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Warm thanks to habu for giving me a firm hand and plenty of encouragement.

*****

Usually, I don't sleep all that well when someone's in the bed with me, especially in the beginning. With him, I slept great. Better than I sleep alone, actually. I woke up once in the middle of the night, my arm aching from how I was lying on it, and I extracted myself from our cuddle as gently as I could, but he woke or stirred, and as if we'd planned it ahead of time we both rolled over and he molded himself against my back and draped his arm over my waist, and we were still like that when I woke up in the morning.

As usual I woke up hard. The first was waking up to the feeling of someone else's morning wood pressed against my ass, which, I noticed, did nothing to diminish my own erection. For a couple minutes I lay there, enjoying that unfamiliar feeling, enjoying the arousal it was provoking, enjoying the feeling of his warm breath breezing over the back of my neck and my cheek, the warmth of his body against mine, the weight of his arm on my side. Then I succumbed to my bladder's demand that I get up. When I stirred, though, his lax arm embraced me, pulling me tight against him.

"Morning," he said in that soft, intimate tone he'd started using with me.

I turned over to face him, and he was looking at me so bright-eyed I realized he'd been awake for some time. "Morning." I kissed him. A real, slow, deep kiss. After, he looked surprised. Almost startled. As if everything we'd done the night before had only been possible in the cloud of some magic spell that had ended with the sunrise.

"I guess you have to go to work?"

"Afraid so."

"If you have time, I'll make you breakfast."

I found my phone and checked the time. "I've got time. But don't get up yet." I went and took a leak, and came back to bed, pulling the covers up over my shoulders because I'd gotten chilled walking around naked. "If I had a choice, I'd choose a little more time here in bed with you over breakfast," I said, pressing my body against his, running my hand over the firm curve of his ass, then brushing my fingers lightly as I could up the length of his hard-on.

He gave me a smile that made him look incredibly vulnerable. "I make excellent pancakes. But I'll do my best to make the tradeoff worthwhile."

At first we went slowly, both a little sleepy, cuddled up in that warm cocoon. Slow, shallow kisses. Tender caresses. Nuzzling into each others' necks. But then he was kissing my body, his mouth, his tongue, and now and then his teeth thrilling inch after inch of my skin, making me tingle, making me writhe. No one had ever kissed and teased my nipples the way he did that morning, as if they were the main event, as if he could make me come just licking and sucking them until I was whining and squirming under him. Then he moved and pulled me on top of him, and I did my best to return the pleasure, stroking his cock just enough to tease while his nipples hardened under my tongue.

"Can you reach the condoms?" he panted.

I opened the drawer and reached for the box, but was distracted by the cornucopia of paraphernalia in the nightstand. Avoiding the dildo and the other things that looked kind of like dildos and which I vaguely understood to be ass toys (why were they vaguely familiar? Too much time on triple-X Internet sites?) and held up a set of pretty heavy-duty leather restraints, grinning and cocking an eyebrow. "Did someone shoot a porno here and leave their props behind?" I joked.

"That must be what happened."

Suddenly I was totally intimidated again. And just slightly freaked out. But I put the restraints back, grabbed the lube, and found a condom. Just like the night before, he took it from me and put it on me, obviously enjoying the act, the sight of sheathing and then lubing my cock as much as I was. When he shifted under me I lifted myself so he could turn onto his knees, but he stayed there on his back, and only brought his legs outside of mine.

He asked, "Are you up for trying it like this?"

I was so dense I honestly wasn't sure what he meant until he put his hand on my waist and pulled me to him, while he guided my cock to his hole. It had never occurred to me. It was so intense, so strange and wonderful looking at him while I pushed inside him, us looking at each other, kissing, then looking again as we fucked. This time, I made it last. Maybe for the first time in my life I was really there, present as certain types of people are fond of saying, just relishing each moment, not fretting about how good a lover I was being, not working toward the goal of getting my partner and myself off. Just losing myself in each sensation, drifting away in his sighs, the rise and fall of his chest, his belly, the way he was looking at me, like his soul was swelling up with a happiness that was going to mortally wound him when it burst. When he came, his semen streaked his belly and chest, and tears streaked his temples and slipped away into his dark waves of hair.

"Is it hurting you? We can stop."

"No. You're not hurting me. Don't stop. Keep fucking me all day, if you can."

Sadly, I'm only human, and I came probably less than a minute later. When I stopped shaking and caught my breath, I asked him why he'd cried.

