Chapter Text
“It’s been too long, Marge. I don’t think I can.”
Almost as if he conjured it out of thin air, there’s suddenly an arm slung over Gale’s shoulder and voice in his ear. “Can’t what?”
“Hi, John,” Marge greets, teasing lilt to her voice that tells Gale she absolutely saw John walk in. It’s what he gets for having such a private conversation in the teacher’s lounge with his back to the door, but he glares at her anyway. It’s a poor attempt at reprimanding her that goes largely ignored.
John leans forward with no regard for how Gale’s shoulder digs right into his chest, it takes a concentrated effort to stay relaxed.
“Nothing,” he answers, albeit with less confidence than he’d like. He wants to take a step outside John’s circle but he’s doing that thing with his eyes and Gale can’t move an inch.
“Aw, c’mon, Buck. I thought we were friends.”
It was less a mutual decision of friendship and more John simply barging into his life and demanding a seat at the table, but Gale wouldn’t have it any other way—most of the time. Now is one of the rare times where restraint from John would’ve been appreciated.
“Yeah, Gale, aren’t you friends?”
He can’t help but groan when Marge fixes him with a stare, John is still behind him, all but whining like a kicked puppy. Unstoppable force meets immovable object, and Gale is caught right in the middle.
“It’s nothing. Seriously.”
“You’re a moron, you know that? Bye, John.”
She stares at Gale a beat longer, muttering a quiet ‘ugh’ before leaning up to kiss his cheek because they both know she’s too much of a sweetheart to walk away without saying goodbye. He tries his best not to smile but knows he failed from the way she rolls her eyes.
John pulls away and Gale tries his best to not be disappointed by the loss of his warmth. “See ya, Margie.”
Gale doesn’t have same speaking skills Curt has, doesn’t know how to begin getting himself out of the hole he’s in when he notices John with something that looks too close to a pout for a grown man to be sporting. He’s endeared anyway.
“It’s nothing, John. I promise.”
“Is it, like, private?”
Truth be told, it is private. Very, very private. Never willingly disclose this information to anyone besides Marge kind of private. But John just seems so sad and for all of Gale’s stubbornness, John has always been his biggest weakness.
“A little, yeah—but,” Gale bites the inside of his cheek to buy himself a second, “Marge was asking me if I wanted to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend and, well.”
“Well?”
“I have a… problem.”
“Right.”
“I have,” he motions towards his body, “a problem.”
“Heard you the first time.”
Gale sighs. “You can’t need me to say it out loud.”
“I think I do, Buck. I have no idea what this,” John mirrors the same motion, “is supposed to mean.”
The thing is, since he met John, it’s been the easiest thing in the world to communicate with him. Part of the reason why is because he doesn’t have to outwardly say most things. John has this almost uncanny ability to read his mind, that if he were a more gullible individual, he’d probably believe John has superpowers.
So having to say something this monumentally embarrassing to him might require a more courage than Gale has and John is doing everything he can to make this experience so much more hellish than it needs to be. He swallows the embarrassment bubbling in his throat and tries his best to look John in the eye when he says it.
“Okay. When I have sex, it usually doesn’t go well because it doesn’t, uh, last.”
John furrows his brows. “So, you struggle with your stamina? How long do your partners usually want to go for?”
“The average amount of time, I guess.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I can’t have sex with anyone,” he pitches his voice as low as it’ll go and leans in to speak directly into John’s ear, “because I finish too fast.”
“Yeah, and—oh.”
Gale pulls away and notices the shells of John’s ears have gone beet-red. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so close when he admitted that; there’s a simmering warmth settling into the bottom of his gut. It’s something like embarrassment but Gale finds that he doesn’t mind so much when John spends a moment blinking dumbly at him.
“You or your partners haven’t…”
“I’ve tried, not much works besides using a spray or cream.”
“Don’t those just numb you?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait, so you’ve been numbing your d—”
Gale shushes him loud enough to draw a stare from the only other teacher in the room. “Can we take this conversation to somewhere that isn’t here?”
