Work Text:
The first time, Jayce doesn’t recognize what he’s feeling, exactly. Not right away.
The thing about growing up solidly middle class in Piltover, about requiring the resources and approval of the higher houses to further your one obsessive goal that will make your life worth living, is that it requires a certain amount of emotional masking.
Pairing this with being the only child to a single parent, Jayce spends a lot of time appeasing others and not a lot of time in touch with his emotions.
Caitlyn, the daughter of his patrons, was the first person he met who encouraged him to break out of this. Kids can be precocious that way, and too perceptive. Jayce appreciates it though, and while he doesn’t lean on a literal pre-teen—who happens to also be the pride and joy of the people funding his independent studies—for too much emotional support, he’s glad to have someone he can start being himself with.
This is all to say that when Jayce and Viktor lock up the lab after cracking hextech and head to Viktor’s academy apartment to prepare their presentation for the Council the next day and Viktor jokes that he completely flaked on this adjunct professor he had plans with tonight and Jayce laughs with him but feels wildly sick to his stomach—he doesn’t get why.
Until later, when he’s home and still high on the endorphins and adrenaline of finally making headway towards his goals, getting himself off in bed to the memory of electric blue magic and weightlessness and Viktor smiling at him as they floated in the air together.
Jayce kind of gets it, then. He’s a little jealous of this adjunct professor. Okay, fine. Viktor’s cute. Assertive. A little mean. Maybe a lot mean, actually, and just holding back for now. And he’s the only person besides Caitlyn that Jayce has met who seems to share his obsessive ambition. He’s Jayce’s type, for sure.
But it doesn’t mean anything. It would be foolish to let anything get in the way of his first, real chance of making his—their—hextech dream come to light.
So Jayce tucks those emotions away, too. And it’s not hard to do so. He’s had his whole life to practice.
The second time, it’s their first day working together after getting official approval from the Council. Jayce is hyperaware of the first time and full of those impressing-the-new-coworker jitters, so he can’t stop looking at Viktor, taking in every detail of the way he wears his academy uniform, every facial tick, every mole dotting his visible skin.
Then there’s a yellowing bruise on the curve of his neck that Jayce stares at for so long he’s pretty sure he gets caught. From the adjunct professor, maybe, or one of the likely countless other suitors Viktor’s got. It evokes the same, nauseated, dangerous turning in Jayce’s stomach.
Jayce resolves to just maintain eye contact with Viktor going forward. And sometimes glance at his favorite mole, the one over Viktor’s lip.
That’s much safer.
When it happens the third time, Jayce hasn’t thought about it for quite a while. It’s been nearly six months since he and Viktor started working together. Half a year of progress, setbacks, and camaraderie. He lends Viktor one of his non-Academy-standard red cravats once, and Viktor stops wearing the white ones altogether, since they’re more adjacent to the Academy than anything.
They’ve got their own thing going on. Viktor’s his best friend. And he’s pretty sure the feeling is mutual, but he doesn’t want to risk asking.
Jayce learns more about Viktor’s upbringing, the clawing and fighting that it took to carve out a place for himself in Piltover, and he knows Viktor gets it. Better than Jayce gets it, actually. So, Viktor’s the second person—the first actual adult—in Jayce’s life who lets him be himself and bring all his emotions to the table.
Most emotions, he means.
Jayce engages in casual touching—his hand takes up all of Viktor’s shoulder, it’s obscene, he can’t help but do it whenever the situation calls for it. And he still sneaks a look at his favorite mole sometimes, but that’s it.
They keep it professional.
He doesn’t see Viktor outside of work much. For one, they work nearly sixteen hours a day, often all seven days a week, so the time they both spend outside of the lab is almost exclusively spent sleeping in their respective apartments. Jayce has been to Viktor’s once, dropping off some requested reading material when Viktor fell too ill to come in for a few days. He’d left the books in the foyer and had to talk himself out of snooping around Viktor’s meticulously clean living room.
He also had to talk himself out of checking in on Viktor, quarantined to his bedroom. Likely fever flushed, glossy eyed, and delirious. And contagious. Breathing Jayce’s air and letting Jayce palm his forehead and infecting Jayce with his sickness.
Keeping it so very, very professional.
Viktor’s not been to Jayce’s at all. Sort of by design, because Jayce’s apartment is a fucking mess. Fitting, really.
