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If you ask Patrick, it’s the jeans that are really at fault here. The artfully bleached, generously ripped skinny jeans, and the way they cling to the long, long legs of the man sitting two rows ahead, five seats to the left.
When Patrick first signed up for the business seminar at the local community college, he hadn’t had much in the way of expectations. He saw it as an opportunity to brush up on certain aspects of his degree that he hadn’t had reason to use in a while. He hoped it might also be a chance to network, build up his contacts, and look for new partnership opportunities. He’d been complacent recently. He needed to shake things up.
Then, on the first night of class, a tall, gorgeous man with dark hair and a distracting fashion sense walked into the lecture hall and upended Patrick’s heartfelt intention to get the most he could from the course material. The man had cast a shrewd look around the room, his gaze eventually landing on Patrick, who'd offered him an easy smile in return, nodding his head slightly in invitation toward the chair beside his own. The man had scoffed and taken a seat on the other side of the room. It was a clear message that he wanted to be left alone, and Patrick has been trying to honor that ever since. He has been honoring it. He's talked to the guy a few times, sure. An offer to share notes here, an innocent joke there, all to no avail. So he's honoring it. He's an honorable guy.
But those jeans, though.
“Can you stop drooling all over your desk?” comes a voice from the seat beside him. “I feel like I’m dangerously close to the splash zone.”
“I’m not drooling,” Patrick responds automatically, touching a fingertip to the edge of his mouth to make sure. He doesn’t know how he got so lucky as to have Stevie sitting with him this week, but at least she’s good at distracting him from the source of his thirst. If he doesn’t manage to settle down and start thinking with his upstairs brain soon, he’s going to miss the rest of the lecture.
“Why don’t you just ask him to marry you already?” Stevie chirps, failing to provide any kind of useful distraction at all, and Patrick sighs.
“He’s made it clear he’s not interested in anything I have to say.”
“Maybe he’s interested in something else,” she says, and her words are innocuous enough, but she manages to deliver them so lasciviously, throwing in a shoulder shimmy and eyebrow waggle for good measure, that Patrick nearly blushes.
“I think he just wants to focus on the material,” he insists, trying to steer the conversation out of the gutter.
“Uh-huh,” Stevie says. “I bet you’ve got some material for him to focus on.” She once again makes the words sound so much dirtier than they have any right to, and Patrick shakes his head at her.
“What is wrong with you?” he marvels.
“So many things.”
She’s not really paying attention to him anymore, head bowed low to scribble something on her notepad, and Patrick wonders which key piece of business advice he just missed from the instructor. Before he has a chance to refocus, the class is wrapping up, and Patrick didn’t even realize how late it was. By the time he starts gathering up his things, most of the others are already moving toward the door, and Stevie moves with them, not bothering to wait for him, not that he expected her to.
As he finally stands to go, Patrick catches Stevie dropping something onto the desk of the man with the dangerous jeans: a piece of paper. He watches as the man picks it up and unfolds it, but he doesn’t stay to see what happens next, rushing to catch up with Stevie instead.
“What was that?” he demands.
“My gift to you,” she informs him, looking extremely pleased with herself. “He won’t be able to ignore your material now.”
Patrick looks back over his shoulder, but he doesn’t see anyone else come out of the lecture hall. He follows Stevie through the double doors and out onto the sidewalk.
“Why do I feel like all you’ve done is get me in trouble? Do you even come to this class to learn, or are you just here to torture me?”
"Oh, both. It's called multitasking."
***
“Hey! Hey, yeah! You, in the blue shirt! What the fuck is this?!”
In the few short minutes it's taken Patrick and Stevie to walk to their cars, nearly all of their classmates have already gone, leaving only Stevie to bear witness as Patrick’s face flames red while the hot guy from class comes barreling across the parking lot. He glowers at Patrick, waving the scrap of paper in the air.
“Where do you get off—” he accuses, chest rising and falling as he struggles to catch his breath. Patrick can’t help but track the movement, admiring how the guy's shirt strains, the muscles in his neck bunching and releasing with the effort to slow his breathing. Patrick is only human, after all. He may be honorable, but he’s not dead. “Where do you get off,” the guy starts again once he reaches Patrick, whose traitorous brain immediately latches on to just the last two words, “sending this, this,” he gestures to Stevie, who is watching the scene from a few feet away with sheer delight, “this troglodyte to do your dirty work for you? What makes you think that any of this is appropriate?”
He waves the paper in Patrick’s face, and Patrick snatches it, scanning it quickly. Jesus.
To the Hottie in class,
Did you sit in sugar? Cause you've got a sweet ass.
xx Guy in blue shirt
“I swear I didn’t ask her to write this, David.” Patrick spares a moment to appear as earnestly apologetic as possible before turning to shoot daggers out of his eyes at Stevie.
