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“We literally popped our zits together dude, you think a badly chosen dildo and your asshole are gonna scare me?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“The zit popping or the nine inch nailer making a home in your lower intestine?”
Henry givens in to the ache that three hours of rigid, excessive bending has given him, and dissolves into his bedsheets. He’s boiling hot and sticky for so many reasons, only the blanket he’d gotten for £9.99 at Dunelm (40% off—a steal) two winters ago covering his modesty, and he could’ve done with the universe giving any other hand than this . A building fire started by his flirty pensioner neighbor. A stubbed toe. Even a handy little car crash would be somewhat preferable to this.
But no! At 9:13pm on a Friday night, he is stuck with the friendly end of a cheap, changeable suction cup dildo lodged at least four inches beyond his poor abused rectum. His only hope of salvation comes in the form of Alex Claremont-Diaz; the boy he’d grown up across the street from, and the only person who’d picked up his phone at a time when everyone else has settled firmly into their pre-drinking rituals.
Christ on a fucking bicycle.
“Neither, if you’d be so kind,” Henry grumbles, lifting a hand and dragging it roughly down his damp face. It’s still vague tacky from the two different kinds of lubrication he’s gotten through trying to get himself out of such a tight situation, but he’s lost whatever pride he may have been entitled with earlier that day. Lube on the face. Sure, why not?
“If this doesn’t define me as being more than just kind ,” Alex says while dropping a heavy-sounding backpack onto Henry’s bedroom floor and shrugging off his thin hoodie, “then Mother Theresa must’ve been performing miracles.”
“Leave the religious figures at the door, I beg of you. I was already going to hell for being as queer as a three dollar bill.”
“And if they needed the proof—”
Henry yelps as Alex snickers. He reaches back to grab ammunition, and chucks one his pillows in Alex’s direction. He dodges, because of course he does, but trips over his own ankles when he tries to right himself again. Henry cranes his head to look at him. “You’re such a reprobate.”
Alex grins. “And you’re a hypocrite.” He claps his hands together, and Henry swallows. “Now! Lay back and think of England.”
Henry splutters, brings himself up to his elbows and holds the blanket tight to his chest. “Hold on, hold on ! Don’t you want to. I don’t know. Prepare?”
“Do I need to?” Alex asks, brow raised. “What else do you have down there?”
Henry sighs. “I just mean, are you sure you want to do this?”
Alex stays quiet for a moment too long, and Henry is treated to the swooping nerve one gets when they realize they’ve taken the wrong step a second too late to change it.
“I don’t know what else you expected me to do when you called me over here,” Alex says finally.
Henry sucks his inner cheeks between his molars. He’d panicked, really. It’d been two hours of straining his own arms, bearing down like a mother in childbirth and trying to give himself a concerning amount of enemas just for nothing to help at all. The hospital had been the logical next choice really, but he hadn’t thought he could face the pure humiliation of waddling into the ER and giving everyone a story to tell to their friends.
Pez had gone out of town the day before, so Henry hadn’t even tried with him. His other options came down to who had already seen his arsehole in varying states of use, aka: his rotation of hookups. He’d been routinely ignored when he’d say that no, he isn’t booty calling them. If they’d given him the chance to explain his predicament, he has a hunch that at least one of them would’ve been happy to help.
Alex had been a last ditch effort.
“I…” Henry ducks his gaze and avoids looking at the other man. “I don’t know either, really.”
It’s a lie, but what Alex doesn’t know, won’t hurt him.
“You were kinda vague,” Alex says.
Henry shrugs and falls against his duvet again, and wonders what a mess of a sight he must make. “If you didn’t want to come over, I didn’t want to go broadcasting my mishap to everyone I know.”
“Right. I get it.”
Henry angles his head to look back at Alex, whose shoulders are pinched around his ears. “You’re more willing than I’d’ve thought,” he mutters, while one side of his face is squished into the cotton thread sheet.
With a sharp click, Alex stretches his neck and turns his head either side while letting out a long breath through his nostrils. “You need my help, right?”
Henry swallows. “I do.”
Alex meets his gaze. It’s solid and sure, not dissimilar to the way he looks at his textbooks when he’s in a studying hole, or his laptop when he’s sunk into a wikipedia deepdive about whatever niche area of the internet he’s gained as a short-lived obsession. Alex falls in waves with his attention. He can dedicate weeks of his time to one singular fixation to his own detriment, and then float around without a tether to stick to. It’s concerning sometimes, but not today.
