Chapter Text
Quentin was — it must be confessed — better at sex than Eliot had thought he would be.
And Eliot had given the matter no small amount of consideration, in the dull and increasingly desperate lead-up to the night when much to his shock he found himself in a position to evaluate the evidence directly. It had, after all, been nearly a year that they had been toiling away at a puzzle of such stupid parameters that even Quentin’s fanboyish zeal for the project had long since waned. Each failed design felt less like they were getting closer to winning the key and with it (they assumed, they hoped, they prayed, they dared not speak aloud the fear that perhaps —) safe passage home, and more as if they were attempting to move the entirety of the beaches at Fire Island to the Chinese coast one grain of sand at a time. There were only so many topics with which to occupy one’s mind which after a year in the woods did not lie in dangerous proximity to the existential terror, deepening lately with each hour that passed, that they may have more months left here than they had so far lost. Hypothesizing privately about the sexual habits of the only human being from his own time he had spoken to in three hundred days (three hundred and twelve days — three hundred and twenty-six days — three hundred and fifty-eight goddamn days —) presented itself as an irresistible pastime.
Of course it didn’t hurt that Quentin was, objectively speaking, attractive, and perversely only growing more so forced into a lifestyle that involved moderate physical labor and regular exposure to the sun. But Eliot had bedded the genetically gifted often enough to know there was no real correlation between beauty and skill in this domain. Furthermore it was obvious from every single thing about his wardrobe and personality that Quentin had no idea he was attractive, which was simultaneously maddening, bemusing, and depressingly on brand. Naturally in his life of neuroses and social isolation he had convinced himself that his appearance was one of the myriad factors stacked against him; Eliot sometimes thought that if he could ever be made to perceive the truth, it might be more likely to upset him than to bring any kind of balm. But a relevant corollary of Quentin’s persistent cluelessness on the subject of his own sexual appeal was that it suggested life had not brought him sufficient evidence to contradict his hypothesis, and indeed that some of the available evidence may have gone unheeded as such; Eliot himself could attest to the latter on the basis of the two fruitless months he had spent futilely attempting to seduce Quentin when he had arrived at Brakebills, what was coming to seem an entire lifetime ago. Or, in other words: Quentin wasn’t a virgin, but he was likely fairly close.
So he was inexperienced. That left the question of natural affinity for the sport. Here the issue of temperament came into play. Quentin was uptight; easily embarrassed; pedantic; intellectual to a fault; often sour; somewhat prudish; graceless and unsubtle; not to mention physically clumsy, perpetually tense, and pathologically self-conscious. It was an assemblage of traits that made him entertaining if occasionally irritating company, but bade poorly for his sexual performance. Quentin in bed would be all elbows, no eye contact; flinching if anything came dangerously close to feeling too good, stiffening up when he should have been relaxing into touch; he would be nearly noiseless, and when a rogue sound might escape he would stuff it back down his throat embarrassed — his eyebrows pinched with effort and perhaps with displeasure at the thought of being so fully seen. Eliot pictured anemic thrusting and sloppy kisses with too much tongue and teeth, maddening quizzical looks with no accompanying questions as if Quentin were unsure of what was expected but too embarrassed to ask. It made for a dispiriting image, one that gave Eliot some belated sympathy for poor Alice Quinn, somehow falling into bed with the only person on campus almost as repressed as she was. Truly the fact that they successfully fucked even once was close to a miracle.
And yet Quentin was the only prospect for miles around; and the days were creeping on and on and on; and Eliot was after all only human. While his initial musings on the topic of Quentin Coldwater and sex had buzzed safely in the realm of abstraction, inevitably his thoughts began to circle, like leaves caught in a whirlpool, on the more concrete question of what it would be like for him, Eliot, to have sex with Quentin here, in Fillory, now, whenever the fuck that might be. It was a hypothetical scenario, but — Eliot did not think it was so very terrible to admit — not one he was certain was destined to remain as such, his past failures notwithstanding. Quentin was human, too, and hardly coping with their predicament better than Eliot was. A time might yet come when he would be glad for the kind of distraction only sex and really good drugs could provide, and none of their ventures into the surrounding woods had suggested really good drugs were lurking somewhere on the dappled ground. Obviously Eliot wasn’t exactly Quentin’s type, to say the least, but that had never been an obstacle with which he had concerned himself; he wouldn’t be the first straight boy Eliot had charmed into a good time. And while Eliot retained no memories of their contextually disastrous sole previous encounter, he had it on good authority (Margo, very drunk) that at least in that circumstance, Quentin had been game.
