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The paper on the exam table crackles every time Verso shifts, and he has been shifting quite a few times in the last four minutes, because he is nervous. He is always nervous at this appointment, and it is only partly about the health of his prostate.
Gustave is half-turned away at the computer, scrolling through last week's bloodwork. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow on the right. The left one stays buttoned down over the carbon, which Verso worked out somewhere around year two is about how cold they keep this building and not about hiding anything.
The brown curls are slightly shorter than last year. There's more grey at the temples than there was, and it's spread into the beard, and the round glasses are the same round glasses they have always been. Forty-four has done nothing to Gustave Virlogeux except make him even more devastatingly handsome.
"PSA's good," Gustave says. "Same as last year, which is what we want. Free-to-total ratio's fine too." He taps something on the keyboard. "Honestly your numbers are boring, Verso. I love that for you."
Verso chuckles dryly. "I think that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all month."
Gustave smiles faintly at the monitor. "That's grim."
"Well, it's August. My students don’t come back until October, so there’s nobody around to say anything to me at all." He shrugs and grins. "Which is a shame, because it turns out I quite like being told nice things about my bloodwork. Especially by handsome doctors."
The tapping stops.
"Well." Gustave clears his throat, still facing the screen. "Do you have any other regular check-ups?"
"I do — unfortunately, there's only one good-looking urologist around."
Gustave huffs a laugh but still doesn't turn around, and Verso watches the back of his neck go slightly pink above the collar, the way it has, every time, for five years running.
Because that's the thing about this appointment.
It is a forty-minute slot in the second week of August, and it exists because the male members of his family have a history of prostate cancer, which means Verso started screening at thirty-eight instead of fifty like a normal person. It is a medical procedure. It involves a paper sheet. It is also, if he’s counting, the longest anyone touches him in any given year.
That isn’t as bleak as it sounds. He simply hasn’t made any effort. Fifteen years of hotel rooms and hotel bars and men whose names he learned at midnight and forgot by the flight, and he came out the other end of it wanting the exact opposite — no noise, no schedule, nobody waiting on him. And then the quiet was finally there and he found he was too worn out to do anything with it. Meeting people takes energy. Talking to them takes more. Some weeks he does not have it.
It’s easy with Gustave, though. It has always been easy with Gustave.
He has been back in Lumière five years now. He teaches piano at the conservatory, four days a week, second floor, in a studio with a radiator that clanks. He has a mortgage. He goes to the same market on Saturdays and the woman at the cheese counter knows his name and asks about his dog, Monoco. It is exactly the life he wanted when he stopped touring — the one he told himself he was owed after fifteen years of hotel rooms and airport lounges and the specific loneliness of being applauded by two thousand people and then eating alone at eleven at night.
He got the quiet. He absolutely got the quiet.
Nobody warned him how much of it there would be.
"Okay." Gustave rolls the stool around to face him, and folds his hand over his knee. It's a small gesture, but Verso gets the distinct impression that Gustave is nervous. "So. Small logistical thing."
Verso raises one elegant eyebrow. "That's never a small thing when a doctor says it."
The corner of Gustave's mouth curves up, and his hazel eyes crinkle a little behind the round glasses. "It's small. The thing is … our probe's out." He tips his head toward the corner, where the ultrasound cart sits with a laminated sign taped to the transducer holder. "Transrectal one, I mean. Sterilizer flagged it Thursday, it's gone back to the manufacturer, we get it back in … eleven days? Or maybe twelve."
"Okay," Verso says slowly. "We can also reschedule and I come back when—"
"Ah no, there's no need," Gustave interrupts him gently. "We'll just be doing the digital exam today. Fingers," he adds, unnecessarily, and then seems to hear himself and pushes his glasses up his nose.
The word hits him sideways. Not the clinical fact of it, this he knows. But the concrete implication: Gustave’s fingers, inside him, in about four minutes. And his cock gives a distinct and unmistakable twitch against his thigh.
Verso swallows and stares at the wall, trying to rein his body back in.
He is forty-five years old. He has played in the most prestigious concert halls in the world. He owns a house, and a dog. Being turned on by your doctor is honestly too pathetic, even for him.
Somewhere to his left, Gustave is still talking.
"Which is — that’s how it was done for about ninety years before we had — before there were … toys." A beat. Verso looks back at Gustave and can see the exact moment the mortification registers in his brain. His eyes widen. "Toys. Not toys. Tools. Instruments. Imaging instruments." He drags his hand down his face. "Putain. I’m not doing this right."
Verso laughs quietly. "You're selling it very hard, Gustave."
"I'm aware." He's gone pink again. "The machine still works, by the way, the unit works, it's just the specific probe. So if anything feels off, I can still get a look with the abdominal transducer, it's less detailed but it's — it's something."
"Great," Verso chokes out. "Wonderful. Love a backup plan."
Gustave is watching him, and there’s a small line between his eyebrows that Verso has learned means he’s about to apologize for something that isn’t his fault.
"Gustave. It’s fine."
"It’s just not how I’d have—"
"It’s fine," Verso repeats. "It’s you. I’d rather it was you than a stranger and a machine, honestly."
He's aiming for dry. It comes out about a half-step higher than dry. Gustave doesn't seem to notice, which is a mercy, because Verso has just experienced a full-body reaction to the word fingers delivered in a French accent by a man in a lab coat, and he'd rather not broadcast this embarrassment.
Gustave looks at him for a second longer.
"Right," he says then, seemingly making a decision. "Okay. Good. Then we'll proceed."
Gustave stands, crosses to the sink, and starts washing his hand. His voice is back to normal now, the professional composure restored. "Everything else good? Any changes since last year — urgency, getting up at night, anything with flow?"
"No."
"Blood in anything?"
"No."
"Sex life normal?"
Verso opens his mouth.
Closes it.
"Define normal," he offers, with a grin he's glad Gustave can't see.
Gustave laughs into the sink. It's the real one, the one that comes out through his nose, and Verso feels it lodge in the middle of his chest with the accuracy of a dart.
"Erections fine, orgasm fine, no pain?"
A beat. Verso tries to remember the last time he jerked off before answering. "All fine."
"Good." Gustave shakes the water off and reaches for the towel. "You can get undressed from the waist down, the sheet is already there as well. Then please settle back down on the chair, on your left side, knees up toward your chest — same as always."
"Same as always," Verso agrees, and gets to work.
The first time, five years ago, nobody had warned either of them.
He'd been eleven weeks back in the city and still trying to shed his old life — still reaching for a phone that didn't have a tour manager on the other end of it, still buying too much food. He'd made the urology appointment from a list his GP gave him, picked a name at random because the clinic was four Métro stops from the apartment, and he had shown up with his coat over his arm expecting nothing at all.
And a man had come in with a chart and said Monsieur Dessendre? before freezing entirely.
Twenty-two years. Twenty-two years, and Verso had known him inside of a second: not the face, exactly, because the face had gained a beard and two decades and a pair of round glasses, but the way he stood there holding a clipboard against his chest like it was going to save him.
"Gustave?"
"Verso." His voice had dropped, and then climbed back up, until settling in some weird middle cadence. "I— I didn't realize you're back in Lumière. So you're — this is you. This appointment is you."
"This appointment is me." They stood there for a moment, just looking at each other.
"Right." Gustave had dragged his gaze back down at the chart. Looked at the door. Looked, briefly and with visible horror, at the exam table. "So I should … do you want a different — I can absolutely get you Dr. Marchand, she's excellent, she's — honestly she's better than me at the—"
"Gustave."
"—because there's a whole thing about prior relationships, and we did - I mean we knew each other, at—"
"Gustave."
