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"By the way," Reassuring-Trace says, after a dressing-down over a missed foetal heart murmur that Julian really doesn't need or appreciate, "your nemesis has got a new job."
Julian rolls his eyes. "Honestly, I really don't care what private hospital Adam is pimping for now."
"Oh, it's not a hospital he's pimping, it's himself." Tracy's smirk is laced with delight. "An escort, I think is what they're calling it."
Julian tries to put the image of it out of his mind. He really does.
But as he scrubs in for a caesarean, he can't help but think about it. The spiky and acerbic Dr Kay on his knees by the bins in the back-alley behind the hospital, a fiver clutched in his sweaty fist as some anonymous man—god, perhaps even a patient—takes his fill. He rubs the anti-bac into his nail-beds and thinks of Adam's angry mouth open and panting as he takes it from an expectant father behind the curtain in one of the cubicles while mum-to-be gets a scan. He rinses off the white lather and, as he watches it swirl down the plug, he thinks of Adam spitting out a mouthful of paid-for cum rather than a mouthful of insults for once.
Would swallowing be extra? Julian doesn't know how these things work. He isn't even interested, not really.
After eight years in practice, Julian can do a c-section with his eyes closed, a fact he proves by getting through the entire procedure on auto-pilot, barely even noticing whether the baby is a boy or a girl. Luckily, the expectant mother is the squeamish sort and doesn't want updates from him as he slices her open or stitches her up.
Which is good considering he's spent the whole operation imagining scenarios where Adam offers himself up like an à la carte brunch.
The thing is, Julian isn't gay.
He's not bi-curious, he's not heteroflexible, he doesn't even enjoy Eurovision. Not once in his life has he ever looked at a man and thought of anything remotely sexual. Up until Adam and Harry's disastrous engagement party, Julian's pretty certain he hadn't even spoken to a gay man before. He has lived a singularly heterosexual life. Apart from his own, the only dicks he's ever interacted with were during a slightly traumatic urology rotation in his first year.
So it's not that he particularly wants to have sex with Adam. It's just that the thought is now there, niggling away in the back of his brain, like an unwanted pop song from the radio that sticks in your brain all day long.
And no matter how hard he tries to forget it, it just won't leave him alone.
Being a registrar while Adam is acting-up as one means their schedules rarely align. The useless SHOs and somehow even more useless first years were divvied up between them at the start of the year, and now they mostly work opposite shift patterns. It's not often they're on the ward at the same time, and it's not all that unusual for Julian to go weeks without actually interacting with Adam beyond trying to decipher his handwriting on patients' notes and cleaning up his messes.
With any luck, he won't see Adam until this bizarre fixation has passed.
With any luck, by the time they next meet, Julian will have completely forgotten all about the fact his colleague is now, apparently, a rent boy.
With any luck, he won't have any opportunity to humiliate himself in a possibly-career-ending moment of hysteria-induced homosexuality.
Of course, fate being what it is means that now Julian doesn't want to see Adam, he can't go five minutes without bumping into him.
It starts when the first interesting patient of the day is brought up from casualty—a woman presenting with placenta praevia at 32 weeks. Adam's already at her side, having discovered her bleeding on the lunchtime replacement bus service from Shepherd's Bush.
There's a small amount of chaos as they both try to process her at the same time, physically manhandling one another in an attempt reach her vagina first, as the bemused woman looks on. It might not be conjoined twins or an extra limb, but it's better than spending yet another shift digitally extracting constipated second trimesterers or giving old dears their antibiotics for their raging water infections.
"If you don't mind, Julian, she was my patient first," Adam says through his teeth, unsubtly elbowing him in the ribs as he reaches over for the anti-bac.
"It's always nice to have a second pair of eyes, Adam," Julian replies with a fake smile as he snaps on a pair of gloves. "We wouldn't want you to have any more accidents, would we?"
Normally Julian would pull rank and simply tell Adam to fuck right off, but he can't bring himself to do so with his brain malfunctioning as it is. There's a good chance 'fuck off' might get lost on its way to his mouth and become 'fuck me' or something equally hideous.
"Well, it's good news, Mrs Chaudhry," Adam says eventually, head wedged between the patient's open thighs. "There's not too much breakthrough bleeding, we might get away with putting you on bed-rest."
Julian is still two gloved fingers deep in her, halfway through his own pelvic examination, his arm awkwardly pinned between the bed and Adam's torso. Every word that comes out of Adam's mouth brushes against the thin skin on the inside of his wrist. It's bizarrely alluring in a way it never would have been before he knew the man spent his free time sucking off strangers in dark alleyways for cash.