(Honestly, I said it as a joke, she’d whispered conspiratorially in her room at Whitespire, some night between the frying pan and the fire, but he got right down and opened up — opened wide, El, like a — like a fish. Like a drunk, slutty fish — and Eliot had laughed so hard at the image that he’d spilled his wine, and Margo had laughed, too, saying Fuck! This is why we can’t have nice things, but she’d looped her arm around his neck, as she’d done a thousand times before, and — well! That was quite enough reminiscing for the day, Eliot thought, and reached for his flask.)
So Eliot thought about it; he considered it; he may even be said to have imagined it. They would be drunk, of course. That much was near certain, given that it had become their habit to bring out the wine the second they stopped working for the day, and sometimes (often) before. Eliot would, naturally, be the one to initiate the proceedings; there did not exist a version of Quentin drunk or desperate enough even in the farthest and wildest reaches of Eliot’s considerable erotic creativity to conceive of the idea himself, much less bold enough to act on it. Eliot could see himself leaning close one night, a few sheets further to the wind than was their custom, announcing that he had a proposition. The tone would be a subtle thing to manage: too businesslike, and Quentin would merely splutter in useless indignation (Okay, you can’t just — this not how normal people — I’m not, I’m not like — not that there’s anything wrong with that — sometimes Eliot wanted to take this approach just for the delight of watching him turn red, and the joy of arguing easily against his inane protestations, but of course then the topic would have to be buried for weeks during which an unpleasant awkwardness might seep into their already unpleasant days, so it was important to show self-restraint). Yet it would be crucial that Quentin fail to realize he was being seduced until the process had begun to take its desired effect. If he caught on too early, Eliot would succeed only in scaring the poor thing, like a qausi-virginal deer skittering on knobby legs away from the noise of an American male’s favorite substitute phallus. Eliot would need to be alluring, yet unthreatening; gentle, but just a little dangerous; casual in a way that conveyed nevertheless he would be very careful with all of Quentin’s delicate and extremely manly parts.
Eliot would pull this performance off with aplomb. It was, perhaps, the role he had been born to play.
He would make his offering, steady and soft, playful enough that they could laugh it off if necessary but not so mischievous that Quentin feared Eliot might be making fun. Eliot liked to make fun of Quentin, because Quentin was so very easy to make fun of with his many embarrassing habits and interests, and because Eliot liked his pouty little frown when he got defensive and he liked it even better when Quentin rolled his eyes and huffed a laugh out the side of his mouth like he thought Eliot was being an idiot, but an idiot of whom Quentin had found himself unaccountably fond. But it would not do to tease a sexual novice before some level of security had been established first. In that first moment Eliot would be careful, for the sake of Quentin’s ego, and, selfishly, for the sake of his own ability to get laid.
Quentin would be, in all likelihood, confused: his drawn-in frown, his eyes blinking rapidly with those infuriatingly long lashes — more than once that first Brakebills fall Margo and Eliot had sighed over how wasted they were on someone who would never be made to care. He might think that Eliot was joking, squinting as if he were trying to avoid getting pranked, or he might protest, arguing in favor of preserving his dignity, some semblance of boundaries, their friendship relatively unmarred still by awkwardness or strain — reasonable concerns in reasonable circumstances, concerns Eliot himself may once have shared, but about which the encroaching horror of their situation had broken his ability to care. Quentin might simply say no. But Quentin might — Eliot daydreamed; Eliot fantasized; Eliot perhaps, worn down by the onslaught of days and unable to believe that Quentin’s borders of normalcy had not been similarly eroded, even dared to hope — Quentin might say yes.
