Chapter Text
💙Nick💛
“You’re literally pinching me against the steering wheel, Nick.”
“Sorry—” I reach down in the narrow space to try and manoeuvre the seat backwards, to give us more room. Charlie winces when I accidentally push it further forward, almost winding him, and glares down at me. He’s got a very expressive face, especially this close up, and even in the dark, right now I think he might be veering towards hate-fucking me. His fingertips are digging into the flesh at my sides, nails almost drawing blood where he is clinging to me so hard, and I want to ask him to stop. Or to be more gentle, maybe. But that isn’t what this is. It isn’t what I asked him for, when I approached him in the club.
Charlie Spring. I haven’t actually spoken to him properly since we sat together in form during my GCSEs. I don’t think I said more than ten words to him back then, either, but at least I wasn’t mean to him – unlike some of the others. He was quiet, kind and funny. I was— I was okay… on the surface. Popular, sort of, thanks to rugby. Polite enough to get by without drawing any attention to myself, which was my main aim in life back then. Teachers didn’t really notice me, except our rugby coach, and I doubt any of them gave me a second thought after I failed pretty much every exam and never came back. Maybe, if I’d made more of a fuss, they would have questioned it a little more.
Still, it was better than before, back in primary where I developed a reputation for being the kind of boy that your parents didn’t want you being around. It’s not like I hadn’t asked for it, by pushing other kids away – literally, in one slightly traumatic case at the playground – but there’s something lonely about being eight years old and only having your brother for company. Particularly when said brother copes by shutting down.
At least in secondary school, most people don’t listen to their parents, and I had a hope of making some friends. There were the rugby lads, and some of the girls who hung around them by the fence in the mornings. Not many of them kept in touch, but that’s life. Back then, I’m pretty sure that Charlie avoided us at all costs – something to do with the bullying he suffered when he first came out – and by extension, that included me, regardless of Mr Lange’s seating plan. He always seemed nice enough, though. Even if he largely ignored me.
I heard, a lot later, that Charlie ended up being sectioned before his GCSEs were up. He spent some time in one of those clinics you hear horror stories about, and has apparently been in and out ever since. I’ve followed him quietly on Instagram for years. He breaks rules, he breaks hearts and there’s not much he isn’t game for, if the offer is right. I can’t quite marry up the sweet boy I’d known with the one people have told me about, but there you go.
Bit like how it’s hard to picture him looking at me shyly now, when he is grinding down into my lap. Every so often he leans in and bites my lip, before arching his back and moaning. He’s not shy when he meets my eye. He knows what he wants. It feels very real, when he looks at me like that. I’m slightly glad that one of the two lampposts in this carpark seems to be on the fritz and only illuminating every third second because I’m not sure I could handle the full scope of his gaze. I scrabble on the passenger seat and grab the bottle we threw there earlier. Straight vodka burns, but I gulp it down regardless, before he gives me another look and I tip it down his throat too.
My keys rattle and clink as they fall out of my pocket when I lean in even closer. Charlie flinches a little at the sound, but carries on kissing me anyways. There isn’t enough room for me to go scrambling about to find them without opening the door. No matter, it’s not like I can drive us home anyways.
Charlie is toying with my belt. My jeans feel too tight.
This is not what I expected to happen today.
Three hours ago, I walked out of the flat I share with my girlfriend in a rage, and headed straight to an empty car park to scream… and then went on to the club. I’d like to pretend I had no plan, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the second Charlie uploaded a story – him under flashing purple lights, with his location right there in a sticker superimposed over the image – I turned my engine back on and threaded through back streets to park up outside that club. I picked up Charlie like it was the most natural thing in the world and promised him a good time.
I have, quite literally, no idea what I’m doing.
Fuck Imogen, is all I can say.
No, not Imogen. Fuck her fucking friends. Imogen is nothing but good, and sweet, and far more than I ever deserved – she just keeps unfortunate company, apparently. It’s my fault, for forgetting my wallet when they were all having a girls’ night in our flat. If I’d been more organised, then I would have been none the wiser about what they really think of me. My plan had been to go straight from the gym to the pub for my usual Friday night drowning of sorrows – maybe call David, and listen as he accepts drunk-me being a prick to him down the phone, like he always does. If I’d remembered my wallet, I wouldn’t have walked back into the flat just in time to hear one of Imogen’s bitchy friends cackle, then scream in her wine-drunk voice:
“What do you mean, he can’t ever get it up?”
