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How has David gone a full week without this?
How is it possible that he missed every sensation so intensely—the weight of Patrick on top of him, the heat of his mouth, the awkward tug-and-shimmy of being helped out of his sweater—even though he’d forgotten they even existed until now? Doesn’t matter. He lets himself be taken into the rushing current of it all. He even missed Patrick’s scratchy sheets.
Almost.
Let’s not go overboard.
“I missed—” David swallows the next word right down. I missed you might throw off the mood. “This. I missed this.”
Patrick’s hands are everywhere. Gripping into David’s hair, swiping down his bare ribs, tugging up against one of his thighs. They’re everywhere, god, how are there only two of them?
“What do you want?” Patrick pants against David’s neck.
David did not miss this question.
Without waiting for an answer, Patrick sits up and strips out of his undershirt. His pale skin, even in low light, is still the only thing that can make Ray’s hideous wallpaper fade into the background. Or maybe that was Patrick’s way of waiting for an answer, because then he’s back in close, skin to skin and hands everywhere, whispering, “David, tell me what you want.”
David tucks his wince into Patrick’s shoulder. A long time ago, he used to give his honest answer. That was before he learned the hard way that “Oh, nothing really” isn’t what anyone wants to hear in a moment like this. There were several hard ways he’d learned that, actually. Best case scenario, things ground to an awkward halt, leaving David to pick up his clothes and pieces of the other person’s broken ego. Worst case, they kept pressing and prodding for a different truth so insistently that David would be forced to invent a lie and follow through with the performance.
“What do you want?” David asks back.
“Nice try,” Patrick’s smirk appears first against David’s cheek, then travels to his mouth. “I asked you first.”
It got easier once David started picking partners who didn’t care. Well, that part got easier. Pairing up with people who didn’t bother asking or listening for what he wanted brought other consequences and complications. But the sex was good. And that mattered, didn’t it? They always seemed to think so.
“Why don’t you take a guess?” David rolls his hips upward, dragging out the delicious friction between their jeans.
Patrick groans, “David.”
The sex is always good, because David is good at it. He got good at it because, no offense, sex is really easy to get good at when it doesn’t hold much power over you. Without the brain-blurring distortion of desire, it comes down to the simple mechanics of pleasure, which David’s body has always understood well. And he’s had plenty of practice. Why not? Sex is fun and has reliably made people want him around, so where’s the downside?
“David.” Patrick presses a hand down on David’s hips to still them. “I want to give you what you want. What do you want?”
Patrick is different. Patrick asks and expects an honest answer. Patrick is intense and intent and attentive in bed. He’s also easily overwhelmed by the newness in his own body. It’s been easy, would be so easy even now, to distract him from the answer he wants. To roll him over and press him down and fuck him breathless the way he likes. It would be easy because sex is easy. Distraction is easy. Avoidance is easy.
But trust. Trust is a complication.
“David?” Patrick asks into the silence that’s gone on too long.
Unexpectedly, all at once, David’s choking on his own honesty. The words tumble out before he’s even thought them: “I’m asexual.”
In the still moment that follows, all David can do is blame Rachel. If she’d never shown up, Patrick wouldn’t have spent the last week trying to win back David’s attention, and Stevie wouldn’t have lectured him about opening up, and David wouldn’t be here spilling the truth about something that isn’t Patrick’s business, that he’s not going to understand. It’s really all Rachel’s fault that David’s forgotten how to distrust. Or maybe it’s Tina Turner’s.
“Okay.” Patrick blinks down at him but doesn’t move.
“No, I—” David clamps his jaw shut before he can say anything else he hasn’t thought through.
“We don’t have to—”
“Okay, that’s not what I’m saying!”
Patrick blinks again, a tiny crease forming between his invisible eyebrows. “Then what are you—”
“I’m not saying anything!”
“But you just said—”
“I know what I said!”
“Okay,” Patrick says again, and it sounds like they’re back where they started. “I’d like to understand.”
That’s the final straw. Tonight has already had them both bursting with gratitude and generosity for each other, but this possibility is too much, too agonizing. David’s burning up with need for Patrick to know what being asexual means to him. That’s what David wants. He doesn’t want to want it, because getting it means explaining himself, which means being misunderstood, which means more explaining and more misunderstanding. But he wants it. He can’t handle Patrick wanting it, too.
“Can you—” David pushes up on Patrick’s shoulders weakly, asking for space and getting it. He covers his face with his hands, taking a little more. “I didn’t mean to say that. It doesn’t matter.”
“David. It matters.”
Behind his palms where they’re still hidden, David rolls his eyes. “Yes of course it matters, but it doesn’t matter to you.”
“It matters to me.” Patrick’s starting to sound offended now, fuck.
