Chapter 8 #2
Patrick would let me have it. That's the worst part. He'd accept the dropped call, send the recap, never mention it, the same way he never mentioned the video room or the office, and the file he keeps on me would quietly grow one page thicker.
Patrick inhales, slow, through his nose.
Below the counter, the sound comes again.
I stay.
His eyelids lower a fraction. "The cylinders," he says, with a control I want to break with my bare hands, "come in two heights."
I look at the spreadsheet. Two product photos sit side by side, one tall and one short, both currently beyond my comprehension.
"Use both." My voice comes out sanded.
His breath does something at the sound of it, a small failure, in and out. The flush that's been living at his collar starts to climb. Under the island Theo must attempt something ambitious, because Patrick's whole torso rocks forward an inch before he plants a forearm on the stone and stops it.
And then he checks the camera.
Me.
Even now, getting taken apart one nerve at a time under his own kitchen island, he comes back after every beat to see how I'm doing. Whether I'm still here. Whether this is still yes.
That, of everything tonight, is what finishes my denial off. The checking.
Somewhere along the way, my hand has left the table.
It rests on my thigh, one inch from where my cock is tenting gray cotton, wet at the head, and the inch is everything.
On this side of it I'm a man with a spreadsheet.
On the other side I'm a man jerking off to his nemesis on a charity call.
No administrative system on earth files those two under the same heading.
Patrick's face tightens around a swallowed sound. Below him the wet rhythm quickens, hungrier now, and Theo makes a noise around him that I feel in the soles of my feet.
The inch loses miserably.
My palm closes over my cock, and even through cotton the relief is enormous, blunt friction dragging across the head, my hips pushing up into it before I authorize the movement. A breath punches out of me, loud and ragged.
Live.
The microphone. My mic is on. It has been on this entire time, and is currently broadcasting me to a kitchen in Milwaukee in full fidelity.
Heat goes up my ears as I lunge for the trackpad and hit mute so hard the laptop skates an inch across the table.
The icon turns red, and I sit there with my hand on my cock, heart slamming, feeling fifteen and caught.
Patrick's eyes flick to the corner of his screen.
He saw the icon change. He knows exactly what I did and why, and one eyebrow moves, a question he's too occupied to ask out loud.
I don't answer it, either. Behind the dead mic, nobody hears the next breath, or the one after. The silence makes me brave.
I hook my fingers into the waistband, lift my hips, and shove sweatpants and boxers down together.
My cock lands hot and heavy in my hand, already slick, and the first bare stroke bends me forward over the table, dragging pre-cum down my shaft, pulling a sound out of me the mic will never get to testify about.
Patrick's nostrils flare. His gaze drops below my frame and finds only the table edge, and the frustration that crosses his face is human, and deeply, deeply satisfying. The laptop cuts me off at the chest and he wants what it's hiding.
The laptop stays where it is.
He gets my face, the pull of my shoulder, whatever honesty survives up there, the same cut of him I'm getting in return. It feels fair.
Patrick gives up working by degrees. He scrolls the centerpiece photos anyway, muscle memory with nowhere to go, and his next sentence comes apart around a cost per table.
He starts it again, slower, and loses it again in the middle.
The flush completes its climb from his collar to his cheekbones while I stroke myself to the rhythm of the ruin.
The sounds from Milwaukee arrive clearer now.
Wet suction under the room ambiance. A hitch where the rhythm breaks.
A quick, greedy breath from below the counter before Theo takes him back in, deeper by the sound of it, and Patrick's fist opens flat on the stone like he needs more surface area to survive.
My grip tightens on my cock, pace picking up. Pleasure pulls low and hot through my stomach on every stroke, sharper each time Patrick loses another increment on camera—his lips parting, his shoulders rounding, forearms straining against the counter's edge.
He watches my face change and gives up a piece of his own for every piece he takes.
And it's not enough. Taking their sound while giving nothing back sits wrong in my chest. I'm watching them, hearing them, working my cock to the tempo Theo's mouth is setting, and all Milwaukee gets in return is a flushed man breathing at a muted microphone.
They showed me everything. Three times now they've left a door open, and never once asked me to be anything on the other side of it but present.
The cursor drifts to the red icon.
One click, and the room opens between us.
My next breath reaches Milwaukee clipped and loud, and it lands on both of them at once. Patrick's eyes close, half a beat, jaw flexing, his upper body jolting toward the island, and from under the counter Theo makes a sound around him that no one could ever blame on reception.
When Patrick's eyes open, they come straight to mine.
"The taller ones," he says, every word individually carried, "block the sightlines."
"Then use the short ones." My fist doesn't stop. Neither does my voice, apparently, wrecked and steady at the same time.
"Half the tables."
"All of them."
Silence, if that's the word for it. My breath. His. The slick work of my hand, and the obscene rhythm running underneath the call like a current.