“Schwa…shwa—”
He could smell Reese’s come, the salty scent of him like the ocean washing him clean, sucking him down, until he went under. He slid a hand up Reese’s thigh to his hip and yanked him forward, knocking Reese’s arm free with his other hand and aiming that flushed cock at his mouth until it slid home, hot and hard against the back of his throat. He groaned because it would feel good on Reese’s skin and pulled his head back a little because he still hadn’t figured out how to deep throat and when Reese’s cock went too deep it made him gag. But he could lick and play to his heart’s content and he did, losing himself in the suck and hum and the sounds that were pouring out of Reese. Until Reese’s hands landed on his chest, pinching at his nipples, nails scraping against his skin and he bucked up hard. His dick was a hammer looking for a nail and finding nothing but air above him.
The urge to roll onto his side and squirm around until his head was at Reese’s crotch, take him in his mouth again and feel him swell and harden even more on his tongue, swept over him like a wave scraping the shore clean. Reese could pillow an arm under his own head and play with him as he liked, running those fine long fingers up his thighs and wrapping them around Tom’s hips as he licked his way from the start to the finish line.
He pictured it in his head and growled, which made Reese shiver and jerk against his mouth. It would never work. Tom only barely fit on the bed as it was. No fucking way could they lie down together on these stupid twin mattresses unless they were face to face. The only other option was face to feet. Face to cock wasn’t an option. He pulled his mouth off Reese to complain. The injustice of that was worth interrupting a blowjob.
“Stupid fucking twin beds,” he grumbled. “I wanna sixty-nine, but there isn’t enough room.”
Reese was panting as he wrinkled his brow. He looked fucking hot, hard dick shiny with spit and bobbing in front of Tom’s face. Confused, but hot. “Sure there is.”
He swung himself around on one knee until his ass was in the air over Tom’s face, his junk hanging low and heavy.
“Ask and you shall receive,” Reese said, the words hitting Tom’s dick on a warm exhale.
I’m an asshole. Tom was glad Reese couldn’t see his face as he groaned. “I think your dick makes me stupid.”
“I’m not sure you can blame that on my dick, baby.”
He bit at the thigh closest to him and laughed when Reese yelped.
“Dude, you totally don’t want to bite me when my mouth is near your dick.” Reese dragged the flat of his tongue down the crease of Tom’s thigh. “I’m just saying—gay boy lesson number twenty-seven.”
Tom laughed and then sighed as Reese’s mouth slid over him, taking him deep. God, if only they could stay in this room forever. Fuck Dave and Theresa and getting to know people. Fuck the So You Think You Can Dance viewers and the guy who flipped his shit if a lone Styrofoam cup escaped into the wild. Fuck ’em all, because the only one he gave a damn about was Reese.
If only Reese could be persuaded not to give a damn about the rest of them. He rubbed his palms up the back of Reese’s thighs and scraped his fingernails across the curve of his ass until Reese’s muscles quivered under his hands, sensitized and shivering. He concentrated on pulling Reese into his mouth, losing himself in the push and pull between them until they took their turns coming and collapsed into a sticky pile of tangled limbs.
He waited for his breathing to slow and dragged his fingertips over sweaty skin, drifting back to his earlier thoughts.
Tom knew if it were up to him, they really would hide away from the rest of the world. He’d fallen into sex and openness with Reese like coming home, the most natural thing in the world (except for swallowing, which was really a sonuvabitch to master, timing-wise), but his connection with Reese didn’t mean he was throwing open the gates to the rest of the jerkoffs out there.
He didn’t know much, but he knew people couldn’t be trusted not to fuck you over when given the chance. To gloat in your humiliation.
Except Reese. Somehow, despite everything, he trusted Reese.
And for Reese, he would crack the door open a little and see if the light hurt when it shone in on them both.
