Kyle
“Put it down, Ky!”
Max’s scolding voice floats into the kitchen, and I whirl around, hissing at the sharp pain that stabs up through my arm and into my neck. Max is nowhere to be seen, still in the living room.
“I’m not picking anything up,” I lie, pulling my hand away from the jar of peanut butter I’d been reaching for with my left hand.
Sure, my wrist is still technically sprained, and it’s not exactly comfortable to do, well, anything with it, but I can’t just stand around while Max waits on me like I’m a giant, incapacitated baby. No matter what my doctors say.
I can’t work. I can’t go to the gym. I can’t cook, not that I was any good at it anyway. It takes me half an hour to get myself dressed, and I have to piss sitting down. Wiping my own ass feels like scaling Everest.
I can’t even jerk off.
All I can do is watch TV, scroll mindlessly on my phone with one sad, bruised finger, and stare out the window.
It’s only been two weeks, and if it weren’t for Max coming over and keeping me company while I do one of the three aforementioned activities, I’d have gone clinically insane on day two.
Max strolls into the kitchen, still wearing his gym training clothes. “You were about to open that jar of peanut butter.”
“How could you possibly know that?” I mutter.
“Because I know you. Sit down, I’ll make you a sandwich.”
I grumble my way back to the sofa, feeling completely useless.
The boredom I can deal with, but the helplessness of this whole thing is what’s really getting to me.
I’ve done everything for myself since I was seventeen, and I’m damn proud of it, so not even being able to make myself a fucking sandwich is killing me.
“Monsieur,” Max says when he joins me on the sofa, placing a plate with a sandwich on it into my lap. “Bon appetit.”
I pick up the sandwich gingerly, but I grin when I take a bite and the acidic taste of pickles hits my tongue. “I thought you said putting pickles in a PB sandwich is deranged.”
Max shrugs, swallowing a bite of his own sandwich. “It is. But you like it, so.”
“Fucking softie.”
He shakes his head with a grin, and we eat in comfortable silence for a few bites.
“You know what you can do to repay me,” Max says eventually, and I groan, knowing exactly what he’s about to say. We’ve been having the same argument for the last week.
“Nope,” I say. “Not happening.”
“Ky—”
“I’ve told you, it’s not happening. Sponge baths have been doing me just fine.”
Max rolls his eyes. “The funky edge to your scent says otherwise. What if you get syphilis or something?”
“That’s not how you get syphilis, dipshit.”
Max sighs heavily and shoves his empty plate onto the coffee table. “If you could use your hands, I’d challenge you to a game of Mario Kart. Loser has to take a proper shower.”
I snort. “No, you fucking wouldn’t. You haven’t beaten me at a game of Mario Kart since 2003.”
“That’s a lie, and you know it. I can think of at least three times I’ve wiped the floor with you in recent memory.”
“It doesn’t count if I was drunk.”
“It absolutely does,” he laughs, before he holds a hand up. “Stop trying to distract me. I’m putting my foot down. If you don’t let me help you shower tonight, I’m calling your mom.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” I hiss. I love my mom, but my god, the woman can be overbearing.
She knows I was in a minor accident, but I’ve been purposefully withholding the full extent of the damage from her, because if she knew how much help I needed surviving right now, she’d be camped out on my bedroom floor for the next few weeks.
“Oh, believe me, I would,” he smirks, way too gleefully. “If you don’t want me helping you shower, I’m sure Pauline would be more than happy to give her baby a scrub down; it’s nothing she hasn’t seen before, anyway—”
He reaches for his phone, and I manage to knock it out of his hand with my foot.
“Okay!” I groan. “But I need you to know that I hate this.”
Max gives me a smug look. “You’ve made that abundantly clear. But I’ve known you since we were five years old, dude—I’ve seen you in every state of nakedness known to man. We shower together like, four days a week at the gym. It’s no big deal. Now strip off and spread ‘em.”
I ease myself off the sofa and head toward the bathroom like I’m walking the last mile. “We’re never speaking of this again. Once it’s over, it’s like it never happened.”
“I’ll be telling anyone who’ll listen.”
I strip down to my underwear in the bathroom, glancing at the raw, slowly healing skin on my calves and the ugly bruising on my back.
It’s gone from purple to green, and now seems to be entering a new yellow phase, which is somehow even worse.
The carefully honed definition across my chest and stomach is already losing its edge after a few weeks away from the gym.
