Disclaimer: Not real.
Warnings: Anal fisting! It comes along by the middle, so feel free to skip ahead if you're squicked by blood (consensual, non-self-injurious cutting; mentions of temporary piercing and lacing) and are just here for the Boy Butter.
Notes: For We're So Dirty, Babe, the bandom kink challenge. Title from The Tool Song Which Shall Not Be Named. Handholding by the obligatory estrellada, beta by the incomparable heyginger. Please note that there is not actually any Boy Butter in this story, because Patrick is a classy guy.





What Became Of Subtlety



Patrick has a set of sharpened stainless steel fingerpicks. For a long time, he only brings them out to scratch or tease or tickle or terrify Pete--holding Pete's balls gently on the wickedly gleaming tips of his fingers. Tonight, though, they're in Patrick's den in LA and Pete is shirtless on the couch while Patrick rolls up his sleeves, standing over the black duffel bag in which he keeps his toys, looking thoughtful. Patrick says, "Lay down."

Pete does, heart and nerves pulsing dully with anticipation. His fingers fidget on his thighs aimlessly. With his bare toes, he creases the fabric covering the arm of the couch.

Patrick comes over with the fingerpicks cupped in his hands, a shiny, painful jumble. He crouches beside the couch and looks across at Pete. "I'm gonna cut you with these, okay?" he says, and Pete is nodding before the question mark even registers.

"I can?" Patrick asks, eyebrows rising.

"Please," Pete says.

Patrick shrugs. He carefully sets the picks on Pete's stomach--or, nine of them. He keeps one and gets to his feet and walks away, doing something with the supplies set out on his desk.

Pete watches the little steel knives rise and fall as he breathes. He gets himself to a slow, deep place, staring at the way the room's golden light turns cold white against the metal. He smells rubbing alcohol and knows Patrick is wiping down the pick.

Patrick comes back with a damp square of gauze, his right hand gloved in blue nitrile; he still uses gloves, and it's not because he's sleeping around, or sleeping with anyone. It's pretty obvious to Pete that it's because Patrick doesn't really believe him when Pete says he's been keeping it to himself for the last six months.

Patrick nudges Pete's elbow with his knee and Pete raises both arms, resting them on the arm of the couch above his head. Patrick crouches again and wipes down Pete's sides and chest, left to right, top to bottom, leaving the picks on Pete's stomach untouched. The brim of Patrick's cap and the angle of his glasses hide his eyes, and Pete swallows hard around a sudden lump of nervousness.

Patrick has cut him before, a hundred times, but always with a perfect, sterile scalpel, fresh from its plastic sleeve, like a take-out fork, while Pete is laid out like an autopsy patient on a white plastic sheet. Patrick has pierced his chest and arms and back, with plastic-hubbed needles popped like gum from their hard plastic wrappers, while Pete is sitting on another plastic sheet. Patrick has had him stomach-down on a tarped bed, and sewn Pete's legs together with nylon fishing line zig-zagged like a corset, from his tailbone to his knees, and wound Saran wrap around him from his waist to his ankles, and then caned the backs of his thighs with a plastic rod, blood seeping warm and ticklish along his skin.

Patrick has drawn his blood in a thousand ways, but never like this. The bare corduroy of the couch's upholstery is warm and textured on Pete's back, under his toes, and it should be comforting, but it isn't.

Patrick slips the clean pick over his right index finger and skates it quickly across Pete's chest, lightly, just enough to raise a pink scratch underneath the mantle of thorns. Pete inhales sharply and the picks on his stomach tinkle faintly.

"Shallow, slow breaths," Patrick says, his voice low, and Pete nods and says, "Okay."

"Or through your nose, I guess," Patrick adds, consideringly.

Pete smiles a little and looks up at the ceiling and when the pale thread of a scratch curves warningly across his left nipple, he says quickly, "Yeah, yes, okay. I heard you."

Patrick's finger pauses, the pick poised at the edge of Pete's areola. "I could cut it off," he says. "It wouldn't be hard. This thing is very sharp."

