1
'Thinking naughty things?'
The unmistakeable chime of his phone's message tone seemed so loud and somehow so urgent in the still of the night.
He had been lying there, recalling the events at the party - specifically none other than those which took place in private, between him and the impossibly sexy Miss Vanessa Thomas - and again he was hard as a rock, knowing all too well that he wouldn't sleep until he took care of himself once, or twice, or maybe more.
Just lying there with his eyes closed, happily playing victim to the graphic visions that visited and courted with the imaginative erogenous zone between his ears, his blood simmered, his heart skittered, and that dazed and hazy state she'd put him in left him with a delicious buzzing sensation that vibrated deep into his bones.
And the longer he went without giving in and touching himself, the greater the need to touch her became. It was a terrifying kind of hopelessness to want somebody this much; to the point where lust could lead to paralysis.
Outside the world was a blur of black and white as the blizzard raged on in all its deafening silence, insulating the world against all signs of life but for an occasional bird tweet.
His eyes opened to the horrid brightness of the lit screen now before him, and his heart once again pulsed stronger as he read those words. As his eyes adjusted to invite her words, Michael breathed deep and thought of what to say.
'I can't stop thinking,' he replied. 'And you?'
He waited minutes for a reply that maybe wasn't going to come. For a moment he trusted himself to drift off because - sod's law - now the lag was hitting him. But again he was jolted awake by the arrival of a new text.
'Thinking and doing,' came the reply with a line of winking emojis. His hardness ached insatiably. Fighting with his remaining strength not to touch himself now, he failed happily. But he went slow and gentle for how tender and sensitive that woman had left him.
Still he felt jittery and in the best way. What did he say without sounding as desperate as she had made him?
'Me too...'
'Is it too late to call?' Vanessa texted back.
'No, you can call,' Michael replied, and a moment later they were listening to each other's soft, heavy breathing.
'Hi,' she said, as did he. 'I really enjoyed our private party.' Sweetly she sighed. 'I'll tell you now that I'm a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it, but as for doing what I did - that was new to me.'
'You and me both,' Michael responded, thinking that she definitely didn't mean the things she did to him with her mouth. He just laughed.
'Just so you don't think that this is something I just go and do.'
'I didn't think it,' Michael disarmed as he lay flat on his back in the dark, his free hand wrapped around his shaft. 'I haven't been able to think of anything other than what we did,' he testified.
'Me too!' She breathed heavily. All playing with herself had done was work her up into a desire to fuck Michael into a lustful frenzy. 'That and the ideas it put in my head.'
'Tell me...'
She laughed. 'But that'd be telling.'
'That's the idea,' Michael teased. And he thought of what had happened near the end, with the lights off - with Vanessa on her knees before him. He closed his eyes and swallowed dryly.
She wasn't even in the same room, the same building, or the same neighbourhood, and again Michael's heart was jack-hammering in his chest as though she was right there, her lips on his, her hands on him too.
'In this case, Michael, telling would be spoiling,' she hinted mysteriously.
'Terrible tease,' he chided with a sleepy grin.
'Maybe just a little,' she half-admitted, and then, 'what are you doing next Friday evening?'
Michael wasn't even sure he'd survive until next Friday.
2
"What the fuck have I done now?" were not the words any friend of Michael Bench would associate with him, and least of all in the family home. But then the fools even a clever man had no choice but to suffer he would have to be bound to by blood.
Three days Aaron had harassed his now ex-girlfriend by phone, although it was ultimately him who rejected her at the end of that fateful night. Now somehow it was the fault of his allegedly frigid virgin younger brother.
Before that nonsense had touched him, soiled him - made him feel dirty and abused - Michael was summoned once again to his mother's house with the words, 'your brother's got a few choice words to say to you.'
'Then he can say them,' Michael responded coolly from his own side of the call. It was seven in the evening on a horribly cold Tuesday and he was about to sit down to his dinner - ramen noodles, toast, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs.
'You'd better come round to the house then,' Victoria said distantly. In that moment his own mother was no better than the guy who wore sunglasses and a baseball cap to the game on a sunny afternoon, only to be sitting there none the wiser, shading his eyes with his hand with the bill of his cap resting over the back of his neck.
How stupid could she get? How insultingly stupid, for god's sake?
'He has a phone,' Michael reminded her patiently. 'He knows how to use it. What's it about?'
'You'll find out, won't you?' Michael did not care at all for the dismissive tone of her voice. 'He's here now, waiting, anyway.'
'Put him on,' Michael insisted less patiently. She hung up.
Now he was sitting there all alone, his simple dinner getting cold right in front of him, and he had lost his appetite. Well fuck it, he thought, in spite of the way they treated him like a human footstool sometimes.
Regardless he trayed his food on his lap and sat back to eat, and he would take his time just to piss them off, because if anybody had provoked a fight over nothing, he was not going to jump through hoops for them.
