THOMAS
Thomas hadn’t meantto stay over at Ben’s. But Ben had a gift for hand jobs that wrung every last ounce of energy from Thomas’s bones and he’d fallen asleep in a puddle of sweat and cum. He’d woken up around midnight and tried to climb out of bed and make an escape, but Ben had flung an arm around his waist and pulled him back down. Thomas had settled without argument and quickly fallen back asleep.
He’d forgotten how nice it was to be held at night. It had been years since he and Jennifer touched each other that way, craved each other’s touch and intimacy. He knew things with Ben weren’t anything like that, but still, it was…nice.
But now the sun was out, creeping through the slit between Ben’s new curtain panels, and Thomas didn’t have the strength to face their relationship or, rather, their agreement in the daylight. Ben snored softly beside him, and Thomas carefully crept out of bed, gathering his clothes off the floor and balling them up against his chest. He carried them into the bathroom and quietly closed the door, the click of the lock deafening in the otherwise quiet of the apartment.
He dressed and thought he’d made a clean break, but Thomas startled when he reached the main area of the apartment, finding Ben in the kitchen brewing some coffee.
“Morning,” Ben mumbled, syllables slurred from sleep. He wore his dirty underwear from the night before and nothing else besides a streak of dried cum that tracked up the left side of his stomach. First thing in the morning, he looked even more muscular than normal, and Thomas tried not to stare. He was alwaystryingaround Ben, but he wasn’t sure he hated it. There was part of him that liked the unyielding attraction he felt for the other man—as long as he could keep it under control.
“Hey.” He stopped shy of his shoes near the door and ran a hand through his hair, meeting Ben’s tired gaze.
“Did you want coffee?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I was going to head out. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Ben answered that with a thoughtful noise and a shrug. Thomas couldn’t help but feel dismissed and his first instinct was to take offense, but he swallowed it back. He was the one trying to leave without a goodbye. He was the one feeling like he’d overstayed his invitation. Ben was merely going along with the signals Thomas had been sending.
“Do you want to make plans for next time or just…” Ben blinked slowly. “Play it by ear?”
“I’ll probably be busy with work all week,” he said.
“I don’t think I know what you do.” Ben’s coffee filled his mug and he pulled it off the small single serve pot, turning to face Thomas head on.
“It’s not important,” he said, and he wasn’t trying to be dodgy or deceitful. His job just…wasn’t important. It was something he wasn’t passionate about, but had made a career out of anyway because that’s what his life had required of him.
“So you’re replaceable?”
“Hardly. It’s just…” Thomas shrugged. “Not relevant to who I am.”
“That sounds miserable.”
“It sounds like it pays the bills.” He bent over to put his shoes on. Ben leaned against the wall, still barely dressed, still looking like he’d walked out of Thomas’s most secret dreams. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What do you do for work?”
“I’m not an Olympic medalist, much to my parents' dismay,” Ben answered, mouth twisting into a sad smirk.
“Swimming?”
“That obvious?”
“You have a phenomenal body.”
Ben brushed a hand over his stomach, fingers making contact with the dried cum Thomas had spotted earlier. Ben picked at it, letting the evidence of their night flake away beneath his fingers.
“I work for a bookstore,” Ben said. “Managing their marketing.”
“That sounds…honestly a lot better than what I do.”
“Well, it’s not nothing.”
“Is it what you wanted to do?”
“I wanted to swim,” Ben admitted. “But I also wanted swimming to be fun. It was tearing my muscles up and getting unenjoyable, so I backed away from it my junior year.”