My cheeks burn with shame at the thought that they’ve all talked about me. They’ve discussed the fact that I’m technically a virgin at 22 – unless you count some enthusiastic finger-fucking and going down on my girlfriend – even if the entire concept of virginity is bullshit. From a technical perspective, I’m not even sure I am. Does it count if you didn’t want it?
Does it count if someone pushed their way into you and never once considered that they’d be ripping your very being in half?
I hope not. I hope I get some choice in the matter.
Charlie. I chose Charlie. Even if this means nothing to him. I try to focus on him – on the here and now – instead of letting myself dwell on what I’m pretty certain is now a doomed relationship. Maybe it always was destined to fall apart, from the first moment Imogen leant in close and said she was ready to take things further, and I chose to lie, instead of admitting the painful truth.
I don’t know how either Charlie or I are getting home, given that, between us, we have now polished off the leftover third of a bottle of vodka David dropped in my car last time I picked him up. I feel woozy and boozy, and I don’t know how Charlie is upright with his slighter frame, but I guess he’s more used to the wild life than me. Both our hands are clumsy, and there’s no way that I would be able to stomach the feel of his hand creeping lower down my body without the buzz, but he looks at me with a kind of wicked clarity that tells me he’s not too far gone to do this.
Maybe I will end up too far gone. I’ve heard of whiskey dick, but maybe vodka will do the job too. But I’d be deluding myself if I pretended that I’m not hard as fuck right now. I feel queasy with a mixture of nerves and booze and memories, and I bite it all down and focus on the bruise I am trying to work into Charlie’s throat.
Mine. Just for a moment.
Maybe he’s not the first person that I’ve ever fancied, but he’s certainly the first I’ve ever let pull down the fly of my jeans and press their palm to my erection like it doesn’t fill me with fear.
But he does. And he’s the first person to do so in fifteen years.
It wasn’t Mum’s fault. She was lonely when our Dad left. Grandma told us that she needed some decent friends in her life – that David and I should be supportive, and grateful that she hadn’t left too – so when Auntie Diane introduced Mum to a work colleague, we pretended to be delighted. When she brought him home – ostensibly as a friend, though even as kids, we could tell she wanted more – we acted polite, and told him stories about our days. He sat with us at the dinner table and asked us about school, our friends and our favourite subjects. David was in his first year at Truham, and I had not long moved up to the junior building of our primary. I felt grown-up – especially when I was allowed to eat dinner later and join them all at the table – and it was nice, for a while, to have someone show an interest. Christ knows our dad never did.
Mr Scrubs, we called him. He was tall and handsome – I suppose – and kind to Mum. David and I would speculate, at first, whether he would become Mum’s boyfriend, and eventually, our new dad. Once or twice, we overheard her and Auntie Diane giggling about him over their glasses of wine. Not often – the anti-anxiety meds that Mum was on made her a bit dopey when she mixed them with alcohol – but enough to know that she was happy. We wanted her to be happy.
David caught him sneaking out of my bedroom a couple of months in. I don’t remember the first time it happened, but I do remember the first time I saw my brother’s face crumple in my doorway.
“Don’t tell Mummy…” I had whispered, when David bundled me up in my duvet and carried me to his room. He was almost too small to lift me, but somehow he managed – shuffling slowly down the corridor and knocking my socked feet against the wall as he went. “Don’t tell her – she’ll be too sad. She’ll think it’s her fault.”
I could have told our dad, I suppose. But back then, he was refusing to speak to us in anything other than French, and neither David nor I had the words for this thing that had happened. I don’t think I even had the words in English.
So, instead, it was down to my big brother to protect me. And he tried, he really did.
