Chapter 5: Jasper's cock stretches Elias open with brutal precision, his hips pistoning as sweat drips onto Elias's heaving chest - the betrayal fuels their coupling until Jasper's release floods deep, both men trembling with the knowledge this violent joining might finally take root.
Elias didn't sleep. He perched on the edge of a vigil, in a plastic chair beside Jasper's hospital bed, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, the sluggish drip of blood into the IV line. The room smelled of vinyl and sickness, a world away from their apartment. Jasper’s face, usually so mobile in sleep, was a still, pale mask, the freckles a dusty sprinkling of rust on parchment.
They discharged him at noon the next day.Dr. Finch used words like “lucky,” “minimal internal trauma,” and “complete recovery expected,” but his eyes, when they met Elias’s, held a haunted apology that went beyond the clinical failure.
The cab ride home was silent. Jasper leaned heavily against the window, every bump in the road drawing a soft hiss of pain from between his teeth. Elias carried the small plastic bag of supplies, his fingers brushing against the specimen cup he’d smuggled into his suitcase. It was wrapped in a hospital gown now, a grimy little secret.
Their apartment felt hollow. The familiar—the faded blue sofa, Jasper’s discarded sketchbook on the coffee table, the soft hum of the refrigerator—had a thin layer of dust over it, as if they’d been gone for years. Elias helped Jasper into bed, arranging pillows for support.
“I feel like I got kicked by a fucking horse,” Jasper mumbled, his voice raspy from the breathing tube.
“You rest.” Elias’s voice was tight. “I’ll get you water, your meds.”
The next three days passed in a quiet, sterile pantomime of care. Elias changed dressings, timed pain medication, made bland food. He slept on the couch, jolting awake from fractured dreams filled with the shriek of alarms and the sight of Jasper’s blood blooming on white gauze. In every dream, he reached for the vial, but his hands were always empty.Jasper healed. The color returned to his face. The wincing gave way to careful movement, then to a restless frustration. The optimism Elias relied on was conspicuously absent, replaced by a simmering quiet. They didn’t talk about the procedure, the failure, the future. The silence between them grew a membrane, thick and palpable.
On the fourth morning, Elias woke on the couch to find Jasper standing in the doorway of the living room, silhouetted by the weak dawn light seeping through their single window. He was dressed in sweatpants, shirtless, the bandage a stark white square on his lower abdomen. His eyes were bloodshot, not from sleep, but from something sharper.
“You’re having nightmares,” Jasper said. It wasn’t a question.
Elias sat up, the blanket pooling around his waist. The stale scent of last night’s takeout lingered in the room. “Just… processing.”
“You talk in your sleep. You say ‘I’m sorry.’” Jasper’s voice was flat. “You don’t say it to me when you’re awake.”
A cold wire of dread tightened around Elias’s ribs. “Jasper…”
“What are you sorry for, Elias?” He took a step into the room. The soft hum of the coffee maker on its timer filled the heavy silence. “For the procedure failing? That’s not your fault. For me almost bleeding out? Not your fault either.” Another step. “So what is it? What did you do?”
The weight in Elias’s pocket was a phantom limb, a constant, guilty pressure. He looked at Jasper—really looked—and saw the deep, wounded suspicion beneath the fatigue. The trust was cracked. He could lie. He could nurse that crack until it became a canyon. Or he could try to fill it with the ugly, shameful truth.
His voice, when it came, was a dry leaf scraping on pavement. “The sample. The one they took. Dr. Finch said it was compromised. Mixed with blood. He said it was useless, that they had to focus on you.”
Jasper nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving Elias’s face. “I know. He told me when I was in recovery. Said it was contaminated. A lost cause.”
Elias’s heart was a frantic bird in a cage. He took a breath that didn’t reach his lungs. “It wasn’t… completely lost.”
The room went utterly still. The coffee maker gurgled, a obscenely normal sound.
“What does that mean?” Jasper’s voice was low, dangerous.
“When they took you… when they rushed you out… the vial was on the tray. The one with the…” Elias couldn’t say it. “I took it. I poured it into a clean cup. I have it.”
Jasper stared. For a long, terrifying moment, there was no expression on his face at all. Then it fractured. His eyebrows drew together, his mouth opened slightly, and a raw, disbelieving sound escaped him—not a laugh, not a sob, but a choked expulsion of air. It morphed into a low, guttural laugh that held no humor.
“You have it,” he repeated, deadpan.
“Yes.”
“You stole my fucked-up, bloody jizz from a fucking surgical tray while I was bleeding out on a gurney.”
Put like that, it was an act of grotesque insanity. Elias could only nod, a tight, miserable jerk of his head.
Jasper’s composure shattered. It didn’t explode; it imploded, collapsing inward into a cold, focused fury. He crossed the room in three swift strides. Before Elias could rise, Jasper’s hands were on his shoulders, shoving him back down into the couch cushions. The force was shocking, fueled by pain and betrayal. Elias’s head snapped back.