Not that Julian's still thinking about it or anything.
"We'll get you changed into a gown and settled in," he tells the patient, shoving at the back of Adam's knees with his foot until he has no choice but to either move aside or fall. "Let's get your paperwork sorted, hmm?"
Julian manages to spend the rest of the afternoon blissfully Adam-free. He's definitely not hiding; it's more of a tactical withdrawal from the maternity ward than anything.
Instead, he works his way through the bed-blockers on the gynae ward, old ladies with water infections and uterine prolapses and vaginal mesh issues. It's far below his pay-grade really, something he should be offloading onto the housing officers so they can tick a few boxes off in their progress file, but keeping busy is better and safer than letting his mind wander.
Well, perhaps not safer. He does have to fend off a couple of old dears' wandering hands as he does their obs, but that's pretty standard Tuesday afternoon behaviour when you're a good looking hunk of a man like he is.
Julian doubts Adam ever has to fend off the sticky paws of an 89-year-old with Werther's Originals breath. Hell, Adam probably encourages it. He's probably got a business card with set prices on. Like a menu of depravity.
How does one charge for sex anyway? Is it per orgasm or by the hour? Perhaps it's by the minute. Maybe Adam uses his work pulse monitor as a stopwatch. Should he flag this up with a consultant as an abuse of hospital property? If he gets Adam struck off he won't have to see him again and he can go back to being the sort of man his mother still allows in the house.
"You alright, dearie?" the woman he's supposed to be examining asks him. To be fair, he has paused halfway through checking her vulvar warts are responding to the prescribed anti-fungal treatment.
Deep in thought, deep in her crotch.
"Everything's fine," Julian tells her with a smile. "And it looks like everything's doing just fine down there too." He only just stops himself from patting her mons pubis like a mechanic slapping a car bonnet.
She grins at him, all gums, her teeth in their container on the bed-side table. "Careful, young man. For a moment there I thought I was going to have to give you mouth-to-mouth," she tells him, breathless with both wistfulness and her chronic pneumonia.
Julian tugs her gown back into place and flees to the staff room.
Because fate is a cruel mistress indeed, Adam is already in there. Julian strides in far too purposefully to turn around and leave without attracting attention, so he diverts to the fridge and attempts to hide his face between someone's caesar salad and a lone scotch egg. When no sarcastic comment greets him, he risks a quick glance over.
Adam is engrossed in eating a yoghurt at the table, spoon in one hand and a pen in the other as he nonchalantly scribbles something on the tell-tale green of a patient error form. He's probably pulled a baby's head off with some forceps or something, Julian thinks. Or removed the wrong ovary during an oophorectomy, distracted by thinking about his sex appointments after work. That would be so like him.
As he watches, Adam finishes the yoghurt and casually licks the back of his spoon clean, a streak of creamy white that he swallows down with a satisfied hum.
Can you be put on the sex offender registry for being degenerate enough to find a yoghurt erotic? Julian isn't certain but he's fairly sure if he doesn't get out of there soon he'll do something he regrets, like offer Adam a mouthful of something slightly less pasteurised.
He bends down, pretending to be tying the non-existent shoelace on his waterproof surgical clogs, and shuffles as quietly as possible across the room until he reaches the open door. A quick look back reveals Adam now peeling the most phallic-looking banana Julian has ever seen in his life.
Christ.
Julian runs.
At some point mid-evening, a call comes through from Dermatology asking for a gynae consult on a pregnant patient. Julian happily takes it, any excuse to get off the ward—and away from his new object of obsession—a welcome one.
He dumps a pile of patient paperwork in front of one of the HOs, a slightly ditsy blonde woman he's never bothered to learn the name of, young enough to still have spots. She could probably do with a dermatology appointment herself now he thinks about it.
"Get all this processed for me, thanks," he tells her with a dismissive smile and turns to leave.
"Oh! Oh no, Doctor Julian," she splutters at his back. "I can't. I've got a meeting with someone from the Trust in five minutes, I'm so sorry!" In her favour, she does look sorry. All the foundation year staff have mandatory check-ins these days, where they're interrogated Stasi-style about their mental health and work-load until they inevitably break down sobbing and confessing to stealing uneaten sandwiches from sleeping patients.
No one wants another Shruti.
Julian groans and takes the pile back. "No problem, don't worry about it..." his eyes flick down to the name badge pinned to her scrubs pocket in what he hopes is a subtle move, "...Laura?"