He'd stopped. He'd been so red it had gone all the way into his ears.
And Verso, who had spent fifteen years learning how to walk onto a stage in front of strangers and make it look easy and confident, had heard himself say: "It's been twenty-two years. I think we can survive one prostate exam."
Gustave had laughed so hard he'd had to take the glasses off.
It had been so awkward, that first time. It had been magnificently awkward, both of them talking too much and neither of them looking anywhere, and Verso had walked out into the rain afterward and laughed at nothing on the sidewalk for a full minute, just to expel all of the nervous energy he'd suddenly felt.
After, he'd assumed that was it. One weird afternoon, filed away, a story for a dinner party.
Except there'd been another one the next August. And another. And by the third year, Gustave was telling him about his sister's second kid before he got anywhere near the gloves, and by the fourth they'd stopped pretending the appointment was twenty minutes long. They run over. They have always run over. He is always the last slot of the day and he has never once asked why.
And outside of it: they meet at the market, usually twice a month. At the bookshop on rue Villette, once, where Gustave had been holding a novel he clearly wasn't going to buy and they'd talked for twenty minutes in the doorway. A tram platform in February. Each time the same rhythm: the delight, the twenty minutes of easy conversation, the well, the I should, the both of them backing away still talking.
Neither of them has ever made a move.
Twenty-two years, and then five more, and Verso can account for every single one of those meetings: where they stood, what Gustave was wearing, which book he wasn’t buying. And if his memory renders the brown curls and the hazel eyes and that easy crooked smile in high definition on certain evenings, alone, then that is nobody’s business but his.
Behind the curtain, he gets his shoes off, then his trousers, then his shorts, and folds all of it over the back of the chair with more care than any of it deserves.
Then he looks down.
He is half hard. Not dramatically, but just enough, and the thoughts that got him there are still very fresh in his mind.
Verso regards his own cock with the sternest expression he can manage, on the theory that it might respond to authority.
It does not, of course.
“Fine,” he tells it, under his breath, and picks up the sheet.
He gets it arranged. It is a pointless sheet. It has one job and it is bad at it.
"Ready when you are," he calls, even though he feels not ready for this at all. He is very certain that he is going to embarrass himself in the next four minutes, and tries to brace for it.
The curtain slides back. Gustave comes around with the stool and settles at the side of the table, pulls the tray closer, and the whole thing is so calm and so procedural that Verso's heart rate really has no business doing what it is currently doing.
"Okay. Left side, good. Knees up a bit more if you can — yeah. Perfect."
Verso pulls his knees up a little further and his gaze lands on the wall.
The wall has a poster on it about hydration.
"You know the drill," Gustave begins, his voice settling back into the level professional register, "but I'll narrate anyway, because this time is a little different. Glove, lubricant, one finger, and I'm feeling for size, texture, any nodules, any asymmetry. Thirty seconds, maybe forty. Pressure's normal. Pain isn't — if it hurts, you say so and I stop, no negotiation. Yeah?"
Verso gives a faint nod. "Yeah."
"And if you want me to stop for any other reason, that's also just — you say stop. Okay?"
"Okay," Verso agrees, still staring at the hydration poster. Eight glasses a day, says the hydration poster.
Behind him there's the crackle of the packet, and the small suction sound of a hand being squeezed into latex, and Gustave's voice, absolutely level, saying, "This will be cold for a second, sorry —"
And Verso needs to say something, anything, because he will not survive this otherwise. "Hey, Gustave."
"Mm?"
There is only one thing that comes to mind immediately. "Do you remember the prom?"
There's a pause behind him. About a second and a half of one.
"… What?"
"Nothing," Verso says, too fast, to the wall. "Just a thing I think about sometimes."
"Verso—"
"You may proceed, doctor."
Gustave makes a sound that isn't a word.
Then the glove touches him, and Verso closes his eyes.
There’s a pause. Then the cool blunt press of a carbon hand against his ass as Gustave draws his cheeks open with the prosthetic hand, because the other one is gloved and occupied, and Verso’s whole body goes tight.
And then, quietly, behind him: Gustave breathing in.
It’s nothing. It’s a doctor taking a breath before starting a procedure. Verso hears it anyway, hears exactly how careful it is, and a shiver goes down the backs of his thighs before he can do anything about it.
The lubricant is cold, exactly as advertised.
The touch is worse than cold. It’s gentle, that’s the problem; it's just the pad of one finger settled against his hole, not pushing yet, only there, waiting.
"Okay." Gustave's voice is close behind him, steady. "Bearing down helps — like you're — yeah. Yeah, like that. Good."
Then pressure. Slow, steady, no hurry in it at all, and then the give, and Verso bites down hard on the side of his tongue.
And then Gustave’s finger is inside him and his entire nervous system stands up and pays attention.
Fine. He is fine. He is a forty-five-year-old man on a table in a clinic and this is a medical procedure and he is completely fine.
"Prostate's just here," Gustave continues, conversational, like he's pointing out a building, and Verso tries not to jump from the feeling. "Front wall. Feels about the size of a walnut, which is what we want. I'm going to map it — I'll do the left lobe first, then the sulcus, then the right, and I'm checking texture as I go. Nice and smooth, no lumps, no hard spots."
His hand is warm even through the latex.
That's the first mistake, noticing that. Because once he's noticed the hand he notices the other one too — the carbon fingers resting on his hip now, holding him steady, because Gustave only has the one hand for working and so the prosthesis does the anchoring, and it has done that for five Augusts and Verso has never once let himself think about it.
He is thinking about it now.
"Left lobe's good," Gustave continues. "Symmetrical."
And Verso's mind wanders, the traitor. To the freckles first. God, the freckles, the ones across the bridge of his nose and the ones scattered down his forearm where the sleeve's rolled up, and Verso has spent five years not counting them and could still tell you exactly where they are.
"Sulcus is clear, that's the groove down the middle —"
To the laugh. The one through the nose, the one he does when he's caught off guard, and the way he takes his glasses off to do it if it's a really good one.
"— and I'm just working around to the right side now."
And to the voice, which is doing this calm competent thing, this here-is-what-I-am-doing-and-why thing, and Verso has a sudden and extremely vivid idea of what that voice would sound like saying the exact same kind of sentences about something else entirely. I'm going to open you up first. I'm going to take my time with it. Tell me if it's too much.
He shuts that down.
It comes back within a second, worse, with details.
"You okay there? You've gone quiet." Gustave's voice is quiet, but Verso can hear the tinge of worry in it. His finger is still inside him, pressed against his prostate.
"Mhm." Verso's voice does a bad job of sounding convincing. Convincing would probably require thinking about something other than the hand inside him, which he is spectacularly failing to do.
"Any pain?"
"None."
"Great, that's — okay, texture's good on this side too, give me another ten seconds —"
And Verso is picturing the sleeve. Not even anything filthy, that's the humiliating part; he's picturing Gustave rolling the right sleeve back down afterward and buttoning the cuff one-handed with his teeth, which he does, which Verso has watched him do five times, and somehow that is the image that finishes the job.
He is hard.
He is extremely, comprehensively hard, on a paper-covered table, in front of his doctor, who is currently three inches inside him.
There is a beat of nothing, and Verso's ears ring with it.
"Okay," Gustave says, and his voice hasn't changed at all. "That happens. Genuinely — it happens a lot. There's a nerve bundle running right past where I've got my finger and it doesn't know the difference between a clinic and … any different setting. It's not embarrassing and it doesn't mean anything, alright? It's natural."
"It's natural," Verso repeats faintly.
"It's natural. I've had guys apologize to me for twenty minutes about it and I always tell them the same thing, which is that I'd be more worried if nothing happened." A pause. "Do you want me to stop?"
