The Silence Between

Chapter 19

Brett leaned away ever so slightly, satisfied to see Eddy's pupils enlarging with lust. The older man peered down at him through half-lidded eyes and, growing impatient, placed a hand on his back and drew him in, subtly nudging his legs apart with a deft maneuver of the knee. Brett's temperature rose– was he losing control of the situation already? The warm hand dropped lower still, resting suggestively on the curve of his butt. Eddy leaned down and captured his lips again, parting them with his tongue and drawing out a soft moan...

"Eddy—" Brett began to say in a breathless whisper. But then abruptly, he pushed Eddy away, turned, and sneezed.

The cloud of desire in Eddy's eyes dissipated somewhat. He observed Brett with a dry stare.

Brett grinned sheepishly. "So . . . should we keep going?" Another sneeze.

". . . No thanks."

*

No thanks, Eddy had said, because he could tell that Brett was still shivering from the cold, so he had pushed Brett into the bathroom for a hot shower as if he were totally unbothered, as if he weren't the one who needed a cold rinse.

He fell onto his couch with a broken exhale and looked down with an embarrassed grimace. To think that's all it took to get it up: a look, a smile, a touch of assertiveness. Eyes, sultry and questioning that said, but don't you want me? Another second, and he might have given in too, might have tossed that silly boy in bed, consequences be damned, run his fingers over that smooth body, and fucked –

An unhealthy line of thought. He turned his mind to more unpleasant things – mushrooms, roaches – and willed his erection away.

*

"But you have to admit it was a good surprise," said Brett with a triumphant grin, feeling better about the whole thing. Clearly, Eddy could be seduced, and that was really all that he had set out to prove.

He was sitting beside Eddy on the couch now, his freshly washed hair dripping water all over the papers Eddy was trying to grade.

Eddy snorted. "Getting sneezed on was a good surprise? That's a first." He had turned up the heat so that the room was warm and toasty, but wasn't wet hair a cause for colds? Eddy retrieved the towel that Brett had flung haphazardly over a chair and rubbed it gently against Brett's wet strands. Brett leaned happily into the impromptu massage and rewarded him with a pleased, kittenish smile at the end.

"Maybe I'll try again tomorrow," Brett mused, now lying down with his head pillowed on Eddy's thighs, beginning to feel bored. He had been making stray marks and drawing faces on Eddy's papers with a red pen until Eddy took it away from him and told him to behave. "Besides, I don't see why you have to work so much."

"Some of us aren't trust fund babies. Have to learn a living somehow."

"But I can take care of you," Brett murmured sleepily. "I have enough money."

Eddy rolled his eyes skyward, hiding a smile.

"Anyway, I . . ." But it was unclear what Brett had in mind, as his sentence trailed off and his eyes drifted shut.

*

As it turned out, nothing happened the next day, because Brett practiced his duet with Hyung for too many hours and by the time Eddy brought him back, he was half dead with fatigue.

*

"It's not too bad," said Hyung, pleasantly surprised. Which was to say, it wasn't the best he'd ever heard, but for one-day notice, it wasn't awful. Perhaps he should have given Brett more credit.