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Once they were like two young wolves, running wild and free, thinking the world were made for them. Now only one wolf remained, bound as he was to nature. The other one had become coiled up in civilization, business, money. And yet they needed each other's services from time to time.
"Bullets. Barbwire. And a collar meant for a dog, right?"
"…"
"Right. Anything else?"
They were at their usual meeting spot by the lake, close to where they used to fish. Maybe all friendship just became colorless with time. Eden wouldn't know. He had no other friends than Bailey.
Bailey was doing those tiny shifts that meant he was getting ready to walk back to his responsibilities as the new head of the Orphanage, coddling kids until they were ripe enough to pay their dues. Dues Bailey himself had paid as a boy, not only with fish and pelts like Eden. No, Bailey was more experienced at sordid stuff. Thinking about it, Eden felt an old ache, more maddening than any chastity belt.
"I think the plumber played you with the sink," Eden said, voice muffled from hiding half his face in the collar of his gray wool sweater. His mouth was the ugliest part of him, especially when it lied.
In contrast, Bailey looked like a funeral kind of caretaker, studying his black gloves as if cash had just been stolen from his grip.
"Your sink is faulty?"
"Dunno. Need you to look it over."
"I have somewhere to be."
When had they started lying to each other? Was it when that terrible thing happened to Eden? Or was it after she went away?
"It won't take long. And you'll get to see what I built, hey." Eden used a different tone of voice at that last part, like it used to get when it was just the two of them, running in the forest, believing they were free.
After a minute of consideration, Bailey gestured for Eden to lead the way to his cabin. Away from the lake. Deeper into the forest. Down into the heart of what they once believed themselves to be.
Eden did not look behind himself because his senses had sharpened from living here and he could feel Bailey walk behind him, a breathing body, all lean muscle, slighter and colder than Eden's, but wielding a strange power of his own that broke down categories of predator and prey. Eden would never tell it to him directly, but Bailey was the only human being that Eden felt relatively safe around.
The cabin was as ugly and practical as Eden himself. Wooden walls that smelt of pine oil, some bare furniture he'd built himself, animal skins on the floor and on the walls to ward off the cold. He shredded his hunter's coat and left it on the floor as he went to stoke the fire, where embers were burning from the venison stew that he'd cooked earlier that day and not eaten.
Avoiding the Town hadn't made the nausea stop. Living in the forest didn't make him a part of the neutrality of nature. The thick walls, his collection of guns, and all the traps outside – meant for prey and predator alike – didn't make him able to to touch himself without breaking into a cold sweat.
Bailey went to the sink and washed his hands with the sliver of green soap there. Even while making a point, he was a clean freak.
"So. What did you really want?"
Eden blew on the flame and watched it catch on the sticks and wood, more difficult than when he'd used newspapers. Watching the flame grow, he undid the zipper of his sweater, revealing his face to the fire. His skin issues had flared up like when he was a teenager and he kept picking at it like the idiot he was.
"You told me once that any kind of purity makes you more of a prey in this town," he said slowly.
"And?" Bailey prompted, which meant he was interested at least.
"I'd like to get rid of some of mine."
A pause. Then a snicker, there and then gone. Eden's shoulders tensed.
"If you need to order one of mine, you could just say so. I can give you the recent yearbook."
"No." Not yet, Eden's mind supplied. "I'd like someone experienced."
"I think I do have some with experience," Bailey said, sounding a lofty kind of businesslike, "though I don't care enough to keep tabs on it. I can just guess by how much they make me. But I could get you someone older from Briar's lot, if that's more your style."
"I don't trust them."
"You don't trust anyone, Eden," Bailey said, a smile in his voice.
There was some fondness between them still, and that was what gave Eden the strength to face him, skin issues be damned.
"I trust you."
Though his gloves were off, Bailey was still wearing his long black coat and dress shoes, getting mud on the animal skins, almost romantic in how it added fresh dirt on top of Eden's. But he had opened the coat at some point, revealing the white shirt beneath, and a tension to his body that seemed to increase along with his gauntness. It took a lot of guts for Eden to raise his eyes from Bailey's chest to his face. Not his eyes – that would be too intimate – but at those folds in his temple that showed evidence of time spent frowning and scowling. Now he had a poker face, the smile long gone if it had existed at all.