It’s an average day of science breakthroughs—tedious yet quietly thrilling in the way that Jayce thrives on—until someone drops by the lab. Not Sky, not Caitlyn, not Heimerdinger, not one of the other Councilors looking for insider information. Just some guy. Some tall guy with the kind of stylistically broad shoulders and stacked arms earned through packing into a gym rather than those granted from manual labor.
Jayce would know, because he had the latter until he stopped halving his time between the Talis hammer business and this. Now that he sits at a desk or a lab station all day, he has to make time to exercise. What a concept. This guy must not go at dawn, cause Jayce has never seen him before.
The guy is there for Viktor. They exchange the kind of banter reserved for close friends, the guy hands Viktor a book, and then he touches Viktor’s shoulder and leaves. He doesn’t acknowledge Jayce. Viktor doesn’t make an introduction.
Jayce only remembers to blink and breathe manually when the guy is long gone, and Jayce realizes he’s dug half-moons into his palms.
“Who was that?” Jayce asks, from his desk. He’s pretty proud of how casual it sounds, coming out of his mouth, because he’s really not feeling casual, not at all.
He can hear Viktor shift at his own desk and shift back when he realizes Jayce isn’t looking at him, just talking down to his notes. And Jayce regrets that choice immediately. That’s gotta make him look weird.
“His name is Vaido,” Viktor says, and he definitely sounds amused, so Jayce has definitely fucked up the casual thing. “And he’s an adjunct professor at the Academy. I’ve mentioned him before, I think.”
“Have you?” Jayce is holding onto his pen too hard. The guy Viktor mentioned nearly six months ago? Great. “I don’t remember.”
“I lent him a book last week and I guess he wanted to return it before our next scheduled plans.”
Viktor sounds a little lost in thought, like he’s unsure of the professor’s intentions, like he’s contemplating what it all means, and the fact that the guy is taking up that much of Viktor’s headspace, enough to make him contemplate, makes Jayce’s chest flare in heat and his heart knock on his ribcage.
“He’s a friend?” Jayce asks. He knows it’s more than that. He knows intimately what it means to put a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. But his mind doesn’t allow him to not ask.
He can practically hear Viktor’s sideways smile across the room when he says, “I think it’s more eh, friends with benefits situation.”
“Cool,” Jayce says, nauseated. “You’ll have to introduce me next time.”
“It’s not nearly serious enough for that.” Viktor still sounds thoughtful, contemplative, though. Giving the token resistance necessary for emotional distance. Jayce’s all too familiar with what that sounds like. “I prefer to keep my personal affairs separate from work.”
“How professional.”
“Yes, well…do you mind reviewing these schematics? I’ve just finished.”
Jayce rises and retrieves the blueprints, and they don’t talk about the professor, or personal affairs, again.
Fucking Vaido.
The fourth time, they’re at an investors event a week or so later. Jayce attends these on what seems to be a monthly basis. Viktor gracefully declines most of them, and even though Jayce would love to have a partner to kill the time with, he’s glad to play martyr, here. He finds them easy, if sometimes tedious—a chance to turn off his brain and play up the charisma. Jayce has spent his whole life impressing these kinds of people, and it’s almost disgustingly straightforward now that he’s got the Council backing him.
Viktor, he knows, finds them—both the events and the people—intolerable.
But Viktor accepted the invitation for this particular event. Eagerly, Jayce would say. They arrived together, leaving straight from work in their uniforms.
Then Jayce got pulled into a conversation about cutting funding for the less profitable programs at the Academy—he is often touted as an example for the importance of hard sciences over anything else, and he’s rarely allowed to speak otherwise—and Viktor deftly avoided being involved. And now Jayce doesn’t know where Viktor is.
Jayce excuses himself as soon as it’s socially acceptable to do so, grabs a glass of dry champagne from one of the rotating waiters, and attempts to make a round.
It doesn’t work. He’s pulled into several other conversations. He drinks two more glasses of dry champagne. He idly agrees with some rich guy that the worst problem facing Piltover is increased income taxation. Because it’s easier than not agreeing.
Easy and tedious, same as always. But tonight Jayce is also mentally stuck on the fact that Viktor is there and what Viktor would say about cutting funding to arts programs and giving tax breaks to the rich.
Probably nothing good. Probably something scathing. Probably a take-down so well-crafted that he’d leave them unsure he’d disagreed in the first place, since they’re so used to being agreed with.
