by JD Ruskin
They stood for a moment in this place that was so familiar, and yet, with the entire world being made new by the sudden turn their friendship had taken in the last twenty-four hours, it too felt strange and unexplored.
“So,” Brandt said, his voice bearing the same anxious reserve as it had this morning when he had greeted Donnelly’s shocking presence in his bed. He still wasn’t sure what they were doing, and what they might be about to do concerned him even more.
Donnelly, however, felt the time for anxious reserve had passed.
He tossed his keys onto the table next to the front door and stepped over to face his partner. He stood for a moment, looking into Brandt’s face with an intensity that made Brandt’s stomach turn a flip.
“What are you—”
Brandt was silenced by Donnelly’s fingers on his mouth. He held them there for a moment, shaking his head slightly, a sly grin taking shape.
Brandt, however, was taken aback—here was Donnelly treating him like the girl in a 1940s romance, shushing him by putting his fingers on his lips.
But then, Donnelly’s fingers were warm and soft.
But then, they smelled faintly of the chocolate raspberry sauce he had swabbed off the dessert plate after they had shared that decadent torte.
But then, his fingers twitched a little, as if fear and desire were fighting each other.
And then he leaned in and his lips took the place of his fingers, and Brandt was lost in the kiss he had needed for so long.
He felt Donnelly’s hands on his neck, on the back of his head, pressing them close; that tongue entered his mouth, as it had last night, and he felt the thrill both of the new and the familiar, a combination that made him dizzy. Without realizing he was doing it, he wrapped his arms around Donnelly’s waist and held him tightly. Their eyes were closed and they felt only each other for a long moment as their entire existence centered on the place where their lips met.
Finally, Donnelly’s grip on Brandt’s neck slackened a bit, and he pulled back slightly. His eyes sparkled as they had at the restaurant, and his expression was one of pure joy. Brandt smiled, caught up in the excitement emanating from his partner.
“Dude, that was amazing,” breathed Brandt, overwhelmed.
“Shhh…,” Donnelly replied, taking Brandt by the hand and leading him down the hall.
Brandt opened his mouth to protest being shushed—again—but then they arrived at Donnelly’s bedroom, and he lost whatever words he was going to say. He had been in this room before, of course, but it was never like this. Next to the bed he saw the chessboard from last night, the pieces still scattered around the floor in the corner of the room, and he had a flashback to how that awful event had unfolded. He shuddered at the memory, but then realized that he had nothing to shudder about; all of the strangeness of what they had done last night was made normal by what they were doing now.
Donnelly stood in front of Brandt, near the foot of the bed, and kissed him again, and then again. Then his hands slid up Brandt’s torso, nearly up to his neck. He began to unbutton his shirt. After undoing the top two buttons, he spread Brandt’s shirt open and gazed hungrily at the top of his exposed chest. He leaned down and kissed the right clavicle, and then the left, and then kissed Brandt again on the lips. Brandt felt a surging in his chest that was completely new to him, and he wasn’t sure he could remain standing. Donnelly kissed his chin, then his throat, and finally down between his pectorals. He continued to unbutton as he went down, until finally he knelt before Brandt and kissed his navel, pushing the shirt completely open. It hung off Brandt’s shoulders as if he were an angel leaping heavenward whose clothes were too mundane to make the trip with him.
Donnelly looked up the expanse of Brandt’s muscled torso, and saw his nipples jutting out from his chest—how could he have missed those? He stood slowly, and as he arrived at their level, he reached out with his left hand to pinch one while he caught the other between his teeth. Brandt gasped, then moaned incoherently, and then his knees buckled. He sprawled backward onto the bed, Donnelly landing on him, catlike, his grip on Brandt’s sensitive nipples never faltering.
Brandt gripped the sheets with his arms outstretched, writhing under the ministrations of his partner, who seemed somehow to know that his nipples were wired directly to the fuck center of his brain. He couldn’t take much more of this.
“Get up here,” he growled, grabbing Donnelly’s shoulders, pulling him away from his nipples, which were sparking with sensation.