"You want me to fuck you?"
Bailey had figured it out so quick that Eden had to turn back to the fireplace. The question cut him deep, because it had been asked of him during… When he hadn't paid the old orphanage caretaker on time, and… ("Do you want this, boy?" "Sure he does, look at how hard he is, even while taking two cocks at the same time!" "Yeah, we didn't even have to drug him, he's a natural." "Of course he's a natural. This is his rightful place. This is the way of the world.") Eden wondered why he heard the distant echo of the last statement in his own voice, then blinked hard. It didn't matter. What mattered was this: How had Bailey known which purity he was talking about?
"You wanted me to stake out that new mansion on Domus Street, right?" Eden said after clearing his throat a couple of times for him to keep his voice as level as Bailey's.
"You already agreed to do that."
"Another future favor, then."
Bailey inclined his head, and Eden knew he had to offer more than that.
"I found a book. Near the old temple. Made up of the symbols you're obsessed with."
"Show me."
Eden reached into a satchel nearby because of course he'd had it ready. He threw the book over. Bailey caught it easily, because he hadn't been the keeper at their school's football team for nothing. He lit himself a cigarette as he flickered through the book. Eden disliked the smell, reminding him of the cigarettes that had been put out on his skin, but he remained silent. Bailey would've looked more intimidating if he hadn't told Eden – when drunk off his tits from their first succesful batch at homebrew – that he mainly smoked to look cool.
"You'd be better off with one of Briar's lot," Bailey mumbled, not looking up from the book. "They'd be nicer to you."
Eden didn't want nice. Niceness meant nothing in that kind of situation, not when all touch – even his own – felt like a stab at his sense of self. He needed to recreate touch in another light, but it had to be the same stakes, as this was the way of the world.
Bailey put the book in his inner pocket and replaced it with his datebook. It was filled to the brim with text and numbers and small sticky notes.
"I'm available at the end of next week. And as you know, I prefer not to walk at night. When do you want it to happen?"
"Now."
"Like I said, I have somewhere to be."
"And like I said, it won't take that fucking long." Damn, he hadn't meant to lose his temper! But luckily, Bailey wasn't easily spooked.
"Fine then."
Some wolfishness remained in Bailey's alert and confident stance. But he had changed since they ran together, walking slower, almost creeping, like the reptile that adorned his family crest.
"Where's your bed? Unless you'd like to do it standing."
No. Not standing, not outside, and not anywhere near Town. Eden didn't want to recreate any sort of external triggers when he might get some interior ones. Not the cabin itself, but the inside of his body, tensing in preparation.
Silent, Eden walked towards the ladder to the attic. He climbed up and felt an animal panic when Bailey grabbed the ladder he was on, a good spot for an ambush (grabbing his leg and dragging him down, making him slam against the ground only for a weight to be shoved on top of him, and then another, and then-), but no ambush came. At the top, he wiped his sweaty hands on his pants.
"Put some light on, would you?" I don't like dark attics, Bailey might’ve said if he'd been honest.
I know, Eden could've responded. As it was, he silently lit the candle on the dresser next to the cave of furs, skins and old textiles. He couldn't have a bed because he kept having a nightmare of dozens of hands dragging him out of and then underneath the bed.
Due to the low ceiling, it was easier to crawl around. Bailey, who was shorter but still tall by the standards of people who didn't look like cavemen, hunched.
"Do I need to take my clothes off? To add them to your collection? Damn, I haven't seen that stupid blanket in years."
Eden almost smiled; the blanket was stupid. It was a work from an amateur temple member, with a huge angel embroidered on it, but the lack of skill made it look devilish. The fact that they had such a past, sharing smiles over childish crap, soothed Eden. But if he tried to speak about the past, Bailey would clamp down, and if Eden pushed him ever so slightly, he would say something that rendered the good times into bad ones with a few choice words.