Chapter Twelve
They took to leaving the door to their room open at all hours, which went unremarked by their neighbors for long enough that Tom wondered if they’d missed some window of bonding with everyone. Maybe they’d end up ignored by all as antisocial bastards.
But eventually, Scruffy Beard Guy—Dave, damn it, Reese would kill him if he forgot it again—wandered in one night to shoot the shit. And Theresa took to poking her head in on Friday evenings to ask for help setting up the living room bar and evacuating any stray Styrofoam from the vicinity.
When Alice, the ex-cop from Boston turned Islamic Studies major shooting for a job with the State Department, boomed a complaint down the hall at top volume, Tom knew they were in.
“Goddamn it, Worthy! If you two leave your lube in the shower one more time, I’m gonna squeeze it into your toothpaste tube.”
After weeks of flinching and bracing himself not to react whenever someone strolled past their door or entered unannounced, Tom found a Zen state about the entire thing. He didn’t know if everyone had already assumed he and Reese were fucking, if they didn’t notice Reese’s hands or feet or ass constantly draped somewhere on Tom’s person, or if no one gave a shit. In any case, though he still avoided being on campus and participating in conversations in general—thank God Reese did enough talking for the both of them—he’d relaxed into a comfort zone at Perkins that had felt as awkward at first as a poorly fitted jock strap, but was now more like a warm bath. Reese had cajoled him into trying one of those too.
As a rule, the bathtubs in the house were avoided, under the belief that the porcelain may or may not have been touched by a chemical cleanser at any point since the Kennedy administration. Reese swore up and down the very grout itself had squealed and begged for mercy when he’d scrubbed it to within an inch of its life. He notified the entire floor the bathroom would be off limits for an hour at ten o’clock on Sunday night.
“You know I’m not a girl, right?” Tom asked as soon as he opened the bathroom stall door that hid the tub instead of a toilet and spotted the candles flickering on the window sill high in the wall above the old claw-foot tub.
“Get in the tub, stud.” Reese flipped off the overhead light switch by the door and shed his clothes on the way over. By the time he reached the tub, he was naked to the waist and Tom was frozen with his jeans halfway down his thighs, arrested by the sight of his boy in the dancing golden light, hair pulled up off his neck in a topknot.
He got in the tub.
When Reese slid over him, slippery and wet in the hot water, he didn’t care if the gasp that escaped him was girly or not. Reese’s hands drifted lazily through the water, pinching one of Tom’s nipples before skimming down his hip with a touch so light it almost tickled. Sweat misted Tom’s face as he leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and luxuriated in the slick rub of skin-on-skin. He let his own hands drift over Reese’s ass to stroke the back of his legs, feeling the transition from smooth skin to the scattered hairs of Reese’s upper thighs under his fingertips.
They laid in the tub, rubbing torsos and tangling legs without any race to the finish, cocks hard and bumping up against each other while they touched each other everywhere else. When the water cooled and they got out, Tom felt half asleep and as if he’d been walking the edge of coming for so long that he didn’t remember any other way to be. The bright light of the hall was harsh in his eyes, but their room was dark and he let Reese push him down on the bed, dropping the towel he’d wrapped around his hips to the floor. Reese’s mouth sliding down him felt as easy and smooth as the hot water of the bath. He tried to tug him back up.
Reese raised his mouth from sucking a circle of heat on Tom’s
hip with a pop.
“Just let me.”
And he did, the slick wetness of Reese’s mouth sliding over his dick slow and easy, Reese pushing on the back of his thighs until Tom raised his knees, remembering watching this with a cramp of wanting that almost bent him in half.
“Easy. Relax.”
But nothing had ever felt so good, so intense, as the circling rub of Reese’s fingertip against his hole as his mouth kept up the slow, hard suck on Tom’s cock. Every muscle in his body clenched until he ached from the back of his neck to the arch of his feet. His entire groin was wet and slick with spit and lube that had appeared out of nowhere and when Reese finally pushed the tips of two fingers into Tom’s ass, the sting and burn of the stretch hit his nerves like a gong that reverberated a shimmering bell of a climax throughout his whole body.
