and mugs. She looked kind of dyed and plucked and constructed, and far too well-groomed for first thing in the morning, but she smiled at me in a friendly enough way.
“Hi, I’m Lena. You must be Matthew.” Her eyes locked on the bars through my nipples. Served me right for not bothering to put a shirt on. I could deal with straight women asking about my piercings, even first thing in the morning.
“Yeah, I’m Matthew,” I said. “I think Andrew’s going to have a killer hangover when he wakes up. Have you got any electrolyte replacement fluid?”
She tore her eyes away from my nipples for a moment to nod. “Sure, it wouldn’t be F’s place without Gatorade.” She opened a cupboard and gave me two bottles of vile blue liquid.
“Thanks.”
Her eyes were back on my nipples. Here we go; she was going to ask to touch them.
“Um, would I be able to just, you know, touch them?” she asked, looking coy.
“As long as I get to touch your nipples, too,” I said, and she spluttered at me.
“But… You can’t… That’s completely different!” she said, drawing her bathrobe more tightly closed around herself.
“It’s what you wanted to do to me,” I pointed out.
She took the kettle over to the sink stacked with dirty dishes, filled it, and put it on to boil. “All right,” she said when she turned back to face me.
Damn. About one time in ten, the woman was either sufficiently curious or sufficiently comfortable in her own body to take up the offer. Looked like Lena was that one in ten.
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.
“Tell me about the book,” I said, not opening my eyes. Oh, yeah, my body was just soaking up the potassium and sodium.
“It’s a murder mystery,” Matthew said. The mattress dipped beside me as he moved and his leg slid over mine.
“Lots of characters with backstories I don’t know. A pathetic dead body in a graveyard, some obscure literary references, and a baby with Apert’s syndrome. I could tell you about Apert’s syndrome if you’d like.”
“Tell me about Elis-van Creveld syndrome instead,” I said.
I hoped the man in the bus shelter had scored last night.
“Don’t know anything about Elis-van Creveld,” Matthew said. “Except that somebody had an unfortunate
