It's Like This
Authors: Anne O'Gleadra
Beaten TrackPlease be aware that the following is not about a safe, sane, sober and fully consensual BDSM relationship (although it is not non-consensual). It is instead about two people who want what they want but don’t know how to express exactly what that is and the emotional repercussions of their miscommunications.
Please do not use the characters’ actions as an outline for healthy BDSM play, as communication is of utmost importance during and around scenes and that is not what goes on here. If you have triggers concerning dubious consent or breath play, I would recommend giving this story a miss. Thank you so much for reading.
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For Nazneen: for bravery.
It’s like this: Ian and Brice and Parker and Dylan get off the bus. They’ve pretended this whole time—just as they’ve pretended for the last three years—not to notice that Rylan has his arm draped casually over the blue plastic bar at the back of my seat. They pretend not to know that the second we get off the bus (scratch that, he’s not even going to wait for that second; it happens before the bus has even come to a complete stop), he’ll lower that arm over my shoulders, or drop his hand forward to fuck with my hair and knuckle my neck a little.
He’s like that: likes touching me in public, holding hands, kissing, and he does it in that easy way of his—with a Rylan-specific brand of confidence that almost makes people around us forget to look twice. Like he knows, as far as I can tell, what the fuck is going on. That is the difference between us. He knows. I don’t.
“So, guess who I saw?” Rylan says, after the bus doors fold shut.
“When?” I ask.
“The point isn’t when, douchius, it’s who!”
“Seriously? Douchius? Did you just make that up?”
“Once again, not my point. And yes. What do you think?”
“Douche, and all its variants, still reminds me of showering. Grade five French. Stuck in my head.”
“Should’ve washed it out with German, I told you.”
“Schnell, schnell.”
“Um. OK.”
“That’s the only German I know. Might have learned it in grade five, too, with all that depressing concentration camp fiction they made us read. So, who did you see?”
* * *
This is how it works. He touches me, like right now, his hand lazy-smug as it does stuff to my neck and hair and shoulder that probably makes a few of our fellow public transit patrons uncomfortable, and we carry on a conversation like the physical aspect of things is not happening. For us, this is normal. It’s normal for other couples, too, I assume. Except we’re not a couple—at least so far as I can discern. My reasoning is this: to the best of my knowledge, if you’re a part of a couple (which, to be fair, I’ve never actually been), it means that at one point the issue of your relationship status has been declared or at the very least discussed. Like, at one point in time, Partner X says to Partner Y, “So, wanna go out?” or, perhaps if Partner X is slightly more subtle, Partner Y just might suddenly be introduced to others as Partner X’s significant other. Or maybe Partner X and Y would discuss the nature of their relationship, what they want from the other, what their joint goals and aspirations are, if they see each other in their futures. Lofty shit like that.
I mean, I could be totally wrong. I could just be an impressionable idiot who’s watched too much TV and now incorrectly assumes that that is what relationships are like. Maybe all I’d like is for Rylan to just once infer that we’re exclusive. Or that he, I don’t know, cares about me when we fuck. Or maybe not when we’re fucking because that would be sentimental and weird, but maybe cares about me
because
we fuck. Or we fuck because he cares about me? Anything, really, I just like the thought of those two things going together and I am at least eighty percent sure that that is sort of normal. But honestly, I’d settle for him saying
anything
about our sex life.
Shona says I should just talk to him about it and obviously, cerebrally, I know that. But how does one enquire into this kind of situation, because, “So, Ry, are we like...
together
-together?” doesn’t quite cut it. Because if we are, well, together-together, and have been for the three years that I think we have been together, he might get pretty pissed at me being in the dark about the whole thing, whereas, if we’re
not
together, and we’re just screwing around, then voicing it might make it go away. And no matter how much I may bitch about the whole thing, I most definitely do
not
want it to go away. Or stop. Or change in any way—with the possible exception of me knowing what the fuck is going on.
I know the whole thing is ridiculous. It totally is. And even if I did somehow forget just how ridiculous the whole thing is, Shona draws me a pretty clear diagram of the magnitude of its absurdity every time we hang out.
“How are you and your ambiguous friend?” she likes to ask.
Usually this results in me flopping forlornly on her bed and whining that I wish I knew what I was to him. Most of the time, I have a pretty clear idea. Usually, I can lull myself into very-almost believing that he’s mine and I’m his and all that, because he really is super affectionate, and I mean, everyone we know knows we’re together. Like, all of our friends, other than Shona, sometimes call Rylan my boyfriend to me, and I assume when they talk to him I’m called his boyfriend? Maybe? Though it’s really not enough to settle things, because we were all friends before Rylan and I ever started hooking up, so mainly, our friends just refer to us both by name, Niles and Rylan, the “boyfriend” word only ever surfacing as a sort of joke.
So that’s not exactly concrete evidence. The affection though, it is all physical, never verbal, which leads me to think, in my more cranky moments, that we’re just fuck buddies. Which makes me worry (OK, obsess) about the fact that I’ve emotionally invested the last three years in someone who doesn’t really want
me
. Oops.
I mean, we’re friends, so I know he
likes
me, and the sex…well, the sex is beyond the best thing probably ever, but maybe that’s all. Maybe he’s just hanging out, waiting for someone who makes him fall in love to come around. Or maybe love doesn’t do it for him. What this is? Too many fucking maybes.
