Work Text:
“Robert Reynolds, you get your thumb out of your mouth right now.”
Bob was eight years old, curled up on the left side of the dingy old couch. He jumped when his mom walked through the door. She was earlier than usual. Normally he had a full hour after school before she got back. His heart raced as he ripped his thumb from his mouth and grabbed the TV remote. He flipped the channel before she noticed that he was watching an unapproved cartoon.
“You’re in third grade now, Robert,” his mom seethed. She knelt in front of him and grabbed his left wrist, narrowed her gaze when he inhaled sharply. His thumb glistened with saliva when she held it up to the light. “You said you wanted to be a big boy. Big boys don’t suck on their thumbs. Babies suck on their thumbs. Are you a baby?”
A squeak escaped his lips first, his words caught in his raw throat. “No.”
“Then don’t act like one.” Bob’s mom dropped his hand suddenly, then set her palm on the side of his face. She brushed her thumb over his ear gently, tenderly. She kissed his forehead and leaned back. Bob’s body stayed tense, frozen, unsure whether she would suddenly snap and grab him again. “Do you know why you’re not supposed to suck on your thumb?”
Not really. It was confusing, to say the least. Bob liked to suck on his thumb. He liked the feeling of having something in his mouth. It calmed him down after school, helped him fall asleep when his parents were screaming downstairs. But it made his mom mad when she saw. It made his dad shout at him like he’d broken one of those precious bottles that were only for adults.
“Because it makes Daddy mad?” asked Bob, unsure.
“That’s one reason,” his mom confirmed. She sat on the cushion beside him, tugged his shirt into place, and smoothed out the wrinkles. “It makes Daddy mad because he wants you to be a big boy, too, and sucking your thumb is baby behavior. It’s not any different than you having a tantrum and crying. Can you think of any other reasons?”
“No.”
“You know how some of the older kids at school have braces?” Bob nodded. The metal chains on their teeth. “When you suck on your thumb, you’re bending your front teeth and you’re making it more likely you’ll need braces to fix them. And braces are very, very expensive. Mommy and Daddy can’t pay for braces, so you need to take good care of your teeth, okay? Or you’ll have to live with a messed up smile because we can’t afford to have them fixed.”
Bob choked on a breath as he swallowed hard, his t-shirt tight beneath his burning ribs. He ran his tongue over his teeth, wondered what it would feel like if he messed them up forever. It had taken his two front teeth ages to grow in after his baby ones fell out. He imagined them becoming crooked, bent, or breaking off completely. His stomach bubbled with fear.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I’ll take good care of them, Mommy. I promise.”
“Good boy.” Bob’s mom brushed a hand through his hair, smiled in a way that wasn’t quite reassuring. “The last reason you shouldn’t suck your thumb is because of germs. You remember how we’re always talking about germs?”
Right. Bob’s dad taught him a lot about germs. That was why it was so important that he cleaned up after his dad threw him down the stairs and he got sick all over the carpet. That was why it was so important he washed his face after his dad shoved him into the wall and made his nose bleed. All his fluids were germy and if he didn’t wash them off right away, he could get himself and his parents and everyone else they saw sick.
“Your spit has germs too,” she continued, her tone soft and her grip on Bob’s forearm strong. He tried to pull away, but she held him tight in place. “When you put your thumb in your mouth, you cover it in your spit germs and then you wipe them all over the house. It’s disgusting. That’s why it makes your daddy so angry when you suck on your thumb. It’s fucking disgusting.”
There were a lot of things that were disgusting, according to Bob’s dad. It was disgusting when Bob sucked on his thumb. It was disgusting when Bob threw up or bled. It was disgusting when they walked down the sidewalk and saw two men holding hands. It was disgusting when Bob’s mom tried new perfumes. Bob’s dad just liked that word, Bob realized. To Bob, it had lost most of its meaning. “Disgusting” had gone from a universal adjective to a synonym for “something Dad doesn’t like.”
Bob jumped when a key slid into the front door’s lock again. His mom yanked on his arm and threw him to his feet. “Go upstairs and wash your hands right now before your father sees that spit. Go.”
He ran up the stairs without hesitation. Bob locked himself in the bathroom just before his dad walked in the door; just before he greeted Bob’s mom and almost immediately started to shout at her for something Bob couldn’t make out. It was probably something Bob had done wrong. Maybe he’d left spit on the arm of the couch. Sometimes, when he laid down sucking on his thumb, he drooled a little. Maybe he did that and didn’t notice.
In the bathroom, Bob turned on the water and stared at the mirror in front of him. He tried to smile to see his teeth, but his lips wouldn’t curl so he just gritted them instead. His teeth were okay. He was missing one and another was only half grown in, but they’d find their shape. A loud crash echoed through the vents from the room below Bob and he sank to the floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut, and forced himself to keep his thumb out of his mouth as he trembled.
“Bobby, you feeling okay?”
Bob was thirty years old, curled up on the left side of the black leather couch. He nodded to answer John’s question but didn’t speak, his lips blocked by a thumb held between them. Rather than the arm of the couch, Bob was leaning against John, shoulder to shoulder. He had a headache that had been worsening for hours, no doubt connected to how much he’d ground, clicked, and realigned his jaw throughout the day.
In Bob’s defense, he managed to go years without sucking his thumb. The problem was that when he originally kicked the habit, he did it by trading his finger for a pipe. Ironically, the pipe—or rather, the meth he burned in it—was even worse for his teeth than his thumb. He fucked his teeth beyond repair. That was, until Sentry. Sentry, who made his teeth perfect again. Sentry, who stopped his body from taking damage.
So, when he had a craving not to do meth but to suck on his pipe, he sucked his thumb instead. As an adult, he was good at washing his hands before he touched anything, good at keeping his drool to himself. Therefore, all the reasons he had not to do it were gone.
“Look like you’re falling asleep.” Bob nodded again. He’d gone through something like eight Zyns during the day, but they didn’t scratch the itch. He didn’t feel even somewhat satisfied until he sat on the couch beside John and let his thumb slide into his mouth without thinking. “Migraine?”
“Mmhm.” He tugged his thumb out of his mouth just long enough to speak. “Just a headache.”
Bob’s migraines were far worse, far more painful, and most often occurred during manic episodes. What he had that day was just a headache caused by too much strain on his jaw, too much pressure on his teeth. But it was starting to subside. He felt better with the soft, constant feeling of suckling on his thumb. With the weight of John’s arm around his shoulders, holding him close against his side.
They weren’t in a relationship, technically. They didn’t go on dates or call each other “boyfriend” but Bob really felt that someday, they might. He had doubts on occasion, worried that John just wanted him for sex, but he always got over it. There were too many little things John did to show he really cared for Bob. Like how he would set a hand on Bob’s waist and kiss his forehead when he walked by; how he would hold his hand when they laid in bed; how he wrapped his arm around Bob’s shoulders and held him close as they cuddled on the couch.
“C’mere.”
John set his left hand on Bob’s right cheek, gently stroked his scratchy jaw. He stayed there for just a moment before he shifted his hand down and grabbed Bob’s palm in his fingers. Bob tensed, fully stopped breathing when John pulled his thumb from his mouth. There was a small part of him that realized it was an irrational response, but there was an eight-year-old inside of him still ready to be screamed at, to have his thumb broken to force him to stop.
Of course, John didn’t intend to hurt Bob at all. He just freed up Bob’s lips so he could touch them with his own; just squeezed Bob’s hand like his thumb wasn’t wrinkly and covered in drool. John slid his right hand into Bob’s hair and brushed it through his tangles. He started to pull away and Bob bit down on his bottom lip, carefully tugged him back. Bob licked the outside of John’s lips before he kissed him again.
Bob loved kissing John for all the reasons no one ever believed. Because he was so patient and never expected anything more if Bob didn’t want to give it. Because he was so gentle the way he twisted Bob’s hair but never, never pulled too tight. Because he liked to make Bob laugh after they pulled apart by pressing an extra kiss to his nose and then his forehead. They never said, “I love you,” they never said, “you’re mine,” and yet it was the kind of love Bob had spent his entire life searching to find.
When they finally ran out of oxygen and had to break their kiss, John did exactly what Bob loved so much. He kissed the tip of Bob’s nose and then moved up to his forehead and kissed him not only once in the center but twice more on each of his temples. He threaded his hands through Bob’s hair and straightened it out around his ears, looked directly into his eyes when he asked, “Feel better?”
“Yeah.” Except Bob’s head felt a little better but somehow, his mouth was tingling. He tapped the Zyn in his upper lip with his tongue. It was basically at the end of its life, and it wasn’t giving him what he needed anyway. He shifted his jaw uncomfortably, tried to do what he was always told and sit with the discomfort. “Hey, you’re really sweet sometimes, you know that?”
Instinctively, Bob started to lift his thumb back to his mouth after he spoke. It was more than a little surprising he was intercepted by John’s thumb reaching him first. Bob closed his lips without a thought, sucked on John’s thumb like it was his own. John’s fingers had been in his mouth many times before but never like that. Never when they were just cuddling, never in a way that was so intimate but felt so innocent.
“Remember who this belongs to,” said John, his words breathy. Bob couldn’t get enough of the way John acted like he was in charge; the way he acted so possessive and so dominant when he would crumple at any command Bob gave. “Your mouth is for my lips, and my skin, and my cock. You don’t use it to tell anybody these lies about me being sweet. All right?”
He wanted his mouth to be John’s. His weird thing with his mouth was the one “innocent” secret he hadn’t been able to tell John yet. Sure, it had come up during sex a few times—mainly because he tended to leave a lot of marks whether by sucking or by biting—and Bob didn’t mind that, but it was a lot more than a kink. Bob didn’t fully understand it himself, but he knew that his thing wasn’t sexual at its roots; that it was something he had to satisfy at all times of the day.
It was embarrassing, really. That was why Bob hadn’t told him the whole truth about it. Bob was uncomfortable with his own mouth, with his excessive need for oral stimulation. He never even realized how intense the need was until after Sentry. Or, more specifically, after he got off meth and no longer had a pipe to roll on his tongue at all hours of the day. When it first started bothering him how desperately he craved oral stimulation, Bob thought deeply enough about it to trace it back to his childhood, to his earliest memories of sucking on his thumb to self-soothe.
Bob was tempted to tell John “no,” to play the brat, to trick him into letting Bob suck on his thumb for longer. But, for once, he found he wasn’t bold enough. In a funny way, it reaffirmed that whatever his issue was, it wasn’t inherently sexual in nature. Because Bob wasn’t shy at all when it came to sex, when it came to asking for what he wanted. Nine times out of ten, he was the one guiding John on what to do, making the requests for more or less. And if Bob wanted to suck on John’s thumb in a sexual way, John would have understood it. But it wasn’t sexual. It was just…
Weird.