Donnelly slid slowly up Brandt’s body, maximizing the friction between his clothed torso and Brandt’s naked one.
Brandt gripped the sides of Donnelly’s face as he looked into his eyes.
“I… just have… one thing… to say…,” Brandt panted, flushed with emotion and adrenaline and whatever new chemical it was that served as the pathway between his nipples and his cock.
“What would that be?” asked Donnelly, innocently.
“My turn!” grunted Brandt as he flipped Donnelly onto his back and landed atop him. He looked down at his partner, who smiled at being handled a bit roughly, staring up with frank desire in his eyes.
He froze for a moment, hesitating on the precipice of the biggest plunge of his life. If he did this, if he did what every fiber of his being was crying out for him to do, there was no going back. He would be something different, something new, starting today and forever.
He dropped his hands to Donnelly’s chest, heaved a heavy sigh, and closed his eyes.
Donnelly’s lusty playfulness gave way to concern as he studied Brandt’s deflated posture. He knew full well what this meant—to Brandt, and to him. He saw the internal struggle for what it was, and he knew.
Brandt’s fingers, numb with panic and clumsy with an agitated restlessness, wriggled and fidgeted where they had fallen onto Donnelly’s chest. Then—whether or not Brandt willed them to do so he did not know—they found their way into the gap between the buttons on Donnelly’s shirt, and touched the skin beneath. The electricity of contact blasted through Brandt, up his spine, directly to that part of his brain that had been ignited by Donnelly’s tweaking his nipples. A brilliant clarity broke through the fog.
A tearing sound rent the quiet of the bedroom as Donnelly’s shirt was ripped apart by Brandt’s sudden, violent, effortless sweep of movement. Buttons clicked off the wall, sent flying by Brandt’s slashing hands.
Brandt was panting. Donnelly wasn’t breathing at all.
Suddenly Brandt was everywhere on Donnelly at once—kissing his lips, his eyelids, his quivering throat; rubbing his stubbly cheek along Donnelly’s taut torso, feeling the heat of friction; squeezing meaty handfuls of pectoral muscle; fluttering his tongue on each nipple with a faint whisper of contact like a hummingbird, followed by full-mouth suction that drew the sensitive flesh into his wet, hungry warmth.
Donnelly writhed and thrashed in the face of this onslaught, delirious with the thrill and release of giving himself to it entirely, yielding up his whole being to the man he trusted most in the world. The man he loved.
Brandt suddenly stopped and brought his face slowly up to stare directly into Donnelly’s. He looked at his eyes, at his lips, at his cheeks, as if trying to recognize traces of someone he had once known well and lost long ago. Then a slow spreading smile broke across his face, slow like a summer sunrise when the early heat makes ribbons of light dance on the horizon.
“It’s you,” he breathed, his expression one of pure wonder. “It’s you. It’s always been you, hasn’t it?”
A flicker of confusion flashed across Donnelly’s face, but he blinked it away. He studied Brandt’s face carefully, as carefully as Brandt had searched his, and then he knew—he knew what Brandt meant, and he knew what his answer would be.
“Yes. It’s me. It will always be me.”
Brandt exhaled as if dismissing a lifetime of doubt and regret.
“I…,” Brandt started, and then shook his head, grinning. Was he really g
oing to say this? He had never said it to anyone and meant it the way he did at this moment. “I love you,” he said simply. It was a fact now, and he marveled that he hadn’t seen it before.
“I love you,” Donnelly answered back, reveling in the feel of the words as they formed in his mouth. “I’ve loved you forever.”
Brandt chuckled.
“You’ve only known me two years,” he said.
“And I only realized it last week. But looking back on it, it seems more like forever.”
“When did you know?” prompted Brandt, intrigued.
“When I saw you with Will. I knew what you two must have been talking about… and the look on your face, that panicky, lost look… I just wanted to wrap my arms around you and hold you until you were okay again.” He paused to kiss Brandt on the nose. “Scared the fucking shit out of me, that did.” He smiled at the recollection. “Thought I was really losing it.”