There was the time David slashed his tyres; big, long gashes made with the penknife that our Grandpa once left on the kitchen counter. The one that David had squirrelled away in his pocket, and later pulled out to show me when Mum had gone to bed. I remember being frightened by how sharp the edge of the blade looked – begging David to stop when he prodded the tip with his finger and watched the little speck of blood bloom. Turns out, it sliced through rubber like butter. I never did ask David how he managed it without getting caught. We had just had one of those camera doorbells installed, but somehow he was able to sneak out completely undetected. The romantic part of me imagines him shimmying down the guttering, or creeping down the trellis that lined the brickwork underneath his window. More likely, he slipped through the French doors to our garden, and clambered over the fence like I had seen him do dozens of times before.
When the tyre vandalism didn’t work, and Mr Scrubs came back again and again, there was the time he put laxatives in the water. We’d both been watching too many spy films, unattended in his bedroom, and so he sprinkled the powdered contents of some pills from the medicine cabinet into two glasses before he let him take one – a preventative measure just in case Mr Scrubs tried switching the drinks, he told me later. I was pushing my peas around my plate as I watched; David maintaining eye contact with this big, dark and scary man as he gulped at the water. The front door had slammed shut less than an hour later, as I listened to David groan in the toilet from my bedroom. Safe, for once. For a little while.
Until it all went wrong, and things got a lot worse before they got better.
I thought nothing of it when I found David out in the garden one afternoon – carefully grinding a rock against a tea towel on the patio. It made a satisfying crunching noise as he did so, so I sat down with whatever toy I had brought outside with me and watched him frown in concentration.
“What are you doing?”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
Mum caught him gently spooning the shards of glass – remnants from a pair of our dad’s old reading glasses David had found in the kitchen drawer, and one of the ramekins we had eaten pudding from the night before – onto one of the plates of food she had just finished dishing up. Mine, the smallest, was safe at the far end. Mum always gave herself fewer roast potatoes. I’ll never know if David had intended the rest to be a gamble – whether he planned on tipping the shards into both plates and hoping for the best, or if there had been more to the plan. Either way, it never got that far.
Mum was beside herself. Apoplectic and apologetic and afraid of a son she no longer recognised. And David sat, tight-lipped, as she demanded to know what had possessed him to do it. I remember sitting at the bottom of the staircase, trying to worry a hole into the waistband of my pyjama bottoms so I could pull the elastic tight around my waist, and listening to the chaos. Mr Scrubs had suggestions – he was a psychologist, don’t you know – and he had the connections to find David a place at a summer school for troubled boys. Six weeks. And David never said a word – never broke his promise not to tell Mum… not to make me into the reason her heart was broken all over again.
Auntie Diane tried to intervene. I think she knew there was more to it than David just acting out for no reason. She heard Mum’s complaints that I was wetting the bed far later than my brother ever did – saw the way that I stopped letting everyone hug me – and knew. She knew something was wrong. She just couldn’t quite see what. I guess our brains protect us, and hers couldn’t let her believe that the man she’d introduced into our lives could be a monster.
And without David, I couldn’t quite see myself surviving.
I ran away before the first week was over. Or at least, that was the intention. I got as far as making sure I had matching socks and some snacks in the little satchel that I took to school, before sneaking out through the back door into our garden. I nearly screamed when the grassy floor flashed red and blue, and a siren chirped, once, somewhere nearby. The police, looking for David. David, who had somehow crawled out of the window of the old scout lodge that served as a camp base, and was missing. Mum was beside herself when I crept back in and pretended that I had just woken up. So much so that she didn’t even notice that I was wearing mismatched clothes instead of pyjamas.
It was the final straw though. The presence of the police meant that I was no longer easy prey. Once they’d found David, plodding along the edge of the dual carriageway that was his only familiar route home, we never saw Mr Scrubs again. Mum mentioned him, from time to time, with a slightly sad air. But he never set foot in our house again.
David still crept into my room almost every night for months, though. Curled himself around me like a question mark and fell asleep. Until he got too big, and the memories started to fade to the point that we could both lock them away enough to function.
We never talked about it again, not in any real detail. But, sometimes, he lets me know that he remembers as well as I do.
“You should talk to someone,” he had hissed, the evening when I brought Immy home for the first time. He saw the way I flinched when she leant in for a kiss or tried to hold my hand. “Deal with it, finally.”
“Absolutely not,” I’d snapped back, downing the last of my drink and slamming the empty bottle down on the table. He had given me that pitying look that I hated, but at least he hadn’t pushed.