She smiles at him in relief and rushes off to her meeting. Julian's left standing there with an armful of folders and an unanswered bleep that he can't see to until he at least attempts to get rid of them. He scans the room for another poor sod he can offload the unwanted paperwork on and spots someone in navy scrubs bent down by the shitty computer station at the other end of ward, no doubt fiddling with the faulty plug. All NHS computers are useless, but if you wiggle the plug at just the right angle, this particular one will eventually let you access your patient's test results without having to call down to the lab and offer them your first-born.
Someone with enough time on their hands to attempt to use the computer definitely has the time to write up the latest round of patient obs. Bingo.
"Hey, can you do me a favour, mate," Julian says in his jolliest I'm-your-new-best-friend tone of voice as he strides over.
The figure swivels a 180 on his knees. It's Adam. Because of course it is.
"Oh, hmm, let me think about that," he pretends to ponder it for a moment. "No. How about you do me a favour and go fuck yourself, Julian," Adam practically spits the name out like he's allergic to it. He looks up at the three inch pile of patients' notes in Julian's arms. "Is this how you got your promotion, by shoving all the actual work onto younger staff? Have you ever actually filled in a form by yourself? Should I call your mum in, ask her to write you a little note excusing you?"
"I can't do it myself, there's an emergency," Julian says. He knows he's whinging, it's excruciating.
"An emergency? Where?" Adam asks, looking round at the quiet ward. To be fair, it is unusually quiet for a weekday, like every uterus has taken the day off.
"In dermatology," Julian says in as dignified a manner as a man attempting to skive off can.
"In dermatology?!" Adam repeats with a scoff. "What, someone's going to die of eczema if you take five minutes to actually do your job? You can fuck right off, Julian. I know plenty of people who'd rather be getting that registrar salary–" He's working himself up into righteous indignation, his chest heaving, and Julian-
Well. Julian can't help but think of another scenario where Adam might be on his knees, breathing heavily, gazing up at him with fire in his eyes. Adam opens his mouth, probably to continue yelling. There's a flash of pink tongue, and Julian legs it before his imagination can get him into any more trouble.
Finally, the shift comes to an end. Julian feels his already highly-strung nerves ratchet up to high alert as soon as he steps into the staff locker-room to change out of his scrubs. It's his newly-discovered Adam-sense tingling, like a Spidey-sense but so much less useful. He tries to remember back when this was a place where he could relax, where he felt at home and confident in his existence as a normal man rather than a sex-obsessed fiend.
It all seems like an awfully long time ago.
The changing room is empty but who knows how long it'll stay that way. He quickly opens his locker and grabs his trousers, but before Julian can do anything with them, the door opens and Adam walks in. The man doesn't even look over at him, just shuffles exhaustedly to his own locker, discarding his stained scrubs on the floor as he goes.
Julian doesn't mean to watch. He doesn't. He has never in his life had any interest in watching another man get undressed. But he physically cannot move his eyes away from Adam as he shimmies out of his scrubs bottoms, every knobble in his spine sticking through the skin as he bends to pick them up.
How often must a man get undressed in front of others before he stops feeling someone's eyes on him, Julian thinks. He's certainly never stripped off without checking the room first. Is that normal? Maybe he's the weird one. It's definitely weird that he can't stop staring.
Does a voyeurism charge get you struck off as a doctor, Julian wonders idly. His mother would never speak to him again.
"If I'd known I was going to have an audience, I would've sold tickets."
"Huh?" Julian snaps back to attention, and finds Adam staring back at him with a mocking tilt to his lips. Caught in the act. He's never been so grateful for his dark complexion and inability to blush in his life. This is awkward enough without his face broadcasting his embarrassment to the world. It feels unfair that Adam's the one in his underwear and yet he's the one feeling exposed.
"Well, maybe you should have," he says, childishly, unwilling to gift Adam the last word. "Though I'm not sure I can afford your prices. What is your going rate, these days?" Cruelty feels like a pretty good shield right now. It's either that or he does something reckless.
"Someone's been gossiping, I see. Nice to know I'm always the main character in your life. Now get bent," Adam says dismissively and turns back to his locker.
Julian's grateful for the respite, an opportunity to steel himself. Unfortunately, it also offers the opportunity for him to ogle the other man a little more, to flick his eyes over the angles that are too sharp and limbs that are too unwieldy for anyone to find them appealing, surely. Adam lifts his arm to spray on deodorant and that simple movement sends his trapezius muscles flexing.