Jayce smiles into his fourth glass of champagne, and the woman he’s talking to thinks he’s smiling at the pictures she’s showing of her grandchildren at their summer home.
And then he sees Viktor across the banquet hall. Talking to some guy. That guy. Vaido the adjunct professor. They’re laughing, and Vaido’s got his hand on Viktor’s shoulder, and Viktor’s reaching up and touching that hand and—
Jayce extricates himself from the grandchildren conversation and joins them. Liquid courage, and all that.
He considers striking up conversation, but since Viktor likes this guy, Jayce is worried if he grants him the ability to speak, he’ll start to like him too. And he’s not really in the mood to begrudgingly suppress his emotions again because it turns out Vaido is a good match for Viktor.
So instead, he asks, “Can I borrow you, Viktor?”
And Viktor smiles and excuses himself, and Vaido squeezes his shoulder, and Jayce finishes his fourth glass of dry champagne.
The first time Jayce acts on it, they’re outside on the terrace surrounding the banquet hall. It’s seasonably warm for late autumn, but there’s no mood lighting or bottle service here, so they’re alone aside from a few waiters smoking off the balcony.
“Did you come to this event because of that guy?” Jayce asks. He might be slightly buzzed. He doesn’t usually get to the point that fast.
Viktor blinks up at him, stone-faced, one hand curled around his cane, the other around his own glass of champagne. Jayce wonders how many he’s had. Probably not four. There’s a breeze across the terrace, disheveling Viktor’s hair, and the lights of the city behind him are doing something twinkly with the champagne glass and his golden eyes.
“Yes,” he says, eventually. “Is that a problem?”
“No,” Jayce says. “I mean, I guess, sort of. It’s just that you never join me at these things. But you’ll come to them for him?”
There’s a twitch in Viktor’s stoic expression, now, and he sets his champagne glass down on one of the flat stones that make up the balcony. Jayce is nauseated for a reason apart from jealousy. He’s pretty much laid it all out there, thanks to all that free dry champagne and those intolerable investors.
“Allow me to get this straight, Jayce,” Viktor says. “We work together nearly sixteen hours a day, and you are jealous—”
“I’m not jealous—”
“You are jealous that I am spending my meagre free time with someone else?”
“Um,” Jayce says. “Well, when you put it that way—"
Viktor steps up and kisses Jayce.
Jayce supposes he’s not surprised that the first time he acts on his jealousy over Viktor, it’s not him acting on it. No, not really.
It’s not soft or tender or sweet like Jayce imagined their first kiss. Viktor grabs the back of Jayce’s head with his free hand, fists his hair, and kisses him like he’s drawing oxygen from Jayce’s body. Teeth on gnashing teeth and tongue down Jayce’s throat and mouth tasting like sweet champagne—there was sweet champagne available?—and Jayce barely gets his hands up to hold Viktor’s sides before Viktor breaks the kiss.
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” Viktor asks, into the heady space between them. It’s seasonably warm, but their breath is hot and visible in the autumn air. And then Viktor’s kissing Jayce again before he can respond.
Which is good. Because why didn’t Jayce say something earlier?
Emotional masking. Furthering their goals. Something about the inherent toxicity of lusting after someone so badly you want them to infect you with their cold just so you can spend an afternoon languishing in their apartment.
But Viktor’s kissing him. It’s a little hard to reflect.
Jayce’s eyes fall shut and he holds Viktor closer and kisses back.
One of the waiters says something loud, and Viktor steps away. Jayce is impressed he forgot they had an audience. The idea that Viktor’s been pining even a fraction as much as Jayce is something Jayce can barely wrap his head around.
“Would you…like to get out of here?” Viktor asks.
And they’re not even going to talk about it? Jayce is hard in his uniform and he’s rocking a steadier head buzz as the last glass of champagne enters his bloodstream, so maybe that’s for the best. They can talk later.
“Can we go back to your place?” Jayce asks. No way can Viktor see his place. And now he’s going to have to clean it in case there’s a next time.
Something uncertain flickers across Viktor’s face, but he nods.
“And what about, uh. That guy?” Jayce asks.
“Vaido?” Viktor rolls his eyes. “I can’t believe you’re so jealous of an adjunct geology professor, Jayce.”
“Wait, he’s a geology professor?” Jayce clicks his tongue. “He doesn’t sound so bad.”
“He’s also quite adamant that the academy has only denied his request for a full-time position and tenure because of an overfunded arts and music program. Seems like, eh, profoundly misplaced blame.”
