My best friend asked me a favor - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.

Chapter 1

Travis can’t finish with his own hand.

He didn’t say it like that at first. He came into the coffee shop at eleven, after I’d already flipped the sign, and stared into the pastry case like the answer was behind the last muffin. Cap on. White T-shirt tight across his athletic chest. Gold chain. Beard he’d been growing since he left high school. Twenty-six. The kind of face people trusted. All-American. Reliable. My best friend since ninth grade, which had never stopped being a problem for me.

I’m twenty-five. I work here. I don’t look like him. I never did. I looked at him the way you look at the version of a man you were supposed to grow into and didn’t.

“You busy tomorrow morning,” he said to the glass.

“No, I’m off. Why?”

He tapped the counter. Stopped. Tapped it again.

“Forget it, man.”

He got as far as the door.

Then he came back, sat down like the chair had made him, and took the cap off just to have something to turn in his hands. The wavy messy hair he hates showed for a second. He put the cap back on.

“I’ve been selling to that clinic,” he said. “The one behind the dentist. Two hundred a cup if the count’s good. Three months. I hate the room. It smells like cold plastic and other guys’ cum and embarrassment. There’s a poster of a baby and of a happy family. I sit there with my dick in my hand facing a crazy poster and my head leaves my body. It’s hard for me to cum. I’m not used to jerk off, you know?”

I didn’t say anything. I was still holding a rag.

“I can get hard,” he said. Still not looking at me. “I start. Then I think about the nurse in the hall. Then it’s like jerking off a numb limb. I dry up. I already ate two appointments. They said if I waste another one I’m off the list.”

The fridge in the back hummed.

“I’m not asking you to be gay with me.” Too fast. “I’m not gay. You’re gay. That’s your thing and I totally respect that, you know. This is just— you know how to make a guy finish. I don’t. Not in a room like that.”

He stood up.

“This is stupid. Forget it. I’ll figure it out.”

He got to the door. His hand on the bar. Then he laughed once, no humor, and came back and put fifty dollars on the table like he was paying a guy to help move a couch.

“Fifty as a tip. You have to take it. If you don’t take it then it’s something else. It’s a job. It’s practical. You wear a glove. You don’t put your mouth on it. They test for stuff. Everything needs to be sterilized. Hand. Cup. That’s it. It’s mechanical. Like you’re a helping machine.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say okay like that.”

“How should I say it?”

“Like I asked you to jump-start a battery.” He stared at the bill. “Tomorrow. Ten-forty. You wait in the waiting room. You don’t come in unless I text. If I can do it myself you stay out there. I’m going to try. I mean it.”

He tried.

The clinic was a beige box. Travis went in with his jaw set and the sample bag they give you like a lunch sack. I sat in the waiting room with the fifty still folded in my pocket from yesterday because he hadn’t let me leave it on the table. I live six blocks from him. Separate keys. Separate mail. The only reason I was in that chair was the text that had said you coming or not.m?

Fourteen minutes. Then my phone lit up.

Travis: room 2. lock’s shit. glove on. don’t talk.

I went in the side door. Hall like alcohol wipes. 

Room 2. He pulled me in by the shirt.

Chair with a wipeable seat. TV on a bracket, porn playing, blonde sucking a big black cock, sound down. Locked box for the cup. Box of nitrile gloves. Sink. The baby/family poster.

Travis had his jeans open. White boxers shoved under his balls. He was half hard and angry about it. Cap still on. Chain in the hollow of his throat. He looked like he should have been outside changing a tire.

“I said I’d try.” His voice was tight. “Sit there. Don’t touch me yet.”

He sat. Took himself in his own fist. Two ugly strokes. Three. His face did the pastry-case thing — concentration turning into disgust at his own palm. He sped up like speed was the issue. His mouth opened. Nothing happened. He let go like the skin had burned him.

“See? That’s what I mean. It’s my own dick and it feels like it belongs to the room. I’m not used to jerk off bro, I like pussy and I never lack pussy.”

He tried again. Some lube. Worked himself with his jaw locked, eyes on the muted blonde, the way the pamphlet probably told him to. He got pink at the ears. The cap brim dipped. After a minute he slapped his own thigh once, sharp, and shoved his hand away.

“Fuck. Fuck my dry-ass hand. Fuck this room.”

He looked at me then. Not long.

“Glove. Don’t make it a gay thing.”

I pulled one. Blue. Snapped it at the wrist. He watched that like it was the part that made this medical.

“You don’t spit. You don’t do whatever you do with guys. Hand with lube. We can’t contaminate the sample. When I say, you aim. Nurse is twelve minutes away.”

I stepped in close.

Up close he smelled like man and deodorant. I wrapped the gloved hand around him. The nitrile made him look obscene and official at the same time. Thick. Heavier and veinier than the boys I brought home to my place. My best friend’s cock. The head already reddish from his own failed work.