Or, more realistically (eyes darting every which way, shoulders hunched towards scarlet ears): Uh, like, okay, yeah, I guess, I mean, if you’re cool with it. But (perhaps, once the words had left his mouth and he had given himself permission to begin pondering the idea in full-blooded detail, there would be detectable on his pinched face the slightest hint of startled interest blooming, like a bird peering curiously at a hand that may be moving to open its cage) it would be close enough.
And thus they would begin: Eliot mindful, slow, as gentle as need be to keep the proceedings enjoyable for everyone involved; Quentin wound tighter than a clock-spring, hesitantly accepting the carefully selected offerings before him. Eliot imagined that to start with they might merely kiss, as Quentin would be too dumbfounded and uncertain to do anything more. Eliot would have to show him, piece by piece, all the wonderful, magical, filthy things they could do to each other if Quentin would only consent to letting himself be taught what all along his body had been for. He would kiss Quentin softly, with barely parted lips, hand on Quentin’s neck waiting for the tension to ease; then, just as Quentin was relaxing into the rhythm, Eliot would push, just slightly, just enough to keep him alert and wanting. A little hotter then, mouth to mouth, tongue reaching for that permissible penetration (Quentin’s tongue, he imagined, might lap at his lips in half-panicked response, aware that he should do something but unsure of what to do; Eliot would accept the effort graciously as he pressed back slowly and firmly to provide both pleasure and guidance, consummate erotic multitasker that he was). As they found a rhythm, Eliot would bring his hand to the back of Quentin’s neck, that first foray primarily laying the groundwork for future touch. He imagined Quentin might mirror him, or reach for a shoulder or an arm, out of politeness if not desire. They would sit there, unhurriedly making out like teenagers in the backseat of a car, albeit the kind of teenagers Eliot had certainly and Quentin had almost definitely never been, an image almost sweet for the chasteness of Quentin’s shy uncertainty under the moon. (Moons. Whatever. God, Eliot fucking hated this place.)
Perhaps that would be as far as they went that first night. That would be fine; the one thing they had no shortage of was time. It would become part of their nightly ritual, a project for Eliot to take on that unlike the damn puzzle would yield its secrets slowly but reliably under his careful hands: how to unfold the knot of repression and anxiety that was one Quentin Coldwater, and reshape him into someone who could, at least in specific circumstances and with much guidance and support, calm the fuck down and enjoy himself. Eliot didn’t mind taking on this kind of mentorship. In fact, some part of him relished the notion, and not only because it buoyed his self-image to imagine returning Quentin to the future newly sexually capable, all his future girlfriends owing Eliot more than they would ever know — a kind of sexual noblesse oblige, one he was much too classy to ever take credit for (except with Bambi, perfect Bambi, whose eyes would flash with wild delight as he regaled her with his tale of the thousand and one nights spent unfurling Quentin Coldwater under his tutelage, recreating every blushing stammer and wide-eyed gasp at pleasures heretofore unimagined). No, if he was being honest with himself — and what the fuck did he have left to hide, out here in the wilderness with only the least socially discerning person he had ever met for company — Eliot rather thought he might enjoy the process, slow as it was sure to be. His sexual history, after all, while impressively (if he did say so himself, which he did) varied and exotic, included nothing of this kind. And beyond the sheer novelty factor (itself not to be discounted), Eliot found that when he took the time to picture it — Quentin’s fluttering breath when he allowed Eliot to run his hand up the skin of his back; his shoulders hunching shyly after Eliot had removed his shirt; his uncertainty at the proximity of Eliot’s face to his cock giving way to pinched groans of arousal as Eliot skillfully took him in his mouth, giving way long after that to full-throated cries of pleasure as Eliot taught him, well enough to make him believe it, that he needn’t ever be ashamed of showing how much he liked what he liked — there was much to savor in the prospect of the road before him. It gave him something to do, fine-tuning the plan for his initial overture while they stacked and unstacked the hateful tiles; and it gave him something to look forward to, drifting off at night content with the preemptive satisfaction of a job well done.
