Chapter 18: The Hidden Cure
The clinginess of the previous evening had softened into a quieter, more diffuse tension by morning. They’d all slept tangled on the couch, a pile of limbs and tails, and woken stiff and wordless. The desperate, territorial energy had dissipated, leaving behind a familiar, slightly embarrassed normalcy. Willum made pancakes. Malcolm organized the week’s schedule. Tyler sketched the empty syrup bottle. Josh, returning from his overnight shift at the gym, had crashed in the actual bed with a dramatic sigh about “professional sleeping arrangements.”
But Patrick felt off.
It wasn’t a sickness. It was a low-grade, humming dissonance in his veins. The memory of Willum’s skin under his hands yesterday—the possessive grip on his shoulder, the way they’d laid claim to his hips—it had ignited something that wouldn’t settle. It buzzed behind his eyes, made his tail twitch with a restless energy that had no outlet. He’d tried to focus on the manuscript he was editing on his tablet, but the words blurred into meaningless shapes. The quiet companionship of the others, Malcolm softly discussing a client call with Tyler on the sun-drenched drafting table, felt suddenly suffocating.
He needed something the room couldn’t give him.
“Gonna… stretch my legs,” Patrick muttered, not looking up from his screen.
Malcolm glanced over, his green eyes missing nothing. “Everything okay?”
“Peachy. Just stiff.”
Patrick slid off his stool, the impact of the wooden floor vibrating up through his soles. He walked, not toward the door, but across the vast plain of the workshop floor toward Willum. The human was at his lathe, shaping a long, slender leg for a table. He was lost in the work, his body a study in controlled motion. The steady whirrr of the machine, the scent of fresh-cut oak, the focused curl of his shoulders—it was a beacon.
Patrick began to climb. Up the faded denim of Willum’s jeans, using belt loops and seams as handholds. The fabric was warm from Willum’s skin, vibrating faintly with the lathe’s rhythm. He reached the leather belt, then the soft cotton of the tucked-in t-shirt. He paused at the waistband of Willum’s briefs, his own breath sounding loud in his ears.
The idea, once formed, was a compulsion. It wasn’t about sex. It was about the dark, the warmth, the absolute closeness. It was about pressing himself into the source of the unease until it either consumed him or calmed him. It was about being inside the orbit of Willum’s gravity, not just circling it.
He hooked his fingers over the elastic. With a practiced, fluid motion, he pulled himself up and slipped underneath, diving into the soft, close darkness.
The world changed.
Sound became muffled, the lathe a distant thunder. Light was a diffuse glow through the white cotton. The air was hot, humid, and carried the profoundly intimate, clean musk of Willum’s skin. It was overwhelming. Patrick’s heart hammered against his ribs. He adjusted, finding his footing on the firm plane of Willum’s hip, his back against the gentle curve of his lower abdomen.
He was surrounded. Above him, the cotton canopy. Before him, the soft, vulnerable skin of Willum’s belly. And beside him, the heavy, warm presence of his flaccid cock, resting against Willum’s thigh. Patrick let out a shuddering breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. The restless buzzing in his nerves began to dull, smothered by a blanket of sheer, tactile reality.
Willum hadn’t noticed. His hips swayed slightly with the gentle pressure he applied to the spinning wood. The movement shifted the world around Patrick in a slow, oceanic roll. It was calming. Primitive.
Seeking more, Patrick turned. He pressed his face against the skin of Willum’s hipbone, his nostrils flaring. He wrapped his arms as far as he could around the curve, holding on. His tail, seeking its own comfort, uncurled. It brushed, then rested, against the base of Willum’s cock, the sensitive skin there. The touch was incidental, a search for stability in the warm dark.
Then Willum shifted his stance, adjusting his grip on the tool. A deeper roll of his pelvis.
Patrick’s tail, draped there, moved with it. A slow, frictioning slide.
A low, absent sigh drifted down from above, barely audible over the lathe. Willum’s body registered the sensation on a level below conscious thought. A slight twitch, a flush of blood that Patrick felt as a subtle change in temperature and density against his cheek.
Patrick froze. Then, driven by a curiosity that burned hotter than any anxiety, he did it again. He deliberately flexed his tail, stroking the length slowly, from root to tip.
This time, the response was unmistakable. A full-body shiver that ran through the flesh surrounding Patrick. A low, gut-deep hum that wasn’t the machine. The cock beside him began to swell, filling the limited space, gently pressing Patrick tighter against Willum’s hip.
Patrick’s own breath hitched. This was it. This was the connection, the feedback loop he’d craved without knowing the name for it. He wasn’t a burden here. He was a catalyst. His touch, his presence in this secret place, elicited a pure, biological truth from Willum’s body. A truth Willum’s mind was too focused to police.
