Chapter 13: Post-Exam Feast
The silence felt different in my own apartment. Rico had packed for a weekend gig in Vegas, leaving a vacuum of glitter and accusation in his wake. My phone was a dead, black slab on the coffee table.Two weeks. Fourteen days of radio silence after the shower, after the bookshelf, after I’d left him sprawled and wrecked in his sterile bed at dawn. He’d texted once: Finals hell. Sorry. I’d replied with a thumbs-up emoji. It felt cowardly, cold.It felt necessary.
The problem was the quiet. In the quiet, I could hear the echo of his gasp against the tile, see the way his eyes went soft and unfocused when he came. In the quiet, my own bravado felt like a costume left on the floor, sequins facing down. I cleaned. I rehearsed a new lip-sync to a brutal, heartbroken ballad. I scrolled apps, swiping past faces that seemed like cardboard cutouts.
Then, the phone buzzed. A single vibration that seemed to shake the whole room.
It was him.
Omar: It’s over. The last final. I turned it in.
I stared at the words. They were simple, factual.They offered no entry point. My thumbs hovered. I typed, deleted, typed again.
Me: Congrats. Aced it, I bet.Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Omar: I don’t know about that. I missed you.The air left my lungs. Four words, and the careful scaffolding I’d built over the last two weeks—he’s busy, it was just fun, don’t be clingy—collapsed into dust.He missed me. Not the idea of me. Not the thrill.Me.
A wild, reckless grin spread across my face. I didn’t fight it.
Me: Prepare the joints. I’m coming over.
I didn’t wait for a reply. I was already pulling on my boots, grabbing my leather jacket. The drive to Westwood was a blur of neon and my own heartbeat thrumming in my ears. I didn’t bring pizza this time. I brought only the specific, buzzing hunger his text had unleashed.
His building loomed, a monolith of cool glass. I took the stairs two at a time, my boots echoing in the concrete stairwell. I didn’t knock. I texted.
Me: Open up.
The door clicked unlocked.I pushed inside.
The apartment was dark, lit only by the blue glow of his laptop screen on the desk and the orange pulse of a soldering iron cooling in its stand. The air smelled of ozone, burned coffee, and the sweet, familiar scent of high-grade weed. Omar was slumped in the burgundy armchair, looking utterly demolished. He wore the same grey sweats, now rumpled. Dark circles pooled under his eyes. Textbooks and scribbled notes were fanned across the floor like the aftermath of an explosion.
He looked up as I entered. His exhausted face transformed, a slow sunrise of a smile breaking through the clouds of fatigue. “You came.”
“You said the magic words.” I shrugged off my jacket, letting it fall to the floor. I walked to the desk, to the little ceramic tray. Two perfectly rolled joints lay next to his laptop. “I see you followed instructions.”
“I’m a good student,” he said, his voice raspy from disuse.
I plucked one up, lit it with his desk lighter, and took a long, slow hit. I held the smoke in, letting it burn away the last of my own stupid anxiety, then walked over to him. I leaned down, cradling his face, and exhaled the smoke into his open mouth. He inhaled deeply, his eyes fluttering closed.
When he opened them, they were brighter. “Hi.”
“Hi, yourself.” I passed him the joint and sank to the floor at his feet, my back against the chair, my shoulder against his knee. “You look like shit, anak.”
He took a hit, coughing slightly. “Feel like it. My brain is… soup. I can’t even remember my own name.”
“It’s Omar,” I said, leaning my head back to look up at him. “You’re the boy who makes my dick hard and finishes his organic chemistry finals. In that order of importance.”
He laughed, a real one, rough and warm. “Good to know my priorities are straight.”
We passed the joint back and forth in comfortable silence. The weed was smooth, heady. It unspooled the tight knot of stress in my shoulders, in his jaw. I could feel the tension leaching out of him, his body sinking deeper into the chair.
“It’s quiet now,” he murmured after a while. “In my head. It’s been just… noise. Equations, mechanisms, failure scenarios. For weeks.”
I understood then. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to text. His mind had been a locked room, and he’d finally found the key. He was handing it to me now.