“Shit, yeah, sorry.” He leads them out with a warm palm on Gale’s elbow. His stomach does a little flip, and he casts a glance down to make sure his body isn’t already betraying him—he’s not a teenager, he doesn’t get hard from a stiff breeze, but this is unchartered territory.
“Okay,” John exhales once they’re a good distance from listening ears. “Walk me through this.”
Gale blinks, once, twice. John’s fingers are still wrapped around his elbow like he hasn’t remembered to step back yet and the air around them smells like him—sweat and cologne, something smoky like the tobacco you could smell on him after work.
“Walk you through what?”
“Sex, if you have to use a numbing spray, does it feel good? At all?” He jostles Gale’s elbow a little, like he’s trying to emphasise his question, eyes wide and unblinking.
“It feels okay; I guess. You don’t lose sensation entirely, it’s just less intense. Sometimes I can’t get hard.”
Gale suddenly feels his joints lock up from how badly he wants to take that last bit back, gritting his teeth so hard he hears his jaw click. John, on the other hand, stands there—slack-jawed and a little stupid looking, long enough for Gale to shift away from him. Like the movement snapped his senses back into place, he closes his mouth and clears his throat.
“Sorry, I just—you can’t get hard?”
“Happened once or twice, but yeah.”
“Well, that’s not so bad, it happens to the best of us.”
Gale swiftly ignores the implication. “Given my track record, it’s not great.”
“Huh?”
He’s at a cross-roads; he has the option to shut this conversation down and act like it never happened. Sure, the guilt at having to stomp on John’s curiosity will weigh on him, but it beats the alternative, which is airing out his dirty laundry. But John has always been one of Gale’s biggest weaknesses.
“I’ve only ever had sex a few times.”
“Okay.”
“I mean,” Gale takes a breath to steady himself, “I’ve had sex, or almost had sex, maybe five times. Once in college, the other times after I graduated.”
“Hold on—”
It’s easy to steamroll over him because if he doesn’t get this out now, he never will. “She was nice, in college, knew I was a virgin and said she didn’t mind when I finished maybe thirty seconds after we got started—she said that it’s normal because I haven’t had any practice, but I knew, y’know? It wasn’t just with other people, I can’t last too long, even by myself.”
“Yeah,” John whispers, taking half a step forward, and another.
They’re standing far closer than what would be considered appropriate for two teachers on school grounds, but Gale continues barrelling through. “After that, I never slept with anyone in college because I thought people would find out, not everyone was as nice as Vivi. When I got a job, I met another person but I couldn’t get it up—couldn’t continue seeing him either. Then, I met this woman who thought it was cute, I guess, I had sex with her twice and couldn’t get it up the third time.”
And that’s it, that’s Gale’s entire sexual history, summarised in mere seconds. As a young teenager, he had the silly notion that he’d save himself for marriage, but somewhere between then and his junior year at college, it fell through. Even if it’d happened earlier, he isn’t sure he’d have ever tried before then.
“You couldn’t get it up for the man you were seeing?”
Gale definitely expected questions, but this is far enough removed from what he thought John would ask that the answer comes out unbidden in his surprise. “It’s not what you think, I got excited over the prospect of having sex with a man and knew it’d be as bad as college all over again, so I used more numbing cream than I needed to.”
In a way, he’s grateful to the last woman, Ellie—sex had always felt like it was two parts humiliation ritual and one part chore to Gale, if it weren’t for her, and a frankly uncomfortable conversation they had in their last encounter, he might not have figured out that the problem wasn’t him as much as it was the partners he was choosing. Or maybe he would have, because he met John a few months after his little awakening.
John laughs, boisterously loud and not at all cruel. “Gotcha. So,” Gale steels himself for the questions when John suddenly becomes serious, “you’ve never had the chance to actually practice, with another person.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It’s embarrassing, I don’t—”
“It isn’t, though. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m sure if you found a partner that you feel comfortable, and safe with, you’ll be fine. It’d take some trying, but it’s not a lost cause.”
“Yeah? And where do you suggest I find someone willing to put up with that?”
John shrugs. “Me.”