"I know," Pete whispers, imagining the brief sting and the long ache and the immediate well of blood and the never, ever being able to go shirtless, ever again. He swallows, and looks over at Patrick's profile, at Patrick, who is looking at his hand, whose eyes are still hidden, whose mouth is pulled to one side in contemplation.

Patrick tilts his head to the the side and looks at Pete and winks, suddenly, his thoughtful expression twitching up into a smile. "Nah, too messy," he says, and Pete huffs out a warm breath almost like a laugh.

"Yeah, just a little," he says, because he has to say something. When Patrick talks to him, he has to talk back. He's not allowed to wander away inside his head, inside whatever Patrick is doing to him, inside whatever good or bad thing he's feeling. It's hard, sometimes, to stay where Patrick can see him.

Patrick breaks eye contact and continues skating the pick across and around Pete's chest and sides. His finger wanders, while Pete concentrates on his breathing, to the edge of the sterilized area of Pete's torso, and then beyond, to Pete's hip and the waist of his jeans just below it. The edge of the pick plucks at the denim and Patrick says, "I want these off."

"Okay," Pete says. Patrick gathers the unsterilized picks from Pete's stomach and puts them on a side table while Pete pushes and tugs and kicks his jeans off.

Patrick flicks the pick on his finger against the curve of Pete's half-hard dick in his underwear and Pete jumps. Patrick smirks at him and Pete stares at the ceiling, pretending he's not blushing, while Patrick cleans the pick again with another alcohol wipe.

Patrick lifts Pete's leg and presses it back. Meeting Pete's eyes, he asks, "Can you hold it?"

Pete says, "Yeah," and wraps both hands around the back of his knee, but Patrick leaves his warm, bare hand anyway.

Patrick runs his other hand over the exposed underside of Pete's thigh, just above the cuff of his boxer briefs, the strange not-quite-rubbery texture of the nitrile glove dragging uncomfortably against Pete's body hair.

Patrick's finger pauses again. "Here," he says. "Ready?"

Pete closes his eyes and breathes through his nose and makes himself relax, and says, "Yeah."

More alcohol, and the air-meeting-astringent sting is a pale foreshadowing of what it's like to be cut. Pete feels the press of the pick's edge against him, and hears Patrick's anticipatory inhalation, and a bright horizon of hurt opens, and Pete feels and hears the whuff of Patrick's slow exhale, just below Patrick's bare hand. Patrick's hand, Patrick's presence, firm and solid and grounding. Pete sighs into the pain, letting himself enjoy it, letting himself remember that Patrick enjoys it too.

Patrick moves the tip of the pick, cutting Pete open a little more, and the pain of the new and the pain of the old are harmonious. Pete makes a quiet, pleased noise and shifts his grip on his knee deliberately. He feels a trickle of warmth down his thigh. Blood, finally.

"Jesus," Patrick breathes. He blots his damp forehead on Pete's raised shin, just rests for a second: heavy, welcome weight against Pete, and then he's gone. "Okay?" he asks.

Pete just moves again, flexing the muscle underneath the cut, drawing another bead of blood from himself, and cries out when Patrick lands a hard, stinging slap on the top of his left thigh, stretched out on the couch.

"Okay, okay," Pete spits. "Okay, I'm fine, fuck, ow. You know it's okay. You know you can do whatever you want, ow, Christ."

Patrick's gloved palm cups Pete's cut thigh; his other hand rubs the sting in, and he says, "Whatever I want?"

"Yes," Pete says, squeezing his eyes shut and putting his hand over them. He means it, he does, but it's a fucking scary thing to say.

Patrick is silent for a long moment, and then he says, cocky and sarcastic, "Can I put my hand in your ass?"

Oh, god. Pete's fingers dig into his left temple and he bites his lip, only thinking about how he can't take back what he said. He can't let Patrick think he doesn't know what he's doing--Patrick already thinks he doesn't know what he's doing. He can't let Patrick be right. Patrick will never let him live it down; or he won't let himself live it down. He hears Patrick inhale to take it back, to move on in the scene. And because he did mean it, even if if he didn't mean this exactly, Pete says, "Yes."

The blade is gone from his thigh and Patrick's hand is gone from his other thigh and Patrick is breathing out hard and snapping, "Bullshit."

Pete shakes his head.

