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With my thumbs, I stroked his eyelids, gentle as I could. "Are you okay in there, baby boy?"

He nodded. "Yeah..."

"You sure?" I probed. "I'm worried here. I kinda made you discuss this, and now you seem..."

"I'm okay," he assured me. "It's just-"

I petted his hair. "I'm listening..."

"I...I moved away from home, because after that second holiday I realised things would never go back the way they were, and actually I didn't want them to. But I also didn't want to pretend all the time. You only get one life, why waste it pretending?

"I had the job before I moved and I thought that was the key to it, that everything else would just fall into place so long as I could support myself financially in a context where it's fine to be...yeah...gay. And sure, it's easy to get a fuck here. But...I don't have, y'know, a network built up. I don't know anybody, the housing situation's been shit from the beginning, and...okay, so this is weird, but it doesn't completely feel like honest work, selling twelve thousand dollar taps..."

God, what a darling. What an absolute, utter darling...tying himself up in knots about his complicity in propping up the luxury-goods industrial complex...

His eyes opened and sought my own. "In any case," he whispered, "you're a bright spot..."

I bent over as far as I could, twisting and cricking my spine, and just managed to kiss my forehead to his. "You are too," I breathed. "You're such a bright spot - and I thought I lost you. I was going mental, hunting for you on station platforms week after week..."

He laughed quietly. "I went back to that rubbish bar a bunch of times and you never showed..."

"Fuck! I can't believe I didn't think of that!"

"I sat in the cafe opposite every weekend morning for two months, watching and hoping, and never got a glimpse of you. Where do you get your coffee, man?"

My heart skipped a beat at the thought of him, watching and hoping...

"Um, here? In the kitchen. My folks have a coffee machine."

He fixed with those deceptively innocent eyes. "Damn. You owe me quite a few coffees by this point, Jeremy..."

Seeing as it was after five, I convinced him to take a rain-check on the coffee and cooked us some dinner instead. Then we cleaned up and watched some Netflix, took a shower together, went to bed and fooled around some more - and fell asleep before we could have one of those stupid 'are you sure/ yes it's fine/ but are you sure' conversations about staying over that always turn into a thing...

In the morning we shuffled sheepishly out to the kitchen together and I made him the first of the coffees I apparently owed him, standing behind him with my own as he drank it on the window seat, looking out over the moody beach.

It was comfortable like that, being rather than doing, watching together with my free hand on his bare shoulder. It felt really...normal. Like something we'd always done, which obviously...but from that point on, he kinda never left. I mean, in a purely literal sense he obviously did - but if we weren't at work or busy with other commitments, he was pretty much guaranteed to be at my house.

I'd sit with him between my legs the way I'd imagined, as often as I could - but I'd always have to disengage after a while because I was overheating. Quinn. He was always so warm. So warm. Too warm to spoon all night long, for sure. On the upside, he'd still be toasty any time we returned from a walk on the beach or a spell on the bike, so I could wrap myself around him to defrost my extremities...

The beach seemed to exert a kind of pull on him, in the same way the bike did with me - the novelty of it. He was continually wanting to explore no matter the weather, and dragging me along - just like I was always angling for another opportunity to indulge my new-found appetite for speed...

Witnessing his fascination on the days where I lost and the bike stayed parked in the driveway, I started to see the beach in a new light myself. My parents had always lived near the shore - Seatoun when Lindsey and I were at home, now here - so it was more of a background thing for me, nice to look at, mostly taken for granted - but now I was going down there daily, and god it was such a freeing place...

On the beach, I saw birds being birds, dogs being dogs, and people being people - everybody doing their own thing, in their own way, and it felt totally fine to take Quinn's hand, link our fingers together as we walked. Nobody's gonna harangue us while their wet Labrador's jumping up on them because they're not throwing the ball, I thought. Nobody's gonna tell me they don't need to see that kind of thing while they're standing there in togs with their cellulite hanging out...

I was right. No-one we passed ever said anything other than a smiling 'hi'. Quinn mostly didn't see them, being so focused on searching for treasures at his feet. We never returned from an expedition without a handful of shells or sand dollars, and I was thinking about this one day as we were washing our feet with the hose before going indoors, recalling his growing little collection laid out to dry on the framing by the back porch, reflecting on how cute it all was, when he suddenly said;

"Jeremy? Can I fuck you?"