“What does it sound like when it’s quiet?” I asked, my voice low.
He thought for a moment, his fingers absently tracing the shell of my ear. “Right now? It sounds like your breathing. And the traffic. And… wanting.”
The word hung in the dark, smoky air. Wanting. It was an open door.
I stood up. I took the joint from his limp fingers, stubbed it out. Then I reached down, hooked my hands under his arms, and hauled him up out of the chair. He came easily, pliant, his body soft and warm against mine.
“Come on,” I said, steering him toward the kitchen. “You need fuel.”
I sat him on a stool at the breakfast bar and rummaged through his fridge. It was depressingly academic: energy drinks, Greek yogurt, wilting spinach. But in the freezer, behind bags of frozen peas, I struck gold: a package of corn tortillas. In the pantry, a can of refried beans. “We’re improvising.”
I heated a pan, warmed the tortillas, slathered them with beans. I found a sad block of cheddar and grated it over the top. It wasn’t glamorous. It was beige on beige. But when I slid the plate in front of him, he looked at it like I’d presented him with a Michelin-starred meal.
He ate with a quiet, focused intensity, tearing the quesadillas apart with his fingers. Grease and bean paste smeared his chin. I watched, mesmerized. This wasn’t the careful, curious Omar from the club or the pliant, submissive one from the shower. This was someone utterly present in his hunger, animal and basic.
He finished the last bite, licking his thumb clean. A drop of grease clung to his lower lip.
Without thinking, I leaned across the counter. I caught his wrist and brought his thumb to my own mouth, sucking the salt and grease from it slowly, my eyes locked on his. His breath hitched.
Then I leaned further, my tongue darting out to catch the stray grease on his lip. I kissed him, deep and slow, tasting beans and weed and the unique, essential taste of him.
I pulled back just an inch. “Fuck your exams,” I murmured against his mouth, my voice a low growl. “I’m your final now.”
A shiver ran through him. He surged forward, kissing me back with a desperate, hungry energy that tasted like release. He knocked the empty plate aside, the ceramic clattering on the granite. His hands were in my hair, pulling me closer over the cool, hard surface of the breakfast bar.
This wasn’t going to be slow. This was a conflagration.
I broke the kiss, panting.“Outside. Now.”
He didn’t question it. He just followed, a step behind me, as I grabbed the remaining joint and his lighter from the desk. We spilled out of his apartment into the hallway, down the stairwell, and out into the balmy Los Angeles night.
The street was alive. The bass from a nearby club thumped through the pavement. The scent of jasmine from a neighbor’s yard fought with the smell of exhaust and fried food. And there, on the corner, was a beacon: the Midnight Taco Truck, its neon "OPEN" sign flickering, a halo of steam and light around it.
We joined the short line, a collection of club kids, night shift workers, and fellow insomniacs. I stood behind him, my front to his back, my arms loosely around his waist. I could feel the residual stress in his muscles, the way he leaned back into me, trusting me to hold his weight.
We got our food: two burritos the size of forearms, dripping with carne asada grease and vibrant red salsa. We found a semi-secluded spot on a low wall around a nearby office complex, partly shrouded by a sprawling bougainvillea.
We ate in silence for a few minutes, the monstrous burritos demanding our full attention. Then, Omar tore a piece of meat free with his teeth. A long string of juicy, marinated carne asada dripped down his finger. He looked at it, then at me, a challenge in his tired eyes.
I took his wrist again. This time, I didn’t suck his thumb clean. I let my tongue follow the trail of grease up his finger, slowly, deliberately, then took the tip of his finger into my mouth. His eyes went dark, his lips parting.
The taco truck’s music switched to a slower, pulsing reggaeton beat. The lights from the truck painted his face in streaks of orange and white. The scents of cumin, chili, and his own clean sweat mixed in the humid air.
I released his finger with a soft pop. “You’re a mess.”
“You started it.”
I grinned, wiping my own mouth with the back of my hand. “I’ll finish it, too.”
I put our half-eaten burritos aside and pulled out the second joint. I lit it, took a hit, and passed it to him. We smoked there, in our little bower of bougainvillea, hidden from the street but bathed in the ambient glow of the city. The weed wrapped us in a warm, intimate bubble, softening the edges of the world, amplifying the sticky heat between us.