His whole relationship with his mouth was weird. Bob was thirty years old and still sucked his thumb and couldn’t even explain why. He had a lot of strange habits that he often attributed to trauma, but he hadn’t been able to logic that one out yet. Some of his anxious tics were easy to identify, like how he put physical barriers between himself and others because as a child, it was the only way to give himself time to roll out of his dad’s punches. Or how he constantly rubbed the bridge of his nose when he was uncomfortable because he spent so much time with his eyes and cheeks injured that he got used to the area being itchy.
But why he had such a strong urge to put things in his mouth? Bob couldn’t explain that. So even though he wanted to play the brat and hold John’s thumb in his mouth, he made himself nod instead. “Mmhm.”
“Good boy.” John slipped his thumb out of Bob’s mouth, and Bob’s eyes followed it as it dragged down his chin, as John nudged his face upward with his first two knuckles. Bob flushed when John smiled and asked, “What’s that look for?”
Rather than speak and confess what he was really thinking, Bob set his hands on either side of John’s face, his fingers curled around John’s ears, and pulled him into a fresh kiss. Their lips never broke their connection as Bob leaned back on the cushions and dragged John on top of him. Bob slipped his tongue in John’s mouth, satisfied his needs with the lingering taste of salt and sweetness. Bob shifted his hands down, clawed at John’s shoulders with his hands.
John slowly pushed his knee between Bob’s legs and smirked against Bob’s lips when a quiet moan escaped him. He took his mouth off Bob’s and leaned their foreheads against each other. Bob squirmed involuntarily when John slid his right hand in front of his knee, palmed Bob through his sweats. He squeezed and traded his forehead for a gentle kiss on Bob’s skin when Bob’s breaths turned shallow, needy.
“Tell me what you want,” said John, exchanging dominance for obedience. He was commanding because Bob wanted it. He was rough because Bob wanted it.
“Fingers,” Bob breathed.
He grabbed John’s left hand in his and lifted it to his mouth. Bob drew John’s first three fingers into his mouth, closed his eyes as he focused on the feeling of sucking on his skin. His hand held John’s left in place as his left moved to grab his right. He lifted John’s palm just far enough to guide him inside his waistband.
“Not worried we’ll be caught?” Bob shook his head. He bit down, a low, soft sound escaping him when John’s fingers curled around his shaft. John gently brushed Bob’s chin with his thumb, his fingers shifting just slightly inside Bob’s mouth. “If you want to be naughty where anybody can see, I want to commit. Are you okay with that?”
The moment he nodded, John pulled Bob’s cock from his pants, exposed for anyone to see. He moved his hand up and down, his pace steadily increasing as Bob’s breath did the same. Normally, Bob would have paid more attention to the pressure building in his pelvis. Normally, Bob would have acknowledged and communicated when he was about to break. But he was so focused on John’s fingers, so focused on trying to satisfy the persistent tingling in the back of his mouth, that it managed to slip right by.
Bob’s breath hitched when he came. He dropped John’s hand and whimpered as his warm, white release soaked his t-shirt. His back arched and John quickly slipped his left arm underneath him as his right helped Bob strip himself of the wet, sticky fabric. Bob mumbled out an apology as John laid on top of him, kissed a line from the center of his chest to the tip of his still twitching cock. John wrapped his fingers back around Bob’s shaft, probably intending to tuck him back into his pants, but Bob’s second whimper made him drop it.
“Too sensitive?” he asked, brushing a lock of hair behind Bob’s ear. Bob nodded. His body had always been too sensitive, too reactive, too needy from his cock to his mouth. Thankfully, John was the first person to understand, to be patient with him when his body needed time to calm down. “Let me know when you’re ready. You can wear my sweatshirt.”
John leaned down to kiss Bob’s forehead and Bob made sure he hit his mouth instead.
"I’m not saying he’s not normal, it’s just that this particular behavior is abnormal.”
Bob was twelve years old, seated at a desk a few rows back from his parents. His teacher said he didn’t have to sit at his usual desk, but he didn’t want to be closer to his parents. Not when he knew that, regardless of what the meeting entailed, it would end with Bob being shouted at and beaten. His parents did not like to have to talk to his teacher, especially not for issues as frivolous as the reason they were there for that day.
“It’s not even the fact that he chews pencils in itself,” Ms. Gaines continued, oblivious to the thick tension between Bob and his parents. “I’d say a good half of my students chew on their erasers and other squishy things. My concern is that Bobby has been doing it almost constantly. Aside from the damage it could cause to his teeth, it’s possible it’s also a sign of an underlying issue like anxiety, stress, or pica.”
“He doesn’t have anxiety,” snapped Bob’s dad, unaware that Bob had panicked so badly about the meeting that he threw up in the school bathroom before his parents got there. “He doesn’t eat weird shit, and he has nothing to be stressed about. I agree it’s weird he’s chewing pencils but he’s twelve. Twelve-year-olds do weird things.”
Weird things like chewing on the drawstring of his hoodie while they were actively discussing his unnerving compulsion to put things in his mouth (because it stressed him and when he was stressed, he felt the urge to suck or chew). Like not asking Sadie Simpson to the seventh-grade dance even though everyone knew she had a crush on him (because he tried so hard to see what was “cute” about her and kept getting distracted by her brother). Like getting angry at the tiniest things for no good reason and screaming until he sobbed (because his anger was never as strong as his fear or his guilt or his sadness).
“I understand that,” said Ms. Gaines, her patience clearly wearing thin. Bob didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he mattered. “But the behaviors I’m observing are cause for concern. If you would like me to explain more specifically about the why, I can—”
“No, we’ve heard enough.” Bob’s dad’s chair screeched against the tile when he shoved it back. “Annie, get your son. We’re leaving.”
Bob rose to follow before his mom even looked at him. He spat his drawstring out and kept two steps behind his parents as they left the school. His dad would never do anything to him inside of the building. Not where there were cameras, not where a mandated reporter could see.
But as soon as they got to the parking lot, emptied of all the families who didn’t have to stay late, he lost it. Bob’s dad grabbed the front of his shirt and slammed him into the side of his beaten pickup truck, his eyes wide and furious. Bob swallowed hard, forced himself to keep breathing when his instinct was to stop.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he spat. Bob’s mom climbed into the truck, chose not to intervene, not to save him. “Why can’t you just be fucking normal? Are you fucking crazy like your mom, Bobby? Is that what this is? You fucking insane like your mom?”
“No,” Bob gasped. That was why he didn’t tell anyone that sometimes he got so stressed he threw up—he knew already what his dad would say, and it wouldn’t help anyone.
“You’re a little shit dragging me out here to talk about what a fucking freak you are. All you have to do is be normal and you can’t even manage that. All you had to do was keep your hands to yourself and instead you suck on fucking everything.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Shut the fuck up. At least now I know why all my friends’ kids think you’re a fucking faggot.”
A tear escaped his eye, and his heart skipped a beat. Crying made it worse. Crying always made it worse. “I’m not.”
“You want to suck cock, Bobby?” His hand moved upward, closed around Bob’s throat. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe. “You a little faggot practicing to suck cock?”
“No,” was all he could say, his voice a pitiful squeak.
“Put your thumb in your mouth.” It was a trap and there was no way out. Either he complied and he was beaten, or he refused and the punishment was worse. Bob lifted his thumb to his lips, trembled as he pushed it between his teeth. A sob escaped him when his dad shifted a hand to his hair and twisted until his scalp burned. “You like sucking on skin? You pretend you’re sucking cock when you do that?”
Bob’s vision began to blur. He used the last of his oxygen to answer, “No.”
“Get in the goddamn car.”
It physically hurt to hold in his sob when his dad slammed him into the car door one last time and his spine hit the handle. His throat burned when he was released, when he forced himself into the vehicle even though he already couldn’t breathe.
Bob’s hands trembled as he pulled on his seatbelt and shoved his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs and broken breaths. It made his chest even tighter, made it even harder to fill his lungs, but it was the safer way. The more he cried. the harder he would be beat.
“Should’ve fucking aborted him,” Bob’s dad ranted as he started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. “They never should’ve let you reproduce knowing how likely it was that your kid would turn out just as fucking crazy as you.”
Though Bob wanted to tell his dad to stop, not to talk to his mom like that, he couldn’t. Because he was crazy, and he was fucked up, and even though he tried really hard not to, sometimes he did look at boys. And, all that aside, his throat still burned too much to speak.
“You didn’t hear a word I just said, did you?”
Bob was thirty years old, seated on a chair in the briefing room. He didn’t really need to be there during meetings, but he liked to be involved. So, he made himself the notes guy. He listened as the Thunderbolts made their plans and wrote it all down in the notepad on his knee. And when they devolved into their inevitable arguments, he leaned his head against his left palm and chewed on the end of the pencil grasped in his right.
“I don’t care if you disagree with the plans,” Yelena went on, her gaze narrowed, “but the least you can do is pay attention to them.”
“Sorry,” said John, unusually submissive. “Just a little distracted.”
He’d noticed John watching him about twenty minutes earlier, but he wasn’t entirely sure what the look meant. He squinted but it was bright, licked his lips but it was warm. The way he kept slowly turning his head to look at Bob actually made Bob think that the pencil chewing annoyed him. It made him think of when his peers would catch him doing it in class and laugh at him behind his back.
So, when the meeting was adjourned and John asked Bob to stay back, he sort of expected a lecture. He expected John to tell him how irritating it was when he chewed on his pencil, how gross it was, how if he wasn’t the Sentry he’d be fucking up his teeth. But John didn’t say any of that. He didn’t even say a word before he grabbed Bob by the collar of his shirt, shoved him back against the wall, and smashed their lips together.
It took Bob a few seconds to fold into the kiss, a few seconds for his body to realize that it was the kind of aggression that turned him on rather than the kind that triggered him. He set his hands on the back of John’s neck, fully licked the outside of his lips before he pushed his tongue inside. John slipped his hands up the bottom of Bob’s shirt and felt up his back, dug deep into his shoulder blades. He moved his mouth to the side of Bob’s head, shoved his hair up his face as he kissed along his jawline.
“You come in here just to distract me, Bobby? Chewing on that pencil all fucking cute?” Truthfully, he hadn’t. Bob just wanted to be involved in the team and he’d yet to find a way to quench his need to put things in his mouth. “You trying to give me a hard-on in front of everybody?”
“Thought you liked that,” said Bob breathlessly.
