Archive of Our Own

Liam twitches and sucks in a deep breath, inhaling a lungful of old cologne and that citrus vape scent that clings to Brett’s pillowcase.

He’s on his belly tangled in a mess of bedsheets, with Brett himself draped over his back and his cock pushing deep inside him.

They started probably an hour ago and Brett’s pace hasn’t shown any signs of flagging. His hips rock back and forth in an inexorable rhythm, scraping his dick in and out of Liam’s ass with a steadiness that’s driving him mildly insane. Brett has tormented him with two orgasms—the first by stripping Liam’s dick ferociously until he writhed on the bed, and the second by battering his prostate without relenting—and Liam can guess amid the soupy haze in his brain that the taller man is gunning for a third.

Out of the corner of his eye, Liam spies the red light of Brett’s camera still blinking. He estimates he’ll be here another ten minutes before Brett finally comes and gives the audience the grand finale they’re all awaiting. Brett posts a variety of content on his page, but by far his particular audience hungers for livestreams, and Brett always obliges them with one of his favorite techniques: overstimulating his partners till they’re left tearful and red-rimmed with blotches across their cheeks.

Given how much his guts ache right about now, Liam doesn’t doubt he makes the perfect picture of overwhelmed.

“Gonna show the camera?” Brett mutters into his neck. He’s not so much leaving trails of kisses there as he is worrying the sweaty skin between his teeth, provoking a long moan from Liam.

Liam nods and flashes a smile backward at him. He rearranges his forearms in front of himself and rests his cheek against them so part of his face is visible under the unkempt bangs on top of his head. Tomorrow or the day after, when Liam is in the mood to watch back this portion of the livestream, he’s sure he will feel a delightfully conflicted bolt of humiliation at the moisture shining in the corners of his eyes or the slick covering the bottom of his lip where he’s bitten it far too hard to keep from coming yet again.

“There we go. Ready? You ready?” Brett pants in his ear.

Liam squirms and does his best to nod. He’s got that gigantic one-hundred-page reading he has to finish for his history seminar tomorrow. He’s so ready for this to be over.

“Good boy,” Brett purrs. And, okay, Liam is aware the dirty talk and cringey names are for the camera, but he can’t help but stifle a laugh into his forearm.

The laugh quickly dies as Brett picks up the pace and starts ramming inside him to the hilt. He withdraws and burrows back in to the root on each thrust, poking up against the bend in Liam’s guts each time and making him writhe under Brett all over again. Brett isn’t even aiming for his prostate this time, but the bundle of nerves is hypersensitive and bordering on painful every time the side of Brett’s cock scrapes across it. Liam jolts and pants in his arms.

“That’s it. That’s it. Gonna come with me?” Brett doesn’t wait for an answer, just loops a long arm around the front of Liam’s chest and pulls him up against himself, making Liam scrabble briefly for balance on his knees and an elbow, and then chuckles in Liam’s ear as the new angle makes the younger man start gasping and mewling from the force of their fucking.

“Almost there,” Brett promises him.

Liam gulps in more air. Brett pulls him back and seats him in his lap, dropping him deeper on his cock, and instantly Liam lets out a shout and starts coming.

Liam’s abs are a mess of dried come and new stripes of hot, sticky spend. It’s the perfect shot for the drooling audience on the other side of the screen.

Finally, at long last, Liam registers the tickling sensation of Brett coming into the condom inside him. Brett drops a final kiss on the side of his head and then carefully slips out of Liam and detangles their limbs. With a cocky smile at the camera and a few words of closing, he slides off the bed and pads over to shut off the device. Then he turns back around, stretching his ten-mile-long arms lazily over his head as he regards Liam panting on the bed and smirks.

“Shower?” Brett offers him. He’s back to his normal voice, which is probably what most guys and girls would still consider a swoon-worthy gravel on any day, but Liam is so inured to it now after having fucked the guy for the camera more times than he can count that he’s just mildly annoyed at this point by being spoken to while his brain is struggling to recover from being drained through his dick.

Liam grunts something unintelligible in response. He prefers the showers back at his apartment—his roommate Theo always has these designer shampoo and conditioner combos that are to die for and which he grudgingly allows Liam to leach off of, despite his vigorous grumbling each time—but he doubts he’ll be able to drive home without getting into an accident if he insists on leaving Brett's apartment now while his back muscles are all knotted and sore. Even a quick blast of hot water on his poor shoulders sounds heavenly.

Brett lets out a short laugh, having correctly interpreted Liam's grumpy sound for assent. “Protein shake for the road when you get out?” he asks.

“Nah,” Liam says. “Thanks, but I'm good, man.” Those things are foul and only somebody obsessed with maintaining the physique of a Greek god—as Brett the gym rat is wont to do—would willingly subject his taste buds to unsweetened raw kale.

Brett shrugs. “Suit yourself. I don't keep all the other crappy grab-and-go snacks you eat. So it's shake or nothing.”

“I'll grab dinner on the way home,” Liam assures him. He's about two seconds away from throwing away all propriety and walking out of the living room so he can finally piss and shower.

Thankfully, Brett doesn't keep him any longer, but simply waves him away as he's pulling up his underwear and heading in the opposite direction, presumably toward the kitchen.

Liam allows himself the indulgence of exactly six minutes under the spray. Brett doesn't have any of those fancy bar soaps or above-minimum water pressure—Liam’s pretty sure the guy's masochism is a Brett thing and not a Buddhist thing—so as soon as the worst of the ache has been beaten out of his shoulders, he towels off and digs out his fresh clothes from the backpack of essentials he brought over.

Brett is wordlessly holding out a bottle of spring water and a red Solo cup the moment Liam exits the steaming bathroom. When Liam snatches the bottle but eyes the other item warily, Brett gives the cup a demonstrative shake. “Ibuprofen, max strength.”

Liam softens. Brett isn't that big of a dick after all—just happens to possess one. And, okay, so maybe Theo will rant at him later if he finds out Liam's taking people's prescription meds, but it's not like Liam makes a habit of it.

Only when Brett's the one fucking him that week. The dude has a monster of a cock, and not in the all-around pleasant way.

Liam accepts the cup and swallows the pills dry, then waves the water bottle in thanks. “You got a handle on editing, yeah?”

Brett's already sucking down a protein shake with one hand and reaching for the door with the other. He didn't bother to pull on anything else beyond his black briefs in the time Liam was cleaning off. “Yeah, sure,” Brett says easily. “That's our agreement, right? You just gimme a pretty hole to work with and I take care of the rest.”

“That pretty hole’s got a name,” Liam says, only half-joking, as he wrinkles his nose.

Brett just laughs and sends him off with a stinging little slap to Liam's butt cheek.

—

Theo is working his magic at the stove when Liam stumbles through the door of their apartment an hour later. LA traffic is always a bitch.

“Told you I was picking up takeout,” Liam grouses toothlessly from the foyer as he stumbles around, toeing off his sneakers.

“Good thing Chinese pairs well with my world-famous Korean pancakes,” Theo shoots back over his shoulder.

“You're just itching to show off your ‘culinary prowess’,” Liam mumbles. He trudges over to the kitchen, shedding his backpack on the floor somewhere that is sure to give Theo an aneurysm later, and promptly pitches forward against Theo’s back and nuzzles his face into his shoulder.

“Wow, you're still talking in full sentences,” Theo says dryly. He moves his head in subtle acknowledgement, in the process tickling Liam's brow with the ends of his hair. “Talbot didn't do that good a job of wringing you out this time?”

Liam pouts. “No, he did. Three times, though, as opposed to four.”

Theo's grimace is audible. “That time he gave you four was brutal.”

Liam hums. He does remember that day, back when he didn't have a car yet and was taking the train to and from his little filming trysts. He'd taken one look at how many more blocks he'd have to walk to get to the subway station, and he’d crouched down on the sidewalk and phoned Theo crying.

Theo had driven straight to him, picked him up, and paid for his favorite Thai takeout without complaining once about shouldering the cost. Once Liam had eaten his weight in larb, though, Theo had demanded that he either speak to Brett about his hard boundaries or give up filming with him altogether.

“He's usually pretty good at sensing when it's too much,” Liam defended him. “This was just different ’cause of the new position, I guess.”

“Then my point still fucking stands,” Theo quietly seethed. “Talk to him, or find a new guy for his slot. You can't go on risking your health.”

“My health is perfectly fine,” Liam snapped. “We're always wrapped.”

“I'm not talking about your stock of rubbers, for fuck’s sake, Liam. I'm talking about the guy fucking you so hard that you can't sit down without bursting into tears.”

Liam's tear ducts chose that exact ill-timed moment to start leaking. “Stop yelling about my sex life in the middle of Thai Garden,” he hissed back, aiming for threatening but probably landing somewhere around pitiful wet kitten.

Theo took one look at him and heaved a noisy sigh through his nose. Then he reached across the little table and gruffly scrubbed at Liam's tear-stained cheeks with a napkin.

“Ow. Ow, you suck at aftercare,” Liam hiccupped.

“Fuck you,” Theo said casually.

“Fuck you first,” Liam shot back, still half-blubbering.

Theo’s face creased with one of those absolutely dickish smiles—frequent when they first met in freshman year and swiftly dwindling into disgustingly fond or exasperated looks the longer they lived together—and he blew him a lazy kiss. “Promise?”

—

Back in the present, Theo generously allows Liam to koala all over his back while the pancakes burble away happily in the pan. He only nudges Liam back once so he can gather a bunch of garnishing ingredients from their spice rack, and then laughs with a rumble that travels down his spine and up the front of Liam’s chest when Liam whines in refusal at the hint that they should move to the dining table.

“I don’t wanna see a hard surface for the next forty-eight hours,” Liam complains.

“You’re literally leaning against my back,” Theo points out.

Liam grunts. “Like I said. Not a hard surface.”

He can sense Theo rolling his eyes even without having to see his face. Theo may not be as gym-obsessed as the likes of Brett Talbot are, but he’s decently disciplined at it and he keeps himself ridiculously active around the kerchief-sized apartment, always finding ways to stretch his muscles or make a dozen bicep reps out of, like, passing the vacuum cleaner over the tiny rug under their dinette.

“I guess I’ll decide to be insulted by that when you’re more coherent,” Theo says. “Then you’ll pay for that comment. C’mon, the pancakes and takeout are getting cold.”

“But I don’t wanna sit down.”

“Who said anything about sitting?” Theo says, like Liam’s a giant idiot. He probably is, by Liam’s own admission. He just doesn’t have the brain cells to figure out why, this time. “We’re taking this to the couch.”

Liam exaggerates a dramatic gasp. “Neurotic Ass Raeken? Letting us eat on the couch?”

“And watch TV,” Theo admits, already sounding like he partially regrets the invitation, as he maneuvers both the plates of cooking and the bag of takeout toward the living room, Liam still attached like an octopus with both hands to one of his elbows. Once Theo has dumped the takeout on the coffee table, he flicks his chin at the remote sitting at the base of the lamp. “You get to pick this time.”

“You know I’ll always say B-Nine-Nine.”

“Course. Go ahead, put it on.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my asshole roommate?”

“Hey, don’t expect the princess treatment every time. Next time I get fucked seven ways to Sunday, I’m gonna send you on a run for swedish fish and make you give me a dozen foot massages.”

Liam feigns a shudder as he flops belly-first across the leather couch. He knows, based on Theo’s posture on the carpet with his knees pulled up to his chest, that the older man has magnanimously granted him full access to their best seating in the house for tonight.

“Letting me pick our show while we eat Chinese is not on the same level as subjecting me to your athlete’s foot,” says Liam.

Wordlessly, Theo seizes one of the little throw pillows he bought from the secondhand store downtown and whacks Liam across the booty with it. Liam lets out a vociferous howl for the hell of it.

“I’m on my last fucking straw with you,” Theo says, sounding anything but. “Here, eat the fat, you know I hate that shit.”

Next thing Liam knows, the tip of a succulent chunk of pork is being shoved in his face between the ends of two chopsticks. He opens his mouth obediently and sucks the meat down, making sure to slobber all over the utensils with his tongue as he does so. Theo raps him on the end of the nose with the wet chopsticks.

“You’re an animal.”

“You like that about me,” Liam says around a flaming hot mouthful of stir fry.

“Unreliable sources have greatly misrepresented my levels of tolerance for you,” Theo says, aggrieved.

“No shit. You love me.”

“Shut up.”

“You love giving me massages on Thursday nights.”

“Why you insist on filming and bottoming on a school night beats me.”

“’Cause. I don’t wanna actually be out of commission on Friday night or all of Saturday. Then our partying wouldn’t be half as fun.” Liam pushes out his bottom lip in a pout and then gives a small, giddy grin as Theo continues shoving more pieces of pancake and General Tso’s chicken and young corn into his mouth.

Neither of them acknowledge the fact that half the time, their weekend ‘partying’ consists of slipping into clubs, knocking back a few light drinks, and then spending the rest of their time people-watching and bitching to each other about the overeager guys and girls that constantly hit on them. The other half of the time, it’s slumber party galore at home, with all their missed shows lined up for marathoning and their favorite snacks piled in a nest between them on one of their beds. They almost never make it to their respective mattresses for the rest of the night when that happens. Theo wakes up with a crick in his neck that he’ll bitch about for the next twenty-four hours, but having him collapse in Liam’s lap where the younger boy can easily access his hair and run his hands soothingly through the wavy locks is always worth it.

“’M serious,” Theo mutters, withdrawing the chopsticks for a moment from Liam’s reach to catch his attention. “You’ve been filming almost every week lately.”

“Is that concern I hear?” Liam asks flippantly.

Theo stabs the chopsticks back into their bed of stir fry in the half-empty takeout box. “I’m not a complete sociopath, you know.”

“I know,” Liam says, mock seriously. “You cried buckets when you guys lost your pet rock from the lab.”

“The 07 section took it,” Theo seethes, a little too hotly to be fully recovered from an incident from their freshman year. “Fuck off about my pet rock. We’re talking about your health.”

“I’m not talking about my health. You’re talking at me about my health.”

“Yeah, ’cause otherwise no one else would be worrying about it, dipshit.”

“Well, have you considered that student loans won’t pay themselves with good intentions, asshat?”

“And have you considered that maybe I don’t want to see you run yourself ragged, speaking as your…friend?” Theo looks like he instantly regrets the second of hesitation and follows it up with a swift, “Fuckwit.”

“Dickhead,” says Liam. “Did you just admit we’re friends?”

“Shut up. You’re the one that keeps going on about friendship bracelets and getting extra coupons at the froyo place for referring ‘friends and family’.”

“Yeah, I’m aware we’re friends. I wasn’t sure that you were aware we’re friends until, like, wow. Point-three seconds ago.”

Theo glares up at him through his bangs. “Gloating’s not a good look on you, Dunbar.”

Liam’s too giddy with triumph to care. He seizes the throw pillow formerly weaponized against him and whacks Theo in the shoulder. “Get wrecked, Raeken. We’re friends. We’re mates, we’re buddies, we’re best-best-buds—”

He doesn’t get much farther in his crowing when Theo tackles him across the sofa and smothers him.

He’s definitely earned more than one penitent back massage from his roommate by the end of the night.

—

Theo may seem like a prude to anyone on the outside listening in, what with his near-constant nagging at Liam to mind his health and balance his school schedule properly with his filming, but no one would guess that Theo was the one that got Liam into this whole camboy business in the first place.

He was real slick and casual about it, too.

Liam and Theo met in a woebegone eight a.m. section of calculus during their first semester, see. Liam was the one who made a new year’s resolution to make every class on time and started reneging on that same vow less than two weeks into the school year. Juggling two jobs after school hours—a shift at the IT help desk buried in the basement of the library where he was liable to nod off after the first thirty minutes of mind-numbing ennui, and an off-campus busboy, sort-of waiter, sort-of cashier, all-around errand boy at the local pizza parlor—had Liam oversleeping his alarm two thirds of the time and sprinting with mismatched socks to the lecture hall all of the time.

So naturally, he’d been jealous of his seatmate’s irritatingly serene aura, the way the guy’s too-tight t-shirts looked like they’d been carefully smoothed down over his abs in the mirror that morning and the light stubble had been artfully shaved down to a dusting on his jaw because the asshole had the time for such ridiculous things before his eight a.m.

Liam couldn’t take it when, near midterms, he and Theo and their little study group were slouching into the expensive sub shop next to the library and Theo just out of the blue volunteered to cover all their sandwiches and drinks for the night.

“Seriously?” Liam griped. “First you dare to look like an Adonis every morning in calculus, and then you have the audacity to have money to spot everyone for dinner?”

(Liam’s had finer moments. Many, many finer moments, including the ones when he’d actually spouted bullshit from an IED episode and not just whined like an ungrateful hungry prepubescent creature.)

“That’s because I don’t waste my time working tons of jobs,” Theo said calmly, glancing over his shoulder to ascertain that the two girls in their group had just disappeared to the bathroom. “I’m a camboy.”

Liam gawked at him. “Suck a duck.”

Theo’s lips twitched. “Not quite exactly what I suck for a living, but hey, pay me enough and I guess there’s a first for everything.”

Liam let out a sound like a dying sea lion at that moment. It was one thing to have to put up with the unfairly sculpted chest and thighs of his seatmate on a near-daily basis. It was another thing to now have to contend with the unwelcome images—oh, the sinful, delicious, unwelcome images—of said seatmate teasingly stripping his white shirt off and sinking to his knees to suck off some rando’s cock on camera.

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t have enough money,” Theo went on, like a complete and utter dick, since one could not possibly exist more than twenty seconds around Theo Raeken before triggering the man’s innate impetus to be a pain in the ass.

“I would,” Liam hissed, “if only I had enough hours in the day.”

“Maybe you should try camming instead of slaving away for the overlords.”

“Slaving away for the overl—how dare you call my library job slavery.”

“Is this the part where you call my job being a sex slave?” Theo asked, brow cocked, clearly testing him.

“What? No! Of course not. You’ve got your—sexy agency and shit and—you’re entitled to make money however you want, as long as it’s not, like, stomping on people’s fingers or slitting their throats.”

“Interesting. Is that the first impression I make?”

The first impression Theo made, Liam thought furiously, was an utter prick, and a sexy one at that.

Instead, what came out of Liam’s mouth was: “You didn’t impress me.”

“Oh.” Theo’s eyes danced. The space in the already cramped sub shop suddenly felt several square feet smaller, like if Theo just leaned forward on one elbow across the sticky table he’d be close enough to brush noses with Liam. “Maybe that’s because you haven’t seen all of me.”

It was at that moment that the girls chose to return, complaining loudly about how they just figured out the stupid chain rule problem in the homework, and Theo leaned back and stretched his obscenely popping arms and smiled at them like he hadn’t just left Liam wide-eyed and panting and confused.

Later that night—much, much later—Liam’s phone pinged with a single text from Theo reading: @dtlabeachboy.

Liam knew he should click his phone off and go back to sleep. Or go back to fighting himself and his stupid eyelids for sleep, which is what he’d been attempting to do for the past hour and a half before Theo texted him.

He could, alternatively, put an end to this irritatingly effective quasi-flirtation from Theo with a snide text back, something nonjudgmental but definitively uninterested, like, Thanks but it’s not my cup of tea. Go you. Or, a little more in character: Thanks, but I already see how much of an asshole you are on MWF, I don’t need to add my personal time on TuTh to that.

He didn’t do either of these things.

Instead, he sat up in a slouch against his pillows, unlocked his phone, and navigated straight to the most popular camboy website and entered the provided username.

Stupid sexy coy beast.

Theo may or may not have been testing the waters in their conversation in the sandwich shop earlier. Liam wasn’t sure what kinds of vibes he was giving off all semester (hadn’t really cared to curate them, to be honest, despite swearing he’d be more of a beacon of bisexual pride once he started college), but he was fairly certain he didn’t exude the aura of someone who had a paid subscription to the website. Okay, not like he paid for the premium level, but he got access to pretty decent content at the basic stratum.

Either way, Liam was not about to let slip to Theo that he knew what website he was talking about, much less had a paid fucking prescription to get him access to Theo’s direct page preview.

Theo’s page loaded and it was a tasteful, if overwhelming, collage of his bare abs and back muscles on his banner image and a rather unassuming side profile shot of him with more stubble than usual for his profile pic. Liam didn’t have to scroll very far, though, before his cheeks heated up and he almost let out a squeak into the dark of his dorm room at the downright indecent screencap previews for every video upload.

Liam smashed his trembling thumb over the first video he landed on before he could lose his nerve. He let the ten-second ad play—again, he paid a basic subscription fee, not a premium one—and then steeled himself for a possible shot of Theo’s pecs or shoulders or even a teasing pan of his cock.

Instead, he was stunned by the high-definition visual of Theo’s face hanging upside down off the edge of a dining table.

The camera angle was stationed from above and someone watching Theo’s channel for the first time likely wouldn’t have been able to recognize him for a minute. But Liam knew that stubble, knew that muscle that rippled under the skin of Theo’s cheek when his jaw was clenched, knew the little mole on his left cheek and the particularly lazy curve of the cupid’s bow on his lips. This was Theo, and he was shirtless for the camera and, it seemed, near naked, save for a skimpy piece of blue underwear that barely counted as a jockstrap, and he was about to get his throat fucked.

The cock that came into view was darker than the skin of Theo’s face. It curved slightly and looked punishingly thick.

Now, Liam had jacked off to a diversified enough selection of porn to know that sometimes camera angles and lighting played up or down someone’s size. Indisputably, though, the dick Theo was going to suck looked like it was about to wreck him.

Theo lifted a hand to steady the cock and bring it toward his lips. He craned his head up a bit to meet the head of the dick and then start gently suckling the tip. His lips, already slick with spit, made these filthy, smacking sounds around the guy’s penis every time he bobbed forward and back to coat the end with more saliva. He played around with the flat of his tongue along the underside of the cock, too, fondling the base a little as he licked from tip to root and back and then chuckled breathily when the man full-body flinched and the twitch of his cock was caught on camera.

“You like that?” Theo asked the guy coyly, and fuck, his voice was like gravel.

Liam’s boxers tightened almost to the point of cutting off circulation. He didn’t waste another moment and shoved the waistband down below his balls so he could get his free hand around his own throbbing dick.