"No."
That comes out too fast, and too flat, and Verso hears it leave his mouth and cannot do anything about it.
"Okay," Gustave says quietly, shifting slightly behind him.
And then he presses.
It's not much. It's a small, deliberate press against the front wall, the kind of thing that has happened in this room every August since five years and has never once done anything except make him mildly aware of his own bladder.
The sound that comes out of Verso is not a sound he has made in front of another person in a very long time.
The moan is low and it's broken open in the middle and it goes on slightly too long, and the room is very small, and it fills the whole thing. Verso slaps a hand in front of his mouth, mortified.
The silence after it is enormous.
"That's —" Gustave clears his throat. "That's normal too."
"Is it?" His voice is barely a sound. Putain, he feels like a teenager all over again.
"Verso, it's — the pressure sensation is —"
"Please just— just continue." He doesn't trust himself to say more.
"I need to do the right lobe again." A beat. "I want to check something."
Verso wonders, briefly, if he really needs to do the right lobe again.
He does it anyway, and he does it slower, and Verso's fingers close on the edge of the table and he moans again, higher, cut off at the end because he bites down on it, and he hears — behind him, close — Gustave breathe out shakily through his nose.
"Sorry," Verso manages.
"Don't be."
"I'm not being extremely professional about this."
"You're being — " Gustave stops. Starts again. "You're being fine. You're fine."
Another press.
This one Verso doesn't manage to bite down on at all. His hips move on their own, back, into it, before he can catch them, and his whole face goes hot, and the hydration poster swims a little in front of him.
Eight glasses a day.
Verso thinks that he will have to change doctors. Possibly move cities, again.
"Okay." Gustave's voice has dropped somewhere lower, and it sends shivers across Verso's back. "Okay. The exam's — clinically, we're done. Everything is exactly where it should be, size is fine, no nodules, I'd write it up as unremarkable."
He doesn't take his hand away, though.
Verso becomes aware, with perfect clarity, that his own breathing is the loudest thing in the room.
"Verso?" Gustave asks.
"Yeah?"
"Would you turn your head and look at me, please?"
Verso swallows heavily, but does as he is asked.
It takes actual physical effort, and when he finally manages Gustave is right there, closer than he expected, leaning in over the edge of the table with his glasses slightly askew and his mouth open and his hazel eyes absolutely steady — and that's the thing, that's the thing that undoes him, that Gustave Virlogeux, who cannot finish a sentence about a bookshop, is looking at him without a single tremor in it.
"I'm going to say something," Gustave says slowly, "and I want you to know that whatever you answer, you keep this appointment. You keep me as your doctor if you want, or I hand you to Marchand, and either way nothing bad happens to you here. Alright?"
Verso's heart beats in his throat. What is Gustave getting at? "Alright," he says out loud.
"So." His carbon thumb moves once against Verso's hip. "I can end this now. Right now, I take my hand back, I write up your notes, we talk about your sister's wedding, and neither of us ever says a word about the last two minutes for the rest of our lives. That's completely on the table and I will never bring it up again."
Verso can't speak.
"Or." A breath. "Or we continue with — and please correct me if I've got this wrong, because I have thought I had this wrong for about five years — what we both want."
The clock on the wall goes on ticking, and he is terrified.
Verso opens his mouth to say something clever. He has, at all times, something clever available; it is the single most reliable feature of his personality. It has charmed donors at receptions he did not want to attend, conductors who thought he rushed the third movement, and journalists who asked him whether the tattoos were a phase. It has never once failed him.
But now, there is nothing.
There is nothing there at all, and Gustave is waiting, and his finger is still inside him, and Verso hears himself make a small ruined noise and say, "Yes—"
"Yeah?"
"Yes, God, yes, Gustave —"
And Gustave breathes, "Okay," and his voice cracks straight down the middle on it.
For a second neither of them moves at all.
Then Gustave leans down over the table and kisses him, and it's an absurd angle, and Verso has to twist his neck to get anywhere near it, and it's still the best thing that has happened to him in five years.
It's soft, first. Careful. Gustave's beard against his mouth and his hand still exactly where it is, unmoving, and Verso gasps into it, a little helplessly, and Gustave breathes out hard through his nose and stops being careful.
"Wait — hold on —" Gustave pulls back. "Give me one second."
"Don't you dare leave—"
"I'm not leaving, I'm — the door."
He goes. Verso lies there on his side with his knees still up and his heart thundering and listens to the lock turn, and then to the blinds shutting, and then to Gustave crossing back and stopping at the end of the table.
"Last slot of the day," Gustave says casually. "Everyone's gone. Marie left at six."
"Was that always on purpose?"
"… Yes."
"For five years?"
"Verso, I would like the record to show that I'm the one who said something." Gustave's ears are scarlet, and it's adorable. "Eventually."
Verso laughs, and it comes out shaky. Gustave watches him do it with a look on his face that is not remotely composed anymore.
"On your back." His voice has shifted. "I want to see you."
Verso rolls onto his back and the sheet covering his lower body slides down and meets the ground in a soft whisper.
He is bare from the waist down, still in his purple shirt, hair still up, and his cock is lying flushed and hard against his stomach and there is nothing on this earth he can or wants do about it, so he doesn't try. He lets Gustave look his fill.
Gustave looks for a long time.
"Okay?" Verso says, and it's meant to come out light. It doesn't.
"Yeah." Gustave's voice has gone rough. "Yeah, you're — knees up for me."
The lubricant packet again. More of it this time, much more, and then Gustave's fingers are back at his hole and it is nothing like it was three minutes ago. Slow. Circling first, pressing at the rim without going anywhere, and Verso's whole body clenches around nothing.
"Gustave, if you would quit teasing now—"
"Demanding," Gustave chuckles, and pushes back in.
It's easy this time, easy and slick, and Verso's back arches off the paper and the sound he makes is loud enough that he'd be worried about it if there were anyone left in the building.
"One more?" Gustave asks, as he gingerly pumps his finger in and out.
"Yes — yes, please —"
The second finger stretches. There's a burn to it, brief, and then it opens out into a tingling feeling at the base of his spine, and Gustave works them in slowly to the last knuckle and then holds still and lets him feel it.
"That's good," he murmurs. "You're taking that so well."
Verso's whole body reacts.
It's not subtle. His breath breaks in the middle, his hips push down onto Gustave's hand, and a noise gets out of him that is humiliatingly close to a whine.
Above him, Gustave's hazel eyes widen behind his glasses.
"Oh," he breathes.
"Shut up," Verso mumbles and turns his head a little to escape Gustave's knowing and delighted gaze. He can feel his face burning, but it's just too good, and Gustave's voice praising him in this gentle but competent voice is frankly unfair.
Gustave curls his fingers, and finds the spot dead-on, and Verso's mouth falls open. "You like being told," he smirks, and Verso's eyes flicker to him again.
"Gustave —"
"You're doing so well," Gustave breathes, right against his ear, and Verso keens.
There's no other word for it. It's high and it's undignified and it's drawn out, and his hand flies up and closes in the front of Gustave's shirt and stays there.
"There we go," Gustave murmurs. "That's it."
He keeps his fingers pressed to his prostate. He works them in small circles, relentless and patient, and the pressure builds in a place Verso has no vocabulary for, deep and low and spreading out through his thighs, and his cock is leaking steadily onto his own stomach without a single thing touching it. But there is something he desperately needs.
"Take the glove off."
Gustave stops. "What?"
"The glove." Verso is breathing like he's sprinted somewhere. "Take it off. I want your skin. I've wanted your skin since I was eighteen years old, Gustave, take the glove off —"
Gustave withdraws his fingers quickly.
