Work Text:
They need to rearrange the stockroom. There are boxes everywhere. David knew there were boxes in here but since when have they been fucking everywhere like this? Whose fucking idea was it to pack the stockroom so full of product?
It must have been Patrick; it sounds like something he would do. He ordered all these goddamn boxes and put them wherever the fuck he wanted with no consideration for wall space. So it’s his own fault, which makes it particularly frustrating that he’s trying so hard to get David up against the wall. There is no David-sized space of wall in here and Patrick should fucking know that because he’s the one who made the room like this, he did this to them. It’s infuriating.
Not infuriating enough for David to like, do anything about it, though.
For now, he’s going to be polite, and let himself be squished between a ladder and a stack of boxes, with a series of shelves pressed into some very weird places on his back. He’ll save his complaints for later. For now, there is a very cute boy, moaning very emphatically into David’s mouth, and pressing his very noticeable erection against David’s hip. And David is going to enjoy it while it lasts.
Because it won’t last. It can’t. Because in this context, ‘lasting’ would mean that he and his business partner would have sex, here, in their place of business, during business hours.
Which won’t happen for a lot of reasons, the most blatant one being that they’re not doing that. They’re not having sex. Yet. They don’t have sex. They’re waiting. They’re waiting, and that’s obviously fine and not fucking terrifying at all, but it does mean that David has some questions about what exactly Patrick is planning on doing with the hard cock he’s been grinding against David for the past ten minutes.
David wants to ask, but that would require getting his tongue out of Patrick’s mouth, and that’s obviously not going to happen, so he tries gently, politely nudging his thigh between Patrick’s legs to indicate his intended inquiry. And just in case Patrick can’t hear the question in the gesture, he also moans with a very clear upward inflection.
Patrick grips David’s shoulders, tight, and pushes back until their mouths finally separate. His face hovers so beautifully close, like the temptation is too strong to resist…
He makes a high and helpless sound, and lets his head fall onto David’s shoulder. “Sorry,” he gasps. “I’m sorry—shit, David, I’m so sorry.”
David’s brain can’t follow that at all, so he shakes his head to try and sort the words into the right order. “What? Why?”
Patrick makes another noise and slowly, slowly lets his fingers go slack in the folds of David’s sleeves. “It’s—this is…” he sighs out some half-formed word, and tries again. “It’s too much. I’m going too fast, and I should have—I shouldn’t—I should have said something sooner. I’m sorry.”
“Whoa, hey.” David is suddenly aware that his hands are still very much on Patrick’s ass, and he tries to move them to a more chaste position… but he can’t think of a part of Patrick’s body that isn’t an erogenous zone to him right now, so he keeps them awkwardly to himself. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“No, I do. I’m not—” Patrick lifts his head up, and his expression is so tense it looks painful. “I asked for time. I’m the one who asked for boundaries, and it’s not fair to you that I’m always the one going too far.”
David keeps shaking his head, still waiting for his brain to start working again. “But that’s still—it’s fine. It’s fine if you don’t always know your boundaries until you get to them.” He keeps grasping, hoping that he’s anywhere near what the actual problem is. “And you can always stop. You don’t have to feel—” he frowns, “bad?” he tries first, then, “guilty? There’s no… pressure. We don’t have to do. Anything. We don’t ever have to have sex, if it’s not what you want.”
Patrick laughs, though it sounds more like a whine. “No, David, that’s not it,” he says quietly. “I do want to. I want to… too much. I want you too much, I—” he lets out a shaky breath. He touches his fingers to David’s cheek, then holds his other palm to David’s jaw, and then he’s cradling David’s face. His hands are gentle. His skin is overheated. The places where they’re touching feel so sharp, like sparks of electricity that shoot right into David’s chest. Patrick brings David’s face closer to his, until their foreheads are touching and they’re breathing shallowly into the same tiny space, and David doesn’t know what the fuck is happening or what Patrick thinks he’s doing or why his throat is suddenly so tight. It’s too much. It’s too much, it’s too much, too much too much too…
“David,” Patrick whispers, and he sounds ragged, “you don’t even know. I didn’t know I—I could—god, David, you make me feel—”
The bell rings.
Fuck.
“Fuck,” David hisses. Why was the door unlocked? Why are they open? David can’t believe the universe is submitting him to this torture.
“David.”
“I changed my mind, I don’t want a store anymore,” David whispers frantically. “Shut it all down.”