Only — then Quentin kissed him.
So. That was the first thing he had been wrong about.
The second thing he had been wrong about was that Quentin, even metaphorically speaking, was no blushing bride. He was inexperienced, clearly; uncoordinated, to be sure; and, for someone so pathologically verbose in everyday conversation, astonishingly inarticulate once bodies were involved. All of that was as expected. But nowhere to be found was the tension, the reluctance, the fear, the shame. Here and there were traces of embarrassment — an eyebrow twitching during a lull in the action as though he were worried he’d misstepped but afraid to ask, or a delectable flush after he came in Eliot’s mouth — but Quentin let go of these more easily than Eliot had ever seen him let embarrassment slip, too eager to get on with the business at hand to allow such concerns to weigh him down, a transformation all the more remarkable for the fact that the business at hand was Quentin and Eliot fucking each other’s brains out. Yes: Quentin was eager, no coaxing required, and not just for the obvious, like receiving his first blow job in well over a year, but for kissing Eliot like his life depended on it, and for tearing off Eliot’s clothes so that the two of them could press against each other skin to sweat-slick skin, and for sucking Eliot’s dick like not only his own life but the fate of the entire universe depended on it. It was a revelation as startling as it was inexplicable, but at this point in his life Eliot would take his victories where he could. He took that one to the tune of three blisteringly hot orgasms by the time they had exhausted themselves, at which point Quentin proferred one final surprise: chest still heaving, he threw an elbow over his eyes and laughed — an easy laugh, like Eliot had not known Quentin to be capable of making, frictionless and glad. The smug, self-satisfied laugh of someone who had just gotten laid.
In the morning, Eliot had looked back with no small amount of wonder at the events of the night before and concluded that Quentin, and perhaps he himself, must have been much drunker than he had assumed. Probably he would be humiliated when he came to his senses. Eliot found that he could not bear the thought of Quentin attempting to apologize for what the two of them had done, so when he heard the opening bar of the familiar song called About Last Night, he cut it off swiftly: “Let’s save our overthinking for the puzzle, hm?”
Flustered but doubtlessly relieved, Quentin agreed.
And that had been that.
Only then, bewilderingly, Quenitn kissed him again — kissed him that very night, barely half a drink in, with a ferocious energy as if he had been waiting all day for the circumstances to grant him permission to do it — kissed him and said, in response to Eliot’s frankly baffled stare, “Sorry — you said we shouldn’t overthink it, so I thought — did you want to, like, talk about it? Because we could —”
“No,” Eliot said, foolish enough to have mistaken it the first time but not stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth twice, and not nearly so masochistic as to destroy it with the one thing guaranteed to ruin the mood. “No, let’s not talk.”
This didn’t seem entirely to satisfy Quentin. But nibbling softly at the side of his jaw did, and so the matter was put to rest.
Since then, they had kept up a steady pace of what they took to calling jokingly in the daytime stress-relieving activities — as in El, I’m feeling kind of stressed, which it turned out was not a request for a turn at the flask or a sympathetic ear but in fact an invitation to pause the day’s tiling long enough to jerk each other off on the grass. Eliot had thus had a chance to learn much about what Quentin was like in bed. He was eager; he was impatient; Eliot would even say he was wild — Quentin! Quentin Coldwater! But it could not be denied. It was as if all that nervous energy had been in fact long stoppered up, and kissing Eliot after a year in the woods was for whatever reason the thing that had popped the cork. Now he kissed Eliot, when they were kissing, with a greedy, sloppy hunger, like he had been dying for permission to unleash himself on someone for years. He touched Eliot, when they were touching, frantically, searchingly, running over Eliot’s skin with no particular plan or intent except the heat of contact. He spoke rarely, but he moaned and whimpered and cursed and grunted freely, a breathless fuck fuck fuck or oh holy shit falling out of his absurdly shaped lips when Eliot pressed tongue or fingers or cock to a sensitive spot or when Quentin rutted up against or fucked into him, pushing towards his own release, and he shuddered with a choked-out groan when he came, every single time. His mercurial face twisted unflatteringly with pleasure as easily as it fell open with something deliriously close to awe, as though every good sensation caused him one form of overwhelm or another. He lacked imagination but was astonishingly amenable to suggestion and direction, given his occasionally infuriating clenched-jaw stubbornness in literally every other area of life. He pursued Eliot’s pleasure with an almost mercenary intensity, and sometimes after Eliot came he thought he could detect on Quentin’s face the hint of a smirk, a faint smugness in his own skill that would have been unbearable had it not been so well-earned. And when they had finished for the night (or the evening, or the afternoon, or the morning, because it turned out on top of everything else Quentin was positively insatiable), he would often, just as he had that first night, roll onto his back and laugh.
