by Wendy Qualls
“Touch me,” Brandon said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “Fuck, just—touch me and touch yourself. Get yourself right to that edge. I want to hear you.”
The moment Paul’s hand closed over his own length, the tension in the rest of his body ratcheted up tenfold. It was like all the sensations had been separate, disjointed, and they’d all suddenly found a home at once. He groaned around Brandon’s cock and Brandon banged the back of his head a few times against the shower wall again in appreciation. And when Paul let his other hand close over the base of Brandon’s erection, covering all the parts his mouth couldn’t reach, Brandon groaned louder. “God, so fucking amazing. Fuck.”
It was heady. It was incredible and astounding and it felt so powerful to be the one making Brandon tremble like that. Paul realized he could have happily stayed there all evening, just doing this, being together. Being the kind of person that everyday, boring, effectively-closeted Paul Dunham never got to be. He executed a particularly luscious maneuver with his lips and tongue and was rewarded with a not-at-all-muffled shout from Brandon. Hell yes.
“So damn close,” Brandon breathed. “I want you to come too—but I want to do it. Don’t you dare get yourself off until I can get my hands on you. Oh, Christ.”
Paul hummed acceptance around Brandon’s cock, just to make him jump and shiver, then backed off enough to give him a moment to come back down from the edge. Tiny kisses, up and down his shaft. One hand gently rolling Brandon’s balls back and forth and the other on his own. “Where should I touch you?” he murmured between kisses.
“Want your fingertip inside me.” Brandon let out what could only be described as a whimper. “Want to come with a little bit of you in me. Please.”
Paul sucked in a breath. Anything anal had always been his hard line with Christopher, the one thing he absolutely wasn’t comfortable doing. But this was his big chance, wasn’t it? In the shower, perfectly clean, feeling ridiculously turned on but still mostly lucid, with Brandon all but gone already above him? He couldn’t let himself think about it too much—if he thought, he might chicken out. Instead he let go of his own cock and brought both hands between Brandon’s legs, thumbs caressing the insides of Brandon’s thighs. Brandon immediately shuffled his feet a bit wider, sucked in a sharp breath—
There. Paul pressed one forefinger gently against Brandon’s perineum and traced upward and back. He couldn’t see, not with the head of Brandon’s cock still in his mouth and his other hand blocking his view, but he didn’t really need to. The skin was soft under his fingertip, lightly dragging against his cuticles on either side, smooth changing to textured in the middle. Brandon bucked and twitched his hips, clearly trying not to thrust so hard Paul would gag but having a hard time holding still. Unable to control himself. Paul passed his fingertip over Brandon’s hole again, light enough to be considered teasing, then nudged it inward slightly and sucked hard.
And Brandon came apart with a long groan and a shiver. Paul pulled off and stroked him through the aftershocks with his free hand but kept his fingertip right there where Brandon liked it. The shower washed all the evidence of orgasm away immediately, except for the taste already in Paul’s mouth, but that was fine. More than fine—he was about ten seconds from coming himself, just from seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting Brandon shake apart. He started to get to his feet but Brandon tackled him halfway through and knocked them both down to the floor of the tub.
“Not done yet,” Brandon growled in his ear, practically lying on top of him, water raining down on his back. “My turn—you want my mouth or my hand?”
Oh yes. God, anything. “Both?”
“Done.” Brandon grinned and nipped a slightly-too-sharp bite at Paul’s earlobe, then scooted backward and flailed blindly over his shoulder to turn the water off. The sudden silence was startling. Paul didn’t have much time to adjust, though, because Brandon zeroed in on his cock with a vengeance and less than thirty seconds later, Paul was arching his back and groaning nearly as loudly as Brandon had.
They lay there on the wet tub floor for a few minutes, bodies tangled together, both catching their breath. Eventually Brandon stood and offered Paul a hand up.
“Suggestion: We turn it back on for a super-fast rinse off, then we go crash in bed and spend all night enjoying being naked together with nowhere to be in the morning. Acceptable?”
It sounded perfect, and Paul told him so. And if every little comment and gesture between there and the bedroom felt infused with more meaning than it would have had before… Well, Paul didn’t need to mention it.
Chapter 13
“What time is it?”
Brandon rolled over and stared blearily at the clock. “Fuck-it early. It’s a Saturday. How are you awake?”
“Bladder.” Paul rolled out of Brandon’s bed and stumbled his way to the bathroom. The overhead light hurt his eyes, but he couldn’t find the nightlight without it (there was one in the socket under the mirror, he noticed eventually) and by the time his eyes had adjusted well enough to see the nightlight it didn’t really matter. He relieved himself, scrubbed a hand through his hair, brushed his disgusting morning breath away, and went to climb back into bed. When he got back in the bedroom, though, the lamp was on and Brandon was awake enough to seize him from behind and tug him back under the covers in a limpet-like grasp.
“Thought you were asleep,” Paul said.
“I was. Then you left and your side of the bed got cold.” Brandon grumbled something against the nape of Paul’s neck and pulled him closer, throwing a warm leg over Paul’s own and pressing a hard, recognizable shape up against his rear. “It’s all your fault, you know—I didn’t know what I was missing until you let me sleep next to you. I had no idea I would be a morning cuddler.”