“I’m saying it doesn’t change anything. Between us. I don’t want it to change anything.”
Patrick eases his weight down onto his own side of the mattress, leaving David free and adrift. “I feel like maybe that’s not… up to you to decide?”
“This isn’t about you, it’s about me!” David snaps. “It’s not like—I’m not rejecting you or anything.”
“I didn’t think—David, this isn’t about my ego.” Patrick catches one of David’s wrists and tugs. Releases. “Hey. I know what being asexual means. I’m not worried you’re repulsed by me.”
David peeks out over his fingers. “You… know what it means?”
Patrick catches his bottom lip between his teeth. God, he’s beautiful like this. “Fifteen years of underwhelming sex with someone you care about a lot will make you want to google some things.”
“Oh. Sure.” David hadn’t considered that the sex with Rachel must have been underwhelming. He forgets, often, that that’s a thing people pay attention to. Using sexual connection as a barometer for how well a relationship is going, how easily the happiness is flowing, has always felt to him like converting measurements to furlongs or quarts or stone. All that complicated math, and for what? But it makes sense that Patrick would look for answers about that.
“I got as far as understanding that it’s about attraction—what you feel for someone, not what you—what you do with them.” Patrick’s eyes linger somewhere on the sheets between them. The darkness hides it, but David knows he must be blushing. They’ve done a lot together, in this bed, to make him blush. “Then I decided it didn’t really fit me and just kind of… moved on.”
Of all the things that confuse David about allosexuality—genital preferences, thirst trap etiquette, the entire concept of a “sex life”—this is the one he’ll never wrap his mind around: How they can casually encounter the definition of asexuality without it snapping everything into focus. What do they feel that makes them so sure they’re different?
“And it turns out I was right.” Patrick catches David’s eye, but laughs mostly to himself. “I’m very definitely not asexual.”
David searches for some reply to this that isn’t Good or Congrats or Duh, though those would all be honest, and lands on: “Noted.”
“Yes, please update your records.” Patrick laughs for him this time, and it’s another thing David missed this week. But he remembered the sound of it exactly. “So it’s not about me. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to me.”
David squeezes his eyes shut against Patrick’s unreasonably empathetic gaze. “It’s really not a big deal.”
“Even your small deals matter to me.”
This time David rolls his eyes in the open. So they’re not going to drop this. “I just don’t really know how to answer when you ask what I want in bed. I never want anything in particular from sex with you—with anyone, I mean.” Fuck, does that sound bad? That sounds bad. “It’s not like we’ve been sleeping together against my will or anything—If I didn’t want to, I’d—”
“David.” Patrick chuckles. “I know what it looks like when you’re doing something you don’t want to do. I’ve watched you make small talk with Ray.”
“Okay, but—” David waves away thoughts of Ray. “It’s like. I don’t ever want to have sex with you, but it’s… always appealing?”
“That makes sense.”
“What? No it doesn’t.”
“Does it make sense to you?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“Then it makes sense.” Patrick reaches out to stroke his thumb across David’s cheek. “I trust you.”
David’s face tries to split itself open at the seams, but he refuses. He refuses. He grimaces and scowls and—fuck. He smiles. “Okay, that’s not fair.”
“I know.” Patrick’s smile leaps out proudly before he reels it in. “I do think I know what you mean, though. A bit. About enjoying sex with someone you’re not attracted to.”
“I thought you said it was underwhelming.”
“We had our moments. And there were other girls. I don’t know, it’s complicated.” Patrick shakes his head. “Sometimes it can be a fine line between underwhelming and enjoyable, don’t you think?”
“Not with you,” David says quickly. “With you it’s been…”
He knows what he could say here. He’s memorized all the ways to tell people that they’re good in bed, to keep their self-image intact and their pride churning. But that’s a learned language, not native. The words to describe all the ways David enjoys sex have never existed, or at least he’s never found them.
The truth is that sex with Patrick has been incredible, but only because Patrick is incredible. Not anything he does, just how he is. Stretched out naked on the mattress or fully clothed in the stockroom with just his fly down, he’s receptive and responsive. New. Free. It’s not that the sight of Patrick’s body, the sound of his pleasure, the touch of his skin drives David wild with lust, whatever that feels like. The satisfaction is much quieter than that, the thrill of purpose, of selling exactly what someone else is buying. Every time Patrick cried out about how he never knew it could be like this, David tried not to give away that he’ll never know. But it’s enough to be on the periphery of the secret, to be the one making it happen. It feels good. It feels so good to make Patrick feel good.
“David, I know.” Patrick rubs his palm across David’s chest, saving him from words. “I’ve been there. I can tell you’re having a good time. I think you’re forgetting that you’re a really bad liar.”
