Unexpected Item

I chewed it over for maybe an hour and concluded that subconsciously, I'd been way more invested than I'd let myself realise in the possibility that something might happen between us when we met up. Because, yeah, I'd thought she - he - was a girl...

It probably also didn't help that he was so tactile, so apparently clueless about the concept of personal space...all that grabbing of my wrists, not to mention the times he looped a casual arm over my neck while the other stretched out in front holding either his phone or mine. And even when people volunteered to take photos of us and there was no need to kind of snuggle up so everything fitted in the frame, he pretty much did it anyway...

...and I had.not.hated it...

It's hard to calm down and just, I dunno, get some perspective on things, when it's the middle of the night and you're alone in unfamiliar surroundings. I was still awake when Halley left for work, but once he was gone I fell asleep again, only to come to in the glare of full sunlight just before nine, sticky and thirsty and hung-over feeling. Yet another thing that wasn't in the plan...

I drank some of Halley's freeze-dried coffee, showered and dressed and brushed my teeth and hair, grabbed up the spare key he'd left for me and tumbled out to my car as fast as I could manage, not wanting to miss any more minutes of this once-in-a-lifetime experience than absolutely necessary.

Obviously I was tired, and probably a bit hungry - and maybe still slightly jaggy from all the night-time psychoanalysis? Whatever the reason, the whole thing felt a bit...flat, compared to the previous evening's experience.

About midday, I decided a different approach was needed. I left the venue and found myself a smoothie and a chicken salad wrap, hoping some healthy food would re-set my system. And then...without precisely intending to, I drove back to Halley's place, instead of returning to the roadshow. Oh well, I thought, slotting my key in the lock. Might as well admit it. It was more fun with him there.

...you might as well admit the rest while you're at it, Bede, said the voice in my head. Go on, admit it...

I stood and glared at the sofa that'd hosted me last night, jaw clenched, fists balled at my sides, as if it was somehow responsible for all this. But...no. It came from me, that...thing ...that happened, there, last night, and it owed nothing whatever to my expectation that I would find Halley was female, and not a lot to him being on the handsy side of things.

It happened because I was into him. Into him, knowing he was a him...I flopped down on the sofa and dropped my head in my hands. Fuck...

Should I just leave? I thought. No, I can't. I'd have to have an explanation, and there isn't one. He knows I got my shifts covered. He knows I've been looking forward to this for, like, forever. He knows I had a great time last night. He was there.

Now I was back at the scene of the crime, the dream itself kept intruding. In some ways I didn't want to dwell on it, but in other ways I absolutely did - because it was a superb dream. I mean, I wanted to not be thinking of it like that, but I was anyhow, and...well, it was.

Ugh, it totally was...the sun was still slanting in, currently bathing the spot where I sat, and now I wasn't encased in a sleeping bag, it was nice. Relaxing.

I sat up, leaned back, closed my eyes - relaxed. After a while I drifted into that beautiful half-sleeping state where time goes all bendy and nothing really matters, and Halley was there on the inside of my eyelids, lit up and dancing, dancing just out of reach...

I wanted to touch him. I ached to touch him. His vampire-pale skin, his eyebrows so expressive, his hair so...Halley. I loved the way he bit a corner of his mouth just before he smiled, like every time he was trying not to, and failing. Mmm, and the way he wore his whole self on the surface, and god I loved the length of him, the way he drooped and draped over his surroundings...

His surroundings, including me...last night while I slept those handsy hands of his were everywhere, and the sense of it lingered even now. My skin hummed with the memory, electric and enlivened, and it felt good. It felt amazing.

I started to touch myself, just gently, reveling in my heightened sensitivity as I grazed the skin of one arm with the very tips of the fingers of the other hand, eyes closed. Up and down, up and down, imagining it was somebody else exploring me...

The latch clicked and Halley appeared through the door in dark pants and a somewhat smeared white jacket with two rows of black buttons and a little embroidered logo at the breast. He did a slight double take before grinning quizzically at me.

"Um, hello...?"

If the vision of him I'd been entertaining in my head was hot, the reality, as it stood before me, was too fucking much...

"God. Damn." I hissed, and unfortunately there was no mistaking my tone. Honestly, where's the brain-mouth filter when you need it the absolute most?