By that point, I had aged out – or, more accurately, bombed out – of any sort of education, so it’s not like there was a school counsellor’s door I could knock on. So, in reality, even if I did want to talk to someone, it was either ask Mum for the money for private counselling, or risk seeing one of Auntie Diane’s colleagues at the public clinic nearby.
“They’re not allowed to share anything you say, you know,” David had assured me. Which I know, on a sort of intellectual level. Yet the part of my brain still occupied by that frightened little child can’t get past the fear that people do talk to their colleagues about their patients. Maybe not by name, but with details that could eventually leak back to him, and have him showing up at my door like a ghost I can’t quite shake.
Or what if I’d bumped into Auntie Diane in the corridor, and had to watch, in horror, as she connected the dots? What else would she do? Oh, who are you here to see Nicky? My colleague who specialises in child abuse victims? How interesting.
“Not worth the risk,” I insisted, while David had tutted and drained his beer.
I don’t think I could talk about it, even if I wanted to. It’s all in a neat box that I manage to keep locked away most of the time. Pandora should have kept a lid on it, and so should I.
And, don’t get me wrong, I was upfront with Imogen from the beginning. Well – as upfront as I could be. She knew pretty early on that sex was completely off of the table, on my end. I told her some wild story of a rugby tackle gone wrong at a camp when I was a teenager that left me completely unable to, well, perform. She listened, with rapt fascination, as I pretended to be sad that things just never worked down there after that.
And she was patient, and kind. I almost felt bad for lying to her. Until we started experimenting with me getting her off in bed, and I hated myself more and more for having any kind of reaction to the experience. Eventually, she suggested that maybe my complete lack of sex drive was what was causing my low moods – how was she to know it was the literal opposite? – and marched me straight to the doctor. He barely listened to me talking vaguely about feeling depressed before he shrugged, tapped away at the computer, and then handed me a piece of paper that I dutifully took to the counter at the chemist. Reading the long list of side effects of the prescription I ended up with – the dosage high and numbing – and realising that it could be the key to boxing the last remnants of any sexual feelings completely had had me kissing Imogen in gratitude for suggesting it in the first place. It dampened things just enough – and it’s not like an even lower sex drive had any impact on my day-to-day life.
All in all, a ‘teenage rugby injury’ was working perfectly well as an excuse, until Imogen had to go and mention it in front of Mum one day over dinner. Mum, who looked confused while David choked on his roast potatoes.
“What rugby injury?” had cut through me, a cold shard, and even David’s attempts to cover me fell flat.
“Well, to be honest, Mum. We both got injured so much as kids it’s no surprise you can’t remember.”
The bitter tone in his voice was lost on everyone other than me.
And the seed of doubt was suddenly sown in Immy’s mind. After that, it was all did your Mum take you to a specialist? and are you sure that there’s nothing that can be done?
Suddenly, my delicate cover was blown, and I was no longer her poor boyfriend who medically couldn’t get it up. Now – what was it her friends called me? – now I’m just frigid.
Poor Immy, they had said. How have you coped?
And now I realise that their doubts have been rewriting everything in her head long before I heard about them. I could see the cogs whirring, in hindsight. All those times I used my hands and my mouth to leave her panting and satisfied on the bed, before slipping away to the bathroom, were tainted. She saw me, in her mind’s eye, sneaking off to have a quick wank because I just didn’t want her – instead of the truth, which was that I needed to get away before I ruined everything and vomited onto the carpet at the slight fizzle of arousal that crept up on me.
Maybe I should have told her I wanted to wait until marriage and been done with it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so fucking offended by her awful friends’ opinions of me. It’s not even like Imogen likes them that much. They’re just the final hang ons from school; Bella, who was always a bitch, and some girl called Melanie… or Melinda… or Maggie. I’m the boyfriend who fetches the wine, and kisses Imogen chastely, and then makes myself scarce so they can all catch up without me eavesdropping. I’m the good boyfriend, the one who isn’t sex-obsessed and staring at other girls’ boobs right in front of her. I had a reputation. I thought it was a good thing.
I didn’t expect to want to prove them wrong. To prove I wasn’t as broken as they made out, when our best bottle of wine had been drained and fucking Bella pulled out the Prosecco.
