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Dennis sleeps.
He wasn't sure he would. He hasn't shared a bed since childhood, and his brother was was thrasher, leaving Dennis clinging to the edge of the bed to avoid the onslaught.
Robby is the opposite. From Dennis's tiny sample size of a few implausible hours, Robby sleeps like the dead. Even now, his arm is heavy over Dennis's middle, his forehead curled into Dennis's nape. He's warm and solid and reassuring, and still Dennis aches with his own covetous.
It is not morning, but Dennis has a crick in his neck from passing out on Robby's arm. The urge to move is pressing, but even more so is his determination not to. What if Robby wakes up, what if he realizes in his post-trauma haze, he brought an MS4 into his home, into his bed, for a fucking cuddle. Even worse, what if he kicks Dennis out? What if Dennis never gets to feel this good again? Not losing this is surely worth not moving, right?
A wretched few minutes pass. Dennis's neck is threatening spasm before he finally braves a wriggle, turning his body as gingerly as possible until he is facing his attending. He tries his best not to breathe.
Robby stirs and Dennis registers a flickering hint of despair, waiting for the ax to fall.
“You good?” Robby asks, voice rough, eyes still closed.
“Yes,” Dennis says quickly. “All good.”
“Hm,” Robby acknowledges. He shifts onto his back, lifting the arm closer to Dennis towards the headboard. “C'mere.”
Dennis doesn't hesitate for fear that Robby will come to his senses and retract the offer. He scoots closer, fitting into the space vacated by Robby's arm, his head resting on Robby's chest, tucked neatly under his chin. Robby's arm comes back down, encircling him, hand finding Dennis's head and sifting through the still-damp curls. Tentatively, Dennis reaches out, astounded by his own tenacity, letting his palm find the beat of Robby's heart through the worn cotton of his T-shirt.
“Good boy,” Robby mutters. Or at least that is what Dennis thinks he says. Just the suggestion of those words whiplashes through him, re-routing his neural passageways. Fuck medical school, he imagines wildly. His only goal going forward will be to get Robby to say that to him again.
Dennis freezes, still holding his breath, and praying that Robby can't feel the newfound sinus tachycardia hammering away at the spot where their chests meet.
Dennis feels his cock start to fill, which absolutely doesn't help matters. This is his actual, personal fucking purgatory.
He has spent so long pretending his sexuality doesn't exist. He's not lied to himself, not completely. He never believed himself to be straight, but he'd half convinced himself that he wasn't gay, either. Like maybe if he just threw himself into his studies, he could live like a hermit, denying himself entirely, until it took.
He gasps in a breath as silently as he can, and shifts his hips away minutely, unable to contemplate the calamity that would be Robby noticing. The friction of the movement only encourages his unruly dick, and Dennis is actively horrified by the realizations hurtling toward him. Things like how he wants desperately, brutally, to be good. That is not new, he reminds himself. He's always wanted that, took on extra chores on the farm, learned all his verses word-perfect for Sunday School, led his classes in exam scores, not due to natural brilliance, but through dogged, relentless review.
No, he realizes with a sickening lurch. He doesn't just want to be good, but he wants to be told he is good. Specifically, he wants to be told like that.
He wants to shake Robby awake and demand he say it again, plead for the singular details of how he managed to earn it, and what precisely he would have to do to hear it a second time.
Good boy.
Dennis tries to approach it cerebrally, to dissect it, pare it down to its base components, and identify exactly what about it he liked so much. So much. Objectively, it is patronizing. Something more likely to be said to a dog than a person. But a part of Dennis must like patronizing, because Robby's other go-to nicknames for him also cause Dennis's face to heat, and coax an uncomfortable, undeniable urge to blossom in the very core of him.
It's embarrassing, sure, but without the keen blade of humiliation, and blunted further in how it is all wrapped up in something approaching tenderness, or maybe even care.
Dennis is suspended in that nauseating, free-falling moment before a hypnic jerk. Everything in him twists and panics and revolts, because all he wants is for Robby to tell him what to do, just so he can do it. Worst of all, he is unwavering in his belief that there is very little he wouldn’t do if a 'good boy' was the result.
Distressingly, he is fully fucking hard just imagining it. His brain is refusing to supply him with specific images. Instead, he is engulfed by this amorphous fantasy of adoring obedience. Hell, he is not even sure if it sexual, or domestic, or work-related, or if there is even a differentiation for him. He is afraid to find out.
It's fucked. It's extra fucked, because Dennis knows better than most where blind obedience can lead. He saw first-hand how his parents privileged their faith over his well-being. Dennis is disgusted with himself. He shouldn't want this. He should be viciously opposed to anything akin to it. He has fought so hard against submission, valuing reason, science, independent thought, so how can he want this? There is a rotten seed inside of him trying to corrupt everything he's worked for, and he's damned to water it, let its vines coil through his vasculature. He knows he will.
He sucks his inner cheek between his teeth and bites down, hard. God, he's such an idiot. Robby isn't even asking for any of that. This is a fiction of Dennis's own making and he is being actually insane right now.
“Whitaker,” Robby grumbles. His hand finds the back of Dennis's neck and squeezes. Dennis is a puppy being yanked in line by the scruff. He hates how bad he wants it. “Whatever it is, it can wait until morning. You need to sleep, so sleep.”
“Sorry,” Dennis says earnestly.
“Don’t be sorry. Be sleepy.”
Dennis screws his eyes shut, burying his face in the tight cords that are Robby’s sternocleidomastoids, letting the rhythm of Robby's carotid sedate him like a lullaby.
"That’s it, you're okay," Robby soothes, fingers reverently marking the landmarks of Dennis's spine and skull. Dennis feels himself let go and succumb to sleep, or Robby, or probably both. "'Atta boy."