In short, Quentin — neurotic, depressive, insecure, inexperienced, nerdy, dyspeptic Quentin Coldwater — fucked more or less like any other red-blooded American male between the ages of seventeen and twenty-nine.
Eliot could not begin to explain why he found this… so excruciatingly hot.
It made no sense. Eliot had fucked professional athletes and recreational sword swallowers. He had been Daddy and been good for Daddy and been bad for Daddy and hooked up with more than one real-life DILF. He’d had sex while on half a dozen illicit substances, individually and in combinations both tantalizing and terrifying. He’d worn leather and lingerie and a French maid’s outfit, and he’d once received a lapdance from a man who claimed convincingly to have siren blood in his ancestry. He’d dabbled in accessories from blindfolds to handcuffs to edible underwear and beyond, and the spells — god, the spells. The heat and the touch and the delicious rules made to be broken or begged against and the supremely fucked up things sex magic could do to one’s perception of the linear passage of time. He’d had dozens of threesomes and participated in more than one spectacular orgy. Given his greatest hits — the thick-necked blue-eyed bodybuilder who could bench press Eliot’s bodyweight, the dainty Italian pyromancer who did things with non-burning flames Eliot had not seen anyone do before or since, the married gray-haired diplomat who ate him out in the back of a limo — sex with Quentin shouldn’t have cracked the top fifty. It should have been cute, but hardly something to write home about. It should have been basic. It should have been boring.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any of those things.
Instead, sex with Quentin — the same handful of positions, the same reliable stable of moves, the same awkward fuckbuddy whose idea of dirty talk was asking “Is that good?” in the exact tone of voice one would use to inquire about the volume while watching TV — was the best sex of Eliot’s life.
Eliot didn’t understand. He had thought of himself as something of a connoisseur. A man who could appreciate the basics, but whose tastes trended towards the worldly and unique. Someone who craved novelty and creativity, who admired technique and finesse. But here he was, completely undone by the unsophisticated horniness of a guy who acted like letting Eliot come on his face was the kinkiest thing he had done in his life, every single time he did it. (Which was often. Quentin liked that one. A lot.)
The thing about sex with Quentin was — he just wanted it, so badly. Palpably. Desperately. Nakedly. His desire was like his every other emotion: written with neon clarity on that face that had never learned the first thing about hiding. Quentin was so steadfastly terrible at being anything other than exactly who he was, and that was how he wanted, too: wholehearted and undisguised, so raw it was transfixing to witness.
It had been a very long time since Eliot had allowed himself to want anything like that.
It was almost contagious, this kind of hunger. In the face of Quentin’s ungainly grinding and ineloquent shouts of arousal and approval, his dark seeking eyes and the slack-jawed way he stared frankly at Eliot about to go down on him — in the face of how much Quentin just seemed to like it, like all of it, every sight and sensation and noise no matter how awkward or unsexy, how much he seemed to find it in fact extremely sexy just for Eliot’s body to be there for the touching, right next to his body aching to be touched — in the face of his sheer need, of how he moved like someone who had learned only just today that this was the thing he’d been dying his whole life to get and now that he had it wanted as much of it as possible — well, Eliot forgot, a little bit. Or a lot. He forgot to be charming, to set the scene. He forgot about curating an unforgettable experience, about anticipating his partner’s needs and seeing to them as if they were his own. He forgot the art of seduction, and the more advanced art of convincing someone who already wants to sleep with you that they’re being seduced. He forgot all about introducing Quentin to the world of erotic adventure, or even about inspiring any kind of awe in him at the things he hadn’t known were possible and great fun to do in bed. He forgot to put on a show worth viewing more than once.