Jayce laughs, and because his hands are still on Viktor’s sides, he urges him close again. Viktor glances at the waiters, who are not paying attention to them, and gives a token hum of resistance.
“Sounds like he doesn’t get it,” Jayce says.
“He was also just okay in bed.”
“God, Viktor, you’re so mean,” Jayce says, his voice falling lower. He leans down and presses another, quicker, sloppy kiss to Viktor’s alcohol-sweet lips. “I love it.”
The kiss devolves again, Viktor’s body leaning into his, Jayce’s mind spinning a little.
Jayce pulls back. “You’re not like, drunk, are you?” he asks.
“No,” Viktor says, lips quirking. “I’ve had a few. Less than you, I think. Are you drunk, Jayce?”
Jayce is pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to intercept Viktor without the liquid courage. But he’s definitely sure he would do whatever they’re about to do whether he was sober or wasted, and he’s only on the comfortable side of a buzz. So he shakes his head and grins back and leads Viktor out through the least visible exit.
They get to Viktor’s apartment, and it’s a mess. Almost as bad as Jayce’s.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” Viktor says. He doesn’t sound embarrassed, but he doesn’t sound necessarily pleased about it. “But the bedroom is habitable, at least.”
“It’s fine, mine is the same way,” Jayce says. He imagines Viktor sick and cleaning his living room before Jayce dropped off his reading materials a few months ago, like he was concerned with what Jayce would think about his apartment, or something. Jayce shakes his head and continues, “When I—”
Jayce pauses. Because Viktor probably doesn’t want to be accused of that. And what a weird fucking thing that would be to say, anyway.
But he has to say something now, so he says the almost equally weird thing: “When I dropped off those books when you were sick, I regretted not staying and, um. Taking care of you.”
Viktor shoots him a look that’s hard to read in the dim foyer. And then he leads Jayce to his bedroom.
Jayce has been thinking about this moment for half a year, and he’s starting to get a little nervous that this, now, after the reception, egged on by jealousy and alcohol, isn’t the most romantic way of going about it.
But Viktor leans his cane on the bedside table and sits on the bed and undoes his red cravat and fixes Jayce with a look. And Jayce is drawn to it, unable to keep from crossing the room and pressing Viktor down into the mattress and crawling on top of him.
He kisses him harder now that they’re alone. And Viktor’s soft and sweet for it, hands on Jayce’s face and sighing and not making fun of him for how his erection is pressed against the line of Viktor’s thigh, already so painfully fucking hard for this. Viktor slides a hand from Jayce’s neck to his cravat, threads his fingers around it, untucks it slowly.
“You were jealous,” he says, between kisses. Jayce’s eyebrows furrow.
“Uh-huh,” he says.
“And you regret not taking care of me when I was sick.”
“I guess so, yeah.” Jayce’s skin heats up a little. Viktor’s probably realizing he’s a fucking mess, fitting together the pieces of the disaster of Jayce’s life.
“I heard you when you came in that day,” Viktor says. Jayce is pulled back enough to watch him speak, but not enough to break the lines of connection between their bodies. “I wanted you to come into the bedroom, too.”
“What?” Jayce asks. He literally isn’t sure what Viktor said, not in small part because Viktor’s tongue peeks out, licking his lower lip, and his cheeks are champagne-flushed. It’s all very distracting.
“But I didn’t need you to take care of me,” Viktor says. “That’s a little condescending, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, sorry, that was a weird thing to say—” Jayce cuts off, chewing on the inside of his mouth, putting together what Viktor said. “But, uh. You wanted me to, um.”
“You would have gotten sick, though.” Viktor reaches up with one hand and scratches his fingers through Jayce’s hair, and Jayce leans into it. Viktor’s skin might be flushed from more than just the champagne. Paired with his hair, messy and haloing around his face on the bed, and his fattening pupils, Jayce imagines this is what he would have looked like, under him, soft and sick and having called Jayce into the bedroom to not take care of him.
“Wanted you to get me sick,” Jayce says. He doesn’t recognize his own voice as it tumbles into his chest. His hands on either side of Viktor’s face look huge and it’s doing something to the inebriated edges of his brain.
“That is…exceedingly fucked-up, Jayce,” Viktor says, but his voice is pleased and amused, and he keeps carding his fingers through Jayce’s hair.