It's not sexy. It's really not. He's about two stone too underweight to ever be attractive, and one of the rudest people Julian has ever met, and none of his facial features fit together properly. And he's a man, but that's the least of Julian's problems right now. It feels like the entire day has been leading towards this. A blackhole that his dick just can't escape the gravitational pull of.
He tries to swallow it down, but despite his best efforts he hears his voice echo round the room.
"A tenner enough?" Julian whips out his wallet and thumbs through the notes there. He yanks one out and throws it in the direction of Adam's face. It falls short and flutters to the ground between them. "No?" He pulls out another. What the absolute hell are you doing? the voice in his head shouts, but he ignores it. He's got a point to prove about something, and even if he's not entirely sure what it is, he isn't about to give up now. "Isn't this how it works?" he asks, surprising even himself with how desperate and ragged his voice sounds. "Money exchanged for services rendered? You're the expert here, maybe you could show me how it works."
He's pretty certain this is not what the doctor handbook means when it says see one, do one, show one.
Adam looks at him like he's gone crazy. Like he's just escaped from the dementia ward on geriatrics and absconded over the hospital wall.
"You're not half as funny as you think you are, Julian," Adam says quietly. He looks slightly bewildered, a feeling Julian shares like some sort of emotional communism.
"Sorry," Julian says, but instead of laughing it off or making some trite peace offering that will allow him to get out of this with a minimum of damage to his reputation and career, he finds himself pulling yet another note out of his wallet, this time the crisp accusatory red of a fifty pound note. "Shouldn't have assumed you come cheap just because you act like it, should I? There, is that more like it?"
Kissing a man is very much like kissing a woman, Julian finds.
Yes, it's different in that there's the scratch of a five o'clock shadow against his cheeks, and that Adam tastes and smells and feels like a man, and that the lips crushed against his are rough and chapped rather than soft and sticky. But underneath that is the usual desperate energy, and his breath catches in his chest just the same as it has done every time he's seduced some woman at a club.
The hard lump pressing against his thigh as they kiss is new though, he can't deny that.
"Wait," Julian says.
Adam stops immediately, his snort of exasperation puffing against Julian's neck like a caress. He slumps down from his tip-toes, but he doesn't step back. Julian circles Adam's fragile wrist with his fingers, holding him in place every bit as much as pushing him away. For a long moment they stay locked together, a grenade with a missing pin. Julian isn't eager to find out which of them has their finger on the safety.
Perhaps there's a reason prostitutes don't usually kiss.
His hips press against Adam's, his own cock swelling in his paper-thin scrubs. Julian takes a deliberately controlled breath and hopes his voice won't catch as he says, "I'm curious: is a professional blow job really that much better than the ones I can get for free?"
Adam stares at him, head tilted a little, hazel eyes unblinking as he measures Julian up for a seemingly interminable moment. "Are you sure that's what you really want?" he asks eventually.
Julian doesn't bother answering. Just puts his hands, still clutching the fifty pound note, on Adam's fragile shoulders and pushes him onto the scuffed linoleum. Adam goes down smoothly—no, expertly—sinking to his knees and hooking his fingers into the low-riding waistband of Julian's scrubs as he does. But he doesn't pull them down yet. Keeping his eyes fixed on Julian's face, he presses his mouth against the bulge, exhaling hot breath along the hidden length.
Julian releases a shuddering breath of his own. There are just under six litres of blood in his body and it feels like about five of them are in his cock. He leans back against the lockers with a metallic clank, almost dizzy with desire. Adam begins inching the scrubs down with what feels like a deliberate stubborn slowness. Julian glares down at him, tilting his hips forward.
"Hurry it up a little," he says. "The customer is always right," he adds when Adam looks like he's going to argue.
Adam rolls his eyes up at him from the floor and yanks the scrubs all the way down. Julian's cock bobs violently as it's released from its confines, leaving a sticky line of cum where it ricochets against his stomach. Normally he'd find that excruciatingly embarrassing and wipe it away, but he can't really find it in himself to care right now.
For a minute, all Adam does is toy with him. Running his hands over and over Julian but never quite pumping or even stroking, just teasing little brushes that Julian finds both infuriating and ensures that he is so very turned on.
It's very annoying, but then Julian has never known Adam to be anything else.
"Suck me," he says, and pulls Adam closer by his hair.
Adam presses his lips to the tip of Julian's dick and kisses it the same way he'd kissed Julian earlier. Mouth open and tongue twisting, all wet sounds and languorous hums. It feels amazing, and from the triumphant glint in Adam's eyes, he knows it. The cocky bugger.