Truthfully, when Eliot was fucking Quentin, he forgot to think about anything else at all.
Which simply would not do. He needed to get his act together. It was all well and good for Eliot to indulge for a few days (weeks) (months) in the unexpected relief of some surprisingly satisfying fucking while stuck out here in purgatory with no end in sight. But while Quentin was considerably more adept than Eliot had anticipated, and while — fine — he may have somehow tapped into some primal urge lurking in Eliot’s subconscious heretofore unrecognized (did he have a desperation kink? Was that a thing?), it remained objectively the case that Quentin was if not a complete novice still early in his sexual journey. Furthermore, even if sometimes while Quentin was blowing him he had the totally insane idea that he would trade every single one of his greatest hits for another minute in this guy’s mouth and the hopelessly endearing way he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand afterwards, it remained true as well that Eliot had things to teach him, and teach him he must. And it didn’t matter if sometimes in the heat of the moment, covered in Quentin’s sweat and his own, Eliot briefly thought like a crazy person that he was an idiot to have ever thought he needed anything more than the knowledge of how Quentin’s face screwed up when he was fucking someone and getting close, to the extent that the fact that it was Eliot he was fucking felt almost incidental. Eliot wasn’t doing this for himself. He was a giver. He had a sense of duty. He was doing it for Quentin. He was doing it for the girlfriends.
If after the truly unhinged amount of sex they were having he permitted Quentin to go back into his real future on Earth, one day at the end of all this, no more equipped for blowing the minds of his future lady-loves, who would almost certainly not share the particular erotic derangement of an emotionally unbalanced homosexual time-locked out of his life, Margo would never let him live it down.
So one night, when they had once again fucked each other senseless under the stars some time (six months) (more than that) after this had all begun, Eliot took a moment to catch his breath and remind himself what he had worked so hard to make Eliot Waugh mean. Then he propped his head up on his elbow and said, casual as anything, “So what are some of your fantasies?”
Quentin, still panting from their exertions (why was that hot?), blinked at him. “Uh. What?”
Eliot smirked, although he was careful to do it nicely. This was more like it. “You know. Your fantasies. What are you into? What really gets Quentin Coldwater going?”
Those furry little eyebrows furred together in furry consternation. “I like… the normal stuff, I guess? I — uh, I mean, you’ve — you’ve been getting me going. Like, for sure. Sorry if — I kind of thought that was obvious, but if I was, like, ambiguous somehow, or —” He drew himself upright in adorable alarm. “Are — I mean, do you? Have — fantasies? Like, that you wish we were doing, but we’re not, so it’s, like, actually kind of boring for you or whatever?”
“Everyone has fantasies,” Eliot said. “But no. I assure you —” He grappled briefly with the issue of the appropriate nomenclature for that which they were doing constantly but definitely not talking about. “This — with you — is not boring.”
“Because you could, um, tell me, if you’re bored. We could, like — communicate. About that. I would — like I just want to be sure we’re all, uh, that all parties are satisfied, and, and that things feel equitable, and —”
“Quentin.” Eliot laid a hand on Quentin’s shoulder and for a moment wondered if he shouldn’t have. It was a gesture recycled from any of a dozen conversations dating back to their Brakebills days, but not one he had ever done while naked. Typically they didn’t mix their friendship and their benefits. But Quentin settled slightly under the touch, so Eliot pressed forward. “I swear to you on Purple Rain, when we are having sex I am the very opposite of bored.”
“Purple what?”
“The Prince album?” Quentin stared blankly. “Oh my god. Well, we’ll add it to the list.”