"Do whatever you want," Eden said to answer his question about the clothes, while he peeled off his own like they were a nuisance, taking care not to look at himself in the mirror, which he'd only gotten because he sometimes got cuts on his back that needed stitching.
He was secretly relieved when Bailey undressed. Quick and almost militant, folding his coat, shirt, pants and socks and putting them on the dresser, like he had when they shared a room at the orphanage. On most of his body there were the white scars of laser-removed tattoos of writing that he'd never let Eden read. Across his upper back there were the same strange symbols that were carved into the walls of the orphanage and of his flat, from the books that Eden found for him. He stripped down to a gray pair of boxers, which showed off his thighs, hairy and muscled.
The heat from the fireplace was intense up here. It was what made Eden's face so warm. Yeah. He was sure about it, even when it got hotter when Bailey picked up a wrapped condom from his pants' pocket, always ready. Eden hunched over not to hide his arousal, but in tiredness, even as his heart threatened to burst out of his chest in an animal kind of fear.
Then, Bailey held a random piece of paper out for Eden to read, but Eden just frowned at it.
"It's a STD panel. Says I'm clean. I got a kit at home to test myself."
"I don't have anything like that," Eden said, not even knowing that that was a thing.
"I would've used a condom anyways," Bailey said with a shrug. Then he smirked, "I'd ask if you knew what lubricant was, but I remember ordering a damn galleon for you from out of town."
The fireplace sure was going strong because Eden's face was warmer than ever.
During one of their boyhood fist fights, Eden had called Bailey a whore and gotten an eyeroll in return. He got embarrassed and took it as a nonchalant negation. Later, when he saw Bailey return in the middle of the night with torn clothes and a strange smell hanging around him that he'd later recognize as sex, he began to wonder if the eyeroll might've been a nonchalant duh. Bailey had always been good at making money, but never as obsessed with it as he was these days.
This wouldn't cost him much, though. And he wasn't wasting time, sitting down along with Eden on the bed, looking around at all the different textiles with a flat kind of curiosity.
"What kind of position do you want?"
Eden hesitated. He'd overheard talk of positions and remembered that they had some funny names but not the names themselves. He also remembered the positions he had been... taken... in, and hesitated. But face to face was not an option, mostly due to practical concerns; his face would no doubt cause Bailey's cock to shred off no matter how many people he'd fucked, back in the day.
At the end, Eden crawled into the bed and dug himself deeper into the covers, stretching out as though he was getting ready to sleep on his stomach. Dread rose in him, but he forced it down while his mouth tasted of bile, hoping this recreation of his first time would stomp it out for good. He kept his eyes closed as he felt his way towards the nightstand, opening up the drawer to get out a small water skin filled from his… galleon of lube (he meant to save money!). It was quality stuff, thick and warmed easily by his hands; it would've been nice if he managed to get to completion without flashbacks. He threw the water skin to Bailey without looking, and he heard Bailey catch it like he had the book. The cave that surrounded them shifted because textiles on the floor pulled at the ones hammered to the walls.
"Damn, you've grown bigger."
Was that bad? Eden thought it was bad. The muscles of his arms and thighs had stretched his clothes until he added them to the pile they were on. And he'd gotten a bit of a belly because Bailey made a good potato vodka that they used to sell to the other orphans and at school, and if Eden drunk enough, he did not dream.
He stole a glance behind himself, ready to see Bailey's face warped in disgust like it did that time when they were six and Eden ran from bullies while Bailey remained to fight, but... There was no disgust, but simple determination. Bailey's hand was wrapped around his own cock, hoisted over the waistband on his boxers. He was smaller than Eden, long and thin but proportionate in a way that he'd never ever be. He was dripping lubricant down and staining the gray fabric, his own hairy thighs, and Eden's ass. Eden shivered at those drops hit him, oilier than rain but equally gentle; gentle enough to take his breath away.
"Ever been fingered before?" Bailey asked.
"Can you just get it over with?!" Eden said, then yelped at how fast he got defensive.