The emptiness is obscene. Verso actually groans at it, at the loss, his hole clenching around air, and he hears the snap of the latex coming off and hitting the bin and then the squeeze of more lubricant, and then Gustave's bare hand is on him.
Skin. Warm, blunt, calloused along the first two fingers, and Gustave doesn't go back in. He rubs slowly over the rim instead, back and forth, dipping just the tip of one finger in and drawing it out again, again, teasing, and Verso is shaking.
"Please —"
"Since you were eighteen," Gustave repeats.
"This — I mean—"
"No, I want — say it again."
"The prom." Verso has his eyes shut. It's easier with them shut. "You kissed me on the steps behind the gym and I went home and lay awake all night. I think this was the reason I finally figured out what I was." Gustave's fingers still against him.
"Verso …"
"And you — you never said anything about it, so I didn't either."
"I didn't know how!" It bursts out of Gustave. "I was seventeen and I'd just found out I liked — and then you went to Paris in September and I —"
Verso watches him with a stricken expression.
"And I've thought about it for twenty-seven years."
There's a beat of silence when both men are realizing at the same time that they might have screwed up the first real chance they had at something, but that they would definitely not be repeating this mistake. "Alright," Verso finally says. "Gustave. We might have been stupid teenagers. But for the love of God, please put your fingers back in me right now."
Gustave makes a sound like he's been hit and pushes two fingers in to the knuckle.
Verso cries out. It's loud and it's raw and Gustave doesn't apologize for it, he just adds the third on the next stroke, working it in alongside, and the stretch is at the edge of too much and then it isn't and then it's perfect.
"Look at you," Gustave breathes.
"Ah —"
"No, look at you, taking three of my fingers on an exam table like you were made for it." His voice is low and steady and completely destroyed at the same time. "You have no idea what you look like right now."
He reaches over with the prosthetic hand and rests it flat and cool on Verso's hip to hold him down, and then — casually, like an afterthought, like it isn't going to destroy him — his other hand leaves for two seconds to wrap around Verso's cock.
One stroke. Slow, all the way down, thumb easing the foreskin back, and Gustave looks at what he's uncovered like it's something in a museum.
"God, you're beautiful," he manages. "Everywhere. That's — Verso, that's a beautiful cock, I'm sorry, I've wanted to say that for—"
Verso almost chokes on his own spit. "You cannot say that in a clinic —"
"I can say whatever I want." He grins against Verso's stomach. "I'm the doctor."
Verso laughs — and it turns into a moan halfway out, because Gustave has gone straight back inside him with all three fingers, and the laugh dies in his throat and doesn't come back.
After that it stops being anything he can consciously narrate.
Gustave finds the spot again and stays there. No teasing now, no let-up. Just steady pressure, over and over, the same firm circles in the same place, and the feeling stops being localized and starts being everywhere — in his stomach, his thighs, the small of his back. His cock is untouched and drooling and jerking against his belly with every pass.
"I can't — Gustave, I can't —"
"You can," Gustave encourages, continuing his ministrations relentlessly.
"I'm going to —"
"Yeah," Gustave says. "I want you to come. Just like that. Come on, come for me."
And Verso does.
It surges up somewhere much deeper than usual and it takes much longer to arrive, and when it hits, his back leaves the table in a bow and his hand tears at the paper and he spills over his own stomach in thick pulses without a hand on him, keening through the whole of it, shameless, while Gustave holds him down at the hip and does not stop moving his fingers.
He does not stop.
"Gustave —" It's almost a sob. "Gustave—"
"Little bit more. You are doing so well."
"I can't —"
"You can. Look at me."
Verso can't focus. Everything is white at the edges, everything is too much, his cock is still twitching and his hole is spasming around Gustave's fingers and there's more coming out of him, thinner, spilling clear over the mess already there, and it hurts but it also doesn't and he can hear the noises he's making from somewhere very far away. Verso thinks, very distantly, that he has never felt something that intense.
Then Gustave eases off.
He slows. Gentles it. Draws his fingers out so carefully it's almost worse, and then his hand is stroking Verso's thigh, warm and broad and steady, and he's saying something.
"— you're okay. I've got you. You're okay, that was — Verso, that was —"
Verso lies there and shakes.
The paper under him is completely destroyed. His shirt is rucked up under his arms. His hair has half come out of the bun on one side and there's a strand stuck to his mouth, and he is covered in his own mess from navel to hip, and he cannot remember ever being this thoroughly taken apart in his life.
Gustave leans down and kisses his forehead.
"Well," Verso says, when he can. His voice is in pieces. "That's a hell of a bedside manner."
Gustave laughs so hard he has to put his head down on Verso's chest for a moment.
Verso comes back to himself slowly, in pieces, and Gustave gets to watch all of it.
That's the part he wasn't ready for. Not the sounds, not the way he'd arched, but the after. The way Verso's silver eyes stay unfocused for a while and then find him, and the way his hand comes up to Gustave's jaw and just rests there, heavy, like he can't quite hold it up.
I think I could stay in this exact spot forever, and not need another thing.
"Hey," Gustave says.
"Hi."
"You with me?"
"Give me a minute."
So Gustave gives him a minute. He leans down and kisses him, and this time there's no angle problem and no clipboard and no twenty-seven years of longing, and Verso opens under his mouth immediately. Gustave licks into him, thoroughly, and Verso makes a low satisfied noise and kisses him back like they've got all night.
They do, actually. That's the thing. Nobody's coming back into this building until Monday.
When he pulls back, Verso is still spread out on the ruined paper with his shirt shoved up under his arms and his stomach a complete disaster, and Gustave — without really deciding to — drags two fingers through the mess on his chest.
Then puts them in his mouth and licks them clean. It tastes a little salty and something that must be distinctly Verso, and Gustave thinks he quite enjoys it. And what he enjoys even more is Verso's reaction to it.
Because his eyes go enormous.
"You—"
"Mm." Gustave just grins around the fingers in his mouth, making a show of cleaning them.
"Gustave."
"What?" He draws the fingers back with a faint smacking sound and reaches back for the gauze on the tray, entirely casual, and starts wiping down the mess on Verso's stomach. "I'm cleaning you up. I'm being very professional."
"You just — you licked —" Verso props himself up on his elbows, and his voice is somewhere between outraged and destroyed. "Okay. Okay, no, I have a question. When did you become so damn sexy, Dr. Virlogeux?"
Gustave feels his whole face go hot despite his obvious enjoyment.
"Well," he says, to the gauze. "I had to impress my high school crush eventually."
Verso stares at him.
Then he laughs loudly and drops back onto the table with his hand over his eyes, and says, "Twenty-seven years, Gustave," and Gustave laughs too, helplessly, and they laugh together for a while about the whole unbelievable ridiculousness of the situation.
And then it stops, because Verso sits up with a determined look in his eyes.
He gets his shirt off over his head in one movement and drops it on the floor, and Gustave forgets what he was going to say.
He has seen this man in his underwear once a year for five years. He has never once let himself look properly, and there is a version of this where that restraint was noble and a version where it was just cowardice, and neither of them matters now, because Verso Dessendre is sitting naked on his exam table and Gustave is allowed.
There's bold ink over both shoulders, black and dense, curling down toward the biceps. Dark hair going grey at the temples and the white streak standing out in the front, half of it out of the bun now. Moles scattered down his side and his stomach, a constellation of them, and Gustave wants to put his mouth on every single one.
He's forty-five and he's a little soft over the stomach and his thighs are heavy and he's the best thing Gustave has ever seen.