Theo went on slathering more spit all over the cock presented to him. It should have been messy and maybe a bit disgusting on anyone else, but Theo somehow made it seem like an art form. He alternated between pumping the shaft, teasing the balls, leaving kitten licks and kisses all over the cock, and then laving his tongue more aggressively all over it. The man rumbled in unintelligible encouragement above him. Each time, Theo smiled a bit wider, showing more of his infuriatingly perfect teeth and bobbing adam’s apple, and whispered a promise to make it so good for you, you’re gonna come so hard down my throat you’ll see Jesus, baby, I swear.

By the time Theo got more serious and fit the head into his mouth and started inching his way down, Liam had sloppily drizzled lube on his palm and begun stroking himself with a maddeningly tight grip.

Theo did this thing with his lips, then, that Liam had never seen before. He flexed his mouth gently and steadily over the man’s cock, working the shaft into his mouth centimeter by centimeter, breathing deeply and audibly through his nose. It was clear he had experience at this and it was even clearer that he was taking the blowjob seriously, because he knew any ill timing could mean him choking prematurely.

As he turned up the volume on his phone and lay there listening to Theo panting loud and hard through his nose, Liam couldn’t help but think with an internal groan, G-d, that’s so fucking hot.

The guy being blown on camera apparently thought so, too. “Good boy,” he cooed, out of frame, and then Theo became even more unthinkably attractive: a full-body flush stole over him.

Liam thought, oh. Well. There’s a new kink he never knew he possessed. Time to file that tidbit of information away for later.

Theo’s sinful mouth continued sinking further and further down on the cock, but for a long moment, all Liam could focus on was the rash of pink over his smooth chest and how unbearably pretty it was on his skin.

When Theo got about halfway down the man's shaft, Liam's attention was once again arrested. Theo's lips were stretched filthily around the increasing girth of the cock in his mouth. His adam’s apple bobbed once, twice. The man above him held his hips steady, but two large, veiny hands eventually came up into frame to cup Theo's head at the base of his neck.

The single gentle touch of those confident hands had Theo’s lids fluttering and the rest of his body palpably relaxing. The tension in his neck released, and he let out a long, harsh breath through his nostrils.

“That's it. That's it, just give in to it. I'll give it to you good,” the man promised.

Ah, G-d. Liam was such a sucker for dirty talk.

Theo made a low humming sound deep in his chest, and then the man chuckled and his hips pushed forward and the remainder of his cock sank into Theo's throat in one thrust.

The shape of Theo's neck immediately distended around the intrusion. Theo arched off the table for a second—eyes blinking rapidly, moisture shining in the corners—but he'd trained himself well. He relaxed himself back down with a visible effort, and the man fucking him rewarded him with a soft stroke of the thumb over his cheek and a shallow thrust back into his mouth.

“Hands over your chest now, there's a good boy,” the man coaxed Theo.

Obediently, Theo took his uselessly flopping hands and crossed them at the wrist high over his pecs. For all intents and purposes, he was at the other man's mercy.

The man adjusted his grip around Theo's nape to straighten the angle. His thumb tapped on Theo’s cheek again, twice, likely in warning. Then he pulled back and slammed back in and started fucking Theo's throat in earnest.

For all his evident experience, Theo couldn't help the initial, heart-stopping gag deep in his esophagus. The sound was warped by the slap of the top’s balls against his nose and the wet gluck gluck gluck of the shaft sawing in and out of his tight throat. Theo gave a full-body shiver on the table and struggled for a full second before he forced his body still.

Liam's dick was hard enough to cut glass. He wasn't sure how much longer he could last.

The man swiveled his hips in search of a deeper angle and found it. He fucked in and out, slow and then fast, then withdrawing his dick about halfway and pounding it back in to the root on every thrust. Theo's lips were stretched obscenely around the thickness at the base of the cock and his eyes were definitely streaming with tears. The tracks followed gravity to cut paths up his face and fall off somewhere on the floor beneath his head. His throat visibly jerked and spasmed. If Liam didn't know any better, he'd have thought from the desperate sounds Theo was making that he was actively choking to death.

“Your throat. Look at it. Makes such a pretty little cocksleeve,” the man told him. He paused his fucking and took away one hand to caress it slowly down the bulging form of his own dick encased in Theo's esophagus. “I'm so far down your throat you wouldn't even taste me when I finish.”

Theo moaned something incomprehensible around the cock. The man chuckled good-naturedly and went right back to destroying Theo’s throat.

By this time, Liam's hand jerking off his own cock was a blur. His over-sore arms would hate him in the morning, but right now in the midst of his crimson haze of lust, he couldn't possibly give a fuck. Theo Raeken was on his screen, receiving the wicked skullfuck of his life, and Liam had quickly decided he didn't care about the moral nuances of jacking off to his classmate’s wrecked and crying face.

The man increased his pace to the point that the dining table started rocking minutely with every movement. Theo's fingers spasmed on his chest almost like he wanted to sneak a hand down and play with himself while his throat was getting annihilated. For a long stretch of two glorious minutes, there was no talking and no teasing in the video. The silence was punctuated only by the uh uh uh of the top panting under his breath and the unholy glug glug of Theo working to swallow and breathe around the thick cock plugging up his esophagus.

Just as Liam felt like he would literally combust if he didn't come now, the man on camera jerked his hips and then stilled, shaking, with his groin pressed right up to Theo’s nose and his cock visibly twitching under the light as it released a load down Theo’s throat and into his stomach.

Liam came with a raw shout and spurted white ropes all over himself.

Liam’s breath came to him in pants, nearly in sync with the heaving of Theo’s chest on camera as he lay twitching on the table, almost kissing the tip of the other man’s softening cock, and let his eyes flutter open and closed in a haze.

All of a sudden, shame slammed into Liam with the force of a bowling ball. He pounded on the X button on the tab with his shaking thumb and only managed to exit the video—and Theo’s page entirely—after four separate tries. He slumped back with his phone flat on his stomach, and he lay there unseeing with his eyes fixed on his ugly popcorn ceiling, trying and failing to process what he’d just done.

He’d just masturbated to his classmate getting his throat rawdogged by a stranger.

Okay, correction: said classmate was smoking hot and acted exactly like he knew he was smoking hot, and Liam had masturbated to said classmate who had more or less linked him to his camboy page, begging to be watched.

Still.

Liam felt all sorts of dirty now, and not just because of the crustiness of the quickly drying spend forming over his bare chest. On some days he felt like Theo was flirting directly with him, and so surely that justified him clicking on the guy’s page and having a preview of his content when the guy himself practically sent the link, right?

But on other days, Liam knew deep down that Theo was just…like that. He flirted with Liam, sure, but he also flirted with anything and everything under the sun so long as it moved and breathed. A bit more superficially with the girls—and sometimes, like that night when they had the study group at the sub shop, not at all—but he flirted like it was second nature to him. An optional skin he donned and shed at intervals, interchanging with his other, even more maddeningly attractive persona, the asshole know-it-all.

So maybe Theo was just putting some feelers out. Unsure whether it had only been politeness driving Liam to show no judgment back at the sandwich shop over Theo’s choice of extracurricular income, and even more unsure still if Liam would go so far as to encourage him in his endeavors.

As a friend.

Christ, Liam was about to mess all this up.

He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

Theo could be a grade-A dick on most of the mornings they sat together, but he was also intelligent and grudgingly helpful and actually—surprisingly—hilarious in that deadpan way of his, and this sort-of friendship (flirtationship?) Liam had going with him was probably the only thing keeping him afloat in that godforsaken eight a.m. calculus section. Plus, his childhood best friend Mason had decided to attend a fancy private school with a pre-law program up in NorCal to be with his boyfriend Corey, leaving Liam officially friendless for all intents and purposes and liable to slip away from any semblance of structure or motivation in his life if he floundered alone for much longer in his freshman year.

But, G-d, if Liam didn’t want to ram Theo against the nearest hard surface and kiss the living daylights out of him and maybe, possibly, bend him over the next lecture hall chair and fuck him silly.

Liam thrust those intrusive thoughts far, far away from him into a mental oak chest and slammed the lid closed.

Theo Raeken was his friend.

He was an attractive friend, who happened to work a job that made him even more thrillingly sexy in anyone’s eyes, including Liam’s, but that was it.

Okay. Liam could do this.

He reached for his phone. Ugh, maybe after a quick shower and drydown.

Ten minutes later, he stepped out of the dorm bathroom and back into his room with his sense of shame and self-loathing cooling a bit, and he picked up his phone to tap out a quick reply to Theo.

Liam: thx for sending me half a link. took me a minute to find ur page

No point lying that he hadn’t seen it. Liam was a shit liar, and he was self-aware about it. There was no way he’d be able to look Theo in the eyes in class tomorrow without admitting it.

Theo texted back in the two or so minutes it took Liam to bite his lip and think of something else to say.

Theo: And?

Liam had to let out a nervous chuckle to himself at that. Not once before he watched the video of Theo’s blowjob would he have ever described the other boy as desperate, but there was something hidden behind Theo’s monosyllabic text now that was making Liam fondly imagine him perking up at receiving Liam’s text and waiting impatiently for more.

Liam: u look good dude
keep on doing what ur doing

After a brief hesitation, Liam decided to send a follow-up smiling emoji as his last text. Then, racked with the sudden panic that that looked too invested and not chill enough, he tacked on a thumbs-up.

As he crawled back into bed and curled up under the sheets, he had to watch the bouncing ellipses of Theo typing and backspacing on the other end for so long that his eyes drooped and he eventually dropped off to sleep before finding out what scintillatingly intelligent response Theo had to that.

—

Things got awkward after that.

Not in the sense that Theo ignored him or Liam actively avoided him; no, they still attended their insanely early calculus class and sat together, and Liam still looked forward to seeing the other guy as his motivation for getting out of bed at an hour that should frankly be illegal in the human world. But their conversations turned…normal. Friendly.

And no longer flirtatious in the slightest.

Liam would know. He’d been subjected day in and day out to the sight and sound of Theo flexing his arms and laughing loudly and charmingly with the next good-looking specimen that walked his way, whether to slip past toward the back of the lecture hall or specifically to address Theo about something. Day by day, Liam was becoming intimately familiar with the uptick in Theo’s voice and the times he stretched his rough tone low to say something slightly suggestive but seemingly so innocent to the next hot boy or girl.

The difference was that it was no longer directed at him.

Liam nearly convinced himself that he’d imagined it all—that Theo had never really been flirting with him, and it had been Liam’s own stupid hopeful crush that had led him to misinterpret one interaction after another. But then as he thought back to the night Theo sent him the link to his camboy page and Liam jerked off to the criminally hot sight of the other boy deepthroating a nine-inch cock, and then Liam sent him that underwhelming series of texts, followed by Theo replying with a lackluster thanks buddy, always appreciate your support the next morning, Liam could completely understand how this turn of events was entirely and irrevocably his fault.

Theo had tested the waters. In his scramble to not appear desperately horny, Liam had dumped an entire five-gallon bucket of I support you in your foray into the sex industry but we’re just friends signals into said waters. Theo had read the room and withdrawn.

He couldn’t completely complain about his situation, though. As the previous heat between them cooled, making way for Theo’s normal levels of sarcasm and dark humor to bleed through, Liam found himself drawing comfort from their easy dynamic and not feeling nearly as lonely and lost as he was at the beginning of the semester knowing that he was hundreds of miles away from Mason. Theo might have been the furthest thing from Liam’s childhood best friend who was the equivalent of a sassy and supportive human teddy bear, but Theo was the best friend Liam could have had at this new college who wouldn’t be frightened off by his temper or his tendency to be a walking disaster.

Case in point: Liam’s dickhead of a roommate and the fiasco that was the year-end dorm party.

Look, Liam was the last person on the planet to judge anyone’s libido. G-d knows Liam himself had to rub one out at least twice a day, maybe more when impending midterms and finals made shit more stressful, but he also arguably knew how to be reasonable around others.

His roommate Adam, on the other hand, seemed bent on making it his mission to sexile Liam from the room more days out of the semester than he was actually able to live and sleep in it. When Liam had had to crash on the couch in the basement for the fifth night in a row during hell week (because G-d forbid he have any friends besides Theo on campus whom he could bother at that late hour—and no, he was not about to text Theo for help when he had very consciously friendzoned the guy to Antarctica a couple weeks prior), Liam knew the ticking time bomb inside him was about to go nuclear one of these days.

He’d meant to make only a brief appearance at the dorm party. Maybe get one or two drinks in—really, any more than that was inadvisable for someone semi-regularly medicated like him—and try to meet some guys who seemed cool enough to propose rooming with next year.

But seeing as he’d been, well. For lack of a better term, living in the basement for the past five days, and said party was quickly moving from the lobby down to the basement for more room, the sheer volume of people was inescapable.

Liam ducked out after he decided the third slurred exchange of small talk with some football bro was actively murdering his brain cells. He was sure these were all immensely cool guys, but he was way too sober for this shit.

After popping in and out of the bathroom to relieve himself and cool down some, he chanced a glance down the hallway toward his room and noticed the door was shut and there was no sock on the knob. Nor was there any trace of light bleeding out onto the linoleum from the crack beneath the door.

He heaved a gargantuan sigh of relief. He’d left his laptop and other things stuffed underneath one of the couches downstairs, but he still had his keys and his half-charged phone, so that was enough for him to jiggle the door open and light the way with his phone flashlight as he fumbled for the light switch that was placed mystifyingly far from the entrance.

He flicked on the overhead light at the same time that a feminine shriek pierced the air, followed by a booming, definitely drunken “What the fuck?!”

Liam, being very dignified about it, screamed.

Adam and some random girl were writhing on the blue rug between their beds and actively in the process of unhooking the girl’s lime green bra. Said girl was straddling Adam’s waist and there was not nearly enough fabric to be covering any of the vital areas, much less conceal the intent of both parties to go all the way and then some.

“Dude!” Liam yelled. “What the fuck! What the fucking fuck!”

“Get out!” Adam yelled back. “What the hell, I fucking told you I was gonna have Lindsay over tonight!”

Liam did not recall Adam ever saying that. He did vaguely remember a Tricia and an Autumn and probably two mentions of Olivia who, come to think of it, could very well have been two entirely different people, given the inexplicable popularity of the name.

If he’d been reasonable, or not quite as tired as he was feeling at that moment, Liam might have yelled back a half-assed apology and a friendly threat to clear out of there after an hour or so, and then made his exit back to the basement to suffer alone.

But the thing is, Liam Dunbar wasn’t reasonable on a good day. And today was not a good day. It was going on the sixth night of being sexiled from his room, and he’d suffered an entire week of getting his spine bent out of shape by an ancient couch that dipped in the middle like a giant U, and he had his stupid fucking calculus final tomorrow at midmorning and he hadn’t had a moment’s peace to truly get some rest and recharge his brain so he could absorb more than one line of notes per hour in preparation for the final exam from hell.

Plus, Liam Dunbar had one nasty case of intermittent explosive disorder that was making its appearance less and less frequently these days but could cause seismic waves of destruction when it finally reared its head amid the stress of it all.

So Liam did the next best thing his brain could think of and he picked up a textbook from the nearest desk and he lobbed it at Adam’s head.

The girl screamed and dove out of the way, definitely freeing way more of her boobage than Liam cared to see now or ever again in his lifetime. Adam howled as the corner of the hardback connected with his temple.

His roommate roared, “Dude, are you fucking crazy? Are you off your shit? What the actual fuck?”

Oh. That was Adam on his feet now, and there was a bit of blood trickling sluggishly down the side of his face, and those were his eyes bugging out furiously at Liam.

Liam hated being backed into a corner. He was a very proactive type of guy about these things. Besides, the rage at being thrown out of his room and being forced to give up his precious sleep and study time was swiftly building back up in his chest and spilling out.

So he took the first swing.

The night could have ended very differently, Liam knows now looking back on that incident. He could have been spotted by a dormmate who would have booked it for the campus security office, and he could have been carted off in handcuffs or zipties or whatever the fuck it is those portly campus policemen tend to use on unruly youths these days, and he could have spent his night somewhere far more miserable awaiting his fate on the morrow. Facing expulsion or—worse—a call to his parents.

As it was, the blare of his ringtone jolted him from his seething haze. He had no idea who it was that was calling him at one in the morning. He didn’t even bother to check. He just stumbled to his feet and clambered backward, up and off Adam’s squirming body beneath him, and then he shot a single look of horror at the equally frozen Lindsay in the corner and then he booked it out of there.

Liam was halfway across the campus with his socked feet pounding across the rough concrete by the time he had to stop, doubling over and gasping for air. His phone was ringing again in his hand. His mind was a tangle and he was running on pure adrenaline and instinct: he glimpsed the screen, read the name Theo and swiped to pick up.

“Dunbar, I’ve been calling you for the past fifteen minutes. You were supposed to give me back my flashcards in class yesterday.”

Liam didn’t reply. He couldn’t. His throat was stoppered and it felt like his vocal cords were permanently laced together. If he dared split them apart, something ugly and animalistic might burst out.

“Liam?” Theo tried again. His aggravated tone was starting to give way to curiosity.

Liam choked on an inhale. After a couple of fortifying breaths, he managed to croak out: “Where are you?”

“Liam,” Theo said again, this time devoid of all irritation and replaced with…was that worry? “What’s going on? You good?”

“I don’t know,” Liam rasped. “I might have killed somebody. You might have to help me bury the body. There was a girl, too. Oh, shit, she witnessed it. I’m done for. Oh, G-d, oh, G-d—”

“Liam!”

“Theo, where are you?”

“Better question is, where are you?”

Liam glanced around. He saw trees, bike stands, a school newspaper rack, and a nude statue showing off its boobs in front of a small fountain. He conveyed as much to Theo.

There was rustling and muffled cursing on the line as Theo proceeded to pick up and drop a series of items on his way out the door. “Stay there. Don’t move. I’m coming to you.”

“Where are you?” Liam whined again, sounding childish and plaintive. Shit. He didn’t mean to start crying.

“None of your business. Stay there and don’t you dare move your ass an inch, or I swear, I’ll be skinning you alive.”

Liam hiccuped but plopped down on the curb and stilled. The characteristic threat from Theo Raeken was oddly comforting.

When Theo finally arrived in his sweatpants and a t-shirt that had no business being as wide-cut across the neckline as it was, he found Liam starfished on the sidewalk catastrophizing about all the ways his parents would find out he murdered his roommate.

Theo toed Liam’s inert form with his sneaker. “You’re good, nobody died. Quit being dramatic.”

Liam flopped closer to him and eyed the beautiful god of teenage disdain staring back down at him. “How do you know?”

Theo waved his phone in the air. “Some chick posted about it on Yik Yak. Her man’s fine, just got a busted nose.”

Somehow, that riled up Liam even more. He sat up, his head spinning. “That’s even worse!” he wailed. “Now he’s alive to go and tell the police!”

“Will you fucking chill?” Theo manhandled Liam up to his feet by his armpits and shoved some paper towels at him, ostensibly to clean off the blood and crusty skin from his knuckles. “I tracked down who the chick was and it turns out, her guy is in my Intro to Bioethics seminar and I have his number. I already called him and threatened him fifty ways to Tuesday. He’s not talking.”

Liam blinked. Time was very slow and his brain after an episode was always molasses. “What?”

“Christ, you ran all the way here and didn’t even put shoes on. Here, take mine.”

“But—no,” Liam protested, as Theo started to kick off his battered sneakers. “Stinky.”

“Fine, suit yourself, walk the rest of the way to my dorm in your sopping pizza-print socks. See if I care.” Theo stuffed his right foot back into his shoe with zero remorse and grabbed Liam by the bicep and started hauling his ass back in the direction he had come from.

They managed to stumble the rest of the way to Theo’s dorm without the older boy biting off Liam’s head for his inarticulate queries and blubbering. Stepping inside the building for the first time—and Theo’s room, for that matter—was enough of a novelty to shut Liam up as Theo shoved him into a worn black moon chair.

Liam glanced around, bleary-eyed. “You—you don’t have a roommate?”

Theo was busy shucking off his shoes and rooting around in his dresser for some spare clothes. He turned around long enough to bare his teeth in a smile. “Had one. Don’t have one anymore.”

Liam stared at him dumbly. “Did you kill him too?”

“Jesus Christ, Liam.” Theo snapped open the fabric of a shirt and flung it at Liam’s head, quickly followed by a pair of fresh socks. “He was dealing hard drugs and he got caught before midterms started. Admin didn’t bother pairing me up with anyone else.”

Liam’s mouth rounded out into a small O.

“What about you? What got you all Fight Club mode on your roommate?”

“How’d you know he’s my roommate?”

Theo waved his phone again demonstratively, if not a bit irritably this time. “Yik Yak. Instagram. You left a digital trail of fans in your wake.” He paused. “Also, I know shit.”

Liam ran the edge of his thumbnail up and down the seam of his sweatpants. “He sexiled me from our room, like, six nights in a row.”

Theo looked at him then, not like he was evincing the normal brand of Liam Dunbar idiocy, but like he’d invented an entirely new kind. “You know that’s something you can say no to, right?”

“But he’s—my roommate.”

“So clearly punching your way out of this one was the superior choice to setting boundaries from day one.”

Liam muttered something under his breath about punching his way out of Theo’s room, too.

Theo was still eyeing him as though he were contemplating the best method of curing Liam’s imbecility. “It’s finals week, too.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You suck at communicating your needs.”

“Yeah. I know.” Liam glanced around, hoping to glimpse at least a mini fridge or something in Theo’s godforsaken and barren excuse of a college dorm room. “I also have a mental illness that makes regulating my emotions hell.”

“Well, why didn’t you lead with that.”

“Sorry, I don’t normally like to meet people with a giant sign hanging around my neck that says biggest basketcase you’ll ever meet on campus.”

“I mean. I don’t know that that’s true.”

“Huh?”

Theo opened the mini fridge tucked in a corner under his bed on risers—sneaky aesthetic fucker—and tossed something carbonated in Liam’s direction. “You’re probably the biggest basketcase I’ve ever met in the entire world.”

Liam debated briefly whether it was worth going to prison over ripping out Theo’s kneecaps.

In the end, he decided if Adam really wasn’t gonna tell on him this time, then keeping his athletic scholarship was way more worth it than any sense of petty revenge against the stupidly hot prick in front of him.

As Liam remained silent, Theo studied him. “You don’t go bonkers around me, then.”

