Anthology - Threefold

by Desiree Holt

That time she’d tripped and planted her face in his groin. And he’d got hard. That time she’d looked at him, just around the curtain of her curly mass of dark hair, or winked at him, or chewed gum in a certain sort of way.

  And he’d got really, really hard.

  All of that gone, now, because he’d done something awful about the whole getting hard thing.

  He couldn’t meet her gaze. It was currently flicking between the two of them, but he couldn’t return it. Even without eye contact, he knew his cheeks were burning red. He could feel it on the nape of his neck, too, and perspiration had gathered in the hollow at the base of his back.

  “I really didn’t hear anything,” she said, but it wasn’t a relief. Mainly because she was obviously, obviously lying. He could hear it, in the up and down vibrato of her voice. And when he dared look at her, he could see it in the tremble of her arms—as though she’d held the cake far too long. While listening in awestruck horror.

  Then there was the flush all over her, too—the one that Jimmy kindly thought to mention.

  “Are you sure? ‘Cause you look sort of hot there, El.”

  The word hot made him want to close his eyes. Clearly she was mortified and unsure of what to do, and Jimmy was there using a word that could mean so many, many things.

  Hot as in gorgeous—which was unfortunately true, right at that moment.

  She had on that clingy jersey with the almost v-neck—the one that showed off how full and firm her breasts were. And her lips were all wet and parted and her hair just messy like that, and he could see really clearly through the skimpy material that her nipples seemed to be hard. He tried not to look, but it was as obvious as the lying.

  Which brought him around to hot, as in turned on.

  Why, his mind was an absolute cess-pit!

  “I’m just…is the furnace on?”

  Now she was flustered. There wasn’t anything particularly exciting about Ellie being flustered, but his cock seemed to be stiff, anyway. In truth, he wasn’t sure it had even gone anywhere, during this entire humiliating escapade. Not even when they both blundered in here, and there she was.

  He thought about her hearing him, moaning. God, he had moaned really, really loudly. And said her name, when he climaxed! He was pretty certain that he had almost definitely said her name.

  Probably while adding something disgusting, like oh baby sit on my face.

  “Nah—the furnace isn’t on,” Jimmy was saying—in this weird, suggestive sort of way. How in fuck’s name did you get suggestive into furnace? Next he was going to start talking about boilers or pipes, and oh what then, what then?

  She was putting the cake down on the bed. The cake was on the bed, and now she was wiping her hands on her jeans—as though they were sweaty. He knew a thing or two about that, though. His own hands felt as though oceans had set up camp around the palm area.

  Ships were going to start sailing, any second.

  “Listen, guys. I really didn’t mean to…hear anything. I swear to God! And about two minutes in when I knew where it was going and you said…stuff, I was going to burst out and act like I’d not heard the…stuff. I really was! But then…”

  Oh God. Was she apologising? Oh no she was. They had masturbated while saying things about her and watching porn with her in it, and she was apologising to them. This was hands down the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Even worse than when he’d tried to tell her that he thought he was falling in love with her, and instead had asked her if she got bad cramps during her period.

  At least when asking inappropriate questions about the female reproductive system, you couldn’t accidentally masturbate over her. Or hear her apologise about that.

  “It just got too embarrassing for me to come out!”

  “Embarrassed, or a little worked up? Huh?” Jimmy said.

  Then he laughed. Laughed. And did some winking and some other stuff and God, he couldn’t remember why he was friends with a person like Jimmy.

  “Look—we’re really sorry, Ellie. I’m really sorry. You don’t have to be at all, you don’t. You came over here to do something nice for us and we…do that. I can’t imagine what you must think.”

  His voice sounded weird and crumpled, even to him. But her expression remained without accusation. If anything she looked nervous, and…maybe a little ashamed?

  “Don’t listen to Mr. Moral, over there. Come on—you liked it, right?”

  “Jimmy!”