Wow. That was quite the pivot... "Sure," I said. "Can I fuck you?"

He nodded. "Yup. But I asked first, so I'm going first."

"Okay," I told him, laughing a little. I actually thought that was kind of sweetly funny, but when I caught sight of his expression it was so predatory I started to wonder what I'd let myself in for...

I swallowed. "Um...when were you thinking?"

"Now," he said, eyes boring into me, fixing me to the spot.

"I, um...now? I probably need to, um, have a shower and such...?"

The eyes released me, reluctantly. "Then go do it."

I took a while in the shower, because I needed to do more than clean out. I needed to accustom myself to this new version of Quinn, who held his mouth in a tight straight line and issued orders, and also I needed time to get myself into the right headspace for what was coming...

Physically, I knew I could take him - he was solidly average size-wise, same as me. Mentally...yeah...I'd previously only been fucked when I decided that was on the menu for tonight and went hunting for it. Never because I'd been informed it was my turn - today, now. That was hot though, I admitted to myself. And the fact that he knew what I was doing at this moment, that he was right out there in the house, waiting for me to be done...that was a turn-on too...

Okay, I thought. Okay, I'm there...I can do this. Now.

I shut off the water and sketchily dried myself down, walking naked to the bedroom. Quinn was lounging against a wall in there, completely clothed, utterly at ease. The disparity between us, that was hot too...I got onto the bed on all fours, at the edge, facing away, ready and waiting for him to do what he chose, when he chose...

He came up behind me wordless as ever, laying his hand on the back of my ankle. All the way up to my shoulder he ran it, across and along the other side of my spine, over the other arse-cheek. Down the inside of my far thigh with his palm, up the inside of the near one with the back of the same hand - I felt the coarse hairs at the trailing edge against the thin skin.

The other hand - his watch hand - rested at my sacrum, warm like always, while his right explored at a constant measured pace. Up and down it tracked continuously, thighs and butt, his thumb occasionally grazing my taint, but never following further...almost an accident on the return journey to my inner thighs. With all the stroking, my skin was becoming over-sensitised, each pass of his hand across the jangling activated nerve-ends more and more intense...not painful, but pain-adjacent...

Oh god, I thought. Just fuck me already. Please. I'm ready. I can take it. I possibly even need it by this point...

I felt so exposed, even though he wasn't touching me especially intimately - or maybe because he wasn't. Just appraising my body neutrally, like I was a pedigree animal on a dais at a show, being scrutinised, assessed against a score-sheet...

What happened next was far from neutral. The steadying hand moved to my shoulder, his left foot planted itself on the mattress near my ribs. He reached underneath to grab my dick and balls - not hard, but...resolute, then he leaned forward all along my spine and bit into the scruff of my neck.

Finally. Finally. I shimmied in his grasp, loving the bony pressure of his wrist against my taint, the wider fleshiness of his forearm burrowed in my crack, trying to find more, more of that...apparently he didn't want me wriggling. The pressure of his teeth increased with each attempt - eventually I stilled and instead breathed shakily in and out, held in place by the twin anchors he was imposing.

I don't bottom all that often - generally I like to be in control, to be the one who makes things happen...but sometimes, just occasionally, I can get into not being in control. It stays conditional though. Lingerie-wearing? Sorry, nope. Slapping my balls about while you fuck? Double nope. There are limits to my submissive side and honestly I would have thought that biting me and digging in until I quit resisting and took it qualified as one of them...

I was already revising that idea fast as the pain receded and the dopamine took over, but when I was released and flipped quickly onto my back in a single motion, and the hand that had captured my junk fell heavy across my throat, possessive rather than threatening...I forgot the concept entirely. Quinn stared a hole in me as he gently squeezed, and in that moment at least I'd have done anything for him - anything.

He straightened up, stepped back, and slo-o-wly stripped under my gaze and out of my reach, before just as deliberately jacking himself a few times, then rolling on a condom. It was absolutely definitely done for effect, and it absolutely definitely sent my pulse spiking higher to realise that he wasn't quite as unaware of his hotness as I'd imagined. He wasn't in his own head about it all the time, but clearly he was plenty prepared to get it out and wave it around when the occasion demanded...