"Stop that," Verso says, rubbing the bridge of his nose that is dusted slightly pink.
"Stop what?"
"You're looking at me like I'm a … I don't know. A medical phenomenon."
"I'm looking at you like—" Gustave stops. Tries again. "I've had five years of about four seconds each of looking at you. I'm just catching up."
Verso stares at him a second longer, then slides off the table.
His knees nearly give out. He catches himself on Gustave's shoulder, laughing at himself. But then he's crowding in close and his hands slip inside the open lab coat, working the buttons of Gustave's shirt open, and Gustave's stomach drops.
It's automatic. It always is. His right hand comes up to catch Verso's wrist before he can go any further.
Verso stops immediately.
"No?" There is a question in his eyes Gustave doesn't quite know how to answer.
"It's …" Gustave swallows. "The socket's — there's scarring, and the liner leaves a … it's not —"
"Gustave …"
"It's not … nice to look at, is all."
Verso gently cups his jaw and turns his head back to him. He catches Gustave's gaze and holds it for a long moment, searching for an answer.
Then he takes Gustave's hand off his wrist, very gently, and puts it back down at his side, and continues with the buttons.
He pushes the lab coat off his shoulders and lets it slide down to the floor, before the shirt follows suit. He works the sleeve down over the prosthesis, careful with it, unhurried, like it's a normal thing to do — and it is a normal thing to do, that's what he's saying, that's exactly what he's saying without saying anything at all.
And then he bends his head and puts his mouth on the scar tissue at the top of Gustave's arm, right where the socket sits. Nobody has done that. In all of his years, not a single person has put their mouth there.
Gustave exhales shakily.
"Okay?" Verso murmurs against his skin.
"Yeah." It comes out cracked. "Yeah."
"Good." Verso kisses him again, higher, at the shoulder, at the throat, at the corner of his jaw, and then his hands drop to Gustave's belt. "Because I've got a lot of catching up to do too."
He opens the belt. The button. The zip.
And then Verso puts both hands flat on his chest and pushes, and Gustave sits down hard in the desk chair. It rolls back six inches and hits the desk with a thump that rattles the monitor.
"Verso—"
"Shh."
He sinks down onto his knees on the clinic floor between Gustave's thighs like it's nothing, like it's the easiest thing in the world, and pulls Gustave's trousers and shorts down over his hips. Gustave lifts up to help because his brain has stopped participating in any other way.
And then Verso doesn't touch him at all.
He puts his hands on Gustave's knees instead and pushes them wider, and settles in, and starts kissing the inside of his right thigh.
Gustave nearly jumps at the feeling of his beard against the sensitive skin of his thigh. "Verso," he almost begs, because he needs that mouth on him right now.
"Mm?"
"That's not —"
"I know where it is." Another kiss, higher. The scrape of his beard follows every one of them, and Gustave's leg twitches. "I've waited twenty-seven years, Gustave. I'm not rushing this."
He works his way up one thigh and back down the other, unhurried, using his teeth twice, and by the time he gets anywhere near the middle Gustave has both hands — the good one, and the carbon one — clamped on the arms of the chair and is breathing like he's been running a marathon.
Then Verso turns his head and nuzzles into him.
Just that. His cheek against Gustave's cock, the side of his face, dragging slow. His nose. His mouth open against the base without doing anything with it, breathing hot over him, eyes shut like the contact alone is the point.
"God —"
"Mm-hm."
He licks up the vein on the underside — one long flat stripe, root to tip, agonizingly slow — and then goes to work around the foreskin with just the point of his tongue. Under it. Circling. Little wet flicks, teasing it back with his lips, and Gustave's hips come off the chair and Verso's forearm comes across them and puts him back down.
"Verso, I swear to God —"
"You have a beautiful cock too," Verso says, entirely conversational, tonguing at the slit. "I meant to say that earlier. It seemed rude not to reciprocate."
"I hate you so much."
"Do you," Verso asks, and takes him in.
The whole length of his cock, in one slow slide, and Gustave's vision whitens out at the edges.
It's hot and it's wet and it's tight, and Verso continues down until his nose is pressed against Gustave's stomach and stays there, and swallows, and Gustave's whole body locks up.
"Oh — oh, that's — Verso, that's almost too—"
Verso pulls off him and clamps his hand hard around the base.
Gustave's building orgasm hits a wall.
The sound that comes out of him is not human. Everything that had been gathering just — stops, held, pinned in place with nowhere to go, and his thighs shake and his hand flies to Verso's shoulder and grips.
"What — Verso — what are you—"
"Not yet, Doctor."
"I was right there —"
"I know." Verso is looking up at him with his mouth wet and his eyes bright and an expression of such enormous satisfaction that Gustave wants to strangle him or marry him. Maybe both. "That's rather the idea."
"You—"
"Everyone thinks it's the piano," Verso says, thumb rubbing slow circles at the base of his cock while Gustave shudders. "It isn't. It's this. This is my hidden talent. And I don't perform it just for anyone."
Gustave gets out about half a word.
Then Verso goes back down and it stops being funny.
He takes him deep and stays there, working his throat around him, and when he comes up for air there's spit running down his chin and he doesn't wipe it away. He uses it. Slicks his hand and works the base while he sucks the head, cheeks hollowed, tongue moving the whole time, and every so often he pulls all the way off just to lick at him — under the ridge, along the vein, sloppy and with obvious hunger — and then swallows him again to the root.
Gustave is making noises he has never made in his life. Some of them are words.
"Please — Verso, please, I can't—"
Verso hums around him.
And squeezes again.
The second one is so much worse. Gustave's back arches off the chair and he shouts, actually shouts, in an empty clinic, with his hand in Verso's hair and his heels skidding on the vinyl, and it takes what feels like a full minute for the pressure to ebb back down to something survivable.
When he can see again, Verso is resting his cheek against Gustave's hip, watching his face like it's the only thing in the room.
"You're enjoying this," Gustave rasps, and it's accusation and revelation both.
"I'm having the best evening of my adult life."
"You're a monster."
"Mm." Verso kisses his hipbone. "You've gone completely to pieces, do you know that? You're usually so — the glasses, and the sulcus, and 'I'd write it up as unremarkable.'" His voice drops. "And now look at you."
Gustave can't answer that.
Verso takes his wrist and moves Gustave's hand deliberately into his hair — deeper, gathering it, closing his fingers for him.
"Now." He holds Gustave's gaze. "Go on."
"What?"
"I've been holding your hips down for ten minutes." He opens his mouth and gives the head one slow lick, eyes up. "Stop letting me."
And Gustave — who has spent five years being careful in this room, who irons his coat, who says if it hurts, you say so and I stop, no negotiation — puts his fist in Verso's hair and thrusts up into his waiting mouth.
Verso moans around him.
So he does it again, and harder, and Verso takes it, takes all of it, hands open on Gustave's thighs and throat working and that filthy encouraging sound coming out of him every time Gustave bottoms out, and the last of Gustave's control comes apart completely.
It doesn't take long after that. Four thrusts, five, and the pressure that's been dammed up twice comes roaring back all at once and there is absolutely nothing left to stop it with.
"Verso — stop —"
Verso pulls off instantly, breathing hard, chin soaked, hand going still.
"Too much?"
"No, I'm — I'm going to come, and I'm not —" Gustave gets a fistful of that hair and tips his head back and looks down at him: mouth swollen, hair everywhere, absolutely satisfied with himself. "Not like this. Not the first time."
"How, then?"
Gustave's heart is beating so hard he can feel it in his throat.
"Get back on the table," he says, and his voice has gone low and certain.
Verso gets up off the floor and doesn't quite make it back to the table on his own.