  It snapped out of him, but his friend barely flinched. Just glanced at him, one eyebrow rakishly raised.

  “What? She clearly did. She’s all hot and trembly—like the way you get.”

  Evan tried to make words, but could only find the wherewithal to cover his face with one hand. Though really, he should have known Jimmy would want to make things worse.

  He always did.

  “I’m…not!” she said, after a moment of stuttering struggles.

  That pause between I’m and not seemed immense.

  “I didn’t even listen. I mean, I heard the gist, but that’s only because you guys were really loud!”

  Oh God.

  “Yeah, he makes a ton of noise for someone usually so quiet. He calls out your name all the time, too—he’s got a real—”

  “Will you knock it off!”

  Evan made a grab for him, suddenly stuffed with fury. But Jimmy just danced away, still grinning and full of probable other awful things to say.

  “I don’t mind, I don’t—Jim, don’t tease him, okay?”

  Evan’s stomach folded, on the word tease. Like the pair of them were in on a joke, together. Then Jimmy wrapped an arm around Ellie’s shoulders, as though all of this hadn’t quite made him feel small enough.

  “Yeah—you don’t mind, do you, El? Thinking about our tall, handsome friend here, twisting himself into knots over you. Getting hard just at the thought of you, but too shy to say.”

  And oh no, words came out then, awful words, as though the portion of his brain that controlled sense had decided to shut down.

  “Even if I was too shy, the first thing I’d tell her wouldn’t be that she made me get an erection!”

  He had been pushed into a corner, but even so. Using the word erection seemed insane, at best.

  Ellie looked mortified for him.

  “It’s okay. I think she’d be happy to hear it,” Jimmy said.

  Then she just looked mortified for herself.

  “Jimmy—don’t. Let’s just have some cake or something, okay?” Evan said.

  The first part of his words came out strident and tense, the second so faint it was embarrassing. Though in truth, the thought of all of them sitting down together to eat baked goods seemed, at best, torturous.

  Which turned out to be a wonderful premonition. They all sat around the kitchen table, Jimmy secretly smiling and Ellie looking traumatised, cake sliding down Evan’s throat like bricks coated in glass. And the silence. God, the silence. He didn’t think they’d ever had any time together, spent in such unnerving quiet—apart from the sound of chewing and forks scraping on a cake base and the occasional flick of Ellie’s tongue over her upper lip.

  Not that you could really hear something like that. It was more like he just really wanted to watch her do it. Then she caught him watching her, and that flush all over her cheeks deepened, and he had to look away again.

  Only to catch Jimmy, grinning at him. Though to his friend’s credit, he continued to say nothing more about erections. There were some small comforts, amidst this awkward nightmare. And eventually, Ellie’s shoulders seemed to unclench, and her smile got less quavery, and she said a few mindless things like good cake and did you play pinball at the bar?

  To which he even answered, haltingly. He managed an I beat Jimmy, only then her eyes locked with his and there was something very weird and uncomfortable about that.

  There was probably going to be something very weird and uncomfortable about all of this, for a long, long time.
r />   * * * *

  Of course, sleep didn’t want to come. Though the worst of it wasn’t that all of it had happened, or even that Evan hadn’t been able to stop himself touching the section where she had probably sat, on his bed.

  While wondering if it smelt even vaguely of her. And of a very specific place, on her.

  No, the worst part was—she had decided to sleep over, in the guest room. It just seemed like such a crazy thing to do, though he felt sure she must have a reason for wanting to. Did she expect him to get up, and go and talk to her about it, alone? Without Jimmy there? Maybe that’s what she was waiting for.

  Maybe she was in there, expecting an apology. A more personal one, directly from him. They had good talks, sometimes, while alone. Sweeter things, than the ones they all had together about dick and fart jokes and who’s tougher, Sigourney or Linda. Once she’d spoken to him about her Mum, and how much she missed her, and all that stuff about reshaping her life around the loss of someone and—

  She would definitely be waiting for a discussion about this.