Patrick says, "Fucking look at me," and Pete drops his hand and meets Patrick's eyes.

"You can," Pete says, trying to make it sound like an invitation. "I want you to."

Patrick's mouth scrunches up like he's tasted something iffy. He says, "We don't. You don't--this isn't sexual."

Which is true, of course: it isn't. They don't. Patrick hurts Pete, and when they're done, Pete gets some cuddles and some water and then they split up. Patrick goes back to work or whatever he was doing, his normal life, or goes and--satisfies himself, whatever; Pete's not going to fucking ask about it. Pete usually lays in his bed or on his couch or in his bunk and prods at his bruises and bandages and determinedly ignores the lift in his pants until he can't stand it anymore and jerks off. But--yes, Patrick does this with guys, Patrick has--all of a sudden, Pete wants desperately to know how many guys' asses Patrick's hand has been in.

"Fuck sexual," Pete says instead of asking. "You asked if you could put your hand in my ass, and I said yes, so are you gonna get the fuck on with it or what?"

The sting of the back of Patrick's hand across his cheek and mouth, the jolt of the slap and the jolt of surprise. His own quick inhale when it's over, the way his eyes are shocked wide and he's reset to look up at Patrick in silence, waiting.

Patrick stares down at him, eyebrows raised, also waiting, wiping Pete's spit off his hand onto the couch. Pete blinks and Patrick says, "Since you asked so nicely, yes. I will get the fuck on with it."

"Okay," Pete says.

Another moment of Patrick staring at him, biting his lip, considering, and then he shakes his head and gets up. He comes back with Polysporin and gauze and medical tape and bandages Pete up efficiently, silently. Finally, he slaps Pete's thigh, right on top of the gauze, and says, "If you think this is going to be easy 'cause I'm a small guy, you got another fucking thing coming."

Pete winces and says, "I have seen your hands, actually," and Patrick laughs.

Patrick helps him over and up onto his knees and Pete crosses his arms on the arm of the couch.

"I'm gonna, um," Patrick says, slipping one finger under the hem of Pete's underwear. "I don't want to disrupt the bandage, okay, so I'm gonna just. Cut these off." The cold metal edge of the EMT shears slips in beside Patrick's finger almost before he's done talking.

"Yeah, okay," Pete says. "I know you're just a fucking perv who can't wait to get my clothes off, Patrick. There's no need for lies with me." He jumps a little as Patrick thumps him across the ass with his forearm, snickering.

The blunt nose of the shears moves up over each cheek, and the final snip of the elastic band sends them sliding off in one piece. Pete looks down his chest and sees them in a tidy heap, medium blue cotton decorated with a long island of his own blood, his hard dick along his stomach above them, and Patrick's gloved hand braced on the couch between Pete's bent knees.

Patrick's bare hand skims over Pete's ass, lightly, like he's nervous, and then more firmly, like he remembers that he's familiar with this territory, after all, and then roughly, and Pete shudders under his touch, because Patrick knows how much Pete's flesh can take. Patrick hits him a half-dozen times, open-handed, fingers spread, the bright sting of his wide palm and the solid scrape of his fingernails when he closes his hand before pulling back for another blow.

Pete grunts with the last smack, and groans when Patrick hits him again, and again, with the side and then the back of his closed fist. The deep thud of each blow rocks him forward, jars his bones in all their joints and sockets, bounces his dick against his sweat-damp stomach. It's not exactly painful, it's too slow and deep for painful, except for how the cut on his thigh keeps getting pulled, stretched, reminding him it's there. The thump, thump, thump of Patrick's fist lulls Pete into a kind of meditative rhythm; he can hear Patrick's breath in syncopation with the impact of his hand--Patrick is there too, a zen state where there's only the breath, strike, and the breath, strike, like chanting, like marching, like music.

Finally, Patrick leans against Pete's flank, panting, arm flung across Pete's back, still bracing himself on his blood-streaked, gloved hand. Pete peeks over his shoulder as Patrick is pushing his glasses up his sweaty nose, tongue between his teeth, shoulders rising and falling in his sweater as he breathes hard.

"Need to work on my left arm," he says, and grins, shaking his head. "No fucking stamina at all."