Gustave puts a hand under his arm and steers him, and Verso goes willingly, and there's a moment where the two of them are just standing in the middle of the exam room holding onto each other, naked, out of breath, Gustave's trousers around his knees.
"This is very undignified," Verso says into his shoulder, eyeing the table with the ripped paper covering.
"Well, you're the one who wrecked the paper."
"You wrecked the paper. I merely lay on it."
Gustave finds the pedal at the base of the table with his foot and drops it a few inches, then hikes it back up until it's at his hip. Verso watches him do it with open interest.
"That's adjustable?"
"It's been adjustable for five years, Verso."
"Interesting. You didn't tell me."
"There was no need to. Now, face down." The command in his voice is clear.
Verso looks at him.
"Face down?"
"Face down, chest on the table, and I want your knees apart."
And there it is again — the thing from before, the small hitch in his breath, the way his eyes go slightly unfocused when Gustave tells him something instead of asking. Gustave files it away for the second time this evening with a feeling like stepping off a curb he didn't know was there.
Verso turns around without another word and bends over the table.
Gustave has to hold onto the edge of it for a second.
Because Verso Dessendre is folded over his exam table with his cheek on the crumpled paper and his hair spilling everywhere and his knees spread and his hands gripping the far edge, and Gustave has dreamed about this, in a genuinely undignified way, for way too many years, and the reality is significantly worse for his health.
"Are you going to say something," Verso says, looking back at him with a cheeky grin, "or are you going to stand there having a moment?"
"Having a moment."
"Take your time."
"I intend to." Gustave puts his palm flat on the small of Verso's back and slides it down, slow, over the swell of him, and Verso's breath catches. "God, you're —"
"If you say unremarkable I'm getting dressed."
Gustave laughs and kneels down.
The change in Verso's voice is instant. "Wait — Gustave, what are you—"
"Shh." He presses a kiss to the inside of one thigh. Then, Gustave spreads him open with both hands and licks him.
Whatever Verso was about to say stops existing.
It's one long slow pass, flat-tongued, right over his hole, and Verso's whole body jolts against the table and the sound he makes is thin and stunned and much too loud.
Gustave does it again.
And again — settling in, taking his time, working him with the flat of his tongue and then the point of it, circling, pressing, letting his beard drag against the wet of him because the first time it happens Verso swears in French. He's already loose from earlier, already soft and open, and Gustave can feel him fluttering under every pass.
"Oh — oh God — Gustave —"
He seals his mouth over him and sucks.
Verso's knees give out. He catches himself on the table, forearms flat, and pushes back onto Gustave's face without any apparent awareness that he's doing it, and Gustave grips his hip with the carbon hand and holds him there and pushes his tongue into him.
The noise Verso makes is not a word in any language.
Gustave works him open like that for a long time. Longer than he needs to. Tongue-fucking him in slow shallow strokes, pulling back to lick over the rim, going in again deeper, and Verso's thighs start to shake and his hands claw at the paper and he's babbling now — Gustave's name, mostly, and please, and things that don't parse at all.
When Gustave finally pulls back his chin is soaked and his jaw aches and he is so hard it's actually painful.
"Turn over."
"What —"
"Turn over. I want to see you."
Verso turns over. It takes him two tries.
He lands on his back with his hair fanned out and his chest heaving and his cock hard again, fully, flushed dark against his stomach, and Gustave pushes his thighs up and back and just looks at what he's done to him — wet, open, twitching.
"You should see yourself right now," he murmurs.
"Don't—"
"You're beautiful."
Verso puts his forearm over his eyes.
So Gustave leans in and licks him again, and while he's doing it he gets the lubricant off the tray and slicks his fingers and slides two of them in alongside his tongue.
Verso sobs.
That's the word for it. His hips come up off the table and his hand grabs blindly for Gustave's hair and misses and lands on his shoulder instead, gripping hard enough to hurt.
Gustave doesn't let up. Fingers deep and curling, tongue working around them at the stretched rim, and he can feel exactly how open Verso is getting, how easy, how ready, and he adds the third and Verso keens through his teeth and takes it.
"Please —"
"Mm?"
"Gustave, please, I need — I can't — please —"
"Say it."
"Fuck me." Verso's arm comes off his eyes and he's wrecked, absolutely undone, tears at the corners and his mouth swollen from earlier. "Please. Please, please fuck me, I've waited twenty-seven years, I'm going to die —"
Gustave stands up so fast the stool falls over.
"Okay." He turns to the counter with unsteady hands. "Okay. Yeah. Give me — hold on —"
There's a drawer under the sink where they keep the sample kits and the swabs and the things that get handed out at the desk, and he pulls it open and starts going through it.
"I've got some in here somewhere," he mumbles. "I know we've got — for the demonstrations, they give us — there's a whole box of—"
A weak chuckle behind him. "Gustave."
"—somewhere behind the—"
"Gustave."
He looks over his shoulder.
Verso is propped up on his elbows, and his voice has gone quiet and steady in a way it hasn't been all evening.
"I don't want that."
"Verso—"
"You have five years of my bloodwork on that computer. You have my file. There is nobody who knows my history better than you do, and I haven't been with anyone since —" he stops, and something crosses his face. "It's been a while. And I trust you."
Gustave's hand is still in the drawer.
"I want to feel you." His voice has gone quiet and steady in a way it hasn't been all evening. "I want you to come inside me."
The drawer slides shut on its own.
"You can't just say things like that," Gustave says.
"I've been not saying things for too long." Verso lies back down. "I'm done with it. Come here."
Gustave has no choice but to comply.
He gets between Verso's thighs and gets his own trousers the rest of the way off, kicking them somewhere, and slicks himself with a shaking hand while Verso watches him do it with naked hunger — and then, right as he lines up, his eyes flick past Verso's shoulder.
To the corner.
To the cart.
The ultrasound unit's still on. It has been on this whole time, because he never shut it down after the last patient, and the screen is sitting there in the corner glowing faint grey with the abdominal transducer racked beside it and the bottle of gel in the holder.
Gustave feels the heat crawl up his neck and into his ears all at once. Don't say it. Don't you dare say it.
"What?" Verso ask.
"N—Nothing."
"You've gone completely red."
"It's nothing, it's—" He clears his throat. Something in Verso's gaze makes him throw all caution to the wind, and so he simply says: "It's just … I might have an idea."
"Okay?"
"It's — " Gustave can't look at him. He looks at the cart instead, which is worse, because now Verso is following his eyes. "Would you like to see?" His voice is barely above a whisper.
There is a pause of about two seconds.
Gustave watches Verso's gaze land on the ultrasound cart. Watches him work it out. Watches his throat move as he swallows, hard, and his pupils blow wide, and his cock actually twitches against his stomach.
"Oh," Verso whispers.
"You don't have to—"
"Get the machine."
Gustave doesn't need to be told twice.
He drags the cart over one-handed, the wheels catching on the vinyl, and swings the monitor around on its arm until it's angled down at the table where Verso can see it without lifting his head. Then the transducer. Then the gel bottle, and he flips the cap with his thumb.
"This is going to be cold," he says.
Verso laughs — high, unsteady, half a moan already. "You always say that."
"It's always true."
He squeezes it out low on Verso's belly, just above the hairline, and Verso hisses and jumps and then goes still. Gustave spreads it with the head of the transducer, and presses down, and reaches over to turn the gain up.
The screen resolves into grey. Shapes swim across it, and then resolve.
