by TJ Klune
He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth as Seth’s grip tightened around his wrists, grounding him. “There you go,” Seth said, brow furrowed in worry. “We’re good, Nicky. Relax.”
“Sorry,” Nick muttered, feeling ridiculous. Of course he’d ruined the moment. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He couldn’t even semi-seduce his willing boyfriend right.
“Nothing to apologize for,” Seth said, letting Nick’s wrists go and rubbing up and down his arms. “You good?”
Nick nodded. “Yeah. Just … you know how it is. I thought about your belly button and then I wondered if I have a kink for belly buttons.” He frowned. “Or something. And then peanut butter got involved, and now here we are.”
“I have no idea what to do with any of that,” Seth said, “but here.” He reached down between them and pulled up his sweater, revealing at least ten miles of taut skin. “How’s the belly button?”
“So good,” Nick breathed fervently. And because he couldn’t not, he bent nearly in half and pressed his lips against Seth’s stomach. When he felt Seth tense, he blew as hard as he could. The fart sound ripped through the room as Seth screeched, bucking his hips, knocking Nick off the side of the bed. Worth it.
“You dick!” Seth snapped at him. “What is wrong with you?”
Nick grinned up at the ceiling from his position on the floor. “I’m trying to blow you!”
“Blow me? You jerk, I’ll show you blow me, just you watch. I’m going to blow you until you can’t even remember your stupid name.”
With that, Seth launched himself off the side of the bed, landing on top of Nick, knocking his breath from his chest. Nick managed to grunt before Seth pulled up his shirt and began to blow raspberries onto Nick’s bare skin. Nick cackled as he tried to shove Seth off him, but Seth was too heavy. “Blow me!” Nick began to chant through his laughter. “Blow me, blow me, blow—”
“Ahem.”
Once upon a time, Nick fell from the top of McManus Bridge, plummeting hundreds of feet toward the pavement in what was surely going to be his messy, awful death, all because of a douchebag Extraordinary named Shadow Star who’d taken Nick’s fanfiction a bit too seriously.
And here, now, for the second time, Nick’s life flashed before his eyes because he was sure this was the end. Only this time, it wasn’t going to be because of impact trauma. No, he was going to die of mortification, because apparently his room had fantastic acoustics, seeing as how the words blow me echoed dully as he and Seth turned their heads at the same time to see Aaron Bell standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, a grim look on his face.
“Um,” Nick said. “It’s not what it looks like?”
“Really,” Dad said flatly. “Because it looks like my underage son is demanding oral sex from his underage boyfriend when they’re both supposed to be in the kitchen doing homework.”
Nick hadn’t known that hearing his father say oral sex would be so emotionally devastating. He did now.
“Oh my god,” Seth moaned, covering his face with his hands.
“Dad!” Nick yelped.
Dad rolled his eyes. “Seth, get off of Nick and get your things. I’m driving you home. Nicky, why don’t you stay here and think about all the sex you’re not going to have. In fact, when I get home, we’ll discuss exactly that.”
“What the hell,” Nick muttered as Seth slid off him. Seth refused to meet either of their gazes as he stood from the floor, cheeks aflame. “Dad, you can’t say things like that.”
“And yet I did,” Dad said, not moving from the doorway, even as Seth tried to push by him. In the end, Seth made himself as small as possible as he sidestepped Dad, back rubbing against the door frame. He didn’t even say goodbye. “I live to make your life miserable. It’s in the job description, kid. When you become a father, you get a manual called How to Screw with Your Child. It’s very informative, and it’s the only type of screwing that’ll be happening in this household for the foreseeable future.”
“I hate everything,” Nick announced grandly as he glared at the ceiling.
No response. Nick turned his head to see an empty doorway. He groaned and sat up, glancing at the photograph sitting on his messy desk. In it, a young version of Nick stood with a beautiful woman, her hair blowing in the wind coming off the ocean as she laid her head on his shoulder. Jenny Bell, his mother, now three years gone.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked her picture. “You’re the one who told him he had a sense of humor.”