“No, no. You’re the little brat who likes to be teased where people can see.” Bob shook his head and John chuckled as he bit down playfully on Bob’s earlobe. “Made you come on the couch during movie night, Bobby.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You pulled my hand down your pants. Don’t rewrite history.”
A smile grew on Bob’s face as he leaned into John, brushed the front of their pants together. John’s moan was low, barely audible, and Bob wanted to hear more. He switched their positions, buried his face into the crook of John’s neck. He licked long and slow from the base of his neck to his ear, then gave him a taste of his own medicine twice as hard as he bit down. Bob sucked on John’s earlobe, sank his teeth into the soft skin and pulled.
John’s hands pressed into Bob’s back as Bob lowered his mouth again, sucked hard on his neck. Since they’d been together, John had subtly revealed his insecurities about his own body. Like how he thought some of his moles were a little too prominent, or how after the Captain America ordeal, he felt like he’d let himself go. But Bob was obsessed with his body exactly as it was. He liked to find John’s moles and kiss them, liked to grab his fleshy waist and squeeze it against him.
Bob kept his mouth on John’s neck, just kissing him, sucking on him, breathing against him, until John said suddenly, “You know, sometimes I wonder if Sentry made you a vampire.”
And then he realized just how long he’d had his mouth on John’s neck, how it must have crossed the line from sexy into weird. He pulled away, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. It was stupid of him to leave hickeys when the rest of the team didn’t know. It was weird of him to suck on John’s neck for so long even though his skin was so textured and so interesting and so comforting.
“Hey.” John nudged Bob’s chin up with one hand when he stopped. Their eyes met for just a moment before Bob looked away, too embarrassed to maintain the contact. John pushed his fingers in Bob’s hair and twisted gently, tenderly. “You okay?”
Physically, yes, Bob was okay. His mouth was a little tingly and he kept licking his lips without thinking but his cock was happy enough to make up for it. Mentally, no, he was not okay. He suddenly felt like he was somewhere he couldn’t remember, pinned against a wall—or maybe a car—as his dad screamed at him. A tear rolled down Bob’s cheek and John brushed it away, kissed the side of his head with the world’s softest lips.
“Panic attack?”
All the Thunderbolts knew about his panic attacks. They were severe enough and frequent enough that he told everyone pretty early on. But that wasn’t what he was feeling. It was more like a fast, inexplicable rush of guilt.
“No.” Bob inhaled sharply, tried to blink himself back to reality. “Sorry, I got— I got a little carried away on your neck there.”
“You’re all right,” said John. He kissed Bob’s forehead, one hand on the side of his head and the other still holding his spine beneath his shirt. “I was just joking. I love how good you are with your mouth. Why did you think I was so jealous of that pencil?”
But Bob wasn’t chewing on it in a sexy way. Not at all similar to the way he would fill his mouth with John’s cock. He was just anxious for no real reason, just trying to satisfy that need for something. Yet John saw the pencil in his mouth and thought of the way he did that. John saw the way he held the end of the pencil in his mouth and immediately thought about how good he’d be—how good he was—at sucking cock.
“You a little faggot practicing to suck cock?”
“Bobby?” Bob blinked, eyes glassy. John nudged his chin again, his touch soft and gentle. “Hey, look at me. You know where we are?”
It took him a few seconds to find his voice. “The briefing room.”
“You know what we’re doing?”
“Making out.”
“You know why I’m checking in on you?”
“No.”
“You keep zoning out.”
“Sorry. You can keep going.”
“No, I’ve told you before, I’m not doing that.” John’s weight was fully leaned against Bob but rather than pinning him in a sexy manner, John had switched to holding him protectively. “We’re trying to retrain that instinct, right? When you need to stop, you don’t tell me to keep going, you tell me you need to stop.”
Exactly what John had told him before was that he didn’t like the way Bob said it. He didn’t like how Bob told him breathlessly that he could keep going. Not that Bob wanted to keep going or that he wanted to keep going together, but that John could keep going. Bob hadn’t opened up about his past sexual relationships beyond passing remarks, but John recognized more than he let on. He understood that Bob’s instinct to say “you can keep going” wasn’t him saying he wanted more but him believing it would hurt him less to ride it out.
He twisted the back of John’s shirt in his hands as he arched his back against the wall uncomfortably. “Sorry, I don’t— I don’t know what— I don’t even know what I’m remembering.”
“It’s all right,” said John, more patiently than he deserved. He rubbed his right hand up and down Bob’s back reassuringly, his left shifting to cradle Bob’s jaw. “Take your time.”
“I want to do this,” Bob told him impulsively.
John nodded. “I know, and we can, but I need you to come back to me first.”
“You’re supposed to punish me when I stop. I want you to punish me when I stop.”
“No.” But that was his role. It was the whole foundation of their relationship. Bob acted out and then John would slam him into the wall and kiss him or grab his cock and make him come where someone might see. Bob was the brat and John was his tamer. “We do that for fun, Bob. It’s not fun when you’re dissociating.”
“But you—”
“No, Bob. No buts. I’ve told you really clearly before that I’m not feeding into whatever this trauma is. We do it when you’re feeling safe and comfortable or we don’t do it at all. Here.”
Bob didn’t have the chance to argue before John dropped his hands and squatted down. For just a second, Bob thought maybe John was going to take his pants off. Instead, John looped his arms around Bob’s knees and lifted him up. He carried Bob the short distance back to one of the couches and sat down. Bob’s knees were tucked on the outside of John’s thighs, John’s arms squeezing the small of his back.
It was easy to lower his face into John. Easy to lick the skin right at the curve into his shoulder. Bob kissed the spot three times, breathed open-mouthed into the crook of his neck. For just a second, it seemed like John was going to say something, but then he stopped himself. He took a deep breath and grabbed his own wrist behind Bob’s back, held him tight as he slowly added another hickey to John’s skin.
His heart rate slowed as he sat there, half nibbling on John’s neck and half just breathing against it. His body relaxed when he stopped thinking about why he felt so ashamed, stopped trying to remember what it was that triggered him. Instead, Bob focused on the tiny bumps of John’s moles against his tongue, the scratchiness of the hairs that trailed down his neck. He focused on the way John’s hands pressed into his back, on how hard his cock felt beneath their clothes.
Slowly, Bob reached his hands down to unbuckle John’s pants. He didn’t get farther than the belt before one of John’s hands landed on top of his, and he said, “You sure you’re ready?” He kissed John’s neck again as an answer. “All right, but I’m not domming. You tell me what you want.”
“Wanna ride you,” Bob mumbled against his skin, “exactly like this.”
“Exactly like this?”
“Mmhm. You keep your hands there, I keep my mouth here. Just lose the pants.”
“Perfect.” John kissed the front of Bob’s shoulder as he hooked his fingers into Bob’s waistband, helped him lift himself just enough to tug them off. Bob landed back on his lap, pulled John’s underwear and jeans down just far enough to free his hard, heavy cock. John slid his fingers between Bob’s cheeks, checked to make sure he was ready as he asked, “You want my shirt off?”
“No,” said Bob, his tongue between his teeth as he gazed at the small wet spot where the tip of his cock pressed against John’s t-shirt, “keep it on.”
John chuckled as he swapped his fingers for his cock, tried to gently lower his impatient partner into place. “Gonna make me walk around covered in your cum but I’m the exhibitionist. Right.”
“You didn’t say no.”
Rather than respond with his words, John rolled his hips upward and smirked at the tiny whimper that left Bob’s lips. “Brat.”
“This is going to sting a little.”
Bob was nineteen years old, standing in front of the sink in his tiny little bathroom. He’d already been in the psychiatric hospital for four days. It all started when a kind man spotted him on the edge of a cheap hotel’s roof. Bob had gone up there because he believed he was being chased, because he believed he needed to get to the highest ground. He didn’t intend to kill himself (even though they put him on suicide watch for the way he clawed at his skin after his fear of heights kicked in), he was just paranoid and delusional.
Apparently to the point where, when it came time for the judge to decide whether Bob would be allowed to leave the hospital after three days, he said no. He took one look at Bob and said that he was a danger to himself, to others, that he needed his commitment extended to two weeks at the least. It was ironic how the extension actually made his mental health plummet that much further.
“Is this temperature okay?” It was a little too hot, honestly, but Bob’s dad had put his hands under burning water enough times that he barely felt it anymore. He nodded. “Okay. Have you ever had your fingers taped before?”
“No.”
He stayed still as his nurse, Judy, held his hands under the water, as she finished cleaning off the dried and fresh blood. She turned off the water and grabbed a towel, then gently squeezed each of Bob’s fingers dry. The white towel turned red in places. His nails were still bleeding, chewed down to nothing, his cuticles ripped to shreds. He hadn’t meant to do it. He didn’t like how it felt afterward. He was just anxious and upset and for whatever fucked up reason he couldn’t keep his fingers out of his mouth.
“Okay, so I’ll explain what we’re going to do.” We’re. As if Bob had any say in it. Judy reached into her pocket and pulled out two things: a bag of bandages and a roll of purple tape. “What we’re going to do is make a BRFB barrier. BRFB stands for body-focused repetitive behaviors. It’s an umbrella term for a lot of behaviors but for you, we’re referring to how you chew on your cuticles. We want to combat that by creating a barrier between your mouth and your skin. Does that make sense?”
It made sense but he didn’t like it. “Yeah.”
“First, I’m going to put the band-aids on your fingers that are still bleeding. Then I’m going to put strips of tape over the other ones just like this.” She stuck a piece of tape vertically over her own thumb. “You seem to mostly chew your thumb and middle fingers but just to be safe, we’re going to tape them all, okay?”
Bob nodded. It made sense. It wasn’t half as cruel as things doctors had done to him before. At least Judy seemed to be nice. He held mostly still as she put band-aids on his left thumb and both middle fingers. Then she tore off the first strip of tape, laid it over his right thumb, and something in him just snapped.
It was most frustrating that he didn’t even know why he started sobbing. Maybe it was because he still felt so embarrassed about that particular nervous habit. Maybe it was because his skin was too sensitive, and he didn’t want to feel the tape’s scratchiness and stickiness. Or maybe it was because, like the judge ruled, he was still in the middle of a severe mental health episode and tiny things set him off.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Judy didn’t either. Many doctors had tried to diagnose Bob, but he’d never stayed clean long enough for them to differentiate the mental illness from the meth. “I don’t know why I can’t just keep my fucking fingers out of my mouth.”
