Hush (14 page)

In the end, the hangover and the sour taste in his mouth at the thought of Cam stop him. There’s no way not to think of Cam, not when he is somehow the only thing Wren sees when he closes his eyes to fantasize.

Wine always brings him the worst hangovers; his eyes are blood­shot and his bones ache, even after his shower. Going back to bed sounds like the best idea; burrowing in his covers and the soft familiarity of his room, his private refuge, would be so welcome. But he has a class, and Wren is a responsible student.

Bagel in hand, phone held indecisively in the other, Wren heads for the door. When he checked to gauge if he had time to sit down and eat after his shower, he’d seen a message from Cam,
finally
. He’d managed to ignore it while dressing, choosing a soft gray shirt with a row of horizontal buttons at the collar and ragged jeans. He’s feeling disheveled and doesn’t mind dressing as he feels. Also, they’re comfortable clothes. Wren could use some comfort.

Sunshine stabs at his eyes when he exits his apartment. Wren curses and digs through his bag for sunglasses. He rarely wears them—they make his eyes feel funny—but right now, that can’t be worse than this. It’s not until he’s in class, notebook laid out carefully in front of him, that Wren gives in to the urge and opens his phone. He finds two simple messages.

I’m sorry

and

Call me when you can
?

Wren deletes them, wondering why Cam wouldn’t just call him, before shutting down that line of thought: under that wondering is a small desire for something from Cam. Some sort of pursuit.

He shakes his head and lays his phone flat. There is no way he’s going to allow himself to think or feel that way, because it tips the balance. Wren’s not going to tolerate Cam breaking the rules, much less himself. No matter how much he wants Cam—how often and how deeply—Wren’s rules exist for a reason; and if last night is any indication, he might be in over his head.

* * *

“I need advice,” Wren says.
He’s at the door to Nora’s room; though it was open, he’d knocked softly.

“All right.” Nora sits up on her bed and crosses her legs. She pats the comforter and smiles.

“But I need you to—” Wren hovers in the doorway. “Not do the thing.”

“What thing?” Nora’s hair falls forward when she tilts her head.

“Where you think you know what’s best and try to get me to see the light, or whatever.”

Nora frowns and shifts. “What’s going on, honey?”

Wren perches carefully at the edge of her bed. Her duvet is embroi­dered with a lovely design: pale Japanese blossoms dripped along the contours of her bed. “I…” He thinks about what he’ll say. What advice he needs. He finds he doesn’t know. Nora can’t give him advice without being influenced by what she thinks he needs, because she never stops telling him to try again or that she knows he’s lonely.

The last few days have done nothing but prove how lonely he is, yes. But they’ve also cemented his belief that this means he needs to tamp down this thing with Cam.

Only he can’t really bring himself to end it.

“You know what?” He stands up. “Never mind.”

“Wren, honey,” Nora says, taking his hand and tugging him back down.

“I don’t think… I don’t know what to ask right now anyway,” he says. Nora watches his face for a bit before shrugging.

“Want to watch a movie?” she asks. He nods, grateful that she’s able to find ways to comfort him. “Come cuddle.”

Nora sets up some pillows next to her at the headboard. She picks through what she has on her laptop and queues his favor­ite—
Benny and Joon
. She lies next to him; her pillows smell like mint and tea tree oil and
her,
and when she nestles in next to him, pulling a blanket over them both, he turns until his cheek is pressed against her shoulder.

Things Wren is good at:
writing, comforting people and creat­ing and maintaining order. He knows how to create what most peo­ple find intangible or might not notice. He’s excellent at mak­ing spaces that convey comfort or ease or retreat. He can soothe and give pleasure in equal measure. And he knows how to place every­thing in his world in a way that feels safe for him.

What he’s doing with Cam doesn’t feel safe or ordered, which is a red flag. But after a few days, Wren doesn’t want to stop, tells himself that is just the point: It’s not that he can’t stop, he simply doesn’t
want
to. That means he needs to work harder at maintaining the upper hand. Right now he just has to reestablish his role and put this all to rights so that he and Cam can carry on the way he intended.