"Sometimes during sex, I have these . . . transcendental moments."

It seemed like one of those white lies he supposedly didn't know how to tell. "Are you afraid this was a one-time thing? I asked him.

He grinned. "That too."

"I don't want it to be a one-time thing."

He gave me a long, sweet, deep kiss. "Good."

"But . . ."

He visibly braced himself.

"I feel like a dick. A hypocrite. But I don't really want to go public with this."

Obvious relief. Even an amused little grin. "Do you think that's a surprise?"

"Just, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but around the guys tonight, during rehearsal—"

"A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. Discretion is the heart of valor, etcetera, etcetera. The guys won't have a clue. Not from me."

"You're not mad?"

His sweet, soft laugh. "Martin, you're just starting to figure this thing out for yourself. Why would I expect you to want to bring anyone else's opinions into this?"

In that moment, I felt really sad that we hadn't been closer friends those three years we'd known each other. But I also felt lucky that he was my friend—or whatever he was to me—now.

During the eternal commute to work, through a typically long and dull day of talking to clients on the phone and listening to the banal repetitions of complaints about the work, the customers, the lower-level employees, and the upper management from my fellow project managers, I felt happier than I think I'd felt in years. Everything seemed to be charged, humming with an elation I hadn't felt since my first two or three hard-core crushes in high school. I hadn't felt anything close with Avalyn, and flowing between the flashes of vivid imagery of my night and morning with Dario, little doubts about why I'd pursued her so intently in the first place, along with an unsettling realization that I felt like I'd just woken up from a sedated stupor that, looking back and really thinking about it, I'd been in for probably three or four years. Like I'd just kind of accepted all the safe but profoundly unsatisfying components that made up my existence. My apathetic live-in girlfriend (who I probably would have married if she hadn't left me). My tedious and frankly purposeless job. A social life based on friendships sustained by little more than common memories of high school or college, or the convenient happenstance of working together. And now, Morpheus had just shown up in my sad little office that wasn't much better than the cubicles doled out to the twelve guys and women working under me, and I'd chosen the red pill. I'd been passively, willingly yielding up my life force—all my time, my energy, my whole existence—to a soul-sucking hive organism that was draining whatever potential was inside of me, whatever years were left to me on this earth.

When had I stopped trying to thrive, rather than exist day to day in a state of deaf, dumb, blind numbness? A dozen memories, moments, choices came bobbing to the surface of that stream of doubts winding around all the belly-tickling images of those recent hours with Dario. Giving up the dream of attending a fine arts college and getting a degree in music because I'd caved in to my dad's pressure to get a BA in software development. Letting my college girlfriend talk me out of joining the Peace Corps after graduation because she was dying for us to move in together. Almost completely abandoning my efforts to write and perform the music I really cared about, in favor of joining mediocre bands because somewhere along the line I'd accepted hanging out and drinking beer as the pinnacle of social bliss.

By the time I was back on the freeway, heading toward Dario's for rehearsal, I was high on the certainty that I was awake and aware for the first time in years, and that starting that night I'd stop drifting through my own life like a leaf in a stream, passive and powerless. I didn't know what different choices I wanted to make. The important thing was that starting right then I wasn't going to let my dad's ideas about what a "real job" was, or guilt about abandoning a relationship that had already limped along months after its expiration date, or fear of being left out of a band that sounded like an inferior copy of a hundred other LA bands dictate my fate ever again.

For once, I'd rushed out of the office the minute the weekly status meeting ended, and gotten right on the freeway, hoping to get to Dario's before the other guys. But of course at that hour the freeway was a parking lot, so in the end I only got there fifteen minutes earlier than usual, and like always, I was the last to arrive. True to his word, Dario acted completely normal. As if we hadn't been upstairs touching and kissing and licking and fucking each other ten hours earlier, he gave me the old, polite smile and casual, "hello," and without getting up, told me there was beer in the fridge and to help myself. I tried to act normal, but just seeing him sitting there, taking the pipe when Steve passed it to him, I didn't dare really look at him because I was sure my expression would give everything away. Hoping to hell I didn't sound as weird and nervous as I felt, I said, "Thanks, man," or something equally bizarre, and went to grab a beer.

