My best friend is a Marvel Nerd - Chapter 4 (Patreon)

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

Chapter 4

He almost talked at breakfast.

Coffee. Fog on his glasses. Curly hair shoved back with the same three fingers. Faded Fantastic Four shirt that had been through the wash too many times. He stood on his side of the kitchen like the tile in the middle was a border. I poured cereal I wasn’t going to finish. He opened his mouth over the mug, looked at my mouth like he could still see last night on it, and shut it again.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were.”

He drank. The fridge hummed. Somewhere in the building a door slammed and both of us flinched like it his girlfriend flight landing early.

“Rules still stand,” he said to the sink. 

“Kitchen is clean. Living room is clean. Hallway is clean. Whatever happens after midnight stays in the issue it belongs to.”

“You took the mask off.”

“I put it back on.”

“You said my name at the door.”

Gary’s ears went red. He set the mug down too careful, the way he handled first editions of his precious comics.

“That was the suit talking through my face. 

Don’t build a run on it. Don’t quote it at me over coffee. Don’t look at me like that when I have to go to work and sit in a meeting like I’m a person.”

“You are a person.”

“Not in that room I’m not.” He grabbed the protein shake. “I’m late.”

He wasn’t late. He just needed the door.

I heard him pause in the hallway outside his own bedroom, the one with the Marvel posters and the Funko shrine and the box the black suit had come in. Then his keys. Then the front door. Then the quiet of an apartment that had two toothbrushes and one secret.

I went to work and did a shit job. Every time my phone lit up I thought it was him. It was never him. At lunch his girlfriend posted a picture from a train window. Coast. Wine. A caption about how Europe made her miss “her boy.” Gary liked it at 2:14 p.m. like a man performing being alive. I liked nothing. I sat in the break room and thought about the way his voice had sounded through the black mask when he’d told me not to look for a face.

He got home at 6:40. I was already on the couch with a show neither of us watched. He stood in the doorway with his bag still on his shoulder.

“You eat?”

“Not really.”

“There’s leftover pasta.”

“I know.”

He put the bag down. He didn’t go to his room. He went to the kitchen and made noise with a pan like noise could fill the thing we weren’t saying. I stayed on the couch. If I went in there it would become a conversation and he would run.

He brought two plates anyway. Set one on the coffee table without looking at me. Sat on the other end of the couch with a comic in his lap that he didn’t open.

“She’s extending,” he said.

My stomach dropped.

“What.”

“Two more days. Madrid to some coast town. She texted in the Uber. Asked if I missed her.” He turned a page he wasn’t reading. “I said yes.”

“Did you.”

“I said the word.” He pushed his glasses up. “That’s not the same thing as the rest of it.”

We ate. The pasta was fine. The silence had a shape. I could hear the couple upstairs. I could hear him swallow. I could hear my own pulse in my ears like an idiot.

“If she books earlier,” he said, still not looking, “this ends. I mean it, David. I’m not doing a meet-and-greet at the airport with your mouth in my head.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t okay me like I’m giving a TED Talk.”

“Then look at me.”

He looked at me. For one second the roommate was there — the guy who’d sat next to me in film class and talked Raimi for forty minutes and asked if I wanted to split a two-bedroom. Then he looked at my mouth again and something ugly and hungry moved through his face and he stood up so fast the plate rattled.

“I’m showering.”

“Gary.”

“Kitchen’s clean,” he said from the hall. 

“Don’t follow me.”

I didn’t.

I sat there with half a plate and the comic he’d left open to a page about a secret identity. I wanted to laugh. I didn’t.

He came out in sweatpants and a wet towel around his neck, curls dripping, glasses back on. He stood in my doorway like he hadn’t decided if he was allowed.

“I’m going downstairs,” he said. “Storage. The cage. If a neighbor’s down there I abort and we never have this conversation.”

“What conversation.”

“The one where I tell you to come with me.” His throat moved. “Black suit. You know the rules. If you say my name I stop. If you look at me like breakfast I stop. If you try to make this a bed I stop. It’s a cage next to a bike we don’t ride. That’s the only way I can do the thing I can’t do in this apartment.”

“What thing.”

He stared at me.

“You know what thing. Don’t make me say it in a hallway with thin walls.”

“Say it anyway.”

