Page 67 of Puck You Both

"The chair was adequate." Patrick is already up, fetching a towel that was waiting on the bathroom doorknob. Waiting. This whole room was staged before I ever knocked.

"The chair had angles. You did furniture math." Theo rolls onto his stomach, chin on his stacked hands, facing me. "He did furniture math for you."

"I noticed," I say.

"He moved it three t—"

The towel hits him in the face. Patrick throws it without looking, then brings me a second one. I wipe my stomach and my hand clean while he takes a water bottle from the row on the nightstand.

I trade him the towel for the water. Our fingers overlap on the plastic longer than the handoff calls for. Then he lets go and cracks one for himself, and my hand stays warm where his was.

Theo surfaces from the towel with his curls destroyed and aims a finger at me. "You make a face right before you come. Like a scandalized owl. Don't fix it. It's the best thing I own."

"Drink your water," Patrick tells him.

He drinks his water, and keeps describing my face, gesturing with his free hand the whole time.

And I sit there, naked in a hotel armchair, with two naked men in the room, drinking water somebody uncapped for me in advance, and I laugh at whatever Theo’s hand is doing. Just laugh, easy, without checking the exits first.

That's something scary about it.

The rest of tonight I planned for. I planned for the watching, and somewhere deep down I'd even planned for the wanting. Nobody said anything about the part after. The part when Theo props his chin on his hands mere feet away and Patrick leans on the headboard and lets the quiet settle, and nobody performs, and nobody needs anything from me.

I fit here. I don't have a plan for fitting.

So I do what I know. I stand, take my clothes off the chair arm, and dress while two men watch me do it in respectful, filthy silence.

At the door I turn around. They're both looking at me, Theo starfished and grinning, Patrick with one arm behind his head. Something in my chest wants to make a statement. What my mouth produces instead is, "Thanks. Umm. Good hustle out there."

I’m three steps down the hallway when the words land. Theo's cackle comes right through the door, and underneath it, Patrick. Laughing, unguarded, a sound I have never once managed to get out of him. I collect it from the wrong side of a door with my ears burning and the corners of my mouth climbing.

I regret nothing. The hustle was good. Then, I laugh too.

The elevator carries me down through a sleeping hotel. In the doors' reflection there's a very large man holding a water bottle, hair a mess, mouth still misbehaving, and tonight comes in flashes.

Watching. Being watched. The orgasm, with no comparables on record. All of it is survivable. All of it I asked for out loud, like a man who knew what he was asking for.

Then there's the part I didn't ask for. It rides down with me, warm in my hand.

I didn't want to leave.

And it wasn't the sex.

The sex ended, and I still didn't want to leave.

It was after. Theo including me in the debrief, Patrick letting the quiet settle over all three of us like it was normal. Like I was.

I wanted to stay for the towel. For the water bottle.

The doors open on my floor, and I don't move right away.

Watching has a name. It has a description. I would know, I looked it up weeks ago, in incognito mode, like a coward.

Whatever this is, I haven't dared look it up yet.

Chapter 13

THEO