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Billy twisted around from where he was propping up an increasingly handsy Pete White to look at the door in desperation as Rusty Venture, his knight in weird polyester speed suit, walked irritably toward them.
“Well?” he asked, arms crossing. “You called me down here saying there was an ‘emergency’ that couldn't possibly wait. What’s the problem? Besides White getting into the liquor cabinet you two insist you don’t have down here.”
“Are you freaking serious?” Billy said, batting off White’s hand where it was stroking his chest. “Look at him! This is exactly why I said we weren’t ready for human testing. Whatever this is, it is not a truth serum. It’s… some sort of pon farr drug or something, I don’t know.”
“Pon what?”
“Pon farr,” White murmured into Billy’s neck before brushing a kiss that was a little too open mouthed to be called friendly against it. “The time of mating. Star Trek thing. Means I wanna nail ’im. Or get nailed, dealer’s choice. Just so long as you deal me in, pally.”
“Okay, I’ve seen enough. Whatever you two do in your own time—”
“Wait, no,” Billy reached out and grabbed his employer’s wrist. “You can’t leave him like this! And you can’t leave me with him… like this. It’s. Weird. And I need someone else to tag in and take the heat off me from Don Juan here—ideally someone who can trade off on doing the actual science with me too—or I’m never gonna get my hands free long enough to work on an antidote.”
White was sitting beside him in the chair he’d shoved him into, arms around his waist, and was at that point trying to tug him into his lap. “Come cuddle with me, Billy. Feels like my skin’s itching off my body not having you close. Just wanna hold you… feels so nice having my little guy in my arms, all I can do not to squeeze you so hard your head pops off.”
“Knock that off!” Billy said, pushing him off and telling himself firmly that he didn’t care how hangdog White looked about the rejection. “You know I hate being patronized like that—I’m not your damn teddy bear.”
A wry grin crept over the dejected look on White’s face. “Well, that’s good,” he said, patting his lap with a truly baffling degree of optimism. “I’m a little old to hump my teddy bear. C’mon, come here and gimme some sugar.”
“This has been going on for three hours,” Billy said, turning to Rusty in disgust. “Three fucking hours of… hey! Hands above the waist, mister! And stop sulking like that, you’ll thank me once this wears off. You wouldn’t want any of this if you were in your right mind.”
White sighed and traced an index finger along a crease in Billy’s jacket. He couldn’t actually feel his touch, just the way it was making the fabric move, which was an improvement. Of sorts. But still a long way from ideal. It was distracting having his friend’s hands all over him non-stop.
“Seriously, White,” he said, trying for a more sympathetic tone, “you’re high as a frickin’ kite. You don’t really want what you’ll get if my clothes come off.”
“We lived together in a trailer the size of a matchbox for 20 years and you think I don’t know what I’d get if your clothes came off?” White said, pouting up at him. “You think I haven’t thought about it, pally? For years I thought about it.”
“Well, great, now it’s affecting his memory,” Billy said, pushing his hand away again as he stepped closer to Rusty. “Seriously, you have to help me work on an antidote to this.”
The doors to the R&D lab whooshed open before he could get a response though, and Shoreleave walked in with Brock.
“Hey, Doc,” Brock said, ignoring them completely.
Shoreleave, however, turned to look at White trying to wind his arms drunkenly around Billy’s waist again. He tilted his head to one side and gave them both a smug grin. “Oh, hello, what do we have here?”
“White tested a truth serum drug on himself and instead of doing what it was supposed to, it made him indiscriminately horny,” Billy said, plucking his hands off himself for what felt like the thousandth time. “Obviously.”
“He says this like it was my idea. I drew the short straw. Too bad I can’t get any other short… all right, all right! Stop squirmin’ already,” White said, tugging Billy closer and all the way into his lap. When Billy twisted his neck around to look up at him, White was glaring at Shoreleave. “And for the record, I discriminate. Against him, for one.”
“I think that it’s a little late to cover your tracks by turning the internalized homophobia out at me, sister,” Shoreleave said, gesturing between Billy and White.
White glared some more and then got distracted into kissing a line up Billy’s neck, before Billy pushed him so hard that he started to fall off his lap. White’s arms tightened around Billy again to steady him, and he held him close to his chest, one thin hand stroking the back of his head. Billy sighed and resigned himself to the, granted treacherously comfortable, captivity.