“Yeah, well—” Jayce doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. He leans down and kisses Viktor again, licking into his mouth and pulling at his lip with his teeth until Viktor presses his hands up on Jayce’s chest.
“Let me move to the headboard,” he says. “This is a little uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, for sure, definitely.” Jayce backs off, standing again, embarrassed by how much weight he was pressing Viktor down with. Viktor sits up, breathing through parted lips, and scoots back on the bed, against pillows propped up on the headboard. His red cravat—the one Jayce lent him months ago—is still undone, his uniform rumpled.
Jayce follows him, mind almost disturbingly single-track, and brackets Viktor’s legs with his own. He pulls Viktor’s cravat free, and receiving no resistance, he undoes the buttons down his shirt, slow and methodological, revealing all that soft skin, every mole he hasn’t had the privilege to document before.
“Do you keep the brace on?” Jayce asks, thumbing over the leather straps. When Viktor nods, Jayce licks his lips and slides his hands to his waistband. “Can I?”
“Yes,” Viktor says. It’s somehow simultaneously the most quiet and assertive voice he’s ever used in front of Jayce.
Even between the champagne and the headiness of it all, Jayce is having a hard time clearing his mind. He wants this to be so good that Viktor doesn’t even consider reaching out to Vaido again. He wants to be the reason Viktor ghosts him, wants to be the reason Viktor doesn’t want for anything else in his life.
Okay, maybe Jayce is getting ahead of himself. But also—
“Hold on,” Jayce says, fingers halfway through undoing Viktor’s slacks. “Your friend with benefits was a guy who talks about rocks for a living? And has arms like that?”
Viktor works his mouth. “If you remember, I met him shortly before I met you, Jayce.” He sounds appropriately defensive, though. Good enough.
Jayce drops the subject and rolls Viktor’s pants off with his undergarments. Viktor slides down from the headboard a little with the action, open shirt rucking up around his sides, body shivering as the cool air hits his skin.
He’s unnervingly beautiful, in the dim golden lighting, tangled in his dark red sheets and striped shirt. His flushed thighs press together before Jayce can get a good look at him, but the dark hair that trails from his stomach is damp and—fuck.
Jayce keeps thinking his brain will stop roiling over his possessive thoughts, his obsessive thoughts, and his jealousy the farther this goes and the more tangible proof he unearths that this is actually happening, that Viktor is doing this with him and this isn’t yet another fever dream hallucinated as Jayce falls asleep at his desk at two in the morning.
But instead, the thoughts are getting worse. And it doesn’t feel bad. It feels maybe a little too good.
“How long have you…been jealous?” Viktor asks, when Jayce has just been staring for probably too long.
“Since the night we cracked hextech,” Jayce says, which is both true to his actual question and the implied one.
Viktor swallows and Jayce follows the motion of it down his curved throat.
“I thought,” he says, and furrows his brow, glances away from Jayce. Jayce hasn’t rendered Viktor speechless before, and he’s not sure he likes it.
Then Viktor clears his throat and shakes his head and continues, “I suspected you were jealous when Vaido came by the lab a couple weeks ago. But since that first night?”
“Um,” Jayce says. “Yeah, I guess.” Maybe this situation called for some emotional masking. Maybe Viktor isn’t ready for all of Jayce’s idiosyncrasies, and to be honest, who could be? “I didn’t mean to make this weird, I—”
“You didn’t,” Viktor says, sitting up on his elbows. “It’s just that I’m normally quite good at, um. Reading these kinds of things. And I had no idea, Jayce.”
Jayce almost laughs, in a dismal sort of way. The lifetime of emotional masking paying off yet again.
“If I’d known, I would have—” Viktor huffs an actual laugh himself. “I don’t know. Perhaps it would have been too risky. But I’ve been interested since that first night, too.”
“Oh,” Jayce says.
Something crumbles in Jayce’s cordoned-off heart, looking at Viktor, in the dim light, in the red sheets. His breath comes faster and then he can’t stand even the meagre space between them. He’s buzzed and Viktor is gorgeous and Viktor has wanted him, too, and he doesn’t have to mask anything.
Jayce crawls on top of him and kisses him once, twice, and then cups his right hand to Viktor’s pubic mound, the heel of his palm pressing into those damp curls.
“So this is okay?” he asks. His voice is unrecognizable again, serrated in his chest. It’s not that he hasn’t been with other people like this, but this is Viktor underneath him. It’s bringing out a part of Jayce he’s unfamiliar with. Someone who isn’t compensating or impressing or acting opportunistically. It’s as refreshing as it is terrifying.