“Black spidey is going to fuck you,” he said, quiet, wrecked, pissed at his own mouth. “In the suit. In the basement. And then I’m going to come back up here and sleep in my own bed and we’re going to pretend the lease is still about rent. You in or you stay on that couch.”

“I’m in.”

He nodded once, like a man accepting a bad call from a ref, and went to his room. I heard the closet. I heard the zipper of the new suit. I heard him swear at the fabric. When he came out he had a hoodie over the black, mask in his hand, a bottle of lube shoved in the pocket like a crime.

We didn’t take the elevator together. He went first. Two minutes. I followed.

The basement hall smelled like bleach and wet cardboard. One bulb buzzing. The storage cage at the end — 4B, padlock he always bitched about — was already open a crack. Red bike. Christmas boxes.

Gary was inside with the hoodie off.

Black from throat to ankle. White lenses. The new fabric eating the bad light. Lube in his fist, cap already popped. No glasses. Curly hair crushed under the mask. The bulge in the suit already a problem he wasn’t going to joke about.

He closed the cage door. Didn’t lock it. That was the risk. Anyone with a key to the hall could walk the concrete and see a man in a Venom knockoff and his roommate between a ski bag and a dead printer.

“Rules,” he said, muffled, thicker in the black. “You’re not David. You’re the girl. You asked for the other suit. This is the other suit. You don’t say my name. You don’t say roommate. If someone comes, you freeze and I do the talking.”

“I remember.”

“You don’t remember. Last time you looked at my face.” The lenses stared. “Don’t do that down here. Down here I’m not the boyfriend she misses. Down here I’m the thing that bought the upgrade.”

A pipe knocked in the wall. Both of us went still. Footsteps above, then gone.

“On your knees,” he said. “Quiet. These walls are shit.”

I went down on concrete that had never been cleaned for this. Heat off the suit. New Lycra. The same nerves he’d tried to shower off upstairs. I reached for the fly he’d cut with kitchen scissors. His hand caught my wrist. Same grip as the motel. Same grip as my bedroom.

“Short,” he said. “I’m not wasting the webs on your mouth. The girl in the DMs wanted it somewhere else. That’s why I brought this.” 

He lifted the lube. “Open it. Get it wet. Then you turn around and you keep your voice in your chest. I mean it, man. If you moan loud I will never forgive you and I will still finish. That’s how fucked I am.”

I opened the fly.

He pushed out hard, heavy, already wet at the head. I took him in and he hissed through the mask, one hand slapping the wire of the cage hard enough to rattle it.

“Fuck. Quiet.”

I kept it wet and fast. No speech. No web-shooter bit. He didn’t have the joke in him down here. His hips stuttered. Keys jingled somewhere on the floor above. We froze with him on my tongue. The keys faded.

“Enough.” He pulled out, fist at the base, breathing like he’d run the stairs. “Turn around. Hands on the shelf. Jeans down. If I think about this in the kitchen I won’t do it, so don’t you talk.”

I turned. Palms on the particle-board shelf that held our off-season coats. He yanked my jeans and boxers to mid-thigh and left them there so I was trapped in my own clothes. Cold air. His hand spread me. Lube. Thick. Two fingers, no romance, twisting until I bit my wrist.

“You’ve thought about this,” he muttered. “Don’t lie. You made a fake girl and booked a motel. You don’t get to act brand new on the stretch.”

“I thought about it in film class,” I said, stupid, honest. “Before the suit. Before your girlfriend. I thought about it when you talked about the Raimi trilogy for forty minutes on the day we met.”

“Don’t.” His fingers went still. “Don’t you put college on this. College is the clean version. This is the basement.”

He lined up. The head pressed. He pushed.

It punched the air out of me. I bit my own wrist so I wouldn’t give the hallway a sound. He stopped buried, thighs flush to mine, the black suit slick against my back, and his whole body shook like he’d started a fight he couldn’t pause.

“Jesus. Okay. That’s in. Don’t move. If you move I come and this becomes a joke I can’t take back.”

He breathed. The mask scratched my shoulder blade. Upstairs a door opened and closed. He waited it out, still inside me, one hand on my hip hard enough to count tomorrow.

Then he started fucking me.

Not the motel mouth. Not the bedroom throat. Hips and concrete and the wet sound of lube in a room that stored a fake tree. Rough. Short. The shelf hit the wall. He clapped a hand over my mouth from behind and kept going, the black suit slapping my ass, the lenses down so he wouldn’t have to see my face in the side of a box.