“David,” Patrick says again, and he’s laughing this time, because he’s a cruel person. “Can you go deal with that? I, uh—” his eyes flick down, “can’t.”
David follows his gaze, and—
Oh.
Oh. Right.
David tucks his lips between his teeth, and tries to keep himself from shaking out of his skin.
Patrick, little button-faced button-up business boy Patrick Brewer, can’t go help a customer right now, because he has an erection. In the stockroom. During business hours.
“Mm-hm.” David nods vigorously. “Mm-hm, yep. Yes. Will do.” He disentangles himself from Patrick’s grip and wriggles his way out of the tiny nook he’s been pressed into. “You just… take your time. But this,” he waves vaguely at the very visible bulge in Patrick’s jeggings, “is highly unprofessional. I expect better from you, Mr. Brewer.”
“David, just—” Patrick shoos him out, with a tight look of mortification.
David keeps nodding as he goes out onto the floor. He keeps smiling as he helps a sunburned farm-type pick out a moisturizer with better SPF. He keeps grinning as other customers trickle in. He doesn’t even mind when it grows into a small crowd that he has to deal with all on his own. Right now, he’s all on his own because his business partner is hiding in the stockroom until his boner goes away, and nothing could diminish David’s joy.
By the time Patrick finally emerges from the depths and politely cuts in at the cash so David can work the floor, David has totally lost track of how long it’s been. Patrick is perfectly calm, and David is perfectly calm, and it’s all very normal. But David can see splotches of pink lurking under Patrick’s collar, and bright red at the tips of his ears.
David feels like his feet never touch the floor the rest of the day, because Patrick was unprofessional at work and now he’s all flustered about it. And flustered Patrick is pink and talks a little too fast and sometimes needs two tries to correctly make change and he’s adorable, he’s adorable, he’s the most adorable thing David has ever seen, and it makes the afternoon rush float by like a soft, fluffy dream.
The store doesn’t empty out again until it’s almost time to close. David is tidying up the displays, Patrick is breaking a new roll of quarters, and there hasn’t been a customer in a full minute… then two… then five…
“David.”
“Hm?”
“Would you like to stop staring at me?”
David doesn’t look away. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Patrick’s ears get a little redder. “David—”
“No, I’m just,” David waves a hand, “checking in. You were hidden away for such a long time, and you seemed very…” he makes a long, deliberate show of choosing his next word. “Agitated.”
“I’m fine, David,” Patrick says, with a tiny edge of warning. He clearly doesn’t realize how delightful this all is. “I took care of it.”
David frowns. “Took care of it.”
Patrick’s expression somehow manages to become even less amused, while his face becomes an even brighter pink. “Yes. Can we get back to work now?”
“It’s just, what you phrase it like that, it almost sounds like—”
“David,” Patrick says firmly, “I tried waiting for the situation to go away on its own, and it was taking too long, so I—” he chokes off, and waits a moment before very, very carefully continuing, “I took care of it.”
David takes a deep breath.
And then he takes another.
“Oh. My god.”
“David—”
“Oh my god!” David drops the bag of tea he was holding and runs into the stockroom, flinging the curtain aside so violently he almost takes the whole thing down. Then he stops dead in his tracks, and looks around, and drinks it all in.
Because this isn’t the stockroom anymore. This will never be just the stockroom again. Now, and forever more, this is a room where Patrick Brewer has had an orgasm.
This is a place in their store, in their place of business, where Patrick has gotten an erection and then ‘taken care of it’ and taken his cock in his hand and jerked himself off and made himself come—
Made himself—
“Oh my god.”
David looks around frantically, because there’s no sink in here, no trash can, so—
“Oh my god!”
David wracks his brain: Did Patrick walk by the trash when he came back out on the floor? Did he reach for the one behind the counter? Did he go to the bathroom?
Because if he didn’t, that means there’s a very good chance that he cleaned himself up with the tissues in the box on the windowsill, and then—god, god, god, god, god—did he put them in his pocket? Are there dirty masturbation tissues in Patrick’s pocket right now? Has he been walking around, working, dealing with customers, with his own come in his pocket?
David flails, leaning on the nearest stack of boxes to keep himself upright, because his knees are suddenly weak.
He hears the curtain move behind him. “Okay, David—”
David whirls around, and he looks at Patrick, and he presses his lips together.