I wished the other guys would get off their stoned, lazy asses so we could rehearse, because there was no way I could keep my shit together sitting around in a cozy little circle chit-chatting. Dodging danger, I went and got my guitar, and quietly practiced the new piece I'd played for Dario the week before. When the guys decided to stop getting stoned and start rehearsing, I played the piece for them. I wasn't all that surprised that they didn't have the same enthusiasm as Dario for something so far from our usual repertoire. Over in his armchair, I'd noticed Dario listening while I auditioned the song for the group, and now he was watching, listening to the guys' limp response. From all the way across the loft I couldn't tell if he was giving me a small smile of empathy, or smirking in disapproval of the group's timid attitude about stretching our range. Actually, I think his expression was completely neutral. As if our agreement about keeping the thing between us secret meant he couldn't even have an opinion about the band's cold reception of the song that he'd expressed so much admiration for.

After rehearsal, we all hung out, and when the pipe got passed my way I took a hit, and when the pipe came around again I took another. Stoned, I was calm and still and quiet. While the others talked and joked, I absorbed the sights and sounds and smells courting my senses—Dario's patient smile as Jeff and Tom endlessly debated the plausibility of a zombie finding its way into the food cart elevator of an airplane, the yeasty smell of the beer I was sipping intermittently, the fizz of it on my tongue, the zen chime of the intercom and Dario's baritone voice, sexy even when he was handling a transaction with the delivery guy, the mingled sweet and spicy aroma of the Hawaiian and the sausage and pepperoni pizza we'd ordered from the indie place down the street, the flex of Dario's angular jaw as he chewed, the motion of Steve's animated hands while he gave a long explanation too elaborate to follow of how he would escape a city overrun by zombies in which he was the lone survivor. The contours of Dario's pecs and nipples under his gray, long-sleeved T-shirt. Dario's dark eyes fixed on Tom, fixed on Steve, fixed on Jeff, and never fixed on me because he was being careful for my sake. Eventually, when the collective buzz had more or less worn off, we left, and I went to my car, and the rest went down the street and around the corner to Tom's car. I turned on my car, turned on the radio, and without releasing the parking brake I texted Dario and asked if I could come back up. He answered within a few seconds.

We smoked a little more. Fooling around and fucking stoned was incredible. Transcendental, to steal Dario's word.

"You were staring," he said when we'd been lying there silently holding each other for a while in post-orgasmic bliss.

"Hmmm?"

"After rehearsal. You must have been pretty stoned. You were staring at me. I don't think you realized."

"Oh. Sorry."

He laughed. "I don't mind. I could feed off you gazing at me like that all night long. But it might not fit too well with your plan of silence and secrecy." His fingers combing through my hair was delightfully sedating. Did I even care if everyone figured out something was going on between us? In that blissed-out moment I couldn't imagine what the suggestion of something sexual happening between me and Dario would trigger in me. My veins flooded with endorphins and testosterone, all I cared about was the feel of his body pressed warm and close against mine, and that sensuous, tranquilizing touch of his fingertips meandering through my hair.

And the drawer.

"Dario."

"Yes?"

"Can I ask a question?"

"Anything. Always."

"I think I know it's a dumb question. Ignorant or naïve or whatever. But I still want to ask it."

"Then ask."

"When you're with other men, are you always the one who . . ."

"Do I always bottom?"

"Yes. If that even means what I think it means." I was so fucking clueless.

He turned onto his side and looked down at me, smiling patiently. It took him a while to finally answer me, as if he were choosing his answer with a lot of thought. "Actually, until I met Jared, I was what they call a 'total top.' I never let any of my lovers penetrate me. Not even what you've let me do to you."

"And Jared convinced you to let him—"

"Jared didn't convince me of anything, except that I was safe with him. Safe enough to be trusting and vulnerable enough to do something I'd always wanted."

"So now you . . . like it both ways."

"I don't bottom for casual fucks. But yes. When I'm with someone I feel safe with. Someone I'm really into."

I basked in the implication of that last remark for a few seconds. Then I asked him, "And can I ask you about the drawer."

"Of course."

I laughed. "So, what's with the drawer?"

And he laughed. "You might have to be more specific."

"You . . . like being restrained?"

"Sometimes. Usually, though, it's the other way around."

"Is that an important part of your sex life?"

"Yes, in a way. I love vanilla sex. Vanilla sex can be delicious, satiating, fulfilling. But doing bondage takes me somewhere else. Somewhere I need to go sometimes. Not all the time. Not even all that often, if we're talking about need. But sometimes."