The humiliation of stepping into the living room and picking up my wallet was almost worth it to see the looks of horror dawn on their faces. They sat, their glasses frozen at their lips, as I said nothing and left. I think Imogen called after me when I slammed down my workout bag by the front door. No doubt she’s currently being comforted as she sobs and Bella tells her that I’m the problem, not her.
I guess I am.
I’d showered at the gym, and the clothes I’d pulled on after were tight enough that I figured I could get away with them in a club. Instagram told me where all the cool people – the ones with far more interesting social lives than me – hang out on a Friday night. So I headed there, and told myself that I would pull the first person I found.
The fact that it turned out to be Charlie, whose provocative pose in his Instagram story had been the final push I needed to head to the club in the first place, wasn’t exactly going to make me complain. Charlie, whose spiral – according to the people from school I still talk to – has ended with him banging any boy who shows the vaguest interest. I think he’s as broken as I am, and it made me feel confident, just for a second.
I don’t think I even said a word to him before I kissed him; silent as ever as I dove in and parted his lips and pretended that this is me. That I do this. He tasted of cigarettes and schnapps and something else, something harsh and medicinal – cheap vodka, maybe – and he took me by the hand and led me back towards the entrance as soon as I bent my head and whispered:
“Fuck me.”
And now, here we are.
Above me, Charlie braces his hand against the roof of my car and dives in for another kiss.
Fuck, is he expecting me to thrust enough that he might actually hit his head on the ceiling?
I find that, if I spread my fingers out in his curls, he holds onto my hand instead and the whole thing feels kind of… nice? It’s not as quick and filthy as I was expecting – being here with him. I can’t see the clock on my dashboard, but it feels like we’ve been doing this for a lifetime; kissing and touching and rutting against one another, in a way that I hadn’t expected to feel so good. There doesn’t seem to be any rush, despite Charlie’s reputation.
He leans back slightly, balanced on my thighs, and his fingers go to the buttons of my shirt.
“I’m going to undo these, okay?”
I nod. My bare chest is exposed a little more with every flick of his deft fingers on the fastenings. When he reaches the bottom he palms my erection firmly and grins down at me.
“Big boy,” he whispers. It sounds forced. Like he thinks that’s what I’m expecting to hear.
“You don’t have to do that,” I murmur. I can feel myself flushing hot and red with the embarrassment of it all; the discomfort in knowing that this is supposedly how we are meant to be together, when it feels so fake.
“Do what?” He’s acting dumb, but his voice falters, like he’s afraid he’s done something wrong.
“Talk like that. Pretend to be like that.” I lean forward and press my lips to the hollow of his throat. “Not with me.”
“How am I supposed to fucking know that?” he says, but quietly, and almost to himself.
He’s looking down at my lap, strangely chastised, so I take the opportunity to tug my shirt off of my shoulders and let it crumple down in the narrow space between my back and the seat. Charlie’s eyes widen as he takes me in – roaming my chest in a way that makes me feel exposed – and I swear his hands are shaking as he brings them up to smooth his palms across my skin.
Somewhere nearby, a car is speeding down the country road beside the carpark we’re in. It appears soon enough, its headlights illuminating us in a way that is slightly uncomfortable. For some reason, it pauses at the carpark entrance and the residual light from their LEDs is enough to cast us both in a silver glow. It changes the mood between us, in a way that makes me wonder if this entire endeavour is about to fall apart. Charlie looks down at me as if he has never seen me before, while my eyes are drawn to his exposed arms.
In the club, the flashing lights made it hard to see, and then he’d worn his jacket for the entire journey here. But now, in the low light and with only his thin shirt on, I can see just how much of the surface of his skin is marred with scars.
It is, I think, the saddest I have ever felt.
Charlie shivers when I press my fingertips lightly to his pulse – feel the life there – then run them up to the crook of his elbow. The moment between us seems to come to a standstill, suspended in time, before the car pulls away. We are left in the pathetic light of a single lamppost, which flickers before winking out completely.
Whatever that was between us, it’s broken again, and we are back to our original goal; fuck, use one another, and then face the consequences tomorrow.
Charlie makes no attempt to remove his shirt, and so I am left to wonder what the underneath might hold.
