The loft was the only room with just one occupant.
Everybody else was stacked on the main floor — Matt and Chris in the bunks, Tyler on the pull-out, Justin on the couch he’d claimed the first night like a dog marking a rug. I got the converted attic over the garage because I was the one who’d found the listing and arranged everything. Slanted ceiling. Skylight. A bed that sat too low and a window that didn’t catch a breeze even with the blinds cracked. Forest on three sides. River beach twenty minutes down a dirt road we kept promising we’d walk and never did.
Six of us. One isolated Airbnb. One week. Justin’s idea after Jenna dumped him three days before we left.
He’d said it in the group chat like a joke. She won’t even let me near it. Seven months and I’m out here living like a monk. Somebody book a house before I do something stupid.
I booked the house.
I was the gay one. I had been the gay one since eleventh grade, when I told him first and he said cooland then asked if that meant I was going to stop spotting him on bench. I didn’t. We stayed best friends the ugly way — the way where people assume you’re fucking and you laugh it off and you go home and you don’t laugh. He dated girls who looked at me like a mascot. I dated nobody worth bringing to a river. I liked preppy boys who smelled like Burberry Hero. I liked, in a locked folder in my head, the other thing. Guys who didn’t ask. Guys who filled a doorway. Guys who looked like Justin after practice in 2018 with his shirt off and his mouth mean.
I had not planned on telling that folder anything this week.
Saturday started with a rec-league call he never should have taken on vacation. His old coach FaceTimed from the sideline of a match Justin wasn’t even in. We were on the deck with coffee. Justin stood at the rail in grey sweats and no shirt, phone pinned between ear and shoulder, beard catching the light, watching a game two states away like it still paid his rent. When they lost he didn’t throw the phone. He set it face-down on the wood and went inside and came back with a beer at ten in the morning.
“Don’t,” he said, when Matt opened his mouth.
Nobody did.
The heat sat on the house like a hand. We swam in the river at noon and the water didn’t help. Justin stayed in longer than the rest of us, floating on his back, hair dark and dripping, eyes shut. I watched him from a towel I was supposed to be reading on. He knew I was watching. He didn’t call it out. That was new. Usually he’d yell take a picture, faggot the way you yell at a brother, and I’d flip him off, and the folder would stay locked. Today he just floated.
Dinner was burgers on a grill Tyler almost set on fire. Six guys around a picnic table that wobbled. Justin sat across from me. He’d put on the black T-shirt that made his arms look like a problem and he hadn’t said his ex’s name once, which meant he trying to forget. He drank cheap whiskey, bottle was already down a third.
Matt asked if he was going to text her.
Justin looked at me when he answered.
“She said I was disgusting for asking,” he said. Calm. Like scores. “Seven months. Wouldn’t even try. So no. I’m not texting her.”
Chris laughed. Tyler said something about rebound apps. I moved a pickle around my plate and felt the look stay on my face a second too long. Justin’s mouth did that small thing it does when he notices a tell in a game. He drank. He didn’t look away first.
After dinner we were a pile of controllers and open bags of chips on the living-room floor. I sat on the arm of the couch he was using as a bed. His shoulder burned against my knee every time he leaned for the bottle. He smelled like the river and the grill and alcohol. When he reached past me for the remote his chest brushed my arm and he didn’t apologize. Guys laughter. Somebody died on-screen. Justin’s hand landed on my thigh to push himself up and left a print of heat when it came off.
“You’re quiet,” he said, low enough that it was only for the two of us.
“I’m tired.”
“You’re watching me.”
“You’re sitting in front of the TV.”
He smiled with no teeth. “Go to bed, David. Before I say something I can’t put back in the bottle.”
I went up the narrow stairs with a bowl of jelly leftover from lunch because I wasn’t hungry and the shower was lukewarm and I still came out of it dripping.
I slept naked. There wasn’t another option. Fan on. TV on low — some British show I wasn’t watching. Window cracked. Mosquitoes ticking the screen. Sweat in the hollow of my spine five minutes after I lay down on my stomach.
I am twenty-five. Thin. Built like a guy who did track and then stopped. Almost no body hair. The opposite of him. Justin is twenty-five the way a wall is twenty-five. Six-three. Shoulders that make a black T-shirt look like it filed a complaint. Dark hair he hasn’t cut for a while, falling in his face. He says he wants a Game of Thrones warrior look. Beard thick enough to hide his mouth when he doesn’t want you to know what it’s doing.
Hairy chest, hairy arms, the kind of legs you see on a guy who still runs because he’s angry. In the photo we took the first night by the tree line he looks like he could break the camera. I look like I asked it to be my friend.
I thought the slamming was Matt dropping a controller. I thought the voice was from the TV. I went back under.
The door opened without a knock.