Bailey stared at him like he was an interesting bug. He'd get like that in the orphanage sometimes, in the dark of their shared room, staring.
Then he pounced and oh fuck.
Eden stared forward with his neck lifted on alert. So alert that he felt the weight of Bailey's arms on each side of himself, and his thighs, on top of Eden's. Cold. He was kind of cold. Or just colder than Eden's body, which was blazing with shame and heat and more shame because of the heat. Thinner? Cold, because he was thin? Was Bailey working himself to the bone; to bones sticking out of a ratty wolf pelt?
A pressure at his hole, pushing in, meeting resistance. Eden gritted his teeth. His first time flashed before his tightly shut eyes, making them water, and he felt hands all over his body although Bailey wasn't touching much at all, except where slick knuckles angled his cock to try get inside Eden.
"If you want it over with you gotta loosen up, big boy."
Loosen up-? How the hell-?
Bailey slapped Eden's ass, and then he fondled the heated skin. It made him acutely aware of the tension down there, and that tight ring of muscle, massaged by Bailey's thumb. The touch was new in its precision and urging, coaxing forth a battered desire to please.
Little by little, Eden tried to relax. His head fell back against the mattress.
"That's it," Bailey said, and Eden was so sure he'd be insulted that tears welled up in relief and he rubbed his face into the mattress like a humiliated or just overstimulated dog.
When the pressure appeared a second time, there was even more slick. Bailey must've used his free hand to add more lubricant. He really was the right man for this. At the same time, it did make the memory more physical, even if it was in slow motion. Or not quite slow motion: Bailey held himself at the opening, too unrelenting. It hurt less when the head of his cock entered than that first time (or second or third if one counted the cocks that had gone inside of him during that time), but it still hurt.
Tears spilled freely from Eden's eyes. He didn't make a sound. He hadn't back then either. But he had clenched up, and had made the other men and women curse, though Bailey's curse was much more neutral. Like his pain at the tightness existed outside of himself and Eden, just like the horrors that he sent his wards towards, so removed from sexuality (perhaps through the numbing conquering of such through whoring?) that he treated this more like a difficult round of poker than an intimate, soul-shattering encounter. A slide out, then another push; the same movement repeating and accelerating, taking time to adjust and to let Eden breathe and relax slightly, not just forcing himself inside. Bailey was coldly kind.
Eden kept on crying silently. His nose became blocked, and his head felt stuffy, worsened by the heat gathering on top of the cabin. He'd have a headache after this.
It felt like it lasted a small eternity. A slightly harder thrust had Eden sobbing, and he fumbled over the sheet before his hand slapped in front of his mouth to stifle the second sob, too late.
Bailey stilled completely. His gaze burned at the back of Eden's head.
The snake inside the ratty wolf pelt of the man moved and rattled.
"Are you crying? Really? You?"
The response was pure instinct. Eden reached under the covers and a particularly soft set of rabbit pelts and found the pistol he kept there for emergencies. He stroked the safety and imagined blowing Bailey's brains out all over the attic. Then he gave Bailey a look over his shoulder.
Bailey paled. Eden hadn't seen him get like that since he'd thought Eden was interested in his childhood crush. But this time there was no burst of rage, but he went similarly quiet. He was afraid of him. Of all his goons and most of his associates, Eden was the most likely to seriously injure him if he put his mind to it. Their childhood fist fights had been real fights, though they were fighting together to become stronger to take on their true adversaries, all the creeps roaming around town and looking for a piece of parentless ass. They were fighting together, just like now. Eden trying to get his demons fucked out and Bailey trying to gain a lucrative favor later on. All relationships were transactional.
Eden let go off the gun. He would never tell Bailey it was there.
"Want me to continue?" Bailey asked, blasé.
"Shut the fuck up. And yes."
Bailey rolled his eyes, and there it was again, that familiarity that never quite left. He began to move rather mechanically, doing that same acceleration as before, as if handling an old but gentle car. Eden wondered if he treated his own car with the same mechanical care.
Each thrust made his breath catch, but he did not cry anymore, though he had to swallow a sob.
