Chapter Text
>April 2012<
You open one of your eyes, only slightly; the other one incapacitated by the pillow you’re squishing half of your face into. And you wish for that moment of confusion, that moment in which you don’t know what it was that jarred you awake. Problem is, you always do. It’s him. Again. Or rather, it’s one of his tricks. Again. Then you remember, not for the first time, that you’d wanted to look up Pittsburgh’s population on the internet, as well as a demographic that would give you a rough statistical estimate about the percentage of homosexuals in any given country. Then you’d be able to approximately guess the number of male gays in the city, add to them a ballpark figure of closeted gays as well as those still undecided, and maybe then you could figure out how much longer you’d have to endure being roused awake by the moans and groans of some nameless, brainless, faceless, lucky bastard.
You force yourself to sit up, rubbing your face and eyes and doing nothing to stifle your huge yawn. Reaching a level of wakefulness that you deem sufficient, you bang your fist on the wall behind the head of your bed. The moans immediately die down; just as you knew they would.
Taking a few more minutes to completely arrive in the land of the living, your eyes wander to the alarm clock on the nightstand. You don’t even know why you have it. After all, you have a live-in, human alarm system in place. You lift your blanket and glance down. Deciding the boner in your pants died down enough for you to make a trip to the bathroom, you finally get out of bed.
The routine is always the same: Piss, wash hands, splash some water on your face, brush teeth. Then wait for Brian to use the shower first because he likes the water scorching hot. For some fucked up reason the water in this shithole mansion of a students’ resident hall only runs hot for the first 10 or 15 minutes. According to Brian, the water is only warm after that. It’s still hot enough to turn your skin piggy pink, but you’ve long ago come to accept that Brian lives by different standards than the rest of the human population. You really don’t mind waiting to shower, or wouldn’t if it wasn’t for the fact that Brian doesn’t think much of covering his goods on his trips to and from the bathroom. You could always wait in your room, of course, and avoid seeing him – all of him – but the kitchen is where the coffee lives and so what if it so happens to be the room that Brian has to pass through on his way to the shower each morning. You don’t allow yourself to think further than that.
You go about stuffing the coffee filter with Brian’s favorite and ridiculously expensive coffee – one of the few extravaganzas he allows in his tight monthly budget – and feed it to Brian’s favorite and also ridiculously expensive coffee maker. They’re freshly ground of course – another one of Brian’s ridiculously expensive fixtures without which he wouldn’t bother to start the day.
You’re on your second cup when Brian finally appears in the doorway. You nod towards him, eyes still half-closed.
Brian stops short when he sees you. “Too loud?” he asks.
“Too loud,” you confirm.
“Damn,” Brian says, “and I thought I had it down to sort out the screamers.”
“Well, you failed,” you declare definitively but with no vehemence behind it.
Brian smiles at that and comes closer, taking your chin between two fingers and kissing your forehead. “You know, Sunshine,” you flinch at the nickname, but he doesn’t notice, “there’s not many people who can say that to my face and live.”
You smile affectionately. You know. “I know.”
Brian looks longingly at the coffee, then smells his armpit. “Fuck, I need a shower. I reek.” He trudges towards the door of the bathroom and stops halfway through it. “Would you mind showing my guest the exit when he recovers enough to walk and make sure he doesn't overstay his welcome?”
You nod slowly into your coffee and Brian’s satisfied with that. It’s also part of your routine.
“Movie and then Babylon tonight?” he asks when he emerges from the shower, rubbing at his hair with a towel that you wish he’d had covered himself with. No matter how hard you try, you always lose the battle – every fucking morning. And so you surrender, like every day, and let your eyes travel the planes of his body. There’s still a few stray droplets of water clinging to his chest. But it’s his stomach and belly that you love the most and want to touch so desperately, your fingertips prickle. Because you’re afraid they’re gonna develop a life of their own, you bite your nails. It’s something you started doing not long after the two of you moved in together. Brian still thinks it’s a nervous habit. You don’t think he’ll ever know the truth.
“Yeah, movie sounds okay,” you answer his question and he’s quiet for some time. You know exactly what he’s going to say. It’s always a variation of the same.
“Babylon’s not the big bad place intent on corrupting young impressionable youths like you. By entering you don’t automatically sign a contract to visit the backroom.”
You’ve been there once; in Babylon that is. You spent the evening watching Brian dance and disappear behind the chain draped doorway numerous times. Whether it was the first or the latter, you’re not sure, but you’ve never had a hard-on like that before. Or after. You’d excused yourself shortly after midnight and went home, claiming to have a headache and feeling shittier than you ever have before in your life. You had to jerk off three times before you could even think about going to sleep and all the time you felt like you were going to break in two, the pain in your heart was so unbearable.
Brian had chalked it up to shock. You let him believe it. You’ve never gone back there with him since then. You also let him believe that what you were looking for was not a quick fuck. He teased you for wanting romance and flowers and candy. But he couldn’t have been further from the truth. You weren’t interested in those things; not that you had any experience with them, but if you thought about what you wanted, candles and arias for strings weren’t ever in the picture. You just wanted to be on the other side of that damn wall instead of banging on it every morning.