Page 31 of Puck You Both

From inside comes a sound. Wet and rhythmic.

There are explanations. Frank might keep a sink up here. The sponsor packets may have become unexpectedly moist since this afternoon. I stand in the dark hallway generating alternatives like a machine built for exactly this purpose. Then, Theo groans, carefully, like a man rationing his own volume.

The machine burns down.

My hand closes around the edge of the door.

Last chance. Nobody knows I made it this far. Patrick might suspect, but suspecting isn't seeing, and the difference between those two words has become strangely important to me tonight, for reasons I'll examine sometime after my death.

I was invited. To look at numbers.

I open the door.

***

PATRICK IS ON his knees.

That's the first thing I see. Not the office, not the tally I allegedly climbed a staircase to read. Patrick, all six-four of him, folded down onto the floor of a bar office. And then, there’s Theo's cock in his mouth, and every light in my skull goes out at once.

Heat detonates under my sternum and floods straight down. I stand in the doorway, not breathing. I should either leave, or announce myself. Instead I do the thing I've been thinking of doing since Milwaukee.

I watch.

Theo's braced back against the desk, jeans open and shoved to mid-thigh, one hand white-knuckled on the edge. His head is tipped back, throat working every time he swallows a sound. His shirt has ridden up over a lean stomach that keeps clenching in rhythm with the slow slide of Patrick's mouth, and there's an old bruise yellowing on his hip, right where Patrick's thumb rests.

And Patrick... Black dress shirt open at the collar, sleeves shoved up past his forearms, flexed hard where his fist rings the base of Theo's cock, veins standing under the skin.

His eyes are closed. Theo's too. They don't know I'm here, which means I could still back out with nothing lost, which means the decision is still entirely mine to hold.

"God, your mouth," Theo breathes at the ceiling. "Your stupid criminal mouth. I'm gonna get it laminated—"

Patrick hums, and the sentence dies with a crack down its middle.

He takes his time, dragging his lips up the length of Theo's cock like the night has nowhere else to be. When they reach the head and tighten, Theo's hips jerk off the desk. Without hurrying, Patrick spreads one hand flat on Theo's stomach and presses him back down.

The pinning is doing something to me.

Why is the pinning doing something to me?

Nothing in the twenty-eight-year archive of things I know about myself has a single word to say about it.

Patrick pulls back to drag his tongue up the underside, root to tip, and I get my first unobstructed look at Theo's cock. Flushed dark and curved up toward his stomach, shining everywhere Patrick's mouth has been. The head is swollen, leaking against Patrick's knuckles.

It's a good-looking cock.

Wait. Hold the fuck up. It's a what?

I don't have opinions about cocks. A few thousand locker-room showers, and I've never once had an opinion about a cock. Except now my mouth has gone dry over this one. I grab that thought, stack it somewhere dark, and stand on it.

"If you stop I'll die," Theo informs the ceiling. "I'll die right here in the bar and you'll have to explain the body—"

Patrick takes him back in.

"—fuck, thank you. Thank you—"

I'm staring at a man's mouth. At Patrick's mouth, wet and stretched, his beard dark and damp at the corners, cheeks hollowing on every pull, while my own cock is aching behind my zipper, full and heavy and getting worse each time his lips slide down.

The stack I'm standing on moves.