She didn’t reply.
Nick looked away from the photograph when he heard the front door open. He jumped up from the floor and went to the window, sliding it open. The sounds of Nova City filtered through, loud and obnoxious and comforting. The air was frigid, causing gooseflesh to prickle along Nick’s bare arms. They were supposed to get snow later, the clouds above an ominous gunmetal gray.
He looked down the stone path that led to the street. Seth and Dad were walking toward Dad’s SUV parked in the space in front of the house. “He won’t keep us apart!” Nick shouted, laughing when both Dad and Seth jumped, looking around wildly. “I’ll find you, my beloved! No matter where you are, we will be together. Nothing will ever come between us!”
Dad glared up at him. “Kid, I’m warning you.”
Nick blinked innocently as he leaned forward on his elbows, breath streaming from his mouth in a thick fog. “Why, Father! It’s not my fault if the neighbors hear us and think you’re trying to keep my boyfriend from me.”
Dad slid a single finger pointedly across his throat as Seth looked as if he wished a sinkhole would open up underneath him and swallow him whole. Rude. Nick was being romantic.
But then Seth looked up at Nick and said, “We’ll be together in this life or the next,” and Nick knew it was quite possible they were meant to be.
Dad sighed dramatically before steering Seth toward the SUV.
Unfortunately, it was about this time that Nick realized two things: he was alone in the house and he was still thrumming with arousal.
He didn’t think as he turned away from the window to reach for his phone. He typed in his passcode (Seth’s birthday) and opened the internet browser. He created a new incognito tab just to be safe and typed in his favorite porn site. The screen filled with stills of men in quite a few different positions that should’ve been anatomically impossible. He swiped through until he found his favorite category, a recent addition gaining traction.
Extraordinary porn.
He sat on the edge of his bed, ready to make the most of his time alone. He clicked on the third video on the list, one he was intimately familiar with. In it, a skinny man in a ridiculous costume who went by the name Boner Boy saved a rough-and-tumble dude who worked at an oil derrick that had exploded. However, since the budget for this particular piece of cinema verité didn’t allow for an actual explosion (or an actual oil derrick), it only showed the aftermath: the man covered in artfully placed smudges and most of his clothing ripped off as Boner Boy felt him up under the guise of tending to his fictitious wounds.
Nick hit play, already anticipating the first lines of dialogue.
“You’re safe now,” Boner Boy would say woodenly. “But I should check you for serious injury. Take off your pants.”
“Yes,” Rough-and-Tumble would reply. “You should check very closely as I take off my pants.”
Except no sound came from his phone.
Oh, the actors were doing their acting, and the sex was most certainly happening on-screen, but he couldn’t hear a single thing. Nick frowned, clicking the button on the side of his phone. The volume was already turned up all the way. It should’ve been loud.
He frowned. “Goddammit. I just got this phone.”
A horn honked outside, but Nick ignored it as he lowered the volume and then turned it back up to no avail. Nick was about to throw his phone down and grab his laptop when his gaze darted to the upper right corner of the screen. A little symbol blink
ed at him—one he knew very well.
Bluetooth.
His phone was connected via Bluetooth to … to …
He raised his head slowly in abject terror. He stood slowly, as if in a dream, and drifted toward the open window as the horn honked again. He looked out to the street below.
The windows of Dad’s SUV were rolled down. Seth’s face was in his hands. Dad was leaning out the window. As soon as he saw Nick, he waved up at him and reached over to the dashboard to turn up the volume of the sound system in the SUV.
“Yes!” Rough-and-Tumble shouted from the speakers, echoing in the street around them. “Superpound me with your Extraordinary penis! Fill me with your superqueero power! Yes! Yes!”
A neighbor looked over at the SUV before practically running away. That certainly wasn’t necessary. What a disproportionate reaction.
Nick closed the tab. Rough-and-Tumble and Boner Boy’s passionate love affair was silenced.