"Didn't think you'd be so normal," Bailey muttered. "That's all."
Let it go, please, Eden thought, even as he balked at being described as normal. He didn't dislike it. It was just so unexpected. Monstrous? Yes. Normal, though?
"It's all the way in soon," Bailey said, to Eden's surprise.
It had gone in easier this time around. The slowness had helped. His hole still burned, but other than that ring of muscle, the ache was worse in his lower back than inside him. There was an ache, yeah, but it wasn't like the horrible fire of bleeding all over somebody's dick.
"Am I bleeding?" Eden asked abruptly, wondering if it was normal to bleed every time.
Bailey pulled all the way out slowly, then used his hands to pull apart Eden's cheeks like he had in the beginning. Inspecting him where no one had before, not even when he'd been fucked. It was like visiting a doctor who also happened to be his only friend in the world.
"Nope," Bailey said, popping the p with his tongue like he did when they were kids.
Then he pushed all the way back in. It stole Eden's breath away and he tightened, but there was so much lubricant there was no fire. There was a scraping sensation, but it took him a moment to realize that was Bailey's pubic hair, course and dark, feeling particularly nasty on the asscheek that Bailey had slapped.
"Nice," Bailey said, low and hungry. It was a mild hunger. Nothing he would lose himself in. But an appetite all the same, which meant that Eden had awoken that part of Bailey that he knew was awoken by very little else. It made butterflies flutter in his stomach, and he felt his cock respond to the praise.
And then Bailey started fucking him for real. Rhythmical, no longer as uneven, staying a pace that was easy to lose one's mind in. Eden let himself lose his mind just a little bit, because he'd already lost it when he prepositioned this to Bailey. But he was suddenly glad he'd gone through with this, because while it hurt, it wasn't terrible. His cave of furs and skins and cloths was nice and soft and his own, and he'd invited this in here, he'd taken some control back over such an experience. An experience that meant nothing to Bailey like it did for him, so it was like they'd slept at their shared room in the orphanage, sometimes smelling each other if the other shifted or grunted in their sleep or got out of bed to piss.
They smelled each other now, too, and Eden liked it. He’d cleaned up extra nicely before he saw Bailey because the man had been a clean freak since he was a teenager, maybe because the mines his family were renowned for owning had been dirty places, where the children who worked there found black dust in their noses and ears for years if they lived that long. Or maybe it was his prostitution work, renowned for its impurity, its innate filth. But Bailey smelled good, like soap and cotton and salt. It was nice things to bring into his bed and into all the memories. Eden probably smelled sweatier, and more like the forest, but he hoped it was just as nice for Bailey. Like the forest they ran together like two young wolves, before Bailey abandoned it for the orphanage and avoided dark places if he could help it.
Bailey fucked him a little faster, a little meaner. Eden couldn't lose himself in nostalgia when his hole was opening to take the other deep into his guts. Distant, but oh so close. Painful, but with a strange kind of pleasure, a feeling that this was right in all the wrong ways.
There was a hiss from behind him, and Eden knew and liked that sound; Bailey made it when he'd taken his first glass of a really good brew of his potato vodka and hissed through a grin. He seemed to be getting into it now, sinking his weight down on Eden. The discomfort came slow, and then like a storm. It made the whole of him tense up, arms aching for a jaw to break now that they weren't in shackles; legs ready to kick; jaw, to bite. Sensing his reaction, Bailey got up, which was good. If he'd remained crushing him down like that Eden's instincts might've caused him to put him in an armlock and choke him out.
"Push your ass up," Bailey said, as if he hadn't just narrowly avoided brain damage. "It'll be easier."
Eden made a hitch-pitched noise of uncertainty as he did as he'd been told and ended up like a wolf in a mating position. He'd seen wolves act like that when dividing the pack positions around themselves. Was he Bailey's bitch, now? There were no teeth on the back of his neck, no bending his full weight over him; he knelt behind Eden and applied even more lubricant. It felt excessive, but it was kind of good when it spilled down his thighs, tickling him, gentleness for a weakling who deserved pure violence for being weak.
