Bed Seventeen

"Look out for bed seventeen," Jen said as she was handing over. "He's a real perv."

"Great," I said. "Just what we need."

I've heard some horror stories from other nurses, of course. Tales of patients - male patients, always. Not all men but always

a

man, right? - with weird kinks who get bored in their beds and have nothing better to do than to harass the staff being paid to look after them. But on Ward F it's usually fine.

I'll spare you the grisly details about exactly what sorts of cases we look after here, but let's just say we see men who've had surgery in... let's call it

intimate

areas, shall we? Most of them are in pain, dealing with the embarrassment of having dressings changed and being prodded and poked in their most private of places all day every day. Sex is generally the last thing on their minds, and we tend to get left alone. But it sounded like bed 17 had other ideas.

Thankfully I was on nights, so as I gathered my things and sat through the handover I thought that I probably wouldn't have to worry about him too much.

How wrong I was.

The first time I saw him was early the next morning, three-ish. He was scheduled for surgery that day and so I went to do a bedside check to make sure there was no food or water nearby. I expected him to be sleeping, but it's never a surprise when patients are awake at that time. Quite aside from the pain and discomfort, hospitals just aren't easy to sleep in. There's always a light on, there's always someone awake and making noise, there's always something beeping or being wheeled along the ward. So I wasn't shocked when he spoke as I was cleaning away the jug of water that had been left by his bed.

"I haven't met you yet," he said, his voice low and rough.

"You haven't," I said. "How are you feeling?"

"Thirsty," he said. "And sore. Can I get some more pills?"

I smiled and shook my head. "Sorry. You're nil-by-mouth now until you go into surgery."

He laughed, shifted under the thin bed sheet. I saw his hand snake down to his crotch.

Here it comes

, I thought.

"Well, I can think of something that might help with the pain."

I raised an eyebrow. "Meaning?"

"I might be nil-by-mouth, but you aren't."

I turned away from him, reached down to the bottom of his bed to grab his chart. "Next of kin is listed as your wife," I said. "I'm sure she'd be delighted by what you just said."

He started to speak again but I cut him off. It's always best to take a firm hand in these sorts of situations. "I need to hang some fluids for you. I'll get some painkillers up with them, too." And before he could say anything else I walked away.

"You were right," I said in the morning when Jen arrived back on the ward to hand over.

"I was?" she asked.

"Bed seventeen."

She rolled her eyes as I told her what he'd said, and how I'd made sure to request good strong painkillers to knock him out for the rest of the night so that he wouldn't bother me again. "He's scheduled for this morning," I said, "so he probably won't bother you much today, at least."

She laughed. "which means he'll be bothering you all night again. Lucky you."

At home my mind kept coming back to that one interaction, replaying his words on a loop, the image of him grabbing himself under the thin sheet seared into my imagination. The light had been dim and I hadn't really seen anything, but in my head I'd been able to trace the shape of his cock as it hardened under the sheet, been able to see it pulse as he squeezed it.

Something about the way he'd said what he said was really getting to me, somehow pushing past the disgust that logically I knew I should be feeling but couldn't quite summon. He'd said it with such calm confidence, without a hint of contrition or shame. Normally when men say things like that there's a sense that they know they're pushing at the boundaries, a feeling that they want you to react so that they can feel powerful. It's always made me feel dirty, violated, like being forced to take part in someone's fetish against my will. But this felt different, somehow. Like he'd said it with the full expectation that I'd say

yes, sir, you're right, I can put that in my mouth

.

Why did I like it? Why could I not stop thinking about his voice, and the veins in the back of his hand?

I drifted off to sleep with the image of the shape of his cock under the blanket in the forefront of my mind, and I hated myself for it.

The next day Jen reported that she'd had no trouble. Bed seventeen had been into surgery and come out with no complications, and he was resting. He'd eaten, he'd asked for seconds, he'd moved his bowels already. You know, all that sexy stuff that nurses deal with. Now, she said, he was sleeping.

"Let's hope he stays asleep," I said, but somewhere in the back of my head was the image of the tendons in his wrist flexing as he squeezed his hand.