"Well," Pete says, struggling through the good fog in his brain, "well, dude, it's your right arm that needs the stamina for fucking, isn't it?"

Patrick laughs and slaps Pete one more time, sloppy and unserious. He pushes himself to his feet and Pete watches him go back to the desk, peeling off his dirty glove and pulling a fresh pair from an innocuous white cardboard box, like something you'd see in a hospital or doctor's office or tattoo parlour. Exactly like, in fact, since Patrick gets his gloves from a tattoo artist friend, avoiding shopping in medical supply or sex stores or giving his credit card information to the internet.

The gloves Patrick is pulling on are black. Pete's noticed that Patrick seems to colour-code his gloves--plain white for piercing, dental blue for cutting, unsettling red for liquid latex and hot wax. Pete has seen tufts of black gloves in Patrick's bag, and seen boxes of them in the cupboard of Patrick's den here, in LA, and under the master bedroom sink in Chicago. He'd wondered what they were for, but never felt brave enough to ask.

Pete looks back down at his crossed arms, waiting, trying to relax. He's aware that half of him is playing a weird, wrong, one-sided game of oneupmanship with Patrick and himself, but he's also honestly curious. Can he take it? Can Patrick do it?

This time, Patrick comes back from the desk with a black jar under his arm, adjusting the fingers of his left glove. He sets the round container on the side table, beside the discarded picks, pretty much right under Pete's nose. Pete reads the label and snorts a startled laugh. FIST, yeah right.

Patrick grins, unscrewing the lid. "Exactly what it says on the box," he says. He scoops out a glob of lube and smears it over the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Pete can feel his eyes getting bigger as he watches, so he puts his forehead on his arms and just tries to keep breathing.

Warm hand on his lower back. "Have you ever done anything like this?" Patrick asks.

Pete scrinches his face up in embarrassment; this isn't an interview, he can't lie to Patrick, and there's no entertainment value in exposing himself in this situation. He really fucking hates talking about this stuff when it's important. "I don't--you know I don't like talking about--"

"Yeah, whatever," Patrick says. "I need to know." Pete grumbles into his arms. Patrick slaps his painfully tingling ass and he yelps as Patrick says, in his patiently serious voice, "Yes or no. Have you ever been fucked, by a guy, with his dick?"

Pete's heart and dick jump a little, hearing Patrick say that. At the same time, he rolls his eyes, because Patrick fucking knows the answer is, "No."

Warm, thick, slick moves over the sensitive dip at the top of his crack, over the edge, and Patrick asks, "Have you ever been fucked with a dildo? Or other inanimate object?"

Pete snorts laughter into his arms again and remembers Lindsay rolling a ribbed condom over one of her vibrators and says, "Yeah, a few times," and feels the singular, sweet, heavy press of Patrick's fingers against his hole.

"How big?" Patrick asks, rubbing two fingers up and down, round and round, the knuckles of his other fingers resting against Pete's perineum and balls.

Pete wants to say: it was huge, it was a monster cock, it was like something out of science fiction or hentai, he doesn't want to concede one fucking thing, but he just swallows and says, "Not very."

He feels rewarded for his honesty when Patrick says, "Breathe in, and--" they exhale together and he relaxes, just like getting pierced, except that instead of a needle in and out of Pete's skin, Patrick is sliding both fingers into Pete's ass and patting Pete's hip affectionately with his other hand, his forearm heavy across Pete's lower back.

Pete is adjusting to the presence of Patrick's fingers in his ass, and to the fact that Patrick has his fingers up his ass, holy shit, when Patrick says, "Bigger than you?"

"I--what?" Pete says, shifting his hips, also remembering the hot, greedy feeling of having something in there, moving, fucking him.

"Was it bigger than your dick, Pete," Patrick says, leaning closer to Pete's ear, breath on his neck, Patrick's arm moving and his fingers moving.

Pete makes a strangled noise and says, "About the same, fuck, please," and Patrick's other hand scoops some more lube from the jar and paints it around Pete's hole, where the fingers in his ass can gather it and use it and--Patrick adds a third finger and is filling him as widely as he ever has been, but not as deeply.

