly.
I really appreciate that.
* * *
One night, he crashes on my side of the room.
It’s not a weird thing. It happens—the room is small, my gaming chair is more comfortable than his fancy desk chair, so he migrates there sometimes when he’s reading. I get back from the lab at 1 AM and he’s out cold. I just stand in the doorway for a second, catching my breath.
He looks different asleep. Less armored, I guess. The sharp edges go neutral, and you can see the kid he probably looked like before whatever high school did to him.
I’ve shared rooms before. I’ve lived in dorms, I’ve had roommates, I’m not a bitch about my space. But there’s a huge difference between sharing space and actively wanting someone to be in it.
You’re down bad, my brain helpfully suggests.
I tell my brain to shut the hell up because it makes no sense.
It doesn’t.
* * *
I’m grinding out an essay for a class I actually like, hitting that flow state where my hands know the drill and my brain is just along for the ride. Reid’s at his desk with a highlighter and whatever paper he’s destroying himself with this week.
The room is quiet.
At some point, he clicks his highlighter shut and says, “You’ve got something on your face.”
I touch my cheek, finding a smear of axle grease from the prototype I was messing with earlier. I have no idea how long I’ve been walking around like that.
“Thanks,” I mutter.
“It looked hot.”
He goes back to his reading. I go back to mine. But I’m smiling, and I don’t catch it until the grin is already stuck there—a stupid smile over nothing. Over some grease and three words. I look at my screen and think:
Okay.
So.
That’s a thing.
I don’t know what to do with it. I’m honest enough to admit I don’t have the playbook for this. It’s not that I’m repressed—I know what I am. Or I thought I did. But either way, this doesn’t fit into any of the neat little categories I had filed away.
So I just sit with it.
In the quiet, with the rain starting up again outside, and the muffled chaos of Finn’s stream vibrating through the wall, I let it be a thing I don’t know the shape of yet.
For now, that’s valid.
* * *
There’s also the other thing. The thing that runs parallel to our new friendship.
Reid uses the doll differently from the rest of them.
I noticed that on the first day when he wrecked my ass, and made me feel between heaven and hell. It’s not like I’ve got a spreadsheet tracking the actual differences—I’m not that unhinged—but when the rhythm changes, you feel it. Reid’s style registers even when my brain is powered down.
He takes his time. That’s the simplest way to put it.
Walker uses me like equipment, efficient and thorough. Finn uses me like something that’s just there and convenient, which is the point. Grant goes at it rough, which, fair, that’s just Grant. Miles is slow and considerate, but in a methodical way (unless he’s high).
Reid is slow because he’s paying attention.
He touches my ass a lot before he does anything else.
It’s never just quick-and-dirty foreplay.
He touches it because he genuinely likes doing that, I guess.
He’s obsessed with palming it, spreading me open, and pressing into the rim with his fingers.
He’ll eat me out for so long that by the time he finally slides his cock inside, I’m so far gone I nut immediately.
That’s not supposed to happen. My body has way more discipline than that.
Except with Reid, it keeps happening.
Three times in the last two weeks, I’ve come hands-free just from him going down on me. It’s the attention, I think. Or the way he talks—low and vibrating against my skin. It bleeds through the doll mode in a way most things don’t.
The downside to coming that hard is that the plumbing needs recovery time.
Miles built the Maintenance status for exactly this, and I’ve toggled it more in the last month than in the entire period before.
Finn noticed and made exactly one comment about my hole being out of commission before Grant told him to mind his business.
“You good?” Miles asked one day, nodding toward the tablet where the Maintenance light was glowing for the third time that week.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Just sore.”
Miles looked at Reid across the room. Reid didn’t look up from his plate. Miles looked back at me with an expression I didn’t totally know how to receive.
“Cool,” he said, and dropped it.
I don’t mind being sore. I’ve always had a high tolerance for it—it’s part of the trade-off—but I used to view it as a neutral physical inconvenience. Now, I’ll be sitting in a lecture, shifting in my seat to ease the ache, and I can feel exactly where Reid’s hand was the night before.
It makes me feel electric. Like the soreness is a reminder of something good rather than just a side effect of being used.
And holy fuck, I’m so whipped it’s actually embarrassing.
I’m not going to pull the trigger on anything, though.
I don’t have the right words, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what they were trying to say.
I just know that Reid falls asleep in my chair sometimes, and he takes his time on my body in the dark, and he tells me about his life while we sit by the window.
When I think about those three things, they all hit the same spot in my chest.
Which I’m not doing.
I’m looking at the rotor on my desk.
I’m absolutely not thinking about Reid.
I keep thinking about Reid.