Desperate best friend - Chapter 3 (Patreon)

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

Chapter 3

The house finally went dead after one.

Chris had been the last one talking, some story about a girl in Daytona that nobody asked for, voice carrying up the stairwell like the loft didn’t have walls. Then a fridge door. Then nothing. Even the river had that thick night quiet, bugs and water and somebody’s phone dying on a charger downstairs.

Chris had taken the biggest bed downstairs because he’d said he snored and because nobody argued with Chris when he decided something. He was twenty-six, a year older than the rest of us, the one who’d shown up to the Airbnb straight from a job site with orange high-vis still on the back seat of the truck and a case of beer on his shoulder. Full dark beard. Cap that never came off except in the river. Hands that looked like they’d been built for tools — ink on the fingers, a knuckle tattoo I still couldn’t read. He talked slow and looked at you like he was measuring whether you were worth the sentence.

At dinner he had eaten more than Justin. That was the fact that had made Justin mean for ten minutes. Then they’d both gone quiet and drunk out of the same brand of bottle and I’d watched Chris’s throat move and hated myself for watching two straight men chew.

He was the one who’d almost walked in last night.

He was the one I could still hear in my head saying you good? through a door.

Justin stood at the sliding door in a pair of shorts and nothing else.

I was on the edge of the bed with my hoodie still on because taking it off felt like admitting I was waiting. His load from the night before was a rumor in my body I was trying not to think about. The loft smelled like lake and the ghost of the mac and cheese pot.

He looked at the dark living room below, then at me.

“Deck,” he said. “If I stay in here I’m going to do something I can’t explain if somebody knocks.”

“They’re asleep.”

“They’re drunk. Drunk people piss. Drunk people want water.” He slid the door. Warm air. Wood. The lake a black sheet beyond the rail. “Out. Now.”

I followed him because that was the setting now. Favor. Best friend. Door unlocked. I had stopped pretending I was going to grow a spine on this trip.

The deck was still hot from the day. Boards held the sun like a grudge. Justin went to the far corner where the chair sat in the shadow of the overhang, out of the rectangle of light the kitchen window would throw if anybody flipped a switch. He dropped into the chair like his body weighed more than it had at dinner. Hairy chest. Beard. The same man who had eaten pasta out of a pot with a serving spoon and then fucked me like the house was on fire.

He hooked his thumbs in the shorts and shoved them to mid-thigh.

He was already half there. Thick. Heavy. The head of him dark. He didn’t look at it. He looked at the sliding door.

“You’re going to put your mouth on it,” he said. Not a question. “My-ex never— she doesn’t. That’s not a speech. That’s the situation. You wanted to help. This is help.”

“I know.”

“You don’t talk. You don’t make the sounds you made last night. Somebody hears a moan they come up here and I have to throw you in the lake. Just kidding, suck it.”

“Okay.”

“David.” He said my name like a warning and a request in the same breath. “If you don’t want this you go back inside. I’m not doing the thing where I find out tomorrow you were being nice.”

“I want it, Justin, you’re my best friend.”

I went to my knees on the boards.

The wood bit through my jeans. His smell hit first — lake, sweat that a shower hadn’t fully killed, the musk at the base of him that the shorts had been trapping since the river. I put a hand on his thigh because the chair was wide and I needed something that wasn’t him. Hairy. Hot. His muscle jumped.

“Don’t pet me,” he muttered. “Just—”

I opened my mouth and took the head.

Justin’s whole body went still, the way a man goes still when a lift is heavier than the number on the bar. A breath punched out of him through his nose. His hand found the arm of the chair and locked.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

I didn’t go deep. Not yet. I learned the shape of him with my tongue the way I had learned the rest of him in the dark of the loft — slow because rushing him made him mean, slow because I wanted it to last long enough to be real. Salt. Skin. Heat. He thickened against my lip in seconds, filling, the weight of him suddenly a problem my jaw had to solve.

“That’s— okay. That’s—” He swallowed. Looked at the door. Looked at the lake. Looked at my mouth. “Don’t you look at me like that.”

I looked at him anyway.

