“Yeah, Stryker.” If Julien was the kind of name you could savor, Stryker was the kind of name you could choke on. “How did you know?”
“He appeared in some of your older TikToks.”
Greg thought he had wiped his page clean of Stryker, but perhaps he missed a video or two. Who knows? He made so many. “When the sexual side effects kicked in, he started getting frustrated with me. My sex drive was slowing down and my ability to stay hard was getting, well,harder.” Julien’s laugh at Greg’s dumb joke propels him to continue. He appreciates a man who can laugh even at a heavy topic. “He was annoyed that I wasn’t satisfying him enough, and he kept saying, ‘It must be me. You must not be attracted to me anymore.’ But it was never that. I tried to explain, but he claimed it was excuses. All excuses. Ever since we broke up, it’s just been me and my hand.”
Julien nods. “I’m sorry you had to deal with that, but thank you for trusting me enough to tell me. I’ve been going through a similar dry spell.”
“Oh.” Greg borrows Julien’s phrase as he processes, and a small smirk tugs on Julien’s pale pink lips.
His perfect pale pink lips. The perfect pale pink lips Greg would like to feel against his own. Feel everywhere and anywhere on his body if Julien would be so kind.
JULIEN
Julien can’t believe he’s going to share any of this with Greg Harlow, but Greg is looking at him in a strange way and the words are rushing out before he can vet them.
“I go on and off of Grindr like most people, but I don’t use Grindr like most people. I’m not much for relationships, but I do like a friends-with-benefits situation. Actually, I need a friends-with-benefits situation if I’m going to enjoy myself, and my most recent friend-with-benefits moved away a few months ago, so I logged back into Grindr in the hopes to find someone new since there are crap few ways to find other queer men in this area, but I’ve been striking out left and right.”
Greg furrows his eyebrows. “Surely you’re not at a loss for options.”
Julien can’t handle that compliment right now because he’s bad at accepting them in any context, so he bypasses it completely. “I have very specific standards.”
“You have a type?”
“No, I mean standards for boundaries and cleanliness and what I like and don’t like to do.” Julien swivels nervously in Greg’s desk chair, certain Greg won’t judge him over this disclosure but nervous all the same. No matter how many times you say it out loud, it doesn’t often get easier. “I have OCD, which means anything from a scent to a wrong touch can trigger me to lose interest. Most guys don’t want to deal with all that just to get off.”
Greg sits on the edge of his bed, clearly taking this in. “Guys can be really impatient.”
“I don’t blame them. People aren’t downloading Grindr looking to receive a novel-length list of dos and don’ts just to touch a guy. I get it.” Often, he wishes his mind wouldn’t make him so high maintenance, but he’s on a rocky road toward acceptance.
“I don’t.” Greg’s statement is firm, and it swipes over Julien once again as if he’s passed into a force field. Like now he’s sitting inside Greg’s protective aura. They had been keeping one another at arm’s length before, but here in Greg’s room, their commonalities create an impenetrable bubble of connection around them.
“Everybody wants quick,” Julien notes, trying not to sound so downtrodden about it. “That’s why they choose the shot or the cocktail over the wine. They want a fast buzz, an immediate good time. On the Grindr grid, I’m the merlot you have to decant for forty minutes before serving, not the tequila shot. I know that. I get it.”
“Again, I don’t.” Greg’s words are harder this time. “Before we lost touch, my grandma used to tell me that good things take time. Those people that aren’t willing to invest their time don’t know a good thing when it’s staring right at them from their phone screen.”
Julien has no choice but to registerthiscompliment. He can’t brush by it because it arrests him. It shakes him. It forces him to look at Greg—really look—and consider that his sunny demeanor is a coping mechanism (as he’s mentioned before), and that the heated flirtation he felt near the bathroom on that first day might have been true after all. The ride-giving and number-slipping might’ve been part of his TikTok act. What he feels with Greg currently might be real.
“I could say the same about Stryker,” Julien says.
There they sit, twogood thingsfinally seeing eye to eye.
“I think I’ve been so wound up and snippy because I lost my sexual outlet. I like being touched.” In his mind, Julien catalogues all the ways he likes to be touched. Sensually. Hurriedly. Nails scratching. Kneading.Has the room gotten hotter?
“I do, too.” Greg’s admission turns the small space into an inferno.
Julien, nearly in a full sweat, pounces on an idea that can maybe give them both the outlet they’ve been missing. “So what if we were to...”
Greg interjects, eyes slipping in the opposite direction. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, of course,” Julien says with disappointment washing over his skin.
“No, it’s not you. It’s me.”
“Sure.” As if he hasn’t heard that one before.
“I’m being serious.”
“It’s all right to admit you’re not attracted to me. I’m a big boy. I can take it.” He realizes only after the fact that his words have an unintentional double meaning.