Six, upper east by the agriculture books,
he texts Cam.

Okay
, Cam responds immediately, which is pleasing. Then,
Thank you
, which sits strangely, because it feels sexy but somehow unsettling. That thank you should be everything he wants, right?

“You made me wait,”
Wren
says without preamble. Cam’s eyes are hooded and at Wren’s words he looks a little troubled. Still, his hands reach for Wren unerringly. When his thumbs wind into Wren’s belt loops to pull him in, Wren doesn’t bother to repress the shiver rolling through him.

“I had—” Cam starts.

“Shush,” Wren whispers, lips already millimeters from Cam’s.

It’s not only hunger that slams through him then, and not just hunger that he bleeds into Cam. Still, Wren has a plan, and he’s going to execute it to the letter.

“That was—”
Cam pulls his
shaking fingers through his hair, gasping as he comes down. Wren’s hands work to tuck Cam back into his jeans. Arousal and a desperate need for completion are wrecking him. It’s hard to see straight, and harder to hold on to the steps he was going to execute to shape this encounter the way he sees fit.

“We should talk,” he says. His voice is gravelly and unsteady, and Cam’s hand on his shoulder is searing hot.

“Um,” Cam blinks, “a good talk?”

Wren laughs with only a trace of bitterness and just says, “A talk.”

They find a secluded table. Cam pulls out a chair for Wren, then one for himself.

“I made rules,” Wren starts.

“Yes,” Cam agrees.

“If you don’t follow them—”

“Did I break a rule?”

“Did we agree that I am in charge?” Wren says with a dangerous sweetness.

“Yes, and that’s—”

“So when you didn’t return my call…” Wren raises an eyebrow and waits for Cam to rise to his lead.

“I wanted to,” Cam starts, looking troubled. “But I’m falling behind in school and I—”

“Oh, I didn’t ask to hear excuses,” Wren cuts in. Cam bites his lip and looks away, and a cresting surge of frustration rolls through the room and straight through Wren.
Fuck
. It’s a lot easier to balance this when he doesn’t actually care that much about whom he’s playing with.

“If I don’t do well in school, I’ll have to figure something out. I’m here on scholarship, and if I lose that… I am
not
going back to Nebraska,” Cam says stubbornly, and Wren has to work hard to suppress the surprise that wants to show clearly on his face. Oh, the things he doesn’t know about Cam! He’s hungry for them, even when he knows he has to shut that curiosity down.

“I do suppose that if you have to drop out of school, this—” he gestures between them, “might be harder to do.”

Cam nods. His fingers are splayed wide on the table. Wren picks at the remnants of a sticker that had been plastered to it.

“Give me a schedule of when you’re free,” Wren concedes. He hates making concessions. “When it says you’re free, you’re free, do you understand?”

“Absolutely,” Cam says without hesitation.

“You’re gonna tell me what you want. Make me a list. We’ll see from now on if you can be good enough to earn those things,” Wren says.

“I could just tell you right now, because the thing I really want—”

“No,” Wren interrupts softly, hungry eyes searching Cam’s. “I want a list of your fantasies. Even the ones you don’t know if you really want but that linger in the back of your head.” Wren tilts his head and smiles; it’s not a comforting smile but a coaxing, deliciously dirty one. “Even the ones that make you feel unsure and slightly ashamed.”
The ones tucked into your heart
. “The ones that will be hardest.” Wren really knows now that having this con­trol seems like owning Cam.

“Where do you live?” Wren asks, and tries to ignore the way Cam’s face lights up. Cam digs through his bag until he finds a pen, a bright green one decorated with Hulk stickers. He searches out a semi-dry napkin and writes his address on it. He has to go back over the lines several times before it’s actually visible.

“Can you read that?” he pushes it across the table to Wren. Wren holds back a smile.

“You went to the trouble to find a fancy pen,” he laughs, “but not a piece of paper?”

“Oh.” Cam shrugs. “My friend gave this to me as a joke.”

