A Cage for Hungry Hearts [COMPLETE]

15. Winston

The first night I stay in Domare's room, he shakes me out of a dead sleep. I panic at first, squirming under his iron grip on my shoulders, then relax when I realize it's just him leaning over me, his knee wedged up against my thigh.

"You're a menace," he says, a freaky animalistic growl underlying his words. He sounds like a dog trying and mostly failing to mimic human speech. He glares at me through the darkness. I'm surprised that I can make out his face in the pitch black room, but that scowl of his is unmistakable.

Wincing at a tight twinge in my back, I shift my weight, causing a spring in the mattress to dig deeper into one of my shoulder blades. Christ this bed sucks.

"What time izzit?" I ask.

"Nearly three." He lets go of my shoulders and sits back. It's then that I notice the tent in his pants. He turns sideways to try and hide it about the same time I realize I'm in a similar state.

"A menace," he repeats, clearly embarrassed. "I rarely have this problem."

"Not sure I'd call it a problem." I flop onto my side, nearly knocking him off the small bed. "Just go deal with it. Did you have to" I yawn mid-sentence "wake me up?"

"I don't just deal with it! I don't like it! You deal with it!"

Heat rushes through me, my mind conjuring up a fantasy of how I might do just that, until his face twists up with disgust.

"Not like that, you ingrate," he snarls. "I mean deal with yours! For Vlad's sake!"

I glare at him. My brain-to-mouth filters in the A.M. are all but gone. "I told you yesterday. Months of basic training didn't allow for a lot of fuckin' around, alright? Or did you forget what we're talking about?"

"Hard to do that," he snaps, which makes me laugh.

"Oh, shut up!" He rubs his eyes with his fingertips. "As I said, if yours goes away mine probably will, too. So go" he flaps his hand at the bathroom "handle it."

I sit up slowly, stretching and yawning all at once. "I could just go back to sleep and ignore it. It'll go away eventually."

"Winston," he practically begs. It says a lot that he's not using Ollie's nickname for me. "I really don't like this sort of thing."

Aw, hell. Of course I can't say no to that.

I groan, getting up to do as he asks. Some twenty minutes later I emerge from the bathroom in only a towel, damp from the shower and loose-limbed from release. It should've felt more awkward jerking off with him sitting knowingly in the other room, but for some reason it didn't bother me.

Apparently, my feelings on the matter are not mutual.

He brushes by me with a handful of fresh clothes, slamming the bathroom door behind him. The shower kicks back on as I flop back onto my springy rock of a bed and stare at the ceiling, feeling just a little guilty. I can make out spiderweb cracks in the concrete above me through the dark. I shouldn't be able to, but I can. I guess that's the Nexus.

Domare emerges from the bathroom a while later in a cloud of steam, a towel wrapped around his head. By then, I'm feeling awake enough to sit up and appraise his appearance. He's changed into another loose-knit sweater, gray sweatpants, and black socks. His typical sleepwear, I take it. I tend to sleep in just my sweats, so I've at least got pants on now, but my torso is bare, and I can't help but be proud of my current physique. Even straight men would glance at my torso at the very least with envy, but Domare doesn't seem to give a shit.

I really don't like this sort of thing, he'd said earlier, the words ringing through my head as if he'd dragged them to the forefront.

"Why'd you shower?" I ask meanly.