“Don’t take it as such a huge compliment, loser. You’re just not worth the energy.”

Theo cracked into a toothy grin. “Good to know I don’t have to worry about you bashing my teeth in.”

Liam squinted at him. “Jury’s still out on that one.”

“Oh, is it? Well, I’d like to keep my teeth intact. Considering…y’know.”

A flush flooded over Liam instantly at the casual reminder of Theo’s camboy page. “I dunno, I guess guys would actually prefer you blowing them without teeth, don’t you think?”

Theo raised a single brow at him. There was something in his eyes, then, a spark that looked eerily similar to the flame that he’d always shown in the past when flirting with Liam.

“What I meant,” Theo said, “was that I’d prefer to keep all my teeth, considering that we’re probably gonna be living together for a long while.”

“Come again?”

“Look, I didn’t call up this Adam character and threaten him and his grandmother’s cousin twice removed for nothing. Obviously this situation could benefit me.”

“Hold on, what did you threaten him with, anyway?”

Theo stared at him like duh. “You live with the guy. How could you not have noticed?”

Liam thought back to all the times his roommate had been stoned, drunk, or a concerning combination of both. And considering that the last time he’d hooked up with one of the Olivias, he was pretty sure he’d seen the girl leave with a little plastic something, he was starting to kick himself for not figuring it out sooner.

“That’s not cool. It’s probably just weed,” Liam snapped.

“I know,” Theo snapped back. “And I’d never rat out somebody over that. Contrary to your assumptions, I never said a word to campus police about my roommate. Still, it didn’t hurt to bring that up with your roomie and let him fill in the blanks.”

Liam narrowed his eyes at Theo, his Fanta long forgotten. “Okay, so what do you get out of this?”

Theo gestured around at the spartan surroundings of his cement-walled room. “Room and board is expensive as fuck. If not for their stupid ass rule that you have to live on campus for your first year, I would’ve gone to one of those off-campus properties the minute I moved in. I’ve got my eye on a place for next year, anyway, and I need at least one roommate to make the rent.”

Liam gaped at him. He pointed to his own chest with a finger. “Me—moi. You want me to be your roommate.”

“Well, don’t make it sound like I’m bending over backwards to get you onboard.” Theo scowled. “There’s a line of people who’d love to be my roommate, you just happened to be the first one I asked.”

It was Liam’s turn to study him. He might have been hallucinating, but he was fairly certain there was a light dusting of pink across the tops of Theo’s cheeks. The older boy refused to look at him and was instead busying his hands folding some random laundry at the foot of his bed and smoothing out the hems.

Sure, there were probably dozens, if not a hundred, other acquaintances of Theo’s who’d jump at the chance to room with him next year. Being easy on the eyes and charismatic as hell to carry a conversation with literally everyone certainly didn’t hurt. But Liam Dunbar, he suspected, was the only person whom Theo had flirted with who…hadn’t flirted back.

Huh.

If that was Theo’s reasoning—that he needed a stable friend who wouldn’t jump into bed with him and ruin whatever they got going on between them—then it made all of Liam’s internal anguish over friendzoning Theo over text worth it.

Truth be told, the instant Theo had confided that he needed a roommate, Liam hadn’t had the brain cells or the willpower to think of any objections. His heart screamed yes.

His dick screamed yes, too, but he was trying to listen less to his dick these days.

(Or so he tried to convince himself.)

This could either be the best decision of his life, and he’d finally be set with someone he relatively liked and whose company wasn’t the worst in the world, and he could make it through the next three years of college without drowning in that loneliness and lack of structure anymore—or it could be the worst thing he’d ever done and he’d try to, like, plant one on Theo Raeken in a drunken haze one night and throw their budding friendship out the window.

“I mean, if it’s a no, you don’t have to stare at me in silence and be a dick about it,” Theo spoke up after a while.

Liam had to snort at that. “This, coming from the resident asshole.”

Even from the side, he could tell Theo was rolling his eyes. “So? Just tell me if it’s a yea or a nay.”

“It’s a yea,” Liam said quietly.

Theo swiveled his head to look at him, dumbfounded.

Liam shrugged, uncomfortable under the sudden scrutiny. “S’not like there’s a dozen people lining up to live with me for next year. Especially…uh…after tonight.”

“Hey, you’re a plenty fun guy.” Even Theo looked like he didn’t believe it one hundred percent as the words were leaving his mouth.

Liam scrunched up his nose. “Save the flattery for when we’re actually living together and you have to apologize for not taking out the trash.”

“Something tells me it’s going to turn the other way around real fast.”

—

The night Theo lets Liam lie across the entire couch and select their TV viewing and he feeds Liam bits of fat from their Chinese takeout, their hangout ends with Theo massaging the muscles in Liam’s lower back with a very grudging, put-upon sigh.

His hands definitely work the knots in Liam’s lumbar region more thoroughly than Liam would have expected him to if he really were peeved about doing it. Smiling privately to himself, Liam makes a mental note to actually give Theo that foot massage next time he’s the one tuckered out from filming. He’ll shove Theo into the shower with three different kinds of body wash to make sure his toes aren’t stinky, of course. But he’ll do it.

A week later, Theo leaves a sticky note on the fridge letting Liam know that he pre-cooked some ingredients for dinner and not to wait up for him, because he may or may not make it home that night.

Liam yanks open the fridge door and glimpses the little Rubbermaid containers stacked neatly to one side. The same lime green Post-It notes are attached to the lid of each one, with numbers and concise instructions spelled out in Theo’s maddenly neat handwriting. There’s even a series of arrows inked out to indicate how far back Liam should peel the plastic seal from the store-bought guacamole.

Which, rude. And maybe a little bit adorable.

It’s only when Liam has lugged all the plastic containers out and arranged them on the counter that his brain turns back on, and he realizes the full meaning of Theo’s message.

It’s been a long time since Theo has been gone overnight. That could only mean one thing. Or, well, one of two things: either he’s filming with that giant dude with the name that begins with B (Buck? Brody? Boyd?), or he’s seeing someone and sleeping over at their place.

As in. Seeing someone, seeing someone.

Liam’s stomach drops to his toes.

He doesn’t know how he feels about this. Scratch that, he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel.

He friendzoned Theo. They stopped their flirting, for the most part. They got a place together, and somewhere along the way, they pulled their heads out of their asses and started to freely admit they enjoyed being sort of friends and doing friend things with each other.

Liam won’t stand there and lie through his teeth that it still isn’t just one man’s face and one man’s body and the image of one man’s hands and teeth on him that gets him to come when he jerks off in the mornings, but he still made himself a promise that he wouldn’t make a big deal out of anything Theo does because—

Well. Theo isn’t exactly his, is he?

He putters around the kitchen and burns the tip of his finger twice while heating up the nonstick pan for the tortillas. Almost shaves off a chunk of his thumb wrangling with the deadly plastic edges of the guacamole container. He’s a mild disaster on normal days while cooking, and a downright dumpster fire when he can’t figure out where his head is.

As he reheats the refried beans in a pot—Theo would have an apoplectic fit if he suspected Liam just popped them in the microwave, because G-d forbid a college student eat anything fit for a plebeian—Liam bites his lip and fights not to imagine it.

Is Theo with another student?

An older guy? A younger guy?

Despite his predilection for flirting with anything and everything that breathes, Theo categorically declared himself gay a long time ago. Still, that doesn’t narrow down the options an awful lot.

Maybe the guy is long and lean, with a trim little waist and light hair that shines in the sun. Or maybe he’s of a thicker build, a little broader in the shoulders, a delicious sort of natural tan all over his skin and a little bit hairy across his stomach: dark locks, a killer smile.

Or maybe he’s got soft curves and a bubbly ass that Theo can ogle and grope every time they’re out and about and feeling naughty in public.

Or—or—

Liam slams the spatula down on the counter and grips the ends of his hair, tugging and growling in frustration.

He doesn’t own Theo. He doesn’t. His stupid fucking jealousy can go and fuck itself in, like, the Heard and McDonald Islands or something.

After another minute of hair-pulling and spiraling, Liam pulls himself the fuck together and finishes rolling his fajitas. Then he throws himself onto the couch and scoops up the TV remote—Theo’s not here to yap at him for bringing food into the living room—and he puts on a rerun of something mindless so he can chew and sulk in peace.

—

The truth is that Theo is over at Boyd’s place, about to get his brains fucked out.

He doesn’t film often with the guy. In fact, he’s been limiting himself to a lot of solo content in recent weeks, getting creative with the places and angles that he can finger himself or play with his modest array of toys on camera. But something about the way Liam shut his eyes and moaned as his teeth closed around the piece of meat between Theo’s chopsticks, and the way his body undulated and then shuddered under his hands as he gave Liam a massage, and even the way Liam’s arm flopped over the edge of the couch so he could poke Theo in the shoulder incessantly as they watched their show—it’s all got Theo on edge.

Ever since he met the disaster that is Liam Dunbar in freshman year of college, he’s known, objectively, that the guy is hot and cute. And caring and funny and flawed and stubborn and protective and downright childish sometimes.

The fatal combination for Theo Raeken.

So he’s here, inside Boyd’s high-rise apartment, with his little overnight bag on the floor of the foyer and his own body spread naked on the blue leather couch as the other man eats him out, and he’s hoping for a good long fuck (or two or three) so he can turn off his brain and stop thinking about Liam for once.

Boyd told him before that his particular audience loves a vocal bottom, so Theo is biting his lip and projecting a slutty moan in the direction of the camera in the corner. He doesn't even have to try that hard to sound aroused when Boyd's tongue and lips are doing sinful things inside him.

Boyd eats out his bottoms like they're dinner and he hasn't had a single morsel in weeks. Theo is on the receiving end of that wicked tongue now, feeling the muscle probe past his ring and curl up and around inside his tight channel. The lips around his rim pucker and suck, and more saliva slobbers out around Theo's hole, driving him slowly mad with the steady stimulation that's pushing him toward the edge but never quite letting him see the end in sight.

Whenever Theo twitches, the other man's giant hands firm up their grip on his ass cheeks and his fingers dig warningly into the meat. Theo jolts again, half-moaning, half-cooing at the way Boyd draws his head back an inch for breath and the suddenly cold air rushes in toward Theo's hole, reminding him of how much he's been opened up on a single tongue.

“Pretty hole,” Boyd tells him. He kisses and sucks right along the upper edge of Theo's rim, lips grazing over his perineum. “Pretty—pretty—hole,” he goes on between wet kisses, “all pink and wet and ready for me.”

Boyd stands and his hands encircle Theo’s ankles, raising his legs high up above his shoulders and folding him in two against the couch cushion. Theo struggles a bit out of habit as the taller man sways forward and slides his heavy dick back and forth over the exposed crease between Theo's abdomen and thigh. The proximity of the action sends brushing teases along the side of Theo's cock, rock hard and weeping a steady stream of precum onto his abs.

Theo glances down at himself. Boyd sometimes sets up a dual camera situation when he's feeling fancy, and the second camera is usually one mounted at the corner of his ceiling that zooms in on the faces of his bottoms in the throes of ecstasy. If it's on now, Theo can imagine just how gargantuan Boyd appears next to him. His dark cock, jutting out straight from his groin and resting next to Theo’s dick, at least three or four inches’ difference between them. Theo knows he's reasonably endowed, but visually his dick is no match to the monster he's about to experience tonight.

Good thing he prepped extra long after his shower earlier.

“You want it?” Boyd asks him. Theo nods, and Boyd uses one hand to nudge his chin up to restore eye contact. “Use your words, baby boy. What do you want?”

“Fuck—want you to fuck me,” Theo mumbles.

Boyd grins at him. “Don't know if they heard that.”

“I want you to fuck me,” Theo repeats, louder, knowing he's starting to turn a little pink from the mild humiliation.

Boyd hums. “How d’you want me to fuck you?”

A pedestrian question, but the way he asks it, slow and deliberate, fills Theo’s cock with even more blood if at all possible.

Theo gnaws at his lip as he thinks. They're already in a pretty hot position and it's relatively easier than others to just take a dick while he's sort of on his back. He’s not so sure his spine will agree with being curved unevenly against the couch cushions for so long, though.

More importantly, he still hasn't gotten over his thing against fucking face-to-face. He tried it once in his earlier days of filming—with a sweet, friendly top named Scott who'd learned the inner workings of his very core and blown his mind that night—but despite the good memories, watching back the video and seeing how his partner had been able to respond to every minute detail on his face had felt strangely…violating. Eventually he'd hidden the video and stuck to other, less compromising positions.

“Dick so good you can't think even though I'm not inside you yet?” Boyd jokes warmly.

Theo gives a full-body laugh. “Okay, tough guy, we know you can give it to me good. I'm just thinking…doggy, probably.”

“Okay,” Boyd agrees easily. His eyes crinkle at the corners with his gentle smile.

“Oh, and also,” Theo adds as the other man steps back and allows him to rearrange himself, “go as hard as you want.”

Boyd raises a brow.

“I'm sure,” Theo cuts off his impending question. “I want my brains leaking out my dick by the time the night is through.”

Boyd’s grin widens. “Your wish is my command.”

Theo is kneeling away from him now with his legs balanced on the edge of the couch and his head and shoulders resting over the top of the cushion. He dips his lower back to highlight the curve of his ass, then shakes it slowly and tantalizingly for his partner.

Boyd gives a low whistle of appreciation. He massages Theo’s cheeks for a bit, sending thrills of heat and anticipation through his groin and making the younger man bite back a groan at the stiffness of his untouched erection.

“Hold on now,” Boyd murmurs to him.

Then he’s stepping forward and crowding against Theo’s space and his thighs brush the backs of Theo’s legs and the tip of his rubbered cock has found its target and is sinking hard, fast, and deep, deep, deep into Theo.

The younger man erupts in a high-pitched, completely unfeigned gasp of shock and sensation.

Unlike Liam, Theo has no qualms about letting himself get fucked till he feels like his inside are turned inside out. He craves the girth, the heat, and above all, the way a partner can batter his nerves and search the innermost bend in his cavity in their quest for pleasure. Just the notion of being so fucked out that he’ll be staggering on his feet and wincing whenever he sits down sends thrills through him and makes him drip steadily with arousal. He doesn’t even ask Liam to massage his back or tend to his other sore parts when that happens. Maybe he’s a freak that way, but hey, he knows exactly what makes him hard as steel.

Boyd thrusts into him with the measured, unflagging strokes of a man with plenty of experience in fucking for the camera while reserving his energy for the last leg of their filming. He has one massive hand bunched up in the material of the cushion next to Theo’s head and his other arm clasped across Theo’s collarbones, just below his neck but high enough to make the younger man’s Adam’s apple bob convulsively at the thought that he could easily be choked at this angle.

“Don’t hold back, dude,” Theo reminds him in a murmur.

Boyd’s chuckle behind him is warm and affirming, like honey. Sure enough, he adjusts his stance so he pulls back an inch farther and then rockets his cock inside to the hilt.

The skin of Boyd’s thighs collides with the flesh of Theo’s ass with an audible clap in perfect timing with the low whine that is punched from his lungs. It takes a minute for Theo to recover himself, to keep from floundering in his head as Boyd’s cock buries inside his hole and stretches his insides and heats up his core with how full he feels, how inescapable the fucking will be. Theo’s ensuing breaths are shallow—nothing more than pants—and broken notes of mindless pleasure fly from his mouth at every instroke.

“Take it, take it,” Boyd murmurs in his ear.

Theo would have thought of something equally sexy to say back for the camera, but Boyd chooses that moment to ghost a flaming breath over the back of his neck and then plant a trail of wet kisses along his nape and shoulders. Theo writhes in his grasp, struggling against his limited range of mobility. He doesn’t know if he’s trying to get away from or lean further into the tantalizing stimulation.

As gentle and happy-go-lucky as he may seem, Boyd isn’t the kind of top to make a habit of helping his partners along toward climax by jerking off their cocks. He operates with a single-minded focus, making viewers drool with the undulation of his muscular back and buttocks under all those miles of smooth, sweaty skin, and driving any bottom toward incoherence with his implacable stamina. He and Theo agreed early on, before they began posting the few videos that they have with each other, that Theo is fine with being treated like a pet on camera: he can jerk himself off if he has the energy to do so, or he can let it be; either way, Boyd will incidentally give him any and all of the prostate orgasms he desires.

“Take it, that’s it,” Boyd goes on rumbling from behind him.

Theo is at the stage of their fucking where it takes many long, syrupy minutes for him to even register that the keening noise in the room is coming from him. He didn’t even know his vocal cords could pitch themselves that high. Or that he could sound so whorishly desperate for it, either.

Boyd is laughing behind him. He’s relinquished his hold across the front of Theo’s chest and instead is shifting so he can lean forward, his abdomen pressing ever closer to the sweat-slick skin of Theo’s back. Hands come up in Theo’s view. Then suddenly they’re interlocking over his jaw, under his chin, and Theo’s entire upper body is bowed backward in an almost painful arc.

The new angle has the cock inside him sliding past that bundle of nerves and striking the bend at the end of his hole. The shock of the sensation has him seeing G-d.

“You were made for this,” Boyd encourages him in that deceptively mild voice, as he ramps up his speed ever so slightly and sets to work annihilating Theo’s hole. “Feel how you wrap me up? That’s it. Take it. Take it like a good bitch.”

Theo doesn’t even have the brain cells to be ashamed that it’s those words, of all things, that have his cock jolting and spewing his first rope of come all over the smooth leather couch.

Boyd laughs, full-bodied and rich. He’s still fucking into Theo’s spasming channel without a care for his sensitivity. “All your brains leak out of your dick yet, man?”

Theo shakes his head as best he can in Boyd’s near-chokehold on his neck. “Nah. Keep going, my guy.”

“Okay, baby. There’s my good bitch.” Then Boyd folds himself over Theo and scoops him up into his arms so when he plops himself backward onto the ruined couch, it’s Theo forced to ride him reverse cowgirl style.

He doesn’t leave Theo any choice: he simply arranges the younger man’s floppy limbs so his heaving chest and still chubbed-up length are fully visible to the camera, and then starts bouncing him up and down on that massive dick till Theo is howling.

—

Liam crawls into his bed alone that night after numbing his brain with far too many episodes of Family Feud to be justifiable. He knows Theo left him the note not to expect him back at the apartment any time soon, so he doesn’t know why he still perks up and glances around at every minute sound from outside the front door like a golden retriever craving the return of its owner after a long day of work.

Eventually, he falls asleep to a combination of whale sounds playing from the white noise machine next to his bed, and the sheer exhaustion of playing word games on his phone. It’s several hours later that he jerks awake to some random sound that he can’t at first identify.

Like any respectable millennial with decent social media connections, the first thing Liam does as he stretches and stifles a yawn is to reach for his phone to check his notifications. It’s half past ten in the morning, and he has a deluge of messages related to his classes—nothing unusual there—but the one that must have gotten through his do not disturb setting is the alert from JustFans.

His cheeks color even as he eagerly swipes down on the screen to tap on the notification. He’s subscribed to a handful of content creators on the camboy site, few enough that he can count them on his fingers. But there’s only one creator for whom he toggled on real-time alerts.

Sure enough, dtlabeachboy has been tagged in a new video upload. It’s originating from the account named lovetotasteboyd.

Liam doesn’t even possess enough dignity or coherence to feel ashamed at last night’s spiral into jealousy at the prospect of Theo having spent the night with an unknown boyfriend. Of course he was just filming with Boyd; of course he would be too tuckered out from the session to make his way back home.

Whatever. Liam doesn’t give a fuck. He navigates over to the new video and slams his thumb down to press play.

This one begins in media res. It seems like the raw file must have been much longer—from personal experience, Liam estimates the original livestream could have gone on for two hours or more. Boyd, per usual, must be uploading little snippets of the best parts to goad his regulars into paying premium for the streamed content.

On the screen, Boyd and Theo have obviously migrated from the blue leather couch in the background down onto the floor. The signs of the soiled cushions are evident.

Theo is kneeling on the plush rug, thigh muscles taut and clenching, the rest of his upper body bent forward from the hips by Boyd’s powerful forearms looped around his and forcing him into a half-nelson position. Boyd’s hands fold together over the back of Theo’s neck, keeping his head bowed and his arms stretched back from the shoulders. He’s giving it to Theo terribly good, rolling his hips backward and forward, fucking him with filthy, wet sounds like this is far from the first time they’ve fucked in this scene.

And throughout it all, Theo is giving the camera these low, broken, whimpering noises, like he isn’t even aware that he’s making them. The faintest string of drool stretches from his open lips toward the floor.

Liam doesn’t stop. Doesn’t think. He shoves down his shorts and underwear and grasps his weeping cock and jacks off like there’s no tomorrow.

His vision is almost too blurry from arousal to even notice when Boyd rearranges his hands to shove Theo forward onto his elbows and bury his face into the carpet. Liam hears it, though, when Theo comes with a muffled shout that sounds halfway between anguish and ecstasy.

Liam doesn’t know when he came. All he knows, suddenly, is that his stomach is a sticky mess of white and he’s buzzing with lust and shame, and there’s someone pounding at the door.

He mumbles shit, shit, shit under his breath. Rolls off the now overheated bed and grabs a wad of tissues from the box on his nightstand. Wipes himself as best he can with his shaking hands, tucks himself away. Turns off his phone screen and chucks the whole device far away toward the other end of the room and then takes a steadying breath so he can waddle out into the foyer.

It’s Theo on the other side of the door.

Liam scowls at him. “You have a key.”

“I’m carrying too much shit and I can’t find the key in my bag right now.” Theo’s voice sounds shot to hell. Liam wonders, a little viciously, how many times Theo screamed last night.

Liam holds the door open wider and wiggles the knob demonstratively. “Well? Enter, traveler, if ye dare. And go wash up.”

“Already did.” Theo brushes past him, almost skin on skin, close enough for Liam to involuntarily hold his breath as though the other man could possibly smell the guilt wafting off him. “Or are your nasal nerves as dead as your brain cells?”

“Ha, ha,” Liam laughs humorlessly. Despite himself and his semi-pissy mood, he kicks the door shut and moves to the kitchen to start pulling out brunch options for Theo. He knows for a fact Theo will not have eaten anything this morning, unless he deigned to order something as plebeian as a McMuffin on his way back. Theo has this thing against accepting breakfast or even, G-d forbid, granola bars from his hookups and filming partners. Says it’s the same tic that makes him hate being handed things.