“This is the super-hero fucking,” he whispered, wrecked. “This is not a roommate thing. This is not a breakfast thing. You wanted the dark version. You’re getting fucked by the dark version. Take it. Quiet.”

I took it. Forehead on my arm. He went deeper when my body let him and swore into the mask, the nice best friend gone, just a guy in black Lycra because extra days of Europe had burned the plot down.

“David—”

He heard himself say it.

He fucked me harder for the slip, punishing the name, the hand on my mouth tighter.

“Fuck. I didn’t— that’s not— don’t you answer. You’re the girl. The girl doesn’t get the name.”

He grabbed my hair and pulled my head back so I was looking at the sliver of hallway through the cage door. Empty. For now.

“If anyone walks that hall they see me in this stupid thing inside you. That’s the issue. That’s why you don’t moan. That’s why I don’t kiss you. That’s why the mask stays on.“

A key hit a lock two units down.

We both went dead. He stayed buried, cock twitching, my jeans a rope at my knees. Somebody opened a cage. Dragged a tote. Muttered about Christmas lights. Closed it. Walked away. The hall went empty again.

Gary let out a sound that was almost a sob.

“I can’t do this in a bed,” he whispered. “If I do this in a bed I’m gay in the lease. Down here it’s a fantasy. Don’t you make it a bed. Don’t you make it the couch. Don’t you make it the morning.”

“Shut up and fuck me, Spider-Boy.”

“You’re David. I know you’re David. I’ve known since you took the wig off and I still came here with a bottle of lube to fuck you.”

He pulled almost out and slammed back in. I came on nothing, shaking, teeth in my wrist, and he felt it and laughed once, ugly and quiet, and didn’t stop. He used the tightness. Fast. Brutal. The water heater kicked on. He came saying my name into my shoulder like it was the only word left in the suit, pulsing hot, filling me, hips locked, the black mask pressed to my neck.

He held it through every pulse.

Then he stayed inside, breathing like the cage had air problems.

“Don’t talk,” he said.

I didn’t.

He pulled out careful. I felt him leave and run down my thigh onto the concrete. He didn’t look at that. He pulled my jeans up over the mess with both hands, clumsy, roommate hands, and stepped back.

The mask came off.

Curly hair plastered down. No glasses. Mouth open. Eyes wrecked under the basement bulb. He looked at me — the friend who still stole his comics, the fake girl, the mouth from the motel — and for a long time he didn’t put the mask back on. Ten seconds. Twenty. He just stood there in the black suit with his cock still out and the lube on the shelf and the hallway one thin door away.

“I said your name.”

“I know.”

“I said it while I was in you.”

“I know.”

“I’m still going to pretend at breakfast.”

“I know that too.”

He tucked himself away. Put the mask on. White lenses erased him. He shoved the lube into the empty carton like evidence.

“You go up first. Two minutes. Lobby clear. We don’t ride the elevator together. We don’t look like a scene. If anyone’s in the lobby you keep walking and I take the stairs.”

“Gary.”

“Don’t.” The mask turned to the door. “I already broke the rule I wrote on my own book. Don’t add more fuel to this fire.”

I went first. Concrete stairs. Him leaking out of me on every step. The lobby was empty. I took the elevator alone. I heard the stairwell door two minutes later and then his bedroom door, soft, the soft of a man who was afraid of his own volume.

He did not come to my room.

I showered and the water didn’t do anything useful. My phone lit up. A message from Gary.

the box stays open.

don’t talk at breakfast.

when she returns this ends.

Then, after a full minute:

i’m not putting that suit in storage. that’s the problem.

i almost kissed you down there. that’s the other problem.

I sent one line from me. Not the girl. Me.

same cage. tomorrow. mask off. say my name when you finish or don’t come.

He liked it.

He didn’t reply.

In the kitchen he poured coffee on his side of the tile. Fog on the glasses. Fantastic Four shirt. He didn’t look at my mouth. I didn’t say cage. The fridge hummed like the building hadn’t seen a thing.

His girlfriend posted a photo of a beach.

Gary didn’t like it this time.

He stared at his phone until the screen went dark, put it face-down next to the mug, and said, to the sink, not to me:

“Two days.”

Then he left for work with the protein shake and the lie and the black suit still hanging in his closet like a third roommate neither of us could evict.