Justin’s face in the deck dark was worse than in the loft. The beard. The mouth open. The eyes that kept checking the glass like the glass was going to grow a witness. His hips wanted to lift and he glued them to the chair.

“Favor,” he whispered. “That’s all this is.”

I took him deeper.

He was bigger in my throat than he had been in my ass in the sense that there was no angle to hide in. Straight down. My eyes watered on the first real push. Spit ran. I pulled back, breathed, went again. His hand left the chair and hovered over my hair and didn’t land, the same almost-touch from the first night, the one that meant he wanted to steer and wouldn’t give himself the crime of steering.

Then it landed.

Fingers in my hair. Not kind. Not cruel. Sure.

“There. That’s— fuck. That’s why they say you guys are good at this.” He heard himself. Hated it. Kept going. “Don’t stop. If you stop I think about it. If I think about it I go inside and I jerk off like a person and I hate me in the morning.”

I didn’t stop.

The lake made its small sounds. A fish. A branch. Justin’s breathing got ugly in a way he was trying to swallow. Every time I hollowed my cheeks his big thighs opened a fraction and then closed like he could hide what his body was doing. I used my tongue under the head and he hissed through his teeth.

“Don’t. That’s— David. That’s the spot. You do that I am not going to last and I told you I am not the guy who lasts two minutes.”

I did it again, because I was tired of being the favor who followed instructions perfectly.

“You little—” He pulled me off by the hair. A string of spit broke on my chin. He was shining, thick, leaking. His chest was going too fast. “Slow. I mean it. The guys are a floor away. If I make a noise that isn’t a chair I’m done in this house.”

“You’re already making a noise.”

“Don’t be funny.”

I put him back in.

I gave him the middle and stayed there, breathing through my nose, letting the spit run because wiping it would have meant taking a hand off his thigh. Justin’s cock was thick enough that my jaw started a conversation with itself on the second minute. I ignored it. I worked the underside with my tongue the way that had made him hiss, then backed off before he could yank me away again.

“That’s— David. Christ.” His voice had gone low enough that the lake could have taken it. “You keep that pace I can do this. You speed up I paint you and I wake the house.”

I kept the pace.

His hand finally committed. Palm on the back of my head, not shoving, just there, a weight that said stay. The shorts were a ruined frame around the hair on his thighs. I could smell the river on him still, under the sex, under the panic he was trying to breathe out through his nose. Every few strokes he checked the glass. Every few strokes his hips gave that little traitor lift and he glued them down again.

“My ex would lose her mind,” he whispered, and it wasn’t dirty talk. It was a man doing math. “If she knew. If anybody— don’t you stop. I said don’t stop. I’m talking so I don’t come. That’s the only reason I’m talking.”

I took him deeper once, just to feel his stomach jump, then eased back to the head and sucked there until his knuckles went white on the arm of the chair.

“Two more minutes,” he said. “Then I finish in your mouth and we go inside like nothing. That’s the plan. That’s a good plan.”

It was a terrible plan.

It was the only plan.

Slower. Meaner in the patience. I could feel him ticking like a clock he couldn’t see. His grip in my hair started to shake. The shorts were a joke around his thighs. The deck boards printed my knees. I thought about his ex in another state who wouldn’t do this and about the fact that I would do this until the sun came up if he asked, and I kept that sentence behind my teeth because the second I said it the favor turned into something he would have to kill.

Justin’s head dropped back against the chair.

“Fuck. Fuck. I’m—”

The sliding door moved.

Not a slam. The soft wrong sound of a latch somebody thought they were being quiet with.

Justin’s whole body seized.

He didn’t pull out. That was the mistake. His hand clamped my head like a reflex, keeping me there, and I felt him swell hard against my tongue, past the point of a warning, past the point of a choice.

Chris’s voice came out of the dark of the loft, thick with sleep and beer, the deep friendly voice, the job-site voice that didn’t rise even when he was pissed.

“Justin? You out here? I thought I heard—”

He stepped onto the deck.

The night-light from the kitchen caught him in pieces. Orange work shirt, unbuttoned enough that the dark hair on his chest showed. Cap still on, brim low, the same dirty beige he’d worn to the river. The beard made his mouth a line. A glass of water in the tattooed hand. Barefoot. Big. He filled the door the way Justin filled a chair.