“You experience a lot of very severe anxiety,” said Judy in that phony caring tone. He knew hospitals well enough to know the staff never really gave a shit. Not about him, the unstable meth addict. “Chewing on your cuticles is a physical manifestation of that. It’s a way of self-soothing.”
“It’s not self-soothing to rip my fucking skin apart. It hurts.”
And he felt stupid for being upset that it hurt too. Bob had been cutting his own arms and thighs since he was barely thirteen and yet his cuticles were where he drew the line. Maybe it was the lack of control he had over it. The way he’d tear his fingers to shreds before he even realized what he’d done. Or possibly the trauma related to it. The times his dad had broken and sprained his thumb ripping it out of his mouth.
“What calms you down isn’t always good for you. Lots of people struggle with this exact issue. That’s why we have the tape system in place already. You’re not alone.”
Except that he was alone. When his commitment eventually ended, Bob would be back to his old ways; his only “friend” his dealer. When other people left the hospital, they had homes to go back to. Bob had nothing. He had nobody to support him, nobody who loved him. He was such a failure and a disappointment that he wasn’t even twenty years old and he already had nobody and nothing.
Bob lifted his hand to his mouth instinctively after several seconds of silence. He bit down on the band-aid Judy had wrapped around his left thumb, tasted the bitter adhesive, and collapsed into a new wave of sobs. It took Judy half an hour and two backup nurses to calm Bob down. And when they finally got his fingers taped, they decided they’d had enough of him. They left him alone in his cell of a room, and he ripped the tape right off again.
“Fuck.”
Bob was thirty years old, standing in front of the sink in the kitchen. He’d been sitting in a chair for an hour reading his book before he felt a sharp pain and a drop of blood fell on his page. He’d made it an hour before he even realized that he was chewing on his left middle finger; before he realized he’d pulled off not a thread but a chunk of his cuticle.
A single tear slipped out of his eye not because he was sad or because it hurt but because he was frustrated. He was embarrassed. He was fucking thirty years old and still putting his fingers in his mouth, still chewing his cuticles until they bled. He sniffed as he shook his hand under the cold water, exhaled when a pair of strong arms wrapped around his back.
“Hey.” Bob quickly brushed his tear away as John kissed the back of his head. As if his fast half-bun was worthy of that. He almost turned the water off, claimed he was just washing his hands, but a drop of blood gave him away. “You all right? Paper cut?”
“No, I—” He cut himself off. He couldn’t tell John. He was surprised that John hadn’t noticed his habit already, honestly, but Bob was sure he couldn’t have. If he had, John would have seen it as disgusting, told him to keep his fingers away from his face. “I just scratched it.”
It was surprising John believed the lame excuse given Bob was the near-indestructible Sentry. He wasn’t even sure anything could physically hurt him aside from himself. “Can I help you take care of it?”
“No, I can do it. I’m not that pathetic.”
“I know, that’s why I said ‘can I’ and not ‘do you need me to.’” Oh. Bob hadn’t even noticed the difference in verbiage. He was used to medical professionals helping him with that issue; people who didn’t know him or trust him and refused to let him act alone. “I’m not trying to baby you, it’s just that your tremors look pretty bad right now. Thought I’d ask.”
It was weird to have someone point them out in a way that was factual, nonjudgmental. Bob wasn’t really sure where his tremors came from—there were too many potential sources to pin down any one—but they’d always been a source of frustration. One that relaxed when John laced their fingers together, when he squeezed Bob’s palm and steadied the part of him he couldn’t steady himself.
“Okay,” said Bob, “you can help me. But only because I don’t know if I can get the band-aid open.”
“I’m sure you could figure it out.”
John reached around Bob and turned off the tap. He held Bob’s hand in his, unbothered by the freezing drops of water as he grabbed a hand towel. Bob squeezed it quickly and John wiped it back over his middle finger, probably just to be sure it fully dry. John set the towel on the counter and, rather than immediately swap for the band-aid Bob had already set aside, he lifted Bob’s hand to his lips.
On TV and in books, Bob always heard of parents kissing their children’s wounds to make them feel better. No one had ever done that for him. Outside of the hospital and one fucked up bender, no one had ever even helped him with a wound. It was easier to leave him to hurt, to bleed, even when he was tiny and scared and just wanted his mom to hold him. Bob didn’t think anyone ever really kissed anyone else’s wounds. It was just fiction. It was silly and it wouldn’t help.
Except it did help. John’s lips were a little rough and chapped but they were warm, gentle. His two tiny kisses made Bob chuckle which made him forget about how frustrated he’d been with himself. Bob’s gaze pointed down at his hand until John nudged his chin upward, pressed a third kiss to his lips.
“What was that for?” asked Bob, his own smile still painted on his face.
“Looked like you needed it.” When they first met, Bob never would have imagined how sweet John could be in a relationship. He didn’t even understand how John got married in the first place, thought it was no wonder he ended up divorced. But a few months in and zero labels attached, Bob understood everything Olivia once saw in him. “Hold your finger out.”
“If I do that, I’ll be flipping you off.”
“Like you don’t do that every day anyway.” Bob held out his first two fingers, spread them far enough apart for John to easily loop the band-aid around his fingertip. Once it was stuck in place, John shifted his hand, laced his fingers between Bob’s. “You need anything else?”
Rather than answer with his words, Bob leaned into John and kissed him again. He didn’t stop at the quick peck that John gave him but fully engaged his tongue, bit John’s bottom lip and refused to let go. He squeezed John’s fingers in his left hand, slipped his right in the back of John’s pants. John snorted when Bob squeezed his cheek. He nudged Bob’s teeth off his lip and kissed the tip of Bob’s nose.
“You all right?” asked John, his left hand playing with Bob’s hair. Bob nodded, eyes fixed on John’s lips, unsure what he was referring to. “You keep clicking your jaw. It’s one of your nervous habits.”
He didn’t know John had noticed that. Did he notice when Bob chewed on his lip too? What about the way he ran his tongue over his teeth? Bob forced himself to nod, tried to ignore the pang of shame in his chest. John wasn’t judging him, he reminded himself, he was checking on him. Bob let John’s hand go, slid his opposite hand down the other side of John’s pants, and dug his fingers beneath his cheeks to distract him.
Bob lowered his face to John’s neck, used his nose to push his sleeve down just enough to kiss his collarbone. John twisted Bob’s hair in his fingers, exhaled slowly against the side of his head. The warm breath on his ear made Bob kiss him deeper. He sucked lightly on John’s skin as he leaned his body into John’s, felt his growing erection press against his hips. Bob smirked, shifted his right hand from John’s ass to his belly, his fingertips just inside John’s waistband.
“That for me?” Bob breathed, tickling the top of John’s bulge.
“Not gonna fuck you in the kitchen,” John whispered, one eye on the doorway. That was his one limit. John had fucked him in the common area, jerked him off in the meeting room, let Bob blow him in the training ring—but the kitchen was the one place Bob couldn’t get him to budge on. “And you need to keep that hand away from germs.”
He kissed John’s neck twice. “Your ass isn’t germy.”
“Hand out of my pants, Bobby.” Bob whined beneath his breath and squeezed John’s cheek harder as he pressed his forehead into John’s shoulder. He rolled his hips against John, pushed their cocks into each other. John pulled his hair hard enough to make a point but not so hard that it hurt. “Can you be a good boy and hold on until we get upstairs?”
The last thing Bob wanted was to have to go so far away but he nodded. Anything to get his hands on John, to distract himself from the lingering burning at the tip of his finger. Anything to satisfy his mouth so he could stop clicking his jaw before it got weirder, before he forced his bones out of place. John looped an arm around Bob’s waist and guided him to the elevator, Bob’s needy gaze shifting between his face and his pants.
When they stepped inside the elevator, his mouth told him to pull John’s pants down and suck him off right there. His mouth told him that all he needed was to get on his knees and hold John between his lips and he would feel better.
His mind called his mouth a fucking faggot.
Bob grabbed John’s neck in his hands the second the elevator doors closed. He pressed the button to stop the elevator, to keep it shut, and turned them around so that his back was against the wall. He pulled John into him and locked their lips together, grinded their hips on each other as John gave up and moaned into his mouth. Bob moved his hands to John’s hair, tugged at its growing ends as he pushed his tongue between John’s lips, tasted every part of him that he could reach.
John dropped his hand down the front of Bob’s pants. He wrapped his fingers around Bob’s shaft, ran his thumb over his leaking tip and smirked. “This what you want?”
“Please,” mumbled Bob, his cock throbbing beneath John’s grasp. He whimpered when John tucked his shaft back into place and pulled his hand out of Bob’s pants before he gently kissed his jaw. “John, please.”
“You know brats don’t get what they ask for.”
He nuzzled into John’s neck, latched his lips around one of his moles. Bob pushed his hips harder against John, practically humping his leg. “John.”
“Shh.” John kissed the side of Bob’s face again as he reached behind him to start the elevator. He dropped his right hand between Bob’s legs, cradled his bulge in his hand and squeezed. “Show me how bad you want it.”
The elevator started to move as Bob sucked on John’s mole, flicked it with his tongue. John kept his hand around Bob’s cock, holding it in place, stopping him from stimulating himself. Except he was getting just enough stimulation to push himself close to the edge. Just enough that when the elevator suddenly jolted to a stop, forcing John’s hand against him, Bob choked on a breath as his hips lurched.
A hot, sticky liquid coated his cock beneath his black pants as John glanced behind them, kissed his forehead, and whispered, “It’s all right. You’re all right.” He rolled off Bob, removed his hands from his skin completely, left him shaking, twitching, desperate for more. Something. Anything. He was probably mad. Other men always got mad when Bob came before they wanted him to. Bob braced himself for a strike that never came. His train of thought faded when the elevator doors opened, and he realized that the reason John glanced back and moved away was because they stopped too soon. They were on the wrong floor.
Mel was only on the elevator with them for something like thirty seconds, but it was the longest thirty seconds of his life. All he could think about was how fucking pathetic he was and how much he hated his body. He hated his compulsive need to put things in his mouth, hated that he was so sensitive John could make him come when he was actively trying not to. He hated everything about his body from his needy eyes to his too-perfect abs.
He cried after sex a lot. He didn’t really know why. Maybe it was just something his muscles got into the habit of after years of getting fucked by men who hurt him. Whatever the reason, he hated that too. He hated that the second they were alone again, a tear escaped his eye as his knees buckled.
“Bobby.” As soon as the elevator doors closed again, John’s arms were back around him, holding him upright. He kissed Bob’s forehead, his temple, squeezed him in an embrace tighter than he deserved, his hips pushing against his wet, tender dick. “It’s all right. It’s just us again. Are you all right?”