The list was a set of cultural references the two of them had in exasperation declared their intent to force upon each other when they got back. Eliot had started it after discovering Quentin had never seen Showgirls. Quentin wouldn’t understand camp if it licked a stripper pole in front of him, but Eliot couldn’t resist the thought of his baffled indignation at alleged cinematic crimes. In return Eliot had wound up agreeing to watch, among other things, at least two Star Trek movies, and not the ones with Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine which were apparently abominations of some kind although Eliot had found them perfectly enjoyable.
“The point is,” Eliot said, “it’s basically the closest thing to a holy text I have.”
That seemed to appease Quentin. He lay back down, although the line of worry was not totally gone from his brow. “So — you’re not bored.”
“Definitely not.” Eliot let himself smile invitingly. “I just thought, you know — we’ve pretty much mastered the fundamentals. This seemed like the appropriate time to start branching out.” Seemed being the operative word there; in fact Eliot could not be said to have much expertise on the matter of this sort of timeline, because he had never spent this long fucking the same person.
But if Quentin caught that, he didn’t show it. “Branching out… like how?”
Eliot leaned in, arching a seductive brow. This conversation was going exactly according to plan. “Like: if there was one thing I could do to really blow your mind — anything at all, maybe even something you’ve never done before — what would it be?”
And here was the part where Quentin would stammer a little and blush and say something like Uh, I don’t know, I never really thought about it, which could be the truth or could be repression, but either way, Eliot would be prepared with a list of spicy but approachably gentle ways to introduce some novelty into their stress-relieving activities. Quentin would listen, trepidatious but intrigued; Eliot would watch his face for cues about what seemed to strike a chord; they would choose something fun and not too intimidating; Eliot would murmur reassurances to ease Quentin’s nerves. To convince him that he was in good hands and had nothing to fear.
Except Eliot really should have learned by now to stop thinking he had Quentin’s number for things like this.
Because Quentin frowned lightly, like he was considering the question the way he might turn over an issue of spellcraft or meta-math or whatever the fuck he used to talk about when he hung out with Julia (geopolitics? Shakespeare? Jedi shit? Eliot didn’t know how nerds occupied themselves in private). And then he said: “Uh — you could tie me up, I guess?”
If it were possible for one to fall over while lying down, Eliot would have done it.
Apparently sensing some unanticipated reaction, Quentin hurried to say, “Or — not, if that’s, like, if you’re not comfortable, or —”
“I’m comfortable,” Eliot managed.
“It’s not too weird?”
“Adorable question. But no.”
Quentin rolled his eyes. He hated it when Eliot called him adorable, which of course only incentivized Eliot to do it more. “Okay, well — you asked, so. That’s what — what came to mind. If you want.”
“I do want.” Now that the shock of Quentin’s frankness had passed, he took a moment to congratulate himself for having had that on his list of options. Not that it had taken much insight; light bondage was in fact Cosmo-level basic and to say Quentin seemed like the type would be an understatement of epic proportions. But it did change things, knowing that it was something Quentin had thought about enough to be willing to name. “Have you done it before?”
“No.” A flicker of hesitation crossed Quentin’s face. He opened his mouth, bit his lip. “Not — I mean not like that.”
Eliot raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”
Quentin shrugged. “A couple times, with Alice — round two, or whatever — she, like — we did stuff kind of… conceptually similar, I guess.”
In a perfect world Eliot might have inquired further about this conceptual similarity, but in this world it had been a year and a half since they had seen any of the people who had mattered to them on the day they had stepped through the clock, so to keep things light he let it go. “Was that what got you curious?”
“No, I — it was kind of a preexisting thing.”
“Where’d it start?”
Quentin squinted at him skeptically. “Is this, like, important? For — I don’t know, like are there different, uh, methods or whatever you’re thinking of, or something? Because I was just thinking, like, the regular kind.”
Eliot felt caught out. In truth he was being nosy. The thought of excavating this secret part of Quentin made him feel curiously greedy. But he couldn’t tell Quentin that. “If I want to make it good for you, obviously it helps to know exactly what it is you like about the idea.”
Quentin wrinkled his nose. “I guess that makes sense.”