He saw the chair.

He saw Justin’s chest.

He saw my back.

He saw my head in Justin’s lap.

He stopped so hard the water sloshed over his knuckles and ran down the ink.

“What the fuck.”

Justin came.

He didn’t have another setting. The shock went down his spine and out through me. I felt the first pulse hit the back of my throat and then he yanked me off by instinct — too late, too much — and the rest of it painted my face in thick ropes while he made a sound he had spent two days swearing he would never make in this house. Hot. A lot. Across my mouth, my cheek, the bridge of my nose. His hips kicked. His hand was still in my hair like he could hide me if he held on hard enough.

Chris stared.

The glass hung in his hand.

Justin was still coming. A last weak stripe hit my lip. He looked at Chris and then at my face and then at Chris again, wrecked, shiny, the shorts around his thighs, the chair, the lake, the crime fully lit by the kitchen night-light somebody had left on.

“It’s not—” Justin’s voice broke and came back mean because mean was the only clothes he had left. “Chris. Don’t. Don’t you say a word.”

Chris’s mouth opened. Closed. He looked at me, at the mess cooling on my skin, at his best friend still twitching in the chair.

“You were—” He laughed once, no humor, the laugh of a man whose vacation had just changed species. “David. Your face.”

I couldn’t move. Justin’s load was running down my chin onto the hoodie. My knees were glued to the boards. The favor was over. The house was awake.

Justin shoved himself into the shorts with a hand that didn’t work. He stood up too fast. The chair scraped.

“You didn’t see this.”

“I saw all of this,” Chris said, still holding the water like it was a microphone. “I saw you nut on his face, bro.”

Chris didn’t move out of the door. The cap brim hid his eyes until he tipped his head and then I got them — pale, catching the kitchen light, looking at my face like it was a dent in a truck he was going to have to explain to a boss.

“That’s David,” he said, slow. “That’s your best friend from school. That’s the one you said was just the gay one. That’s—” He laughed once, no humor, the laugh of a man whose vacation had just changed jobs. “You came on his face, Justin. I can see it from here. It’s on his hoodie. It’s everywhere.”

Justin’s hand was still in my hair.

“Chris. Eyes up here. Look at me. Not him.”

“I am looking at you.” Chris’s voice stayed flat. Work-flat. The voice he used when a beam was wrong. “You told me last night you he was in the bathroom. You were fucking his mouth last night too?”

“I know what I said.”

“You want me to forget I saw your dick in his mouth or you want me to forget I saw you finish. Because I don’t think I get both.”

“Chris.”

“I’m going back inside.” Chris’s voice had gone lower and then flat. “I’m going to drink this. I’m going to go to bed. In the morning you two can tell me if I’m crazy or if my straight friend just used his best friend’s gay mouth on the deck.”

He went inside.

The door didn’t slam. That was worse.

Justin stood over me with his chest heaving and his shorts a disaster and my face still wearing him. He looked at the glass door like it might come back.

Then he looked at me.

“Wipe it,” he said. His voice was raw. “Wipe it and get in the loft and do not come downstairs until I say. If he talks—” He dragged a hand down the beard. “If he talks I will handle it. You don’t handle it. You don’t explain. You don’t apologize to him.”

“Justin—”

“David.” He crouched, sudden, close enough that I could smell the sex on him and the panic under it. His thumb dragged through the mess on my cheek like he was going to wipe it and then didn’t, like touching it made it more real. “I didn’t mean for him to see that. I didn’t mean to— on your face. That wasn’t the plan… but I got your back. Fuck Chris.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to look at me tomorrow.”

“I know.”

Justin stood up. The lake kept moving. The house was a held breath.

“Loft,” he said. “Now.”

I got up. My legs were wrong. I didn’t wipe my face until I was inside the sliding door, in the dark, with his taste still in my mouth and Chris’s glass still in my head.

Below us, a floorboard creaked.

Not Chris’s room.

The other hallway.

Somebody else was awake.

Justin heard it too. His hand closed on my wrist, hard.

“Don’t you make a sound,” he whispered.

The creak happened again.

Closer.