“Yes, Jayce,” Viktor says, with that muted amusement again. His eyes are blown wider, though, and there’s a tremble in his knuckles where his hands rest in the red sheets. So Jayce is pretty sure Viktor is surprised by all these mutual revelations, too.
Jayce steadies his breath and slides his hand down farther. Viktor’s so wet already that his fingers glide across his swollen cock and slit, and it makes Jayce feel better about how hard he is in his uniform, still trapped along the buttons of his fly.
Viktor chews on his lower lip and his golden stare flickers between Jayce’s hand and his eyes. And when Jayce pushes one finger into the slick, feverish heat of him, Jayce can feel Viktor’s quickening breath against his face. He presses in two on the withdraw, slides his thumb around Viktor’s cock, and turns that quickened breath to a teeth-gritted groan.
“Fuck,” Jayce says, repeating the action, grinding the pad of his thumb against the sides of Viktor’s dick until his hipbones stutter upwards.
“Why are all your clothes still on?” Viktor asks.
“I don’t know,” Jayce says. And he almost censors himself for Viktor’s sake, but then he remembers how good it feels to lay it all out on the table. “I was just thinking about you, I guess.”
“That is—” Viktor’s eyebrows tighten up and he squeezes his eyes shut, his lips pressed together until he manages, “Please take them off.”
Jayce doesn’t need to be told twice, certainly not by Viktor. He withdraws his hand, evoking the most desperate sound yet from his partner, and rips his dress shirt off over his head, shucks off the trousers of his uniform along with his boxers over the side of the bed. Viktor’s golden eyes track him, teeth worried into that kiss-bitten lip again, and then Viktor is grabbing Jayce’s wrist and coercing him back on top of him.
All of him. All Jayce’s weight pressed along Viktor’s soft, lithe body. Jayce scrambles to get onto his knees again, to relieve the pressure, but Viktor’s hands wrap around his back, molding their skin together like he can’t get enough.
And then Viktor’s teeth sink into his neck where the tendons meet the shoulder. Jayce hisses and pulls back and Viktor’s looking up at him, still wide-eyed and champagne-buzzed and fake innocent.
Jayce doesn’t break eye contact when he slides his hand back between them, pushes three fingers into Viktor and works his cock with his thumb directly.
“Jayce,” Viktor says, rutting his hips up, the tight seal of their bodies providing better purchase to grind. Jayce’s cock is slotted up against Viktor’s stomach, and the more his partner rocks his hips the more he slides through the divots of his hipbones, slick where Jayce drooled pre-cum. Viktor’s cunt clenches around Jayce’s fingers, drawing them to the knuckle each time he fucks them forward, and Jayce can feel Viktor’s heartbeat in his little cock as he rubs it off with his thumb.
“Viktor, God.” Jayce grinds down harder against Viktor’s abdomen. But there’s not enough friction there, even with Jayce bearing down on top of him. “You—ah—can I fuck you?”
“Yes,” Viktor says, easily breaking his own record for most assertive in the same night. He buries his teeth into Jayce’s neck again, in the same place, and Jayce groans and withdraws his hand. He plants both on either side of Viktor’s head again and Viktor reluctantly extricates his teeth and lays back.
“Can I hold this thigh up?” Jayce asks. He palms Viktor’s stronger leg, still instinctively rutting against his stomach.
Viktor nods and licks his lips, his chest heaving with each breath now. Jayce has never seen Viktor like this. He wonders who else has. He wonders if he’s crushing whatever mediocre skills Vaido had in bed.
Jayce hikes Viktor’s stronger leg up against the plane of his abdomen and lifts Viktor’s hips from the bed with a hand under the small of his back. He slots his dick along the length of Viktor’s slick pussy, rocking it there, bumping it against Viktor’s own, red and straining cock. Viktor’s head tilts back into the pillow and his fists curl in the sheets, but he’s still just gritting his teeth through every moan, still holding back.
Jayce thinks about Viktor’s line of questioning, how curious he was about Jayce’s jealousy. And how accepting he’s been of every weird fucking thing Jayce has said all night. So he decides to lean into it a little further.
“I don’t want you to see that guy again,” Jayce says.
Viktor’s eyes widen. “Oh?”