“Can we just,” Patrick puts his hands on his hips, then changes his mind and folds his arms instead—which doesn’t look any less awkward. “Can we be professional about this?”
“Professional?!” David shrieks, “You’re going to look me in the eye and talk about ‘professional’ after you lit-rally masturbate in the store during work hours? There were customers—”
David cuts himself off with another shrill noise, because he hadn’t thought about that part yet. “There were customers! I was out on the floor with customers while you were right here behind a flimsy little curtain, coming all over the stockroom!”
Patrick tries his hands on his hips again, still restless, still the brightest shade of red a person so pale can possibly be. “Okay, I didn’t—it was not all over the stockroom, David.”
“Where was it?”
Patrick clenches his jaw. “You don’t need to know that.”
“Excuse you? I’ve never needed to know anything this badly!”
Patrick wasn’t amused to begin with, but now it’s clear that even his begrudging tolerance is starting to wear thin. His expression is hard, and not in the ‘You’re Annoying But I Still Think You’re Cute’ kind of way that’s become so familiar. Now, David is being annoying, and Patrick doesn’t think he’s cute at all.
He should stop. David knows that. He knows he’s being too much, and he’s bothering Patrick, and he’s not even getting anything out of it, and any rational adult would stop now because this is just obnoxious.
But he’s not a rational adult, is he? He’s not a mature, considerate partner (they’re not doing ‘partner’). He’s an obnoxious brat. That’s who he is. That’s who he knows how to be.
So he leans into it. “I’m sure there’s some fancy business code that says you’re not supposed to leave bodily fluids lying around your store,” he reaches for the pocket of Patrick’s jeans—
Patrick grabs his wrist. “David,” he says, and it sounds like that last thread of his patience is ready to break.
And David wants it to. He doesn’t know why, why he’s being so awful—except that he is so awful, he’s being exactly who he is, and he can’t stop himself. He’s being horrible and Patrick is getting sick of him and David just wants to make him snap, he wants to wear out all of his calm, fond patience and annoy him past his breaking point and piss him the fuck off because that’s it, that’s what he does, and he wants Patrick to fucking know that. He’s being horrible right now because he is horrible, and people can only put up with him for so long before they’re over it. Everyone has a level of David Tolerance, and he’s gonna find Patrick’s, so everything will make sense again.
David wriggles his hand out of Patrick’s grip. “No! It is entirely unfair that only one of us has had an orgasm at work,” he reaches for Patrick’s other pocket, and Patrick grabs him again, and then they’re in a stupid, childish back-and-forth grapple, “and if I have to be the sad loser who hasn’t come in my own store, I’m at least gonna get the satisfaction of knowing the dirty details of your unprofessionalism!”
Apparently Patrick has been holding back, because he grabs both of David’s wrists, and suddenly his grip is like iron. David can’t break free, no matter how hard he wiggles—god, has Patrick been this fucking strong the whole time?
“David,” he says in a voice that’s just as severe as his hands, “what if I told you there was nothing to clean up, because I licked it all off my hand?”
David—
David blinks, and every single thought he’s ever had just… oozes out of his brain.
“So—s’y… You th—hm. Mm.” It’s like there’s cotton in his mouth. He looks at Patrick’s perfectly serious, perfectly stoic expression. He clears his throat. “S—um. Did—you. You d- you did- You did… that? You did that?”
Patrick stares him down, silent, looking like he’s finally ready to snap.
He presses his lips together, and those stupid dimples show up, and he’s smiling—he’s doing that ridiculous fucking smile where the corners of his mouth go down and his face gets all soft and now he’s laughing to himself because he apparently thinks something about this is funny.
“No, David, I didn’t.” He lets go of David’s wrists. “But the look on your face makes me wish I had. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next time.” He pats David’s hip, a playful little swat, and he leaves. He goes back out on the floor. David can still hear him chuckling as he goes.
So—
What…
David stays where he is, surrounded by stacks of boxes. He stands, alone in the stockroom, lost.
Incorrect. That’s what this is. This is incorrect. Patrick has been incorrect about many, many things before, but this is different. David was testing him, and he failed. Spectacularly. God, how hard is it to give in and scream at David to knock it off? It’s not. It’s not hard at all, as people have proven over and over and over and over and over again. If Patrick can’t even do this one, simple thing right—
He thought he still had time. There’s a sweet spot, and it’s about a week after the first date (more commonly the first fuck, actually, but they’re sort of doing things out of order here). That’s usually how much time people need to realize they’ve made a mistake, and that the sex doesn’t make up for… the rest of it. The rest of him.