“You think this is about being ashamed of the gay thing?” White said, scoffing before laying a much less lustful kiss against Billy’s forehead than had rapidly been becoming normal. “Moron.”
“Oh, yeah, clearly you’re totally comfortable with yourself,” Shoreleave said. “Just need to get shot up with truth serum before you’ll admit you—"
“I can’t be with him, and you know why,” White snapped. “And, frankly, you should be thanking me! Wouldn’t look great for the team for me to be some out and proud creep all hung up on a guy I’ve known continuously since he was a teenager. And for most of that time he couldn’t even fucking remember that I ruined his life! You know, this cutie was lecturing me about informed consent and me not being ‘compos mentis’ before you guys got here? Like I didn’t willingly sign up for a lifetime of celibacy because I love one person and I wasn’t going to fuck someone who couldn’t remember why he should hate me. That’s not fifty shades of White, that’s supervillain shit.”
Billy looked up at him, jaw dropping. “What the fuck?”
White’s grip around Billy faltered for a second and then went lax, and he pushed against the small of his back. “Oh… Jesus, Billy, get away from me.”
“Oh… thank God, it’s wearing off,” Billy said. “I… but why would it retroactively… we need to go back to rodent stud—”
“I shouldn’t even look at you,” White said. When Billy turned back, his face was in his hands and his shoulders shook with silent sobs. He sniffed loudly, and did look up at him to steal a quick guilty glance before screwing up his face and turning away, wiping his bloodshot eyes roughly. “Why would you forgive me, pally? I’ve done nothing to deserve it. Have you even forgiven me or have I just… trapped you here with me?”
“Yeah, just callin’ it like I see it, but that’s… not wearing off,” Brock said, shifting his weight a little and flicking a cigarette to one side.
“Yeah, no shit, Einstein,” Billy said, turning back to him to glare. “I still don’t understand why this is all… White, when did these feelings start? How soon after you took the—”
“I get to hold you at night because I’m holding you fucking hostage,” White muttered and then curled up into a tight ball on the chair. “Living a freaking lie because I stole a good man’s future and I can’t face letting you go. But why don’t you go? Or make me go? Why do you let me live with you and your ma and… you can still go be somebody. Get away from me. I’m fucking poison. Fuckin’… weird creepy old faggy… why the Guild never headhunted me, I’ll never know.”
“Yeah, but he’s totally not a self-hating queer,” Shoreleave said in an undertone to Brock, who punched his shoulder lightly. “Well, excuse me for not crying my eyes out over his little pity party. So, you mind-wiped your boyfriend! Big deal! We’ve all done it.”
“So… what I’m hearing here is that this is a working truth serum,” Rusty said, stroking his beard. “Well… we’ll probably want to make sure the… libidinous effects are a fluke, but this screams government contract to me. If you can just—”
“Let’s… give the guy some privacy, mmkay?” Brock said, grabbing both Rusty and Shoreleave by the sleeves and dragging them backward.
Billy went to go follow them but then looked back at White curled up, face pressed into his bony knees, and sighed. He hung back, hearing the doors slide shut behind them.
“Goddamn it,” he said, going to stand nearer his friend. “Okay… we’re alone. So… what’s this about? You don’t really… you really expect me to believe that you’ve been wasting away for the want of my touch all these years but never said anything about it? That you slept in the same bed with me for decades and never said…”
White balled himself up tighter and Billy sighed again, rubbing his forehead with his flesh and blood hand.
“I wasn’t tryin’ to be a creep about it or nothin’,” White muttered. “We didn’t have room for another bed. And now, with your ma thinkin’… I mean, why rock the boat at this point? I’m not… I don’t need you to be anything to me that you’re not already. I don’t even need that, I’m just damn lucky to have it.”
“I see,” Billy said. “Well, that’s very noble of you. I’m glad holding me tenderly through the night for my entire adult life because you ‘couldn’t help’ getting close ‘for warmth’ in ‘your sleep’ was enough.”
“I can hear all them finger quotes, and I resent the implication,” White said, some wounded indignation in his tone muddying the waters of his previous tearful self-recrimination. “It gets cold in the desert at night, and we were in a tin can with no heating. And… I’m used to sleeping with you now, so what, I’m supposed to change how I’ve gotten to sleep for nearly half my life on a dime now that we’re not liable to freeze to death if we leave room for Jesus? It wasn’t… I never laid a finger on you, I don’t get some credit for that?”
“You laid a little more than a finger on me today, pal.”
