#also oops greg is an exhibitionist again

[ezlebe]

Prompt - Tom threatens or tries to wrestle Greg again, resulting in Greg accidently revealing his masochist kink

“Why’re you always like doing that?” Greg says, pinching his lips together and not quite pushing Tom away, but also sort of putting six inches at least between their persons. “You know I’m not like, into… general fisticuffs.”

“You should be, Greg,” Tom snaps, getting huffy, like he always does when Greg won’t rise to shoving him or whatever, even though he really clearly doesn’t want Greg to do it, anyway? “I’d like to even out the field, here, alright? Clean the slate. You need a hit or two to reset that back to zero and you’re being really difficult. Just do it!”

“Like…” Greg blinks rapidly, looking from Tom’s face to his hands, nose curling with reluctance. He’s pretty it would be the wrong thing to say that there was never exactly a zero. “Oh.”

“It simply needs to be done – especially now,” Tom says, matter of fact, with that slight upturned pinch at his mouth, which means he knows he’s being like a little out of bounds but cannot stop himself. It’s not a good pinch. Historically.

“Wh-what if, um…?” Greg drags his teeth across his lip, face flushing, and attempts to think of something to change the subject, but considering how often Tom has tried to get this to happen, he isn’t just going to give up on it. “It’s reset a different way? Like. You – uh, you get in some good ones to cancel the bad ones? And that’d be… better for me, especially now.”

“What does that even – ?” Tom pauses, his focus sliding markedly to the right while his mouth hangs open mid-thought. His eyes sweep back at Greg, going wide, then narrow, “You’re going to need to be very unambiguous here, Greg, as much as that might give you a stroke.”

“It doesn’t have to be hits, necessarily,” Greg says, rubbing at the back of his neck, then slumping down on the next bench they pass and wrapping his hands around the edge near his thighs. “Like, I – I prefer not hits, actually? But I do, uh. I don’t exactly dislike the bruises.”

Tom stares harder, standing over him with hands on his hips. “Even less ambiguous.”

Greg takes a shaky breath. “Instead of me – um, me hitting you, or – or wrestling?” He says, feeling a little weird in a kind of restless way with Tom standing over him looking so serious. “You could like… hurt me, maybe, but in a way I – I want you to.”

Tom is still for a beat, then nods with a slow drop of his head and gestures for more with an inward curving hand.

“And that is, like I think actually settling it even better, because I wouldn’t like hitting you, and you don’t want me to, so that would like just be putting more points on the bad board. Not making it a tie – or um, putting the board back in… black, I guess?”

Tom wets his lower lip, glancing sideways in the direction of Mondale, then shuffles to the side to join Greg at the bench. “…Right.”

“But like, only if you want to,” Greg says, glancing over to look at Tom from the corner of his eye.

“Have you already thought about this?” Tom says, still visibly skeptical, then gestures with a drop of a pointed finger toward the bench below them. “Before now.”

“Uh,” Greg intones, as his face begins to feel truly like it must be about to light totally aflame, “A little…. I got this bruise on my thigh from the desk like, trying to dodge the water bottles? And it was like in sort of a sexy place and I – I uh, I sometimes pressed on it, you know? Until it went away.”

Tom’s mouth flattens, quiet for a pair of tense moments. “But not the ones from the bottles?”

“I didn’t get any from the actual water bottles.”

Tom blinks rapidly, visibly deflating, “Oh.”

“And that time you grabbed my wrist a little hard to yank me away from Roman –”

“You two were being unreasonable,” Tom interrupts, voice pitching, then twisting his own grip against the bench. “And I didn’t know it was too hard – you didn’t… say.”

Greg wets his lips and shakes his head, then lifts his arm to show the metal clasp at the band, pushing slightly into his tendons. “It wasn’t, actually; the watch was just what sort of pinched into my wrist? But I could feel it for like two days.”

“Ah,” Tom intones, staring hard at the watch band.

“And then, uh,” Greg says, tilts his head with an especially thick swallow. “On the plane home from Italy – ”

Tom makes a low noise. “Oh, god.”

“Your fingers were like digging into my elbow for like ten hours,” Greg says, lifting his other hand now to press at the place across his opposite elbow where purple had decorated around the joint. “That gave like the best ones, so far.”

“So far,” Tom repeats, faintly, shoving his head straight into his hands. “This conversation has totally broken its leash.”

“I didn’t even like realize really that it may be something I could find – uh, find satisfying, until the whole hostage thing?” Greg swallows, then takes a slow breath, “Which is like kind of messed up? Since I was like going for the opposite of that.”

