Page 44 of A Totally Platonic Thing
Maybe especially if he enjoyed it.
Besides, did I want to go there? Sure, I might want to experiment at some point, because wanting to have sex with a guy, any guy, made me more bisexual than I’d ever considered. But if I wanted to fuck a dude and try it out, Chris wasn’t the dude to try it out with. He meant too much to me to be an experiment.
And that’s all it would be. I’d always dated women. Admired women, jerked off thinking about women, imagined myself marrying a woman. That was…what my life would be like. I loved breasts and couldn’t really imagine giving them up, for one thing. I couldn’t picture giving up women, period.
Weirdly, I wasn’t freaking out about wanting a guy all of a sudden. Maybe it wasn’t quite so sudden, since I’d been enjoying gay porn with Chris for a while. It was more like…an addition than a change. Like, I loved electrical engineering, and if I’d suddenly hated it and wanted to change majors that would’ve freaked me out. But if I added a new interest? Painting, or something. I’d do a minor, or take a few classes at the community college after I graduated. It’d be a hobby. And that would be cool. But wanting to paint wouldn’t change what I wanted out of my career, just like wanting to fuck a guy didn’t change what I wanted out of life. I still wanted women, mostly.
Chris deserved better than being the sexual equivalent of a couple of community college classes taken in the evening after work. And with the way he’d been acting lately, depending on me to take care of him…I couldn’t risk it. If he mixed up sex with needing me to take care of him, that would be such a clusterfuck.
And yet I’d hurt him if I let him think I didn’t want him, even if he didn’t really want me. I knew Chris, and his sense of self-worth could be so fucking fragile.
Basically, anything I did or didn’t do could have catastrophic results, with the top-of-the-list catastrophe being losing Chris.
Okay, no. Hurting Chris, followed by losing Chris. But he wouldn’t leave me if I didn’t hurt him so badly he hated me for it. I knew that as well as I knew that the little bastard didn’t have a middle name and took a special, evil joy in addressing me as Lucas Jasper Robertson when I didn’t take out the trash. Like I knew all the little things about him, from his shoe size (nine and a half), to the way he pretended not to be sad when he talked about his parents and how they preferred meditation and weed to spending time with him, to how he ate his spaghetti (with so much powdered parmesan it wasn’t red anymore and turned this weird shade of pinkish-beige).
I couldn’t lose Chris. It’d kill me. What the hell would I do with myself? Half the point of getting a decent job after I graduated would be finally being able to support both of us while Chris decided between grad school and trying to get a good job of his own.
So fucking him would be the worst possible idea. Worse than doing nothing.
On the other hand…the devil on my shoulder wouldn’t shut up. I peeked at him from under my eyelids. I’d gotten a good look at him sitting there with his laptop before I took my glasses off. Without them, I couldn’t see the blush on his cheeks and throat and chest. But it didn’t matter. I knew he was aroused. And a slightly blurry aroused Chris still had my teeth on edge.
Chris, what we’d done had already been sex, was the thing. Maybe that ship had sailed. I’d come, and I’d made him come. I’d had a part of my body inside him.
I bit back a groan.
Inside him. I’d never really thought about it before, what that meant. It felt like I’d made him mine, like I owned him somehow. And I knew how fucked up and irrational that sounded. I didn’t have any claim on anyone I’d ever fucked, and no one who’d ever fucked Chris had any claim on him.
That last thought made me see red for a second. Screw those guys. Not one of them had wanted to keep him? Fucking morons.
Anyway. I knew that kind of thinking probably made me a caveman and a douchebag, but…I felt like now that I’d gotten in him, he wasmine. And my cock wanted to stake its claim too. Why should my fingers get all the fun?
Fuck. I had to stop this.
Bernoulli’s Principle. I went through it, variable by variable. And then did the equation again, reciting in my head. Running through the maximum power transfer theorem didn’t help much either.
I did a couple of partial differential equations. Usually those could double as an antidote for Viagra.
But nope. Nada. Still hard, still aching, still straining my eyes trying to see him over there in his bed.
He ought to be inmybed, God damn it.
We’d already screwed around. What difference would it make?
Right, pull the other one. What difference would it make if I fucked him? A difference, obviously. A big one.
Damn it. I had to keep it together.
Chris turned off his laptop and went to bed before I went to sleep. I heard a little bit of rustling, a couple of soft gasps.
I forced myself to roll over and wrap a pillow around my head, even though every cell in my body wanted to listen. Or do more than listen.
It took a long time to drop off.
So by Thursday, I’d started to get a little crazed.
I got home earlier than I had the last couple of days. My brain wouldn’t stop buzzing and my body had this all-over ache that felt like having the flu—except it felt nothing at all like the flu. I didn’t feel weak or drained. The opposite. I had this weird energy that wouldn’t dissipate no matter how hard I worked or how hard I pushed at the gym, where I’d gone halfway through the morning out of desperation to get rid of some of it.
Chris. I needed Chris, and I needed him like I needed air. It didn’t have to be sexual. But I’d hardly spoken to him for the last few days, and I needed to hug him, see his smile, bury my face in his hair and inhale him.