I half-raised and stretched out toward him, clawing at the air with my arms, but he shook his head - no. Instead he had me hold my legs up and out of the way and knelt down between them...

The problem with being on my back wasn't that I could see him - I always liked seeing him. But it meant that he could see me as he worked me, fingers dancing at my entrance, lips and teeth worrying an already-sensitised area of inner thigh. He could see me. What he was doing to me. My reactions, my emotions - me.

I'd never found it easy to let myself be a piece of meat for a man, to become nothing, despite knowing the rewards were there if I managed it. But this...he was watching me so intently, cataloguing my reactions as he touched and teased and squeezed and eventually stood once more and hauled me to him, hooking my knees on his shoulders, taking careful note of what worked and what really worked, committing them to memory, because that was what he did - Quinn, who couldn't afford to wing things and knew that about himself...

He fucked with purpose, determination, with a deadly little twist of the hips at the end of each stroke, mute as per usual...which was fine because I was making enough noise for both of us...and all the while he was gauging my responses and matching his intensity, doing it for me as much as to me...

Suddenly I understood why this was so confronting. Today I wasn't nothing, I was everything, and that was a whole other kind of vulnerable, a kind I wasn't sure I could handle...his look, his voice, his hand on my throat had all said 'I'm gonna own you' - but the way he was going about it was 'I'm gonna own you and treasure you'...

A weird noise issued from my throat, weirder than the groans and moans - a panicky noise.

Quinn's eyes fastened on my own. "You okay?"

"Scared..." He had me in such a state I couldn't even filter my thoughts.

He didn't pause in his thrusting, so obviously he understood I wasn't so much frightened and wanting him to stop as frightened by how much I wanted him to not stop, to never stop...

"Why...?"

Why?? Because of what you're doing to me! "I really, really like you and...auughh..." one of those little twists, right on my spot... "and I - I - aggh..."

He reached up and took hold of my left calf, lifting it from his shoulder, and turned his face to plant a little kiss just above my knee.

"Yeah? Is that right? You like me enough to cum for me? You gonna let me see? Show me. I wanna see it. Show me, Jeremy..."

Oh god, sexy talk at last from Mr. Silence! Fuck...absolutely lethal...all I could do was garble in response as he pulled the other leg up too, holding them spread, straight and scissored toward the ceiling in the most wanton position imaginable, while I fumblingly pawed my half-hard cock to the acccompaniment of Quinn's breathy background lyrics on loop play...do it...yeah like that...show me that cum...let me see...

I didn't actually know if I could cum to order, despite being almost out of my mind on some cocktail of lust, arousal, and desire to please...but he switched his tempo from insistent to brutal and my body got the message loud and clear, everything tightening and drawing up in response to the combined demands of his voice and his cock...

Even better than cumming was the fact it was Quinn who brought it about, that he'd talked it out me - and that my orgasm triggered his own. His fingers took a death grip on my calves as I felt him swell to shattering hardness against my walls - then he was digging in, leaning down on me for maximum penetration, forcing my shoulders into the mattress. He fixed me with that same carnivorous gaze, and it was me, not him, who moaned as he pulsed and pulsed inside me...

It's always hard to predict how somebody might behave post-fuck, because there's no way of knowing how they'll feel, or how they'll deal with whatever they're feeling. But Quinn apparently felt excellent, given he didn't act at all withdrawn. In fact, he seemed even more cheerfully uninhibited than usual.

He stepped back, exiting me, and kissed each of my feet before gently depositing them on the mattress, ankles together. Then he threw himself down beside me without even bothering to remove the condom, laying his heated cheek on my shoulder.

"Fuck, it's a miracle I lasted," he panted, "an absolute miracle. Because it was very nearly too fucking much, the way you were hanging by a thread there..."

I didn't really know what to say. I hadn't exactly been in the habit of dissecting a fuck after it was done. And I was still hanging by a thread, in a way. A thin thread linking back to who I'd thought I was, before...that...

