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He revisits the turnstile too often. Once the idea enters His mind, there’s no removing it. Maybe that makes Him some kind of pervert. Maybe not. But the thought falls out of the recesses of His mind, onto the very alter of His daydreams and the Protagonist snatches it up with an open fist.
He has to go back.
Two days ago, by chance, He’d walked into their training facility hoping for a moment with the heavy bags. Hoping to strike something or someone hard enough to split knuckle while He pondered the end of the world. Instead, He saw Neil alone in the locker room showers.
Neil’s back was to the doorway, unaware of His entrance as the sound of bootsteps were washed away by the downpour of water hitting tile and Neil’s own absent singing voice. The Protagonist’s first thought was, ‘of course Neil sings in the shower’.
His second thought: Neil’s ass. Blossoming pink from the heat of the water. Freckles across pale shoulders. Blonde hair gone a shade too dark under the stream and clumps of suds trailing down Neil’s spine into the dark secret space between Neil’s cheeks. Right then, He wanted to cross the room, get down on His knees and lick that space until Neil pressed his pale mouth to the tiles and whispered His name. But He didn’t. Instead, He left the room and went back to His office and used a fistful of tissues to stroke Himself off.
It was stupid. In a facility dedicated to stopping the apocalypse, there were bound to be cameras. Even on Him. But He’d done it anyway and avoided Neil’s gaze at lunch.
Two days ago, watching for those few minutes, short though they had been, certainly made Him a bit of a pervert. But now, going back through the turnstile to see it again and again…He wasn’t sure what that made Him. Surely, nothing short of desperate. The Protagonist stared at Himself in the proving window, shook His head in disapproval and stepped through.
After three trips, He got his timing down to avoid His past self’s arrival.
After six trips, the movements had become rote.
After eight trips, this scene was no more a true event to Him than a recurring dream.
Mask donned, He walked in the backwards world of the past toward the only sight that had made sense to Him in years. He set his watch. He came five minutes before His past self would arrive, stepping backwards into the training facility shamefaced and awestruck all at once. He took up His vantage point back at the doorway of the showers. When He got there, He was half hard already, but had no more interest in touching His cock in this room than He had two days before.
As the days passed, this trip had become less and less about sex for The Protagonist. This was about enjoying the simple pleasures of sensuality and a moment of stolen peace before their world would begin to fall apart.
How beautiful His friend was. Even just from behind.
How still the training room was at this hour when usually there were an army of agents coming in and out, learning to defend against the worst possible outcomes.
Here, on The Protagonist’s thirteenth trip through the turnstile, those outcomes were far far away. The Protagonist watched Neil unbend from the waist up. Soap disappearing from his legs. He watched him move his palms in the wrong direction around his belly and chest. Still just as graceful. He watched Neil dip his blond head back between his shoulders and unrinse the long column of his neck. Water trekked up Neil’s body, back into the faucet from which it had come.
He’d dream about these things tonight instead of His Neil, dead in a pit in the desert with an eye missing and his brains blown out the back of his skull.
< -- >
The Protagonist’s apartment welcomes Him back with the door three inches ajar and a shadow crossing beneath the frame. The Protagonist pulls His gun and puts His back to the hallway wall before He has a second to think. Who knows where He lives? Could they be coming to kill Him? Kill Him before he gets the chance to save the world from itself? He kicks the door open fully, swings into His sitting room and holds His gun up to…Neil’s smirking face sitting on His couch as if he owns it. Sipping whiskey from The Protagonist’s cabinets. Good shit that He’d been hiding for an occasion. Well. This was an occasion.
“What are you doing here?” He finally asks, lowering the gun and fully shutting the door behind Him.
Without missing a beat, Neil says, “I thought I might take a shower. Join you for dinner and a tumble. Not necessarily in that order. How would you prefer it?”
The Protagonist falls still. If not for His deeply rich skin, His blush would be laid plain. Caught. Too caught to play anything off. Too caught to lie. He puts His gun on the table and sits across from Neil in the armchair. It swallows Him. He lifts brown eyes to Neil’s own blue and registers immediately that His friend looks nothing short of amused. Eager. Almost too eager.
Neil stands and begins to strip, knowing he won’t be stopped.
“How long have you known?” The Protagonist asks as Neil’s cobalt tie comes loose and spills at his feet.