“Oh, please,” she rolls her eyes. “I only wrote what you’ve been thinking this whole time.” She slides into the driver’s seat of her rundown car, cranking down the manual window to add, “You’re both welcome, by the way.”
Thoroughly un-admonished and clearly bored with the situation, she peels out and drives off into the sunset like some sort of 21st century trickster god. When Patrick turns back to his accuser, he finds David looking at him with a slightly less enraged, though still clearly annoyed expression.
“Look, I don’t appreciate this kind of behavior,” he starts.
“I’m definitely getting that.” Patrick sighs, leaning against the driver’s side door of his own car and letting his shoulders sag under the weight of his own frustration. He readies himself for a different kind of lecture.
“You’re obviously very cute,” David says, and Patrick can’t help his own tiny, pleased smile, “but this is not acceptable behavior.” His tone and volume begin to rise again, his agitation resurfacing. “This is an extremely inappropriate setting for something like this! You need to be respectful!”
Something about David's use of that word hits Patrick the wrong way. He squints, his head tilting a little in disbelief at what he’s hearing.
“I’m sorry. ‘Respectful?’” he challenges, crossing his arms. He has been the picture of respect for weeks.
“That’s right, you need to respect me,” David goes on, emphatic. He doesn’t seem to notice Patrick’s reaction. “I’m not just some piece of meat for you to—to gawk at!”
“David. You wolf-whistled at me not two days ago.”
“That’s different.” David gestures at the parking lot around them, moving his hands in broad circles. “We are in an environment of learning, here.”
“We were at our place of business at the time,” Patrick points out.
“Well! I can’t help it if you look sexy when you carry those big boxes of product around!”
“Oh my god,” Patrick can't help the laugh that escapes him. “Well, I can’t help it if you look sexy when you wear those jeans.” At that, he watches all the pretense of fighting leave his husband, who tries and fails to reel in his smile, biting at the inside of his cheek.
“Hm, I knew you were going to struggle with the jeans,” David tells him, voice dipping low and conspiratorial.
“Oh, so you admit that you’re cheating!” Patrick demands.
“I’m not cheating! We said that we wouldn’t distract each other during the seminar. We didn’t say we weren’t allowed to look good.” The expression on David’s face tells Patrick that he knows exactly what he’s been doing and feels little to no shame about it.
“But you know that when you look good, it is a distraction,” Patrick points out. “You used my weakness against me.”
“I’m not the one who’s been flirting this whole time,” David argues.
“How have I been flirting?”
“Oh, please. How many times have you asked to borrow a pen?”
“I’m forgetful.”
“No, you’re fucking not. And what about the time you offered to share your notes with me?”
“I’m a conscientious classmate, David. That’s all.”
“And the constant pick up lines? The jokes?” He snatches the paper back from Patrick and waves it in the air. “This delightful little compliment?”
“I really didn’t ask her to write that,” Patrick insists. “Besides, we said we wouldn’t distract each other. We didn’t say we weren’t allowed to be our naturally charming selves.” He punctuates his paraphrase of David’s own words with a wink.
“But you know that when you’re charming, that is a distraction,” David parrots back to him. “You used my weakness against me.”
Patrick shrugs and pushes himself off the car, finally closing the distance between them so he can wrap his arms around David’s waist and pull him in like he’s wanted to do all damn day.
“We do what we have to do,” he says, leaning in and tilting his chin up for a horribly overdue kiss.
When he’d decided that the two of them taking the business seminar was a great way to grow the store’s success, Patrick assumed David would take some convincing. When David immediately agreed—on the condition they pretend not to know each other, adamant they would get more out of the course if they weren’t constantly distracting one another—Patrick had said yes right away.
It hadn’t even occurred to Past Patrick how hard it would be, giving up hours each week that used to be quality time the two of them spent together. Instead, he had to spend those hours watching his gorgeous husband—making that sexy face he makes when he’s in focus mode, strutting around all aloof and untouchable, joking with Stevie or chatting with the other students—and wasn’t even able to touch him or kiss his cheek or hold his hand. He couldn’t put his zip-up hoodie over David’s shoulders when the AC was cranked too high in the lecture hall, or carry his books (or, more accurately, his Saint Laurent embossed leather attaché case) so that everyone in the class knew they were together. What a fool Past Patrick had been.
Present Patrick is attempting to make up for his idiocy by kissing his husband as thoroughly as he can in public without getting arrested, when David pulls back just enough to raise a finger in protest.
“Okay, but I’m still pretending not to know you next week,” he says. “It’s our last class; people might get confused.”
“Noted,” Patrick agrees. “Wanna pretend we don’t know Stevie as well?”
“Oh my god? Yes.”