“No.” He was embarrassed and uncomfortable and still had an urge to suck John’s cock. Like that would somehow calm him down. “No. I hate myself.”
“Bobby—”
“No. I fucking hate myself.”
John held Bob close, didn’t let go even when the elevator doors opened again, revealing the correct, empty hallway. “I think you’re pretty great.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Come with me to the shower,” started John quietly, his right hand pulling Bob’s thumb away from his mouth, “and I’ll show you why I think I’m not.”
When they got out of the shower half an hour later, Bob still hated his body just as much as he had before. But he was convinced that, for some reason, John liked it, and that gave him just the tiniest boost in confidence that he didn’t have before.
“You can’t have drugs in prison, kid. That’s the whole reason we arrested you.”
Bob was twenty-two years old, trapped in a jail cell after being caught with meth. It was stupid for him to even ask if he could have his pipe back, but he was mentally ill and untreated and still half high. So, he wasn’t exactly making smart decisions. He grabbed the bars in his hands, blinking more than he needed to in the bright lights.
“No, no, I don’t want the meth,” said Bob, indirectly confessing to the fact that he was, in fact, in possession of meth. “I just want my pipe. Just my pipe.”
It was an irrational request, but Bob felt like he needed it. He felt like his mouth was tingling and he couldn’t stop licking his lips and cracking his jaw and it hurt. He needed his pipe just so he could hold it in his mouth; just so he could suck on it and satisfy that annoying fucking urge. But, obviously, the cops couldn’t give him his pipe back for a laundry list of reasons. So, rather than comply with his request, they just laughed at him.
They laughed at him and called him names. A tweaker. A crackhead. A junkie. They were above the law, and he was a peasant in a jar. Their laughter filled the air as Bob sniffed, as he clicked his jaw back and forth until something popped. He took a step back and pushed his hair out of his face, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes thanks to the unexpected pain on the right side of his mouth.
“I just want my pipe,” said Bob weakly. He was sleep-deprived, desperate, scared. “Please.”
“You’re a pretty little thing, you know that?” No. That exact same guy had called him disgusting not an hour earlier and that was how Bob saw himself. “If you’re that desperate to suck on something, I got a fat pipe back here you can have a go at.”
The cop laughed boisterously as he nudged his partner in the chair next to him. They laughed until they snorted, stared at Bob like he was something less than human. Maybe he was. Maybe that was why his mouth always itched to hold something in it. Because he knew, subconsciously, that all he was good for was being used. Ever since he was a child, all anyone had ever done was use him.
He didn’t like it, but he was used to it. He was used to being broken down and beaten and called degrading names. That was just what he deserved. That was why, even though the very idea of it made him nauseous, Bob forced himself to say, “I’ll do it. If you give me my pipe back, I’ll do it.”
Bob didn’t really expect them to laugh at him again, but they did. They laughed at him and called him desperate, called him a slut and a whore, and maybe he was. He was everything his dad never wanted him to be. He was crazy and a drug addict and a cock slut. The first several times, he told himself that he didn’t like sucking cock, he was just doing it for the money or the drugs, but the more he thought it, the more it felt like a lie.
What he didn’t like was the way that men yanked on his hair until it burned, the way they shoved their cocks so far down his throat it made him gag. But the idea of it? The feeling when he first took a man into his mouth and just held him, just slowly sank into it? That wasn’t just something he liked but something he craved. Something he understood he wanted when he got goaded into a threesome with a woman and he didn’t like it, and it made him realize that his dad was right all along.
“Pathetic little fag.” The second cop laughed again and punched the first cop’s shoulder. “He’s so desperate for meth he was willing to suck your nasty dick.”
He didn’t want meth. Not as much as he wanted to roll his pipe on his tongue. “He wouldn’t have said yes to you.”
“He would have said yes to anybody.”
One might have expected Bob to be upset at what they said. He wasn’t. Deep down, he believed that they were right. That he was nothing and he was worth nothing. Bob took a deep breath and sat down on the tiny, cold bed in the corner of his cell. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in jail, and he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the last. He’d never done anything to physically hurt anybody, but he’d committed burglaries, larceny. It was the easiest way to get cash when he couldn’t bring himself to his knees.
Bob leaned back on the bed’s hard surface. He stared up at the ceiling, tried to think about anything other than meth, his pipe, and the assholes laughing at him behind the bars, but he couldn’t. He felt sick to his stomach, like something was missing from his mouth. Before he even realized what he was doing, Bob slipped his thumb between his lips and bit down. It wasn’t his pipe. It didn’t get him high. But it did something.
It embarrassed him when he resorted back to that same self-soothing behavior. When he chewed on his cuticle until he tasted iron on his tongue. He hated the way that it actually did calm him down, how the simple act of sucking on something made him feel so much better. Bob stayed that way, lying on his side, suckling on his thumb, even when the cops started laughing at him again. Even when a third passed by and they filled him in on how much of a fucking freak Bob was.
And Bob didn’t even flinch, not once, because he knew in his gut that they were right.
“Have I ever told you I really like it when you lay on me?”
Bob was thirty years old, wrapped in John’s arms. He was lying on his stomach, flat against John’s chest, his legs between John’s. They were both stripped to their boxers on John’s bed, their bodies and skin connected almost seamlessly from their shoulders to their toes. Bob shook his head as much as he could with his cheek pressed against John’s collarbone.
“I know you love your weighted blanket, but I never really understood it,” John went on, his beard tickling Bob’s forehead as he shifted, arms locked around the small of Bob’s back. “Now I get it. Could fall asleep with you on top of me like this.”
The sentiment was a little confusing. Bob was next to naked on top of John and John wanted to fall asleep? Even when they spooned, Bob usually wore a big sweatshirt because that was how he liked to rest. But that night, Bob was lying on John’s stomach in literally nothing but his underwear and all John did was hug him. John didn’t try to touch him or try to make Bob do anything. He just held him, tickled the top of Bob’s head with his breath.
Bob lifted his face just enough to kiss the side of John’s neck, raised his right hand to trace John’s moles with his finger. He kissed John in the same place again, just as soft and quick as the last time, then shifted himself down just far enough to kiss John’s shoulder, then his collarbone, then his chest. John loosened his grip to allow Bob to move but never took his hands off him completely.
He kept at it for another minute, just kissing John all over his shoulder and his chest and his belly. Then, when he felt John slowly start to harden against his pelvis, Bob pressed his thumb on John’s left nipple and set to work on his right. Bob kissed the nipple once before he pulled the whole thing into his mouth and flicked it with his tongue. John moaned low beneath his breath when Bob bit down, sucked on the sensitive flesh as he circled his opposite areola with his thumb.
For the first little while, Bob moved a lot. He twisted his thumb, bit down here and there, kept his right hand working. He wasn’t even sure when he stopped, really. When he let his right hand fall and grasp John’s side; when he closed his eyes and forgot that he was trying to be sexy. Bob’s breathing slowed as he suckled on John’s chest, his ribs resting on John’s belly. He listened to John’s heartbeat, to the white noise in the room, to the occasional pinch of sound when his lips parted for just a moment.
Then John dragged his right hand through Bob’s hair, twisted his curls between his fingers. The touch was light and full of care, and it still made Bob jump as he snapped his eyes open. He started to sit up but stopped when John shifted his hand to hold Bob’s cheek, when his blurry gaze met John’s half-closed lids.
“Sorry,” said Bob. John must have thought he was a fucking freak. It was one thing to tease his nipple; it was another to lay there and suckle on it like he was a baby. Bob shoved his hands through his hair and shifted his eyes to the blanket, too embarrassed to maintain eye contact. “Sorry, I don’t know what I was— sorry.”
John’s voice was thick and sleepy when he asked, “For what?”
“For… that. Whatever I just did.”
“Mm.” John reached his arms around Bob’s torso and pulled him back down. He held him tight as he let his eyes drift shut again, as he let out a long, slow exhale. “‘S okay. You can keep goin’.”
Bob was confused. He wasn’t sure what John was referring to. His best guess was that John meant he could keep moving downward, that he should do what he intended to do and get John hot. Bob lowered his hand between John’s legs, barely touched him, and John stopped him with a mumbled, “No.” He gently lifted Bob’s right arm and tucked it between their bellies, then returned his arm to its place holding Bob’s back.
“What do you—?”
“Meant that you can suck on me. If you want,” said John, slowly tracing Bob’s spine with the tips of his fingers. Bob swallowed hard as a sudden, embarrassed wave of nausea crashed in his stomach. Was John making fun of him and he didn’t get the sarcasm? “I don’t mind.”
He opted for the safe answer: that John was joking and he just didn’t get it. “Sorry, I—”
“Why d’you keep apologizin’?” John lifted his right hand to Bob’s head, buried his hand in his curls before he kissed his temple, almost missing the mark. “You’re fine, all right? Everythin’s all right.”
Because it didn’t feel all right. Because he was embarrassed and ashamed and he didn’t understand what John wanted from him. Bob wormed his hands under John’s back and held him tight as he nuzzled into his neck. John wasn’t mad. That was the one thing that Bob was confident in. He wasn’t mad and he wouldn’t hurt Bob. He would never hurt Bob. Except the confusion did hurt, in its own way.
If Bob understood correctly—and he was pretty sure he didn’t—John had given him permission to suckle on him. There was no way John would ever go for that. He could be soft when Bob was upset but he wasn’t that soft. He liked rough sex and firm grasps, not whatever the hell Bob was into. Bob dragged his first two fingers over John’s left nipple, touched it like it was something forbidden.
“Bobby.” John opened his eyes just enough to look at Bob when he leaned his head down. He bumped Bob’s forehead with his chin, eliciting a small smile. “What’s goin’ on, baby?”
Baby.
“Babies suck on their thumbs. Are you a baby?”
“Hey, hey.” John’s arm wrapped around his neck, his elbow strangling—no, hugging—Bob as he pulled his hair behind his ear. “Why are you shakin’?”
Honestly, Bob wasn’t really sure. He had something in the back of his mind triggering his anxiety and he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. It felt like he was suddenly in danger, suddenly being shouted at, even though there was nothing there and no one speaking except John in his near whisper. And, more than anything, Bob had that familiar, overwhelming sense of shame.
Humiliating as it was, he needed to ask for clarity. He needed to know what it was he misunderstood. “Were you joking?”
“Jokin’ ‘bout what?”
“That you don’t mind if I—”
No. He couldn’t. All he could think of was every time his parents ripped his thumb out of his mouth and screamed at him for being a freak. All he could hear was every guy who ever yelled at him, who told him he would be good with his mouth if he just went harder, faster. All he could feel was how it felt when they broke his fingers, when they ripped out his hair, when they shoved their cocks in deeper and deeper until he started to cry and they said he was weak, said he asked for it, said he wanted to use his mouth.