“Okay.” Gustave hears his own voice change and cannot do a thing about it; it drops into the flat patient-facing register he uses roughly forty times a day, the one for explaining a scan to somebody’s frightened father, and once it’s on there is apparently no switch off. "Black area, top of the screen — that’s your bladder. Fluid comes back anechoic, so it looks like empty space here." He tilts the transducer down a few degrees. "Underneath it, that rounded grey mass — see the outline? That’s your prostate. That’s what I had my finger on twenty minutes ago. Thirty-two, thirty-three grams, at a guess. Textbook."
"That’s—"
"And behind it." He angles again, and the picture slides. "The bright line, and the dark underneath it. That’s the anterior wall of your rectum."
He should stop. He is aware, distantly, that he should stop.
Because he has thought about this. Not often, and never on purpose, but it has arrived on its own — twice, three times, always at the end of a long day, always about ninety minutes after Verso Dessendre walked out of this room. The idea of looking inside him and knowing exactly what was there. Seeing what is there, as it happens. He has been thoroughly ashamed of it every single time. He has a licence and a professional body and a framed piece of paper about ethics, and there is a version of that thought he has never once let himself finish.
He is about to finish it out loud now.
"So that’s you," Gustave says. "That’s the inside of you." He steadies the transducer. "And that, right there — that’s exactly where I’m going to fit."
Verso doesn't answer.
He's staring at the monitor with his mouth open and his chest rising and falling fast, and when Gustave looks down at him, he's leaking steadily onto his own stomach.
"Verso?"
"Yes," Verso says. "God. Yes. Do it. Let me watch."
Gustave lines up and pushes in.
Slow. As slow as he has ever done anything, because he wants to feel every part of it and because his hand is shaking too hard to do it any faster — the head first, the give, the tight clutch of Verso taking him, and then the long slide inward while Verso's mouth falls open and his hands scrabble at the paper.
"Oh — oh — Gustave, that's—"
"Ye—yeah."
He bottoms out and stops there and just breathes.
Verso is hot around him and gripping and still fluttering from before, and Gustave has to lock his elbow against the table and count to something, because twenty-seven years is a long time to want a thing and he is not going to embarrass himself in the first ten seconds of having it.
Then Verso says, in a voice that has gone strange and thin: "Gustave."
"Yeah?"
"Look at the screen."
Gustave opens his eyes and looks.
The image has changed. Where there was the dark seam and the layered grey of Verso, there is now a pale wedge driven up into it: bright at the leading edge, the tissue around it pushed aside and packed tight, the whole of Verso's insides rearranged around the shape of his cock.
The image moves when he moves. Of course it does. He shifts his hips a fraction to test it and the pale shape slides forward on the monitor half a centimeter, and the grey around it displaces, and Verso lets out a groan like he's been hit in the chest.
"That's you," Verso says, a little disbelieving.
Gustave draws back and pushes in again, slow, and they both watch it happen on the screen: the withdrawal, the dark seam closing, the bright wedge driving up into him again and the wall of him giving way for it.
Gustave has to stop and put his forehead down on Verso's chest.
"Okay," he says, muffled. "Okay, that was — I need a second, that … that is a lot."
Verso laughs, high and unsteady. "You need a second?"
"It was my idea and I was not prepared."
"You're a pervert."
"I'm a urologist—"
"Do it again," Verso commands.
Gustave lifts his head. Verso is looking at him and his eyes have gone almost black — that pale silver-blue swallowed down to a rim of it, blown wide, fixed on him.
"Do it again," he repeats. "I want to see you move inside me. I want to watch what that gorgeous cock does to me, Gustave, please—"
So he moves.
He sets a slow pace, deliberately slow, all the way out to the head and then all the way back in, and it is thorough and it is without hurry and it is designed to be watched. And they watch. Not constantly — that's what undoes him, the rhythm of it, the way Verso's eyes keep flicking up to the monitor and then back down to Gustave's face and then up again, like he can't decide which sight he needs more.
Gustave keeps the transducer steady with his right hand and holds himself up on the prosthesis planted beside Verso's shoulder, and leans down and kisses him.
Verso surges up into it. Open-mouthed, messy, tongue and teeth, both hands coming up to Gustave's face and holding on. He tastes like something smoky and alluring.
"Look," Gustave pleads against his mouth.
Verso groans against him, unwilling to break the kiss.
"No, look. Actually look." He gets his hand under Verso's jaw and turns his head toward the screen and holds it there, still moving in him, slow. "Look at how well you're taking me. Look how perfectly my cock fits inside you — right there, see it? That's how deep I am. That's your body making room for me."
Verso's whole body clenches around him and he moans.
"You were made for this," Gustave says. "God, you were — you're so tight, you're so good, Verso, I could stay in you all night—"
"Please —"
"Tell me what you want."
"Harder." Verso's hand fists in the paper. "Harder, God, split me open, I want to feel it tomorrow—"
Gustave gives it to him harder, and the shape on the monitor drives up sharper, and Verso's back comes off the table.
After that it stops being slow.
Gustave gets his mouth on him — the throat first, sucking a mark under the jaw where a collar won't cover it, and then lower, working down the tendon, over the ink at his shoulder. He bites. Verso swears. He finds a nipple and closes his lips around it and sucks and Verso's hand fists in his curls and pulls.
"There — do that again — Gustave, there —"
He does it again. He does it until Verso is arching and cursing and clenching around him on every pass, and then he moves across and does it to the other one, and traces his tongue over the moles scattered down Verso's ribs — one, and the next, and the one below it, mapping them, because he has wanted to for an hour and about five years.
Verso's hands are all over him too. Nails down his back. His mouth pressed to Gustave's cheekbone, his temple, kissing over the freckles there in a way that's almost frantic, murmuring something that Gustave catches maybe a third of.
The pace has gone ragged. The table is complaining. The gel has gone tacky and the transducer keeps threatening to skate off, and Gustave presses it back down and the image swims and reassembles: bright wedge, pumping, faster now, and Verso can't stop looking at it.
"Turn over," Gustave commands, in between thrusts.
"What—"
"Turn over. Hands on the table."
Verso is off his back and onto his knees before Gustave has finished the sentence, and that — that willingness, that immediate unquestioning yes — nearly finishes him where he stands.
He gets Verso positioned. Knees apart, chest low, ass up, hair hanging in his face. Then he swings the monitor arm around on its pivot so the screen is angled down and forward where Verso can see it from there, and pushes back into him in one long stroke.
Verso howls.
"Yeah," Gustave says. "Yeah, there we are —"
He reaches around with his right hand and finds the flat of Verso's lower belly and presses the transducer there, and the picture snaps back on screen from the new angle — deeper, steeper, the whole shape of his cock inside him laid out in shades of grey.
And then he sets the prosthetic hand on Verso's hip and starts to really move.
It's feral after that. There's no other word. He fucks into him hard enough that the table shunts an inch across the vinyl and Verso has to brace, and Verso takes all of it, pushing back, head down, hair everywhere, making sounds that are going to live in Gustave's memory until he dies.
"Look at it," Gustave pants. "Verso — lift your head and look at what you're taking —"
Verso lifts his head.
Gustave can see him find the screen, can see the exact moment he catches it — and the sound he makes then is broken all the way through.
"Oh my fucking God —"
"That's my cock inside you. That's how far in I am." He drives up hard and the shape on the monitor lurches. "Watch it. Watch me fuck you. Tell me what you see—"
"You — it's you, I can see you moving in me, God, Gustave, you're so deep—"
"Whose are you?"
"Yours —"
"Good," Gustave manages. "Good. You're taking me so well, you're so — you're perfect, you're—"
He can't get the rest out. It's coming, he can feel it winding up, and Verso is clenching around him in irregular pulses and there is nothing holding his cock and no hand left to do it with —
Except there is.
