Chapter 2
“I’m going to touch you now,” Garrett says, his voice pitched low, even, the kind of voice built for exactly this, calm enough that panicking around it would feel stupid. “You’ll feel some pressure. Try to relax through it, it’ll be easier for both of us.”
“Okay,” I say, to the wall, because I can’t say it to him.
I feel him behind me, the paper crinkling under his weight as he adjusts on the stool, and then a cold press, lubricant probably, and then his finger, gloved, blunt, pressing against me.
“Just breathe out,” he says. “Good.”
He pushes in slow. It’s strange, not painful exactly, just an intense pressure I’ve never felt before, every muscle in me registering an intrusion my brain is scrambling to categorize as medical and nothing else. I breathe like he said. It helps.
“You’re doing fine,” he says, and I can hear him shifting slightly on the stool behind me, calm, methodical. “I’m going to check a few things. Might feel a little strange.”
“Okay,” I manage.
He moves slow, testing, pressing gently in one direction and then another, narrating almost nothing, just the occasional quiet sound like he’s confirming something to himself.
I focus on the wall, on the poster about colon health, on anything that isn’t the fact that a stranger’s finger is currently inside me and somehow it doesn’t feel bad at all, just strange, foreign, oddly intimate in a way I don’t have a category for.
Then he curls his finger, searching for something, and every thought I have evaporates at once.
Heat floods through me so fast it’s dizzying, low in my belly, spreading down into my cock before I can do anything to stop it. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek. My hips twitch against the table without my permission.
“Easy,” Garrett says, unbothered, like my body doing that is nothing new to him at all. “Almost done.”
He’s not done. He presses again, right against that same spot, and I have to grab the edge of the table to keep from making a sound I’d never be able to take back.
I’m hard. Fully, humiliatingly hard, pressed against the paper covering the table, and there’s no way he doesn’t feel the shaking he’s causing under his hand.
He goes still for half a second. Just half a second, barely anything, but I feel it, the smallest pause before he keeps going, like he’s recalibrating something.
Then his hand settles flat against my hip, steadying me, and he presses again, deliberate this time in a way the first press hadn’t quite been.
“Breathe,” he says, quiet, even, nothing in his voice to suggest anything’s out of the ordinary. “You’re all right.”
I’m not all right. I’m hard, shaking, and completely at the mercy of one finger and a stranger’s level voice, and some part of me that I don’t recognize wants him to keep pressing exactly like that forever.
“That’s a normal response,” he says. Plain. Clinical. Like he’s reading it off a chart. “Nerve stimulation. Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
I want to die. I want the table to open up and swallow me. “Sorry,” I manage, my voice cracking on the one word.
“Don’t apologize for how your body works, Tyler.
” He says my name like it costs him nothing, easy, familiar already, and something about hearing it right now, from him, with his finger still buried inside me, makes it worse and better at the same time.
“Half the men I see react this way. It’s the prostate. It’s supposed to do that.”
He doesn’t rush to finish. If anything he takes his time, thorough, professional, and I lie there, trying to think about anything else, the crossword guy in the waiting room, the drive over, anything, and none of it works because his finger is still moving inside me with an unbothered precision that’s somehow the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.
He keeps going a moment longer, in no rush, and I lie there shaking, hard, humiliated, and somewhere underneath all of it, wanting him to press again even though I know he shouldn’t, even though this is supposed to be nothing but a routine exam and nothing about how I feel right now is routine at all.
“Almost there,” he says, and I can’t tell anymore if he means the exam or something else entirely, and I don’t ask, because I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
Finally he withdraws, and I hear the snap of the glove coming off.
“You’re okay,” he says. “Physically this looks like a minor internal hemorrhoid, nothing serious, but I want to get you on a treatment plan and see you again in a week to check progress.”
I sit up too fast, face burning, hands shaking as I reach for my jeans, and I can’t make myself look at him.
My cock is still half hard against my thigh, obvious even through the paper gown, and there’s nowhere to hide that fact in a room this small with a man standing three feet away pretending very deliberately not to look.
“Take your time getting dressed,” he says, already turning to wash his hands at the small sink in the corner, giving me the privacy of his back if not the room itself. “No rush.”
I dress faster than his offer suggests I should, pulling my jeans on before he’s even finished at the sink, desperate to be a normal person again, fully clothed, unremarkable, nothing about me currently on display. It doesn’t work. I still feel exposed even buttoned up to the collar.
“I’ll write you a prescription,” he says, taking his time, writing something on a pad. “And Tyler.” He waits until I glance up. “There’s nothing here to be ashamed of.”
“Right,” I say, not believing it even a little.
He hands me the script, and at the door, almost amused, he says, “I’ll see you next week, Tyler.”
I can’t tell if that’s a doctor talking or something else. I don’t let myself think about it in the parking lot.
I get to my car and just sit there. Ten minutes, maybe more. My hands are still shaking. I don’t know what just happened to me in that room, and worse, part of me already wants to go back.