But Halley never flinched. Instead, he laughed.

"You don't want a piece of me 'til after I've showered off the sweat and cornstarch," he said. "Trust me on that one, bud..."

He flitted away in the direction of the bathroom, leaving me blinking in confusion, my mind filled with half-formed questions. Whoa. What was that? What did he-? How am I gonna-?

I hadn't got even halfway through the list before Halley re-appeared, towelling his hair, his lower half featuring badly ripped jeans perched low on his hips, and on top another iteration of the white jacket from before, this one crisp and pristine - unbuttoned.

He dropped the towel on the floor and ran both hands vigorously through his hair before perching on the sofa beside me, angling himself slightly my way, and swallowed nervously.

"I, uh, put a clean one on. Because...you seemed to like it?"

I nodded wordlessly. I did. I do. But I like what's underneath it even more...My hand slowly crept toward him almost of its own accord. I watched, still wondering what this was, where it came from. I didn't need to ask myself where it was going. That was becoming increasingly obvious...

The backs of my fingers just grazed the nubs of the banana bar at his bellybutton - god it suited him - before my hand disappeared behind the jacket's curtain and made contact with his side, at the soft part, between hip and ribs. The flesh shrank under my palm as he inhaled, then returned warm and yielding when he let go. I swept higher, feeling the undulations of his ribs, and underneath skin and bone noticed the same rapid give and release of breath...

I brought my hand to the centre, spreading on the hard plane of his sternum, out in the open now, where we could both see - see that this was actually happening...

I am touching you. You.

Finally, I dared raise my eyes to his, and I saw my own internal state mirrored there. The confusion, the questioning, the fear, the fascination - and the raging whitewater appetite scouring it all away down to the rock, the bone, the ineluctable fact - of this.

Halley took my hand and put it in his lap, palm up, holding the thumb with one hand and the pinky with the other. He squeezed briefly, cleared his throat, moistened his lips.

"So..." he began, "um, confession time, Bede. I haven't...I mean, I guess I always knew I was bi - in theory - but I've never actually done anything with a guy before. Just - yeah. Mm."

He was wiggling my fingers now, kinda rolling each of them between his own thumb and forefinger.

I watched. Confession time. Yeah.

"Well, if you always knew then you're a step ahead of me, because this just hit me...kinda...yesterday..."

He bit his lip, but the grin leaked out. "And now?"

And now? Now I had the strangest feeling of fate having led me here, to this day, these precise coordinates. A sense that this was always gonna happen at some point. I may not exactly have realised it, but I knew it all the same. A big gay moment was pre-ordained in my timeline, and now it'd found me, I understood I'd been waiting for it all my life...

I grinned back. "I'm all in."

It broke some kind of dam, me saying that - some something that'd been holding him back from just reaching out and taking. He stood, closed his fingers around my wrist, hauled me to my feet and started for his bedroom. Two paces later he stopped and whirled around, leaned in, looming over me, the jacket swinging wide for an instant, exposing his gloriously bony torso as he reached out and took hold of the nape of my neck, fingers spreading up into my hair, and-

God, it was the weirdest thing. I'd pulled that exact move myself so many times, but never been on the receiving end...it felt so alien and new but then when he kissed me and I could just sag back and rest in his palm, it made all the sense in the world...

I don't remember how we got to the bed. I do know that we never came apart on the way, and that once we got there the intensity ramped up even more - it was messy and desperate and visceral, like we were each trying to climb into the other, and the only reason it wasn't working was because we were canceling one another out - which obviously meant we had to try harder. And harder.

At some point I became vaguely aware that Halley was wangle my t-shirt up. Instinctively I resisted, clamping an arm against my side.

My mouth was suddenly, achingly, empty of tongue. Halley was drawn back, watching me, waiting to catch my eye. He raised a brow - the one with the bar in it. It was always that one, I realised...

"Too fast?"

My heart thudded in my throat. Too fast? Not...exactly. But back when I was going to be a successful person, I had a successful person's gym membership and a successful person's physique, and although all of that hadn't gone to hell quite so rapidly as every other aspect of my life...let's just say you couldn't see my ribs anymore...