It's for that reason, and nothing else, that Julian stretches a possessive hand around the back of Adam's head and drags his face closer until he has no choice but to swallow Julian's entire length—holds him there, nose to groin, until the very air Adam breathes comes through Julian's skin.
There's a growing damp spot on the front of Adam's underwear, Julian can't help but notice. He likes this, he realises. It's not surprising, in a way. Adam has always enjoyed being the centre of attention in all other areas of his life. Trust him to be the first prostitute who actually gets off on being used.
The fifty pound note is still, somehow, in his hand. It rubs against Adam's hair as he shifts, the crinkling noise loud in the room, and Adam glares as though newly-insulted. He pulls back, no doubt to say something irritating and ruin everything, so Julian clamps a hand down on the nape of his neck and thrusts straight back in.
Adam tries to say something irritating anyway, gurgling around the cock stuffed in his mouth.
"This is such a good look for you," Julian can't help but say. It's not true. Adam looks possessed, mouth stretched so wide his lips look close to cracking. His entire jaw is sopping wet with a mix of his own saliva and Julian's precum. But something about Adam's clever mouth finally being stoppered by Julian's cock of all things is strangely satisfying in a way that isn't even sexual.
Who's he kidding? It's absolutely sexual.
Julian closes his eyes as he feels a wave of satisfaction surge through him, a thoughtless primitive one that begins at the tip of his cock buried in Adam's throat and flows inwards and upwards. Pure physical pleasure short-circuits his brain for a moment of uncomplicated bliss. Julian clutches at it for as long as he can, letting the seconds stretch and warp and circle back around until it feels like an eternity that he's been like this, his orgasm spooling tighter and tighter and ready to spring.
Adam pulls back, purses his lips around the head of Julian's dick, sucking perfectly—professionally, Julian will later remind himself—but in this moment he's conscious of nothing but lips sliding, brilliant suction, the first hot rush that slams through him…
Julian comes back to himself leaning heavily against the metal lockers, cock hanging limply between his legs like it's ashamed of itself.
He kinda knows how it feels.
Adam is still on his knees before him, his own cock in hand, tossing off into the empty air by Julian's legs. His mouth hangs open and slack; his abused lips swollen and slick. In another world, another life, Julian might kiss him, might laugh into that mouth, might suck his own bitter cum off of Adam's honeyed tongue.
Not that Julian's interested in such things, of course. This was nothing more than a one off. An itch that needed scratching. A scientific curiosity. An experiment to prove a hypothesis that does not require repetition.
The voice of his A-level biology teacher echoes in his mind: an experiment without repetition is worthless.
Yeah, Julian is so unutterably screwed.
Their eyes meet, Adam's dark with the glazed look of a man still lost in desire. There's a moment that hangs between them, where Julian could step forward and change everything, go from prostitute-and-client to something else. Instead, he takes a step sideways, as brusquely and with as much dignity as the hobble of his scrubs between his ankles allows. Just in time. Adam swallows a groan and splatters jism across the lockers, right where Julian was standing just seconds before.
It's a lucky escape. The last thing Julian needs is to be caught throwing cum-covered scrubs in the communal hospital laundry.
He pulls his scrubs back into place without ceremony, tucking himself in without sparing a second glance towards Adam. Despite being significantly more dressed than the man on the floor, Julian feels overly exposed and naked, like his whole body's been given a once-over by the skin graft harvesting machine. Can your soul be sucked out through your dick?
The fifty pound note is somehow still in his hand, an almost startling reminder of how this whole thing started.
"Here," he says, flapping the once-crisp note, now crumpled and damp, in the space between them. "You earned it. You know, maybe you should quit your day job."
Adam gives Julian the finger, but not before snatching the fifty from his hand, as well as the two tens from the floor. "I'll be sure to add it to my C.V.," he says, absent-mindedly tucking the notes into the waistband of his underwear like a stripper. "'Good at shorthand, well-versed in sucking cock, capable of handling even the heaviest of loads.' I'll put you down as a reference, don't worry."
"A heavy load, am I?" Julian says. "Careful, coming from you that's almost a compliment."
Adam smiles up at him, still on the floor, and that's the moment Julian realises they're actually flirting. This was supposed to be a one-off. A quick screw to get it out of his system. Flush it out like grit from a wound. Or pus from a cyst. He's really not supposed to be flirting.
Oh well. Experiments are supposed to be repeated, after all.