Nick looked back down. Seth was banging his head against the back of the seat. Nick would have felt bad if he wasn’t already filled with fiery outrage. Before he could demand that his father apologize for ruining his life, Dad spoke first, shouting, “Get your coat, kid! You’re coming with us. I think it’s time we had a talk. You. Me. Seth.” He grinned. “Bob and Martha Gray.”
Seth snapped his head toward Dad, mouth hanging open, blood draining from his face.
Nick scoffed. How bad could it really be?
2
“And that’s how you make a dental dam,” Dad said at the end of a twenty-six-minute demonstration where he took scissors and cut multiple ziplock bags into large squares. Martha and Bob Gray sat on a couch in their living room, watching Dad with no small amount of interest. “I learned about it shortly after Nick came out and was saving it for a moment like this.” He jerked his head toward Nick and Seth, who were sitting in kitchen chairs they’d dragged out to the living room with the pace of prisoners in a gulag. Nick didn’t know what Seth was doing because his own mouth had dropped open, tiny sounds of pain pouring out.
Bob Gray—a barrel of a man with a devious twinkle in his eye and perpetual grime under his fingernails from his job as a super—leaned forward. “Dental dam, you say? And what’s it used for?”
“No,” Nick whispered. “No, no, no.” Seth grabbed his hand, holding on tightly.
“Protection during oral sex,” Dad said. “But not for penises. This is strictly for cunnilingus and anilingus.” He frowned, stretching one of the squares in his hands. “Or, as the kids call it these days, rimming.”
“Oh my,” Martha said, picking up one of the squares. Normally a kindly older woman with fluffy white hair and a quick wit, she’d obviously decided in the past weeks that her mission in life was to make teenagers more miserable than they already were. “Rimming. So, you just … what, put this over the genitals and it makes it safer?” She lifted the plastic square up to her face, and Seth made a sound like his intestines were being removed through his nostrils.
“These will do in a pinch,” Dad explained, as if he weren’t ruining his only son’s life. “Even cutting open a condom would work. But it’s better to use dental dams made for that express purpose. They’re usually latex or polyurethane. I don’t know if you can buy them at the grocery store, but they’re sold online.”
“Or,” Martha said, glancing at Bob, “we could shop local and support the community. There’s that one shop down on Ninth. You know the one—it’s always playing loud music and has those mannequins in the window with the fun little red balls that go in mouths and attach to the head with black straps. I bet they’d have all kinds of dental dams.”
Nick had never seen a soul depart a body before, but it looked like that was exactly what was going on with Seth.
So, naturally, Bob decided to make it worse. Or better; Nick wasn’t quite sure. Bob said, “Isn’t Seth’s Pyro Storm costume made of some sort of latex? If it comes down to it, he can put that on before he and Nick … you know.”
Nick, forgetting where he was and who he was with, whispered, “Yes. That. For safety.”
They all either ignored him or didn’t hear him. Either way, it was for the best. “I suppose,” Martha said. “Regardless, it’s good knowledge to have. And you’re not wrong, Aaron. It’s a big step to take, and they both need to realize it’s not something that can be taken back.” She glanced at Nick and Seth and smiled warmly. “We get that your relationship is new and wonderful, but you need to think with your heads and not your bits.”
“Easier said than done,” Bob said, folding his hands over his stomach. “I remember being sixteen. I wanted to put myself in pretty much anything that would have me—men, women, didn’t matter to me.”
“Robert Gray,” Martha said with a huff. “Honestly. We have company.”
“Speaking of Seth’s costume,” Dad said.
Nick panicked. “Dad, no.”
“Dad, yes,” he said sternly. “I’m not talking about using the costume for … that.” He shook his head as he set the mangled plastic bags on the coffee table before him. “Bob, Martha, when I came to you after what happened last year on the bridge, I told you I was happy for our kids. Seth seemed to know what he was getting involved with, so I’m not worried about that part, though I did question his judgment a little bit.”