I busied myself with rounds, trying to distract myself, glad of the fact that the curtains around his bed were drawn and I didn't have to look at him. But, of course, I could only put it off for so long. Whatever had happened the night before, whatever images were haunting my imagination now, I still had a job to do.

"Are you awake?" I asked as I parted the curtains. I heard a sleep-thickened grunt in reply.

"Sorry," I said. "I need to hang more fluids for you, and take your blood pressure."

He sat up in his bed, tentative and slow, shifting his weight with the care of a man in pain and trying not to show it.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

"Still sore," he said. "But a different kind of sore now, I guess. Not 'oh god get me to hospital' sore, you know?"

I smiled and nodded. "Sore like we fixed it, sore."

"Yeah, exactly."

I hadn't really seen him the night before, but now that I could I was surprised. He'd spoken with the confidence of a much more attractive man. Not that he was

un

attractive, you understand. He certainly wasn't ugly. But he was just a guy. A perfectly normal guy. Slight stubble, a chin that wasn't weak but wasn't going to win any jawline awards. Nice, normal features that went together well but weren't moistening pants in the street.

I wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his arm and pressed the button to start it inflating, and I braced myself for whatever comment he was about to make. But the biggest surprise was that he didn't say anything at all. Instead we sat in silence while the cuff clenched around his bicep. With each pulse of increased pressure I felt that silence stretch out a little bit longer, felt the weight of his gaze on the side of my face, saw the veins in his forearm become a little more prominent.

Suddenly my mind was back in bed the night before, back obsessing around the image of his hand grabbing his cock through the sheet. The man may not have had a model's face but I found myself staring at his forearms and his hands, unable to pull my gaze away. Wondering what those fingers might look like tugging at the buttons of my scrubs, or looping under the elastic of my underwear as he peeled them to the side.

"All good?" he asked, when the cuff beeped and the tension in it hissed away. Suddenly I felt flustered, and I busied myself with folding the machine away and noting down his blood pressure on his chart.

"Yeah," I said. "All good."

"I'm glad," he said.

"Can I get you some water?" I asked. He shook his head.

"No," he said, "but actually, can I ask you something?" I nodded, and he smiled. "Why are you blushing?"

I don't remember the rest of that shift really. I brought him water, and hung fluids, and took empty fluid bags away, and did my job, and it was all on autopilot. My mind wasn't present. My mind was focused on his hands, and his forearms, and the soft, warm smell of him that had filled my nose as I was taking his blood pressure, that I hadn't noticed at the time but that was all I could think of now.

In bed I thought about his hands and his cock again, and this time I filled in the blanks for myself. I pictured what it would look like for those veins and tendons to pulse and flex as he handled himself. I thought about his smell, and how it would be amplified down in the thicket of his pubic hair - hair I hadn't seen but was imagining, downy and dark, a tuft of tight curls marking the boundary between public and private skin.

I desperately wanted to touch myself, to give in to the fantasy, to make myself come so that I could settle my mind and get some rest, but I also knew that if I did it would be written all over my face the next day. He'd see it immediately, and he'd know.

I slept terribly.

When I arrived at work I could tell immediately that something had happened. Jen was in a rage that she barely contained while we were handing over, and she conveniently found a reason to leave the ward as we came to his bed on rounds.

"What's the matter?" I asked when I caught up with her afterwards. She was in the staff room, already in her coat, halfway to going home.

"He's lucky he's going home tomorrow so I don't have to see him again, because if I see him again he won't be walking out of here," she said.

"Seventeen?" I asked, as though I didn't already know who she was talking about.

"He's a prick," she said.

"Tell me what happened."

She walked to the staff room door, peeked out of the window to make sure we weren't about to be interrupted, then she turned back to me and crossed her arms across her chest.

"He got his cock out," she hissed.

How was it

, I almost asked, having to bite back the words before they fell out of my mouth. Instead I tried my best to feign the disgust that I knew, logically, I should be feeling.

"What the fuck," I said, just for something to say, just to sound supportive and appropriately enraged. I said it again with emphasis, just to be sure. "Did you tell anyone?"

"There's no point, is there? He's going home tomorrow and it's my word against his anyway, nobody witnessed it. I just want to go home and forget about it."

I nodded. "Did he... say anything? When he did it?"