Patrick turns his wrist, slowly stretches his fingers out into a W, and Pete kneels there and pants, head slipping lower and lower until his forehead is against his arms and he's breathing into the courduroy upholstery and feeling Patrick's breath cool over the sweat on his back. He becomes aware that Patrick is not feeling for his prostate, only peripherally brushing it, running his fingers past it the same as any other area of skin inside Pete's ass. Pete presses his temple to his upper arm, eyes clenched shut, thinking, with a weird kind of aroused regret, this is not sexual.

"Okay," Patrick says, his voice grounded and focused. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Pete says to the space between the couch and his chest, summoning his own voice from somewhere. "Yeah, I'm good."

"Okay," Patrick says again. "I think four, uh." More lube, and a new stretch, a new dimension of opening, and Patrick must be flattening his wide palm, because Pete feels like his ass is spreading on a hinge like a mouth. Patrick turns his wrist some more, smoothing his fingers and knuckles and everything around inside, his thumb rubbing a wide circumference across Pete's ass and brushing his balls and it's like Patrick is stationary and Pete is revolving around his hand. Patrick touches the back of Pete's neck, gently, his fingers wet with warm lube, and curls his fingers inside Pete, a little bit, as if he's checking to see if there's room in there. At the new angle, Pete arches his back, gasping, eyes opening and taking in the brightness of the room like a deep sea diver come up for air. He lets out an inarticulate noise between his teeth when his nipples scrape the courduroy upholstery.

"Jesus--keep still," Patrick says, his fingers tightening around the back of Pete's neck. "Or do I have to hold you down?"

Oh shit, oh. Pete groans and then says, clearly, "Yes."

"Oh, fuck, okay," Patrick says, sounding out of breath. His fingers recede and disappear and Pete squeezes his eyes shut because that's an emptiness that hurts, not like the cut on his thigh or the bruises on his ass, but deeper inside than Patrick could ever actually reach.

There is the familiar squeak and snap of gloves being pulled off, and then Patrick's hands, both bare and warm and sweat-damp, familiar, careful of the bandage, urging Pete back over--he swallows endorphin-induced giggles at the endorphin-induced image of himself as a pancake or piece of bacon being cooked. Flushed and squinty-eyed and biting his lip, Patrick looks down at him.

"Okay like this?" he asks, and Pete says, "Yes," even as Patrick rambles on, "It's not the best position, really it's pretty much the worst, but I don't have a, a sling, or--you know, okay, actually--" he frowns and shakes his head. "No, all right, sorry, back on your knees--"

"No, Patrick, please," Pete says, putting his fingers around Patrick's wrist, feeling sweat and the thicker slickness of lube smeared past the edge of a glove. "Please, please, I want to watch."

Patrick stares at him. Pete blinks. Patrick's tongue sneaks out to wet his lip, a nervous habit. Pete blinks some more and breathes hard through his nose. Patrick raises his eyebrows. "You want to watch," he says.

"That's what I fucking said," Pete grouses, suddenly embarrassed. "Jesus Christ, dude."

Patrick pulls on a new pair of gloves and laughs and says, "It's really not that interesting."

To which Pete replies, feeling daring and giddy and free, "You would know this how? You had a lot of hands in your ass, Lunchbox?" He gasps sharply as Patrick pushes in three fingers at once.

"I know you think I'm superhuman, but even I can only handle one at a time," Patrick says, adding his pinkie and rolling Pete's balls around with his thumb, sparks and lines of fire everywhere, even though Pete's pretty much lost his hard-on.

It takes him a minute to realize that the good pressure he's feeling is Patrick moving his hand, in and out, and he sighs and rocks with it. They go like that for a while, re-establishing openness and rhythm.

Pete stirs and pays attention when Patrick's thumb rubs down to his hole and presses close to Patrick's palm, not inside, not yet.

"Breathe in," Patrick says, and they inhale together, and Pete relaxes on the exhale again and Patrick slides his hand in, fingers pointed and folded in on each other and thumb tucked inside.

Perfect, perfect fullness. Pete puts his hands over his face, not quite able to believe what his eyes are telling him. Patrick's hand is in his ass.