And it usually doesn’t matter, that’s why it’s the sweetest of sweet spots: one week isn’t really long enough for David to give a shit. He leaves that week-long window wide open, and when someone slams it in his face, it’s… meh. It’s not great, but it’s not like he cares, it was just a few days. After more than that, he has enough time to start caring. So if someone wants out, David wants them out fast. Get in, fuck themselves out, and that’s all she wrote. It’s dependable. It’s uncomplicated. It has a morbid sort of elegance. It’s the Edgar Allan Poe of dating strategies. A week is plenty of time for someone to realize they’re hurtling toward a David-shaped mistake.
The bell rings, and David listens to Patrick greet a customer.
It’s been six days.
David has tried to hide it, before. In other relationships, he kept himself on his best behavior, and watched what he said and what he did and what he cared about. He made himself easy. Well, in some respects; there are things David can be easy about, and there are things he can lie about. And he’s been aware of those things. In the past, he’s done what he can, to… fix it. Make himself palatable—more palatable, anyway. He’s managed to… prolong it, for a while. Delay the inevitable.
He hasn’t been doing that with Patrick, because he wants Patrick to… get it. He wants Patrick to get it, so he’ll realize sooner. Because he’s going to, eventually. Obviously. And for once, David doesn’t want to drag it out. He wants Patrick to realize exactly what sort of mistake he’s making as soon as he possibly can. David’s been making it easy for him.
Hell, it’s not like he even has to try.
Why couldn’t Patrick have just gotten pissed at him like he was supposed to? David left that door wide-fucking-open for him, and it’s like he was so determined to not go through it that he climbed out the window instead. David’s given him so many chances. Patrick could have just dumped him right then, about the stupid teasing about the stupid stockroom masturbation. He could have dumped David when he got to work three hours late yesterday, or when he intentionally messed up Patrick’s lunch order on Tuesday because he was too embarrassed to admit that he has Patrick’s lunch order memorized, or when he spent all of Sunday complaining that Patrick hadn’t taken him on a second date yet even though he knew it was because Patrick had baseball practice Saturday evening; it’s been chance after chance, it’s been six days of chances after how many weeks of chances to realize it wasn’t worth it in the first place. And Patrick hasn’t taken any of them.
And that doesn’t make sense. David doesn’t know what that means. Patrick was supposed to get pissed at him, because he was being annoying, and that’s what people do. They get sick of him and they fume or shout or leave—they leave, and that makes sense. It’s predictable. David knows to expect it, and he knows how to handle it, and if Patrick won’t do it, then…
Then…
David doesn’t know.
Because if David is being like this—being him, being all the awfulness of himself—and it doesn’t make Patrick upset, it doesn’t make Patrick yell at him, doesn’t make Patrick hate him, then… what? What are the options, here? Either Patrick has inhuman levels of tolerance for things that annoy him, or he’s… not annoyed. If David is being himself, and Patrick doesn’t dislike it, that would mean that Patrick just… likes him.
Which isn’t—
Which isn’t a thing, which isn’t something that’s going to happen in the stockroom during business hours. David needs to be… doing shit.
He presses his hands to his face. He can hear more customers on the floor, he can hear Patrick ringing someone up, just a few feet away.
This isn’t the time.
He already tried to make Patrick figure it out today, and it didn’t work. There’s nothing he can do about that now. Today’s not the day Patrick Brewer leaves him.
So he might as well get back to fucking work.
The store’s pretty full (the usual mad rush of people coming in fifteen minutes before closing because of fucking course they are), so Patrick doesn’t even look up from the cash as David scoots past him. They just work. It’s busy, but neither of them falter. They’re good at this. They’re… David hesitates over the thought, but, yeah: they’re a team. They make a good team.
David has just finished convincing someone that they do really need body milk and a lotion bar when Patrick sneaks by him on his way around the counter, armed with some extra totes and a bundle of sweaters that need to be gift wrapped. He’s got that ‘It’s 4:58 God Why’ look. He nods toward David. “Hey, can you grab this for me?”
David immediately holds out both his hands, not sure which of the twenty-some things in his arms Patrick is referring to.
Patrick says, “Thanks,” and presses a wadded-up tissue into David’s hand.