Bailey held on to his hip, light at first and then harder as he angled himself inside. Eden gritted his teeth; the angle was better, but still tough at first. Once he was fully inside, Bailey gave Eden's ass a few slaps until he got an angry – and hungry – growl out of him.
Bailey's next thrusts weren't violent, but his expression was, showing off some of the wrinkles he'd get when older. His brows were drawn, and he was chewing on his bottom lip as if craving a smoke, containing himself. He had to slow down to comb his hair out of his face, looking stylized with gel that was only sweat.
Helplessly aroused by the sight, Eden clenched around him. Their eyes met and Eden looked away again, because he was not ready to confront the lust that rippled on the surface of that gaze like the forest lake on overcast days. Instead, he gave himself to the sensations. At one point, his tongue lolled. He licked his teeth, which itched, because something good was happening on the other end. The position made the pleasure feel fuller, but also sharper. Bailey was getting balls-deep more often.
"You could've made a killing, back then," Bailey said between pants, one of those few times he alluded to a shared past between them. "Plenty of people here want a big sexy bottom. Though everywhere else," a ragged inhale, "except this town, there are more requests for tops. I wonder why. Or I don't, really."
Big sexy bottom. Such a crude term, delivered in the middle of semi-casual observances that couldn't quite be called dirty talk, and yet it had Eden's cock growing the hardest it had ever been.
Fingers trembling, he reached underneath himself, fully expecting his erection to shrivel away. It didn't. Maybe it was the pressure deep inside, taking up so much of his attention. Jerking off felt less impossible than normal. More of a way to relieve some of said pressure. He was so careful, so hesitant, and so his hand was easily swatted away.
"Let me take care of it," Bailey said.
Such heated words. And yet meaningless, meaningless, meaningless...
He barely had to tug him thrice before Eden spilled into his expert grip.
Eden's mind went white at the edges. It was his first orgasm in months, and so joy wrapped around the whiteness, a kind of purity in impurity that he did not know he could possess. Another man might've felt humiliation, but Eden felt like this was the moment that would change everything and make him a man again. The cave came back to him, swallowing him back into itself, where he was being fucked by Bailey. Squeezing the last drops from him, making him shudder because it was turning uncomfortable really quickly, especially because Bailey wasn't stopping. Those other guys hadn't stopped, either.
"No," Eden mumbled, not losing himself to the memory as much as giving it to it.
To his horror, Bailey stopped.
Eden's mouth opened to tell him not to, but the look on Bailey's face was... not disgust.
"Do you need a safeword?" he asked. Then he winced at Eden's blank expression, and explained, "Something you say to make me stop for real. Could be a color."
"If I needed you to stop, you'd know," Eden said darkly. "I don't need a stupid fucking word."
Bailey's tongue slid over his lips like a snake trying to scent the truth of that claim. And then he gave one of his I can't be bothered with this crap flavored shrugs, but where Eden thought he'd cite urgent business and leave, he went back to fucking Eden like before.
Bailey hadn't gone flaccid despite Eden's first no, nor the ones following, breathed more than they were spoken, no no no, more like hushed mumbles than words. If anything, Bailey seemed harder. It was getting downright painful. Less like it had been in the beginning and still nothing like that first time, but he felt used in a different way. He moaned weakly, too out of it to hold back. His hole felt puffy and sensitive in the way lips could if kissed enough. And he had been kissed, so now kisses reminded him of that time, and he had no wishes to recreate that with anyone else quite so soon. Bailey didn't seem like a kisser anyway.
But he was a fucker, making Eden's arms and thighs shake. When fucking someone after an orgasm, it was clear Bailey had less regard of the other person, focused on his own pleasure rather than theirs. And yet it wasn't terrible. Some part of Eden liked making somebody else feel good, enduring pain for a friend.
"Stop crying like a fucking baby."
"Fuck off," Eden said with too much emotion, revealing his hurt.
"People get more excited because of it," Bailey explained between breaths. "Too excited. Violent."
"Excited. Like... hnng… you?"