He continued. Gentle, persistent strokes of his tail. He nuzzled his face against the skin, his lips parting, tasting salt. He felt the moment Willum’s focus fractured.
The lathe’s whirr dropped an octave as Willum’s foot slipped off the pedal. The spinning wood slowed to a stop. The workshop was suddenly, starkly quiet.
Willum’s hands came down, bracing on the lathe’s bed. Patrick could feel the tremor in the muscles of his abdomen. A large hand descended, hovering over the fabric covering Patrick, fingers splayed. Willum’s voice, when it came, was a hoarse, confused rasp.
“Pat…?”
Patrick didn’t answer with words. He pressed his whole body forward, wrapping himself around the now fully erect flesh, his tail tightening in a possessive spiral. A silent, desperate plea in the dark.
He heard the sharp intake of breath. Felt the agonizing tension in the body around him—the conflict between shock, propriety, and the insistent pull of arousal. The hand didn’t push him away. It didn’t pull him out. It settled, heavy and hot, over the mound of fabric, pinning Patrick in his intimate cage.
“Christ,” Willum whispered, the word shuddering out of him.
And then, with a surrender that was both terrifying and glorious, Willum’s hips pushed minutely forward into the pressure of his own hand, into the clever coil of Patrick’s tail. A silent, grinding concession.
Patrick closed his eyes, the restlessness gone, burned away in the furnace of shared, guilty heat. He had his answer. The closeness didn’t just alleviate his nerves. It rewired them. It made them belong to Willum, completely.
And in the quiet workshop, with Malcolm and Tyler just feet away discussing veneers, the only sounds were their two ragged, synchronized breaths, and the soft, relentless friction of cotton on skin.
And in the quiet workshop, with Malcolm and Tyler just feet away discussing veneers, the only sounds were their two ragged, synchronized breaths, and the soft, relentless friction of cotton on skin.
Malcolm’s laugh, a bright, mundane thing, cut through the haze. “That’s walnut, Tyler, not oak. You’re spacing again.”
Reality crashed back in, cold and sharp. Willum’s eyes flew open, staring at the dormant lathe. Patrick felt the immense body around him stiffen, every muscle locking. The large hand over him lifted away, leaving the fabric to fall back, a loss of pressure that felt like abandonment.
“We can’t,” Willum whispered, the words strained and thick. “They’re right there.”
Patrick didn’t move. He pressed his forehead against the hot skin, his tail giving one last, defiant pulse. He felt Willum shudder, a silent war playing out in the twitch of tendons and the quickening heartbeat under his cheek.
After a few moments, Willum managed to get a hold of himself. He inhaled, a long, shaky drag of air that expanded his ribs and pushed Patrick tighter into the crevice of his hip. His hands, which had been braced on the machine, moved with deliberate slowness.
One found the chisel. The other flipped the lathe’s switch.
The motor whirred to life, the table leg blurring into a brown spindle. The noise was a shield. Willum leaned into the work, his shoulders rolling with familiar rhythm. But he repositioned his hips, a subtle shift only Patrick could feel, settling his weight forward. The hard, solid edge of the oak table top that the lathe rested on met the aching pressure in his groin. He could rub against it with every controlled pass of the tool, a secret, grinding counterpoint to the public act of creation.
Patrick understood. The surrender wasn’t over; it was just quieter. He uncurled his tail, laying it flat against Willum’s skin as a stabilizing line. He felt the slow, rolling thrust of Willum’s body into the table’s edge, a deep, hidden rhythm beneath the lathe’s scream.
Willum continued working, his gaze fixed on the shaping wood. Sweat beaded at his temples. Each forward rock was a confession, a plea, a silent conversation with the tiny being tucked in his clothes. The workshop air smelled of sawdust and desire, and Malcolm and Tyler kept talking, completely unaware of the frantic, loaded stillness just beside them.
The workshop air smelled of sawdust and desire, and Malcolm and Tyler kept talking, completely unaware of the frantic, loaded stillness just beside them.
Patrick could feel the frantic pulse of Willum’s heart through the skin against his cheek. The rhythm was ragged, competing with the lathe’s steady scream. He needed more. The frantic energy that had driven him here wasn't settled; it was demanding a shape. He shifted his grip, his small body moving with intention in the hot, dark space.
He repositioned himself slowly, deliberately. He turned, sliding his back along Willum’s hip until his shoulders pressed into the coarse hair at the base of his stomach. He stretched his legs out along Willum’s inner thigh. His own body now lay draped along the full, pulsing length of Willum’s erection, a living sheathe against the hot skin. He pointed his head inwards, his face nuzzling the tight skin of the lower abdomen.