“You said he isn’t fucking you right.” Jayce pushes his cock against Viktor’s again, and again, and again, and while it’s nice friction for Jayce, it’s causing sound after choked-off sound to build in Viktor’s pretty, tilted-back throat. “And he doesn’t get it. If you want someone to talk to you about rocks or whatever, you can come to me. I get it. And I’ll fuck you the way you deserve, after.”
“Will you?” Viktor asks. And Jayce can tell this gamble paid off, that Viktor doesn’t care about that guy. If there are other guys he cares about, Jayce will cross those bridges, but for now Viktor’s flushed and straining for more and arching his delicate hips and saying, all breath and gravel, “Why don’t you show me, first?”
Jayce secures Viktor’s leg and lifts his hips further and presses the head of his cock to Viktor’s hole. He expects to take his time, to fuck him open on each inch, but Viktor’s soaked and relaxed and tilted at the perfect angle like this, so instead Jayce pushes forward and slides into him all at once.
“Jayce—fuck—”
Viktor’s eyes close and his mouth parts as their hips connect, and Jayce stays there, leaned in, buried entirely inside of his partner. Inside of Viktor. He’s inside Viktor, fuck.
“Viktor,” Jayce says, catching his breath, watching every twitch of Viktor’s eyebrows and the thrum of his heart beating up against his shallow chest. Jayce’s own blood pounds in his ears and his face burns.
No, it’s not exactly how Jayce always imagined it, what with the nauseous jealousy and the imperfect confessions and the dry champagne.
It’s better.
The first drag out of Viktor, gripping tight and molten hot along every inch of Jayce, evokes the first, unabandoned groan from his partner. So Jayce pushes forward, and repeats, and repeats, until Viktor’s all unbridled sound and fingernails in the headboard behind him. He curls his hand around Viktor’s ankle, hooked on his shoulder, and turns his head to kiss the delicate bone there.
“Jayce—I—hold on—”
Jayce stops, immediately, balls deep inside, his lower stomach grinded up against Viktor’s cock. “Yeah?”
Viktor grabs a pillow with one hand, and Jayce picks up on the intention, taking it from him and fitting it snugly under Viktor’s raised hips, still pressed up inside so deep he can feel his heartbeat from within.
“And I’d prefer to have both knees propped up on the bed,” Viktor says. Jayce nods and unhooks his ankle from his shoulder, kissing it again as he helps him reposition.
It’s better for a dozen reasons, not least of all that now Jayce can press closer in between Viktor’s knees, and Viktor can reach around Jayce’s back and dig his fingernails into skin instead.
And when Jayce begins moving, pinning Viktor down with each thrust, hands planted into the sheets on either side of his head, Viktor takes advantage of their closeness to dig his teeth in, again, to that place between Jayce’s neck and shoulder. It flares in pain, and Jayce groans through his teeth and fucks Viktor deeper and Viktor’s teeth do the same.
“Why there?” Jayce manages, but he doesn’t stop fucking into him. “Fucking…that hurts, Viktor.”
Viktor tongues over what’s sure to be a nasty, purplish bruise later and digs his fingernails in harder around Jayce’s shoulders. He doesn’t respond, just noses into Jayce’s collarbone and keens more pretty, pretty, choked-off noises, and Jayce forgives him for the pain. As if there was any doubt he wouldn’t.
Maybe Viktor’s a little possessive, too.
That line of thought isn’t safe for Jayce’s brain, here in the heat of the moment, but it claws into him the same way Viktor’s nails do, and he presses down, presses heavier, presses all his weight in to spread Viktor open on his dick. He frees one hand from the sheets and shoves it between them, takes Viktor’s slick cock between his fingers and grinds his thumb into it. And then Viktor’s teeth are gouging his collarbone, and he’s groaning into Jayce’s skin and going off, seconds later, dick pulsing in Jayce’s fingers, cunt spasming around him, body shaking the mattress.
“Fuck, Viktor,” Jayce says, and he’s not there yet, the four glasses of champagne making it hard to follow him down like he wants to. But he’s pretty sure he can get his partner off again, and Viktor isn’t pushing him away. In fact, his fingernails are gripping harder, and he’s rutting his cock up against Jayce’s hand and whining through his teeth.
With the next punishing thrust, Jayce returns the favor and buries his teeth into the soft triangle of skin underneath Viktor’s ear, and Viktor comes fully alive for him.