“You kept it?” Jasper snarled, his face inches away. His warm brown eyes were black with anger. “Why? To do fucking what, Elias?Frame it? You think some miracle is swimming in that cup of blood and trauma? After what my body just went through?”
“I couldn’t let it go!” Elias shouted back, the guilt twisting into defensive anger. “It was all we had left! It was you!”
“It wasn’t me!” Jasper roared. “It was a fucking medical waste product! I was the thing on the gurney! Did you even look at me when you took it, or were you just looking at your goddamn future?”
The words were a physical blow. Elias thrashed, trying to get up, but Jasper’s weight—his stocky, solid, healing weight—pinned him. He grabbed Elias’s wrists, wrenching them above his head, holding them there with one strong hand. His other hand fumbled with the drawstring of Elias’s pajama pants.
“What are you doing? Jasper, stop, you’re hurt—”
“Shut up,” Jasper spat, his breath hot on Elias’s face. The bandage brushed against Elias’s stomach. “You want something viable? You want a real shot? Not some clinical fucking garbage. You want it raw. You want it the way it’s supposed to be. Well here it is.”
He yanked the pajamas down, the fabric tearing at the seams. Elias cried out, a mix of protest and sharp, unwanted arousal that sparked like a live wire in the pit of his shame. Jasper’s hand shoved between his legs, fingers rough and demanding, finding him already half-hard—a betrayal of his own body. He pushed Elias’s thighs apart.
“Jasper, you’re not healed, this is insane—”
“Fuck my healing,” Jasper growled, spitting into his own palm. He didn’t prep, didn’t reach for lube. He used the spit and his own furious momentum, pressing the head of his cock against Elias’s tight, unprepared hole. “You wanted it so bad? Take it. Take all of it. Every fucking drop.”
He shoved in.
Elias screamed. A raw, ragged sound of pure burn. It was a dry, brutal intrusion, a tearing friction that screamed up his spine. His body arched, trying to escape the invasion, but Jasper held him down, burying himself to the hilt in one vicious thrust.
“See?” Jasper hissed, his face contorted in a mask of pain and fury. “This is real. This is me. Right here.” He pulled back, a searing scrape, and slammed back in.
Elias gasped, tears springing to his eyes. The pain was blinding, a white-hot brand. But beneath it, woven into the violation, was a dark, coiling thread of something else. The sheer authenticity of it. Jasper, alive and furious and inside him. Not a lab, not a vial, not a hope. A punishing reality.
Jasper set a brutal, punishing rhythm. Each thrust was a wordless accusation, a physical manifestation of the betrayal. The couch springs squeaked in a violent, ugly tempo. Jasper’s bandage was stained a faint pink where the wound strained.
“This is how you get pregnant for real,” Jasper grunted, his voice thick with effort and anger. He leaned down, his mouth against Elias’s ear. His words were hot, wet, and filthy. “Not from a fucking cup.From me. Filling your tight little hole up. Making you take it. Making you drip with it.”
The obscenity, the raw possession in the words, sent a shockwave through Elias. His cock, trapped between their sweating stomachs, throbbed. He hated himself for it. He came untouched a moment later, a strangled sob wracking his body as his release spurted hot and shameful between them.
Jasper felt it. He snarled, a sound of triumph and deep disgust. “Yeah. That’s it. Now you take mine.”
His pace became frantic, erratic. His grip on Elias’s wrists was iron. He was close, his breath coming in ragged, pained grunts. He drove in one last, deep time, his body bowing, and Elias felt the hot, liquid pulse deep inside him as Jasper came with a low, wounded groan.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their labored breathing, the smell of sex and sweat and pain souring the air. Jasper collapsed onto him, his weight heavy, his face buried in Elias’s neck. Elias could feel the damp heat of tears, whether from pain or fury or grief, he didn’t know.
Slowly, Jasper pulled out. The sensation was a wet, aching emptiness. He rolled off, landing on the floor beside the couch with a thud, wincing as he jarred his wound. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.
Elias curled onto his side, his body screaming, his insides feeling raw and violated and… claimed. The cooling come leaked onto the couch cushion. He didn’t move to clean it.
“Where is it?” Jasper asked, his voice hollow now, all the fire spent.
Elias didn’t pretend not to understand. “In my suitcase. Wrapped up.”
“We’re flushing it today.”
Elias closed his eyes. A part of him, the desperate, secret-holding part, wailed in protest. But the larger part, the part that felt the phantom ache of Jasper’s thrusts and the sting of his words, just felt tired. Defeated.
“Okay,” he whispered.
The dawn light had strengthened, cutting a bright, shameful line across the messy living room floor, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air above them. The coffee maker had finished its cycle. The familiar, comforting smell of fresh coffee filled the apartment, a cruel, mundane counterpoint to the ruin between them.