It is what it is, I told myself. You're here. You want this. So does he. Don't blow this whole opportunity because you're mildly squishy in a few places...

Taking a big gulp of breath, I raised my arm. "It's okay. Go ahead."

He went ahead, pushing it up to my armpits, compelling me to half-sit as he gloved his hands in the fabric and kept going, easing it onto my shoulders, over my head - and off.

"Agh, fuck," he growled, in a different register than I'd yet heard from him. "Oh, god, you're such a babe..." He paused, laughed. "Though I guess in your case, you're more of a beeb..."

Normally I hated people riffing on my name, but...this wasn't a normal day. I loved it - just like I loved the way he was looking at me...

I didn't get it, but I couldn't deny it. He definitely approved of what he was seeing. Casting his jacket away, he flung himself back down on the bed and tugged me onto my side, in close, facing. He filled my mouth again, but only for a moment. He had other places to be. I traced the curve of his ears and the cords in his neck with the tips of my fingers, still trying to believe this was real as his lips made trails across my body...

When Halley was kissing, he kinda hummed with it. When he wasn't, he talked. He talked, like, directly into my skin, into my belly button, the hollow of my throat, bathing me in breath and raising all the hairs, making me shivery...

"This hair, it's the color of pecan pie," he said, back at my neck, taking a big handful of it, "which you should know is my favorite thing ever..." He tugged. "Fuck, it's so rich and thick...and your skin...I work all day with sugar and still I can't get enough of it, the sweeter the better and you...god, you're all honey and maple and caramel and brulée and fuck you're so fucking delicious..."

He tore himself away and reared up, kneeling high, straddling my thighs and opening his fly.

"Look what you did," he breathed, slo-o-wly jacking himself...

I hadn't spent very much of my life thinking about dicks - the one I owned worked fine and nobody had ever laughed at it - and obviously I hadn't made a practice of looking at them either. In fact, until a couple of days ago I'd considered myself a connoisseur of tits. Yet here I was, getting down with somebody who possessed, if possible, negative tits - skin so taut over his frame that his areolae were stretched into ellipses, somebody who very much had a dick and wanted me to see it...

Look what you did...I felt something like triumph along with a whole lotta lust surge through me, filling every pore. Halley's fingers were at my waist, working the button there.

He caught my eye. "Is this okay?"

It is now, yeah...I nodded feverishly, pushing my thumbs down into the waistband - both waistbands - helping him along. When they came off, he didn't say 'agh, fuck'. Instead, he let out an mmmmmm...Long and velvety, a slow-tailing sigh, a sound of pure contentment as he dismounted and threw away his own jeans, laying beside me once again, full contact this time, skin on skin on skin...

He had his hand in my hair, his face in my neck, but he wasn't talking anymore. Just breathing and grinding, breathing and grinding, hot and urgent against my outer thigh...

Feel what you did. Feel it...

I moaned in response, but my 'mmmm' was different, higher somehow and vibrating with need. Halley grabbed my far hip, pulling me onto my side again, even more skin, oh god, and then, and then he reached down and grabbed both of our dicks, smooshing them together as he flexed his hips in a gentle rhythm...facing inward, full-length contact, like a microcosm of what we were doing as a whole. Who was I kidding? - it was the core of what we were doing, not some incidental thing. Slip-sliding, grinding, the wet kissing of our glans - all of it...

I moaned again, unashamedly. That Halley was hot for me made it okay for me to be hot for him, it both validated and fed the fire, and it felt so good and it looked unbelievable. It was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen - by a mile - and I would've been happy to watch it go on forever...

...but of course it was too good, and I came. I watched it happen, which I'd never really...but then, all of this was new...

"Oh god, yes," Halley grunted into the skin of my shoulder. "That's it, sugar, oh jesus, go-o-od-" and then it was him and I watched that too, and then...

...then suddenly it was quiet and still and...a bit weird, until Halley sat up, raised that brow, and said;

"Well, fuck. It's quite the mess when you double the cum, isn't it..?"

That made me laugh, which made him laugh, and everything felt okay again.

Halley stood, scooping a goopy blob off his abs, wiping it on mine. "Hang tight, hon. I'm gonna go get...about ten damp washcloths to mop this shit up, 'kay?"