His breath left him like he’d been punched.

“Jesus. Don’t look at me like I asked you to prom. It’s a hand, Drew. It’s a favor. Best friend thing. You’re my bro for life, right?”

I stroked him the way you stroke a man you have wanted since you understood wanting. Slow at the base. Twist at the top. The wet glove whispered. His thighs opened without him telling them to.

He lasted thirty seconds and then panic arrived.

“Stop. Stop.” He caught my wrist. “I got it. I can finish. Give me—”

He took over. His raw hand on wet nitrile-slick skin. The rhythm went wrong immediately. Too tight. Too proud. He chased it and it ran. His face flushed ugly. He let go and stared at the poster like he wanted to put his fist through it.

“I hate this,” he whispered. “I hate that it works when it’s you.”

“Travis—”

“Don’t.” He put my gloved hand back on him himself, rough, like passing a tool. “Just do the thing. Don’t talk. Don’t say my name like that.”

He stood up like the chair had burned him. Jeans at mid-thigh. Palm on the counter. I stepped in close. Kneeled in front of him.

I did the thing.

He got close too fast and fought it. Pride. The last wall. His hips wanted to chase. The silver chain ticked. The blonde kept bouncing on mute. I hated her. I watched the muscle jump in his stomach under the white shirt instead.

“Faster,” he said, hoarse. “We don’t have— fuck. Like that. Don’t you slow down to be cute.”

I didn’t. The glove went loud with a sloppy sound. He kept his hands off mine. If he stacked them it would stop being a favor.

He grabbed my wrist again, not like a lover, just claiming my attention.

“Cup. Cup. Now. Get the cup. I’m about to nut, Drew.”

I had the glove on him. I picked up the cup with my other hand.

He snatched the cup.

“I got it. I aim. You just—”

He came before the rim was under him.

The first pulse hit the plastic. The second didn’t. It jumped. A thick stripe across my cheek and the corner of my mouth. Hot. His. I was still stroking — that was the job — and a last pulse caught my chin while he cursed and forced the rest into the cup with his jaw locked, eyes wide at my face like he’d shot a coworker.

He shoved the cup onto the counter hard enough to click.

“Oh my God. Sorry. Fuck. Fuck, Drew. I’m so sorry man. Wipe it. Wipe it, Drew—”

He grabbed a Kleenex and held it in the air between us like touching my face was gayer than the glove. Then he did it anyway, two rough strokes on my cheek, and looked at the tissue like evidence.

“I told you to aim,” he whispered.

“You aimed.”

“I missed.” A traffic ticket. Then, quieter: “Don’t lick that. That’s not the job.”

I hadn’t licked it. There was still a smear at the corner of my mouth he hadn’t seen. I didn’t tell him.

He hissed and shoved my gloved hand off him.

“Enough. Enough.”

He stayed on his feet. Zipped. Fixed the cap with both hands as if the cap had been the problem. The cup sat on the counter, heavy. Half full. The nurse was going to say great volume and not know why.

“Fifty’s already in your pocket. Don’t argue.”

He put the cup in the window the way they tell you to. Washed his hands like a man leaving a crime scene. I pulled the glove off inside out and dropped it in the red bin.

A few minutes later in the hall the nurse smiled at him the way people smile at Travis.

“Wow. Great volume today, much better than the other attempts. Whatever you changed, keep doing it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Travis replied tipping his cap.

We walked to the automatic door without looking at each other. Sun. His truck ticking in the heat.

He started the engine. He didn’t put it in gear.

“This stays in the room. You don’t tell anyone. You don’t tell your little gay friends. You don’t get weird when we grab food. It was a favor. That’s it.”

“I won’t. It was nothing special.”

“And if they book me Thursday…” He stared at the clinic door. The beard made his mouth look older than it was. “I’m still going to try first. Alone. If I text, you come in. If I don’t text, you stay in the waiting room and that’s the good version. That’s the version I want.”

“Okay.”

“Say it’s not gay.”

“It’s not gay, Travis. It’s a favor. You’ll pay me another fifty dollars.”

He nodded once. Pulled out. Rock music on the radio low. The cap brim cut the sun. He didn’t talk the whole way to my building. He didn’t come up. He waited until I shut the passenger door and then he left, because that’s what best friends do when they don’t live together and one of them just came on the other’s face in a sterilized room.

At a red light I was already inside. I didn’t see his hand flex on the wheel. I found out later, in a text he sent at 1:14 a.m. and deleted, that he’d sat at that light and said it out loud to an empty truck:

You were really good at it. Don’t let that get in your head.

It was already in my head.

It had been in my head since ninth grade.

Thursday was going to come. He was going to try first. Maybe he was going to text. And I was going to walk down that hall like a dog that’s been called by name.