Bailey's thrusts were turning erratic, indirectly answering Eden's question.
Once he'd told Eden that it seemed like the forces of the Town made common sexual tastes increase and warp until crying turned the regular joe on beyond belief and they couldn't stop themselves even if they wanted to. Had Bailey already turned into the old orphanage director? Not quite. Even now, he was kinder to Eden than the people he'd been sold to had been.
In the future, this was what he'd choose to remember as his proper first time. The time that reverted the status quo. That would bleed into the future moments where he'd fuck somebody else, because Bailey had taught him most of what Eden knew about sex, also through this.
Bailey came silently. Holding his breath. Eden stole a glance at him and saw him shake, the moment his nostrils flared like an animal's. When he opened his eyes, they were dazed with pleasure.
He pulled out slowly, but it still produced a scraping sensation that Eden knew could be far worse if done too quickly. Eden didn't look away, surprised at how much cock his ass had taken without tearing, and how red it was where their bodies had met. Even while softening, Bailey's cock did look like a weapon, trapped as it was in the filled condom. For some reason his expression had a flicker of guilt in it as he stared down at it.
Eden felt strange. Like he needed something more. But he supposed he had gotten all the care he would out of Bailey. To expect any care after sex seemed impossible. And yet his eyes sought a kind of affirmation, and in disorientation, he reached for the past.
"Hey, Bailey. Why did you take on my debt, back then?"
Did you know what happened to me that time I didn't pay? If so, why didn't you help me?
Bailey snapped out of the guilt, gaze blackening with betrayal, before he snuffed it out.
No affirmation or answers would be coming, then. Eden should've known.
Bailey tried to stand up from the bed and hit his head on the ceiling with a grunt.
Eden's lip quirked. Then it became a thin line as he rolled over on his back, grimacing at having to sleep in a wet patch, then smiling again because it still felt like a breakthrough. Gingerly, he touched his own softening dick, feeling far less strained than before. He'd rather sleep in a wet patch for the rest of his life than go that long without release ever again. Things were back to normal again. They had to be.
When he remembered he wasn't actually alone, Bailey was already halfway dressed. He was balancing climbing down the ladder and holding his remaining clothes (shirt and coat) and the used condom held gingerly like he wanted to preserve the contents.
Curious, Eden crawled out of bed and to the edge of the attic space, watching Bailey go towards the sink. He held the condom up under the tap and filled it with water. ...Why? Was it some kind of fetish? Wait, was Bailey the pervert who drove around town and threw water balloons at orphans?!
"Checking it for tears," Bailey said loudly as if having read Eden's mind. He tied it at the top and then squeezed the water around like he actually was checking the condom for tears. "You'd be surprised by how many orphans are the result of the parents not doing this."
Eden snorted. It wasn't like he could get pregnant anyway. He frowned, thinking there was a puzzle piece he was missing from the situation, but then he got distracted by how Bailey was putting on his coat. It wasn't long before he was just as put together as he had when he entered the cabin. His hair was messier and his cheeks redder, but that could've just been from a brisk walk.
Eden had covered himself in pelts to ward off the sensation of being stripped bare. When he emerged back to the front of the attic space, looking down, Bailey was in front of the door with his hand on the handle.
"I meant for us to run it together, you know."
"What? The orphanage, you mean?" Eden asked, genuinely confused. "What changed?"
"You did," Bailey said without turning around. "I thought you were a wolf. But she always did say you were a fox. Clever enough to run away if things got too hard."
"Run away?" Eden asked, frowning. "You're the one who left the forest. Where we really were free."
"As if any of us were ever free."
Eden frowned. He didn't understand what Bailey meant. Freedom was all about belief, wasn't it? If you believed you were done with something, then you were actually done with it, right? He shook his head, then realized that this was maybe about money, Bailey's favorite thing in the whole world aside from soap. And following that trail of thought, Bailey's services certainly never came for free.
"Are you going to ask me to pay up?" Eden joked, trying to end the evening on a better note.
"Oh," Bailey said, smiling coldly up at him. "One day, you will."