Bob actually flinched when John set his hands on his cheeks. But he didn’t yank on Bob, didn’t force him to do anything. He just gently nudged him down to his chest, wordlessly told him that he was serious. John wasn’t mocking Bob, wasn’t judging him, wasn’t embarrassed of him. He kissed the top of Bob’s head as he released his hands, gently stroked his hair before he wrapped his arms back around him.
“You looked like you were fallin’ asleep before,” said John, when Bob still didn’t move his mouth, didn’t put his lips where he ached to. John shifted slightly, his thighs leaned against the outside of Bob’s hips. “I was too.”
“You don’t think it’s…?” Weird. Freaky. Bizarre.
“I think you looked comfortable.” He inhaled and exhaled slowly, his eyes fully closed as he sank into the mattress. “I think you looked real pretty suckin’ on me too.”
He smiled, his tongue between his teeth. “You sound southern when you’re sleepy.”
“I am southern.”
Bob turned his face into John’s chest. It took him a moment to think, to breathe, to allow himself to do what he wanted. John never loosened his grip, never rushed him, never told him to stop. He actually held Bob tighter when Bob first put his lips back on John’s skin. The first time, Bob kissed beside his nipple, still harboring too much shame to do more. Then he kissed his nipple once, right in the center.
When he paused, John rubbed his back and muttered a reassurance. It almost made Bob wonder if John had noticed Bob’s thing more than he ever let on. But then he decided it couldn’t be. Maybe John accepted that one part of it, but his issue as a whole was too much. Bob sniffed, his lips hovering above John’s nipple as he took a shaky breath.
“Stop thinkin’,” John whispered. “You’re all right.”
And even though he didn’t quite feel all right, Bob did as he was told. He opened his mouth, closed it around John’s nipple. For a second, he didn’t move at all. He just held John in his mouth, tasted the slight saltiness of his skin. Then he let his tongue explore, let his teeth close around him just enough to claim him without leaving a mark.
It was harder to fall into a rhythm when he was trying to do it consciously. The first time, Bob’s mouth had completely gotten away from him. He only intended to be there for a moment, but his mouth latched on until he zoned out. It took him a good few minutes to even start to relax when he wanted to, when he could feel John’s eyes on the top of his head; the way he shifted when Bob pulled his lips away and when he pressed them down again.
“I feel like a freak,” said Bob quietly, his fingers dug into John’s sides.
“You’re freaky,” John told him, a small smile on his lips, “but you’re not a freak.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means you keep tryin’ to get me to fuck you in the kitchen.” His right fingers drifted upward, tickled the hair on the back of Bob’s neck as he chuckled. “Means you like to be a brat and get me horny in weird places. That’s freaky, and lucky for you I’m really fuckin’ into it.”
“I knew it,” Bob joked.
“But this isn’t freaky. You’re just tryin’ to get comfortable. I’m not sayin’ I don’t understand why you think it’s weird, but I don’t think it’s weird. Not weirder than me usin’ a six-foot man as my blanket.” He dropped his left hand down, gave Bob’s ass a teasing squeeze. “If you’re not feelin’ it, that’s all right. I just want you to know that if you are, that’s all right too.”
Bob turned to give John’s nipple one last kiss and, for some reason, that was the one that made him feel it. His body relaxed between John’s legs, his eyes drifting shut as he closed his mouth around John’s nipple and sucked. Not hard, not fast, just slow. Gently. Barely even moving. And he still felt silly and just a little bit ashamed but with John holding him and whispering to him, it was easy to give in to his natural urges.
Even with how much it calmed him down, Bob didn’t expect to actually fall asleep. He didn’t expect to wake up the next morning with his face buried in John’s chest as they laid on their sides, but he didn’t think he’d ever woken up happier.
“Don’t be shy, little slut. You can take it all.”
Bob was twenty-six years old and on his knees for a second-rate dealer. If he had the power to snap his fingers and change one thing about his body, he would have made his gag reflex less sensitive. Even with everything he hated about his body—his face and how it resembled his father’s, his teeth and how they’d cracked from the meth—he would still choose that. Because he knew, in moments like those, it was always the thing that ruined him.
Up until the point where the men would show exactly what kind of men they were, Bob never minded giving a blowjob. Not once he got it out of his head that it mattered what his father thought; when he convinced himself that he was comfortable being gay, especially out of spite. That was the one thing his father accurately predicted—Bob loved the weight of a cock on his tongue. Some were better than others, in more ways than one, but most satisfied his need to fill his mouth in a way nothing else ever had.
The problem was that he couldn’t just give a blowjob. The problem was that he gave blowjobs in exchange for things (especially the “three Ms”—money, morphine, and meth), which made him less of a human and more of a product. It made men believe that it was okay to abuse him, to treat him like he was something less. And after enough times, Bob believed it. He believed that he only deserved what they gave him, that he was an object more than a person.
He gagged when the man’s cock hit the back of his throat, squeezed his eyes shut thanks to the pain from how aggressively the man pulled on his hair. Tears bit at the corners of his lids and he tried to hold them back but one escaped, slipped down his cheek and dripped off his chin. The man’s rough hand grabbed his face, shoved his thumb over the wet trail like he was genuinely disgusted.
Not that Bob blamed him. He was disgusted by himself too. He was willing to get down on his knees, to take the man’s foul, short, salty cock into his mouth, but he couldn’t see it through once it was in there. He couldn’t hold his head up high and, at the very least, wait to cry until he was alone.
“You got to make me come if you want the meth,” the man sneered, the baggie pinched in his right hand.
And Bob was an addict. He had no friends, no job, no hobbies. His life was meth, and he was out. He had no money, and he was out. He needed that meth as soon as possible and he had no other way to get it. So, he let his eyes glaze over, made himself let go. He let his body move on autopilot, let himself function as a machine without regard for how he felt or where he hurt. He sucked the man off until he finally let out a groan, shot a sour substance down the back of Bob’s throat.
He barely pulled out before Bob turned to throw up. Bob dropped on all fours, gasped for air as he emptied his stomach of all the food he couldn’t afford. The man said something to him, but he couldn’t hear it over his heaving. He only saw the baggie of meth when the man threw it directly into his pile of vomit, almost like a punishment for not holding himself together. He choked on a sob as he fished out the baggie, as he leaned back against the alley wall.
Bob trembled when he fished his pipe and his lighter out of his pockets, tried to ignore the tears burning his cheeks as he lit up. It would be worth it once he smoked. He would feel better once he smoked. He set the pipe between his lips just a little before it was actually ready, unable to wait any longer. The meth made him shakier, more nauseous, and he just kept inhaling it anyway. He was desperate for the high to hit, desperate to stop crying and stop caring that he’d sold himself as a piece of meat.
It was impressive, really, how Bob had managed to become the epitome of everything he’d promised he’d never do.
His dad had accused him so many times of being a fag that he promised himself he’d never suck cock, yet he sucked so many he lost count. His mom was hospitalized multiple times for her mental illness and addiction, and he promised himself he’d never fall into either, yet he fell into both. His first dealer warned him he would reach a point where he was so desperate he’d do anything and he promised himself he wouldn’t, yet he did.
There were some nights when Bob just smoked enough to calm himself down to fall asleep. That was not one of those nights. It was the kind of night when he just kept smoking and smoking, and he wished he hadn’t taken all his morphine because he wanted to fucking overdose. He wanted to die in that alley and be a John Doe, for no one to grieve or to mourn him or to even give him back his name.
No.
He wanted someone to hold him and tell him that he would be okay. He wanted someone to tell him that he wasn’t a monster, he was just broken, and his addiction was a disease. He wanted someone to tell him that everything that ever happened to him wasn’t his fault and that he didn’t deserve to be used and abused and treated like less than trash.
But he didn’t have anybody to tell him those things because his first thought was right. Bob had nobody. If he were to die that night, there wasn’t a person on the planet who could be bothered to identify his body.
“Bob. Bobby, look at me. Look at me. You need to breathe. Breathe.”
Bob was thirty years old and on his knees for John. He loved giving oral, he really did. It was probably his favorite, not least because of how much he loved the weight of John’s cock on his tongue; the way he filled his mouth just right and made him salivate. He’d probably given John one or two dozen blowjobs since they’d been together and they’d never had a problem before. Not like that.
It was the tiniest little mistake that they made. Bob didn’t even know what it was, exactly. Maybe John’s grip was a little too tight or Bob was a little too eager and his gag reflex was a little too strong. All he knew for sure was that one minute, he had his head between John’s thighs, his own cock leaking eagerly on the towel beneath his knees as John cradled his chin and played with his hair. The next, he was on his bare ass a few feet away, tears streaming down his face as he hyperventilated and yanked on his own bangs.
“Bobby. Bobby, can you hear me?” He could, but he couldn’t answer. His chest burned like his lungs were on fire, every breath a sharp and painful wheeze. “You want me to hold you, or you want me to stay away?”
He’d traded a lot of quick, painful blowjobs to a lot of men who did not deserve him. Sometimes, he thought he forgot most of what he’d put himself through—most of what they’d put him through—but then there were times like that when he realized he was wrong. Times when not the memories but the feelings came flooding back and he physically felt like he was dying.
“John.”
Somehow, John understood exactly what Bob needed. He folded his arms around Bob, squeezed him in embrace that was almost too tight but perfectly grounding. Bob hiccupped against his shoulder, rivers of tears sliding cleanly off his cheeks on to John’s bare skin.
“I’ve got you, Bobby.” John took a shaky breath, his heart pounding beneath Bob’s chest. He must have been freaked out. Bob had never told him about that part of his past, had never expected it to crash into them in that way. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
A part of him still didn’t trust it, still expected John to grab his head, shove it back between his legs, and hold him there until he finished. Until Bob crumpled and threw up, and he was either abandoned or kicked for his insolence. But John wasn’t like that. He’d seemed like he might have been, when they first met, but he wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” Bob gasped, because it was habit, because it would make his punishment less severe. Except John had no punishment to give.
“I’m not mad that you don’t feel safe.” He kissed Bob’s temple, and even as Bob trembled, he didn’t miss the shake in John’s hands and his words. “Can you tell me something you can see?”
It was hard to open his eyes, to convince himself that he was somewhere safe. “Your— Your eyes. I can see your eyes.”
“Okay. What’s something you can feel?”
The strong arms holding him together, overlapping just slightly as John grasped his own wrist to hug Bob even tighter. “Your arms. Your arms holding me.”