Gustave shifts his weight forward onto his hips, keeps the transducer flat against Verso's belly with his flesh hand, and brings the prosthetic around and closes it around Verso's cock.
Verso goes absolutely rigid.
"Gustave —"
The grip is a machine grip. Steady, cool, precise, and it does not tire and it does not falter, and Gustave strokes him with it in a long even rhythm that has nothing to do with the increasingly wrecked pace of his hips.
"Oh God, oh God, that's—"
"Yeah?"
"Don't stop — don't you dare stop —"
Gustave doesn't stop. He fucks into him and strokes him and holds the transducer down against his belly so that the two of them can watch it, and Verso's arms give out and his chest drops to the table and he turns his face sideways so he can keep his eyes on the monitor.
"I'm going to—" Verso's voice breaks apart entirely. "Gustave, I'm—"
"Me too. Me too, I'm—"
"Inside — please, inside, please—"
He tips over.
Gustave feels it happen from both ends at once: the clamp of him, the pulse against the carbon of his hand, the shape on the screen seizing and squeezing tight around the shape of him — and it drags Gustave over the edge with it so fast he doesn't get a single word out.
He comes so hard his vision leaves him for a second.
He's dimly aware that he's still moving, shallow and shuddering, still buried in Verso, that his hand has locked on Verso's hip hard enough to bruise, that there's a long low sound coming out of him and another one coming out of Verso and neither of them is stopping.
The transducer slips off Verso's belly and hangs from the cart on its cord.
The monitor keeps running anyway, throwing grey static and half-shapes at nobody, and the two of them stay exactly where they are, spent and shaking and folded over an exam table in an empty clinic on a Friday night in August.
Gustave pulls out slowly, and then stops breathing.
Because his cum follows him. It slides out of Verso in a thick slow trickle, down over him, onto the wrecked paper, and Gustave stares at it with the last functioning part of his brain going completely offline.
"That's—" His voice isn't working properly. "God, Verso, you're—"
"What?" Verso is still face-down on the table, boneless. "What is it?"
"You're leaking."
Verso makes a small pleased sound into the paper.
Gustave puts two fingers against his hole and pushes it back in.
Verso's whole body jolts. "Oh —"
"Sorry — too much?"
"No. No, do that." His voice has gone thick. "Do that again."
So Gustave does it again, slow, watching his own fingers work the cum back into him, watching Verso's hole clutch weakly around them, oversensitive and swollen and used. Verso pushes his hips back against the pressure and makes a low ruined noise and Gustave has to close his eyes.
"You're going to kill me," he says.
"Mm, says you. Keep going."
He keeps going, until Verso's shaking gets bad enough that it stops being about the pleasure, and then he stops and rests his palm flat on the small of Verso's back until it settles.
Afterward, the doctor comes back.
Not on purpose. It's just that Verso's legs won't take him and his hands have gone cold, and Gustave hears his own voice saying okay, sit down, put your head between your knees for a second before he's thought about it at all, and gets him water in a paper cup from the cooler in the corridor and makes him drink all of it.
"You're doing the voice," Verso says weakly.
"What voice?"
"The doctor voice." He drinks. "It's very unfair of you to do it now."
"Drink your water."
"See, that's the—"
"Verso."
Verso shuts up and drinks his water.
Gustave cleans him up properly then, with warm water and paper towel and about three times more care than is strictly required, and Verso lets him do it with his forehead against Gustave's shoulder and his eyes shut, and neither of them says anything for a while.
Then Gustave straightens up and takes stock of the room.
"Oh," he says.
The paper on the table has not survived. Neither has the gel bottle, which is on its side, having emptied a good portion of itself onto the floor. The transducer is hanging off the cart on its cord. The stool is on its back where he kicked it over. There is a used glove, a fan of gauze, an entire drawer of sample kits pulled half out from under the sink, and his lab coat is on the floor with a footprint on it.
"Oh no," Gustave says.
Verso lifts his head and looks. And starts laughing.
"Please don't say a thing."
"You're going to have to—"
"I know."
"— sterilize that—"
"I know, Verso—"
"— and there's a whole log, isn't there? There's a form. You're going to fill in a form about the transducer."
"You are a guest in my clinic," Gustave says with as much dignity as he can find, standing there naked with gel on his hip, "and you are being extremely rude."
Verso laughs so hard he has to sit back down.
They get dressed. It takes a while, because they keep stopping.
Gustave does the buttons on his shirt and finds that he's watching Verso do his own — the shoulders going into it, the ink disappearing, the way he shakes his hair back and then can't find the tie for it. It's on the floor by the sink. Gustave picks it up and hands it over, and Verso ties his hair back up one-handed without looking, and something about that is so ordinary and so domestic that Gustave has to turn around and busy himself with the cart for a second.
Ten years since Sophie. He hasn't wanted anything since Sophie. He'd started to think of it as a settled fact about himself, like his blood type.
"So," Verso says, behind him. "Doctor."
"Mm?"
"You never actually gave me my results."
Gustave turns around.
Verso is leaning against the exam table, arms folded, shirt half-buttoned, hair up, his mouth still swollen and a mark coming up dark under his jaw that no collar in the world is going to hide.
"Prostate's fine," Gustave says. "Normal size, smooth, no nodules, no asymmetry. PSA's stable. Everything's exactly where it should be."
"Same time next year, then?"
"About that."
Gustave goes to the desk. The chair is still where Verso shoved it. He sits down, wakes the monitor, and — because this is a real clinic and he is a real doctor and there are real systems — brings up the scheduling module, and prints the little card.
It comes out of the machine warm.
He looks at it for a second. Then he takes a pen and crosses out the printed date, and writes underneath it.
When he hands it over he can feel his ears turning pink, and he pushes his glasses up his nose. He finds he can't quite make eye contact.
Verso reads it.
Café Verne, rue Villette. Tuesday, 19h.
He doesn't say anything for a moment, and Gustave's stomach drops about a foot. Did he overstep? Was this the wrong move? Did he somehow read the room all wrong again, like it happens—
"That's the bookshop street," Verso murmurs, and pulls him out of his spiraling thoughts.
Gustave exhales. "Yeah."
"Where we stood in the doorway for twenty minutes talking about a book you didn't buy." Verso's eyes are still glued to the card in his hand.
"I did buy it, actually. Later. I went back in, once I remembered what I actually wanted there," Gustave mumbles; he can still feel the heat in his cheeks.
Verso looks up with a grin.
"Don't you go all shy on me now, Doctor," he teases, tone light and joking.
And he reaches out, and takes a fistful of Gustave's shirt, and pulls.
Gustave goes. He goes easily, gracelessly, one hand landing on the table to catch himself, and Verso kisses him — no urgency this time, and warm — and Gustave holds onto him and lets himself melt into the kiss.
When Verso pulls back he keeps his fist in the shirt.
"It's a date," he says with a bright smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes.
Gustave walks him out through the dark waiting room and unlocks the front door for him. It's still light outside, that long slow August light, and the street is full of people going about their evening.
Twenty-seven years ago there were steps behind a school gym and a kiss neither of them mentioned, and then September, and then half a lifetime of not saying anything.
Verso descends two steps and turns around.
"Tuesday," he calls back.
"Tuesday," Gustave agrees.
"Don't be late."
"I'm never late."
"You ran forty minutes over on a twenty-minute appointment for five consecutive years, Gustave."
And he turns, laughing, before Gustave can come up with a single word in his own defense — down the street, hands in his pockets, hair coming loose again already.
Gustave stands in the doorway of his own clinic and watches him all the way to the corner.
Then he goes back inside, because the transducer isn't going to sterilize itself, and there is, in fact, a form that needs to be filled out.
— THE END —