“Mmm.” He’s bad at honesty, too, is the thing.
“I’d like to hear more about it,” Patrick says. “What that’s been like for you. Doesn’t have to be tonight, but sometime.”
David almost responds that there’s nothing more to tell, almost believes it’s true. Then he remembers where that lie started.
Even before high school, he’d always been drawn to all kinds of people. When his classmates started directing their sexual attention toward one gender or another, that didn’t happen for him. He stayed open to all possibilities. Like, all possibilities. Including the many fans of his two-episode Dateline arc. “Pansexual” fit for a while, until David got high with a green-haired sculpture student his first week at college, and she explained how being asexual doesn’t mean she hates sex. Everything clicked: How he could only ever imitate the kind of attraction that was supposed to be instinct. How sex satisfied in the moment but didn’t otherwise occupy his mind. How it was never the reason he did anything. He and the sculpture student fucked that night, rattling her lofted dorm room bed while her roommate watched Mean Girls down the hall. It was the worst sex of David’s life, and when it was over they shook the bedframe with their laughter instead, giddy with the revelation of failure and how little it mattered. They caught the end of the movie and had a much better time.
No one understood. He was open about being asexual through college, but no one took it seriously. Not when they saw him in his leather jacket trying to attract randoms most weekends. He got tired of explaining that it wasn’t the sex he was after but the desire. It was so easy, being desired, even when the other side of it, the desiring, was impossible. Or maybe it was a power trip, demanding attention he’d never give in return. Either way, he kept hooking up and he kept calling himself ace. There was nothing confusing about it except how confused other people got.
So he learned to hold this knowledge alone. He stopped sharing it, not out of shame, but because he decided it was more than anyone needed to know about him. He brought that couple home from college, and his dad stumbled so hard over the concept of pansexuality that correcting him to “panromantic sex-favorable asexual” clearly would’ve been too much to ask. He couldn’t ask it of his romantic prospects either, such as they were. Whenever Sebastien photographed him, he shouted out praise for David’s “innate sexual rawness” and never looked for anything his camera couldn’t see.
No one has ever understood, but that’s different from David having nothing to tell.
“Sometime,” David agrees.
“Good.”
David stares up at the ceiling. Without Patrick touching him, these sheets are getting harder to ignore.
“So this doesn’t… change anything? About how you—” David forces the question all the way out. “—how you feel about me?”
Patrick props himself up on one elbow. “Have you been asexual this whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s changed?”
David fights the relief threatening to take over his body. “Well you’re not… mad that I lied, or whatever?”
“Did I ever ask if you were asexual?”
“No.”
“Then how could you have lied?”
“Okay, Mr. Socratic method. Take a break.”
“I never got an answer to my original question though,” Patrick protests. He loops an arm around David so that they’re chest-to-chest again. “What do you want? Give me your honest answer.”
“Um.” David isn’t sure what to do with this kind of half-naked closeness. “We don’t have to—We can still have sex.”
“I know we can.” Patrick keeps crowding in, landing a kiss on David’s shoulder. “And I know you’ll like it. But that’s not what I asked.”
David sighs. He wants to be done with quicksand, with keeping so much of himself below the surface of someone’s attention that he can’t help but sink further and further down. He wants to bring all of himself into everything Patrick’s offering. It’s terrifying, but he wants it. He can’t get there yet, but he wants it. He’s glimpsed it: in the framed receipt on his dresser, and across their shop floor with acoustic guitar in the air and half the town staring, and right now with Patrick looking at him like he’s too complicated to be real, in a good way. David wants it all.
He can’t say that, though. It’s too big. How would he even phrase that request? It must be nice, he imagines, to be able to express this form of honesty physically and skip the words. David was never meant to have that kind of ease. That path to intimacy has only ever disappeared under his feet, but escaping quicksand isn’t about finding footholds. He’s heard enough of Alexis’s escapades in the Amazon to know that much. You have to forget about your feet. That’s the way to safety, that’s how ground becomes solid. You hold onto whatever you can reach.
“Is there—” David clears his throat. “Is there ice cream downstairs?”
Patrick beams. He squeezes around David’s shoulders one more time, then starts looking for his shirt in the covers. “Come on, I know where Ray hides the hot fudge.”
David sits up. “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t take—”
“David, do you want hot fudge?”
David nods.
“Good.” Patrick leans across the bed to kiss him, but there’s almost too much grin behind it to make it land. “God, I missed you.”
The mood doesn’t shift, and Patrick doesn’t wait for any reply. He just keeps getting dressed, moving with the same receptiveness and responsiveness that David’s come to crave, like he’s followed his question to exactly where he wants to be. Then he holds out a hand.
“Yeah.” David lets himself be pulled up from the bed. “Yes. I missed you, too.”