  He tossed the covers aside and grabbed his robe. Then couldn’t decide if a robe was the best idea. Would it look like he was trying to cover something up? He never wore a robe usually, and she knew it. And yet somehow the thin jersey top and cotton bottoms combo seemed very revealing, all of a sudden.

  A part of his brain decided to inform him that if his cock should rise for any, you know, random reason—it would be very obvious, through such flimsy material. Plus it was easy to see a lot of his chest hair, over the top of his jersey. Jimmy called it his “gay top”, but it was just comfortable for sleeping, and anyway Jimmy was a dick.

  He loved his friend, but that fact couldn’t be avoided. Dick and Jimmy, sitting in a tree—

  He stopped himself, before such surreal thoughts went any further into awkwardville.

  Crossed the hallway barefoot and freezing, to knock on Ellie’s door.

  There was a brief moment of a concern so strange and panicky it almost stopped him in his tracks—what if Ellie was in there, making love with Jimmy?—then the sound of her voice came from the living room, of all places, and his entire body breathed out.

  No sex with Jimmy. No-one was having sex with Jimmy. And he didn’t even have to have this conversation on her bed, because there she was, all curled up on the sofa.

  She looked cute, wrapped up in a blanket. Cute but with one bare leg poking out from underneath the patterned material, in a way that made his gut kick. And he could see that there wasn’t all that much to whatever she was wearing up top—the curve of her cleavage was just about visible, over the fringe of the blanket.

  It forced him to sit down next to her quickly, lest her eyes should alight on anything he desperately didn’t want her to see— such as an insistent bulge in his cotton pants, for example. Unfortunately, sitting down only put him too close much too quickly, and she just looked startled.

  Then warm, all over. Warm in her eyes, warm in her cheeks.

  “Evan,” she said, and that sounded warm, too. Weirdly, however, the warmth didn’t make him feel good. Nor did her putting her book aside, to wait for him to say God knew what.

  He had masturbated, while watching her porn twin get it on. It flashed so often in his mind, he started to wonder if it should be the title of his eventual biography. You know—the one he decided to write after being put in prison for perverted ogling of a best friend.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry. Again. About everything that happened. I couldn’t sleep thinking about it—you’ve got to know that I couldn’t sleep. I have no idea what you must—”

  It was a shock, when she put her hand over his. So much of one that he stopped talking, mid-sentence, and maybe also felt all of the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  “It’s okay,” she said, in a lovely, reassuring sort of manner. He could practically hear the don’t be silly, silly-head, at the back of her words, as she stroked her thumb over his knuckles.

  “It’s just that Jimmy, you know, he…”

  “He can be very persuasive,” she finished, for him—but that didn’t seem to sit right, somehow.

  “No—no. I’m not blaming him. I know what I did and he didn’t make me.”

  “Right. Of course not.”

  Was she scooching closer? Why was she closer, suddenly?

  “I mean, I’ve always had these…I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  He could feel his face getting hotter, and it didn’t help that she’d progressed from holding his hand, to sort of sliding her fingers underneath, to his leg. And she was rubbing him, in a really not all that friendly sort of way.

  The blanket had slid off her shoulders. He tried not to look.

  “So anyway, what I’m trying to say is—no matter what Jimmy suggested, I shouldn’t have gone along with it.”

  Her hand was really, really high up on his thigh, now. So high up that every time she stroked—in this deliriously firm sort of manner—her thumb very nearly brushed the underside of his balls.

  It made him want to inform her of impending danger, or something like it. As though she couldn’t possibly be aware of what she was doing, despite the fact that she was looking up at him with big, soft eyes, and her lips were all parted and moist, and when he dared to look down, he could see the swell of her breasts above the little vest thing she was wearing.

  He watched, hypnotised, as they went up and down. Up and down.