“Jayce—” His hands thread into Jayce’s hair, fisting and tugging. It’s fever hot and cum slick and endless skin between them, and Viktor’s still trembling from his orgasm, still clenching around Jayce, sometimes so intensely Jayce can’t keep up the rhythm, his hips stuttering and failing.
But he wants to fuck Viktor so well that he has no reason to see that guy again. To see anyone again, really, but that’s an impulse Jayce is pretty sure he can’t express yet. It’s maddening, that anyone would fuck his partner’s tight, warm cunt with anything less than attempted perfection. That anyone would work his pretty, little cock with anything less than the full attention and service he deserves.
Jayce growls, like he’s actually fucking mad at these people who don’t even necessarily exist, and he extricates his teeth from Viktor’s skin and pulls back enough to give himself the leverage to fuck him harder, rub off his cock more insistently.
This also lets him see Viktor again, head pressed into the pillow, lips parted and swollen, eyes glossy and half-mast. He’s moaning for every thrust, in a satiated and soft way, like he’s not desperate anymore, like he knows Jayce will take care of him, and that realization goes straight to Jayce’s dick.
So it’s a relief when Viktor hits his second orgasm, fingers curled in Jayce’s hair still, cunt convulsing around him, voice breaking in satisfaction on Jayce’s name.
“Can I—fuck, Viktor—” Jayce can’t even get it out, he’s so close, so gone.
“Yes,” Viktor says. “Inside, please—”
Jayce presses his forehead to Viktor’s and squeezes his eyes shut and pumps him full with deep, seeking thrusts that have his partner whining from overstimulation. He takes them all, beautifully, even when Jayce indulges in a few more than necessary, just to hear him cry out a little more, to feel his fingernails scratch into his scalp, to see if he’ll let Jayce have his fill and then some after treating him so well.
Viktor, usually all tense lines and coiled nerves, goes lax underneath him, after, and Jayce carefully rolls off him. They’re both catching their breath, and Jayce is honestly not sure this is all real, still, in the dim lighting, with the red sheets, with the dry champagne souring on the back of his tongue.
He needs to be doing something to make it real, so he dismounts the bed and says, “I’ll get a towel, um.”
“There’s an ensuite bathroom,” Viktor says, pointing to an ajar door, his voice quiet, a little wrecked even. He was so loud. This was real.
Jayce nods and gets the towel and returns. He hesitates, unsure if he should help Viktor clean himself up or if that would be patronizing, but Viktor’s just lying there with his knees still up, Jayce’s cum leaking out of his freshly fucked slit, his cock still hard and red and abused above it.
Jayce is fucking salivating, really, and even though the buzz is almost worn off, he’s got the confidence of knowing his partner is well-fucked when he asks, “Want me to eat you out?”
Viktor wets his lips and laughs, weakly, and says, “Alright.”
Jayce crawls onto the bed between his partners arched legs, wraps his palms around his knobby ankles, and kisses the damp hair above his cock. With the addition of another, tangible task to his list, he’s immediately grounded in reality, knows this isn’t a dream. He glances up at Viktor, who is watching him with his golden irises and fattened pupils, and he realizes he’s in love with him.
Maybe that was obvious to anyone else. Maybe it’s even obvious to Viktor. But Jayce is newly infected and lovesick when he tongues into his partner, laves him clean of the taste of both of them. He’s slow about it, only touching his sensitive cock once he’s done with his hole. He draws it into his mouth and sucks him off, filling him with his fingers again and pulling out the rest of Jayce’s cum pumped deep inside him.
Viktor comes a third time in weak contractions around Jayce’s fingers, voice breaking but never broken, hungry but not starving, wanting but not desperate.
“You can stay,” Viktor says, after. “If you’d like.”
If he’d like. Jayce almost laughs at the understatement.
A few months pass before Jayce breaks his lease and moves into Viktor’s apartment. They keep it reasonably clean between the two of them and stop working sixteen hours a day—maybe thirteen, instead. Viktor keeps wearing Jayce’s red cravat, and Jayce wears the imprint of Viktor’s teeth.
Sometimes they get each other sick. And it’s fine, it’s cool, it’s normal.
The Academy increases funding to both the arts and music programs by ten percent. Three adjunct professors are hired to full-time tenure track with the new budget, Vaido included. Though neither of them hear the news from Vaido personally.
And while he has every opportunity to feel all his emotions from then on, Jayce doesn’t really find himself jealous of anyone ever again.