White looked up at him, frowning. “I’m impaired!”
“I’ll say,” Billy said, reaching out to flick his forehead.
White pushed his hand away. “Ableism. Very nice.”
“Since when are you Pete Woke?” Billy said. He dragged a hand through his hair and groaned in frustration. “Look… I think we should talk about this.”
“We haven’t been talking about it?” White gave him a skeptical side eye.
“Well, I mean when this shit is out of your system. Obviously.”
“Listen, just do me a favor and wipe my memory,” White said, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Call it payback. Tell me that this shit got me so blasted I didn’t remember. You were right. I’m not gonna want to know I was like this.”
“Why not?” Billy asked, nudging the side of White’s pointed toe shoe with his scuffed up sneaker.
White looked at him again, disbelievingly. “Why do you think? I made a damn fool of myself.”
“Well, you did do that,” Billy said, and White visibly shrunk back in on himself. “I mean, apparently I was a 37-year-old virgin sleeping in a bed with a man who loved me every night—you kinda made us both look like idiots. Fucking clown shoes behavior, unbelievable.”
He watched carefully as White let out a long shuddering breath and rubbed his eyes some more. “Well,” he said quietly, turning back to Billy with a cautious look of his own. “We know that it’s not… it’s more in vino veritable verbal diarrhea than it is ‘subjects will answer questions truthfully’. And… it wears off in a few hours. If you wanted to take that informed consent for a spin at some point.”
“Yeah, nice try,” Billy said, laughing a little under his breath as he reached out to pat White’s cheek. He could feel the barely visible acne scars there. The start of some stubble. It was… interesting. “You’re not getting any ‘sugar’ until you’re at least 24 hours in the clear.”
White… Pete looked up at him, eyes shining. And misting over a little, actually. Hopefully he wasn’t about to go on another big crying jag. Maybe he should throw him a little bit of a bone. Just to be safe.
He leaned over and kissed his forehead quickly. Pete reached out to take both his hands and kissed them, first one then the other.
“I can’t feel it on that one,” Billy said, pulling his prosthetic hand back to cup his cheek as softly as one could with titanium. “But I appreciate the gesture.”
“Good,” Pete said, swallowing hard against what sounded like a lake of phlegm in his throat. “Cause I got a lot of ‘gestures’ saved up.”
“Okay, lover boy,” Billy said, laughing under his breath again. “Let’s go do some blood tests.”
“I’m pure as the driven snow, baby, I promise. You’re the only one for me.”
“To monitor the effects of the experimental drug you took, genius.”
“Oh, right. Makes sense. You want me to drop trou so you can stick me with your great big needle, doctor?”
Billy sighed and reached out for Pete’s hand to lead him across the lab. “I cannot believe that I’m going to spend the rest of my life listening to this shit.”
“You love it,” Pete said, squeezing his hand. “Another Stockholm Syndrome fairy tale.”
“Stockholm Syndrome is pseudoscientific pop psychology garbage,” Billy replied, squeezing back. “You just grew on me is all. Like a tumor. Nothing sinister about it.”
“I’m benign, huh?” Pete said, flipping his hair to one side and smiling at Billy when he looked up at him. “No need to operate?”
“No,” Billy said. “I’ll die with you, not because of you. Cutting you out would do me more harm than good now.”
When he looked up, a single tear was tracking down his friend’s (or, well, boyfriend’s? Life partner’s?) face again and his lip was wobbling a bit. Billy tugged at his hand. “Hey. I love you too. If you must know. And I didn’t even have to get drugged to tell you.”
“Oh,” Pete said, wiping his eye with his sleeve. “Oh, that’s cool. That’s… I could live with that too, I guess. Hey, you think we should put emotional lability down as a side effect of this stuff? Crying like a freakin’ baby here.”
“My baby though,” Billy said, then screwed his face up. “Oh, hmm, that’s… yeah, that one feels a little weird. We’ll workshop some stuff later.”
“Yeah, okay,” Pete said, laughing wetly. “Snookums.”
“You know what, this was a mistake, I’m breaking up with you,” Billy said, rubbing his thumb against the tender inside of Pete’s wrist. He looked up at him and made an appraising noise. “Or… on second thought, give me one crack at you when you’re of sound mind and then we’re through.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Dr. Whalen.”
“Not all I—”
Pete laughed louder and tugged Billy close, putting his arm around his shoulders. “Don’t spoil the surprise, sweetie. I’ve waited this long.”