Theo is sagging against the kitchen counter, seeming to the untrained eye to be leaning casually like a model that knows his angles under the light. But to someone like Liam who knows him like the back of his hand, he’s obviously favoring one side more than the other and placing most of his weight against the granite so he can remain upright.

Irrationally, Liam feels a flare of protective irritation bloom in his chest.

Is that what Theo feels whenever Liam comes back home fatigued and half-coherent from a filming session?

“Nice to see you haven’t burned down the kitchen again,” Theo notes.

Liam glares up at him through his lashes as he goes through the same motions as last night, pulling out pans, turning on stovetop elements, reheating all the necessary ingredients for the final construction of Theo’s homemade fajitas. “That was one time. And that didn’t even count, because who the fuck designs a microwave that can’t handle metal?”

Theo looks at him in disbelief. “Every sensible engineer ever, Dunbar. Are you seriously still defending putting the spoon in with your oatmeal?”

“The spoon was dripping everywhere and I wasn’t about to set it down on the stovetop that takes fucking forever to clean!”

“Then you could have held it between your teeth?”

“Only barbarians and, like, sabertooths have the orthodontic strength to pull that off.”

Theo is already shaking his head at Liam, though the twitch at the corner of his lips belies his amusement. “You’re a real piece of work.”

“Hey, you’re the one that decided I was the perfect roomie to live with.”

“I didn’t,” Theo deadpans. “I very much did not.”

“You threatened my sex-addicted roommate with arrest and expulsion just so you could get me to live with you.”

“You very nearly murdered the guy, Liam. And let’s be honest, between you and him, you’re probably getting fucked more times a month than he is in a year.”

“Excuse me, I was practically celibate my entire first semester that I had to put up with him.”

“That…is not the flex you think it is.”

“Fine, be that way.” Liam shoves a plate and bowl toward him for the tortillas and salsa. “I don't know why I even put up with you.”

“For my charm and good looks?” Theo says matter-of-factly.

“For the rent and the Hulu subscription, more like,” Liam grumbles.

“Am I nothing but a sack of meat and bones to you?” Theo feigns offense.

“You're so fucking annoying. I should just let you starve,” Liam says. He plops the tortillas onto the plate and trenchantly slops the ingredients in the center.

“If you did, you wouldn't have anyone to massage you when Mr. No Salt No Sugar No Fun blows out your back again.”

Liam glares at him. Internally, he retorts that at least Brett does blow out his back, as opposed to the sexy hunk of perfect, sassy meat in front of him that he can't have.

Theo smirks, evidently taking the stretch of silence as a concession to his scintillating wit. “Oh, my phone's out of battery, I need to use yours to cancel my haircutting appointment.”

Liam heaves a sigh. “Why you schedule your beauty appointments right after getting fucked ‘seven ways to Sunday' beats me,” he says, mirroring Theo's complaint from the previous week. He jerks his head toward his room. “It's somewhere there. Go dig for it.”

Theo shoots him a thumbs up around his full mouth, still serving him that infuriating little smirk. He disappears around the corner for a moment to find Liam’s phone and take care of his business with the salon.

When Theo resurfaces some minutes later, Liam is shamelessly stealing a tortilla from his plate and dishing a generous helping of chicken and guac into the center. Liam senses the blank stare and looks up at him, a single brow arched in defiance.

“What?” Liam demands. So he has bedhead. Theo has seen him at some of the lowest points of his life before, including but not limited to that nasty case of food poisoning in Massachusetts and practically rolling around on a sidewalk panicking over almost murdering a guy.

Theo unglues himself from the carpet and shakes his head. “I just came back from a long, hard night of work, and this is how you repay me?” He affects a disappointed mafia boss accent.

Liam chews loudly on his purloined fajita. “Suck it up, Raeken. Betcha my videos rake in more views, anyway.”

—

Theo has a secret.

He knows Liam watched his latest video with Boyd.

He doubts Liam meant for him to find the image of Boyd shoving Theo’s face into the rug and rutting into his ass still up on his phone screen when Theo unearths the device in a pile of laundry on the floor. In fact, he has a sneaking suspicion that this secret of Liam’s is something that the younger man has intended to take with him to the grave.

Theo stands in the middle of Liam’s bedroom, mouth open and shell-shocked, as one by one the jagged puzzle pieces of who he’s perceived Liam to be over the past few years are shaken loose and rearranged before him.

See, he could have sworn Liam had a crush on him, those first weeks when they began talking during their calculus class together. He’d seen the way Liam’s pupils dilated under the dim overhead light of the sub shop, how a little triangle of pink had darted out of the corner of Liam’s mouth to lick his bottom lip as Theo leaned forward across the table and laid the flirtation on real thick.

He swore he was reading all the signals right when, late that same evening, he worked up the courage to type out his JustFans username in his chatbox with Liam and hit send before his nerves could get the better of him.

Ever since Liam sent back that no-good, awful, pitying, humiliating response of u look good dude, keep doing what ur doing, Theo has been living in a semi-constant state of doubt over his own ability to read the room. And now it feels like a bittersweet sort of vindication to have the confirmation in his hands, more than two years later, that Liam has liked him back all this time.

That he may have some messed up, far-fetched, inscrutably fangled reason for turning down Theo’s advances toward him, but Liam still likes him.

Can stomach watching Theo onscreen with someone else fucking him, even.

Theo taps through Liam’s dashboard, searching for further confirmation. Sure enough, he finds it: Liam’s list of subscriptions is a decent length, but the only username he has push notifications turned on for is dtlabeachboy.

Well, holy fuck.

—

He decides to test his theory.

He’s unsure how to approach the situation. Finding out that your crush whom you’ve suspected for years is crushing back on you, but friendzoned you at your most vulnerable and sexiest of moments, and then joined the same industry as you ostensibly to help pay the rent but doesn’t keep his experiences to himself—no, he instead complains frequently and loudly to you about every detail of how this hung top was somehow inadequate again—and finally, stumbling upon the evidence that the mutual crush wasn’t hallucinated after all…it’s a delicate matter.

The opportunity to test his hypothesis, however, presents itself to Theo on a silver platter much sooner than he could have expected.

It’s a Wednesday almost two weeks later, and Liam is clattering loudly through the front door with a huff and a puff and copious swearing. Theo doesn’t have to look up from the counter where he’s blending up a papaya and banana smoothie to know that his roommate is lugging his lacrosse stick and helmet and cleats and G-d knows what else in his gym bag, fresh from lacrosse practice.

“Coach bust your balls again?” Theo speaks up over the whir of the blender.

Liam throws his shit down on the floor in the foyer and sags with his face turned up to the ceiling, his groan loud and long. “I’m gonna bust his ass if he makes us run like that under ninety-degree weather ever again.”

“Isn’t that what you guys use the indoor track for…” Theo trails off as he lifts his gaze to look at Liam. The younger boy has a relatively clean pair of running shorts on, the cutoff ones that he hacked at with office scissors in a heatwave-induced fury and which ride up over the swell of his thighs. For his top, he’s got nothing on but that over-loose Slipknot t-shirt he also slashed into a cutoff tank. Theo’s eye is drawn immediately and shamelessly to the wide strip of tanned skin stretching from Liam’s armpit down to his trim waist where he can just imagine Liam’s hipbone would jut out and give way to the curve on the top of his ass…

Liam is ogling him just as blatantly. So maybe the A/C was broken again this morning and Theo forgot to put on a top since the maintenance guy came and went.

“That’s—what. What are you doing,” Liam says.

“Making smoothies,” says Theo.

“That’s so—so unsanitary!” Liam splutters next. He gestures demonstratively up and down Theo’s half-naked person.

Theo places his arms protectively around the blender. “Well, I’m making a smoothie for myself. None for you, with that attitude.”

“Theo!”

“That’s what you get for calling this masterpiece ‘unsanitary’.” Theo takes his turn gesturing at his own bare and, he’d like to think, mouth-wateringly smooth pecs.

“Theo.” Liam stomps into the kitchen and starts yanking out cream and cherries and yogurt from the fridge, slamming them down on the counter. Because he’s one of those heathens that regularly desecrates Theo’s smoothies with extra toppings like that.

“What’s got you in such a pissy mood? Can’t have been just the suicide runs. You usually live for that shit,” says Theo. Liam may turn up his nose at gym membership junkies, but he’s just as guilty of his addiction to the adrenaline rush of a full, sweaty workout on the fields.

“Not when I feel like my brain is melting out of my ear holes,” Liam complains, throwing back a gulp of milk straight from the little carton. “The only time my brain should be goo is when someone’s fucking me. And speaking of which, I cannot afford to have my brain melted like fried ice cream this week. I’ve got that huge presentation on Friday that’s worth, like, five thousand percent of my grade.”

“Fifteen percent,” Theo corrects him serenely. Honestly, this kid. If Theo weren’t such a good listener who retained all the details of Liam’s schedule and syllabus requirements, Liam wouldn’t survive another semester in college.

“Same difference.” Liam finishes the milk—thanks a lot for asking if that was needed for another recipe, Theo thinks with a mental eye-roll—and chucks the empty carton into their recycling bin.

“Shouldn’t have signed up for a Friday presentation slot if you knew you’d be fucked out from a Thursday night.”

“Wasn’t my choice. Prof assigned me the date and the partner.”

“Hm. So don’t film tomorrow.”

“I haven’t filmed in more than three weeks. I was trying to let myself recover from Brett at the beginning of the month, but I need to post another video if I’m gonna make my half of the rent.”

Theo shuts off the blender to open it up and jiggle its contents. “So then don’t film on a Thursday. Film early next week or something.”

“But then that will throw off my schedule!” Liam whines. He slumps over to stick his unwelcome hand in the top of the smoothie mixture and lick the sweet mashed fruit off his finger. He doesn’t seem half as chastised as he should be by Theo batting his hand away. “I film on a Monday or Tuesday, then I’m gonna need a week to recover at minimum, then everything gets pushed to the end of the next week, and then soon I’m off my rhythm and I’m late with the rent, and I’m gonna find the next appointments just fucking annoying instead of fun or sexy or enjoyable—”

“So cancel with Brett and schedule with someone else.”

Liam sighs. “Already thought of that. The only other guy available at such short notice is Sean.”

Theo can’t help himself. He wrinkles his nose. “The one with the biting kink.”

“Hey!” Liam says in the other guy’s defense. “I enjoy some good biting action here and there, too!”

“Yeah, so do I, but not to the extent that that Sean character does,” Theo says, doing little to hide his judgmental little scowl. “Last time, you came home and couldn’t even wear a normal t-shirt because of the hickeys. On your arms. Near your elbows.”

“Everyone has their own tastes.”

“And Sean has his orthodontic-level kinks. Nope. I am not going out to buy antibiotics for you just because you decided to sleep with Mr. Jurassic Park: The Reawakening.”

Liam is snorting, despite his obvious best efforts to look annoyed with Theo. “Okay? And I don’t exactly feel like getting carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey by Brett again tomorrow, but it’s either him or Sean.”

“I got a better idea.” Theo pops open the plastic case of cherries Liam’s holding and chomps down on a succulent piece, fortifying himself before he can chicken out. “Stay here and do the shoot with me.”

Liam blinks at him, uncomprehending. “With…you? What do you mean, with you? Like—masturbate in my room while you hover over me like a towel boy?”

Christ, this boy is stupid. Why does Theo—gah—like him?

“With me,” Theo enunciates clearly as he maintains eye contact with Liam, “as in, me fucking you on camera. Or you fucking me. I’m not picky.”

Liam stares and stares at him. And then stares at him some more.

In the silence, Theo fidgets. He wonders if Liam’s face was already this crimson and sweaty at the beginning of their conversation.

Suddenly, Liam’s mouth opens and the words tumble out in a deluge. “Okay. Okay. So that’s—an option. Not that I knew that was an option before, because I didn’t want to presume, ’cause, like, I’m Liam Dunbar the angry firecracker who could smash a chair over your head for the stupidest shit but if there’s something I am not is presumptuous. But, uh. Good to know. That—that doing the shoot together is an option. Because that makes everything so much easier. Less cleanup, no commute time, not having to buy takeout for dinner—wait! I’m not saying that I wouldn’t buy you takeout for dinner! Especially if, like, you’re the one bottoming. But that’s not to say you don’t deserve takeout for topping, either! You get to be babied, either way. No matter whose dick is being stuck in whose ass, whatever time of day…”

Theo bites his bottom lip as Liam’s mindless rant trails off in the air. Jesus on a bicycle, this is why Theo likes him so much. What a fucking trainwreck. He needs his mental health evaluated.

“We’re…getting takeout either way?” Liam peters out, high-pitched.

“Sure, Joey Tribbiani,” Theo says. “Maybe next time. Got this chicken parm planned for tomorrow.” His eyes are probably sparkling or some shit. He quickly grabs the tall glasses from the other side of the counter to pour the papaya smoothies in so he has something to hide his face in. “And since we’re on the topic, anyway, I probably shouldn’t bottom tomorrow. Like I’m not saying not ever in the future, just not so soon.”

Liam visibly works through which aspect of that statement to address first. “So this can be…like…not a one-time arrangement?”

Theo kicks himself. He fishes a Ziploc of crushed ice out of the freezer and keeps a straight face. “Yeah. Why not.”

“Okay. Okay. Um—I have some questions about that, but first…” Liam fidgets. “You told me over the weekend you didn’t need a massage! Are you sure Boyd didn’t hurt you?”

Theo tosses a wry grin over his shoulder. “Not in any way I didn’t like.”

“But—”

“I’m just saying my ass isn’t up to be reamed again yet.”

Liam’s face flames hotter. “Are you saying I’d ream your ass?”

Theo studies him over the top of his glass. “I don’t know. Would you?”

“I can top, you know.”

“Yeah. I know. You’re bisexual.”

“Like I can top guys. Specifically.” Liam runs a hand through his unkempt hair. “Just because I almost never do it on my page doesn’t mean I’m not a switch.”

“Have you ever done it in real life? Like, dating-wise?”

Liam seems to think back to a specific moment in his past that doesn’t seem to thrill him. “Yeah. Just the once. Was always girls before then, though.”

“You don’t film with girls,” Theo notes, not judging, but curious.

Liam shrugs. “I dunno, the straight side of JustFans kinda scares me.”

Theo lifts his glass like touché.

“I am still bisexual, though. Just. FYI.”

“Okay, Dunbar.” Theo teases him this time with a nonchalant smile. “I believe you.”

Liam is eyeing him suspiciously now. “What about you? You’ve never filmed as a top before.”

Theo’s smile widens. “How would you know?”

A beat passes, and then Liam looks like he’s swallowed a stone. Theo wants to laugh out loud in his face. If he ever had any doubt before that Liam watched his videos religiously, now he has his confirmation.

“I’m—you—it’s not like you’re subtle about who you film with! And you, like, tell me details and shit. Which—gross.” The insistent wash of pink over Liam’s cheeks as he wrinkles his nose belies just how…appealing Liam must find these details to be.

In the end, though, Theo takes pity on his roommate. “Sure. Okay. Loosen up, Liam. Didn’t mean to interrogate you.”

Liam snatches the proffered smoothie from Theo’s hand like a peace offering. “I don’t care, by the way. If you don’t have much experience topping.”

“I have enough,” Theo assures him smoothly. “Even if I didn’t, I’d do my due diligence to make it good for you.”

“...Oh.” Liam looks suddenly and intensely interested in the bubbles in his drink.

“So long as you’re not the kind who kicks me to fuck you harder.”

“...I do not kick my tops! How dare you—”

“What? You seem the type.”

“I swear to G-d…”

—

This is it. Holy shit, this is it.

Liam is standing half-naked by his bed while Theo fiddles with the settings on the camera tucked away on its tripod in the corner. This feels like a fever dream. The conversation yesterday with Theo, the casual confirmation that this—whatever the fuck this is—could take place more than once between them, the sudden and incongruous image of Theo leaning over half-nude in his low-hanging athletic shorts in that specific spot of Liam’s room, where before it was all just a vivid fantasy in Liam’s wet dreams—

Honestly, it all feels like it should be illegal.

But it’s happening, and Theo has turned around and is coming toward him with a weirdly intense look, and there’s no more time to freak out or have semi-coherent thoughts because the red light is blinking and Theo is staring at him expectantly.

“What?” Liam asks.

“How do you wanna do this?” Theo says, evidently repeating an earlier question.

“Um—do it well and to completion?” Liam offers, confused.

Theo’s teeth break out in an unwilling smile. “Oh, thank G-d. I was under the impression we were gonna ruin each other's orgasms.”

“You're an asshole.”

“Old news. Anyway, I meant which position you’d like to be taken in.”

“Oh. Oh.” Liam could curl up and die right now.

“It could be more than one,” Theo reminds him. Oh, that’s his—that’s his hand. Coming closer. Being buried in Liam’s hair, now, and tugging gently. It takes everything in Liam to bite back a moan.

“On my back,” Liam blurts out. “I got this, like, giant pimple on the back of my ass right now that they do not need to see.”

Theo’s mouth is twitching again. “Some people could be into that, y’know.”

“Maybe. Probably? Not really in the mood to find out.” Liam squirms—away from Theo or closer to him, he can’t tell. Either way, he ends up with both of their flushed chests pressed together and his own hand sneaking around the rear of Theo’s waistband. “Missionary’s just fine for today.”

This way, he could see Theo’s face. Every ridge, every twitch, each freckle and mole and play of light over his expression as they have sex together.

A complicated look passes over Theo’s eyes. Somehow, it makes his irises greener. “Okay, baby,” he says softly, and then proceeds to slide both hands in Liam’s hair and tilt his head back to mouth at the offered jawline like he didn’t just split Liam’s reality on its axis with a single word.

Theo does something with his hand in Liam’s hair, tugging it or twisting it, and then Liam’s head is tilting further back to expose his neck and Theo is latching on to it with filthy, wet noises. If Liam was already more than chubbed up before, his dick is standing at full attention now. He can feel it straining through the flimsy polyester of his shorts.

“That tickles,” Liam breathes as Theo’s stubble ghosts over the sensitive skin of his throat.

“Too bad,” Theo murmurs.

In retaliation, Liam slides his fingers down from Theo’s waistband and squeezes one of his ass cheeks in a clawed hand.

“Ouch,” Theo says mildly.

“Serves you right,” says Liam. “I could kick you.”

“No kicking. You’re contractually obligated to no kicking.”

“Okay, but I could think of a pretty good alternative to kicking.”

“You’re so annoying,” Theo says into his jaw. He’s made full work of Liam’s neck, leaving little blooms of color and eddies of sensation all over the skin of one side, and he seems intent on doing the same to the other. Liam squirms in his hold and rakes his free hand up and down Theo’s back, digging into his spine, finding the soft spots in the skin and squeezing the flesh. He may or may not be doing it just to check that this isn’t a dream.

Yeah, no. Theo is warm and solid and hot—in multiple senses of the word—and the presence of his body is heavy and demanding against Liam’s, filling up his awareness.

This is very much real.

And Liam won’t even have to pinch himself, because pretty soon he’ll have Theo’s cock inside him as a reminder that this is actually happening.

Liam takes charge over the next few seconds, shuffling backward till his knees hit the bed and he can curl his arm around the back of Theo’s neck and pull him down on top of himself. The mattress bounces under the impact. The sheets are clean and cool under him, though he knows that won’t last for long.

Theo’s stubble scrapes him along the neck again. Liam gasps, aroused and affronted, and promptly attacks Theo’s throat with licks and nips of his own.

“Ow. Your stubble should be a registered weapon,” Theo complains.

“You started it,” Liam retorts.

In answer, Theo pulls back for leverage to pin Liam to the bed by the shoulders with both hands. He shoves Liam’s legs apart with his knees and bends forward, bangs hanging down in waves over his eyes, and slowly lowers himself down to grind his groin against Liam’s.

Liam groans and bucks up against the pressure. Theo’s dick feels heavy against his. Suddenly, he wants to be rid of their shorts, divested of all the barriers between them. He wants to see, to feel the weight of that cock in his hand, to be able to look down his own abdomen and see Theo’s penis lined up next to his.

He knows they’re going bare for today. They talked about it well into the evening yesterday and then some, including the fact that Liam would stretch himself beforehand in the shower so they can get on to the main event.

It’s been months since he did a bareback shoot with anyone. Garrett was probably the last one he trusted with it. His spine is tingling like fireworks now at the prospect of seeing Theo—all of him—without any obstruction.

Theo ruts against him, making these small grunting sounds that are somehow hilarious and ridiculously appealing at once. He shuts his eyes a few times as he holds himself on shivering arms over Liam and humps at him, practically using Liam’s body to get off. The thought sends another bolt of unwarranted arousal straight to Liam’s groin.

He turns and sinks his teeth lightly into Theo’s nearest forearm. Those biceps bracketing his head are mad thick and offensively muscled. Liam knows he’s extremely fit in his own right from the lacrosse scholarship and his fast metabolism, but holy fuck—with those bare guns, Theo could probably bench press him for breakfast.

Theo hisses at the sensation of Liam’s teeth worrying at his skin. “You’re such a freak,” he says.

Liam bites down harder and then soothes the faint marks with a swipe of his hot tongue. “Pot, kettle. Black.”

“When have I ever been a freak?”

Liam yanks Theo’s lower half down by an iron grip on his ass and forces the older man to grind harder against him. He’s so turned on, he could probably come in his shorts like a teenager from just this if he weren’t aware that they actually have to fuck for the camera.

“You don’t want me to answer that,” Liam says, looking up at him balefully, and then tilts his hips up and grinds upward into Theo with a vengeance.

A long, guttural groan is ripped from Theo’s lungs at the contact. His chest heaves and presses down heavily against Liam. “Gotta make this last, sweetheart.”

“Whatever you say, cupcake,” Liam shoots back. “Just waiting for you to take the lead.”

“Fuck you, I am taking the lead.”

Liam arches his brows. “Really? Was kinda waiting for the last ten minutes for you to do that.”

“I can take the lead.” Baring his teeth, Theo props himself up on one hand so he can tug Liam’s shorts down with the other and expose his dick to the camera.

