Page 17 of A Totally Platonic Thing
And since he was doing that…well, why shouldn’t I do it too? After all, he was the straight guy. Like, if either one of us ought to feel uncomfortable getting turned on in the same room with another guy, it wouldn’t be me, right? So if he was cool with it, no problem. Lucas never jerked off with me there, though, because I guess that would’ve been a bridge too far. He would discreetly duck into the bathroom after a while, run some water, brush his teeth, and then come out after a little longer than that process really should have taken.
I, on the other hand, being the lazy little bastard that I was, would wait for him to go to sleep and then take care of business quietly under my covers.
Because watching my silent porn and getting worked up slowly, unable to do anything about it, delaying having an orgasm, while Lucas did the same thing across the room…okay, so it was a total turn-on. Roommate or not, straight or not, guy who was becoming one of my closest friends or not…it was hot.
I thought I was being so sneaky and subtle about it, since all he could see from his angle—our beds were perpendicular to each other, with mine in the corner against the wall and his sticking out from the opposite wall—was me sitting there, laptop on my lap, looking at the screen. I didn’t have glasses to reflect flashes of it like he did, so I thought I was totally getting away with it.
Until one night when I didn’t.
I’d been getting super worked up watching a video that had become a favorite of mine, one with a muscled, dark-haired top working over a little dark-haired twink to the point where he was just sobbing and lying there taking it. I actually kind of liked blond guys more than brunets, or at least that was what generally caught my eye in person, but I drew the line at watching porn with guys who looked like Lucas and me with Lucas right there in the room. I couldn’t fantasize about getting fucked by a tall blond with my tall blond roommate a few feet away, right? That would be creepy. So I tried to find bottoms who looked like me, because I was totally self-centered like that, and tops who didn’t look like Lucas. And this particular video hit a lot of my buttons otherwise.
Not all of them. I had some weird buttons. But I saved the porn that catered to my tastes much more specifically for the times when I had the apartment to myself.
I guess I’d started breathing hard and getting all flushed and squirmy without even realizing it. Lucas had his headphones on, so he was doing his own thing.
And then I jumped about a foot in the air and almost had a freaking heart attack when he said, “That must be a good one, right?”
The laptop tipped off my lap and over the side of the bed, and I dived after it, ending up hanging half off the mattress with one edge of the laptop resting on the floor and the other clutched in my sweaty palm. On the screen, turned halfway away from me, they kept on fucking.
I looked up at Lucas, heart pounding and chest so tight with hyperventilating that I ironically couldn’t get a breath. My fingertips were tingling. Seriously. Heart attack territory.
He’d taken off his headphones and set his own laptop off to the side, and he was looking at me with his eyebrows raised.
“You okay?”
“Oh my God,” I gasped. “God. You almost killed me!”
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry. “Am I not supposed to acknowledge that we’re both watching porn and thinking about jerking off?”
Like I said. Totally straightforward and unflappable. And I felt like I’d been so severely flapped I’d never recover from it.
“What—I—I mean—like, okay, sure, but…what?” I tried to get a better grip on the laptop and pull it and me back up onto the bed, and my hand slipped, and then I was sliding… Lucas tossed his covers back and took the two steps to get to me, grabbing the laptop in one hand and my arm in the other, and heaved me back up.
I flailed at him, but he stepped back—taking my computer with him.
“Hey!” I tried to scramble out of bed, but the sheet wrapped around my legs. “Give that back!”
Lucas grinned at me and dropped down on the edge of his own bed, my laptop on his knees. “This is what you watch?”
My face was so hot they could probably see me blushing from the International Space Station. “Yeah, and don’t look! It’s super gay. Come on, Lucas!” I managed to extricate myself at last, jumped out of bed…and realized I was standing there in boxer-briefs and an undershirt, with an erection that apparently hadn’t been discouraged at all by the burst of adrenaline and irritation. So I scrambled back, grabbing the throw blanket from the foot of my bed and wrapping it around my waist.
Which only made my situation more obvious.
Lucas watched me instead of the screen, his mouth quirking.
“Turn it off!”
Something in my tone finally got through to him, my desperate, near-tears embarrassment maybe, and his smile died away. He tapped the trackpad, presumably stopping the video, and set my laptop aside on his bed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and this time he sounded like he meant it. “Seriously. I didn’t mean to upset you. I honestly thought that since we do this two or three nights a week, it was something we could joke about.” He stood up, and that made everything so much worse, because that meant we were only a couple of feet from each other, and I had to look up at him. He stood there for a second looking totally at a loss and ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up in all directions. “Um. Would it make it better if you saw what I was watching? You know, even the score?”
I gaped at him for a second. No, of course not! I didn’t want to see straight people going at it. Like, I wasn’t one of those gay guys who was totally grossed out by the idea of vaginas or boobs, just like Lucas wasn’t apparently one of those straight guys who was totally grossed out by the idea of one guy’s dick in another guy. I’d come out of a vagina, after all, and my hippie mom had breastfed me until I was, like, three and a half, and I had some hazy memories of it being incredibly cozy and awesome. Breasts and vaginas and women’s bodies were amazing, and women did some amazing things with them…only I didn’t need to see the sex part. It did nothing for me.
On the other hand, it apparently did it all for Lucas.
Curiosity took the lead, outrunning my indifference-verging-on-distaste.
Besides. He had a point. It was only fair.