“All you had to do was ask.” Neil answers into the glass in his left hand, pink lips smirk under a sheen of brown liquor. The fingers of his right work the shirt button at his collar until it pops and reveals his own flush steadily spreading.
So, even with all his charisma, Neil was not unaffected. It was good to know. It soothed The Protagonist’s embarrassment. “I’m asking now. How long have you known?”
“…You never once made a move,” Neil says, offended. “And I’d gone to so much trouble to leave the door open for you…”
Neil sets his glass down. His shirt comes off entirely. In the lamplight, The Protagonist can finally see the deep rose color of Neil’s nipples. The way arousal draws them tight in cool air. The Protagonist had guessed that the freckles on the back of his shoulders might extend to the front. He was right. They were like a brown sugar dusting on otherwise alabaster skin.
“What are you saying?” The Protagonists asks as calmly as He can. Not because He doesn’t understand, but because right until this moment He’d considered himself so far in the wrong it would take an act of heaven to redeem Himself. Only to possibly find out now, that He had misread the situation from the start.
Neil’s hands move to his trousers and unhook the buckle of his belt with lightning speed. He unbuttons and unzips all without losing eye contact with The Protagonist. Sweat beads at the nape of his neck under the heat of that gaze. Those eyes had been watching him, naked, for two days now – more if they counted up all the inverted time. Over and over, drinking in the sight of him and yet never crossing the line Neil so desperately wanted them to cross.
Neil began again, “I made sure our teams had other things to do besides train at that time. I made sure you didn’t have any meetings. I waited and waited and –”
“Why didn’t you just ask?” The Protagonist turns the tables.
And Neil, God help him, pushes down his trousers, steps out of the puddle they make at his ankles, and crosses the space to The Protagonist’s chair clad in nothing but his skin. “Well, a guy has to be sure about these things. Now that there isn’t a shadow of a doubt…I’ll be in the shower.”
Neil takes one step toward the bathroom and The Protagonist stands to His feet. He takes the whiskey with Him and follows. When He gets to the bathroom, Neil is already under the spray and for a moment the scene is so familiar, The Protagonist thinks He might be in a dream. He thinks He might be stuck on the other side after one too many trips. He always checks the proving window. Always makes sure He sees Himself on the other side before returning. He isn’t wearing a gas mask. The water and Neil’s fingertips are all trailing in the right direction down Neil’s chest and belly. When The Protagonist finally drops His gaze and allows Himself to see the one thing He’d only been imagining for days, it nearly undoes Him. The water, hot enough to make pale skin flush red, settles like gems in the downy bush between Neil’s thighs. It drips from the tip of Neil’s cock.
This is real. This is now.
Neil washes his skin with a fresh lemongrass soap bar The Protagonist had just unwrapped for Himself that morning. (And usually he doesn’t get that lucky so maybe just this once God actually is on his side). Neil automatically changes the game. He has no intention of letting the Protagonist pretend this is another one of His visits. Neil leans his back against the cool tile wall and washes his front, keeps his eyes on Him, smiles even as suds ripple down his hips. The Protagonist drains the last of His good whiskey. To His own credit, He has the patience to wait until Neil’s chest and belly are completely soaped and rinsed. He has the patience to watch him soak his legs clean. But as Neil’s hands reach for his cock, that patience runs out, and The Protagonist does the one thing He’s wanted to do since the start of this. He shrugs out of his suit jacket and gets on His knees. He leans over the ledge of His tub, blinks away the spray of the showerhead and looks up into Neil’s eyes as He takes his soft cock into His mouth. Neil’s legs shake. He gasps and braces a hand on the slippery wall. Neil’s barely hard and that’s okay because The Protagonist is enjoying just how much of him He can get in His mouth like this. He’s enjoying the way Neil’s tip compresses gently against His tongue when He licks across its spongy curve again and again. And because He didn’t let Neil wash it, He can taste every bitter drip from his slit, every inch of salty skin and the heady flavor of precum as His friend begins to spill. After barely a minute of caressing Neil’s slit with His tastebuds, and listening to Neil whine, The Protagonist feels Neil harden and grow thick between His lips and He hums in satisfaction.
