“Why don’t you buy your own food?” Frank asked, opening the fridge so fast the door hit the wall, making a small tube of sauce fall out. Mumbling, Frank picked it up from the spot where laminate had been torn off to expose raw wood, before taking out a single TV dinner and one beer.
“You’ve become a real Scrooge of late, haven’t you? Is that how you treat every guy you invite over?” Shane asked, likely more upset about the booze than anything else.
Frank scowled at him. “Do I look like I have time for guys between work and trying to recover my kidnapped nephew? At this pace I’ll be losing the strongman competition too.”
Shane raised his hands in defeat.
Hammer wrapped his arms on his chest and offered Dex a small smile. “Surprise me.”
Hammer’s presence was like a fire burning in the middle of the room, and it made Dex buzz with giddiness from its heat. Every time he glanced at Hammer, he couldn’t help but envision him sitting there naked and hard, which was both exciting and distracting. He had shaved, so his perfect dimples were even more visible too, but Dex’s imagination was already rushing to the moment when he’d get to lick every inch of Hammer’s perfect body.
“Dex,” Frank said harshly and snapped his fingers. “Stop airing out the fridge. Choose something and close it.”
Dex must have lost track of time. He smiled and reached to grab two of his favorite beers, only to realize that one of his arms was still in a sling. Disappointment twisted his guts, but he’d brave any hindrance to make Hammer proud, so he removed both beers one by one and, after a moment of hesitation, also grabbed the hot sauce. “Don’t rush perfection!”
Shane snorted, but Frank turned to Hammer with a deep frown. “Are you here to explain what exactly you’re doing with my nephew?”
Hammer looked back at him, acknowledging the beer Dex put in front of him with a gesture. “Explain it? What is there to explain?”
Frank’s face darkened. He rushed past Dex and shoved his food into the microwave before sitting at the table opposite their guest. Unusually tall and broad, he towered over everyone else in the room, but his size would not intimidate a man as confident as Hammer. That much was clear even to Frank, who opened his own beer and glared across the table. “Are you fucking with me in my own house?”
“Just wait for it, he might tell you to pull down your pants, so he can check if you don’t have any warts you can pass on to Dex,” Shane said in a not-so-discreet whisper.
Hammer ignored him and shot back straight at Frank. “I’m not doing anything right now. Dex invited me, so I came over. And as for the real question you seem to be asking, your nephew is an adult, and therefore neither of us needs to explain anything to you.”
Dex’s heart soared at having someone in his corner for once. He kept glancing back at the sizzle of anger at the table, but he needed to navigate his current injury, so he scooped four packets of his favorite ramen from the cupboard instead of just grabbing them by the seals, as usual. “Exactly. Just because you don’t get any, doesn’t mean I have to be a monk.”
Shane laughed out loud. “You don’t know what Frank’s been up to these past two weeks. He finally had the house to himself. He could have had orgies in your room and you wouldn’t know.”
Dex shrugged with a smirk. “Well, I actuallywasat an orgy a few days ago, so it’s not like I’m gonna be jealous of him.”
The shit-eating grin on Shane’s face faltered, and one corner of his mouth twitched. There, that got him quiet.
But Frank sucked in a big gulp of air, and beer erupted from the can in his hand like a fountain. “You haven’t even been taking your PrEP tablets! I know because you left them here.”
Hammer’s eyes narrowed as he glanced Dex’s way. “Are you ill?”
Frank rubbed his massive hands over his face before gesturing at Hammer. “This fucker doesn’t even know what they are.”
Dex couldn’t have been more embarrassed. What if Hammer decided he was too much hassle now that they were back in the real world? He could feel his face heating up so fast he wished to guzzle down the hot sauce so the shade of his cheeks could be blamed onthat. “No! I’m not ill! They’re preventative, so I can be safer if I forget condoms. Which I don’t actually do all the time. I mean, I do with Hammer, but like—”
He shouldn’t have said that. Hammer was gonna hate him by the time the water for the ramen boiled. Fuck fuck fuck!
Shane raised his eyebrows, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed that he was eating up all this drama.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Frank growled, moving his gaze from Dex to Hammer, who sipped his drink.
“Again, I don’t see how that’s any of your business. You’re treating him like a child.”
Frank’s chin lowered, and he laughed, soaking up the spilled beer with napkins. “You say that, but I’m the one who needs to fucking remind him to take the pills, use condoms, and I’m the one to pay for STD treatments”
“And yet here I am, alive and well!” Dex growled as he opened the final packet of ramen with his teeth and then shook it over boiling water to make the noodles fall in.
Frank turned toward him, and his expression became even more severe than usual. “Fuck knows for how long, because you just told me that while we were looking for you, worried that this fucker might have killed you and dumped you in a ditch, you’ve been to a bareback orgy!”
Dex rolled his eyes. “Actually, everyone was required to play safe, and all theotherguys wore rubbers! It’s not that complicated.”
“How many other guys?” Shane asked casually, but Dex could see this was just an attempt to bait him into more accidental info spillage.