“Thanks, buddy. That’s nice to hear, that the idea of me scared the fucking shit out of you.” Brandt was still grinning, enjoying being able to finally talk this openly.
“Fuck you,” growled Donnelly.
“I’d like to see you try,” taunted Brandt.
It was perhaps less than a second later that Brandt found himself once more on the bottom, pinned under Donnelly—who indeed remembered his high school wrestling moves.
“Would you, now?” Donnelly murmured, a sinister edge in his voice.
Brandt, for the first time, looked genuinely concerned.
“Umm, actually, no…,” he stammered, his voice a bit higher than it had been a moment ago.
Donnelly appeared not to have heard. He unbuckled Brandt’s belt with a flick of one hand while the other held Brandt’s arms back over his head. Brandt realized in an uneasy flash that Donnelly knew something about leverage—he was unable to move his arms, even though he thought himself the stronger of the two men.
Meanwhile, Donnelly was unbuttoning and unzipping Brandt’s pants. His expression changed instantly; he now looked imploringly up at Brandt, eyes puppylike.
“May I?” he asked, nodding down to Brandt’s open fly.
Whatever panic Brandt had felt about Donnelly having his way this evening ebbed from him as he looked at the innocent, sweet face of his partner. Surely he wouldn’t hurt me, he thought.
Brandt nodded his assent and hoped for the best.
Donnelly scooted down, kneeling between Brandt’s legs, and then grabbed the waistband of his pants and began pulling them down. Brandt lifted his hips to allow Donnelly to work them down his ass, and he felt the fabric of his brand-new underwear rub along the length of his cock. The considerable length of his cock. He looked down and saw with surprise that he was fully erect.
Donnelly noticed this as well—how could he not?—but he continued his work of sliding Brandt’s pants off, taking the socks with them. Now his buddy, his friend, his partner, lay before him on the bed, wearing only the boxers that made Bryce and Nestor mad with lust just hours ago.
Donnelly could see their point.
He shucked off his own pants and socks, and he knelt again between Brandt’s legs, looking down at this beautiful body, really seeing it for the first time—because he let himself really look for the first time. It made him blush to feel the surge of sex energy flowing to his cock, to his entire being.
Brandt looked at Donnelly, trying to guess what he would do next. If he were honest with himself, and this certainly seemed like a time for honesty, he would have to say that he wasn’t at all sure what should come next. He had never, never in his life, imagined sex with another man. He didn’t know if he could do what he thought gay men did with each other, and he wasn’t sure he wanted Donnelly to do it to him, either. His heart pounded with terrible possibility.
Donnelly, for his part, harbored no such complicated reservations. He simply wanted to feel Brandt against him, to press together all of the parts they possessed that could come into contact, and to stay that way until the sun burned out. He put his plan into action and lay himself down atop Brandt, along the entire length of his best friend’s body. Separated only by a double thickness of their matching underwear, their cocks pressed against each other, slipping back and forth as Donnelly settled in.
Brandt never remembered being this hard before. He had always been able to perform sexually with the women he dated in college, but this was different. His cock felt like an iron club, hard and heavy and dangerous. Next to it was Donnelly’s, the heat of which amazed Brandt. As Donnelly kissed him, he ground their hips together, each cock attempting to push the other aside, both too hard to give much ground.
Brandt writhed and ran his hands up and down Donnelly’s back. He roughly grabbed the waistband of Donnelly’s new underwear and yanked them down, exposing the pale, smooth, flexing buttocks that lay underneath. Donnelly reared back, pulled the briefs off of the catchpole of his hard cock, and slid them down his legs. Then he reached for Brandt’s boxers. He pulled them off slowly, reverently, as if he were unwrapping the very best and very last Christmas present he would ever get. Again Brandt thrust his hips up, his buttocks lifting off the bed, and as Donnelly pulled the underwear off, his cock sprang straight up into the air before landing back against his belly with a heavy smack.
Donnelly tossed the boxers off to the side, where they landed on the chessboard. He then resumed his previous position, stretched out atop Brandt. He kept his pelvis pulled back, though, so their entire bodies were in contact except for their cocks. His was so hard it throbbed up along his body.