Still, there’s an urgency when he leans forward to kiss me; like he’s frightened of the sincerity that tiny morsel of light brought us. He latches his lips onto my neck and sucks, hard, and it makes me hiss into the quiet. His confidence is terrifying in the face of my inexperience; he’s going to be able to tell instantly, I just know it. There is no pause, no moment of hesitation, as he presses his lips wherever he wants; wherever the desire takes him.
“I don’t— I don’t know what I’m doing,” I stutter as he nips on my bottom lip. He chuckles quietly in response and then pulls back to look at me.
“Don’t worry, Nick. You’re not the first ‘straight’ guy I’ve been with.”
He says it with actual air quotes, his finger wiggling in front of my face. Without his hands on my shoulders to steady himself, he wobbles in my lap, and I have to grab him around the waist to stop him from tumbling over. It’s the first time I’ve properly touched him. I can feel the ridges of his ribs, like an instrument I want to play. I tug him closer.
“I really don’t know, Charlie. I’ve never done this before.”
This seems to irritate him, and he stiffens in my arms. His voice, when it pierces the quiet again, is clipped and curt.
“I get it, Nick. You and your perfect girlfriend have never had sex in a car, you’ve never fucked a guy. I’m not expecting miracles.”
I choose to ignore the fact that he knows I have a girlfriend.
“No.” I don’t know why it’s so important to me that he understands. This could just be what it is; a drunken, messy hookup that neither of us would enjoy sober. But my mouth is a traitor that I can’t ignore, and it’s determined to ruin this. “I’ve never been with anyone like this before.”
He looks at me like I’ve just told him who shot JFK.
“You—”
“Yeah.”
He shifts back a little, so that he’s resting on my knees instead of literally on my cock. He misjudges it, and his back hits the steering wheel at an angle that makes the horn beep. We both squeal as he launches himself back at me and then giggles uncontrollably. His arms are briefly wrapped around my shoulders and his chest pressed against mine in a way that feels vaguely… nice… until he scoots back and lifts himself from my lap.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
Charlie raises an eyebrow at me again like I’m a bit simple.
“I need to take my jeans off.”
“Oh, right.”
With a certain amount of shuffling and coordination, he manages to lift himself from my lap and drop down on the passenger seat without hitting the handbrake. I watch – fascinated – as he lifts his bum from the seat and tugs his skinny jeans down his thighs. He’s thin and lithe enough that he can fold himself up and kick the fabric off of his feet, instead of them catching around his ankles. Very thin. Like, I could snap him. The passenger side is closer to our one intermittently working street lamp, which has winked back on again, and in its light, I can see the way the skin is mottled with scars – cuts upon cuts on his thighs, in the same fashion as his arms – like he ran out of space.
I think, maybe, that this is what my body would look like if the inside shone out.
I can see the outline of his cock through his boxers, and I have to bite down the brief, icy panic that would consume me if I let it get a single claw into me. Charlie must mistake it for nerves, because he raises an eyebrow at me.
“I’ll look after you, don’t worry.”
He hooks his thumbs at the waistband and shimmies off his boxers so that his cock springs free. When he catches me staring, he raises an eyebrow.
“See something you like?” he teases, leaning back against the headrest and fluttering his lashes at me.
“I— I—” I think my panic is clear, because he laughs quietly and shakes his head.
“Nick, I’m winding you up.”
“I know, I—” Fuck. Why is it so hard to just say? “I just really fancy you, you know? And that’s kind of new to me.”
“Fancying a boy?”
“No. Letting myself feel that way about anyone.”
If he thinks that’s weird, he doesn’t let it show on his face. There’s a faint flicker at the corner of his mouth, and that’s it; erased behind whatever wall he usually puts up around himself. He toys with the hem of his shirt and it’s almost comical; me stripped to the waist and him naked from the waist down, like some perverted fashion show. We’re suspended in time again – him in his confusion, and me in my agonising – when really all I want to do is push through all of this and just feel something else for a change.
“Can I—” I swallow. “Can I go down on you?”
He looks surprised, again, before he’s nodding and there’s another subtle shift between us as both of us angle our bodies very slightly in a different way. His shoulders square to the headrest, while I mimic the way he previously sat, with his side against the seat. We pause, wait, and then I try and be brave again.