“Then let’s get this show on the road,” he says, rubbing at the imprint of glasses frame over his nose bridge. “I think our friendship can survive a little anal fingering, don’t you?
Henry coughs a shocked laugh. “That’s a strong faith you have.”
“Pattern recognition,” Alex chirps. “I witnessed your brace face years, remember, and I’m still here. That’s love, sweetheart.”
Determined, Henry ignores the thump of his heart. “As long as you’re sure,” he warns.
“I can flash you mine if that helps. Tit for tat. Or, tat for tat, I guess.”
“Christ,” Henry mutters, grinning despite himself. “Just get on with it.”
Alex kneels on the edge of Henry’s bed, either side of his bare feet. “Ooh, dirty talk,” he jokes. “Give it to me, Hen.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
Henry sees Alex’s Adam's apple bob as his eyes drop to the blanket separating them. “You have no idea,” he says, low and throaty. It zips over Henry’s skin, leaving prickles in its wake. “Do you have lube?”
“What?”
Alex looks at him. “Unless you want me going in dry?”
Henry breaths through the image that gives him, and reaches one arm back to grab the three-quarters-empty bottle.
“Strawberry?” Alex smirks when Henry gives him the lube.
“I ran out of the better stuff about an hour ago,” Henry explains quietly.
Alex doesn’t reply. He stares over the bottle, and then to Henry’s body beneath the blanket, and purses his lips. “Okay then,” he mutters, and takes the covering in one hand. Even quieter, so much so that Henry wouldn’t have heard it were it not for the proximity, he says, “What even is my life?”
Henry pretends he doesn’t hear it. Cautiously, he lifts his legs til his knees are bent upward, feet planted on the bed. The blanket falls away as he spread his legs.
The only sound getting through to Henry’s ear drums is their paired breathing, labored and loud as thunder around them.
“How long has it… uh,” Alex motions to Henry’s privates, where his eyes have been locked on and focused.
“The base unscrewed itself at about six-thirty, I think,” Henry winces, and motions to his nightstand. He’d unsectioned it from the tiles of his floor, a sad little cup with a stubby screw sticking up from the other end of it, and left it there after it’d been useless trying to reattach it while the phallic end was still hopelessly lost inside him.
Alex looks at his watch quickly and returns the wincing. “That’s like three hours, dude.”
“ Please don’t call me dude when we’re in this situation.”
“Oh, c’mon! It’s affectionate.”
“ Alex .”
Alex rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “No wonder your asshole looks like it’s been attacked with sandpaper.”
“Oh my fucking god,” Henry blanches and snaps his legs back together. “It does not! ”
“I might not have a frame of reference, but not even a white guy's ass should be this pink.” He punctuates his point with a pat on Henry’s kneecap.
“Can you please just—”
“Finger you?”
Henry chokes around his plea. “I was going to say help me,” he says weakly.
Alex shrugs. “Toh-may-toe, toh-mah-toe.”
Never before has Henry believed entirely in karma, but he must’ve smited an entire village and slaughtered their cows for this to be an actual situation he’s been put in. He takes a breath as Alex shakes the bottle of lube and clicks it open, and remembers when the idea of him naked in bed with an Alex who was preparing to finger him would’ve sent him into something giddy and embarrassingly hopeful. His poor high school self has no clue how close his fantasy of such a tryst is coming to being almost true. Sort of. Slightly to the left of fulfilled, Henry supposes.
“You’re gonna need to spread your legs again, H,” Alex remarks, while Henry stares slack jawed at the sight of him idly warming lubricant over his fingers. “You’re clenched tighter than fort knox right now.”
Henry swallows. “Right,” he mutters. “Sorry.”
He lets his legs fall slack and spreads them best he can, adjusting the angle of his hips until he has the familiar stretch in his inner adductor, where he knows Alex will have a better vantage point.
Fucking hell. What is his life?
Alex lets out a sighing, stretched-out okay . His bottom lip is caught between pearly whites, and Henry spots a flash of tongue when he lets go of the pink flesh. His non-lubed hand steadies him on the fold of skin by Henry’s bent knee. Then Henry feels him.
Alex’s finger, touching feather-soft against Henry’s hole. His gut flips. If he hadn’t been sending himself into overstimulation hell for the better part of his evening, just a brush wouldn’t be that good, no matter what pornography tries to tell the masses. Now, though?