He looked Brandt deeply in the eyes, his hands cradling Brandt’s head, and then, only then, did he slowly lower his hips to bring full contact for the first time.
It was their balls that touched first. At the moment Donnelly’s hairless sac made contact with Brandt’s lightly furred one, he froze. Brandt was overwhelmed by how soft, and hot, and wiggly Donnelly’s balls were, and he gasped his surprise. Then, kissing him the entire time, Donnelly lowered the rest of the way. Their hard cocks were pressed together along their entire length (they were almost perfectly matched, with Brandt ahead only by a head), and again Brandt gasped.
Donnelly began to thrust and grind, slowly at first, then with greater urgency. Their cocks rubbed against each other wildly, slipping from side to side; friction came too from the hard lower abs of both men.
Then Brandt’s achingly hard prick released a large drop of precum, which immediately began to spread around his groin. Donnelly’s member slipped over the top of Brandt’s and ran into the slick puddle. He groaned, thrust harder, and felt his own slick begin to spread. Slippery now, they thrust more frenetically, building the heat and friction to an unbearable level.
Brandt felt what he never had before—he felt the steely root of his penis, anchoring the erection that projected from it. He was aware of this hardness inside his body for the first time, as if his cock had required the presence of another like itself to reach its full power.
Donnelly saw it first in his eyes. The pupils dilated slightly, he lost focus for a moment, and then the arching brow shaped his eyes into peaked ovals of pure desire. His breathing grew shallow, and his arms, sweaty, grappling across Donnelly’s back, went rigid. He gasped, and Donnelly thrust harder and more wildly than ever.
“Oh,” Brandt whispered, as he felt the surge begin. “Oh! Oh fuck!” he screamed, as the pulsations grew stronger. They were almost too much to bear, but he desperately needed the orgasm now exploding through him.
The first eruption blasted out of his cock, soaking both men with the hot, sticky evidence of what they had created together. Donnelly’s body immediately answered Brandt’s, jerking instantly into full orgasm, a rush he had never experienced before. Donnelly’s first spasm joined Brandt’s, and both men cried out again as they felt their own and each other’s ejaculation.
Slick with semen, the two cocks continued to surge against each other, racing each other to exhaustion. The tangy smell of cum rose
between them, and still they ground into each other, kissing madly. They didn’t stop until long after the last spasm made itself felt and the slick fluid had begun to grow sticky.
“Oh my God,” whispered Brandt.
“I know,” Donnelly sighed.
Brandt panted a bit, waiting for his breath to return to normal.
Donnelly rolled off, then lay alongside Brandt, their bodies still fully in contact. He looked down at their torsos, sweat and semen glistening across the muscled terrain.
“We’re kind of a fucking mess,” he laughed as he surveyed the sticky scene.
“Totally worth it,” replied Brandt. “That was amazing.”
Donnelly responded by kissing Brandt again, all over his face and neck and down the shoulder that stretched toward him. He nuzzled into Brandt’s armpit, getting an unexpected thrill from the warm, damp musk he smelled there.
He was struck by a sudden inspiration. “You stay here,” he said brightly. “I’ll be back.”
He kissed Brandt once more, then twice, and then he got off the bed and padded into the bathroom.
Brandt watched him go. He saw his partner nude practically every day, but for the first time he allowed himself to really look. He saw the undulation of his buttocks as they propelled that taut, beautiful body; he noticed the motion of each muscle working powerfully under that pale, flawless skin. As he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, he could hardly believe how his life had changed—how the way he saw the world, and his best friend in it, had changed.
He heard water flowing in the bathroom, too loud to be the sink. A bath? Brandt smiled again—would he ever stop smiling?—he hadn’t taken a bath in years. The very thought of it brought a warmth over him, and he lay drifting in and out of sleep until Donnelly slipped back into the room to wake him.
“Typical guy—do the deed and pass out,” he tutted as he poked at Brandt with a tickly finger.