Chapter Text
Before he does anything, Jayce reaches over to his nightstand and turns the picture of him and his mamá so it faces away from him. Even if it’s just a still from her fiftieth birthday, it feels weird having their permanent smiles fixed in his direction.
Jayce has a lot to be proud of for someone his age- he hears it all the time. He’d finished high school a semester early, his undergrad an entire year. Both schools had been small, so making valedictorian was a breeze. He vaguely remembers the first speech, but the second one is still fresh in his mind from only a few months ago. Jayce had practiced saying it is a great honor to be here with you all and I would like to thank all my fellow students in the mirror until his plastic smile felt carved into his face and his voice was threatening to give. He can’t even remember actually giving the speech. All he remembers is telling himself to stand up straight and the migraine thudding against the back of his head from the strong scent of peppermint oil his mamá rubbed under his ears to relieve his anxiety
But all of that feels so far away. Most of his peers are going on to start their careers and settle down all over the country, and here Jayce is moving into another college apartment in another college town getting ready to do it all over again.
He’d chosen to go to grad school because- well, he didn’t really know what else to do. The excuse he gave was that a PhD at the end of his name would earn him a few extra bucks per hour in the long run, but really Jayce just doesn’t want to give up being a student. The structure of college had been nice, and Jayce has always loved to learn, so it just felt right. Maybe he was prolonging the inevitable of going out into the real world, but that’s fine. Prolong he will.
His apartment is still littered with unpacked boxes labeled in thick Sharpie. Everything smells like cardboard. One of his mamá’s family friends had been kind enough to rent Jayce a room in her big house at half the price of the rest of the housing surrounding campus. She’d offered him dinner before he began to assemble his room, but nerves made him too nauseous to accept. Maybe after he settled in.
Except the furthest he got into settling in was a blanket thrown across the bare mattress provided for him, connecting to the Wifi on his phone and turning on his earbuds, and the bottle of lotion he’d tucked into the front of his backpack making an appearance.
He can relieve stress however he’d like, thank you very much, even if it has the tips of his ears burning with shame.
Jayce at least had the foresight to lock his door before making himself at home for the night. He’d turned off the lights as well, because he doesn’t have his lamp unpacked and jacking it in fluorescent lighting just seems a little tacky. All he needs is his right hand and a good video and he’s set.
He pushes the backwards photo of him and his mother a little further away, out of his peripheral completely.
Even if his phone is password protected and there’s no one around to ask to use it, Jayce goes in incognito mode before typing in a website that he’s more or less committed to muscle memory.
Jayce wonders, not for the first time, if the awkwardness of it all will ever go away. He’s been watching porn since before he should have been, but no amount of time makes it any less weird to open a tab and dive into the archive of videos. His head swims at the onslaught of titles and thumbnails, none of which immediately stand out to him. His taste is refined, which probably says a little too much about him and his habits if he even has a taste to begin with.
SEXY BLONDE MASTURBATING
He sinks further down the bed, cheeks flushed with warm guilt as he scrolls.
COCK TEASING + HJ
Click.
ANAL HOMEMADE
Click.
It’s enough to get him started, but Jayce meets the same problem he often faces when he does… this. Everything just feels staged. Fake. Which, granted, he shouldn’t be expecting high quality acting or real emotion oozing from porno videos, but telling himself that doesn’t make his dick any harder.
There’s a tab that seems foreboding at the top of the webpage. LIVE NOW. Jayce sees it every time he goes on this site- it’s hard not to, considering it’s in bold red letters and takes up a lot of room on the small phone screen. But something has always held him back. Watching recorded videos is one thing, but livestreams seem so much more… personal. It’s easy enough to pretend he isn’t just desperate and lonely when he’s able to pause and fast forward. Actually having to interact with someone who is in their room somewhere right now touching themselves is daunting in its own way.
Jayce’s thumb slowly hovers over the big print. He averts his gaze as he finally taps on it. Like he might be able to trick his brain into thinking it was an accident if he wasn’t looking. The new page opens up with still images from ongoing streams. Oops.
The first few streams have a few thousand viewers, which… no. Too much. He can hardly admit to himself he wants to do this, much less to a plethora of other horny people. There isn’t exactly a shortage of pretty people in the world, so Jayce chooses one of the later page options instead of the top hits. He scrolls through the options, the titles blurring together in a mass of run-on sentences composed of the nastiest words that could be uttered and just about every synonym of pussy imaginable.
gay amateur- talk with me
The thumbnail is a guy with a button up shirt from the neck down. Okay, that might work. Jayce shakes his head in disbelief before clicking on the video.
-Except he has to make an account with the site, because of course he has to. As if this wasn’t mortifying enough. Jayce has gone this far, so he might as well fully commit. He punches in an email he isn’t entirely sure exists and makes up the least horrible username he can immediately think of.
New account
Username: hammerofsteel24
Password: *******
Create an account?
Jayce asks himself that too: create an account? But why the hell not, right? If he’s going to be getting used to this area with no friends and certainly no partners- romantic or sexual, he might as well make a damn account on the site he’s sure will become an even closer companion.
He clicks the stream, and it takes a moment to buffer. The image of a man in plain white boxers and a button up shirt partially undone comes to life as Jayce’s phone finally connects. An expanse of pale skin is barely visible where the shirt splits in two, and Jayce can make out a few moles on the man’s chest.
This was really happening. Jayce’s dick twitches in his pants, face on fire when the man leans down closer to his camera as if he might actually see him. The picture is taken up by pronounced collarbones and the long column of his neck.
“Ah, hello,” the man says. His accent isn’t American, which is a little startling at first. Russian, maybe? It’s soothing, words rolling off his tongue like honey.
There’s only seven other people in the chatroom. They’re sending the gross messages Jayce would expect from any porn site comment section.
take that shirt all the way off baby
whats hiding under those briefs?
european, thats hot xoxo
…But it’s a little more unsettling considering they’re directed at someone who can read them in real time.
“Hammer of steel?” the man reads, and Jayce can see just a peek of a plush lower lip as he tests out the username on his own lips. The man chuckles softly. “That’s an… interesting choice.” Jayce reads the other names- wetnwildxx76, rawdogg1ng, im_10_inches_real- and decides that maybe he’s a little in over his head. He hadn’t meant that kind of hammer, Jesus.
The man sits back and seems to move on from Jayce’s poor choice of names. “This is only my second or third stream, so I must thank you all for joining,” he continues. His hands fold neatly in his lap. Jayce can’t help but stare at his long fingers lacing together. It might be imperceptible to anyone else, but he can’t miss how one thumb scratches the back of the other almost soothingly. Must be a nervous habit: Jayce has a few of those himself. Somehow it makes this all a little less terrifying. “I am still a little rusty, so…”
He dips his head a little, just enough to show the dip in his chin deepening as his lips probably stretch into a smile. “Any requests?”