Liam kicks his shorts the rest of the way down and hears them plop softly somewhere on the carpet. The cool relief of the air on his dick is almost like torture with the anticipation of getting to see and feel Theo’s cock next to him.

Theo has paused, hovering over him, sliding his gaze heatedly up and down Liam’s torso.

Liam feels suddenly self-conscious. “Something bothering you?”

“Yeah,” Theo rasps. “You.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re so fuzzy down here.” Without warning, Theo cups Liam’s balls, teases his fingers in a light grip around the base of Liam’s cock. “And this happy trail…” Theo leans back on his haunches to trace the wisps of dark blond hair with the tip of his tongue. The effect is instantaneous: Liam arches up and moans into it like a whore.

“I could eat you up all day,” Theo mumbles into his stomach.

Liam’s abdominal muscles twitch from the sensation of the contact there. “Well, that sounds nice, but you gotta hurry up and fuck me first.”

“You’re so demanding.”

“And you so don’t know how to take the lead.”

“Really.”

Theo’s shorts are off, flung away somewhere. His dick springs out, and holy shit, it’s pretty. Curved and a bit on the thick side, and flushed with blood and so wet and invitingly pink at the end. Liam wants to swallow it and feel that head bumping up against the opening to his esophagus.

Not today. Another time, though. Definitely.

Theo leans back on his knees to reach for the squeeze bottle of lube and takes both of their dicks in hand. “What about now?”

“Wha—what.” Liam’s panting from the delicious friction. “Lost the plot. Rewind. Rewind.”

“You’re getting fucked, darling. That is the plot.”

“Then hurry up with it, pumpkin.” The back of Liam’s heel bounces dangerously off the swell of his ass.

Theo stills. His face goes slit-eyed, flat. “Did you just kick me?”

Liam’s other heel bumps him in the butt again. “No.”

“You kicked me.”

“You pulled back too far and hit my ankle.”

“You’re really in it now.”

Theo starts stripping their cocks, loud, wet, messy, and just on the edge of too tight, making Liam’s mouth drop open and a high-pitched whine escape him. He doesn’t want to come. Doesn’t want to climax yet without Theo inside him. G-d, this is all he’s thought about for the last two years. Has fantasized about bending Theo over the coffee table and fucking him to tears, or Theo taking him against the front door and pushing the side of his face against the latch as he rails him for hours. Liam will absolutely cry if Theo doesn’t get inside him right the fuck now.

“Fuck me. Fuck me. Damn it, fuck me now!”

“So fucking bossy,” Theo complains. But he releases his steel grip on their dicks and pulls back again, this time to slather even more lube over himself, and then he’s there again, held up by one hand flat on the mattress beside Liam’s head, and he’s looking down to make sure he’s guiding his own cock at the right angle into Liam’s warm and winking hole.

Liam can’t help himself. He cranes his neck downward to watch himself as he’s breached and Theo sinks, inch by marvelous inch, inside him. He’s going dizzy with want at the idea of how hot they look joined together.

Theo balances on two hands over him and seats himself fully inside. They both release twin groans at the sensation of the tops of Theo’s thighs brushing against Liam’s ass.

Liam’s head drops back. Theo’s thick, just like he imagined and more. He’d stretched himself with three fingers and then a hefty toy earlier, but nothing feels like the real thing, hot and heavy in his hole, stretching him out and demanding space inside him. The feel of Theo’s heated chest against his and the wild look in his eyes from the pressure of Liam’s insides bearing down on him.

“If you—don’t stop squeezing—this is gonna take a very different direction than…originally intended,” Theo pants in his ear.

“I’m not—fucking squeezing,” Liam protests. “Fuck. Fuck. Hold on a minute, I think you just shoved a whole Yeti bottle up my ass.”

Theo huffs out a laugh, sending a puff of air over the side of Liam’s face.

After some seconds of Theo grinding in and out in minute, gentle circles, he asks through gritted teeth, “Permission to fuck you now, your royal highness?”

Liam shuts his eyes and breathes out through his nose. When he opens them up again, he finds Theo’s eyes shining and greener than ever. He’d do anything just to have Theo look at him like that forever.

“Sure,” Liam breathes. “Blow my fucking mind, baby.”

Theo looks at him—green boring into blue—and then he does just that.

Theo fucks him, mind-bogglingly, like he already knows Liam’s body by heart. He starts slowly and works up his pace to a sustainable rhythm. His hands and lips are never still, always ghosting over Liam’s collarbones, the valley between his pecs, thumbing at his nipples, as he thrusts in and out of Liam’s ass. Liam reciprocates the touch without having to think about it: hands tugging at Theo’s hair, fingers teasing the corner of his mouth. A stray tongue licking long, uneven stripes up the swell of Theo’s smooth, perfect pec just to hear Theo whine and lose control for a second and buck into him with more force.

They start out at the edge of the bed but, with the inertia of Liam clawing at Theo’s torso and urging him deeper inside him, pretty soon they’re near the center of the mattress, with Theo scrabbling for balance on his knees and biting down gently on the round of Liam’s shoulder to ground them.

“This all you got?” Liam teases him.

“Don’t test me,” Theo growls back.

“I don’t know,” Liam pants. “Testing you is…kinda fun.”

“Say that again and I won’t go easy on you.”

“Well, shit, was that—what—you were…doing?” Liam’s voice pitches up and down from the rhythmic punch, punch, punch of Theo’s cock inside his hole. “I—specifically—told you not to.”

“Suit yourself.” Theo’s hands are on him, now, behind Liam’s knees, and they drive his legs back and back until his thighs are pressed against his chest and Liam’s hole is fully exposed for the taking.

The new position drives Theo’s dick into him at an angle that’s turning Liam religious. That thick, delicious cock is hitting his most sensitive spot, caressing near the end of his channel like a tease. Liam’s brain is starting to feel dangerously like the beginnings of goo. He could probably start a shrine in honor of Theo Raeken’s penis.

Not now. Not tomorrow, either. He’d be walking funny. Saturday, maybe.

“Am I going easy now?” Theo asks him through sweat and heaving breaths.

“Depends…” Liam doesn’t even know what he’s saying.

Theo pulls back and slams in like a battering ram. “What about now?”

“Oh my G-dddd!” Liam wails.

Theo keeps up the merciless pace like he intends to break Liam. He isn’t cruel about it, just intent and weirdly focused in that way that one could only describe Theo Raeken. He’s thick, but he isn’t punishingly long: Liam knows that after this, whenever he moves and feels the soreness in his hole from the thorough fucking, the ache left behind will only be delicious and addicting.

When he seems to grow tired of pinning Liam down by the knees, Theo rearranges Liam’s limbs so his legs are bent back and his ankles are crossed between them. Theo wraps a hand around Liam’s joined ankles and begins using them as leverage to slide him steadily back and forth onto his cock. In that moment Liam feels intensely like a cocksleeve, and he wants to weep from how badly he could come from it.

“Just a little longer,” Theo promises. Like bouncing on Theo’s cock—existing on it—isn’t occupying one hundred percent of Liam’s future plans from this day forward.

“Wanna come on you. Wanna come on you. Don’t let me come yet,” Liam warns him.

Theo obliges by wrapping the fingers of his free hand around the base of Liam’s dick. The pressure makes him wince, but it’s a welcome relief from the initially inescapable urge to spurt all over himself.

Theo ups the pace again, rocking back and forth into him and scraping against his prostate with wickedly sharp attention. He gives these little grins at all the soft, wounded cries that spill out of Liam’s mouth. Liam feels simultaneously seen and used under Theo’s gaze, a piece of meat—

Which reminds him.

“Oh my G-d. Shit.” Liam squeezes involuntarily and then spasms around Theo's girth as a full-body reflex. “We forgot to—take the chicken—out of the freezer…”

Theo barrels into him for a few more strokes and then stills. He sounds, irrationally, irritated and sexy at the same time. “What?”

“The chicken! For your chicken parm. We forgot to defrost it,” Liam says with growing horror.

Theo is entirely unimpressed. “My dick is buried, like, three hundred miles inside you. What do you want me to do about it?”

Liam forgives him the wild exaggeration for the alarm of the moment. “But that means we’ll have late dinner!”

“Okay? You want me to pull out now and go defrost the chicken?”

“No!” When Theo makes as though to pull back, Liam untangles his ankles and wraps them around the small of Theo’s back to shove him back inside to the root. “No, you’re staying inside me!”

“Then what,” Theo says through gritted teeth, “do you propose? That I walk over there with you on my dick and get the chicken out and then walk back here?”

Liam gives the proposal some serious thought. As the silence stretches, it’s Theo’s turn to stare at him in horror.

“No. The answer is no, you idiot. The chicken can wait.” Theo shudders and twitches inside Liam involuntarily, making the younger man gasp in turn. “You do not almost make me come and then start shouting about motherfucking chicken, Jesus Christ.”

“I was just—trying—to—be—ah! Fuck! Be helpful!” The rest of Liam’s protest is lost in the jolt of Theo’s body against his as Theo goes back to pounding his ass. The older man is going harder than before, like he’s wreaking vengeance on Liam’s hole just for the nearly-ruined orgasm.

“Then shut the fuck up,” Theo snarls, and then he starts to well and truly fuck Liam with abandon.

The grunts from Liam turn into whimpers, turn into a long, keening whine. Thirty seconds later, Theo’s fingers unwrap from the base of Liam’s cock and Liam is coming with a guttural wail around Theo’s dick pulverizing his insides. Theo batters his prostate relentlessly through Liam’s orgasm, swipes the tears from one of Liam’s cheeks and licks his finger free of the salt.

“Oh my G-d, oh my G-d, oh my G-d,” Liam chants, brainless and overwhelmed.

“That’s what you get,” says Theo. “Fucking taking it.” Then he shoves all the way in, making Liam see stars, and starts coming long and hot and messy and wet inside and Liam thinks there’s no way he can possibly put his brain back together after this.

(He may or may not end up coming a second time, smaller and dribbling clear fluid, merely from the sensation of Theo’s spend filling him.)

—

Liam’s eyes flutter open at the soft click of the front door, followed a few seconds later by the squeaky hinge on his bedroom door. The bed dips under Theo’s weight, and then the man himself leans sideways on an elbow to poke him in the bicep.

“You ready to be more human now?” Theo teases him.

Liam groans and blinks several times to rid his eyes of their crusties. He yawns and glances around fruitlessly for a wall clock that doesn’t exist. It’s darker than he thought it would be. “Time’s it?”

“Almost seven,” says Theo. He hands Liam a transparent plastic cup sweating down the sides. “Drink this.”

Liam does, mindlessly. It isn’t until three sips in that he gives a belated gasp of epiphany. “Iced pistachio latte?”

“Yeah, yeah, just ’cause you’re predictable.”

“I have taste, and it’s reliable.” Liam sniffs. Then he eyes Theo suspiciously, this time taking in the damp shoulders of his shirt and the wet curls plastered across his shining forehead. Now that he’s got a bit more caffeine-boosted situational awareness, he also realizes that’s the soft patter of rain against the window. “Did you go out in the rain?”

“Yeah. So never say I don’t do nice shit for you.”

“You always have an ulterior motive,” Liam says absently. Then—“Holy shit, it’s seven? We started filming at three.”

“Yup. That’s how time works when you’re conked out, genius.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up so I could clean up?”

“I did. Several times. You were being a primadonna about it,” Theo deadpans.

“Shut up. No, I wasn’t.”

“Say that to the cat scratches on the back of my hand.”

Liam’s eyes widen. Theo snickers for a full twenty seconds before having mercy on him.

“Nah, there’s no scratches there now, but I suspect there are all over my back.”

Liam peers mulishly into his drink. “You want me to apologize about that?”

“Fuck, no. Since when does Liam Dunbar apologize for anything?”

“I do. I would,” Liam says primly, “except you yelled at me about the chicken and then sent me to another dimension, so I think a couple scratches on your back are warranted.”

Theo stares at him. “Me? Yell at you? I’m pretty sure things went down the exact opposite of what you say.”

“Uh-huh.” Liam throws back his drink, then makes a grabby hand in Theo’s direction. “Hand me my phone. I’m gonna call for some takeout.”

“Oh, am I getting the baby treatment now?” Theo’s grin is shit-eating. “Rocked your world that hard, did I?”

“You make it so fucking hard to do anything nice for you,” Liam grumbles. “I’m calling the Thai place, and I’m making them put extra onions in your pad thai so you barf.”

—

Liam fully intends to pick up their dinner, but apparently he gets lost in the modern wonders of American plumbing and indulges in the shower long enough that by the time he bundles himself out into the living room, Theo has already run downstairs to the Thai place and back. His hair and t-shirt and shorts, predictably, are even more soaked through.

Liam tsks at him and unwraps his own towel from around his neck to drape it over his roommate’s head. When Theo yelps, affronted, and ducks to avoid the contact, Liam just follows him implacably with the towel.

“We’re earning hundreds per video and we still can’t cobble together enough money for a decent umbrella between the two of us,” Liam grouses. “You should add that to the list.”

“You add it to the list.”

“You’re closer to the whiteboard.”

“And I’m cold as fuck.”

“Whose fault is that?” Done abusing Theo’s hair, Liam snaps him in the butt with the towel. “Go take a hot shower. I’ll plate up.”

Theo, shockingly, acquiesces with minimal grumbling. Liam sets about loading their bowls with the entrees and getting comfortable on the couch as he scrolls through their options on Netflix. They’ll invariably end up watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine again—because it’s comfortable and it’s their show—but he’ll go through the motions of having Theo choose.

When Theo reemerges, it’s to the unexpected image of Liam sinking backward into the crease in the middle of the couch with his feet up on the coffee table and his entire midsection hovering just above the cushions, as though he were halfway through a kegel exercise but lost the will to commit.

Theo plops down next to him and scoops up his bowl and the remote. “What the fuck is up with you?”

“Butthole.” Liam grunts. “Sore.”

“Then roll over onto your back.”

“No, I want to stay like this. Just need to keep pressure off my ass.”

“If you think you’ll last more than five minutes into B-Nine-Nine with that stupid ass position—you know what? Never mind. I don’t know why I thought I could convince you.”

Liam sticks his tongue out at Theo and goes back to chomping on his larb with the most maddeningly charming little double chin ever.

Sure enough, though, five minutes later finds Liam squirming. Theo attempts to ignore the incessant shifting. After all, he doesn’t want to unintentionally embarrass Liam by pulling more attention to what happened between them. (A thing that happened that he…very much would like to continue happening, but he’s in no frame of mind to even begin gauging whether his roommate is onboard with it happening again, even if only for a shoot. Liam may have shown interest in their initial conversation, but Theo knows things can change following having actual sex with someone.)

But when Liam honest-to-G-d sticks his hand backward into his terry shorts to cup his palm to his own crack through his underwear, Theo decides he’s had enough.

“Literally,” he says. “What the fuck are you doing now?”

“It burns less when there’s a hand on it,” Liam explains in a rush. “Like, the pressure from the couch is not comfy, but a hand is okay.”

“So you’re just gonna, what…cup your asshole the entire night?”

“It’s not like you have to stare,” Liam grumbles.

Theo pinches the bridge of his nose. “Did I actually fuck you too hard? Liam, what was I just telling you about setting boundaries—”

“Yes!” Liam squeaks. His face looks horrified. “I mean. No. No, you didn’t fuck me too hard. You fucked me just right, although you fucked me harder than I expected you to, which is—which is not a dig at you at all based on my perceptions of your stamina or masculinity before we did the shoot together, because, like, just because someone bottoms more than he tops in a bunch of videos does not mean that he doesn’t have the sufficient sexual education or prowess to give his partner tip-top pleasure—as a top—which. Unintended pun. I mean—”

Unthinking, Theo reaches out and covers Liam’s mouth with a hand. “You can stop now,” he says. “I get it.”

Liam’s eyes are round above his palm. He wriggles away from Theo’s hand. “I’m serious. You fucked me just enough. It was A-okay. It was all right, apple pie.”

“Okay. I…believe you. Just normal sore, then?”

“Yeah.” Liam grimaces. “And I might have used a little too much of that extra strong soap cleaning up, which is one hundred percent my fault and not, like, a byproduct of our…coupling.”

A beat of silence hangs between them, and then Theo breaks into a chortle. “Okay then, my fair Victorian lady.” He has a smidgen of mercy on Liam, who’s blushing up a storm, and doesn’t tease him further than another round of chuckles.

When Liam shifts uncomfortably again a minute later, Theo pats the space on the cushion next to him. “Scoot over here.”

Liam does, no questions asked. He does lift an inquisitive brow, though, when Theo’s arm comes up behind him, then descends toward Liam’s butt. Theo keeps his face straight and his eyes fixed on the episode ahead, but finds his way to the cleft in Liam’s ass through his shorts. Tentatively, he cups his palm and presses it upward through the fabric.

Liam’s body shudders with a quiet sigh of relief.

“Better?” Theo murmurs.

“Much,” Liam agrees. “Might even let you have my extra mango rice cake later.”

“Okay, now, don’t go making promises you can’t keep,” Theo says, smirking at Liam’s reflection on the TV screen.

—

They fall asleep on the couch and only make it back to their respective beds in the wee hours of the morning. Nonetheless, Liam is blessed with the most refreshing sleep he’s had in weeks. He gets up a full fifteen minutes ahead of schedule without the aid of his alarm clock, takes over breakfast duties, throws the trash out in the communal chute, and makes it to campus feeling brighter than ever. He does end up smashing that group presentation worth fifteen percent of his grade, if he does say so himself.

He’s still whistling to himself when he returns to the apartment. Theo’s backpack is visible under the kitchen bar, so he yells out, “Honey, I’m home!”

When there’s no response, Liam squints and glances around the corner. Theo’s bedroom door is shut. Now that he’s taken a closer look, Theo’s backpack is actually in the exact same spot that it was this morning. So are his fastidiously lined up Timbs on the mud mat in the foyer.

Liam shucks off his sneakers and pads down the carpeted hallway to rap softly on Theo’s bedroom door. “Theo?”

When no response comes for several seconds, Liam gingerly cracks the door open. Sure enough, inside is his roommate, flung diagonally across his bed and looking for all the world like he lost a war with a sentient herd of bedsheets. The skin on his cheeks is shining. Even from this far away, Liam can tell his hair is plastered to his forehead.

Liam wastes no time. He may be a disaster on flaming wheels in the kitchen on his best days, according to Theo, but he can heat up a mean packet of Lipton chicken soup when the situation calls for it.

When he tiptoes back inside the room, Theo has barely shifted. Liam slides onto the edge of the mattress so he can set the bowl of soup down on the corner of the nightstand and then use the back of his now-free hand to feel for Theo’s temperature.

“’M not ’n invalid,” Theo speaks up suddenly, eyes still closed, scaring the everloving shit out of Liam.

The younger boy swats him in the shoulder. “Say that to your throat. Sounds like you ate glass.”

Theo grumbles out something far less intelligible than his first protest.

“Made you some soup,” Liam informs him. “Don’t worry, I didn’t put rat poison in it. Just all my love and care for your invalid ass, if that even makes a difference to you. So. Sit up and eat it as soon as you’re able. Don’t let that shit go cold, electricity’s expensive as fuck nowadays.”

“You’re a…” Theo swallows spasmodically, lolling his head in the direction of Liam’s voice, and his eyes manage to open in painful-looking slits. “You’re a p’ss poor nursemaid…”

“Hey. Never claimed to be anything different.” Liam claps him bracingly on the shoulder and makes a show of tucking him in. “Besides, you decided to live with me. No takesy backsies.”

Theo groans dramatically like his soul is being dragged over a bed of hot coals.

As Liam makes his way back toward the door, Theo stops him with a half-hearted gesture. “Th’ video…”

“I’ll do the editing. You did contract, like, a hundred strains of pneumonia just to get me my special coffee order, so like, you’re forgiven for leaving the editing to me.” Liam tacks on a cheeky smile.

When Theo groans again, Liam sticks his head back in. “And how dare you imply you don’t trust my editing skills.”

He then shuts the door on Theo’s death stare, missing the silent middle finger the older boy shoots his retreating figure.

—

The thing is, Liam Dunbar has common sense. He knows, practically speaking, that the best cut of the forty minutes or so of footage they have from yesterday would exclude all of their stupid bickering over his backside pimple and the frozen chicken and whatever else was spewing from their mouths while they were banging.

The other thing about Liam Dunbar is—nobody ever said he had an overabundance of common sense.

When he plugs in his earphones and settles back against his bed cushions, steeling himself with a professional face to review the reel, he doesn’t expect to find himself fully drawn into the little quips and insults traded between him and Theo onscreen.

Theo had called him sweetheart. Liam had blushed and called him pumpkin.

Ribbing at each other, yes, but with Theo laid out in bed next door and Liam’s own bedroom shrouded in the cozy privacy of the shadows, there’s no stopping the inescapable flush that steals over his face now.

What if he could have this?

What if…he could close his eyes and fully imagine a world where he comes home, and they call each other disgusting pet names, and most of the time it’s for the gag and other times they just straight-up call each other epithets, but for about a precious ten percent of the time it’s actually real?

When he gets to the part about the chicken, Liam doesn’t even cringe. He has his cheek smooshed against his hand, but there’s no hiding the little grin overtaking his face.

The video, in its entirety, is just so heart-clenchingly, soul-tuggingly domestic. So much so that he hasn’t even thought to sneak a hand down to his half-chub and jerk off while watching back the footage.

He makes a snap decision, then. He’ll proceed with the six-minute cut, as per his custom, cutting out all the extraneous banter so his viewers can get to the heart of the show and beat their meat in peace. Then he’ll have a separate file, a longer one—no mental time limit on this one—capturing and highlighting all his favorite bits of their stupid little arguments.

Two hours and one creaky spine later, Liam is done. All he has to do is log back on to JustFans, pick a title, let the file upload, and then wait overnight for the new comments to trickle in.

He taps his chin. Most of his channel titles border on cheeky—he’s always had a proclivity for puns that way. My bro couldn’t find the buns on 4th of july so he ate mine instead. Or think i’ll turn into a vampire after the 20th time he bites me? Or even his personal favorite, not sure these are the riding lessons the rents are paying for.

After mulling it over, Liam finally types in a new title for his and Theo’s upload: i said i wanted a dog and all he gave me was his wiener.

Indulging in a juvenile little snicker, Liam watches the progress bar fully load and then shuts his laptop to turn in for the night.