She laughed, an angry little snort. "Yeah, he did. He asked if I wanted to check his vitals. What a prick."

She left for home and I went about my shift. I was snappy and irritated, short with patients and colleagues alike, and for the longest time I couldn't figure out what was causing it.

It came to me in a hot, shameful flush as I was passing the curtains around bed seventeen, a feeling that settled in the base of my stomach like hot lead. I was jealous. I was jealous that he'd shown Jen his cock, that he'd propositioned her and not me.

I knew it was irrational. Jen had warned me about him in the first place, which meant he'd met her before he met me, had said something suggestive to her before his nil-by-mouth comment. Never had this only been about me and him. This had always been about just him, saying and doing whatever he wanted with impunity. And he hadn't said anything to me after I rebuffed him the first time, after I made it clear that I knew he had a wife.

Had Jen handled it differently? Had Jen reciprocated in some way, played along and encouraged him? Or had she just not told him

no

in quite the same way that I did? Had she failed to make it clear that she wasn't interested like I had.

I thought back to my attempts to sleep through the day before this shift, my restless tossing and turning in bed, the hot knot of arousal between my legs. I was annoyed because I'd become interested, and then I'd learned that I wasn't special.

"Who the fuck do you think you are?" I hissed, not even realising I was speaking aloud until the words were out.

Before I knew it I was pulling back the curtains around his bed and stepping into the dark rectangle that marked his personal space. He seemed to be asleep, turned on his side with his chest rising gently, but something about his stillness told me that he was awake and that he knew it was me.

Now that I was here, though, I didn't know what I planned to do. I'd burst in filled with energy only to realise that it was four in the morning on a hospital ward, surrounded by sick men in need of rest. What was I going to do, have a screaming match with him and wake everyone up? I stood there in silence for a few long seconds, feeling adrenaline dump into my system, the fight or flight panic response settling down firmly on the secret third option of

freeze

. I didn't know what to do.

"Are you just going to stand there staring at me?" he asked. His voice had that low, husky quality again, the same way it had sounded on that first night. I felt a frisson of chills run up my arms.

He rolled onto his back, raised an arm to prop his head up with his hand. The bed sheet stretched tight over his body and my eyes ran across the dark form of him.

"I'm..."

I swallowed, licked my lips to try and bring some moisture back into my suddenly-dry mouth.

"Yes?"

"I'm here to check your vitals," I said, the words Jen had repeated to me suddenly leaping into my mind. I felt a rush of heat in my cheeks and was glad of the relative darkness that would disguise my uncontrolled blush as the image of him grabbing his cock sprang into my mind's eye.

"Oh really," he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice, the almost-mocking sense that he'd won, that he was in control.

Fuck this,

I thought.

He's in bed, helpless. Who's in control here? Get your shit together, woman.

"Really," I said, looking up and meeting his eye, glad again of the darkness to help disguise my flushed cheeks. I didn't smile, and I didn't look away. He was grinning at first but as I held his gaze I saw his body language change, a subtle shift from quiet cocky confidence to slight trepidation. He broke our eye contact first, and I felt a rush of blood to my head that made me slightly dizzy.

Slowly, hyper aware of every motion, suddenly conscious of the way my limbs moved in a way I'd never been before, I circled his bed, still staring at his face, thrilling at the way he kept meeting my eyes with his and then looking away.

I reached up to the glove dispenser on the wall, grabbed a pair of smalls and pulled them onto my hands with practiced ease. He swallowed heavily, suddenly shy and quiet.

"Are you in any pain?" I asked. I was almost whispering, my voice low and husky. I'd never heard myself sound like this before and I loved it. He shook his head. From beyond the curtains around his bed I could hear the sounds of the other men on the ward sleeping. I wondered if any of them were awake, whether our conversation was carrying to the rest of the room. I wondered if the lust in my voice was obvious to anyone other than myself.

He shifted in his bed and the sheet pulled tighter over him, outlining the soft bump of his stomach. He swallowed again and I saw his whole torso shift - and further south, a small but conspicuous twitch where the outline of his cock was visible in the shadows.

"Oh no," I said. "I think I see some swelling. Let me check that."