When his ears stopped ringing with the force of his orgasm, he grabbed Reese and pulled until he knee-walked up Tom’s torso, naked body barely visible in the dark. Tom opened his mouth and sucked in Reese’s cock like he could tell him with his lips and his tongue how badly he wanted him. After a moment, he didn’t try to bob his head forward and back but held his head still, pushing on Reese’s hips until Reese fucked him, one hand braced on the wall, the other on the bookcase at the end of the bed.
When Reese spilled in his mouth, salty and slippery, he swallowed it down and tongued his softening cock until Reese pulled away and slid boneless onto Tom’s chest. His heart was pounding, his chest rising and falling with the heaving breaths of his climax. He rested one hand on Reese’s hip and beat back the impulse to wrap his arms around this man and hold him tight against his body. The air cooled on their sweaty skin, smelling of lust and come.
He wondered if at some point it would ease, this burning need to touch and suck and stroke the man in the bed with him.
Letting sleep press him down into the darkness, he wondered too how long this could last. Because he knew letting himself feel happy was a sucker’s game. It would all go to shit soon enough.
It always did.
Not a word about Tom surfaced in the gossip columns, though. No pictures of his naked ass in the tiny tiled box of the shower or of him sucking face with his boyfriend. Not that he’d worked up the nerve to give Reese more than a peck on the cheek in front of other people, but still. With a zoom lens and the right angle, they could make a kiss from the Pope look like a porn flick.
He assumed this state of affairs was destined to crash and burn in fiery fashion.
Bruce Willis was yippee-ki-yaying all over the place, which was Tom’s reward for sitting through some British period piece about gay dudes without enough sex scenes in it to make up for how fucking depressing it was. Tom lay between Reese’s legs, arms draped on his boyfriend’s raised thighs, head on his chest. Reese was complaining about every scene that didn’t include Alan Rickman.
“I’m just saying, with that voice? I’d be all, hostage here! Please, take me.”
Reese’s chin rested on top of Tom’s head and he’d wrapped an arm across Tom’s chest. Regretting this movie choice that had genuinely caught his boyfriend’s focus, Tom debated nibbling at Reese’s inseam, to see if he could be more distracting than Alan Rickman. In all honesty, Die Hard didn’t rank much higher than Maurice, in the grand scheme of sex with Reese vs. every other thing out there.
If he was gonna start something, getting up to shut and lock the door was a definite must. Their open door policy had been accepted enough that the odds were good a neighbor would poke a head in at some point.
No need to put on a show.
“Mama told me not to come…”An off-key male voice blasted down the hall, getting louder. “That ain’t the way to have fun, no.”
Speak of the devil. Although not a neighbor, per se.
He knew that voice.
He tightened his hands reflexively. Hard enough to interrupt Reese’s stream of commentary on how John McClane’s feet were going to be infected after his bloody barefoot sprint across the broken glass.
All the warning he had time to give.
Although, really, he was the one who needed the warning. The moment to brace himself for one more step into the open, unless he planned on leaping off Reese and sprinting for his own bed.
He only considered it for a moment.
“This is the craziest party I ever did see… Hoooooly shit.”
Cash jerked to a halt in between their closets, two steps into the room.
Reese’s stomach muscles tightened under Tom’s back. Pushing back with his shoulders kept him in Reese’s lap. Every muscle in Reese’s body tensed for a second, as if he were going to fight to break loose, before relaxing behind him. Reese didn’t say a word but raised one hand to cover the tight grip of Tom’s fingers on his thigh.
Apparently he was going to let Tom do the talking. Great. Fantastic. Or it would be, if he had one fucking clue what to say.
Tom should’ve known Cash wasn’t going to wait for him to figure it out.