He actually came back with four - two for me, one for him, one for the bed. "So...anyway, you don't need to sleep on that stupid sofa tonight," he murmured, scrubbing at the sheet. "I mean, unless you want to..."

"Excellent," I joked. "That was the plan all along, y'know - whole reason I let you seduce me, actually."

His mouth dropped open for a moment. "I'm sorry, what? I walk in here an hour ago and you're sitting there all eye-fucking me and saying 'goddamn', but somehow I'm the seducer? What'd I do?"

Uhhh....um...good question. "Existed, I think?"

"Hah, well," he huffed, taking back the cloths, hauling me to my feet. Then he brought his lips to my ear and whispered, "Also? Goddamn right back at ya, sweet-cheeks..."

We dressed and headed to the convention centre in time for the last hour of the afternoon session. It was so much better than the morning's experience - better even than last night's. Less of the spiking euphoria maybe, but in its place a warmth seated deep in my abdomen, the embers of what we'd just done kept glowing by Halley's hand closed around mine - no wrist-grabbing tonight...

He stoked those embers again and again through the evening, feeding me noodles with chopsticks, tucking in the stray threads then reaching over to wipe my chin with his thumb...his palm rested on the small of my back as we stood crowded at a theater entrance, then once we were inside in the dark, he leaned over to lick up the side of my neck in a broad wet stripe. I shuddered in the aftermath. It was so out there, so utterly unapologetic - I'll touch you if I want, I'll lick you if I want...

I felt the glow become a tug, an actual urge, as the area he'd marked dried tight and pulled ever so slightly when I moved my head. We stayed another hour and a half but I don't know what we saw, only that the time was split between the well-lit open floor amongst the booths, elevators, corridors, another theater...split, too, between the advance and retreat of Halley's wandering hands, as the occasion allowed.

It was like edging on steroids. By the time we left the venue I was swimming in need, my desire ten-dimensional, uncontained - overwhelming.

At his car, Halley paused, leaning back, arms crossed. "So-oo," he breathed, "do you maybe wanna come back to my place, mmh?"

"You're an asshole, you know," I hissed, my cheeks stinging with heat. "You've basically been edging me all evening, and now you-"

He looked me up and down. Slowly. "I think you liked it."

Yeah. I did. The embers inside roared into flame once again.

It was dark in the car - dark and private, which meant more touching and teasing, bolder now, more targeted and direct. Fingers walked across my waist, a palm rested for a single suggestive moment over my junk before sliding down the inseam of my jeans. And then back up...

I felt like I should protest, at least a little bit. "Watch the road," I told him.

He snorted. "I am watching the road. But I don't needa be touching it, do I? And seeing as I have a free hand..."

"You're killing me here..." I breathed.

His hand returned to my groin, pressing in. "Honey. You are a long way from dead."

I mean, I was. I was as alive as I could remember being, ever. It's just...I was out of practice at being alive, at feeling all of the feelings, all at once...

Welp. I'd just have to cope. I bunted my hips, twerking up into Halley's hand, which drew an appreciative grunt from him.

"Mh," he muttered, squeezing briefly. "That's what I thought..."

"Yeah. Look what you did."

There was a tiny pause before he whispered, "I can't," voice suddenly high and constricted. A bare second later he lost it altogether, and scream-laughed, "Ihavetowatchtheroad!!"

There's no way I can adequately explain just how funny that was in the moment, so you'll have to take my word for it that we were both still practically crying with laughter when he parked the car, that we had to grab on to one another for support as we dragged ourselves up the path to his door. Anybody watching would for sure have thought we were drunk - and maybe we were, but not in the usual way. Not in the usual way.

Inside, we held on some more until the crazy died down. And then Halley, he tipped his head to the side and he - he licked me again. A slow deliberate swipe just like before, this one crosswise over my lips - and my knees gave out. Just for a tiny moment, they actually forgot what to do...I hauled in a huge breath to steady myself, and Halley's hand closed around my upper arm.

"Time to be horizontal, sugar," he murmured, nudging me toward his bedroom.

Horizontal and naked and all up in each other's business. Oh yes. Halley left the light off in his bedroom, the overspill from the main room providing a muted glow. I smiled to myself. Good. I liked what his hands got up to when the light receded...