Bad Case of Loving You

She unbelted her bathrobe so it hung open and stepped up close to me. She had decent breasts, full and plump, with dark areolas and large nipples, not that I was a connoisseur of breasts.

She touched the bar through my left nipple cautiously, then the right one. “They don’t hurt,” I said. “So you can touch them more firmly.”

I pinched her nipples between my thumb and forefinger and rolled them a little, hoping to get this over, and she became more confident, trying the feel of squeezing them and pulling on the bars.

“Why?” she asked. “Why do you have them?”

“They make my nipples far more sensitive for sex,” I told her. “And I think they look hot.” I tugged on her nipples a little.

When I looked up, F was leaning against the dining room doorway, shaking his head, a look of disbelief on his face and I couldn’t help but crack a smile at him.

Lena leapt back from me, presumably when she worked out that F was standing behind her, and pulled her robe tight around herself again.

“Go on, ask Matthew about his genital piercing,” F said.

“Maybe he’ll let you play with that one, too.”

Lena made this strangled noise and I caught the glint in F’s eyes. He was an evil bastard, but I wasn’t above playing along.

“Do you want to see it?” I asked Lena, undoing the button at the top of my fly and beginning to unzip myself.

Lena looked like she was about to die of embarrassment, whereas F was nearly convulsed with laughter. She shrieked when I undid my zip completely and reached into my underwear and F let out a wheezing gasp and clung onto the kitchen bench top.

I pulled my cock out and Lena screamed, waved her hands at me, and scrunched her eyes shut tightly. I really hoped that F wasn’t going to herniate anything, the way he was laughing.

I zipped my trousers back up and began to laugh, too.

There wasn’t anything quite as good as teasing women, especially the ones who wanted to touch.

Lena rushed out of the kitchen and I heard the bathroom door slam shut. I sank down onto the kitchen floor and let myself laugh long and hard.

“Fucking hell, Matthew,” F managed to gasp. “I didn’t think you’d really do it!”

I was laughing so hard my ribs were aching, partly at F’s completely over the top reaction, but I managed to get out,

“If she turns into a fag hag, that’s your fault.”

F wiped his face and said, “Give her twenty minutes, she’ll work out what it’s for, then you can tease her all over again.”

I hauled myself back up to my feet again and picked up the two bottles of Gatorade, wondering if all the ruckus had woken Andrew.

F held out a small screw top jar. “B12,” he said. “Feed some to Andrew.”

I took the bottle. I could do with one myself.

Chapter Thirty Six

Waking up happened slowly. I was aware of sunlight slanting through wooden slatted blinds, of faint traffic noise, of someone beside me turning the pages of a book occasionally.

I could feel him breathing, and the warmth from his body soaking into mine. My body had that vaguely sore feeling that sleeping for too long gave me. I wasn’t used to lying still for that long.

The page of a book whispered again and I rolled onto my side and smiled at Matthew.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Want something to drink?”

I swallowed. My mouth was as dry as dust, and I suspected that the moment I moved, I’d know all about the size of my brain compared to the size of my meningeal membrane. “Yeah.”

Matthew leaned over the edge of the bed and sat up again, bottle of Gatorade in his hand.

I took the bottle and struggled upright, unscrewed the cap and chugged half the bottle down fast. It should have tasted vile, kind of like the lining of a child’s paddling pool, but it was a sign of how dehydrated I was that the stuff just slid down my throat, smooth as any single malt.

Matthew held out a small bottle of B12 to me, and I took it gratefully and swallowed two. F was completely reliable that way; he would never leave a guest to suffer a hangover without the appropriate remedy. I’d seen him give himself IM

B12 after a big night, before facing a full day at the hospital.

I lay back down again and I could have sworn I felt my body picking up the fluid while I lay there.

When I closed my eyes again, the pages of the book went back to whispering, and I said, “What are you reading?”

“Fiction.” Matthew sounded so pleased. I remembered the last time I’d studied so hard that I’d lost the ability to enjoy fiction. It was the most recent time I’d had a go at my physician’s exams, and it had not been pleasant. After the exam, I’d read everything that wasn’t nailed down, reveling in words that I didn’t have to be able to regurgitate at will.

It was a Tuesday morning, quite late by the feel of it, and I was in bed with my lover. Neither of us had to go anywhere, my phone was off, and I’d handed my pager in at the Enquiries desk at the hospital as I’d walked out after being fired.

It made me smile, despite how my body felt.