Look, Simon’s kind of picky about sex, just like he’s picky about every other thing in his life, and reciting the laundry list of things he doesn’t like is a guaranteed way to kill the mood. “I don’t like—” he starts. Charlie’s looking at him. Simon shuts his eyes. “No hurting. No name calling. Nothing mean.”
“You don’t want me to be mean to you,” Charlie says, and something in his voice makes Simon need to open his eyes.
“No judgment if you like that kind of thing. It’s just not for me.”
“I wasn’t going to call you names, Simon.”
“No, I mean—yes, please don’t call me names. But the main thing is that I don’t want to callyounames.” Charlie looks like he’s trying not to look surprised, and it isn’t working. “I don’t want to be—”
Mean is the wrong word. Bossy is closer. He thinks of himself as sullen and bitchy, but knows it comes off, somehow, as quiet and stern to people who are optimistic about that sort of thing. He’s eightypercent sure—a hundred percent, a hundred and twenty percent—this mistaken impression is what drew Jamie to him at first.
Anyway, he can’t tell Charlie that he doesn’t want to be bossy in bed, because he knows exactly how it’ll sound. Whatever impression Charlie gets will be half right, but he’ll probably conclude that Simon wants to be bossedaround, which isn’t right either. The truth is that he just likes the idea that someone wants to make him feel good, that he wants to make them feel good too. Obviously he can’t say any of this.
“I think the men I sleep with expect me to be,” Simon starts, “something I’m not? Aggressive? I have no interest in smacking anyone around. Also no interest in tying anybody up and telling them they’re a good boy.”
Charlie blinks. “Duly noted.”
“I don’t like being edged. Sertraline edged me for like ten years. I don’t need that energy from amateurs.”
Charlie lets out a crack of laughter.
“Sertraline’s an SSRI,” Simon explains.
“I know what it is. You don’t take it anymore?”
Simon truly can’t imagine a less erotic topic than his psychiatric history, but this conversation has already taken a sharp turn toward the unsexy, so why not just double down. “That class of drugs kept messing with my migraine meds. What sucks is that they were pretty good for my anxiety, but the migraines were making my life hell, so here we are.”
Charlie’s quiet for a minute, and Simon hopes he isn’t casting his mind back, trying to identify the point when Simon went from being someone passably normal-adjacent to the person he is now. But Charlie just says, “Sounds hard.”
Simon swallows. “Yeah.”
“So, no edging. No pain or insults. No, uh, tying me up and calling me a good boy.” He utterly fails to keep a straight face.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Charlie laughs again and pulls off Simon’s jeans. “No, it’s good. I am totally fine with those rules. But what do youwant?” His voice goes so gravelly on that last word that Simon can almost feel it.
“I don’t know.” Simon knows exactly what he wants but can’t bring himself to say it, not with Charlie looking at him. “Just normal sex please.”
“Oh,normalsex. That kind of sex.”
“Charlie.” Simon pulls Charlie onto the bed with him, because they need to be done talking.
“No, really, how do you like it?”
“I told you. Very vanilla.” Simon turns onto his side, away from Charlie, tipping his head into the pillow. He has a perfectly clear vision of what he wants right now and he doesn’t know how he could possibly communicate that more clearly. Well, not without actually saying what he means, which is not an option. “Just. Nice.”
“Nice. Why the fuck are you being shy all of a sudden. Just tell me where, in an ideal world, my dick is in all of this. I feel like you’re telling me you want to get fucked but I literally do not know because you’re being such a weirdo.”
Simon is fundamentally incapable of answering any of this in a sane way. “I mean, Icouldfuck you. Like, if you really wanted me to. In an emergency situation.”
“You’d fuck me to save my life.”
“Yes. Exactly. You’re welcome.” This isn’t even a fair characterization of what Simon likes. He doesn’t hate topping, and even likes itunder certain circumstances, but none of those circumstances are applicable when he has Charlie Blake in his bed for one night only. He knows exactly what he wants, and he does not have the faintest fucking idea why he’s suddenly coy about it, except that he simply cannot open his mouth and ask Charlie to fuck him. “There’s condoms and lube in my suitcase.” He waves a hand and hopes Charlie realizes it’s an order.
Charlie does realize it’s an order. When he gets back into bed, he kisses the exposed side of Simon’s neck, his hand sliding low on Simon’s belly, his chest pressed against Simon’s back. “What I’m hearing is that you want me to fuck you real nice.”
Simon tries to smother himself with the pillow so Charlie can’t hear whatever sound he just made, but there’s no way Charlie missed the way Simon’s body reacted to that. At least Simon doesn’t need to explain anymore.