Weight hit the bed. Weight hit me. A body twice mine, hot, bare-chested, smelling like beer and whiskey and the sweat he’d been wearing since afternoon. A hand covered my mouth before I got the sound out.
“Shush. It’s me, buddy. Shut up and listen. Don’t make a noise and I’ll take my hand off. I don’t want the guys to know I’m here.”
Justin.
His chest hair scraped my wet back, rough, like he’d shaved for his ex months ago and then given up. Sports shorts. No shirt. The full sprawl of him pinning my hips to the mattress. I could feel every ounce of the rec-league loss and the seven dry months in the way he wasn’t asking if I was awake.
He took the hand away when I nodded against his palm.
“What the fuck, Justin.”
“Keep it down. Matt’s on the couch under the vent. Sound comes up that stairwell like a chimney.”
His mouth was against my ear. The beard scratched. The whiskey sat on his breath in a sweet ugly layer.
“My ex’s gone,” he said. “You know that. You were in the chat when I told you guys. She wouldn’t let me fuck her in the ass for seven months. Said it was disgusting. Said I was disgusting for asking. I have been jerking off in that downstairs bathroom like a teenager since we’re here and I am done. I need to fuck something. I need to fuck a proper hole.”
“Justin, you’re not serious, you’re drunk.”
“I’m not that drunk. I’ve been thinking about this since you went up these stairs tonight. I’ve been thinking about it longer than that. Don’t make me say the longer part.”
He rolled his hips once. The hard line of him dragged up the crack of my ass, shorts still on, the heat of it stupid and specific. My body did a traitor thing. It always did, with him. That was the whole secret. The preppy boy who liked choir guys to date and then went quiet when Justin took his shirt off to change a tire.
“I know you take it,” he said. “I have known since you told me you were gay. I have thought about it longer than I should have and I am not in the mood to pretend I haven’t. You don’t have to do anything. Lie there. Let me use it. I’ll be quick.”
“Justin—” my ass hole was twitching like a clitoris.
His arm slid under my throat. Not crushing. Present. Dominant. The same arm I’d watched curl a dumbbell in his garage in high school while I did our homework on the dryer.
“Two ways this goes. You stay still and keep it quiet and I fuck you real quick and this stays in this loft and tomorrow I make eggs and we don’t talk about it. Or I get sloppy and you make moan like a bitch and the other guys find out their friend came up here and put his dick in the faggot’s ass. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. You want me, David. Since high-school. Tell me I’m wrong. What’s it going to be, David.”
The door was ten feet away. I am not small enough that a drunk man is a movie villain. I could have said get off in a voice that meant it.
He would respect it. He’s my buddy.
I didn’t. I was madly in love with him since sophomore year.
I was shaking. Adrenaline and heat and the ugly thrill of the folder opening itself.
“You’re my best friend. You said I would be the godfather of your children in the future.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here and not in a bar bathroom fucking a random whore. Will you do me this favor?”
He pushed my cheeks apart with one hand. The sweat did the rest. A finger slid in with almost no fight. I bit the sheet. He made a sound in his chest I had never heard him make over a girl.
“Jesus. You’re— you’re actually open. You’re wet from the heat and you’re taking my finger like you’ve been waiting on the stairs. Answer me. I need the word, I’m not a sicko, I need to hear you let me fuck you, David.”
“Okay,” I said. It came out thin. “Okay. You can. Fuck me as hard as you can. Please.”
“Fuck yeah, buddy. Bet on it.”
That was the switch.
He went feral in the quiet way, the way a guy goes when he’s been polite too long. Spit on his fingers. Smeared it where the sweat already was. Shoved the shorts down just far enough. The cock that dragged up my ass was thick, hotter than the room, a wet stripe of sticky precum painted across one cheek. He didn’t line it up like a boyfriend. He notched it and drove.
It hurt. The sweat helped and it still hurt. I shoved my face into the pillow and the sound I made was not a TV-show sound. Justin’s whole weight settled. His mouth opened against my hair.
“Quiet. Bite it. I need to empty my balls. That’s all this is. Take it like you take it from those soft boys and don’t make me explain this to the guys downstairs. I said was gonna ask you a favor, they don’t know what type of favor.”
He fucked me like he’d lost a match.
No rhythm that cared about me. Short, brutal, the loft bed knocking the wall in a pattern I prayed would read as a fan. His chest hair sandpapered my back raw. Sweat dripped off his beard onto my neck. The arm stayed loose across my throat, a reminder, not a kill. Every thrust shoved me up the mattress and his other hand yanked me back by the hip like I was slipping off a tackle dummy.
“This is what she wouldn’t give me,” he said into my shoulder, voice wrecked. “This exact thing. Seven months of her looking at me like I was sick for wanting it. And you’ve been walking around this house in those little speeds like you didn’t know. You knew. Don’t lie to me. This ass was on the itinerary the day you booked the listing.”