"Okay?" Patrick asks quietly.

"Yes," Pete says, and drops his hands. Patrick looks pretty disbelieving too, eyes wide and hair dark with sweat. There's a little smear of lube on the right lens of his glasses. Pete cracks a smile and says, "I'm good. It's good."

Patrick nods and smiles back, a little. He looks back down between Pete's bent knees and bites his lip. Pete sees his shoulder move before he feels the thrust, slow and definite. Each push forward builds in deliberation, becomes steady like a waltz rather than a machine.

Patrick's sticky, gloved fingers start tapping counterpoint rhythms on Pete's chest, and Pete rolls his eyes at the ceiling.

Which is, of course, the moment something happens, and Pete isn't even sure what it is, just this huge rolling inside of him and a hard plunge and he flails his arms out, grabbing at Patrick's shoulder and the back of the couch, and Patrick catches him, pressing him back down, holding him, saying, "It's okay, it's okay, I should've warned you, it's just me, relax," and all of these things are true, so Pete does relax.

His right hand has ended up caught between the couch and Patrick's thigh--warm denim and warm courduroy, comfortable. Patrick's elbow just below his sternum, pressing the breath from him with every thrust, like a bellows, like an organ. Patrick's gloved fingers holding his arm against his side, firmly, not digging, not pinching, probably bruising anyway.

He looks down at himself, straining to spy the shine of Patrick's gloved hand, the wrinkled cuff of the glove around Patrick's wrist, and stares instead at his dick, barely hard, nestled and jostled against his balls, between his angled hips, because--because fuck sexual. Patrick is not going to make him come like this. This is not--Pete grunts and his head knocks back into the arm of the couch and he grits his teeth at the ceiling as Patrick runs his knuckles over and over and over his prostate.

"Aw, shit," Pete hisses.

Dimly, distant, he can hear himself moaning, he can hear the ragged edge that means his throat is going to be raw for days, he can hear the pitch change as Patrick speeds up or slows down or does God only knows what with his hand. He feels, concrete, present, complete, as if his ass is the entire world, the long bone of Patrick's index finger pressing against something, an intense pressure at the very foundation of his body.

"You're okay," Patrick is telling him. "You're okay. You've got it all, it's all--"

"Thank you," he hears himself sigh, trailing off and up into a renewed round of moans, and that's exactly right, that's exactly what he wanted to say, exactly what he's wanted Patrick to hear for the last six months.

Patrick's forehead is a burning, wet circle on Pete's thigh, the brim of his cap pushed way up, his glasses askew, his eyes glued to his hand in Pete's ass. Pete flexes the hand trapped against Patrick's thigh, patting and petting and squeezing, in time to Patrick's ineffable rhythm, in time to his own voice chanting, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

"Fuck's sake," Patrick pants, sounding amused and annoyed. "You're fucking welcome, shut the fuck up."

Pete huffs out laughter, and that's in time to the fucking too. It's all in time, it's all in good time, it's all in him, he has it all, he has all of Patrick inside all of himself. He lets a flood of something like yes melt his tense arms and neck and lets it wash a smile over his face, lets himself let this be happiness, lets Patrick's hand working in him be like a wide and thorough tide.

He opens his eyes, something warm and slightly sticky touching his jaw and cheek. Patrick is looking at him, watching him, touching his face with his free hand.

"Hey," Pete says, and closes his eyes again, feeling his smile widen. He butts his cheek into Patrick's hand.

"Hi," Patrick says, and taps his fingers against Pete's cheek in a light slap. "Okay?"

"Awesome," Pete sighs.

"I'm gonna shoot myself for this later," Patrick mutters. "Let me suck you off, Pete, just this time, I promise--"

"Okay," Pete says to the tide, thinking fuck "this isn't sexual", and it takes him in, warm, stretching the world out so he can feel more than the slide of nitrile inside him. He's not really hard, he doesn't feel any sudden urgency, but he does feel his hips start to rock between Patrick's hand and Patrick's mouth, he does feel his ass tighten, a long and beautiful clench that makes Patrick groan too.