Henry just hopes Alex doesn’t think to get an eyeful of his cock and the way it’s already starting to chub up again.
“If I told you to unclench, would you take that as an insult right now?” Alex says, semi-coy, and looking at Henry from behind his feathery eyelashes.
“Can you bloody blame me?” Henry tries to relax, loosening each muscle incrementally per limb. “This is not how I thought this type of scenario would go down,” he mutters. Then Alex is pushing in further, and Henry can only let it happen.
“Jesus H Christ, Hen,” Alex says, a little flabbergasted. He sounds odd. Like he can’t catch his breath but isn’t willing to let Henry hear how breathless he’s become.
“Shut up,” Henry mutters through clenched teeth without a shred of ire but filled to the very brim with shame. He doesn’t look at Alex, staring resolutely at his water-stained ceiling, as he feels Alex push his singular finger in even further, deeper and deeper, til there’s a brush of his knuckle against the skin surrounding Henry’s hole.
“You look—”
“Alex, stop talking!” Henry almost wails, his forearm thrown over his eyes to cover flushed skin. He regrets every choice he’d made to get himself in this situation. He regrets choosing to use his cheapest dildo, the one with the wobbly attachments, instead of pulling up his hopeless Grinder app. He regrets buying the damned purple thing in the first place, no matter how good of a deal it had seemed at the time to his horny-stupid brain.
He almost regrets Alex. The boy behind the bay windows he’d spotted after his family had picked up and moved to bloody Texas, of all places. The boy he’d popped his zits with, even after his mum told him to leave them alone lest they scar, only because 13-year old Alex seemed pleased as punch to be able to teach Henry something, for once.
The fucking boy, who’d turned into a man, and tracked him down at college, years after that explosive argument in Henry’s senior year of high school that’d left them both shaking and wet-faced and without any resolution.
“I can’t help it,” Alex says. “You look fucking beautiful, H.”
That—
What?
Henry can practically feel his brain jolting to a sudden stop, any retorts dying on his tongue. He pulls his arm down, and blinks into nothing. “What?” he gets out.
“You’re so—fucking—pretty. You look insane right now.”
“Alex—”
“Sorry, fuck. I’ll…” he trails off, and Henry feels his effort redouble with the fervor of a teenager. The pressure makes him wince.
“Fucking hell, you’re not digging for gold,” Henry remarks. “Bit gentler, if you so please?”
Alex snorts, but he does as asked. “I think I can feel it.”
“You can?”
“Unless you’ve turned your asshole into Hermione’s bag and got a collection up in here. Could you, uh…”
Henry cranes his neck up. “What?”
Alex leans back, taking his hand with him with a wet sound, and Henry feels the horrible feeling of clenching around nothing. “Could you fold your legs back?
He feels slightly light-headed, but uses both hands to pull his knees to his shoulders, folding himself in half and spreading his cheeks further. “Like this?”
Alex nods, glancing at Henry's face. “Perfect,” he croaks. Then his dry hand is pressing against the back of Henry’s thigh, pushing him further, and more fingers are entering him. Three, this time, and by God can Henry tell.
It doesn’t hurt, the sudden skip straight to three—if anything, he’d like more—but it edges him past stimulation-feels-good-of-course-I’m-getting-turned-on and straight into the bullseye of he-could-really-eventually-come-from-this. It’s a little embarrassing.
“I keep touching it but it's not, like…” Alex pauses. Henry is pulled closer, and yelps when Alex tries to push his fingers deeper.
“ Stop! Oh my fucking god, stop,” Henry gasps and yanks his legs away. Alex takes his hands back immediately, holding them up palms out like a man pleading innocence.
“I’ve stopped, I’m not touching,” Alex reassures. “You okay? Did I hurt you?”
Exhausted and sick to the death of his fuck up, Henry covers his face with his sweaty palms. “No, you’re good,” he mumbled behind his hands. “I’m just… Fuck!”
“Hey, Henry…”
“What?!” His hands go to reveal a fierce, cold glare. Alex’s face suddenly splits with indignance and upset, and Henry’s frustration wilts. “Shit,” he sighs. “I’m sorry, you didn’t… I’m upset, I shouldn't take it out on you.”
Alex swallows and shrugs. “No. But I get it, y’know. You’re scared—”
“I am not—”
“Henry. C’mon.”