I notice Max watching me in the mirror and look away, trying to smooth the discomfort off my features.
I keep my boxers on, trying to hold on to one last vestige of dignity, and Max does the same.
Max steps into the shower behind me, adjusting the nozzle so it’s angled away from the cast on my right arm.
I let out a sharp hiss when the warm water hits the tender flesh of my back, but after a few seconds, the heat working its way into my stiff muscles starts to feel so excruciatingly good that a small groan escapes my lips.
“See,” Max mumbles. “Not so bad, huh?”
His rough palm makes contact with my shoulder to steady me as he takes a washcloth and lathers it up with soap. His movements are slow and painfully careful as he glides it over the bruised skin of my back and around to my sensitive ribcage, letting the suds run over the healing scrapes on my legs.
I watch the water run in rivulets down his broad shoulders to distract myself from the sting, his muscles shifting as he washes me.
We may have showered together a thousand times at the gym, but that feels a far cry from this; he’s so close that his scent would be triggering every aggressive instinct in my alpha brain if we weren’t as close as family, but instead, it’s just hard not to notice how sculpted he is, the lines of his torso impressively defined.
It’s not something I’d usually think about, but I guess being a little more out of shape than usual is making me hyper-aware of his body.
And maybe not having been able to touch myself for the last two weeks, let alone been touched by anyone else, is making me extra-sensitive, because every slow, firm swipe of the cloth sends a bizarre, completely inappropriate shiver across the surface of my skin.
I close my eyes and try to focus on the sound of the water swirling down the drain and the sharp sting of the soap on my wounds, but the heat and the steam and Max’s distinctive, warm ginger scent overwhelm my senses instead.
His hand is warm and certain as he moves lower, over my abs and the curves of my hips, and lower still—
It only takes the briefest, most innocent flash of wet friction for heat to pool rapidly between my legs.
No. Nonono. Absolutely not.
I try to step back, angle myself away, but my balance is shaky, and Max pulls me back toward him with a hand on my waist to keep me steady.
The knuckles of the hand holding the washcloth brush against the rapidly forming bulge in my soaked boxers, and suddenly they offer no modesty whatsoever as the water molds the thin fabric around the outline of my erection.
My breath hitches. Max freezes. All the blood that isn’t in my cock rushes to my cheeks.
“Ky—”
“Don’t,” I cut him off. “Don’t say anything. Let’s just turn the water off and not make eye contact for the rest of my life. I haven’t been able to jerk off for two weeks, that’s all.”
Max doesn’t turn off the water. His hand is still hovering dangerously close to my cock, which is somehow still rock solid despite my total mortification. “Two weeks?”
“Yep,” I say bitterly. “I’ve been having wet dreams again, like I’m fourteen fucking years old. A strong breeze could get me hard right now.”
“You really know how to flatter a guy,” he laughs, but it’s weak. When I dare to steal a glance at him, his eyes are glued to my boxers. “Two weeks is brutal.”
“Tell me about it. So let’s just forget about this, okay?”
Max chews his lip. Then he turns away, and for a moment, I think it’s over.
That he’s turning off the tap and getting the hell out of this shower stall and away from the thickness of my scent.
It must be driving him nuts, after all. But then he adds another pump of soap to the washcloth, and turns back to me.
“It took me a week to get you in this shower,” he mutters, his voice tight. “I’m finishing the job.”
“What do you—” I start, but I cut myself off with a sharp hiss as he runs the washcloth over the outside of my boxers, tracing the entire length of me. He’s gentle, but the movement is enough to send a current of heat twisting through my lower half.
“I’m just washing you,” he says softly, his eyes flickering up to meet mine in a silent question. “Just helping you shower, right?”
His fingers twitch at the base of my cock. I swallow thickly, watching his pupils dilate. “Yeah,” I breathe. “Okay. Just showering. No big deal.”
“No big deal,” he repeats distantly.
He moves the cloth over the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, the back of his hand brushing against the underside of my balls with every movement and sending veins of soap suds running down my thighs.
I have to bite back a moan when he glides it back up my shaft, the friction so, so achingly good, but also not quite enough.
He must catch the edge of frustration in my exhale, because he hooks his thumb around the waistband of my boxers, glances at me for permission, and tugs them down when I give an almost imperceptible nod.
I half expect Max to make a stupid joke like we always do, some comment about how he’s bigger to break the tension, but he doesn’t.