He finished the joint, stubbed it out on the concrete, and turned to me. His eyes were heavy-lidded, gleaming. He leaned in, his lips brushing mine, tasting of smoke and citrusy salsa.
“Take me home, David,” he whispered, the words vibrating against my lips.
I didn’t ask which home he meant. I just stood, pulling him up with me. We left the wreckage of our meal on the wall, forgotten. Hand in hand, we walked back into the light of the taco truck, through its cloud of sizzling aroma, and across the street to his building.
This time, in the elevator, I pushed him against the mirrored wall and kissed him hard, my hands on his face. Our reflection was a blur of motion and hunger. He fumbled with the keys at his door, his hands shaking.
The apartment door clicked shut behind us, sealing us in the dark, quiet space. The only light came from the city through the floor-to-ceiling window, painting his profile in silver and shadow.He turned to face me.
The quiet he’d spoken of was here now, in the room. A thick, living quiet. It wasn’t an absence of sound, but the presence of something else entirely. It was the sound of our shared breath, of my leather jacket hitting the floor, of his soft sigh as I walked him backwards, step by step, toward the clean, orderly lines of his desk.
I stopped him when the backs of his thighs hit the edge. The cold, solid maple. I reached past him, sweeping the soldering iron, the coils of wire, the neat stacks of engineering paper onto the floor with a crashing, clattering sweep of my arm.
“David—” he gasped, startled.
I kissed him to silence him, my tongue plunging into his mouth. I broke the kiss, my hands going to the waistband of his sweatpants. “Shhh,” I breathed against his lips. “This is my classroom tonight.” I yanked his pants and briefs down to his ankles. “And you’re behind on your lessons.”
The cold, hard edge of the desk bit into the back of his thighs. His eyes were wide, the tiredness burned away by a sudden, sharp awareness. I held him there by his hips, my fingers pressing into the soft flesh above his pelvis.
“Two weeks,” I murmured, my voice low enough to vibrate in the quiet room. I leaned in, my lips brushing the shell of his ear. “You kept this tight Arab bussy all locked up for two weeks.”
A full-body tremor went through him. I felt it under my hands. His head fell back, exposing the long line of his throat. “It was… busy.”
“I didn’t ask for an excuse.” I kept my voice flat, almost bored, as I worked the button of my own jeans. The shush of the zipper was obscenely loud. I shoved the denim down just enough. “I asked if you missed it.”
I didn’t give him a chance to answer with words. I was already pressing forward, the slick head of my cock finding his entrance with an unerring, practiced pressure. He was tight, incredibly tight, a hot, clutching resistance that made my vision swim. I pushed in with a single, relentless, shallow thrust, just enough to seat myself inside that impossible heat.
A punched-out gasp tore from his lungs. His knuckles turned white where they gripped the edge of the desk.
I stayed there, motionless, buried to the hilt, letting him feel every thick inch. I watched his face contort, his lips part on a silent cry. The city lights painted his struggle in streaks of silver and shadow. I leaned closer, my breath hot against his neck.
“Did you miss daddy’s big Pinoy sausage in this tight Arab bussy?” I growled, the words filthy and deliberate in the dark.
He whimpered, a high, desperate sound. Then he choked it back, forced his eyes open to meet mine. They were glazed, defiant, surrendered. “Yes.” He swallowed. “Yes, Daddy. I missed it.”
“Say it again.” I withdrew an inch, then drove back in, a hard, punishing snap of my hips that made the desk shudder.
“I missed it!” he cried out, his voice breaking. “I missed your… your cock. Please.”
That single word undid me. Please. It wasn’t a plea for mercy. It was a surrender to the need. My control slipped a notch. I pulled out almost completely, leaving just the tip inside, a teasing, maddening promise. Then I slammed back into him, setting a rhythm that was all possession, no finesse. The desk rattled with every thrust, his chemistry notes fluttering to the floor like wounded birds.
