“Remember the time you gave me a ride? I liked that.”
“You liked riding pillion?”
Carver laughed. “You mean riding bitch?”
“I don’t say that,” Scott said self-seriously. “It’s derogatory to women.”
“I’m not a woman.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I get what you mean,” Carver said, moving closer to Scott and staring up at him, hearing his breathing change. “But I want you to call me your bitch.”
Scott took him in his arms and kissed him again. Carver closed his eyes in gratitude as Scott grabbed his hair and tilted his head back to roughly kiss his neck, scraping him with his beard. Then they met lips and began to kiss with tongue. It was mystifying the way neither of them seemed to care about how bad their mouths tasted. Scott sucked on Carver’s top lip so hard that he could feel blood swelling it.
Carver was the one who broke them apart, with a lurch of inchoate but growing anxiety. He looked down at his Rolex, squinting through the darkness to read it by the soft glow of its Chromalight face. “It’s almost midnight,” he said.
One of Scott’s hands slid up under his t-shirt to stroke the small of his back. This felt nice. “Are you turning into a pumpkin?”
“I do need to go, yeah.”
Scott didn’t seem to want to let him. Carver wasn’t thrilled about it, either. He didn’t want to imagine how he’d feel tomorrow, hungover and sore, his deeds laid bare in the bright May morning.
“I’ll see you at the wedding,” he said with some dread.
“Yeah,” Scott said, pulling him closer and squeezing him hard.
Carver pressed his face into Scott’s neck and chest, mouthing at the hard bar of his collarbone through his shirt. After a moment he tore himself loose, stepped back and let the night air fill the space between them again.
They didn’t say anything else. Carver put his phone flashlight on and began traipsing down to the house, through the soft grass, with Scott a few paces behind him. Once he passed thepool house he heard Scott’s feet on the tile, then the scrape of a glass door opening.
Carver continued down to the patio and let himself in the door as quietly as possible. The house was now dark and silent. He turned his phone flashlight off as he climbed upstairs, where small hallway nightlights guided him back to his childhood bedroom. He stood still outside its door for a moment, humming with nerves, then twisted it open and slipped inside.
Lillian was asleep. The tall window behind his bed, capped with a lunette, let in a stream of moonlight that made her light hair visible in the dark. She shifted in her sleep as he shut the door and crept to the bathroom.
Carver stripped and sniffed his clothes. As he’d feared, the smell of smoke wasn’t enough to cover the smell of sweat and dry semen. He stuffed these deep into the hamper and sprayed them with his cologne, then ran the shower as hot as he could stand and started to scrub himself with a loofah slathered in Lillian’s Sisley-Paris botanical body wash. He was worse off than he thought — there were flecks of cum all over him, dried in his sparse chest hair and on his forearms. The cum inside him had escaped in little dribbles which stopped as low as the backs of his knees. It was smeared in his hair where Scott had touched him, too. He lathered his head up with shampoo, then rinsed his hands and pushed two fingers into himself like an impatient doctor, ignoring his tenderness. When he engaged his internal muscles, semen flowed out of him, dribbling over his fingers.
Carver stood there flustered with impatience as he waited for this to end. Only a day prior this was a scenario he could have spent an hour jerking off to. Now that he’d had what he wanted, he was just exhausted and anxious. He was used to going outside of his marriage, but never like this. He had never let himself feel like he belonged to someone else. He had never let himself forget about Lillian for what felt like a private eternity.
Finally the water ran clear from all parts of his body. Carver slathered on some conditioner and rinsed that out too, leaning against the wall as he held the detachable showerhead over the crown of his skull, light-headed from the heat and everything else. His neck burned where Scott’s beard had scraped it.
He dried off and snuck back into the bedroom. Lillian stirred again at the sound of the door. Carver got some boxers from the dresser and put them on before crawling into bed next to her. A few locks of her hair stretched across her pillow to his. She smelled lovely as always. Carver felt deep foreboding as he looked at her, like she was a sleeping bear.
“Are you finished?” she murmured, scaring the hell out of him.
“What?”
“Are you done… like… walking around and shit…?” She punctuated this with a yawn.
“Yeah, I’m in for the night, sorry.”
“Okay.” She reached over and patted his face. “Few updates.”
“Yeah?”
“I talked to Marcus on the investment committee, and he said he can let us know tomorrow if we’d be able to get more equity… I also talked to a few other banks in the syndicate, and Credit Suisse was slavering at the idea of stepping up.”
Carver shifted in the blankets, mentally reorienting to work with great difficulty after having his brains fucked out. “Credit Suisse? All I’m hearing is it’s a fucking mess over there.”