“Don’t— don’t force my head down, please.”
“Okay…”
I swallow thickly. Charlie slips his hand into mine and strokes his thumb lightly across my knuckles.
“And I— I don’t want you to come in my mouth, sorry.”
“Nick…” His voice sounds… soft? All of a sudden, like he’s lost a little bit of confidence. He strokes the fingers of his other hand through my hair. “Whatever you’re ready for.”
My car isn’t exactly built for this sort of thing, and I’m hardly small, so it’s a bit awkward for me to bend myself over enough to take him in my mouth. The crease of his thigh smells faintly of aftershave – peppery and slightly floral – and it calms me, even as I misjudge and gag when he hits the back of my throat. Charlie toys with a lock of my hair, no pressure, and I hear him snort out a very quiet laugh.
“Careful,” he whispers before he scratches his nails once, lightly, against my scalp. I hum around him and try again.
I don’t really know what to do, beyond letting my jaw go slack and hoping I don’t gag again, so I experiment with swirling my tongue around him and bobbing my head up and down. I’m rewarded with the sounds of his moans filling the car and his fingertips scrunching in my hair. He doesn’t flatten his palm out against my head, doesn’t put any pressure there whatsoever, but the gentle encouragement is nice.
After a few moments, I feel his fingers tugging at my hair, and he pulls me off. I don’t think he was anywhere close, but he smiles at me gratefully when I’m back at his level and leans in to kiss me.
The kissing is nice. Kissing is the kind of love I crave.
Eventually, Charlie growls quietly in the back of his throat, and I know that things are about to shift between us again.
I lean back against the headrest and try and steady my breathing. This is it.
Charlie swings his leg back over my lap so that he’s straddling me again, his chest pressed up against mine as he deepens our kiss again. His lips don’t leave mine even as he starts shifting and shimmying in my lap, and I screw my eyes shut as I listen to the little noises he’s making to prepare.
A strange little squelch and then something heavy hitting the passenger seat.
The click and squeeze of a bottle.
Charlie’s little groans in the quiet.
I open one eye. His head is thrown back and his lips parted as he reaches around behind him. I can’t see what he’s doing – even if there was enough light in here, the space is too small – but his other hand clenches against my shoulder with every move of the hand I can’t see. I glance over at the passenger seat; there’s something shiny on top of his boxers – slightly bulbous on one end, and flat at the other – and I realise just how prepared he was for someone tonight.
Charlie’s entire body twitches under my touch when I wrap an experimental hand around him. He hisses, then stretches his neck from side to side, before he’s leaning right over to reach for his jeans. He retrieves a condom, then hands it to me with a raised eyebrow.
“You may never have done this before, but I have,” he murmurs, his voice kind, before he reaches down to tug at my boxers.
The condom is weirdly slippery when I manage to fish it out of the packet. I don’t really remember sex ed at school – it being one of those times where my brain decided that disassociation was better than staying present – and I definitely don’t remember them being so fiddly. And cocks apparently move about a lot more than cucumbers do – especially when it feels like putting the condom on requires two hands. Where’s the third hand to steady everything?
Charlie laughs, softly, before he’s wrapping his hand around me and stroking gently. The touch makes bile rise in my throat, while also feeling really good, and it’s hard to marry up the sensations. He leans in to kiss me.
“You really haven’t done this before, have you?”
“Shut up.”
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, lips pressing against my jaw. “I’ve got you.”
Despite the narrow space between us, and the way he has to balance to avoid just crashing onto me and snapping my dick in half, Charlie manages to roll the condom onto my cock in a fairly swift movement. The confidence of it sends a warm feeling through my gut; so much so that I’m distracted, and it takes me by surprise when he shifts back towards me and rubs the cleft of his arse against the length of me.
“Fuck—” I hiss, and tug him closer.
There’d be no going back now even if I wanted to. My body is too keyed up with nerves and excitement to pull the plug. I’m terrified, and confused, and every big emotion that I have refused to let myself feel for years now.
Charlie is holding me firm, lining me up with his entrance and slowly – so slowly – sinking down, when he pauses and cups my cheeks in his hands.
“Want me to tell you how well you’re doing?” he whispers, and crashes his lips into mine as soon as I nod.