Wren smiles wider and shoots him a wink. “I’ll see you later,” he says, subtle notes of temptation and challenge in his voice.

That night, in the cover
of an empty room, Cam sits to work on his list. It starts simply, because what he’s wanted is simple and immediate: to get Wren off. Cam’s craved this for as long as they’ve been together. Well, not
together,
Wren would never use that word. Whatever he would call it, Cam has never let himself think beyond the most obvious methods of getting Wren off: with his hands, his mouth, or even just by rubbing against him the way that Wren does for him sometimes, rolling his thigh steadily, sinuously and hard between Cam’s legs. Once, he ordered Cam to ride it, to rock himself against Wren’s stillness until he came, jittering and off balance.

What would that be called, though? There’s a name for every­thing, Cam knows. It’s just a matter of learning. Trepidation—or something like it—follows the movement of Cam’s finger over the wheel of his mouse. He touches it to bring up the screen of his laptop and tries to think of a good phrase to search for what he wants.

Cam has never been much of a porn watcher because it just never felt right; it turned him on but he was disconnected from what he was seeing, as if distant from pleasure. Maybe this was because he’d been watching men and women together. After he met Jason and kissed him, he’d tried other kinds of porn a few times. But nothing matched the feeling he was seeking, a repli­cation of that stolen moment in the library with Wren. For the most part, after that, Cam had stuck with what his brain supplied him.

He can’t manage this search without coming across porn. Appar­ently, the word for what he wants is frottage, which is just ridi­culous. He writes it down anyway. Nate isn’t due home for a while and Wren obviously expects more than three items on his list. He doubts that any of them are boundary-pushing. And Wren seems to need more from him, seems to be seeking something specific.

Porn of all kinds filters through his computer in the next hour. Some acts he never even knew existed. Rimming, felch­ing, fist­ing—all these things make his cheeks darken so much he’s afraid he might overheat, even if he doesn’t particularly want them. Cam can’t begin to unpack his reaction to these things; partly because they’re embedded in videos containing other sex acts that he discovers really, really turn him on.

At ten to two, with Nate due home very soon, Cam’s body is help­lessly throb­bing for release. Some things he’s been watching—like finger­ing and anal—he now desperately wants to try, but he can’t take the time to test whether fingering feels good right now, and he has an idea that Wren wouldn’t be okay with receiving. If it were him—well,
when
it is, because even though Cam feels uncer­tain, the idea of having Wren do it to him makes everything he has stand to attention—if it were him, he imagines, he’d feel very vulnerable. Most of the men in the videos he’s seen actually go
soft
before it starts, only regaining their erections after a little while. Cam isn’t sure why, but even that appeals to him.

He writes his list in order of things he’s most comfort­able with and wants the most, down through the harder things to write. Wren had told him to write every­thing, so, with a few deep breaths, he does. Once he’s written the last—rim­ming—he’s shak­ing.

There’s really no time for Cam to linger when he finally has to jerk himself off and it’s a risk to do so with Nate so close to home, but Cam pulls his cock out of his pants and sets a fast pace from the start. It’s not a new realization anymore, how much the threat of being seen or caught turns him on. Turns out that works when he’s alone, too.

Cam comes mere minutes before Nate’s arrival. He’s cleaned up and sitting limp in his desk chair, still breathing hard, when Nate gets in. The room probably smells of come, and his face must still be red, but Nate ignores it. Nate’s a pretty sexual person, so Cam is almost positive the shoe has been on the other foot.

* * *

Is he gone?
Wren texts
the next afternoon. Cam had emailed him the list, as well as his schedule. He’s hopeful that the list means they’re going to progress to things that involve some nudity on Wren’s part—something he’d really rather do where they have privacy and time. With that in mind, he’d added times when Nate wouldn’t be home.

Yes,
Cam texts back with tingling fingers.

He showers quickly, trims and grooms and styles the way Mag­gie has coached him to. Even though he hopes to have to take them off, Cam chooses the tightest jeans he has and a shirt that shows off his biceps. If he were going out, he might pick something new from his wardrobe, something more structured or daring. With the promise of privacy and time, Cam wants something he can take off easily should he be so lucky. As much as he’s here for Wren to play with, he’s going to be sure to do everything he can to try get his own way, too.