—

Theo awakens groggily at half past whatever o’clock to his phone buzzing incessantly on his nightstand.

When he peers blearily at his screen, it’s to a flood of notifications from JustFans. He expected a few alerts following Liam presumably editing and posting their video last night and tagging him, but not nearly this many.

He struggles upright on an elbow and gropes for his reading glasses so he can find out what the fuck is going on.

He’s a little more than shell-shocked to discover that the notifications are for swathes of comments coming in and—mind-bogglingly—dozens, if not nearly a hundred, new subscribers to his page.

He never bothered to turn off notifications for his new subscriptions, seeing as he’s got a pretty sturdy, loyal base that has been pegged around five hundred for the last several months. Now he may have to rethink that entirely.

As Theo wades through the rest of the alerts, he finds that yes, Liam’s account, bigstick09, did indeed tag dtlabeachboy on last night’s upload. He snorts and shakes his head at the wiener crack in the title. Then he pauses, zooms in on the runtime, and frowns.

Eighteen minutes? What the hell?

In all the months he’s been following Liam—and yes, jerking off to his hottest videos, so sue him for pining a little for the guy (his favorite upload may or may not be that rear shot of Liam's bubbly ass riding a dude bareback in front of a window)—Liam has never uploaded a video longer than, say, six or seven minutes. Longer versions of filming sessions may exist in the form of recorded livestreams or longer cuts on his partners’ channels, but never on his own page.

Risking a glance at the door, Theo bites his lip and then fishes his earphones out of his top drawer. He settles back and presses play.

—

Not three minutes later, Theo is barreling into Liam's room, electrified bedhead and drool tracks and all, and he's screaming bloody murder before Liam can come fully awake.

“What the fuck, dude, what the fuck,” Liam groans.

“You fucking idiot! You had one job! How you've managed to survive this long in this world on zero-point-three brain cells is genuinely beyond me! What the fuck were you even thinking?!”

“What—brain cells—I’m not thinking anything. Uh. What?”

Theo stalks forward and wordlessly shoves the screen of his phone under Liam's nose.

Tentatively, Liam accepts the device and stares at the screen. It takes him a minute to register what he's looking at. When he does, all color drains from his face.

He's scrambling to his feet and wobbling after a fuming Theo in seconds. “I didn't mean to upload that! I swear, I had the shorter, cleaner version up and ready, I literally had my file window open with the specific video highlighted! I never meant to upload this version, you've gotta believe me, I would never do that to you. I swear, Theo, cross my heart and hope to cry.”

That stops Theo in his tracks. He swivels on his heel. “Hope to what?”

Liam blinks. “What?”

“It's die, Liam. Hope to die.”

“Well, why the hell would I do that? Then I wouldn’t be around to tell the truth anymore.”

“Just—” Theo clutches at the ends of his hair and lets out a slow, painful-sounding breath through his nose. “Look. I believe you didn’t mean to upload the original version. But would it have killed you to, I don’t know, check the fucking name of the file you were inputting? Even once?”

Liam gulps. He…has a bad habit of christening his files with unremarkable names that are jumbled between letter and number systems of ordering. Theo is the polar opposite. Liam bets that if Theo could have virtual cascading tabs to organize his camboy videos, he’d have color coded his deepthroating files to distinguish them from his, like, regular blowjob files, eons ago.

Liam holds up a finger to explain. “This was version three. It’s not—it’s not like I name every different edit something else entirely on my hard drive.”

There’s a stretch of silence, and then Liam realizes his mistake.

“Version three? What were versions one and two?”

Liam squeezes his eyes shut. “Um…the original reel, and then the…non-domestic supercut?”

Another bit of quiet fizzles between them. When Liam dares to open his eyes again, Theo’s gaze is trained on him in steely slits. “Don’t tell me…this was the 'domestic’ supercut.”

Liam worries his lip. “This…wasn’t the domestic supercut?”

“Jesus H. Christ.” Theo sighs explosively and clutches the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

“I mean. It’s not like it was that bad, was it?” Liam ventures.

“I sounded like a moron,” Theo snaps. “Talking about motherfucking frozen chicken...”

Liam winces. “Well…” He glances down and scrolls through the rest of the page. After a minute, something catches his attention. “Hey, maybe this isn’t such a huge mistake.”

“Very funny, Dunbar. I’ve heard that before. Usually proceeded by a national-level disaster.”

“No, listen. This person said, ‘The sex was super hot as always but I love the mundane little bits in between.’ Another commenter also said, ‘Haha, the chicken bit was gold. Somehow it all made the video hotter, man.’”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I literally just said ‘cross my heart and hope to cry,’” Liam says irritably. He shoves the phone back in Theo’s direction. “Read the comments for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

Theo does. As he thumbs through, he comes to the ghastly realization that Liam…might be right.

mbwoost19: bro this felt so real like def one of my top 5 faves from ur channel this was just top tier content

XxquisitivexX: Never knew watching two dudes rail while arguing could get my rocks off!!

123pawsitive: @bigstick09 u never told us u got a boyfriend!!!! this was hot hot hot ultra hot literally just told a friend to subscribe and they did :)

senti1290: aww even if you didnt get a dog at least THIS wiener was better! Love the change of pace man

And on and on the comments go, all in the same vein. Viewers praising the natural vibes of the shoot, pointing out how refreshing their dynamic is in an environment of increasingly depersonalized sex videos. And—shockingly—a not insignificant number letting Liam and Theo know that they are new subscribers. To both channels.

Liam, who’s scrolling through his own phone, must be coming to some similarly damning conclusions. He sets his device screen down on his blanketed lap and twiddles his thumbs as he looks at Theo. “The video did absolute numbers, didn’t it?”

He doesn’t even sound smug about it, which is probably why Theo, in that split second, decides against his better judgment to forgive him.

Theo nods. “Apparently you bumbled into people’s weakness. Who knew, argument fucking could be a kink?”

“It’s not just the argument or the chicken,” Liam points out. “They like that we sound human. And, like, yeah—now that somebody’s pointed it out, it makes total sense. I’m probably like that too with the videos I like. Probably if I checked my list of favorites now, it would be a lot more of the ‘amateur’ tag than anything else.”

Theo hums. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That we should get a stuffed dog and prank them at the beginning of the next video with it?”

Theo blinks. Liam is, apparently, ten thousand steps ahead of him. “Yes, we’ll do another video, but no, we will not be spending on a stuffed prank dog.”

“You never know. I could be a secret genius at this. Maybe I have my finger on the pulse of what the people want.”

“Well, I’m people. And what I want is for you to get your ass out of bed so we can go downtown and grab a bite to celebrate.”

Liam bounces up off the mattress. “Is this your way of saying sorry?”

“What the fuck do I need to be sorry about?”

Liam grins at him. Then—“Wait, are you even well yet?”

“Stop fussing, Dunbar. Last one to the door has to pay for drinks.”

“Oh, shit.”

—

Among the sundry things Liam and Theo like to annotate on their communal whiteboard—chore division being one of them, and the next grocery list being the other—one of the most important is their weekly schedule of shoots. It was Theo who took a ruler and an erasable marker to the thing to draw in seven meticulous little squares with color-coded abbreviations for days of the week, and then it was Liam who first penciled in a tentative Wednesday shoot with a friend, all those months ago.

They’re a little less on top of the whiteboard shoot schedule nowadays, but in general there will be a note in green marker at the top if it’s a Theo week or in blue marker if it’s a Liam week.

In the days following the wild success of their joint post, Liam absently notices the green scrawl at the top of the whiteboard. He sees it and tucks it at the back of his brain the same way he notices the plants outside the window: he registers their presence but not their state or exactly what they mean.

So when Theo leaves another trail of orange sticky notes instructing Liam in the full and proper way to reheat the soup and cornbread in the fridge, it hits Liam with the weight of a freight train that his roommate is gone for another overnight filming session.

Sure enough, when he checks the whiteboard, Theo wrote: 6pm Allen’s.

He’s stumped. Theo has never talked about an Allen. Once upon a time, he mentioned a Scott, and a few times he’s mentioned Derek and Boyd and Jordan and even some apparently arrogant prick with a jawline named Jackson.

Liam considers texting Theo for details. Briefly, he shudders at the thought, imagining the frown on Theo’s face when he has to attend to the pesky text of a clingy roommate in the middle of a frisky moment. But then Liam remembers their pact—that they always let each other know their location on these shoots, especially if it’s with someone new—and he steels himself against the embarrassment and pulls out his phone.

Liam: u forgot to tell me the address

Not a minute later, his roommate replies.

Liam inputs the address in Google Maps and frowns. He sends a screenshot of the Street View he finds and tacks on, u rly meaning to fuck some rando in an abandoned building??

Theo takes a little longer this time to answer.

Theo: Relax, it’s not an abandoned building. It’s a complex owned by Derek and one of his trusted buddies Allen rents two units on the top floor. It’s private and secluded enough from nosy ass people for what we intend to do.

Liam: ha, that makes me feel loads better 🙄

Theo: Get your mind out of the gutter.

Liam: we literally film porn 4 a living but go off ig

Theo: I turned on my location. Hope you’re happy. Gtg now, have some guests to entertain.

That last text further deepens Liam’s frown. Guests? As in plural?

He would think, what with them being roommates—not to mention Theo having been literally inside him not seven days ago—that Theo would deign to mention if he was filming something as involved as a threesome. Or…Liam doesn’t dare parse how he feels about this—a foursome.

He’s self-aware enough to identify the streak of jealousy heating up his insides. He thought he would have gotten over it, after Theo came back fine from his shoot with Boyd and then he and Liam had possibly the best sex of Liam’s entire life, but he finds that now the little green monster in his stomach has only grown.

Who all is there now? What are they planning? Is Theo going to be one of the tops and is he going to be fucking some cute bubble butt, prettier and smoother than Liam?

Or is Theo going to be the one offering himself up to his partners? And how long are they going to have the privilege of tasting him and ravaging him?

Liam abruptly slams his phone down on the counter and stomps back into his room, his appetite ruined.

—

Theo doesn’t come home the next morning. Of course, this isn’t all that unusual; that one time he shot an extra long livestream with Boyd, he’d ended up staying over at the guy’s place through early afternoon.

Noon comes and goes without a knock or jingle of keys at the door. Liam hauls himself from bed long enough to grab some saltine crackers and bring them back to his room where he can munch grumpily on them. He watches a random Netflix comedy special on his laptop, but half of his attention is trained on his phone beside him, which remains dark and silent for hours.

He’s desperate enough to start trawling through his online planner of assignments on a Saturday afternoon, when his phone dings.

He scrambles for it, fully expecting a text from Theo updating him on his ETA. Instead, it’s a JustFans alert for dtlabeachboy posting a new upload.

Liam wars with himself as his thumb hovers over the link. On one hand, if Theo hasn’t texted by now, he probably hasn’t made it out of Allen’s place yet, which is a good forty minutes away from their apartment. On the other hand, maybe Theo forgot to text him and is already on his way, and the worst thing that could happen in Liam’s life right now is to be caught with his hand down his pants rubbing one out to one of Theo’s latest videos.

And on the other, secret third hand…Liam doesn’t really care.

He clicks on the link.

The video loads, and the first image that greets Liam is a closeup of the round, perky cheeks of Theo’s smooth ass. Front and center in the shot is his hole, hairless and bright pink and winking from sensitivity, a single thick glob of white squeezing out and dripping lazily down his perineum and onto the ruined mattress below.

Liam shoves down his pants and starts palming his dick frantically.

Onscreen, Theo is half naked, his torso barely clad in a baby pink crop top whose loose hem flaps back and forth over the muscles of his toned stomach. He’s on his hands and knees on a sheeted mattress on the floor, and his spine is dipped and his ass is up for the taking, framed only by the dark panels of his soaked jockstrap, and it’s the sluttiest thing Liam has ever seen.

“Oh, my G-d,” some guy breathes near the camera. A pale hand is patting one of Theo’s ass cheeks and jiggling it. The owner of the hand gasps long and loud as another line of come trickles out of Theo’s hole to join the first one in soaking through the pouch of his jock.

“That’s load number three,” the camera man’s voice tells the audience.

Liam’s cock visibly jumps in his hand. Biting his lip, he pauses the video and zooms out. The post is exactly eight minutes and ten seconds long.

And the title reads: Cumdump thinking of u while taking loads back to back.

Blood rushes south so swiftly and hotly that Liam is left lightheaded and sagging against his pillows. He blinks and groans and struggles to regain his grip on his phone. He has no idea how he’ll survive this.

There are jumpcuts in the video as he unpauses it. Now there’s a scene from a new angle, Theo still presenting himself doggy style, but this time it’s a side shot of his stubbled face being shoved onto someone’s cock to the root. He’s got one of his baseball caps on backwards, but it’s evidently been pushed and pulled in the process of fucking, leaving the sweat-slick strands of his bangs peeking out over his forehead.

“Fuck, that’s a warm mouth,” the guy receiving a blowjob mumbles appreciatively.

From the sawing motions of Theo’s entire body, it soon becomes clear that he’s not the one bobbing his head up and down to deepthroat the man. Rather, he’s being speared from behind. Sure enough, the camera man—who apparently is now seated—pans slowly to the right to reveal a pale, lean guy going to town on Theo’s ass. It seems to be the same man that marveled at his leaking hole in the opening of the video.

Pale Guy has his giant hands bracketed loosely around Theo’s fleshy hips. Theo rocks back and forth minutely to fuck himself on the cock, but most of the force comes from Pale Guy. The slap of his thighs against Theo’s ass cheeks reverberates throughout the large and mostly empty room. The top himself doesn’t speak, only punctuating his enthusiastic fucking with grunts and soft pants and other breathless sounds that almost seem like a stream of praise.

The next jumpcut gives Liam a sweeping glimpse of the lower halves of three guys sprawling across a couch and lazily pumping their semi-hard lengths as the camera man himself heads for his turn at Theo’s hole. There’s some maneuvering and shaky imagery, and then shuffling, like someone pulling himself off the couch to stand and help with the filming. Soon the shot settles on a tall, wide, downward angle on Theo’s back, his butt and the lower half of the top about to fuck him captured perfectly in frame.

Theo shifts from side to side on his hands and knees for a bit as though relieving pressure from several long minutes of being pounded in the same position. He balances on an elbow to flip his cap off his head, run the other hand through his sweaty locks, and then jam the hat back on. He turns his head then to the side to give a nearly imperceptible nod to the dude behind him.

Camera Man shuffles forward on his knees and hovers for a second with one hand touching Theo’s spine lightly for balance. As his cock comes into frame, Liam has to bite back a visceral groan. He remembers this penis. It’s the same tanned one with the curve and the punishing length from that first deepthroating video of Theo’s that Liam watched in the shadows of his dorm room, seemingly ages ago now.

“Gonna pump another hot one in you,” Camera Man’s deep voice says. That’s all the warning he gives before he’s gripping Theo’s hips inescapably between his hands and spearing him on that long cock.

The shot captures the side of Theo’s face as his mouth opens in shock and his eyelids flutter from the impact of Camera Man bottoming out so fast. Then Theo’s head drops between his shoulders, and it looks like it’s all he can do to hang on as the top pulls back and barrels forward in a long, brutal stroke.

The third thrust seems to touch something electric inside Theo that has his spine arching and his limbs spasming for balance. The top chuckles a little and adjusts his angle, seeming not to strike that spot again for a long time. Seconds, moments, a minute later, he hits it again, and Theo almost goes ballistic, mouth open and wetly gasping, his fists collapsing into shaky fingers that claw at the sheets while his knees tremble and the muscles of his ass visibly clench around the length rearranging his insides.

Abruptly the scene cuts again. It appears that Camera Man is still fucking Theo, though now it’s significantly less clear if it’s the same fuck as earlier or a later one. Theo’s sweat-drenched crop top is nowhere to be found. Instead, his bare back glistens in the dim light, highlighting streaks of perspiration and the random pink line where someone’s stray hand dug in and scratched a little too energetically.

Camera Man’s pace is twice as fast as last time. Theo’s butt jiggles with every thrust inward. Theo groans loudly as those inches disappear inside him and carve him up, relentless and unflagging. It seems like his prostate is being tormented now with every stroke. Liam can discern, through his lust-addled haze, that the trembling in Theo’s shoulders is a telltale sign of him pouring his all into staving off his orgasm.

As the top rails Theo, those low pants and grunts spilling from Theo’s mouth quickly morph into sharp cries. The man ups his pace to a gallop and starts snapping his hips with abandon and smashing into Theo’s ass on each pass. Then he gasps and stills, twitches on camera, and floods Theo’s insides with another steaming load that has Theo muffling a moan into his stacked forearms.

Camera Man gets elbowed out of the way by some thick white dude who wastes no time sinking right into that squelching hole. He’s shorter than the previous guy, but thicker than Liam has seen in a while. As he slams inside, Theo cries out and loses his balance completely, pitching forward onto his chest and just barely holding his rear up on his abused knees.

The thick guy fucks Theo with a savagery like he’s got something to prove. He spanks Theo’s round butt cheeks intermittently, too, with a lazy sort of arrogance, like he’s only half interested in the way the beautiful globes bounce and redden under his rough touch.

Another jumpcut, and the brutal guy is folded almost halfway over Theo for leverage to pile-drive into his hole. Theo is whimpering ceaselessly now: he’s got his face smooshed into the middle of the mattress and the top’s hand pinning him there by a firm hold on the back of his neck, while one of Theo’s arms is yanked backward over the small of his back and held there by the man’s other hand and used to rock him back and forth like a cocksleeve on the dick impaling him.

“Good boy. You’re being such a good boy,” one of the bystanders from the couch calls out, sounding somewhere halfway between a comforting dom and a lax bro at a frat party.

“Gonna fill you up. Gonna mark you inside, breed you, come inside you so deep you won’t get it out,” the thick guy promises in a guttural voice.

The frame cuts, and now it’s a shot from below, camera resting on the mattress to capture the brutal guy’s pullout as his still-twitching cock retreats and not a second later, a splatter of cream shoots out of Theo’s hole.

“Holy fuck, that’s hot,” some new dude’s voice marvels.

The other men in the room voice their incoherent approval. Someone reproves “Jack” for railing Theo senseless, but the answering huff lets the viewers know that the brutal guy doesn’t give a shit.

“Fuuuck, that is super hot,” the new guy goes on praising Theo. “Wow. Wow, you did so well. Took all those loads like a champ. I’m gonna just lick you a little bit and have a taste now, okay? Is that okay? You just lie there and relax. I got you.”

Then he dives in with open mouth and outstretched tongue and laps up the stream of come from Theo’s hole like it’s his personal favorite dessert.

Liam’s dick jumps and weeps a torrent of precome in his hand as the video audio floods with the beautiful sounds of Theo’s panting, broken babbling.

The final cut of the video captures the same view from below of a dick entering that soaked hole—the top presumably being the latest new guy—and the tan of his skin colliding in gentle slaps with Theo’s pale butt cheeks, mottled all over with pink and red from various handprints and lightly forming bruises. This top’s touch on Theo’s body is feathery, barely there, and he balances on his own knees while keeping only the lightest of fingers brushing over the small of Theo’s back to encourage him back and forth onto the dick inside him.

There’s something different about the way Theo is groaning with this top. Perhaps he’s all fucked out and just trying to ride this to the end; or maybe the new guy is hitting places inside him that none of the others managed to. Or maybe, Liam thinks, it could even be the soft praises that this man murmurs to him, interspersed with soothing strokes of his fingertips down Theo’s spine. Good boy, you’re absolutely amazing, he keeps saying, and it seems to be shooting Theo right toward a prostate orgasm.

When the top grunts out that he’s coming, he pulls out just enough for his head to be visibly kissing the rim of Theo’s hole as the first rope of come jets out. He keeps pumping his cock, and then seconds later, as he’s still climaxing, he shoves his entire length back in and finishes coming inside that sopping, ruined hole.

The pullout this time is the messiest and hottest fucking thing Liam has laid his eyes on. Theo’s hole is red-rimmed and raw and spasming, like it doesn’t know how to close anymore. It keeps winking and spitting out more globs of white. The come spills out of him in waves. Every few seconds, Liam is sure he’s done, but then the top coos softly at Theo to push out more—and he does.

It’s the final giant spurt of white and the way it lands on the bottom of Theo’s pouch, and then Theo shudders and comes into his own jockstrap with a visible growing patch of damp, that has Liam shouting as he falls over the edge.

The video fades out on an obscene close-up of Theo’s gaping hole. Liam, dazed, doesn’t hesitate.

He adds the video to his private favorites and then rewinds to the beginning to watch it again.

—

Liam ends up leaving the apartment half an hour later to clear his head. He wanders around the little downtown area at the foot of their mid-rise building, phone clutched in one hand, the fingers of his other hand woven through his overgrown locks in barely tamped down distress.

A text jolts him from his reverie.

Theo: Didn’t eat my soup?

He almost taps on the notification reflexively, before catching himself and swiping it away so as not to activate his read receipts. Seconds later, another one comes through.

Theo: Were mushrooms and wild rice too philistine for you?

Liam swipes away that notification, too, caught up in a sudden fury. The emotions are crowding in his skull and he can’t tell anymore where the pathetic jealousy ends and the wallowing self-pity begins.

After only a moment’s hesitation, he navigates to his contacts and rings the one person he knows he should have called sooner to screw his head back on straight.

“Getting ready for date night and shaving as we speak, so make it good,” Mason jests the second he picks up.

Liam sucks in a breath. “Um.” The air shudders out of him, and then suddenly he’s glaringly aware that he’ll burst into tears in the middle of the filthy LA sidewalk if he doesn’t confess everything now. “Theo and I had sex.”

A moment of strangled silence ensues. Then the speaker of Liam’s phone grates and crackles with the unholy shriek of his best friend on the line.

“About damn time, Liam Eugene Dunbar! Didn’t I call it as soon as you told me about him from your calculus class? Huh? Didn’t I?” When Liam doesn’t answer, Mason’s tone drops in instant and comical worry. “Liam. What did you do.”