The fucking changes from full-range, in-out thrusts to nothing so much as a quickening jostle of Patrick's forearm, moving his fist back and forth steadily, and then faster, and then faster still, while he stretches Pete's half-hard dick out with his lips around the head, and then sucks it back in. Pete lets his eyes roll back in his head; it might be a cliche, but Patrick's earned it.

"Gonna," he whispers, a sweet, springing pressure building.

Patrick gives an affirmative noise and replaces his mouth with his left hand, glove and spit creating an odd glide that doesn't turn Pete off in the least. Patrick rests his forehead on Pete's thigh again and whispers, "Come on, come on, do it," moving his hand inside of Pete infinitesimally faster.

He squeezes Pete's dick and somehow makes his hand bigger inside of Pete, and says, "Come on, Pete," growling a little, like it's an order.

"Oh, fuck," Pete says, and comes.





He's floating on a warm, pleasant current, rocking between the back of the couch and Patrick's solidity, readjusting to being empty, feeling his body contract as minutes pass slowly. He hears a wet, squelching, snapping noise, and cracks one eye open to see Patrick tossing a black wad into the wastebasket next to the couch.

Patrick's mouth is damply red, red, red, and he's flushed and sweaty and thoroughly dishevelled, hair in his face, shirt coming untucked under his sweater vest, hat and glasses painfully askew, the whole nine yards. Pete's fingers twitch with a proprietary urge to mess him up more.

"Hey," Patrick says when he sees Pete is studying him. He doesn't wait for Pete to answer, just braces his hands on the edge of the couch and pushes to his feet.

"Yo," Pete says, hoarsely, and closes his eyes again. His side is freezing cold without Patrick's stomach pressed to it. He crosses his arms over his chest and feels his left upper arm for the bruises he'd hoped Patrick would leave. The skin is vaguely inflamed and sore to the touch. He presses his knees together and shifts into the spreading ache in his hips.

Something big and heavy and soft drapes over him and he opens both eyes because this is one of the good parts--the brown fleece blanket that's big enough for ten people, and a cool glass of water. Pete sits up and pulls the blanket around his shoulders, wincing at stretched sore spots and unexpected tenderness. He reaches out of the blanket for the glass Patrick offers him. Patrick's hat is straightened and his glasses are clean and set right on his nose. He's still pink around the edges, but his hair is tucked behind his ears and his lips are dry.

"So," Pete says.

"What," Patrick says, and turns away, screwing the lid back on the jar of lube and putting it in his bag.

"So that was sexual," Pete says. He holds the glass against his sweaty forehead, neck, chest.

Patrick rounds and gestures with a plastic bag of gauze. "I said I'd shoot myself later, you don't have to be a fucking asshole--"

Pete laughs and says, "Fucking asshole," and tugs the blanket higher around his shoulders, snickering.

"Shut up," Patrick says, but his shoulders relax and he tosses the gauze into his bag instead of throwing it.

"I don't mind," Pete says. He takes a drink of water and meets Patrick's eyes over the edge of the glass.

Patrick's shoulders rise again and his mouth tightens. He nods testily and says, "Oh, thanks, I really appreciate your, what, your fucking forebearance--"

Pete rolls his eyes. Loudly, he says, "It was good, I liked it, all of it, we can do it again," over Patrick's defensive voice.

"You--" Patrick points at him and bites his lip, eyes narrowed. "Quit it. I don't need your--"

"Seriously," Pete says. "Do I look like I'd martyr myself to your perverse, deviant, base desires?" He spreads his hands and the blanket parts to show red scratches and finger marks on his chest and arms and a smear of drying come on his stomach, his dick limp and tender between his crossed legs, his inner thighs tacky with lube.

"Well, yeah, actually," Patrick sighs, stepping to the edge of the couch and pulling the blanket closed again, which Pete appreciates: he's getting kind of chilly. Patrick puts his warm hand on Pete's sweaty head and strokes his thumb across Pete's forehead, slowly. Pete looks up at him and smiles tiredly, happily, and takes another drink of water.

"Also," Patrick adds, smiling affectionately back, "perverse and deviant mean the same thing, dumbass."

Pete flips him the bird around the edge of the blanket and Patrick smacks the back of his head, but gently.


End.


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