Sullivan blinked. “No? Yes? I’m not—that was a lot of questions. Wandery?”
“Wandering. Wanders. To wander.” Caty stared at him balefully. “Prick.”
“How did his cues read?” Lisbeth asked.
“Green. And afterward he said it was good.”
Both women studied him for a minute. Lisbeth finally said, “Why are you asking? You know as well as either of us that play should be safe, sane, and consensual, and that’s what it sounds like you orchestrated. Where’s the problem?”
Sullivan didn’t know how to describe the flinching sensation in his gut. It’d started once Tobias got up to go to the bathroom, and it had grown fast, tempered by Tobias’s reassurances that the sex had been good, but the flinch was still there, squatting inside him, waiting for the blow.
“Nick really fucked you up,” Caty said, more gently than she’d ever said anything to him in the years he’d known her, and it was awful. “He’s got you questioning everything, and maybe some of that is okay because that’s how you stay a good person, but there’s nothing wrong with the way you like to fuck. I wish you’d stop acting like you’re trying to cage a beast or something. It was cruel of him to imply that.”
“He wasn’t being cruel,” Sullivan replied wearily, though he wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t going to change her mind at this point. “I scared him. He couldn’t give me what I wanted. There’s no fault in that.”
To Nick, Sullivan’s desires were a corruption, a betrayal of years of friendship filled with bicycles and baseball and private detective movies and grape popsicles and homework sessions and bad prom photos with girls whose names they could barely remember. By the time they’d been old enough and brave enough to exchange confessions about their adult sexualities—Sullivan bisexual, Nick gay—the nature of their bond had been well defined. Sullivan had violated their unspoken contract. He’d changed the rules. He’d stumbled through an excruciating confession that’d felt so much like the others they’d made, up until the moment Nick had yanked his hand out of Sullivan’s and stared at him like he was a predator.
Have you always been like this? Have you been wanting to hurt me all these years? What kind of monster gets off on hurting the people he claims he loves?
Losing his boyfriend of several months over a fundamental difference in sexual interests hadn’t been pleasant, but losing his best friend had been another kind of pain altogether.
Lisbeth pulled a colander from a cabinet. “Are you going to see the college boy again?”
“It’s a complicated situation.”
“No, it is not.” Caty kicked him in the ankle hard, laughing when he yelped.
“I do what I want,” Sullivan snapped, rubbing his ankle.
“Read my lips, loser. He. Is. Blackmailing. You.”
“Ineffectually.” He swallowed hard. “I know. But...”
“But?”
Sullivan remembered the small jerks of Tobias’s body, the eager way he’d sucked Sullivan deep, the way his eyes had gone dark and desperate. The way he’d laid his head on Sullivan’s lap after, letting Sullivan play with his hair as he swam up from that altered headspace, vulnerable and trusting and sweet. The way he’d taken it so in stride, as if the part of Sullivan that Nick had been so disgusted by were something to be craved. It was like the universe had conspired to give him one perfect moment. For the first time since Nick left, all his pieces had been in harmony, all the planets aligned.
Sullivan pretended his voice wasn’t hoarse when he said, “It was really good.”
“Of course it was really good, but it’s not because of him. His dick isn’t magic.” Caty shook her head so hard her hair bounced all over. “It’s because you haven’t boned anyone in over a year! Plus, he’s blackmailing you, which is exactly the sort of weird, interesting shit that you’re attracted to in a person. Of course it was good!”
“I don’t like being blackmailed,” Sullivan corrected. “It pisses me off. There are better ways to not be bored. I’m just still all postcoital, so it’s hard to keep my energy up for bitching about it. There’s this bonding hormone called oxytocin. It floods your system after orgasm, and it’s been shown in studies to facilitate monogamy in men. Well, straight men. Don’t think any bi or gay men were in the study. I should look that up. It’s also been found in women as they breastfeed their children, which is less applicable here, but—”
“Sullivan,” Lisbeth said.
“—it’s—What?”
“You’re monologuing.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Sorry. But you get my point.”
“Oxytocin makes you forget you’re being blackmailed,” Caty said, flatly doubtful.
“It doesn’t make me forget anything. I just like the people I’m sleeping with more than I did before I slept with them. That’s a perfectly normal thing. I like them a normal amount. And it’s not like he’ll let me get all twisted up over him. He wants something casual. So no big.”
“Silverware, Caty, please.” Lisbeth pulled a block of parmesan out of the fridge.
“You can’t keep boning the college guy.” Caty rose and opened the silverware drawer. “You’re in a vulnerable place right now. You’re back on the market for the first time post-fuckface, and you’re so hard up that the boning will be amazing and then he’ll leave because he doesn’t want something serious and you’ll be left lying around in a pool of oxytocin hormones.”
“I’m aware of that,” he snapped. “And stop saying bone. It doesn’t even sound like a word anymore.”
“God, you’re going to keep boning him and you’ll fall in love and he’ll trash you,” Caty moaned.
“Plates, Caty, please,” Lisbeth said, in a tone that meant she was exhausted with their drama.
Caty dragged herself to the cabinet with the petulance of a teenager, calling back over her shoulder, “There are other attractive, kink-minded people in the