He bites back his denial. “I feel like an idiot,” he whispers. Blindly, he pats his hand out to find the blanket. Alex presses a soft edge of it into his searching fingers. He thanks the other man with a smile and tries uselessly to cover any remaining modesty. “You can go, if you’d like. You’ve helped me plenty.”
Alex snorts. “I don’t back down, baby. We can take a break if you want, but I’m gonna help you get that thing out one way or another.”
The assuredness warms the tight space behind Henry’s ribcage, and he presses his lips into a wry, tiny smile.
“This okay?”
Henry can’t see Alex from his new position, flipped onto his front with his face in a pillow, but he doesn’t need to to hear the care and precaution in Alex’s voice. “Mmh,” he groans, fisting the cotton sheet. “Can do more.”
“Yeah? Can you relax?”
He wants to touch himself, desperate as a horny teenager. They’d taken a break just for ten minutes or so to drink water (he thinks Alex might have stolen one of Pez’s fruit roll-ups, but Henry will cover the tax for him as a thank you) before a quick google had Henry flipping around in an attempt to give Alex better access.
“Think so,” Henry says, trying to relax. Trying being the key word. He practically swallows his own tongue when Alex fills him with four fingers, and even breathing becomes a struggle at the stretched sensation. It wouldn’t take much to bring himself to the edge; one strong tug of his cock, the right angle of Alex’s hand hitting that perfect spot—
Alex makes a sudden ah! noise. “Okay yeah, I can—I think I can almost…”
It’d become… not normal, the feeling of having a plastic dick stuck inside him, but he’d adapted. The sensation as it slides out of him is guttural, the depth alien, and it’s just enough to have Henry tensing and twitching, coming over his bedsheets and truly dooming them to a life in a rubbish pile. He’s making throaty sounds, but there’s too much noise in his ears to really understand what’s coming out of him.
He’s being repositioned by the time he’s caught a shred of his breath back. Alex’s hands, still filthy, reposition his slack head so he doesn’t get neck pain. It’s truly revolting; sweat and cum and two types of lube covering him, hair lank and stuck to his scalp, soft bodied with the wave of release a long time coming.
It’s the greatest he’s felt all evening.
“You good?” Alex sounds an even mix of entertained and worried.
Henry hums and mutters mindlessly. “Best orgasm of my life.” Alex laughs as he puts the dildo somewhere Henry doesn’t care about, but it’s too stiff to be entirely sincere. The awareness of that has Henry finally pulling away from his slovenly puddle. “Alex?”
“Do you want me to go? Since you’re…y’know. Good now.”
Henry blinks dumbly at his old friend, whose eyes are flitting around like he can’t stand to stay still even up to his eyeballs. He’s crouched on his knees and balancing on the mattress, awkward hunching almost hiding his—
Oh.
Oh.
“You’re turned on,” Henry says plainly, pointedly dragging his eyes from Alex’s tented crotch to his endearingly pink cheeks.
Alex let out a strangled laugh. “I’m not a robot, Hen. Whatever. It’s no biggie, just chill.”
“I wasn’t not chill with it.”
“Fancy guy with the double negatives. That English major is really working you hard, huh.”
“Don’t try and change the subject.”
Alex opens his mouth, no doubt a retort on his chatty tongue, but snaps it shut when Henry gives him a pointed look. Then he whispers a short, “I’ll go.”
Henry left his dignity behind hours ago, before Alex ever gave him the orgasm he’d originally been chasing with that stupid dildo, so he doesn’t try to cover himself when he sits up properly. “Why?”
Alex furrows his brow. “What do you mean? I came here for a reason, and now that reason is taken care of, so…” he flutters his hand in the area with the motion of a man making a point.
Henry sucks on his molars, kisses his teeth, and says what he may end up entirely regretting. “I can take care of you too, if you’d like.”
Alex says nothing. He wears the expression of wonder, a slack face and blinking eyes. “You—what?”
“I can take care of you.” He motions to the bulge making its attendance known below Alex’s sweats. “If you want it, that is.”
“The fuck,” Alex mutters, choking, “are you saying?”
“You’re not stupid, Alex.”
“That’s not what I’m asking, Henry . Are you seriously asking to get me off?”
Henry shrugs one shoulder. “Basic consent,” he says. “You can say no, you know. If you’re not into—” Me , he thinks “—it.”