  His cock gave the signal for unfinished business, inside the now tight confines of his cotton pants. It made him long for the comfort of a robe, instead of what he had—one leg crossed underneath the other at such an angle that it’d be very difficult for her to make out his erection, should she glance in that direction.

  But one false move, and things would become extremely obvious.

  “Don’t worry about it, okay? Seriously—it’s fine.”

  “You seem to be taking all of this really well.”

  So well that she appeared to be almost pressed against him—though he couldn’t think when that had happened. And her mouth was…her mouth was very close to his mouth. And her other hand had found its way to the nape of his neck, where it stroked and tickled the soft swatch of hair, there.

  It all made her seem very confident—the trembling aside.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, then keenly felt the stupidity of such a question. Of course she wasn’t cold—she was nervous and embarrassed and who knew what else. Which made reaching for the blanket even more ridiculous then his body briefly pressing into hers suggested.

  Her breasts pushed warm and full against his chest, and a little too, too obvious sound came out of her mouth—but that wasn’t the worst of it. No—the worst came when she squirmed in his arms as he fumbled with the blanket, and one of her legs straightened and sort of hooked over his, and—

  The moment it happened, he tried to block it from his mind. But that wasn’t really of much use, because her moving like that—and briefly rubbing what felt like her groin over his—could easily be dismissed. But her words couldn’t.

  “Oh my God you’re hard. Is that you? Is that your erection?”

  He tried to think of things it might possibly be, besides his big stiff cock—and all while attempting to cover as much of her up with the blanket as possible. Could she have felt a strategically placed banana, stuffed down his pants? Perhaps the keys he conveniently kept inside his sleepwear? Maybe a roll of Mentos, for those urgent minty fresh breath occasions.

  “It’s just the way I’m sat.”

  His mind applauded—b ra-vo. But what good was his mind, when it went blank under such duress? It went blank again, the moment her hand suddenly slid utterly and completely between his legs. Right. Over. His. Roll of Mentos.

  “Ellie!”

  “Do I really turn you on this much? Or are you thinking about something else? Jesus, you’re solid.”

  If she kept talking, he felt sure his mind would never return. Th
is just wasn’t how things were supposed to go. She should have been a little mad, then they were meant to talk, and bond again—probably over more cake and Nintendo—before returning to bed, happy and satisfied.

  Instead she was stroking him, through a layer of thin cotton. Not even just exclaiming about it as though trying to embarrass him, anymore. Really rubbing, like she wanted to get him even more riled up.

  And it was definitely working. It was working so much that he felt sure orgasm was close—especially when she tried to kiss his open mouth. Somehow that jerky, hesitant press of her lips—so much less assured than her hand over his prick—sent deep, urgent spikes of pleasure, directly to his groin.

  Perhaps because it meant that she was serious. Not just trying to embarrass him or going for something quick and dirty. She wanted to kiss, and really do this, and maybe God maybe she actually wanted him.

  He thought about Jimmy saying that it had turned her on, to listen. Then Evan kissed her back, in that same nervous sort of fashion—like a blunder of the lips, suddenly together.

  She didn’t let it remain like that for long, however. The hand at the nape of his neck pulled him closer, and her lips slid wetly over his, and after that came her tongue. He definitely felt her tongue slide into his mouth, slippery and lewd, before he got up the courage to give her a little of it back.

  When he did, she moaned all the way down into the centre of his body.

  It made him want to say her name, but such a task became difficult under the duress of frantic kissing. Because that’s what they seemed to be doing—frantically kissing each other. Hands in each other’s hair, mouths greedily working until he felt sure his stubble was about to leave burns.

  Not that she seemed to care. He knew what she was trying to do—stuff her other leg between the side of his body and the couch, so that she could straddle him. Her hand had long since left his aching cock, but her eagerness to get other body parts over it was extremely gratifying. Stunning, but gratifying.

  As were arms, around his neck. And the way she suddenly stopped kissing his lips, to press her wet open mouth to his jaw, his cheek, his throat.