“It’s cold,” Gem whined.
Rusty patted Gem’s hip, fingers spanning over the side of his right asscheek over his panties. “Well, you are practically naked.”
“Then warm me up,” Gem demanded, wriggling closer until Rusty had no choice but to snuggle with him. Rough palms rubbed up and down Gem’s spine, and he hummed in contentment as he burrowed into Rusty’s chest. “You smell like my jizz.”
“You did come on me,” Rusty said blandly.
“I know, and it makes me feel very manly. Like, I want to beat my chest and do squats or something.”
Rusty laughed. “Your panties would explode off your ass if you did squats right now.”
“Rude,” Gem sniffed.
Carting a hand through Gem’s curls, Rusty claws caught on something dried and crusty. “I think you have cum in your hair.”
“I have cum all over me. I told you, I need to shower,” Gem said, patting Rusty’s chest before he pushed himself to a sitting position. “I should probably get dressed.”
As Gem retrieved his clothes and tugged them on, Rusty curled up and hugged his tail to his chest, watching him intently. Flustered under the attention, Gem smoothed down his messy curls and laughed nervously.
“What are you staring at?” he finally asked, and Rusty shrugged.
“You.”
Gem hopped from one foot to the other as he tugged his ankle boots on. “Why?”
“You’re beautiful,” he said simply. “Why wouldn’t I look at you?”
Now, Gem was accustomed to such praise. He’d been told he was beautiful more times than he could count, but it was usually flattery used toget himintobed, not a compliment bestowed after he’d climbed out. His clothes were rumpled, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep, and he was pretty sure he’d been drooling before Rusty woke him up. For fuck’s sake, he had cum in his hair.
Yet Rusty called him beautiful.
“Stop being cute, or I’m gonna kiss your face off and miss my tram,” Gem threatened, and Rusty rolled his eyes.
Crawling out of bed, he grabbed a pair of pajama pants from his dresser and tugged them on. “I’ll walk you to the stop.”
Hand-in-hand, they walked the short block to the tram stop, arriving a few minutes before it was scheduled to arrive. For some reason, nerves swarmed to life in Gem’s stomach at the prospect of saying goodbye. This weekend had been a perfect bubble, keeping their new-found dynamic safe. What would happen in the morning when they had to return to real life?
“So,” Gem said at the same time Rusty said, “Should we—”
“Sorry, you go,” Rusty said.
“No, you,” Gem said.
Scratching behind his ear, Rusty shifted his weight awkwardly. “We never actually talked about, you know, how it would be at work.”
“Right, ’cause the blowjobs were more fun, so we left the adulting to our future selves,” Gem said, and Rusty chuffed a laugh. “But now we are our future selves, and I kinda wanna punch our past selves in the dicks for making it my responsibility to have this conversation when they could have done it already. But that’s the catch-twenty-two about procrastination, I guess.
“And now I’m rambling, because I’m uncomfortable, and when I’m uncomfortable, I ramble.And—”
A black claw pressed to his lips, effectively shutting him up. “I like you, Gem,” Rusty said, and Gem’s stomach dropped to his toes.
“I like you too,” he mumbled against Rusty’s claw, and Rusty’s tail puffed up, one of his shy smiles curling his mouth. “But as much as I wanna eat your face at work, I think Toni might dismember you if he sees. Like, for real, he’s gonna murder your face when he finds out you just-the-tipped me last night.”
At the mention of the Elas, Rusty’s eyes widened in alarm, “Oh fuck, he’s gonna kill me.”
“I promise to do my best to stop him, but we’ll still need to be strategic about when and how to tell him. We’ll need a controlled environment, and honestly, you shouldn’t even be there. I’m stronger than him, but he’ll be fueled by deep-seated rage, so even I might not be enough to protect you. And he knows people; he’ll hide your body where it will never be found.
“So we’ll put you in a bunker, and I’ll barricade all the exits. We’ll make sure Jude is there to distract him with his body, should I fail to physically confine him or in case I get scared of all his shouting, and surrender.”