“What’s something you can smell?”
The faint scent that followed John everywhere except the training room. Something like juniper berries and pears. “Your cologne. On your neck.”
“You can say stuff that’s not me, Bobby,” said John quietly, his tone unreadable past Bob’s quivering breaths.
“No.” Bob shook his head. He didn’t want to think about anything except for John. Because if there was one place he felt safe in the world, it was held there in John’s arms. “No, I don’t want to.”
John’s smile was fleeting. “What’s something you can hear?”
“Your breathing. And— And your heartbeat.”
“What’s something you can taste?”
There was one lingering aftertaste left on his tongue. “Your precum.”
“Jesus.”
Despite his choice of word, John said it with a smirk. He released his own wrist and rubbed his hand up and down Bob’s back. Finally, Bob found it in him to return the embrace, to dig his nails into John’s back and let himself believe that he was safe because John was nothing like the other guys.
John never hurt him or shoved him or demanded he move faster. John didn’t force him to keep going when he needed to stop. John didn’t spit on him and walk away when he launched into a panic attack. John hugged him and rubbed his back and held his hand through the five senses like he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Bob had vowed to himself once that he would never speak of what he’d done for meth. He was too ashamed of it, too traumatized by it. He thought that if anyone knew, it would irreparably damage their perception of him, and the way he acted around them. But John made him feel so safe that he wanted to tell him, he wanted to explain. The words fell out in a tumble.
“I used to suck cock for meth.”
John was silent for so long that Bob thought he made a mistake. He thought that John was going to drop him and walk away. When he spoke, all he said was, “Okay.”
And Bob read into that “okay” like no one else could. John probably thought that he was disgusting or pathetic or both. He probably wanted to stand up and leave but he felt obligated to stay because Bob had a panic attack. Another tear rolled down Bob’s cheek as he pushed his fingers deeper into John’s back, afraid he might pull away.
“Sorry, I should’ve— I should’ve told you before,” Bob choked out, his lungs still burning as he tried to find his normal rhythm. “It’s okay if you think I’m disgusting. I do. I—”
“No. Shit, Bobby, no.” The sound that came out of Bob’s mouth when John kissed his forehead was half a laugh and half a sob. “Sorry, I didn’t respond well. I just— a lot of stuff is making sense now and I’m really fucking mad at these men I’ve never met.”
“I mean, I— I consented, you know?”
“That doesn’t excuse what they did to you.”
“You don’t even know what they—”
“Bobby, listen to me, and I’m saying this with love, all right?” Love? Were they in love? Did John love him? “You just had a panic attack so bad you’re still shaking. I don’t need to know the details to know it was fucked up and you didn’t deserve it. You ‘consented’ because you were vulnerable and desperate, and they took advantage of that. That’s not your fault.”
It was like the world stopped for a second. Bob had never told anyone about his sexual trauma because he felt so gross, so ashamed. He thought that if he told anyone, they would see him the same way. But John didn’t. John hugged him and told him those four words he’d waited ten fucking years to hear—it wasn’t his fault.
“And sorry if you felt pressured into this at all,” said John suddenly, uncomfortably. “If you’re not comfortable with blowjobs, we don’t have to—”
“No, no, no, don’t take that away from me.” Bob shifted himself forward as he squeezed John tighter. Their cocks brushed together on the floor between them, and he was suddenly very aware they were still naked. “God, I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a fucking freak.”
“Already know you’re freaky, baby. Remember?”
Bob lip curled upward. “I really, really like having your cock in my mouth. Like, a stupid amount. But I have this weird— this weird thing with my mouth.”
“Oral fixation,” said John, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“What?”
“You have a really intense oral fixation.” Bob’s face gave away his confusion before he could say it himself. “You’re constantly sucking your thumb or chewing on your cuticles or biting shit like your pencils, so I just assumed, you know? That’s why I let you suck on my nipple that one night. You were understimulated all day and it seemed like it made you feel better.”
John said it like it was the most normal thing in the world, like he hadn’t just put a name to something Bob had struggled with his entire life. Not only that, but he’d casually revealed that he’d noticed every one of Bob’s embarrassing habits and he didn’t care. The only thing he took away from them was that Bob was uncomfortable.
“I didn’t— I didn’t know there was a name for it,” Bob admitted.
“Oh, shit. Yeah.” Then John looked a little guilty, like he’d withheld the information on purpose. Like it was somehow his job to explain to Bob what he was dealing with. “Yeah, I learned about it a bit in college. There’s a lot of psychology behind it we can get into later but it’s pretty much just what you have: a strong need for oral stimulation.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Bother me? That a really hot guy wants to suck on me? No, Bob, that doesn’t bother me.”
He didn’t even think before he lifted his head to kiss John’s lips. Didn’t even think before he laced his fingers around the back of John’s neck and pushed his tongue into his mouth. He licked John’s teeth, chewed on his bottom lip, kissed his beard and his cheek and every mole he could reach.
Bob pushed his knee between John’s legs, stimulated his cock enough to reinvigorate his erection. John asked him twice if he was sure he was okay and ready, and Bob told him he was. He wasn’t ready for another blowjob, but he needed something. He wanted to give John something.
Once John was properly stiff, Bob tugged John with him as he backed up until he hit the window. He opened his legs, made space for John to enter. John tried to stand for the lube, but Bob refused to let go, used his powers just long enough to summon it toward them. He squeezed his knees around John when he crawled between Bob’s legs, angled his cock and let himself inside.
They let out their respective sounds of pleasure, Bob’s a quiet whimper and John’s a loud moan. John set his hands on Bob’s hips as he thrust into him, at first slowly and then faster and harder as Bob allowed it. Bob could barely speak, too full of John’s throbbing shaft, but he found it in him to nod his permission at every step.
A few minutes in, John shifted his left hand to Bob’s belly, gently grasped his cock where it laid flat across his skin; drops of precum leaking out every time John thrusted.
“God, I fucking love your cock,” John mumbled, his thumb catching Bob’s next drip. “Can’t get enough of you leaking for me.”
“I hate it,” said Bob, too full to focus on the embarrassment the puddle of precum brought him. “Fucking hate how sensitive I am.”
“I know.” John rubbed the tip of Bob’s cock with his thumb, urging him to welcome the release he tried so hard to delay. “That’s why I’m telling you I love it. You don’t have to strain for me.”
The word of permission was enough for Bob’s body to decide it was time. He gasped as he bit down on his thumb, let out a trembling, “Fuck,” as his hips bucked upward. The sudden change in angle made him spill warm, white ropes from his own belly to his chest through John’s fingers as he clawed John’s back.
John kept his thumb swirling Bob’s tip as he worked him through his orgasm, milked him for every drop he had. When his cock finally finished draining, twitching limply on his belly, Bob grabbed the back of John’s head and asked breathlessly, “Can you come?”
“What?”
“Right now. Can you?”
“Inside?”
“John.”
It took him a few more seconds of painfully sensitive thrusts before he did. Bob gasped when John’s release flooded his insides, seemingly overflowing as his own cock somehow managed to drip just a little more. He dropped his arms on John’s back when John collapsed on top of him, kissing all over his face like he couldn’t get enough.
“I’ll never hurt you,” John whispered beside his ear. “I’ll never hurt you.”
It was the first time in Bob’s life that someone said it and he believed it.
“Just a moment and we’ll get started, all right?”
Bob was twenty-nine years old, sitting on an unnervingly sterile bed. Then again, everything was unnerving to him. As part of the experiment he’d signed up for, they’d helped him detox. It was the first time since he was twelve that he’d gone more than twenty-four hours without using anything and every part of him longed for it.
Logically, Bob understood that the reason they wanted him to detox was because his drugs would mess with their drugs. But there was a part of him that wondered if maybe they did it because they knew how fucking hopeless he felt without them. If they’d seen his medical history and realized that if he didn’t have meth and he wasn’t having one of his “good days,” he’d just want to die. Then he would consent to pretty much anything.
He laced his fingers together, tried to stop his tremors. Aside from his mind, his hands and his mouth were bothering him the most. His tremors felt worse without drugs and his mouth just kept itching for his pipe. It was almost relieving when one of the scientists put a thermometer in his mouth, but it didn’t last nearly long enough to make a difference.
Bob swirled his tongue forward and back along his teeth, clicked his jaw side to side until it popped out and back into place again. He’d started to wonder, at some point, what the hell he’d gotten himself into. Without the drugs to “help” him, Bob’s anxiety started to take over. He couldn’t stop fidgeting, shaking his hands, kicking his legs against the bench.
“This guy is the one I told you about,” said one of the scientists in a low tone he clearly thought Bob couldn’t hear. “I know everyone she recruited is bottom of the barrel but this guy really takes the cake. Check his file.”
Of course, in a place where everyone was supposed to be just as fucked up as him, Bob still managed to be worse. That was his thing, wasn’t it? From the time that Bob was a baby, all he’d ever done was make things worse. His parents made that clear. He ruined their lives when he was conceived and just kept making things worse after that.
He thought again of all the things he promised himself he’d never do. He thought of how, as a child, he told himself that he would grow out of his need to put things in his mouth. Of how he was almost thirty years old, and he was chewing on his cuticle because he was anxious and uncomfortable.
He thought of how he spent his childhood watching his mother struggle with addiction and mental illness. Of how he’d been hospitalized half a dozen times because the meth and whatever mental illness he had were such a dangerous combination, the judge ruled it wasn’t safe to leave him on the streets.
He thought of how his dad called him slurs from the time he was ten until he left home. Of how he told his dad over and over that he wasn’t a fag, he didn’t want to suck cock. How he stared at all the nice boys who didn’t want him, how he got on his knees for any disgusting man who did so long as they had meth.
“Are you ready, Robert?”
Bob nodded. He was ready. He’d made up his mind the moment he signed up for the experiment. It would only end in one of two ways, he decided. The first was that it would do what it was intended to and that he would finally become something more than what he was. The second was that he would just get more drugs, and he would overdose, and he would die because it was the universe’s proof that he wasn’t meant to be anything.
He wasn’t meant to be loved or held. He wasn’t even meant to be treated with compassion or dignity. From the moment he was born, the world decided that he wasn’t worth it, and it decided that over and over again.
Right when he started to get his shit together and plan for a better future, the universe put him in the car accident. He got addicted to morphine, gave up on everything, and might as well have not even made it to high school. And then the universe decided that wasn’t good enough, so it gave him meth.
And even though he’d made peace with his sexuality long ago, it still bothered Bob sometimes. It bothered him that he was exactly what his father told him he would be. Every little detail from inheriting his mother’s mental illness to using drugs to being interested in dick.