“Dude.” The big guy crossed his arms and dropped his chin until it hit his chest. His eyebrows had climbed into his hairline. “Dude.”
“What?” Shit. Maybe he meant to sound more friendly and less lion defending his pride blustery roar.
Also, Reese would be pissed if he knew Tom was casting him in the role of the female lion. Although Tom could probably make a legit argument that the females were smarter and more talented than the males, if needed—
Focus.
If disbelief were water, Tom could have built a boat and launched it from shore on Cash’s ocean. Cash being who he was, everything actually ratcheted down a notch, until he sounded as if he were drawling. “Something you’ve been meaning to tell me, Worthy?”
“If there were a universe in which it was any of your business, then you’d know.”
“Oh my God, please tell this isn’t gonna be some kind of testosterone frat boy pissing contest. Speaking of which, I’ve gotta take a leak.” Tom could hear Reese’s eyeballs rolling in their sockets as he pushed Tom to sit up and got off the bed. He stopped in front of Cash in the doorway, crowding the bigger man. Cash didn’t move. “Obviously we’re fucking. Try not to kill each other or vomit on anything while I’m gone.”
He pulled the door shut behind him. It had barely clicked before Cash opened the floodgates on the dam.
“Dude! Seriously. You’re gay?”
Tom raised his eyebrows and tried not to make the duh look on his face too insulting. Theoretically he was good at winning people over.
“Since when?”
“Since forever.” Cash simply stood there staring at him. Clearly he wasn’t going to escape with laconic two word answers. Especially not with the long list of chicks Cash was probably remembering. “I’m just, I don’t know, equal opportunity. And girls are easy.”
There was a moment of silence before they both busted out laughing.
“Yeah, they are.”
“You know what I mean.” He tried to explain it, although it was tough to get serious when he couldn’t pry the grin off his face. “They’re there. And it’s…simpler.”
“Dude. Ain’t nothing about this…” he drew a circle with his index finger pointed at Reese’s bed, “…that’s simple.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Tension crept over him with tiny tight claws, pulling on his skin until the back of his neck ached from holding himself still. His face radiated heat.
“So what? A couple of months sharing morning breath and arguing over who farted and all of a sudden you’re all about the penis?”
He couldn’t stop himself from slapping back.
“Yeah, jerkoff, it was just like that. Fuck.”
“So? What’d he do? Put the moves on you?” Cash crossed his arms and frowned. “Because I heard your roommate’s a big slut.”
Tom fl
ew off the bed so fast his feet hurt when they hit the floor.
“Watch your fucking mouth. You don’t know shit about him.”
“I know he’s passing out blowjobs like candy at Halloween.”
“Shut up.”
He didn’t trust himself chest-to-chest with Cash, blood pumping in his fingertips, pushing them to curl into fists.
“I’m just saying—”
“You don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about, dude.”
“So tell me.”
Tom struggled for the words. He thought of Reese telling him things, finding words that had to slice at his tongue and teeth and lips like razors, but pushing them out through the blood and the pain. “You’ve had my back, right? All this totally shit time.”
Cash’s cheeks turned pink but he kept looking straight at Tom.
“Yeah.”
“It took me a long time figure that out, you know. Because I didn’t know what it was. I figured it was maybe gonna take you longer than most before you got around to fucking me over.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“I know. Now. ’Cause you got my back.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, consider yourself my sensei.” He managed to drag up something that almost qualified as a grin. “’Cause now I got his.”
“Jesus. What a fucking mess.” Cash scrubbed his hands over his face and rubbed his own head. He looked around the room, looking for a signal about what to do next. Which turned out to be dropping onto Tom’s bed and shoving a pillow over his face. “I can’t even.”
Seemed a fair response. Tom stretched out on Reese’s bed and waited.
They were still lying there five minutes later when Reese came back and stopped in the doorway at the sight of them.
“Oh my God.” Reese shook his head and curled his lip. “Straight guys suck at talking, don’t you?”
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