“This is mine,” I grunted, my hands sliding up to fist in his shirt. “This shy, smart, spoiled Arab boy is all mine.” I fucked the words into him, each one punctuated by a deep, driving stroke. “Mine to open up. Mine to ruin. Mine to make scream.”
He was screaming now, short, sharp cries that dissolved into sobs with every impact. His body arched, trying to escape the sensation, trying to pull me deeper. He chanted into the space between us, a broken litany. “Yours. Yours. It’s yours, Daddy.”
I could feel the coil tightening in my own gut, a white-hot wire of pleasure. I slowed, dragging myself out with a torturous slowness that made him sob. I gripped his jaw, forcing him to look at me. His face was streaked with tears, utterly shattered.
“You’re my best subject,” I whispered, rough with feeling. Then I kissed him, deep and filthy, swallowing his moans as I started moving again, faster now, my rhythm fracturing into something urgent and final.
My release tore through me with a force that blotted out the room, the city, everything but the feeling of his body clutching around mine, milking me dry. I collapsed against him, my forehead pressed to his shoulder, our sweat-slicked chests heaving against one another.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of our ragged breath and the distant hum of the building. The cool air raised goosebumps on our overheated skin. I gently eased out of him, and he winced, his legs buckling.
I caught him before he could fall, pulling him against my chest. His body was limp, completely spent. I guided him away from the wreckage of the desk, the scattered papers and tools, and toward the bedroom. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to.
In the bathroom, I ran a cloth under warm water. I wiped the sweat from his back, the tears from his cheeks, the evidence of our coupling from his thighs. He stood passively, letting me tend to him, his head bowed. I saw it then, the slight tremor in his hands, the delayed shock setting in.
“Hey,” I said, my voice soft. I tilted his chin up. His eyes were hollow, overwhelmed. “Look at me.”
He did, with effort.
“You okay?” I asked, brushing a damp curl from his forehead.
He nodded slowly, then his face crumpled. A single, quiet sob shook his shoulders. “I just… I don’t know what this is.”
I pulled him into a tight hug, his face buried in my neck. I held him as he shook, saying nothing, just rubbing his back. The fierce top, the demanding daddy, was gone. In his place was just David, holding a boy who had given away a piece of himself he couldn’t name yet.
When his breathing evened out, I led him to the bed. We lay down on the crisp white sheets, our bodies fitting together in the dark. He curled into my side, his head on my chest, one hand splayed over my heart.
“It doesn’t have to be anything,” I finally said into the darkness, my fingers tracing idle patterns on his shoulder. “It can just be this. Me. You. The taco truck. My dick in your ass.”
He let out a wet, shaky laugh against my skin. “You’re terrible.”
“You love it.” I kissed the top of his head. “Get some sleep, anak. Your brain needs to reboot.”
His breathing eventually softened into the deep, even rhythm of sleep, but mine wouldn’t settle. The weight of his head on my chest felt immense, a sacred burden. My fingers, which had been stroking his shoulder, stilled. I stared at the dark ceiling, seeing nothing, feeling everything.
I’d lied. It couldn’t just be the taco truck and my dick.Not anymore.
Sunlight found the crack in his minimalist blackout curtains, a sharp, accusing line cutting across the bed. It painted a stripe over Omar’s closed eyes. He stirred, groaning, burying his face deeper into my side.
“Nggh. Turn off the sun,” he mumbled, his voice thick with sleep.
I chuckled, the vibration rumbling through my chest. “Your expensive curtains are failing you, prinsipe.”
“They’re betrayed me,” he sighed. He didn’t move, though. His hand, which had been limp on my stomach, curled slightly, his fingers grasping a handful of my t-shirt. The simple act, so unconscious and needy, sent a fissure right through the center of me.
We lay there as the room grew warmer, brighter. His desk, just visible through the open door, was a warzone of spilled papers and tipped-over tools. A silent monument to the night before.
“We made a mess,” he said, following my gaze.
“You have a cleaning service.”
“I’ll have to explain the soldering iron footprint on my thermodynamics notes.” He finally rolled onto his back, wincing. “And the permanent dent in my desk. Did you finish carving your initials?”