Alex laughs a chestful of noise and looks around at nothing, scratching the skin of his hip and giving Henry a peek below his t-shirt as a result. His mouth waters at the dark happy trail it reveals. “I don’t know if there’s a guy alive that’d turn you down.”
“The straight ones do.” Henry tilts his head thoughtfully. “And I’m not every gay man’s type.”
Alex snorts. “Idiots.”
Henry presses a smile down. “So that’s a…?”
It’s fascinating, watching Alex pull himself together with a roll of his shoulders. Henry refuses to shy away when his dark eyes drag over his still-naked form. “Do your worst,” Alex tells him.
The permission thunders through Henry, and he doesn’t waste a second, only lurches forward to grab Alex by the belt buckle and haul him closer. Alex lets out a shocked grunt as Henry breaks his perch, but doesn’t fight it when Henry pushes him back to flop on the bouncing mattress.
“Jesus shit, Hen—”
“No talking.
He used to fantasize about what it’d be like to blow Alex. He’d been a horny teenager, well into the thick of puberty, and so very aware of his penchant for other boys that he could have hardly been blamed. Alex had always been hypnotizing, and Henry had always fought to defy the pull even at their least appealing era as spotty-faced tweens; Alex in too-big clothing he’d eventually grow into, Henry with metal and rubber bands on his teeth.
Something almost idle and innocent had only gotten beastly when Alex had started dating during that confusing year, when Henry was settled as a sophomore and Alex had followed into high school a year later than him, bright and gorgeous and sought-after.
He’d pushed it away. Tried his best to hold on to what he was allowed to have for years with Alex, until it felt worse to have a shred than it would to hold nothing at all. The fight, of course, following.
With an urging, Henry gets Alex to lift his hips, allowing him to tear the disruptive clothing down in one rough tug, jeans and underwear thrown somewhere irrelevant. Alex’s cock, thick and plum-headed, bobs in place as Alex relaxes against the bedsheets, crowned by thick hair and a dip of V above it like an arrow guiding Henry to where he needs to be.
No help needed , Henry thinks giddily as Alex looks back. They’re stripped bare, tangled up in Henry’s sheets like cats in string while Henry paws at the dusting of hair of Alex’s left quad. ”I’m going to blow you now,” he warns, before adjusting his weight, ducking down, and doing just that.
It’s—
“Holy fuck,” Alex gasps when Henry takes him into his mouth. He’s sloppy with no hesitation, determined to show Alex what he can do for him— to him. It’s intoxicating. Every little noise, the twitch of Alex’s body underneath him, croaky groans of baby and Hen and fucking perfect pulling Henry’s nerves this way and that.
The hands holding one side of his head get tight, before he’s giving Henry a tense warning and he’s coming down Henry’s throat. Henry laps it up best he can, licking up the length of his softening cock and kissing where pubic meets hip. Alex is petting him slowly. Sweetly. It makes Henry’s chest tighten as he looks up at him and absorbs the sight of a grinning Alex lightly shining with sweat.
“You’re good at that,” Alex says with a meaningful look in his eyes.
Henry licks his lips and sits up on his shins. “I know.” A beat passes with neither saying a word. Henry shifts to stand up, but Alex grabs at his knee before he can. “What—”
“Kiss me.”
Henry blinks. “You—what?”
“Come on man, you’ve just had my dick in your mouth. This can’t be too much.”
Maybe he should protest. Make a fuss, explain why kissing extends this moment beyond a helping hand (and mouth) and stretches it into an affection they don’t share together. An affection Henry had forced himself to understand that he’ll never get.
Alex sits up. “I know what you’re thinking about,” he says, “stop it.”
“How could you possibly know what I’m thinking?” Henry retorts with a snort.
Alex lifts a shoulder. “You’re got an expressive face.”
“I definitely do not .”
“To me you do.” He moves across the sheets till their bare legs are touching. “Just kiss me.”
“But you’re—”
“Henry.”
Henry gulps as Alex’s rich eyes bore a hole into him, seeding him out and pinning him in place so easily. And what else is he meant to do when Henry is being given a chance for something he used to pine for?
Jaw tight, Henry leans in until their noses brush, and melts like butter when Alex takes the pivotal step and drags him in.
He isn’t sure where this will go, but something about Alex tastes hopeful and permanent, like a tattoo under skin or the knowledge of a rising sun after dark nights. He lets Alex drag him into the sheets with a laugh, and licks that taste up like a ration. He’ll get what he can, and keep it for as long as Alex will let him.