“When I don’t have to pee, I don’t mind a bit.” Paul let himself relax further, shuffling back and letting Brandon tighten an arm over his chest. “It’s one of the few things I miss about living with Christopher—he was terrible at waking up in the morning, but I was never cold.”
Brandon exhaled, a soft huff of laughter which ruffled the hair at the back of Paul’s neck. “Demoted to portable space heater. Thanks a lot.”
“Oh, come off it.” Paul nudged a shoulder backward into Brandon’s. “You know what I meant.”
“Not really,” Brandon said, his voice still a bit rough but sounding more awake than he had been a minute ago. “Like I told you before, I never stick around for the sleeping part. I always assumed sharing a bed with someone would be like when we went on vacation and I had to share a hotel room with my brothers—we usually ended up having to draw straws for who had to sleep next to Jordan. He liked to ‘vent a toe’ in the middle of the night when he was hot, then plaster his cold foot against your back when he rolled over. Maybe he still does; could be why he’s been dating his girlfriend for six years now and they’re not engaged yet.”
Paul hid his smile in the pillow. “Jordan’s the next oldest?”
“Eric, Marshall, Jordan, then me. Six, three, and two years older than I am, respectively. Marshall and Jordan both live out of town—Marshall’s in New York and Jordan’s in Virginia—but Eric’s still in Atlanta. He and his wife, Anita, have me over to eat sometimes.” Brandon nuzzled a kiss against the nape of Paul’s neck. “They’re kind to take pity on me, the lonely bachelor who can’t cook. They’re both fantastic at it.”
“Mmmm.” Paul grabbed Brandon’s arm to keep it in place, then rolled so they were chest-to-chest and wrapped in each other’s embrace. “I’m jealous. Danielle and I Skype a lot now that she’s in Paris, but she’s never been able to come home all that often. There’ve been a lot of times I wished I could talk to her in person and couldn’t.”
“You said she’s the only one you’ve come out to?”
Paul couldn’t help planting a quick kiss on Brandon’s cheekbone, just above the edge of his beard. �
�Not including our thing freshman year, since we never quite got around to words. You make number two.”
“Plus your ex?”
How had that happened, exactly? “Not really sure how that came about. I know I never told him I was gay, so I don’t think it counts.”
Brandon drew back, a confused wrinkle between his eyebrows. “You just, what? Accidentally fell into bed together one night?”
“You really want to know?”
“If you’re willing to tell.” Brandon’s gaze darkened, but his eyes were full of concern. “You’ve mentioned him a couple of times now. And it sounds like he was pretty instrumental in creating your mental picture of what ‘being gay’ is supposed to be. I’m curious.”
Paul finally gave in and pressed a second kiss to Brandon’s lips. This one wasn’t quite as chaste—more of an acknowledgment of emotions. Heck if he knew which ones. His fault for being so kissable, anyway.
“We were roommates first. Well, study partners first.” Paul had to sort out how the whole Christopher thing started. “We had an advanced statistics class together senior year; pretty sure that’s where we met. I had already been accepted to the psych PhD program and Christopher was graduating with a job offer from St. Ben’s under his belt. We got to talking about it while studying together one day and decided we’d make good roommates. We found an apartment together that summer—tiny rooms, but it was a two-bedroom and it was better than what either of us could have afforded alone.”
“Did you know he was gay at that point?”
Paul shook his head. “We never talked about it. Our friendship really was just a friendship for a long while—I taught and worked on my degree, he got a promotion to better hours and better pay. I think we were living together for a good year or so before it tipped into anything more than platonic. It’s just…neither of us dated. At all. And eventually you start to wonder. Or he did, anyway.”
“You didn’t?”
“I figured it was wishful thinking.” That rankled a bit, now. It would have been nice to say he’d never been attracted to his roommate like that until Christopher made the first move, but that would have been a lie. “I didn’t really have a lot of experience with any of it, other than you.”
Brandon interrupted him with a sneak attack kiss, one which took several minutes and involved quite a bit of full-body maneuvering against each other. When they finally pulled apart, Paul was panting.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Brandon said.
Yeah right. “No you’re not.”
“Okay, I’m not.” Brandon grinned. “But you were talking about wishful thinking, and I was wishing I could kiss you. And I realized I could and you’d probably let me.”
“Twit.” But Paul couldn’t keep the smile off his face. “Anyway. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we kind of gradually moved from ‘platonic roommates’ to sharing a bedroom and using the other one for a makeshift home office. We never really talked about it; it just ended up that way.”
Brandon’s grin faded. “See, that’s the part I don’t get,” he said. “How do you go from both pretending you’re straight to sleeping together? In either the literal or the idiomatic sense?”
If I knew that, I wouldn’t have been so crap at deflecting him later on. “If you knew him, you’d understand.”
“Try me.”