“We…might have had sex for the first time on camera for one of our JustFans videos and it was really fucking hot and he blew my mind and I was pretty sure I blew his mind too, and it was up in the air whether we were gonna do it again but it’s not, like, explicitly off the table, like in fact I’m seventy-five percent sure he suggested that we should do this again, but he’s over at some other guy’s place right now after filming with a bunch of guys and I may or may not have watched the video of that exact session like a total of three times and I feel like crying or kicking myself and I’m a total bucket of disgusting green slime,” Liam cries out in a rush.

“Oh, dear.” Liam can picture it: Mason letting his razor clatter in the sink so he can slap his palm to his forehead and sink down on the nearest soft surface to process the new heights of his best friend’s idiocy.

“It’s a lot to process,” Liam acknowledges, shifting from foot to foot. He wonders if he should go into this shop and have a pistachio latte to calm down about it. But then that’ll only drench his system in caffeine, and besides, laying eyes on the icy green drink will only remind him of Theo’s kindness to him after they filmed together, and that ever-warm and fuzzy feeling that exploded in his chest when he woke up and his roommate was there after running out into the rain to take care of him.

Mason hums. After a couple seconds, he sighs, “Okay. Bullshit processed. First off—have you guys even kissed?”

The roaring lack of response from Liam’s end is answer enough for him.

“So let me get this straight. The guy you’ve been crushing on for two years and who, by the way, you’re probably legitimately in love with—do not fucking argue with me at three in the afternoon when I haven’t had my ginger chai, or so help me, G-d—propositioned you for a JustFans video. After you friendzoned him harder than a baseball bat in a zombie’s skull two years ago. And you, without clarifying a single ounce of your still-existing feelings for him, agreed.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do?” Liam defends himself. “Just turn down sex with Theo and live wondering for the rest of my days what it would feel like to sleep with him?”

“‘Just turn down sex with Theo’—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the twentieth-century saints thrown in too, because G-d knows you need the help,” Mason groans. “Listen, buddy. And listen carefully. This is what you’re gonna do…”

—

Liam resembles more of a sad rat boy than a roommate when he hauls himself through the front door of their apartment later that evening. Theo is perched on one of the bar stools with his elbows on the counter, two bowls of reheated soup in front of him.

“You never answered my texts,” Theo says.

Liam trudges toward him. He gives Theo a strange look and then glances down at the bowl of soup ostensibly for him, and then back up. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and looks at that, too, kind of blankly.

“Ah. Phone died?” Theo surmises, finally able to smother a bit of his irritation and worry from waiting up for Liam.

Liam shrugs. He mumbles thanks and pulls the bowl closer to himself, though he doesn’t do much besides stare at it for a while before finally picking up the spoon and digging in. Once the taste hits his palate—as Theo predicted—his eyes widen infinitesimally and then he starts scooping up more of the wild rice with some of the usual Dunbar gusto.

Theo doesn’t know what to say. There’s definitely something off with Liam today, but he’s radiating vibes that tell Theo not to pry. Not that Theo is wont to do so, anyway. He can be a nosy fucker on a normal day, but the notion of having extended conversations about feelings probably ranks number three on his list of worst fears.

The silence continues to yawn between them. The tension winds tighter in Theo’s chest like an elastic band, and he catches himself twitching where he sits, despite himself. He tries to distract himself by scrolling through his screen, but all his notifications now have to do with his recent JustFans post or some DM’s on his business Instagram account, and he doesn’t have the energy to address those tonight.

Liam polishes off his soup and leans back. He clears his throat. “Had fun last night?”

There’s an odd edge to his voice. Theo tilts his head, seeking eye contact with Liam, but the other boy refuses to grant him access.

Suddenly, Theo feels profoundly, bone-achingly tired, and he doesn’t want to talk about this. “Can we talk about literally anything else?” he ends up snapping.

“Well, shit. Was just trying to make conversation.” Liam’s face is wounded and Theo would do almost anything to wipe away that look, except he’s still simmering a little about Liam having ghosted him via text and blasting him with mixed signals right about now.

If he’s honest with himself, all Liam has done throughout their two-year friendship has been to give him mixed signals. Theo’s brain hurts.

“If you’re just gonna be judgmental about it, then don’t,” Theo bites back.

“I wasn’t—”

“Save it. You knew the kind of work I was involved in even before we lived together. You’ve got no excuse to act so high and mighty now.”

“Literally when have I ever…”

But Theo doesn’t let him finish. He sweeps up their bowls and dumps them in the sink, turning on the tap to blast them with scalding water and soap, and then shoves them in the corner to soak away the sticky rice starch and then stomps out of the kitchen to sulk in his bedroom.

—

The next week stretches out even more awkward than their last exchange after Theo’s gangbang video. He and Liam float around each other, one leaving the apartment as the other is coming home, or simply drifting through the hallway and giving each other a wide berth where in the past they would have been casually but intimately twined together at every chance they got.

Theo would strangle himself if he could. How could he have been so stupid? So cheesy, so transparent? ‘Thinking of you while taking loads’… It was as naked as a love confession, for crying out loud.

At the time, it had sounded playful and just like the right thing to do. Get on Liam’s level of mischievous titles for his next upload, and reassure Liam, too, that no matter how often he went out or how many guys he filmed with, Liam was always the one he thought of when he got off. Liam’s face and the bliss twisting up his features were the only thing he imagined now when he pleasured himself in private.

Maybe that was just the high of the moment talking. Or maybe he’d always just been in his head, and Liam had never truly looked at him that way. Had simply wanted a good, convenient lay and found Theo attractive enough to do the job.

The awkwardness between this is broken briefly on a Thursday morning as Theo is rushing around the apartment, two different neckties slung around his collar and his cuff buttons barely made up. Liam is groggily stirring fresh raspberries into their chocolate oatmeal, still in his sleep shorts and stretched-out band shirt. He doesn’t have a morning section to attend on Thursday, the lucky bastard.

Apparently the stress leaking from Theo is too much to ignore. Liam blinks at him. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. Gracie was supposed to update the slides last night at seven at the latest, and it’s less than fifteen minutes before I have to leave and she hasn’t logged on to Google Slides once. This shit is a stupid twelve percent of my final grade, too, and he doesn’t do individual grading, which is a shit teaching policy. Plus, I can’t find my good fucking necktie—”

Liam steps around Theo and places his hands bracingly on either arm. The sudden obstruction in his path forces Theo to pull up short.

Liam gazes up at him searchingly. “Breathe, Theo,” he says, and the command comes out far gentler than Theo would have expected.

Theo does.

“I’ll put your breakfast in a thermos and pack everything up for you so you can leave early, catch Gracie before class. And”—he lifts a hand to pinch one of the ties around Theo’s neck—“you should wear the pink one.”

Theo can’t move. “The pink?”

Liam nods. “Brings out the color of your eyes.” The corner of his mouth lifts in a tiny, conspiratorial smile, though Theo can’t help but think that something about it feels a little sad.

Then, before Theo can think of something sharp-witted or even coherent to say, Liam steps away to repack Theo’s breakfast and coffee and stuff them in a crinkly brown paper bag for him.

Theo accepts the proffered items with an open mouth and can only watch as Liam shuffles back sleepily toward his room with his own cooling bowl of oatmeal in hand.

“Break a leg,” Liam mumbles back at him over his shoulder.

—

Theo does end up breaking a leg and surpassing his professor’s expectations, as the stodgy old man himself admits to him on his way out of the classroom. Gracie even managed to pull her weight in the presentation and hold her own during the Q&A section.

Theo races back home with only one thought on his mind—to chuck his backpack in the corner and find wherever Liam’s hiding and crawl into his space and tell him about his utterly tiring but fulfilling day—but the lights are all, tellingly, off when he steps inside.

“Liam?” he tries anyway.

He flicks on the switch in the kitchen and finds a lime green sticky note on the corner of the bar counter. Liam has scrawled out instructions on how to assemble his special honey ham and japanese mayo sandwich for maximum freshness. Liam is normally chaos on wheels around a stove, but he prizes his cold cuts, and Theo grudgingly acknowledges that the younger man has a knack for picking the best toppings.

Theo frowns. He turns to the fridge where the whiteboard hangs. There at the top in blue marker is Liam’s handwriting. 7:00 P.M. Garrett.

Something flares irrationally in Theo’s chest. He crumples up the note in a fist and stares at that innocuous little appointment time, breath coming fast and heavy through his nose, and he tries in vain to bat the images from his mind of Liam undressing and rolling onto his back on a mattress and spreading his legs for another guy to slot between.

Despite his best efforts, the images keep inundating him: a head bobbing up and down as Garrett sucks on Liam’s beautiful cock and brings him to the edge. Fingers teasing Liam’s rim, that pink and elastic and ever enticing thing that Theo had his own dick encased in not so long ago. A body rocking back and forth into Liam and tasting that delicious heat and toe-shivering clench.

Theo sits at the bar and assembles the scrumptious sandwich ingredients left behind by Liam, and starts chewing the sandwich feeling for all the world like it tastes like cardboard, and he doesn’t turn on any other light in the apartment and broods instead in the dimness.

—

As Liam turns the key in the lock and pushes open the door, he’s greeted by a barely lit apartment. He tamps down an instinctive shiver from the déjà vu.

Theo is here this time, though. He hasn’t left Liam to arrive home all alone. Liam can tell from the sliver of light emanating from the crack beneath Theo’s bedroom door.

Liam isn’t as bone-tired as he usually is coming home from a shoot with Brett, but Garrett has always had a surprising amount of athletic stamina in his compact body, leaving Liam with a faint and tolerable ache in his muscles. He would have showered at Garrett’s, but something had told him to make his way home as soon and with as little fuss as possible. That something, perhaps, might have been the little memory of Theo’s bright green eyes widening and going glossy in shock as Liam tugged at the pink tie around his neck.

He didn’t explicitly tell Theo he was going on another shoot today, though. The reminder was up there on the whiteboard, of course, but Liam broke their customary hollered farewell or text update on his whereabouts for the afternoon. The other something niggling at the back of his mind—the one that made a habit of amplifying every doubt and insecurity inside him—whispered to him to test his theory.

To see what Theo’s reaction would be like if Liam, too, served him a dose of his own medicine from the night Theo went and filmed with four guys without letting Liam know where he was or what time he’d be coming back.

To know, once and for all, if Theo’s chest has been thrumming with a twin pang of jealousy every time Liam is with someone else, ever since that video they filmed together, or if Liam hallucinated his gut feeling after all.

Theo’s door opens and floods the hallway with lamplight as the older man strides toward him and steps right up into his space.

“The—Theo?” Liam stammers.

There’s an inscrutable gleam in Theo’s eyes, one that is thrown into high relief by the streams of light from one side that disappear into shadow on the other. He’s staring down at Liam with a strange rebirth of that intensity that always simmers beneath the glances he shares with Liam on ordinary days. It makes Liam truly shiver this time, the sudden reminder of how Theo had gazed him up and down on the bed before crawling over him and thrusting into him on camera. How predatory he had seemed, how devoured Liam had felt under every movement of that body and every flick of those eyes.

Theo glides forward again. Just one step closer, and their chests would be flush against each other.

“You,” Theo declares, “are the single most utterly, incredibly frustrating person in the world.”

Liam’s eyes widen. Instinct has him backing up, but only an inch exists between him and the shut door behind him. His voice pitches up. “Theo?” he asks again.

“I bet you don’t even know what you’re doing,” Theo goes on, as if his roommate’s pulse isn’t visibly racing beneath his skin. “That’s the kicker of it all. Playing games is fun, yeah? Especially when both players know the rules. Can identify the rules.”

“You’re making zero sense, Raeken,” Liam tells him. He’s disappointed with himself for how his voice lacks conviction. But something about the way Theo’s gaze pierces him, pins him in place, the entirety of his attention zeroed in on Liam, is doing things. Stirring long-dampened butterflies in his stomach. Breathing a heady concoction into his brain. Making him feel faintly lightheaded and a little bit weak on his knees.

“I should be the one telling you the same thing,” Theo says, tone gravelly. He closes the gap between them. Then there’s a thump, and, oh, that’s one of his hands pressing against the surface of the door on one side of Liam’s face, nearly bracketing him in. He fills Liam’s senses with his eyes, his scent, his simmering energy.

Now Liam’s attention couldn’t be diverted to anything else in the vicinity, even if he tried.

“You have no idea what you do to me,” Theo goes on.

Liam blinks and swallows noisily. “Annoy the shit out of you?” When Theo stares at him, Liam clarifies, “You’ve…uh…told me lots of times.”

“If only that were all,” Theo laughs bitterly.

“Okay, to be fair, the feeling’s fucking mutual,” Liam snaps. He’s recovered a smidgen of his wits, enough to draw himself up to his full height and poke Theo in the chest within his limited range of movement. “You’re so confusing and—irritating and…caring to the point of nagging and yet you do it all while flexing your muscles and, like, mewing to the max without even realizing you’re doing it, and you don’t even understand how you make me mad.”

Theo stills, like the breath has been shocked out of him. His eyes swing back and forth between each of Liam’s, searching. His head cocks and his lips purse for moment: considering. The flame in his eyes then shifts into a twinkle that Liam recognizes all too well. He knows Theo’s about to enact some ridiculous mischief, and oh, no, he is not going to stand for—

Well.

That’s.

That’s Theo’s hand.

On Liam’s dick.

Gripping him right through the fabric of his sweatpants.

Liam didn’t even know before right this second that he’d been arguing inches from Theo’s face while being rock hard. Which is preposterous to think, really, because he just got fucked by another guy and decently tuckered out, and normally he needs to be looking at someone’s bare skin or at the very least imagining it for his dick to get appropriately ready for sexy times.

“Tell me if this isn’t what you want,” Theo says generously. Except the serious question is undermined by the unmistakable touch of amusement in his voice.

“Hngh,” is Liam’s intelligent reply.

Theo doesn’t move to withdraw his hand or to tighten his grip around Liam, either. He simply rests his hand there, fingers gripping loosely around the thickness of Liam’s member, and lets the soupy thought process of confusion to arousal to irritation to acceptance all play out clearly on Liam’s face.

“If you—” Liam struggles and ceases to put his thoughts into words. He clears his throat as his wriggling unconsciously presses his cock closer against the heat of Theo’s palm. He tries again. “If you wanted me to be filming with you today instead of Garrett, you should’ve just said so.”

“Really,” Theo says dryly. “That what you think this is about?”

This time, he grants Liam a bit of relief and tightens his grip infinitesimally. A long, guttural moan escapes Liam’s throat without his consent, and he bangs his head back against the solid wood of their door and lifts his hips upward to increase the pressure on his dick.

“Don’t—don’t lie,” Liam pants. His breaths are so close to Theo’s that they could be one and the same. “Don’t lie when your hand is telling me a different story.”

“Hm,” says Theo, and then he shifts his left hand from the door down toward Liam’s neck where he can carefully place his fingers against a collarbone and pin him to the surface.

Liam’s cock palpably twitches between them.

Something like a growl emanates from Theo’s chest. He, too, apparently decides to dispense with pretenses. He strokes Liam’s shaft vigorously through the fabric barrier and twists his wrist on every upstroke, digs the side of his thumb into the clear shape of the underside of the head, drinks up the low and broken cries of pleasure from Liam with a flash of satisfaction in his own eyes.

Swiftly, Theo draws back just enough to unbuckle the inconvenient belt around his jeans and shoves the waist down just enough to yank the zipper open and free his own throbbing length straining at the confines of his underwear. Liam, distracted, dips his head down to watch the twitching and pulsing of Theo’s cock through his briefs. Grunting in impatience, Theo uses his hold on the side of Liam’s neck to tilt his chin back up with a single thumb, and then he smashes their bodies together, thigh to thigh, cock to cock, chest to chest, and starts frantically humping him.

More cries of mindless debauchery spill from Liam’s open mouth as Theo buries his face in the unoccupied side of his neck and bites and sucks and licks his way up and down the unbroken skin. He wonders idly if Theo can smell Garrett’s strong cologne there. Garrett always sprays himself where the oils will most permeate, in his elbows and collarbones and in the very crook of his neck. Liam doesn’t wear anything himself. He wonders, more strongly and urgently, what his natural scent even smells like to Theo, for the older boy to be chasing after it so fervently every time they’re pressed together like this.

It’s not nearly enough, any of it. Liam gyrates his hips to add to the hot, delicious pressure of their clothed cocks brushing against each other. Every time Theo humps at him, Liam meets him there halfway. The impact is almost like a collision. It should be painful, but instead it makes Liam feel like he’s seconds away from creaming his pants untouched like a goddamn teenager.

A part of him should be embarrassed by this fact. The other part just wants to grip Theo back and give him a taste of karma, let him feel even an ounce of what he’s compelling Liam to feel in this moment.

So he does. He shimmies a little so his one hand that was hanging on to the back of Theo’s neck for dear life can twist upward and thread through the hair there and gently yank. With his other hand he reaches down and finds Theo’s cotton-clad cock and squeezes.

Theo hisses through his teeth. The sound is like lust embodied to Liam’s ears.

There’s a beat, and then abruptly Theo pulls away from him. The space where previously he was plastered to Liam’s neck, his clavicle, where their groins were grinding against each other without a centimeter between them—it’s all a cold rush of air now. Liam looks up at him, wet-lipped and desperate and stupid.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing,” Theo says through a heavy pant. He grabs Liam’s hand by a pair of fingers around his wrist and gently displaces it from his dick.

“Wait. What. Are we stopping? What is—why are we doing this?” Liam blinks, several times in a row, feeling sobriety knocking distantly at his brain. “Hold on. Is there a video I agreed to make with you that we’re practicing for and I don’t know about?”

Deliberately, telegraphing every movement, Theo lifts a hand to press down on the faintly forming bruise he left just above Liam’s left collarbone. Then he raises the same hand to his mouth and sucks sensually at the thumb.

Maintaining eye contact, he murmurs, “Maybe.”

“Huh?” Liam glances down at them, at the woeful inches of distance that now exist between their bodies, and spots both of their dicks still tenting obscenely through their clothes. He glances back up. “You’re not—you’re not just gonna stop and leave me like this, are you?”

Theo smirks this time. “Maybe.”

Liam lets out a frustrated little growl. Before Theo can turn away from him fully, Liam lunges forward and seizes him by the wrist. Fury painting his eyes, Liam fixes him with a death glare and then brings Theo’s fist up to his mouth and bites down on the knuckles.

Theo stiffens. Neither of them look down, so there’s no way of actually witnessing how his cock just filled again, impossibly, and twitched with arousal so heightened it’s painful. But no need: the vengeful glint in Liam’s eye is enough confirmation.

This time it’s Theo’s turn to stammer out: “What—Liam?”

Liam doesn’t say a word. Smirking back at Theo, he drops the toothmarked hand from his and shoulders past his roommate and down the hallway into his bedroom.

“Night, Theo,” he calls over his shoulder, and slams the door shut.

Ostensibly to get on his bed and finish privately beating his meat like there’s no tomorrow.

—

Liam has flipped the script, somehow. Theo fully intended to corner him and ruin him last night in the foyer. Make him feel held, pinned, owned.

Instead, it’s Liam who seems to have wriggled out of that encounter having gleaned far more understanding of the situation between them than Theo will ever have.

Theo flounders in Liam’s exuberant presence in the kitchen the next morning, feeling like a king that just realized he’s been a pawn all this time on a much different playing field than the chess board he previously occupied.

“So,” Liam pipes up around an orange as Theo is slicing his avocado toast. “What are your thoughts on me fucking you against the fridge?”

Theo almost drops his tomato knife and he’s pretty sure he loses twenty brain cells trying to process that question. “What? You mean right now?”

“Oh! No, silly.” Liam rolls his eyes. “I didn’t mean you as in you specifically, I meant you as a general you. Y’know. The gay population at large.”

Then, without waiting for a proper answer from Theo, Liam ambles away, still sucking on the fruit in his hand.

—

Another time, Theo walks past the living room on his way to the bathroom and catches Liam sitting criss-cross on the couch, gazing thoughtfully at the full-length mirror hanging on the back of their coat closet.

Apropos of nothing, Liam says, “Mirror sex could be a good concept, y’know. Except we’d have to move the mirror to another door, preferably yours ’cause it opens up directly across your bed.”

“Um,” says Theo.

“We’d need the mirror directly across the bed so then the camera captures the shot perfectly in our reflection when I fuck you from behind,” Liam goes on conversationally. “Full frontal view of you.”

Theo says faintly, “What?”

Liam shrugs and shifts his gaze up to smile beatifically at him. “Don’t mind me. Just brainstorming.”

—

The third time Liam torments him, it’s as he’s wandering around the hallway with his toothbrush in his mouth—because he’s one of those restless toothbrushers—and Theo is sitting defenseless at the dining table with his homework.

“This doorway is perfect, actually,” Liam says, patting the lintel on either side of him in the entryway to the kitchen. He’s also, infuriatingly, one of those people who can talk intelligibly around the toothpaste dribble in his mouth.

“Uh,” Theo starts cautiously, half his attention still tied up with organic chem. “Perfect for what?”

“Oh!” Liam beams around his toothbrush. “A side shot of me giving you a standing fuck.”

Theo’s brain record scratches to a halt. “Liam,” he says, harried.

“No, no, believe me, I’ve seen it work. I brace myself against one side and you hold on to the other, and it’s the perfect stability for me to be able to deep dick you.”

Theo regrets, not for the first time, ever introducing Liam to the world of camboy filming and unlocking the tortuous little dirty talker in him that Theo never knew existed.

“No need to say yes right now,” Liam says, eyes all crinkled up from smiling around his ridiculous rainbow toothbrush. “Just give it some thought.”

—

It comes to a head when Liam is dawdling by the whiteboard in the kitchen one afternoon, head cocked and the blue marker uncapped in his hand as he visibly debates what name to put down for his next appointment of the week.

Theo doesn’t care if it’s for show or not. This game, whichever version of it Liam thinks he’s playing, ends now.

He strides to the tiny space between the fridge and the island bar and slaps his hand down against the counter. With the other he snatches the marker clean out of Liam’s grasp.

Liam turns his head to him, not even seeming remotely fazed. He looks at him, summer light dancing in lake blue eyes, like ha, there you are; I’ve been waiting for your move all this time.

“Forget Ass Biter or Turkey Carver or Cologne Department at Macy’s Guy. You’re not filming with them this week. You’re filming with me,” Theo says in a rush.