His head is drenched. His shirt is slowly becoming transparent. Muscle and dark skin straining beneath. He doesn’t care. Not yet. Neil is still filling out. The Protagonist bobs His head nice and slow, hollowed cheeks sucking and pulling Neil’s length taut. When He looks up again and water falls from His lashes directly into His eyes, He sees through blurry vision that Neil’s resolve has left him entirely. If Neil planned to put on a show tonight, that plan has fallen to the wayside. The soap he did use has since rinsed away. The yellow bar of lemongrass is gripped in his fist like a grenade. The other hand braces for dear life even though they both know the Protagonist would never ever let him fall.
The Protagonist slides His hands up Neil’s waist and grips tight. He holds him steady and sucks with a renewed urgency. Fully hard, Neil is more difficult to swallow whole, but He manages to get most of the way down before His gag reflex takes over and pushes Neil’s sodden length out again. Saliva spills down His chin for the shower to steal. Neil moans louder and finally pulls at the wet shirt on The Protagonist’s back. “Get up. Get in,” he breathes.
The sopping shirt hits the tile like a weight and desperation carries The Protagonist into the tub before He even manages His pants. Toes against the back of His loafers free Him of shoes but His first step over the ledge is still socked and gartered. He’s still wearing Armani trousers to look the part. Soaking wet, He takes Neil into His arms and kisses him silent again. They breathe shared air. They grip and hold one another. They search the other’s lips for hidden truths. Secrets to make the past hurt less, secrets to unlock a brighter future. They are all they have, and they both know it even though they’ve never touched before this night. Even though they’ve touched a thousand times, in a thousand lives before.
Neil’s tongue caresses the dark seam of The Protagonists’ lips until they part for him, and he takes a taste from the source. The Protagonist is there to meet him, gently sucking a pink bottom lip between insistent teeth. Eventually, one of them remembers to get The Protagonist out of His pants and socks. Those thud to the bathroom floor too and finally warm bellies touch. Soft lower curls brush, one against the other. Neil’s peaked nipples caress against The Protagonist’s coarse chest hair making him gasp and Greed come flooding in the place of romance. He wants. Neil slips his hand between them and takes The Protagonist’s cock between curled fingers. It’s so swollen the heat radiates into Neil’s palm and one tug gets The Protagonist talking again. It feels so so good, but it isn’t quite what The Protagonist remembers. It isn’t quite the perfection that Neil’s fist was after the Oslo run…losing His edge but not lost. Not yet. It isn’t quite perfect, because The Protagonist hasn’t taught Neil how to please Him yet, how to touch Him, kiss Him, love Him. Lessons every lover learns the longer they spend beside their beloved. But time has never been on their side. Never will be.
“Let me show you,” The Protagonist whispers anyway. His hand fits between them like the perfect puzzle piece. He grips Neil’s fist, changes the way he’s stroking Him until every pull is just right to make Him weak in the knees and get Him panting. He leans all His weight against Neil as the blonde learns quickly just how to get His thighs shaking and His hips rutting the steam around them. Then Neil pulls Him up closer, up onto purning toes, braced by the ass. Neil gets their cocks aligned and begins to rub the glistening tips together.
“Fuck.” They whisper. “—oh fuck, Neil.”
Neil starts to roll his hips too and every time their tips brush, his breathing hitches. Catches. Breaks up in his throat. He starts to make that sharp whimpering noise he makes when he’s seconds from teetering over and The Protagonist can’t help but kiss it away.
Kiss the time away. Make it lag just for them. Steal this moment too.
When they come, the heat in their bellies spill over. Neil’s fist goes hot with it. His belly and The Protagonist’s flash with white that is quickly washed down the drain. With a shaking hand, Neil tugs Him one more time, as though he’s trying to be sure The Protagonist has gotten everything He needs, and that diligence is rewarded with one more string of come slung under his chest. This one sticks. Just out of reach of the spray. Neil sees it dripping all over himself and moans. It’s just what he’s wanted. Just what he’d been thinking of two days ago in the locker room shower.
The shower, like Time, may sweep the evidence of their pleasure down the pipes, but its result lingers. The Protagonist catches His breath. His head rests on Neil’s broad shoulder. Neil’s arms stay locked around The Protagonist as though he alone is the pillar that keeps the man standing, leading them on.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s too soon in their story for either of them to really know.
And maybe it’s too late.