Tom laughs a pitchy squawk into his hands.

“Is this really bad?”

“Honestly? It’s … it’s not that, so much,” Tom says, “But we’ve been sleeping together for months – you’re over all the time, to the point it almost feels like you conveniently forgot to tell me you got evicted – and I only find out now you jacked off to bruises that I feel bad about?”

“It seemed more like a six-month thing?”

Tom raises one of his brows incredulously high up his forehead. “Why?”

“I dunno,” Greg mutters, shrugging small against the back of the bench. “I don’t have any, like… frame of reference, Tom.”

“But that’s… a thing you’re into?”

“I haven’t looked that much into it?” Greg admits, though he had sort of tried, but reading people’s takes on it… was a lot. “Just like. When the opportunity pops up? But yeah.”

“This is something else,” Tom mutters, staring out across the park, as his face folds into various expressions, until he ultimately turns and looks hard at Greg. “Are you sure it’s not Stockholm?”

“You’re not like that bad, Tom,” Greg says, though he kind of is, sometimes, but it’s way more in an emotional way than physical. He’s doesn’t actually think Tom knows that, though, how he can easily twist Greg’s arm into like a lot by having a breakdown. He’s pretty sure Tom isn’t faking them.

“So says you, at least,” Tom mutters, in that way where it’s clear someone else said opposite.

Greg feels something high in his cheek. “You could like do my arm, right now?” He offers, swallowing shallow, “Or my leg?”

“What?”

Greg holds his arm out with his palm up. “Like. Squeeze it really hard?”

Tom looks down dubiously, like he had with the watch. “Uh, are you sure?”

Greg wriggles his fingers, then feels his breath catch when Tom actually reaches out and lays a palm across his forearm.

“Just… squeeze?” Tom clarifies, wrapping his fingers lightly around.

“Yeah, like…” Greg trails off, then shrugs, inching his arm over further and somewhat laying in Tom’s lap. “Hard. Like as hard as you can, I guess?”

“I wish we weren’t having this conversation here,” Tom says, while he tightens his fingers hesitantly around Greg’s arm, and it must look a bit like they’re holding hands on the bench. “Somehow this feels like I just took my cock out here in the dog park.”

Greg wets his lip, flexing his hand against the pressure. He belatedly thinks it’s weird they’re doing this first, as well, rather than holding hands, not that he wouldn’t like to do that, too. “You started it.”

Tom scoffs under his breath, his grip frustratingly wavering within seconds. “To rib, like – like frat boys, not… whatever is going on right now.”

“You can like do it harder,” Greg says, firmly, definitely not anything like a plea.

Tom sighs outright, but his hand constricts tight around Greg’s forearm all at once. “Good lord, you are backpedaling decades of gains by hardworking activists being such a publicly deviant queer right now.”

“I know,” Greg says, head dropping back and staring at the cloudy sky with a brief clench of his jaw, already thinking about what it’s going to feel like in a few hours. He thinks he can feel the pulse in Tom’s thumb, as the pain deepens, throbbing a little through his fingertips. He had no idea what he thought it might be like, so deliberate, but he didn’t… Fuck. He didn’t think at all.

“And there’s an actual, honest to God, squirrel two feet from us – ” Tom continues, as if he’s not got a hold so strong around Greg’s arm that it feels like the bones are going to flex and break into each other. “Mondale, thank fuck, is at least unawares from his mulch tunnel. Luckily, it’s 10AM on a Wednesday, peak hours for engaging in kink in a public park, barefaced and lacking even the anonymity of a stall –”

“Tom,” Greg says, then swallowing hard, ears burning at the rasp of his own voice.

Tom immediately releases Greg’s wrist. “Okay?”

Greg nods his head, leaning over slightly to try to hide his somewhat karmic situation throbbing between his legs. His arm is prickling where Tom was holding it, not really in a sore sense, but in a way where he can still almost feel it.

Tom is silent for a pair of tense beats, then abruptly his hand slides heavy across Greg’s shoulders. “Oh,” he outright purrs, making the situation worse, as he leans sideways and presses his lips nearly against Greg’s ear. “Is someone chubbing up in his lululemon hosiery?”

“I – uh, we shouldn’t have done that. Here.”

“I know!” Tom says, voice lifting in pitch and audibly halfway to laughter, leaning back into his place on the bench while he shakes Greg pointedly at the shoulder. “You make me totally insane, Gregory. I swear you steal away all my good sense with those babydoll eyes of yours.”