When Wren breezes in, not bothering to knock, Cam’s already caught in his web. Wren’s gotten so used to Cam, so adept at compel­ling him, that he can do it from greater distances now. Cam starts stripping as soon as the door is closed; it’s the first thing Wren tells him to do. He has a bit of trouble with the pants. Wren doesn’t move at all while he struggles out of them. He takes off his boxers as well.

“Good boy,” Wren purrs, still standing by the door when Cam is finally free of them. “Lie on the bed.”

Cam’s head spins a bit—this feels like going zero to sixty in no time flat—but the driving
do, do, do
chanting in his blood is what he listens to.

“Spread your legs a little.” Wren finally moves, setting his bag down and stepping toward the end of the bed. Cam has to battle an upwelling of uncertainty and embarrassment. “No, no,” Wren murmurs. He makes sure to connect with Cam’s eyes before bring­ing his enjoyment, his excitement to the surface. And so Cam easily spreads his legs as far as his hips and the bed allow.

“Touch yourself, just a little,” Wren says. His eyes travel down Cam’s body and Cam can almost feel it, a sensual caress from his neck to his hard dick.

Cam palms it slowly, lightly. He’s never been naked like this before, on display and in such bright light. With Maggie it was always in the dark. Foiled against Wren, who is wearing a black double-layer hoodie with a complicated network of zippers and light green, skintight pants, Cam is doubly conscious of his own nudity.

Wren says quietly, “Now your balls.” Cam blushes furiously but cups them and rolls them experimentally. “Perfect,” Wren breathes, something nearly reverent in his voice. He sits at the end of the bed and crawls between Cam’s spread legs. Wren sits back on his own legs and just watches. Cam’s hand starts to work the way he wants it to, over the head, fingering the glans, collecting droplets of pre-come; he feels himself throb against the heat of his palm. He brings his other hand into play, tugging and tracing his balls.

When Cam starts to breathe harder, Wren gives him a devi­ous smile and begins to touch him as well—not his dick or balls or even up near his groin; instead, Wren’s fingers travel over his ankles. Down the ticklish arches of his feet. Behind his knees, which tickles, too, but also sends hot pin­pricks through his body. Cam arches a little, beginning to push up into his hand. He starts to lick his palm to ease the friction, but Wren stops him.

“Tsk, tsk.” He wags his finger playfully. “Not yet. Don’t want you too close. We’re just warming up.”

Cam slows his strokes. Wren puts his hands against the insides of his knees and pushes so that they’re spread farther and up in the air. Cam gasps; he’s so exposed like this.

“You love it,” Wren tells him, and suddenly Cam wishes he could do more, spread himself farther and let Wren see everything and anything he wants. When Wren’s finger traces up his crack, Cam has to close his eyes. He’s never,
ever
touched himself there. Since making his list, he has hoped Wren would be the first to do it; even if it were to feel good, touching himself this way, Cam hasn’t wanted to risk it being weird or
not
feeling good when he knows Wren will make it incredible.

“Hold your balls up,” Wren commands. Cam does. Wren shifts around; Cam’s eyes are closed, because he’s sure that if he looks at Wren, he’ll never be able to hold on to the orgasm they’re both working to keep at bay.

“There’s not enough room,” Wren complains. “Lie sideways with your ass at the edge of the bed.” Wren’s not wrong; he’s quite a bit shorter than Cam, who barely fits onto the dorm-issue bed. He has no idea what Wren’s going to do, but he obeys blindly. “Keep them spread.” Wren nudges Cam’s legs until he is holding them up with hands behind his knees. Cam opens his eyes in time to see Wren steal a pillow and settle on his knees on the floor.

“What—” Cam has to stop to swallow. “What are you going to do?”

“You gave me a list,” Wren says lightly, almost impishly. “I figured we’d start with the hardest and see if you can be a good boy about it.”