“Wow,” Nick said loudly. “It’s not like I’m sitting right here or anything.”
Dad didn’t react, almost as if he were used to having a child who could be irate about pretty much anything. “But Seth is an Extraordinary. He can do things most of us can’t even begin to imagine, what with all the fire and the flying. And he told me he wasn’t sure he still wanted to be Pyro Storm, not after everything that happened. I get that. I really do. I won’t say I understand the weight of such a thing, but I know what it means to feel like you have a responsibility to protect those you care about.”
Okay, maybe Dad wasn’t so bad. Even if he was literally the most embarrassing person Nick had ever known, this was sort of sweet, in a way. He loved his kid, and Nick loved him too. Then he ruined it. “But if Seth and Nick take their relationship to the next level, how can we be sure that Seth won’t burn him if he gets too … excited? Do we even know where the fire comes from? Could it come from anywhere?” He glanced pointedly down at his own crotch.
The silence that followed was absolute, and it was in this moment that Nick planned to find an attorney and file for emancipation.
He yelped, “Dad, what are you talking about?” just as Martha said, “Oh my, I never thought about that,” just as Bob said, “We never tested that, for obvious reasons,” all while Seth jerked his hand from Nick’s grasp and groaned so loudly Nick thought he was dying. They all began to speak over one another, Nick louder than the rest because he knew that volume was the leading factor in winning arguments. He shouted about fire dicks and the sheer audacity of his father. Martha went on about the making of the costume and how she hadn’t had plans in mind for it to be used as protection for anilingus. Bob picked up one of the discarded plastic squares and held it inches from his face, wondering aloud about elasticity of plastic and the human body. Dad said that while he didn’t believe Seth’s genitals could shoot fire, he wanted to make sure it was brought up because if that was the case, they needed to see if there was a flame-resistant material that could be used for condoms.
It wasn’t until Seth shouted, “We’re not having sex!” that they all shut their traps.
Everyone turned to look at him, including Nick. It was the first time Seth had spoken since Dad had begun ruining Nick’s life with assistance from the elder Grays. In solidarity, Nick reached over and grabbed Seth’s hand again. They were in this together. If they were going down, it’d be the both of them—just, apparently, not on each other.
“We’re not,” Seth said in a strangled voice. His face was red, his unicorn-print bow tie so askew it was almost vertical. He swallowed thickly, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “We�
�” He looked at Nick with wide eyes, begging silently for help.
Nick wasn’t an Extraordinary, but he’d mostly accepted his lot in life as the sidekick/love interest to the hero. It wasn’t ideal, but he made do because Seth needed someone like him.
Which is why Nick squared his shoulders, held his head high, and said, “Yes. We’re not having sex. We like to make out and rub against each other without penetration of any kind. I haven’t even stuck my hand down his pants, so you don’t need to worry about that. Today was the first day I’ve even seen his belly button since we started dating. But if it makes you feel any better, should we decide to bone down, it’s a decision we’ll make together when we’re both ready. And to be safe, we can get a fire extinguisher for my room and his in case he can orgasm fire. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’m going to take my boyfriend down to the basement so we can spar because he needs to keep up with his training and I’m still trying to see if I’m capable of getting an abdominal muscle. Father, I shall see myself home by curfew. I bid you good day.” With that, he stood, pulling Seth up with him.
“But—”
Nick turned slowly, eyes narrowed. “I said good day.”
Dad rolled his eyes fondly. “So you did. Funny how you think that means we won’t be talking about this again, and in great detail.”
Seth came willingly enough, only stopping when Nick did at the entryway to the living room. Nick looked back over his shoulder at his father, who watched him with a quiet smile. “Dad?”
“Yeah, kid?”
“I love you.
His smile widened. “Hey, I know. I love—”
“But you’ll rue the day you decided to make dental dams in Bob and Martha’s living room. Do you hear me? Rue.” And with that, he pulled his boyfriend toward the stairs that led down to the basement.
* * *