His tail, liberated, rose lazily. The sleek, muscular tip found the moist head, already damp through the cotton. He began to stroke around it, a slow, circular tease, applying just the faintest pressure where he knew it was most sensitive.
Above him, Willum’s breath hitched. The lathe wavered for a second, the tool skipping a tiny, jagged line into the spinning wood. A soft, bitten-off curse filtered down. Willum’s large hand left the tool rest and pressed flat against his own stomach, right over the lump Patrick made in his briefs.
He didn’t push. He held. His hips stuttered once against the table’s edge, then stilled. Both he and Patrick were perfectly, painfully aware of the situation. They didn’t intend to finish here, not like this, not with an audience mere feet away. But the need was a live wire between them now, humming and insistent. So they played with it, a silent, focused collaboration in the dark.
Patrick’s tail coiled tighter, his strokes becoming more precise, a mimicry of a touch he couldn’t fully give. Willum’s responding grind into the oak was infinitesimal, a deep, contained roll of his pelvis that created a delicious friction against Patrick’s entire body. It was a conversation without words: I feel you. I’m here. This is real.
“You sure about the maple for the inlay?” Tyler’s voice, soft and unsure, pierced the bubble.
Willum’s reply was gruff, strained. “Yeah. Yeah, it’ll contrast.”
Malcolm chuckled. “Willum, you okay? You sound like you’re lifting the lathe, not using it.”
“Fine. Just… deep focus.”
Patrick smiled against Willum’s skin, a wicked, private thing. He increased the pace of his tail’s circles just a fraction. Willum’s stomach muscles clenched like a fist under his back.
The dual reality was intoxicating. The public performance of work, the private ritual of pleasure. Sawdust motes danced in the sunbeam between them and the others. Patrick listened to the two conversations: the one about wood grain and client budgets, and the one told in hitched breaths and the slick, quiet sound of cotton moving under his tail.
Willum was approaching his edge. Patrick could feel it in the tightening of the flesh beneath him, in the short, sharp gusts of breath. His own body was alight, a mirror of the tension, but his focus was purely on Willum’s unraveling. This was the cure for his restlessness—holding the proof of his effect in his hands, against his skin.
He wanted to push him over. The temptation was a physical ache in his own gut.
But then Willum’s hand moved. It slid down, fingers hooking into the waistband of his briefs. For a wild second, Patrick thought he was going to pull him out, or adjust him. Instead, Willum’s thumb found the specific spot where Patrick’s shoulder met his neck, through the fabric. He pressed down, not in passion, but in a firm, deliberate signal.Stop.
It was a command, but a gentle one. A request for sovereignty over his own body, a reassertion of the boundary they’d silently agreed upon. The ache of denial was sharp, but the trust in that touch was sharper.
Patrick stilled his tail. He let it go lax, resting it against Willum’s thigh. He turned his head and pressed an open-mouthed kiss, soft and apologetic, against the skin where Willum’s thumb had been.
Willum shuddered, a long, full-body release of tension that wasn’t climax, but surrender. He slowly lifted his foot from the lathe pedal. The spinning wood wound down with a dying whine. The sudden quiet was louder than the machine had been.
He braced both hands on the lathe bed, head hanging, drawing in deep, ragged gulps of air. The hard line of his body against Patrick’s back began to soften, the urgent pulse gradually slowing to a heavy, spent warmth.
“Gonna… take five,” Willum announced, his voice wrecked. He didn’t wait for a reply.
He walked, stiffly, toward the small washroom in the back of the workshop. The motion jostled Patrick, a gentle rocking in the now-quiet dark. The door clicked shut, locking out the world.
In the sudden, cool silence of the tiled room, Willum leaned back against the door. His hands, smelling of oak and oil, came up and carefully hooked into his waistband. He peeled the fabric down just enough.
Patrick blinked up into the fluorescent light, his red hair damp with sweat, his green eyes wide and dark. They looked at each other in the naked, unromantic glare. The frantic energy was gone, dissipated into a thick, vulnerable exhaustion.
Willum didn’t scoop him out. He simply extended a trembling palm, floor-level, an invitation to disembark.
Patrick crawled onto it, his tail dragging weakly. Willum brought him up, not to his shoulder, but cradled close to his chest. He didn’t speak. He just pressed his lips, once, to the top of Patrick’s head. The kiss was a seal. An acknowledgment. A quiet end to a silent war.
Outside, they could hear Malcolm’s voice, curious now. “Where’d he go?”
And Tyler’s casual, artistic reply. “Bathroom. Probably washing up. We got maple juice everywhere.”
Willum’s chest vibrated with a silent, breathless laugh against Patrick. He looked down at the tiny man in his hand, a world of understanding passing between them. The need had been played. It hadn't won, but it had been heard. And for now, that was enough.