Liam lifts both brows. It’s adorable, how he thinks he can appear insouciant at a time like this, when he can’t even control a single eyebrow and his pupils are dilating with desire in the same breath. “Is that so?”

“Very much so,” Theo says vehemently. “And you’re fucking me.”

“Am I?”

Theo gives a curt nod. “You’re fucking me hard, and you’re giving me at least two orgasms while you’re at it. On your bed in five minutes, if you please.”

The breath leaves Liam in a heady little rush. “Sir, yes, sir,” he replies with a cheeky grin.

He even has the gall to slap Theo on the butt as the older man retreats to his room to undress.

—

“Well, that’s different,” Liam says with hooded eyes as he rakes his gaze appreciatively down Theo’s physique. Theo is flopped over on his belly on Liam’s quilted bedspread, stark naked save for the dark blue and red jockstrap framing the sides of his ass perfectly. He’s seen himself on camera with this jockstrap. He knows it rounds out his cheeks to bubbly perfection, enough to make anything that lives and breathes salivate with anticipation.

Theo wiggles his butt up at Liam, suggestive and impatient all at once. He turns his head to the side on the pillow clutched in his hands so he can speak. “Not that new.”

“Oh, that’s right. You wore it in a recent video, didn’t you?”

The teasing hasn’t left Liam’s tone. Theo doesn’t know how he feels exactly about this new development—this confidence in Liam and how he can wrap Theo around his little finger in a second. Liam’s grown bolder by the day, and Theo’s little stint of confrontational humping by the door was evidently a tactical mistake.

Theo glances back over his shoulder at Liam. The younger man is much closer than he originally thought. He’s standing pressed against the foot of the bed and reaching forward to stroke down each cheek, along the cleft of his ass, and finally give gentle rubs with the pad of his thumb over the edges of his rim.

The sudden contact makes Theo arch and gasp, catlike, getting up on his damn hands and knees. Whether to shimmy away from the touch or to prepare himself to shove back further into it, he couldn’t tell you.

“Not just—recent,” Theo pants through the exquisite torture of Liam continuing to circle his sensitive hole with his thumb.

Liam laughs. “Very recent?”

The way he says it tells Theo everything he needs to know. Liam did watch his gangbang video. And Liam’s not angry about it, per se. Oh, no, it’s much worse.

It sounds like Liam enjoyed every filthy second of it, and he’s intent on marking Theo up inside in exactly the same way.

“You’re a fucking tease—” Theo manages to get out, though he voice truncates in a sharp gasp at the end as Liam’s thumb abruptly digs in and sinks into his hole and pulls.

Theo’s stretched and slick with lube. He knows how big Liam is—has memorized and fantasized about the guy’s size in his dreams—so he’d prepped himself to the point of excess. Still, it takes him off guard when Liam opens him up with a single downward flick of his thumb and lets the cool air rushing into his channel.

“So pretty,” Liam whispers. “You’ve always been so smooth down here, but like—damn. You’re looking extra pink and raw and ready for me.”

Theo groans from the bottom of his chest.

Liam wiggles the tip of his thumb in his hole. “You like the sound of that? Me just shoving in and pounding you into the mattress till you’re crying?”

Fuck, where was this dirty-talking, toe-curlingly confident Liam two years ago? If Theo had had any idea this was how Liam was in bed as a top, he would have climbed the guy ages ago, dignity be damned.

“I’m gonna open you,” Liam promises, and oh, he’s much closer now. He’s leaning forward to speak into Theo’s ear, and the movement has him pressing the blazing heat of his furry chest to the center of Theo’s back already beading with sweat.

When Theo twitches beneath him, Liam goes on, “Oh, yeah. I’m gonna open you up on my cock, and you can moan and bitch about it if you want, but I’m gonna fuck you wide and then I’m gonna have you gaping by the end of this.”

“Fuuuck,” Theo whimpers into the pillow.

“Gonna give the camera a closeup when we’re done. Show them how open you are and how ruined and sloppy your hole is. Heck, you’re gonna be so wet down there. You’ll be dripping all over yourself and that’s only gonna be from one load.”

Theo is suddenly and urgently aware of a hot weight resting between his ass cheeks. Liam’s cock. Without a visual on it at the moment, it feels thicker and weightier than Theo ever remembered or imagined it.

Theo has enough wherewithal to pant out a few times and catch his breath and tell Liam, “It’s your sheets. Your laundry, your funeral.”

Liam honest-to-G-d snickers. “You’re forgetting we do our laundry together. Sucks to have your bedsheets rubbing against mine in the washer next time,” he says with mock sympathy, and then he’s spearing into Theo without warning.

Theo lets out an aborted, strangled cry that tapers off into a whimper. G-d, it’s like a telephone pole between his legs. Yeah, he may have been the one to all but drag Liam by the ear into the room to fuck him, but he’s allowed his little histrionics.

Liam seems to derive a not insignificant amount of satisfaction by the force with which Theo clenches around him, twitching and spasming, and struggles to breathe.

Still, there’s the sweet side of him that will never disappear, as Theo soon finds out. A warm hand presses against his spine and strokes along the small of his back.

“Shh, you’re okay, you’re fine,” he says, as if he thinks Theo’s already crying. Please.

“Ugh,” Theo groans. “Ow. Ah. Ah.”

Liam leans forward to stroke a hand through his hair, in the process carelessly sinking in a few more millimeters. He shushes Theo again and rubs a circle around the soft skin behind Theo’s ear in apology.

Still, he’s a little shit: “See what I mean about the Yeti bottle? My ass?”

“You’re an asshole,” Theo grits out. “You planning on fucking me in the next century?”

“Only when you stop strangling my dick like a C-clamp,” Liam informs him. “Seriously, were you a corkscrew in another life?”

“If you think shitty puns are gonna make me feel better, well, I’ve got—”

Theo never does get to tell Liam what he’s got, because the younger man chooses that moment to pull back and then seat himself inside to the hilt.

Liam gets to work fucking him with long, dragging, well-timed strokes. He has the consistency and the force of a drill hammer, and the way he moves his hips tells Theo he’s got the stamina to match.

“Sorry, honey. What was that?” Liam rumbles, all saccharine.

Theo has all of three brain cells left to reply, “Hngh,” and then clutch at the sheets and submit himself to the deep dicking.

It takes about a minute of steady fucking for Theo to relax enough that Liam’s girth no longer detonates alarm bells in his brain but instead starts to feel like a delicious, achy intrusion. The moment his body unspools completely, Liam pops that last inch or so inside his hole, and Theo is soaring in that floaty headspace where he starts to reconsider his atheism.

Liam stretches him, fills him, pushes in and demands space and attention and crowds out all other pesky thoughts. He’s fiery inside like a brand, almost to the point of scorching. Theo’s not sure he’s been fucked before by a cock this hard. It’s honestly a little intimidating and titillating at the same time.

Well, serve him right for humping Liam like a dog and then ruining his orgasm, Theo supposes.

(He’s not sure yet where they stand yet with evening the score on Liam holding Theo’s heart hostage for two years, though. He’ll have to get back to that when his brain is no longer oozing out his dick.)

At some point Liam’s hands migrate from his hips to the straps of his jock. Those wide, calloused fingers wind their way through the elastic bands and twist for leverage. The shift of weight has the edges digging into the soft skin below Theo’s belly, makes him whine a little at the uncomfortable sensation that has his toes curling again at how held and kept he feels. Liam taking what he wants, dragging him up and down his cock by his grip on a single piece of flimsy underwear.

“You’re so hot. You’re so hot, you’re so tight, you’re literally burning up inside, oh, G-d,” Liam pants.

Theo can’t help the punched-out snark. “Thanks—for the—free thermometer—check up my butt.”

Liam smacks him square on the ass just for that comment. As Theo howls, mainly for show, Liam yanks him back by the jockstrap and something audibly rips.

Theo’s mouth drops open in instant outrage. As Liam goes on railing him like nothing’s amiss, Theo demands, “Did you just—fucking—rip my—underwear?!”

“Mmhm,” Liam hums with not a care in the world.

“That was new, you idiot.”

“Yeah.”

“That was designer.”

“Mm, didn’t feel like it to me.” Liam thrusts, thrusts, thrusts.

“I bought that—paid—for it—full price.”

“Well, that makes you the idiot.”

“I swear to G-d—”

“Are we gonna argue about the price of your underwear or are you gonna shut up so I can actually fuck you?”

“You tell me,” Theo snaps over his shoulder, even as Liam starts pounding him in earnest. “How would—you feel—if it was your briefs—or your—”

“For Christ’s sake.” Liam yanks his cock out, flips Theo over onto his back with a dizzying display of strength, and rams back inside in the space of two seconds.

Theo howls as he’s impaled.

Liam falls forward on his elbows to bracket Theo in and bite meanly at the shell of his ear. “If you…insist on…arguing ’bout this…least…do it…face-to-face,” Liam snarls at him.

Theo’s hips ache as he’s spread wide but it’s the measliest trade-off for the absolute explosion of color that floods his senses as Liam’s cock scrapes against his prostate at this angle. It’s relentless, too, a pressure building with every piston of Liam’s hips and every consistent slam against that bundle of nerves that nukes the last remaining brain cell in Theo’s skull.

He doesn’t realize he’s been clawing at Liam’s back until he hears Liam hissing and feels him biting again on his ear, his shoulder, his collarbone. The scrape of teeth alone along the base of his neck has Theo coming with a raw shout.

Liam isn’t even remotely done. He doesn’t slow down through Theo’s orgasm, just pounding into him as every strike on Theo’s prostate milks the come for a seemingly endless period from his slit. His chest is ruined, his chin marked up and wet. There’s sticky spend all over his stomach and Liam pressing down further into him for the leverage to rut into him only serves to spread the come everywhere.

It’s disgustingly hot and Theo finds, to his mild shame, that he’s probably ready to come again in a minute, just from this.

“Darling,” Liam croons. His bangs are damp and hanging in his face. Drops of sweat trickle from his temple. “What’s wrong? Don’t you wanna argue now?”

He gives Theo’s nipples then a vicious tweak, and Theo cries out ah, ah, ah and starts coming all over again.

“That’s what I thought,” Liam says, smug. He gets up further on his knees and jackrabbits into Theo’s squelching, spasming hole until Theo’s screaming and Liam is climaxing like an inferno inside him.

When Liam finally slows and fades to a relatively gentle stop, he’s gasping for breath just as heavily as a limp and ruined Theo beneath him. Liam groans. He’s still spurting a little, the trickles of the last vestiges of his load seeping lazily into the soft heat of Theo’s overworked hole.

“Wow.” Liam blows out a breath. “If I’d known sooner that this is the thing that shuts you up…”

Theo drops his head back down against the uncomfortably warm pillow and moans at the ceiling. “Do you have to be such an insufferable brat.”

“Brat? Hold on a minute. If I recall correctly, you dragged me over here and you were the one that told me that we were fucking today.”

“Yeah, ’cause you never know how to get with the fucking program.”

“Nah.” Liam’s grin is loose and tired and easy. “I think I get with the ‘fucking’ program just fine.” As though to prove a point, he wriggles his hips and gives his half-chubbed cock a g-ddamn flex that Theo feels to the very nerve endings in his soles.

“Fuck off, dude, you’re just showing off now.”

“Oh, am I? Sorry, I’ll just get out of your—”

As he makes to pull out, though, Theo hooks both heels around the back of Liam’s butt and shoves him back in securely. “Not a chance.” He winces and adjusts himself, still oversensitive. “And not the thing you had to apologize for.”

“If you’re still going on about the jockstrap, then—”

“Liam.”

The younger man looks at him, and then breaks out into a boyish grin. “Is now a good time to mention that I particularly hate that jockstrap?”

“Excuse me?”

“It frames your ass so perfectly it makes me want to bite you and gobble you up like cake,” Liam says crossly. “Now, this way, you can’t ever wear it around other guys ever again.”

Theo’s eyes gleam. Oh, he is so back in the game. “Is that so?”

“It’s very much so.”

“And what about if I told you I know your credit card number and I can easily charge a replacement to your account, huh? What then?”

“Wait. How do you know my credit card number?”

“It was part of Operation Never Let You Lose Your Wallet Again, remember,” Theo reminds him impatiently. “The way I need to memorize your social security number and your dentist’s phone number or you’d be dead in a ditch somewhere. Honestly.”

“I could probably fuck you again so you shut up and stop reminding me of my mistakes.”

“Pfft. As if. I could go all day. You? I’m not so sure.”

“Famous last words, baby.”

—

They post thirteen minutes of footage on Liam’s channel under the title guys help the strap broke and im stuck inside him??

Lapsus2: how I wish I could argue with my boyfriend and be rewarded with a fucking like this every day

jamesnpeebles: here’s a new video idea: buy him a new jockstrap but in pink. @dtlabeachboy looks just sooo so juicy and edible in pink 🤤

4321BiSex: My gf showed me this video and we both got off to it multiple times. Congrats on a new subscriber 👍

bigjugs39: amazing!! u think we could get some naughty kitchen action next?

—

They do end up filming in the kitchen. Standing, to be exact, with Theo draped against the slick, cool refrigerator and Liam nailing him till his voice is wrecked.

They fuck on the coffee table, too, severely compromising the integrity of the furniture, and Theo has Liam’s legs pinned back behind his own elbows and stretched up to his ears while Theo reams his hole and then eats him out and then creams him some more.

—

Throughout it all, the titles get increasingly ridiculous and Theo finds himself increasingly tolerant of Liam’s particular brand of humor being associated with his page.

Increasingly, too, they find themselves shooting with each other and not their usual other guys. Green marker appointments on the whiteboard go old and unerased, fading with light and time. The blue with Liam’s scrawl is smeared off entirely in the process of making their third video.

It becomes comfortable, the banter they share onscreen blending seamlessly offscreen into something more barbed and mischievous than anything they used to share as just friends. The undercurrent of desire swells between them and never ebbs. Theo tastes it in the way Liam stops him in the hallway to inspect the shave job on his jawline, forty-five minutes before Theo needs to be somewhere for a final presentation, and Liam crowds him back into the bathroom to wet the razor and pat cream onto Theo’s face and carefully glide the blade over the spot high up on his cheek that he missed.

Liam feels it, too, in the way Theo taps him in the knee with two fingers when they’re sitting back in their favorite high chairs at the campus coffee shop, and Liam instinctively brings his foot up and Theo nestles it in his lap so he can redo the atrocious job Liam did with his shoelaces.

Or the way Theo looks at him when Liam thrusts his last chapter exam for his Ruins and Their Ancient History class under Theo’s nose and goes giddy about the A+ he earned on it, and Theo flips to the back just to read every last word of the essay he probably doesn’t care about under any other circumstances but that it’s Liam’s.

Or the way Liam looks back at Theo over the top of a giant glass of honey mango smoothie that Theo just mixed for them to celebrate the end of finals week approaching.

“This is, like, top ten foods I’ve tasted in the entire world, for sure,” Liam gushes. He’s got froth on his upper lip and Theo doesn’t resist the urge to reach over and thumb it away. Liam beams at him.

“Pure hyperbole, I’m sure, but since you’ve got a slew of sins against me I’ll take it,” Theo says dryly. “Any plans tonight?”

“Hm…loosely laid plans. Why?”

“Nothing. Just checking.”

Liam hums. “Well, Bella and Tommy from my coding class did invite me for drinks. Ringing out the semester and ringing in good luck for break, I guess.”

Theo hums back thoughtfully. He waits, wondering if Liam is going to mention anything about extending the invitation to him. Though he really shouldn’t presume; Liam’s classmates don’t know him, and he sure as hell isn’t Liam’s…something, to warrant being brought along with little explanation.

The thought irks him far more than it has in recent weeks.

“Well, don’t let me keep you,” Theo says, deciding to try to be mature about this. It’s not like Liam is going off to film with a guy, for goodness’ sake. “Let me know what you decide.”

Liam stares at the side of his face searchingly. “You sure you didn’t have plans for us?”

Theo swallows. “Nah. We got the weekend, right?”

Liam nods slowly. “Yeah. Right.”

Besides, Theo adds silently, who knows if Liam will be up for going out later tonight, anyway. The guy conks out before midnight at clubs.

The day passes in companionable silence. Theo is only reminded of Liam’s plans with a jolt when the younger boy emerges from his room dressed in a newer band tee and his decent-fitting brown jeans.

Theo is too caught off guard to be able to appreciate the swell of Liam’s ass in the pants. “Heading out?”

“Yeah,” Liam throws over his shoulder. “Bella was able to make it half an hour earlier so I thought I might as well go hang with them for a bit. Have some drinks, grab a bite. I’ll bring back something good for you.”

Theo would appreciate the sentiment, except that there’s a little black hole starting to gnaw at the edges of his heart. “Okay. Nothing wasabi.”

“Ha. No promises.” Liam scratches his head. “Hey, lemme know if you need a ride somewhere.”

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks.”

Liam putters around, returning to his room a couple times to apparently fiddle with his hair and then change out his jeans for a lighter pair.

A thought occurs to Theo. “What time will you be back?” He calls out to Liam as the younger boy picks through his dozen shoe options on the mat.

“Uh.” Liam narrows down his choices to the olive Converse and the maroon Vans. “Late. Not sure.”

“Oh. Was just wondering if you’d still be in time to squeeze in our B-Nine-Nine watch.”

“Nah, it’s okay, don’t wait up for me,” Liam says absently with a glance over his shoulder. His shoelace is broken, as usual. He really needs to bump that up to the top of his shopping list. “Like you said. We have tomorrow to do it together, yeah?”

There’s no response. Liam shrugs on his maroon denim jacket and reaches for his wallet and keys on the side table. As he turns around in a little circle, patting his pockets to ascertain he hasn’t forgotten anything, he glimpses Theo sitting in a crestfallen lump in his crease on the couch.

“Promise,” Liam tacks on, trying to be a little more present in the conversation.

Theo nods. “No problem. Have fun, okay?” He even smiles a little bit, the small genuine kind that brings out those rare dimples in the corners of his cheeks and softens the arch of his eyebrows.

Liam salutes back.

It’s only as he’s shutting the door, wallet in his mouth and his hands fiddling with the ancient knob to fit the key inside to latch it, that he catches Theo’s lowered voice through the crack: “I’ve only waited for you for the past two years.”

Liam freezes.

He stops breathing.

The keys drop from his fingers, the wallet from between his teeth. He bursts back inside the apartment with every single nerve ending on fire.

“What?” he gasps. “What did you say?”

Theo’s wide-eyed where he left him. “I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did. You did. I heard you,” Liam says in breathless triumph, in a wave of sickening epiphany, the kind that has his stomach in knots and somersaults. He doesn’t let Theo say another word. He simply crosses the foyer and living room in a handful of strides, gets up on his knees on the edge of the couch, grabs Theo’s face with both hands and mashes their mouths together.

Theo loves him. He’s giddy with the thought: the thought that is no longer just a hoped-for truth. Theo loves him.

Liam has loved him all this time. Has watched Theo orbit around him like the thing so fiery and bright that to have it would be to destroy everything good that Liam has ever dared to keep in his life. Has hoped and cried and plodded on, traced the profile of Theo’s face each night they sit together and watch their show, thrust down the bubbling of feelings in his chest, has thought that Theo deserves more but still prayed that he would somehow never find it.

Liam has loved him, sarcastic comebacks and fussy kitchen habits and stupidly beautiful face full of early morning irritation and all, and all this time Theo has loved him back.

Liam kisses Theo like keeping their mouths apart for a second longer would be to forget how to exist.

And Theo, after a heart-pounding second of hesitation, moves to clutch at him and kisses Liam right back.

He tastes like the honey mango smoothie they were just sharing, and shock and want and hope and doubt and desire. His mouth is warm and his lips slot together with Liam’s like they should have been doing this years ago. His hands scrabble at Liam’s back, his shoulders, reeling him in, winding tighter and keeping him there, lest Liam dissipate in a dream. Liam huffs out a breath between them and presses against the seam of Theo’s lips with his tongue, and Theo opens up for him without hesitation.

When Liam bites down on Theo’s bottom lip, a high-pitched whimper escapes the older boy. They pull apart with a wet little sound and Liam sits back on his heels, knees bracketing either side of Theo’s torso, as his eyes pingpong back and forth searchingly over Theo’s face.

“In case it wasn’t clear,” Liam pants out, “that was because I love you.”

Theo’s eyes are shining. His lip trembles. “Are you sure?”

Liam nods frantically, the ends of his bangs tickling Theo’s brow from how close they’re pressed together. “A thousand percent sure.”

“Historically, you have a pretty giant problem with communicating clearly.”

Liam sways forward to press their foreheads together. His eyes flutter shut as they breathe against each other. “Well, that just means I’ve gotta get to work showing you just how much I love you, yeah?”

Theo blinks up at him, all fragile hope and naked vulnerability.

“C’mon,” Liam whispers. With a herculean effort, he backs off the couch and stands, offering a hand to the other boy. “Let me show you.”

“What about Bella and Tommy ’n’ them?” Theo asks, even as he places his warm hand in Liam’s and lets himself be led to the bedroom.

“Shh,” Liam says with a playful smile. “Stop talking nonsense.”

They stumble into Liam’s room, trading hungry kisses, at some point with Theo hopping fully into Liam’s grasp and wrapping his ankles around the small of his back. Liam carries him forward to the bed and eases him down onto his back on the mattress like he weighs nothing. As they pull apart, Theo’s arms interlocked around the back of Liam’s neck, his eyes involuntarily flicker to the camera setup in the corner of the room.

Liam follows his gaze. He turns back with a mischievous grin. Maneuvering Theo with an astonishing and appealing display of strength, he tugs the covers out from under the older boy and flings the entire quilt over the camera and tripod. The device evidently doesn’t support the weight of the assault and topples backward with a soft crash.

Theo withdraws his arms to raise himself up on his elbows in alarm. Liam snickers and meets him halfway with a messy, love-sweet little kiss.

“That probably cost almost a thousand dollars,” Theo complains. “I don’t know why I love you.”

Liam just beams at him and kisses him again.

In between gentle pecks and deep, searching licks, Theo pants out, “Wait. Liam. I haven’t—cleaned or prepped or anything.”

Liam doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, there’s other ways I can show you a good time, aren’t there, baby?”

Theo looks up at him, radiating trust, and nods.

So Liam crawls forward on his knees and presses his boyfriend to the mattress and does just that.