6
Magnus
“Magnus...Ah!”
Alaric’s sweet voice pings from my phone, fueling me with such lust I feel the need to bite my fist. My hand pumps my cock hard and fast.
“Magnus, please. Can I come yet?”His voice is breathless, ruined.
These videos are from a few days ago but I can’t help but pull them out right before going to bed. We’re both being extra careful just in case our social media’s get hacked, but fuck, I wish I could see his face.
Everything else is almost enough, but I want to see his expression. His blushed neck. His carved abs. His thick dick. Its almost enough, except I want him under my hands, whimpering my name in person.
I come on my chest with a grunt, exiting out of Alaric’s porno.
He hasn’t messaged me since that night.
The city is a smear of sodium orange and cold glass outside my window, a living thing with a pulse that matches the throbin my temples. I should sleep. I should shower. I should do anything except sit on the edge of my couch, half-empty bottle on the coffee table, phone in my hand like a detonator.
I keep seeing his name at the top of the screen—Alaric Hale—and underneath it the last line he sent:
Goodnight, Flint.
Goodnight and not goodbye. Not block. Not silence.
I clean myself up with a tissue before finishing off my drink. I let the whiskey burn a highway down my throat. It’s not enough to drown the buzz in my blood, but it blurs the edges. Recently, I’m all edges: the blade of jealousy, the bright wire of want, the thin line between being clever and being reckless.
I scroll back through our messages like a thief admiring his haul.
I should be furious about Kyle. The image of Thorn’s hand on Alaric’s back—too casual, too familiar—keeps flickering behind my eyes. It spikes my pulse every time. It makes my jaw ache from clenching. It turns the whiskey inside me to kerosene. The jealousy is primitive, ugly, and honest.
But underneath it, something mean and satisfied purrs, because I read between his lines.
He went out for burgers and milkshakes and safe kisses, and the whole time he was answering me fast, letting me in, cracking the door, letting the draft of me into that careful little life of his. Even when he told me to grow up, even when he typedgoodnight,his thumb didn’t travel to the settings menu to pull the ripcord. He didn’t block me. He let me follow his private account. He let me see the dog, the skyline, the book at the café. He let me stand in a room he didn’t want me in.
And if Thorn kissed him at the end of the night? If Thorn glowed with that dopey, pleased warmth that “safe” men wear when they think they’ve found a harbor? Good for Thorn.
Alaric came home and answered me. Bent forme.
I rub my thumb across the cracked corner of my screen. It’s an old habit—calm the hands before the fight, smooth the knuckles after. My reflection stares back at me in the black center of the display: eyes too bright, hair a mess, the faint shadow of a grin I can’t quite control. I look like a man who needs to be talked down.
I open a new message and type:Where do you live?
I stare at it for five seconds, then hold down backspace until the bubble is empty.
Jesus. I can hear Phoenix’s voice already—Don’t start a war you can’t finish.The captain tone he uses when he’s trying to be my older brother and not my boss. It grates because he’s not wrong.
I type again:Text me your address.I backspace that too.
New draft:Dinner.Backspace.Coffee.Backspace.Come over.
I push the heel of my hand into my eye until starbursts open and close. The urge to call him is consuming. Pick up the phone, press the green button, let it ring until his clipped voice saysHello?and then take whatever comes: the fight, the silence, the breath that means he’s listening.
I could be out the door in ten minutes. I could find myself on a couch that smells like soap and book glue and dog hair, telling him things I’ve never said out loud.
I pour more whiskey instead. The glass knocks the table with a cheap chime; my hand isn’t as steady as I want it to be. I hate drinking alone, not because I’m sentimental but because it removes friction, and friction is what keeps a man like me from sprinting into every bad idea like it’s the length of open ice in front of an empty net.
It’s almost funny. I’ve always thought of obsession as a thing that happens to other people—the soft-handed rich who never had to grit their teeth and push, addicts who wanted a reason tofall. I’ve been addicted to this sport, to the way a new blade feels biting into clean ice, to the weight of a game on my shoulders, to the heat of a fight when the gloves come off and something honest breaks through the rules.