* * *
“Pay attention.” He’s got his bottom teeth just under the ridge of my upper ear. On him, that part of his ear is pierced, a loop that looks like a little silver balancing rainbow sitting on top of his ear. I’ve never been interested in getting a piercing, although I know he kind of wants me to. But I figure he’s got enough for both of us. Three: ear, nipple, tongue. But I’m not into it. It wouldn’t suit me, anyway. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m the kind of guy that should be getting a fake tan and giving piggybacks to girls in bikinis. At least that’s what Rylan says. None of those items even slightly appeal to me. But Rylan sometimes calls me JCrew to piss me off. Says I belong on a cheesy advertisement. I think (OK, hope) that he means it as a compliment—that at the very least he thinks I’m good looking. So that’s nice. I guess.
I don’t really get that worked up about it, but objectively I think I’m basically boring looking. I mean, I’ve got a body and a head and the typical appendages, but I don’t have The Look to carry off anything but your average looks-good-in-fitted-sweaters theme, so I leave the making a statement thing to Rylan. And he seems to think he has multiple statements to make, mostly with thrift-store T-shirts, or obnoxious plaid button-ups, or ratty-patch covered blazers and one time a snakeskin cowboy hat that he wouldn’t take off for like two weeks.
“Pay attention!” he growls again, closing his teeth over the rim of my ear, hard.
“Dammit, Rylan!” I blush. I should be used to this. So used to this. He likes attention and gets bored easily, meaning he’ll usually rely on my presence to get the attention he wants, while simultaneously gaining the attention of half the other passengers as well. “What do you want?”
“I was just asking,” he says slowly, flicking his tongue against the cartilage of my ear, which he
knows
gets me every time, “if your boar of a roommate is going to be around this afternoon?”
I know what that means. It means that I am most definitely going to get laid tonight.
“He is not,” I respond.
“Excellent,” Ry hiss-murmurs into my ear. He squeezes my thigh, and then reaches seductively across me to pull the cord for the next stop. Though why he feels the need to seduce me is beyond me; I was a goner a long time ago.
* * *
We’re barely in the door before Rylan is at my neck. He’s impatient, I can tell. Not that I mind. Even though he’s a little smaller than me, well, not shorter, we’re the same height, but definitely slighter, he always takes control. I like that. I’ve always liked that. I have two younger sisters, and always got good grades and shit, so I boil it all down to a little need for loss of power and try to leave it at that, because I’m pretty sure over-analyzing stuff never got anyone anywhere they wanted to go. Rylan makes a dark, needy sound as he grinds his crotch against my thigh. His teeth are biting harshly into my skin now: he’s always been one for instant gratification, for as long as I’ve known him. He’s got my hands pinned above my head, while he rips my sweater upwards off my body, allowing his angry mouth access to more susceptible skin. I am going to be beyond bruised tomorrow.
Shona doesn’t get it. She says she’s all for a little bit of rough sex, but not like this. She doesn’t get how hard it makes me to be slammed against the door, to have Rylan bind my hands within my sweater, then grab me by my belt loops and pull me across the little living room and into my bedroom, half stumbling along the way.
And I only get harder as Rylan strips. We got over the modesty thing a long, long time ago. And now he’s just nude and lean and powerful—hungry. My belt replaces my sweater, cuffing my hands together. He hooks the belt over one short wooden bed post, so my arms are twisted, awkward and painful behind me, jutting straight back and up from my shoulder blades, forcing me to kneel, the bed too high to get to. It’s obvious we’re not going to make it there anytime soon.
Rylan roughly yanks off my pants, releasing my aching cock. He goes down on me immediately and fuck, do I love that tongue stud. But I know he won’t let me come yet. He wants to bring me to the brink, and we know each other too well for him to not know when I’m there. So I’m keening upwards into his mouth, his throat, fully aware that just when I’m about to orgasm he’ll pull off.
Teeth: just a touch, momentary, and awful but glorious at the same time. I almost break our code. Almost say something, like, “Oh God!” before catching my lip between my teeth and biting down, hard, because we don’t talk. He doesn’t talk, and I don’t talk. We converse as friends, and then we fuck like something more, but we don’t mix the two. Not ever. He grins as he slides his mouth off my dick with one last flick of the metal stud. I look at my cock, straining and angry and helpless, and I think that the sight alone might just make me even a little more desperate to come. I love this. Pseudo-powerlessness. Self-imposed imprisonment.
He kisses me then; he loves slavering my own pre-cum across my tongue with his, and I love his body sliding up against mine, even as he plants his hands on my hips to keep me from thrusting, from seeking friction enough to satisfy. His body shifts upwards, and he trails a wet line from his leaking dick up my chest, until it rests at my lips. This will be a new experience: having my hands trapped upwards and incapable of touching him as I swallow his cock, but I really should have foreseen this; our sex has grown increasingly kinky—over this last year especially. I open my mouth obediently and he smiles as he hooks a fist in my hair.
For the first time since we started all this, I feel a twinge of actual fear. The awkward position I’m in would make it next to impossible for me to stand, not without him unhooking my hands from the bedpost for me. As a result, Ry could technically choke me with his cock. My heart rate tells me this freaks me out, but my erection tells me this turns me on, and either way the thought comes too late for me to do anything about it, because he’s sliding past my lips and over my tongue and I’m taking it gracefully. I press my tongue to the bottom of his dick to try and relax myself with the familiarity of his feel, his taste. He releases his grip on my hair slightly, and I allow him access to my throat. But he doesn’t ease off, he’s rigorous and controlling and I can’t breathe, and even though I’ve done this a million times, I’ve always had access to my hands, to put on his hips, to push him away or pull him closer…