Paul rolled onto his back and closed his eyes—this was hard enough to explain without Brandon’s expressive face being six inches away from his own. “Christopher was a lot to take in. He’s a hard guy to say ‘no’ to. Most of the time he was pretty easy-going, but every once in a while he got something in his head and it was usually a heckuva lot easier to just let him have it.” He let out a long breath. “In my case … He probably figured out I liked guys, I guess? I have no idea how. It started out with lots of innuendo and little insinuations, comments I didn’t know what to do with. And then he kissed me one day, and it wasn’t awful, and he was convenient, and he already knew about me anyway, and … I don’t know. It just happened.”
“But he never told you he was gay.”
A short bark of laughter escaped before Paul could rein it in. Hardly. “He pretty regularly insisted he was straight. Even while he was in bed with me. He’d say it was ‘my fault’ I was so tempting—it was always kind of teasing but kind of not. At the beginning I thought I knew what he meant, but by the end I realized he might have believed it.” He turned to look at Brandon again. “You joke with me about me being in the closet, but Christopher was much worse. At least I know I have a closet.”
“I’ve known guys like that,” Brandon said darkly. “They come to the gay clubs and want anonymous blow jobs in the bathroom, but they’re ready to kick your ass if you imply in any way that getting a gay blowjob in a gay bathroom at a gay club might somehow indicate they’re gay.”
“I don’t think he went that far.” Gay bars would have been too public for Christopher, even gay bars as far away as Atlanta. “And I don’t want to make it sound like it was totally on him, because I was pretty eager to give it a go at first, too. My only experience had been—well, you—and for the first time since then, someone wanted me. It was nice.”
“Nice but not perfect?”
Paul shrugged, hoping it looked more nonchalant than he felt. “It got to be too much.”
Brandon levered up on one elbow, so his face appeared in Paul’s field of view as he stared at the ceiling. “He’s the one who said it wasn’t sex if you weren’t doing anal, I’m assuming.”
“Yeah.” God, this was hard to talk about, but it was only fair that Brandon know. “It built up so gradually, but after a while it hit me that we were always doing what he wanted. Almost never the things I liked. He was always a bit too demanding in the bedroom, but he’d go all passive-aggressive and snippy if I dared to call him on it. That’s why we broke up—he kept harping on me about why wouldn’t I have actual sex with him, but that—”
“You can say it, you know,” Brandon interrupted.
Paul mock-glared at him. “—Fine, anal intercourse—was a step too far for me. I told him I didn’t want it but he kept pushing. Eventually I didn’t have a glib excuse and I was sick of his shit. Sorry. His nonsense.”
“Holy fuck, you swore!” Brandon grinned, but the look in his eyes was still slightly pained.
“Screw you.” Paul aimed an open-handed swat at his shoulder, not hard enough to knock him down but enough to make him sway a little. “I only talk like that when I’m really pissed off.”
Brandon’s laugh that time was real.
“Anyway. We split up after about six months of not-gay not-dating, I moved out, and it was another whole semester before he got downsized—or fired or something, I wasn’t keeping track at that point—and I didn’t have to see him around St. Ben’s anymore. It was a whole big bundle of awkward for ages—he was the only IT guy on call during off-hours, so when I had problems with the intranet or the grading software or whatever I usually waited until the next weekday so I could deal with one of the other tech crew instead.”
“He was in IT?” Brandon went very still. “What’s his full name?”
“Christopher Aaron Kluterman.” Paul pulled back, out from under where Brandon was looming over him, and scrambled to sit up against the headboard. “Why?”
“IT employee, worked at St. Ben’s for some number of years, and did on-call troubleshooting so he presumably had access to at least some portion of the tech offices. And the server room. Unsupervised, if he came in during the middle of the night. And he was either fired or downsized, which means he may have been feeling less than charitable about the university when he left.” Brandon rolled out of bed in one smooth motion—still naked, although he didn’t seem to care—and grabbed his laptop off the small work desk in the corner of the room. “I hadn’t gone back that far yet because I was still focusing on current and
recently-fired employees, but it’s possible the security holes have been lying dormant for a year or more. I need to follow up on this.”
“Holy … You think he’s the source of the data issues?”
Brandon pinned him with a sharp look. “Passive-aggressive ex who ‘won’t take no for an answer?’ Who won’t admit he’s gay, but presses you for sex and was the dump-ee in your relationship? And who was ‘awkward’ for months afterward? Tell me, can you picture him spying on you from in that tree?”
Shit. The mental curse didn’t feel like enough, so Paul repeated it out loud. Brandon didn’t laugh.
“Okay, yes, I can, but I don’t want to think about it,” Paul admitted. “He was mad when I moved out, but not…You really think it could have been him?”
“I think he’s worth investigating,” Brandon said, not looking up from where he was already typing something. “Not much I can do today, unfortunately, but if I get a few e-mails out to the right people I can hopefully be ready to jump in with both feet first thing Monday morning.”
The shift from sleepy-cuddly-Brandon to awake-and-working-Brandon shouldn’t have been so sexy, but it was. Especially since he was now sitting at the very edge of his desk chair, foot twitching, typing madly, and still didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. He looked like a businessman’s version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. It was the first time Paul had ever seen him functional in the morning without coffee, too—which probably said something reassuring about how seriously Brandon was treating the whole issue. Paul closed the distance between them and pressed a gentle kiss into the curve of his shoulder.