“Just my spirit,” I said, turning my head to look at him. He was smiling, but his eyes held a quiet uncertainty, the same haze from last night. The script of our usual banter felt thin, like a veil.
We took a shower that was just a shower. No knees on tile, no surrender. Just warm water and the slow, careful soaping of each other’s backs. It was more intimate than anything we’d done. After, we stood wrapped in towels in his spotless kitchen. I made kape with the cheap instant mix I’d brought over weeks ago and left in his cupboard, a tiny territorial flag. He watched me, leaning against the counter.
“My brain is back online,” he announced softly, blowing on the steaming mug. “Sort of.”
“Good. Did it bring any new files to the desktop?”
He stared into the dark liquid. “A lot of them.”
The silence stretched, filled only by the hum of his expensive, silent fridge.
“So,” he said. A tiny, fragile word. “What happens when Rico gets back from Vegas?”
It was the question I’d been avoiding. I sipped my own coffee, the bitter taste grounding me. “He comes home. We bitch about our shows. We fight over who drank the last of the soju.”
“I mean,” Omar said, pressing. “With… this.”
I put my mug down. The clink of ceramic on quartz was too loud. “It gets more complicated.”
“Because I don’t have my own place across town? Because you can’t just… vanish after?”
“Because my bedroom is ten feet from his, and his ears are like a goddamn bat,” I snapped, the words coming out sharper than I intended. I ran a hand through my damp hair. “Because this isn’t just some weekend thing at a motel, Omar. You know that.”
“Do I?” The question was quiet, but it had an edge. He wasn’t being petulant. He was mapping the coordinates, and the map was blank.
Frustration, hot and sudden, flared in me. Not at him.At the situation. At the invisible lines we kept drawing and crossing. I wanted him in my space, in my life, not just in these sterile, expensive rooms. But bringing him into my world, into the chaos and glitter and relentless noise of my real life, felt like handing him a lit match.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked, my voice low. “You want to come over? Watch Drag Race reruns with Rico while he judges your eyeliner technique? Have breakfast where my glitter gets in the jam? That’s the reality. It’s not all… this.” I gestured around the pristine apartment.
He put his mug down, too. He stepped closer, until our bare toes were almost touching on the cold floor. “David.” He said my name like it was the only real thing in the room. “I don’t care about glitter in the jam.”
“You will.”
“Try me.”
The challenge hung between us, soft but absolute. He wasn’t the shy boy from the club anymore. He was the one who’d chanted ‘yours’ on a tear-streaked face, who now stood his ground on a towel, daring me to be real.
He took a small breath, his eyes never leaving mine. His voice was so quiet I had to lean in to hear it.
“I love you.”
The words didn’t ring out. They seeped into the air, changing its composition. They weren’t dramatic. They were a simple, terrifying statement of fact.
My entire body went still. The ambient noise of Westwood faded to a distant hum. I searched his face for panic, for a take-back. I saw only a quiet, devastating certainty. This was the file his rebooted brain had opened. The only one that mattered.
All my rehearsed lines, all my clever deflections, turned to ash in my mouth. The truth, dense and heavy, rose up from a place I’d kept barricaded.
I cupped his face in my hands. His skin was still warm from the shower.
“I love you, too.”
It was barely a whisper, raw and unchoreographed. His eyes widened, just a fraction, as if he hadn’t truly believed he’d hear it back. A single breath shuddered out of him, and his whole body seemed to soften, to settle into the truth of it.
He leaned his forehead against mine. We stood there, in the middle of his perfect kitchen, two barefoot idiots holding onto each other like a life raft.
“I have a week off from school,” he murmured, his lips brushing mine as he spoke.
I pulled back just enough to see his smile. It was small, hopeful, a little mischievous. A week. A vast, empty canvas of time.
A slow grin spread across my own face. The fear was still there, a background hum. But it was drowned out by a louder, brighter sound: possibility.
“Yeah?” I said, my thumbs stroking his cheekbones. “What are you gonna do with it?”
He shrugged, the movement making our bodies sway together. “I was thinking,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “I could use a tour guide. For the glitter-in-the-jam part of town.”