That really did fuck him up the most, in a lot of ways. He’d dreamed for so long that he would someday prove his father wrong and instead, he’d spent the last fifteen years proving him right. And if his father was right about all those things, maybe he was right about everything.
Maybe Bob wasn’t worth anything at all.
He chewed on his cuticles the entire time the scientists worked through his vitals and whatever else it was they were doing. He chewed on his cuticles until they bled and for the first time in a long time, no one pointed out what he had done.
It occurred to him as they prepared his arm for an injection that it was because they saw Bob in the same way as all the men he fucked. He wasn’t a person, he was just a piece of meat for them to use for their own benefit. And he couldn’t even be mad. Just like he’d offered his body for abuse, he’d offered it to science. All he got was what he asked for, what he deserved.
Bob found himself wishing, just before the world went dark, that the experiment would end in his death. He finally understood after a lifetime of struggling to be something that he never would. That his worth was exactly nothing at all.
He didn’t matter to anyone, and he never would.
“You want to do cock warming.”
Bob was thirty years old, sitting on the edge of his bed when he choked on his own spit. Him and John had just been talking up to that point, John rambling on about this and that while Bob listened and chewed on his thumbnail. He turned to John, eyes wide as an awkward smile pulled at the edge of his lips.
“I want to do what?”
“Cock warming,” John repeated, as if it was a perfectly normal and expected thing to say. He’d already made himself comfortable lying down on Bob’s pillows, his legs spread just enough to take up a stupid amount of the bed. “You know, you put my cock in your mouth and you just kind of… hold it there.”
Bob kicked off his slippers, turned around, and laid on his stomach beside John. He didn’t even flinch when John grabbed the side of his head and pulled him in close enough to kiss his hair. “That’s not a thing.”
“No, it’s a thing. People do it while they’re just, like, watching TV and shit. They say it’s relaxing and intimate and whatever.”
“What the fuck were you watching last night?”
“I wasn’t watching stuff,” said John, his cheeks flushed, “I was reading stuff. I was thinking about what you said about how you could never enjoy a blowjob because men always made you go faster or deeper and—” He took a deep breath and kissed Bob’s head again. “Sorry, shit pisses me off. Anyway, I was thinking you can’t be the only one, right? Who… what was that you said? You like the weight of it? Yeah. And you’re not. Other people do that too.”
The fact that other people did it wasn’t as reassuring as the fact that John wanted to. Bob leaned into John’s touch as John’s fingers massaged the back of his head, gently undid a stray tangle. It did sound nice. Just being close to John and holding him in his mouth. Bob swallowed his shame, lifted his gaze to meet John’s.
“So, how do you do it?”
“However you want to, I think.” John stroked Bob’s cheek with his knuckles, stared at him like he couldn’t look away. “However you’re comfortable. You want to try it?”
Suddenly, he felt like John was pressured into it. Like the only reason he brought it up was because it was something he thought Bob would like. “I mean, if you’re— if you’re into it.”
John twisted his thumb, slipped it into Bob’s mouth with a smile. Bob hated the way his chest tightened, the way his body expected John to yank on his teeth. He sucked gently on John’s thumb, held it between his lips until John said, “Just tell me how you want me.”
“Just like that.”
Bob shimmed down the mattress on his stomach, curled his fingers into the waistband of John’s sweatpants and underwear. He kissed John’s belly as he tugged the fabric down his legs, wiggled it around his feet, and discarded it on the floor. He lifted his right hand up and touched John’s half-hard shaft with two fingers as he settled back on his stomach between John’s legs. Bob rested his head on John’s hip, stared at his cock like it was just out of reach.
Then John’s hand landed on the back of his head, lightly played with his hair, and Bob closed his eyes and opened his lips.
He tasted a little salty, a little sweet. He felt wrinkly, not quite hard enough for a blowjob but just hard enough for what Bob was trying to do. Bob didn’t draw John in far—maybe an inch, an inch and a half—but John was thick, and Bob was salivating, and the weight of it scratched an itch that Bob couldn’t satisfy in any other way.
And his heart did pound a little like John was going to grab his hair and push himself in farther, but he didn’t. John let Bob do with his mouth whatever he wanted to. He didn’t tell Bob to move faster, didn’t try to shove his cock against the back of Bob’s throat. He just twisted his right hand in Bob’s hair, stared at him like he was perfect even though he wasn’t moving or teasing and he was wearing a sweatshirt that was way too big to be sexy.
Bob curled his left arm around John’s leg, held his shaft in his right. He suckled on John, eyes closed, barely breathing, and his body finally started to relax. His mouth finally started to relax. Bob forgot so quickly how he was stimulating John that it actually surprised him when he milked his first drops of precum, when John let out a slow, stifled groan beneath his breath.
“You good, baby?” asked John softly, his eyes on Bob’s mouth, on the movement of his muscles as he shifted his tongue, swallowed John’s precum. Bob nodded as he pulled back. He lifted his hand to wipe his chin of the trail connecting them, only for John to nudge him back down. “You can keep going.”
He closed his eyes, dug his fingers into John’s thigh as he kissed the tip of his cock and pulled it back into his mouth. It was ironic that after John had told Bob not to strain himself, John did the exact same thing. It was slow, gradual, but John did get harder, louder. But he just kept brushing Bob’s hair, kept encouraging him to keep going, until his hips twitched and finally nudged Bob’s face away.
John’s breath hitched when he spilled a white, warm release over himself; when he pushed his leg to the side, grabbed Bob’s shoulders and pulled him up to his chest. He kissed the top of Bob’s head, shuddering as Bob settled at his side. It took him a minute to relax before he could speak again, before he kissed Bob again and said, “Sorry. Tried not to.”
“It’s okay.”
It was probably for the best that John made him stop. If he hadn’t, Bob might have stayed there forever. He reached for a towel on his nightstand but John took it from him, refused to let him do the work. John wiped himself off, tossed the towel on the carpet with his pants, and wrapped his arm back around Bob. His breaths were long and slow, deep and relaxed, and his heartbeat was the same.
That was his safe place, Bob realized. The place he’d been searching for his whole life. It wasn’t the Watchtower, wasn’t his bedroom in it. It was in John’s arms, lying on his chest, just listening to him exist. Bob twisted his ankle around John’s and curled in tighter to his side. John set his right hand on Bob’s back, rubbed circles into his sweatshirt as he closed his eyes. He rarely saw John look that relaxed either. Maybe Bob was his safe place too.
“You’re not chewing your thumb anymore,” John mused. Bob pressed his fingers into John’s side. He hadn’t realized he was doing it before. “You feel better?”
Bob nodded against John’s chest. All that and the only thing John wanted was to know if Bob was okay. Because he cared. Because it mattered to him that Bob was comfortable, that he felt safe, that he could communicate what he needed.
It was maybe the wrong time, maybe too soon, maybe presumptuous when they’d never told anyone or put a label on their relationship. But something came over Bob and he couldn’t stop himself from whispering the words, “I love you.”
The moment of silence lasted long enough for Bob to doubt himself. John’s heart raced a little faster beneath Bob’s hand and he swallowed hard twice. Bob tried to look at him, but John wouldn’t look back. He just stared at the ceiling, not looking at Bob, not speaking a word. That was it. Bob went too far, cared too much. He meant something to John but not as much as John meant to him.
“You don’t have to say it back,” mumbled Bob. He resisted the urge to add because I know I’m unlovable.
“Shit.” John wet his lips, shifted on the mattress as he squeezed Bob so hard it almost hurt. “No, I didn’t— I love you, Bobby, ‘course I do. I just…”
John’s voice trailed off, and Bob’s imagination ran wild. There were so many things he could say. So many ways that he could tell Bob they could never be together, not really. Bob was so stuck on the idea that John didn’t want to be with him that he barely registered the “I love you,” didn’t at all expect what he actually said.
“Didn’t think anyone could love me anymore.”
Rather than say a word, Bob shifted on top of John and kissed him. He twisted his fingers deep in John’s hair, showed him with his mouth just how much he meant to him. John slid his hands under the back of Bob’s sweatshirt and clung to his bare skin. He dragged his fingers up and down Bob’s spine, squeezed his shoulder blades, settled on his hips.
Maybe they weren’t lovable to anyone else, but they were to each other. Maybe they were both broken, but they were broken together.
“I don’t want to embarrass you,” started John teasingly, “but you’re poking my leg.”
“Sorry,” Bob told him between kisses, unwilling to completely remove his lips from John’s skin, “you’re really hot.”
“C’mere.”
John rolled over so that he was on top of Bob. His cock was still tired, just half-hard against Bob’s stomach, but he had the super soldier stamina get himself going again. He looked to Bob for permission before he slid off his pants in one fell swoop; before he pushed Bob’s sweatshirt over his head and let Bob do the same to him because it just wasn’t fair that John could see Bob’s chest and Bob couldn’t see his.
He squeezed John’s hips as he spread his legs apart, as John got them ready. Bob grasped his fleshy skin as John moved his fingers in and out, bit down on John’s neck when he pushed himself inside, slowly filling Bob with his thick warmth.
“Need to work out more,” John muttered as Bob squeezed his waist.
Bob shook his head, let out an involuntary sound before he said, “I love your belly.”
“Hmph.” He thrusted forward and back, kept going long enough to earn a few stolen drops from the tip of Bob’s cock. John stopped moving suddenly, his cock barely pressed against Bob’s prostate as he grabbed Bob’s shaft and mimicked his tone. “I love your cock.”
They loved everything about each other that they hated about themselves. Bob held John’s waist tight, mumbled for him to stop when he started to move again. John pulled out halfway and Bob quickly shook his head and nudged him back inside. Their eyes met, neither speaking as John stared, confused, and Bob breathed through the intense, warm pressure on his insides.
“Just stay like this,” Bob explained in a breathless whisper. His cock was still leaking on his own belly, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care because John kept glancing at it, kept licking his lips like he couldn’t get enough. “Just for a minute.”
“I’m on your prostate,” said John, his tone a little puzzled and a little concerned. “It’s not too much?”
Bob shook his head and tugged John’s lips down to meet his. There was no such thing as too much of John. For the first time in his life, Bob trusted a man wholly and completely. He trusted John not to hurt him, not to push him further than he could go. He trusted John not to make fun of him when he whimpered and a tiny spurt of precum spilled out his cock. He trusted John to know him better than he knew himself, to know when he needed to start moving again because the constant pressure became too much.
He wasn’t just everything Bob always wanted in every single way, he was everything that he needed. Everything he never thought he’d have.