Eliot smiled. Then, against his better judgment, he said, “Also — I’m nosy.”
That made Quentin laugh. “That definitely tracks.” Eliot’s stomach did a funny little flip — half pleasant, half not. “Alright. Honestly, I don’t know how helpful I can be, if — if that’s what you’re looking for. Like I don’t really know — what it is, or why. I can tell you where it started, though, if you want to know that. You have to promise not to laugh, though.”
Eliot obediently crossed his heart. “I would never.”
Quentin rolled his eyes. “Yes you fucking would. And actually —” He sighed up at the sky. “You know what? Whatever. It’s fine. You can laugh. It’s, like, objectively kind of funny.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.” Eliot felt the sides of his mouth curling up already.
“So, in college — not for class or anything, just, like, I was in college at the time — I was reading this biography of Houdini.” Quentin was doing that thing where he talked with his hands. Eliot had always liked that thing. He had undeniably attractive hands. “I’d been kind of obsessed with him for a while as a kid, and I was feeling — I don’t know, nostalgic I guess. And you know how a lot of times, biographies have those, like, glossy pages in the middle with pictures from the person’s life or whatever?”
“I truly cannot fathom what I have ever done or said to give you the impression I am familiar with what is or is not commonly found in biographies.”
“Well — so they have these, usually. And this one did. Him as a kid, and his family, and an ad for his act, whatever. That kind of thing. And it also had pictures of the act. Including these pictures of him when he was young, which, first of all, young Houdini was hot, like that’s just — he was.”
“Uh huh.”
“He — we’ll look it up, when we’re back on Earth, and you’ll see, okay? So there’s these pictures that are just, like, this hot guy, practically naked, like — bound with chains, and —” Quentin swallowed. Eliot held his breath. “It was very, uh, I hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me, you know?” He turned to Eliot expectantly, then gave a rueful sigh. “I keep forgetting you’ve never watched Community. Is that one on the list?”
“Like seven times over at this point.” Quentin liked that show a lot.
“Anyway. So —” He let out a short laugh. “Then it did, basically, is the end of the story. Like those pictures — they kind of burned themselves into my brain, and sort of worked their way into my mental spank bank —”
Eliot was sleeping with a person who said spank bank. Worse: Eliot found it bizarrely, aggravatingly hot to hear Quentin say the phrase spank bank. This puzzle was driving him to ruin.
“— and then one day the image shifted and it was, uh, me in there. But — like I said, I don’t know why. It’s just — hot, I guess. Does that help?”
The mental image of twenty-year-old Quentin furtively jerking it in a dorm room to the idea of himself trussed up like Harry Houdini certainly did something to Eliot. He wasn’t sure he would call it help. “I can work with that.”
“Okay. Uh. Cool, I guess.” Quentin made one of his uncategorizable Quentin faces, a sort of smile that suddenly suspected it may have put its shirt on inside out. “Thanks for — not laughing.”
An odd tenderness swelled through Eliot like a breeze that quickly stilled. “One lesson I hope to impart is that when discussing one’s sexual preferences, it’s important to maintain an air of nonjudgmental —”
“Okay, thank you, Coach Francis, my tenth grade health teacher.”
“These topics can be highly sensitive —”
“I hate you,” Quentin said, exactly as Eliot had hoped he would. He began shrugging on the soft Fillorian clothes they had recently procured to sleep in. Their Earth clothes were running close to the end of what magic could do for them, but neither of them wanted to admit that they might still be here when that happened. “Good night.”
“Sweet dreams,” Eliot said, and began to do the same. He closed his eyes to sleep that night secure in the knowledge that he had done right by taking on his rightful mantle as Quentin Coldwater’s sexual guru at last; that he was prepared now to introduce Quentin, through the more than satisfying fulfillment of a longtime fantasy, to the kind of adult exploration of which he had barely been able to dream; that Quentin would be better off afterwards, and better off still after months of their erotic adventuring, armed with a vocabulary and skillset hitherto unimaginable; and that Eliot would have been the one to make him so.