I placed my hand onto his cock and he jumped slightly, like he hadn't been touched in a long time. Without moving it, applying only the slightest pressure, I looked up and met his eyes with mine again.

"Does it hurt when I press there?" I squeezed, the gentlest flexing of my palm. His cock twitched under my hand, grew firmer.

"No," he said, the word coming out as the barest aspiration.

"Good," I said. "What about here?" I squeezed harder, letting my fingers wrap around his rapidly expanding hardness. He gasped, and I heard one of the other men on the ward snort and turn over in his sleep.

"Try to remember that other people are sleeping," I said. "I'm going to need to take a look at this."

I pulled the sheet down to his knees. He was dressed only in his surgical gown, and I pushed it up to his stomach to reveal him naked from the waist down. His cock was twitching gently, pulsing in time with his racing heart as it stiffened and grew.

"Oh, there's definitely visible swelling," I said, my voice somehow steady and in control despite my breathing feeling tight in my chest. I reached out my hand and grasped him round the base, my thumb and index finger in a ring around him and my lower fingers trailing across the top of his balls. I've always loved the way balls seem to move on their own, the soft rhythmic flow of them as they pull up into the body. I pulled down slightly, pulling the skin of his shaft tight, feeling everything swell and grow harder under my touch.

"This all looks normal," I said, and suddenly I felt the urge to laugh a little, swallowed it down before it slipped out and he thought I was laughing at his cock. Maybe that was what he deserved, really, but my brain was too clouded with lust to think of that in the moment. I'd just remembered my reaction to seeing his face for the first time, how normal-looking I'd thought he was. His cock was exactly the same. Normal, nothing out of the ordinary, not unattractive, not particularly big or small. It was, I thought, a perfectly average penis, the dictionary definition of cock. And I found something incredibly erotic about that, about the idea that I was handling the most normal dick I'd ever seen.

I let go, smiled at the gasp that he tried to keep stifled. I reached up to the plastic dispenser on the wall, pumped lube onto my gloved hand. On this sort of ward you do internal exams a lot, and there's lube by every bed. I'd never considered before what other uses that might get put to, in the quiet dark hours when everyone else was sleeping.

"I'm going to perform a quick exam," I said. I didn't know why I kept talking. I was never normally vocal during sex. But then I didn't normally give handjobs to patients, either, and here I was.

I clenched my fist to get the lube onto my fingers then ran my thumb over the tips, spreading it around as much as I could. I placed my left hand onto his groin, let it settle into the curls of his hair, applied the slightest bit of pressure so that his cock stood up straight in the curve between my thumb and fingers. With my right hand I began to spread the lube over his head, so that it glistened softly in the dim light.

Every part of me wanted to grab him, to wank him hard as a rock, drop my pants to the floor and slide onto him on the bed, but I held back. A quiet, controlling voice in my head that I'd never heard before told me to go slow, to remain clinical, to give him only what he'd said he wanted and not what we both knew he actually wanted.

He drew in a deep, juddering breath that seemed loud in the stillness of the ward, and I threw a stern look at him.

"I know it's hard," I said, "but please do try to be mindful of everyone else in the room." As I said this I was wrapping my lubed fist around his shaft and beginning to slide my hand down. I could feel the spots of friction where the lube hadn't quite coated my glove or his cock and I twisted my hand to catch them, spreading the glistening jelly around him. As I moved my fist over him I could hear the soft squelching of the lube and I knew that whatever I wanted to do, whatever he wanted me to do, I was going to have to keep the pace slow so that nobody heard us.

"Just try to relax," I said.

Something about the thin barrier of the glove heightened everything for me. It was like I could feel his cock in a way I'd never felt one before, the shape of every ridge and bump and fluttering vein transferring through the latex and into my warm palm. I let my left hand wrap around the base of him, tightening my grip until I heard him gasp, his cock growing rock hard in my other hand as the blood was forced into it.

He started to breathe in time with the motion of my fist, inhaling as I lifted up over the shining crown at the head of his cock and exhaling as I pushed back down. With my left hand I began to squeeze and release, as gently as I could, not letting myself fall into a rhythm, keeping him in a constant state of anticipation about the pressure I was exerting. I'd never felt more in control of a man in my life.