I had no idea what he was talking about. That need he said he felt. I started wondering if there was a dark side, a scary side to Dario he hadn't let me see, yet. And I was pretty sure I didn't ever want to see it.

"You've never tried it?"

I laughed. Just the image of me tying some woman to the bed (or cuffing Dario to the bed with those restraints of his!) made me feel weird. Nervous. And when the image of Dario tying me down popped into my head it was just shy of terrifying.

"Never wanted to try it? Even out of curiosity?"

"Not really."

"Just the idea makes you uncomfortable," he said, like he was delivering a diagnosis.

"I guess . . . maybe it's different, imagining doing that with a man, with you, but the idea of fucking a woman while she's tied up, it makes me feel bad. It feels kind of like imagining beating a woman."

A sweet, patient smile. "That's why you don't tie down people who don't want it. For a little while, off and on, I was with a guy who couldn't come unless he was bound. The more restrained he felt, the less he could move, the better the sex was for him." How had Dario done so much in the same length of time I'd done so little? In a gentle, almost careful tone Dario asked, "And the idea of being tied down? How does that feel?"

"Honestly?"

"Yes, please." Smiling.

"Pretty scary."

"Bad scary? Or good scary?"

"I don't think good and scary go together, for me." I waited for the look of disappointment, but he kept it hidden. "And the other things?" I said, changing the subject almost out of fear that if I let him ponder my last answer too long, he'd realize that he was already bored with me.

"The dildo and the butt plugs?

"Yeah."

"What about them?" Grinning indulgently again.

"You use them on your . . . partner? While he's restrained?"

"Not exclusively. But yes."

"I'm sure I'm being really naïve again, but I don't see the point."

"The point?"

"Why use a molded piece of silicone or whatever, instead of your cock?"

His grin turned mischievous. "I'd be very happy to demonstrate the point, if you'd like." My face went hot and his wicked grin softened and warmed into a smile. "All good things in time. Meanwhile I'll just say that there's a pleasure—maybe more psychological than physical—going about mundane tasks with a butt plug stuffed up your ass. And it can be a decadent thrill to be down on a man's cock, your mouth stuffed full of hard dick, and get your ass fucked at the same time. Something that requires a toy, if you don't have a third party on hand."

I was blushing again like a virginal ingenue in Dangerous Liaisons, or something. "You've had threesomes?"

He laughed and sort of rolled his eyes. "I'm coming off as the fucking Marquis de Sade or something, aren't I?"

"No." A pretty limp rebuttal. "I guess I'm coming off like some kind of home-school refugee."

"Are you a home-school refugee?"

I laughed. "No. My parents aren't even religious. But I guess they weren't very open-minded, either."

"Well, my view is that you have to fight pretty hard to get past a lifetime of messages—subtle and overt—telling you it's not okay to be you, it's not okay to want what you want, to do certain things you might want to do.

"Yeah." It was like he'd been reading my mind during my drive over from the office.

"So, will you consider telling me something?"

"Yes, of course." I said it effusively, eager to reciprocate his openness.

"What's your dirtiest fantasy? Something you've never dared to do. Something you'd never even dare to ask for." I felt so put on the spot I couldn't have come up with one of my fantasies even I'd been in a confessing mood. Again, that patient smile of his that made me feel like I was getting a hug. "I just asked you to consider telling me. You don't have to say anything tonight."

"They're all obvious. Banal."

Now he looked amused. "Whose fantasies aren't?"

"They're all about women."

"I know."

"Alright. So one is . . ." Why was it so hard to say it? After all the lines I'd already crossed with him? "I'm in a room. Like a cell, really. It's pitch black. Impossible to see anything. Maybe it's dark like that all the time, or maybe just sometimes. But it's pitch black whenever someone comes in, so I never know who she is, what she looks like, how old she is. It could be the same woman every time, or it could be a different woman each time. But I can't know, because I never see her, or them, and she never talks, so I can't tell by her voice. And maybe my hands are tied—it's not really about being forced or helpless. It's just about not being able to tell who it is, or if it's just one woman or a long series of different women, so I can't touch, I can't feel her body to know if she's thin or fat, tall or short, young or old. And it's not about me wanting it or not wanting it. But it's just that I know that she—or they—she needs me. Almost like life or death. Like it's sustenance, as necessary as food. Or water. So when the door opens, and I hear her footfalls in the pitch black, I just give myself to her, like a duty."