“Justin—”
“Don’t say my name like that. Say harder or shut up.”
“Fuck me harder, Justin.” I pushed back because my body had stopped taking instructions from the part of me that had a savings account. He cursed, low, almost grateful, and gave me harder. The slap of his hips on my ass was wet and ugly. The loft held the heat like a mouth. I could smell him everywhere — whiskey, sweaty male body, repressed desire, the sour of a man who had not showered after drinking. I could smell me. I could smell the two of us turning into one sweaty animal on a mattress while some guys played games downstairs.
“Look at you.” he whispered, and there was a laugh in it that was not kind. “Preppy little shit. Button-ups all week. Nice shoes. That smile in the photo by the trees. And this hole just opens. You like a rough dude. You like a guy who comes up the stairs and takes it. Say it.”
I didn’t say it. My tongue was in knots with the adrenaline of what’s happening.
He put his mouth on the back of my neck and bit, not cute, and I finally said it.
“I like it. Fuck. I like it. Don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t going to. You think I climbed these stairs to be nice? To leave without dumping my load? I climbed them because my dick has been a problem since you sat on the arm of my couch with your knee on my shoulder. I climbed them because my fucking ex called me disgusting for wanting anal sex and you looked at me over a burger like I was desired. That’s the whole essay.”
He hooked an arm under my hips and dragged my ass up so he could get deeper. The angle punched something that made my knees slide apart. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He aimed there like it was a play he’d drawn on a whiteboard.
“There. That’s the spot, your clit. That’s why you’re not downstairs with a controller. You wanted a man to come up and use it. I’m that man tonight. I’m using my best friend’s ass because my ex-girlfriend thought it was nasty and you don’t. That’s the math. That’s the only math I care about until I cum.”
The bed complained. Somebody downstairs laughed at a kill-cam. Justin froze for half a second, buried to the root, breathing like a sprinter, and then he started again even meaner for having been scared.
“You hear that? That’s Matt. That’s the house. If you moan I will put my hand back on your mouth and I will not be gentle about it. You take this quiet. You take this like a secret. You were always good at secrets. You hid this from me for years.”
“I didn’t hide—”
“You hid it. I hid it. Now nobody’s hiding and you still have to be quiet. That’s the joke. I’m not gay and I don’t want my buddies to find out I’m fucking a gay ass.”
He shifted, planted a foot on the mattress, and drove down into me so deep I saw white behind my eyes. His balls slapped my skin, heavy, damp. He was talking to himself now as much as to me.
“Tight. Hot and wet. Better than I let myself think. I am going to ruin this for the next boy who thinks he gets to be sweet to you. I’m going to send you back to city walking funny and you’re going to answer my texts like nothing happened. Say you understand.”
“I understand.”
“Say use it.”
“Use it, Justin, use my pussy.”
“Good. Good boy. Good whore. Good fag. Fuck yeah.”
He was close. I felt it in the stutter, in the way his beard scraped harder, in the way the arm on my throat tightened just enough that the loft went sparkly at the edges.
“I’m going to fill you up,” he said, almost kind, which was worse. “You’re going to lie here and keep it in until morning because I want you to fantasize about being impregnated by me. You hold it. You hold my cum in your ass like a favor. That’s what this is. A favor. Say it.”
“It’s a favor.”
“Don’t rush me. I’m almost there.”
Three thrusts. Four. His whole body locked. He shoved in to the base and came with a sound he swallowed against my skin, a growl that wanted to be a roar and couldn’t afford the volume. Heat punched into me in thick pulses. He kept rolling through it, milking himself with my ass, cursing into my hair, take it, take it, take it, until the last jerk left him slumped and shaking.
He pulled out with a wet sound that made both of us flinch. I felt empty. I felt what he left behind slide down toward the sheet. He stayed on his knees between my legs for a second, panting, shorts around his thighs, a dark shape against the TV glow.
No goodbyes.
He dragged the shorts up. The door opened. The door shut soft, which was worse than a slam. His feet took the stairs like a man who still knew which treads creaked.
I lay there on my stomach with the fan doing nothing. Ass sore. Neck damp where his beard had been. The room smelled like whiskey and his sweaty presence. His sticky cum between my ass cheeks.
Downstairs someone asked if anyone wanted another beer.
Justin said, voice almost normal, “Yeah. Toss it.”
I didn’t go down.
I thought about what happened. I thought about his ex, how can a girl breakup with a perfect male specimen like Justin? I thought about my kinky secret brain folder. I thought about whether a best friend who fucks you harder in the ass is still the same best friend in the morning when he’s making eggs.
The last thing I heard before I passed out was his laugh under the vent.
It didn’t sound sorry.
It sounded like a man who had found a solution.
I already knew I’d leave the door unlocked tomorrow night.
He was going to come back.
I was going to let him use me all week.
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