"You're normally so...like, dignified, Jeremy," Quinn continued, his hot breath gently riffling my chest hairs. "I mean, you even manage to look elegant with my whole cock in your mouth. But when you got all squirmy and eyes-rolling-back and forgot how to talk...fu-u-uck..."

He trailed off into a groan and began idly tracing his fingers around in the cum on my belly, glancing briefly at me. "Eh, you're exhausted, aren't you? I wore you out."

I nodded. Actually, yeah...my body felt slack and my eyelids heavy and the rest of me sort of...floaty. I lay there, blinking intermittently as I watched his fingers swirl through the rapidly-cooling stuff, combing it into patterns, then smoothing it again...

I stroked his hair, smiling to myself. God, you're a strange one, I thought. In the absolute best possible way...I'd always accepted the organic, messy aftermath of sex, but I'd honestly never embraced it, lain around in it. What you do after is you get up and have another shower, clean off your sweat and his sweat and all the saliva and spooge and, yeah, whatever else there might be...because it's a whole lot less sexy after you've cum.

But Quinn was using me for a pillow and an x-rated MagnaDoodle and anyway I felt too weak for that. I really was worn out. Screw dignity, I decided. For today, anyway...

* * *

We texted each other quite a bit. I worried about it initially because written comms definitely seemed like they weren't an ideal fit for a guy who struggled with reading. But Quinn wanted it like that.

"It's what people, do, right?" he said, shrugging. "I'm not totally incapable. And I don't wanna be that one weirdo you have to leave voicemails for! Nobody does that shit, except, like...your boss..."

Fortunately my boss didn't do that shit...but I got it. Voicemails are the opposite of casual. They want an audience, right fucking now. And then a response. By you, the summoned one...if I looked at my phone and I had three voicemails all from the same number...gahhh. But three texts? Totally different feeling.

Also, the cool thing about texting is you can scroll back through them anytime you want and see the conversation developing and blossoming between you. I'd often pull my phone out in the inevitable dead space between when a meeting was supposed to begin and when it actually got started, and just...read the things he'd sent.

I was doing it again now, appreciating the wild neologisms, usually from when he didn't know to ignore the autocorrect - 'chicken cow mane' was my absolute favourite - I could never not smile, reading that...somebody's gonna bust me wide open one of these days, I thought, darting a quick dance around the room. I mean, smiling before a meeting? Somebody's gonna grab my phone and help themselves to this whole thing...

But, eh...none of it was incriminating. Flicking the screen with my thumb, watching the two-coloured messages whirr by, his side rich with thumbs-up emojis, I had to acknowledge...it was all totally innocent stuff. We'd never sexted, no cheeky aubergines even...

That changes today, I resolved, shuffling forward on my chair so my screen was under the conference table. I typed:

~CANNOT stop thinking about your arse...~

...and sent it before I could talk myself out of it. I had to switch my phone off once the meeting got underway, but when I arrived back at my desk an hour later I had two messages.

~f'in hell~

~trieing to work here~

I laughed, sent him a peach, and let him stew on it while I went to grab some lunch.

It was Wednesday, and the afternoon's suite of meetings were always especially gruelling - two of them back-to-back, both chaired by individuals infatuated with the sound of their own voices, over-attended and running way longer than necessary. I switched my phone to silent instead of turning it off, laid it on my thigh and texted Quinn again;

~How DIGNIFIED do you think you'll be when I tap that [peach] of yours?~

Ten minutes later I felt a discreet buzz against my flesh and unlocked the screen.

~[embarrassed emoji] not very~

~on a scale of one to ten~

~possibly zero?~

I managed to keep my face suitably bored-looking while I typed a reply.

~So when's it gonna be my turn?~

It was thirty minutes into the second meeting before my phone vibrated again. I woke the screen and - ugh, fucking Vodafone!

~Keep in touch with your loved ones! This week only, overseas calls capped at $10!~

Yes, I thought, directing my eyes to the speaker without really seeing him, I should ring my parents. Amongst other things, I should probably let them know I've kinda sorta let some guy more or less move into the place with me. Before Lindsey does. She showed up without warning Monday evening to borrow the electric hedge-trimmer - fortunately Quinn and I were eating minestrone at the time rather than, uhh...