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nico-di-genova · 6 months ago

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A Lesson in Braking

Chapter 2

Read on Archive of Our Own

A/N: hehehehehehe (my only thoughts while writing this fic).

Warnings: NSFW and a brief mention of anti-harm dorm furniture.

“I fucked an old guy last night,” Lance says to Esteban, when he’s lying on the floor of his dorm room, head resting on the Spider-Man pillow he bought Esteban for his birthday last spring. “Behind the Barnes & Noble. Hand job.”

Esteban hums. He’s sitting at his desk that he’s moved to slot beneath the single small window of his room, curled over his laptop and working on some complex string of numbers. Three weeks into the semester and Esteban is already drowning in assignments – Lance doesn’t envy him.

“He ate my cum,” he continues, picking at a fraying edge of the pillow. When he pulls at the red string it snags on the fabric and then releases, growing longer in Lance’s grip. He should buy Esteban a new one, maybe a whole bedspread to match. The thought occurs that he could buy a matching set, just to sleep on during the nights when he’s too drunk to get back to his own place and crashes in the living room.

Esteban hums again, pushes his glasses further up his nose, keeps clicking away on his laptop so that the number sequence only grows longer. Lance can only catch pieces of it from where he’s lying on the floor, head angled backward to stare up at Esteban as he works. But even the small bit he can see is enough to give him a headache.

“When I kissed him I tasted it.”

That gets him.

Esteban sighs, leans back in the chair as far as it will go given its anti-tip design – dorm furniture made to prevent kids from hanging themselves from their light fixtures – rubs at the bridge of his nose and then falls back forward with a groan.

“You’re telling me this, why?”

Lance pouts, tips his head further back on the pillow so he can get a better look at Esteban with one arm on the back of his chair, leaning down to stare at him with mild judgement.

“You don’t want to know about the old man sex I had?”

“I can barely tolerate hearing about the normal sex you have.”

Lance laughs. The spider-man plush, also bought by Lance from the birthday trip to Disneyland last spring, rises and falls on his stomach with the movement. Technically, he has homework for his intro to Marketing class, but it’s more fun to laze around on Esteban’s dirty floor, talking about his sex life, than it is to learn about how to make people buy things. Besides, he’s grown up listening to his dad rant about his successes in the industry, so much so that his first word might as well have been entrepreneurship. It shouldn’t be a hard class to pass.

The dorm room is so tiny he almost runs the whole length of it, one foot nearly to the door, his head at the base of Esteban’s chair, one knee propped in the air. One of his arms is spread wide enough that it’s laying underneath Esteban’s bed, fingers toying with the shoelace of a sneaker that’s been kicked off underneath. It’s a familiar sight by this point, Lance taking up space in Esteban’s room, his life, with ease and spreading out enough that he can be found in nearly every corner of it. Esteban always makes room for him, sometimes will join him on the floor when his course load isn’t too much. But junior year is already different from the two prior, kicking off with a speed that is giving Lance whiplash.

He misses Sovi, the freshman dorms that once made him feel caged, but provided infinitely more freedom in that they weren’t tied to the paths that had led them here.

“My normal sex life just involves Pato, you’d rather hear about me fucking Pato?” He asks, smirks, just barely dodges the pencil Esteban flicks down at him.

“I don’t want to hear about you fucking anyone! Get a journal!”

Lance muses, “I guess there was also that one guy a few weeks ago. From that party in Q,” the building a few doors down from Esteban’s. It sat on the shore of the lake and far enough away from the central hub that university police tended to overlook it. Esteban had called Lance four beers deep a week into school and told him to get there quick, didn’t specify where ‘there’ was, so Lance had to use Find My to even locate him. When he’d pulled up the party had been in full swing on the third floor, and he was welcomed into the cramped apartment by Esteban who reeked of alcohol and weed. Lance ended up fucking one of the guys who lived there, riding him hurriedly and enduring the guy keeping a sweaty palm pressed to his mouth so he didn’t make too much noise in the room they’d locked themselves in.

Esteban squints at him, “You said that guy was shit.”

“He was.” He came first and then didn’t even bother to get Lance off.

“So why the fuck would you want to talk about it again?”

“Because you don’t want to hear about the good old man sex.”

Esteban’s nose crinkles in disgust, “Well how old was he?”

“I didn’t ask.”

The mechanical engineering is quickly forgotten, Esteban spinning around fully in his chair and staring at Lance with wide eyes. Lance grins up at him innocently, flutters his eyelashes, scoots over on the pillow as a silent invitation for the man to join him on the ugly blue carpeted floor. Esteban doesn’t take it, yet, Lance is still confident he can convince him.

“How old did he look?”

“I don’t know, forties maybe?”

“Forties?! What the fuck, Lance!?”

“What?”

The deadpan stare Esteban gives him isn’t new, it’s pretty standard actually. “You are insane. And stupid.”

Lance, because he likes testing his luck, pushing at the boundaries of his and Esteban’s friendship, seeing where the line is so he can be prepared for when it snaps, keeps going, “I’m seeing him again tonight.”

He wishes he’d been filming, just so he could preserve the way Esteban’s eyes get impossibly wider. Finally, Esteban gets out of the chair, but he doesn’t join Lance on the floor, instead he paces the length of the room, hands held on his head and mumbles a rapid string of words that Lance doesn’t quite get but he thinks are mainly swears.

“You are joking, yes? Tell me you are joking.” Hands on his hips, towering over Lance, he looks like a giant. Tall and lanky with big eyes behind his wire-rimmed frames.

Lance hadn’t been. He’s been texting Fernando since late last night, ignoring calls from his dad in the process. So far the conversation has consisted of little substance, just enough to establish that Lance is a junior, Fernando is retired, and lives in one of the mansions on the other side of the lake that is right outside Esteban’s prison cell-sized window. Mainly they’d talked about Fernando’s cock, how Lance is upset he didn’t get to see it, taste it – how he’d like to return the favor preferably outside of the backseat of a car and somewhere a bit more comfortable.

He wants to be called beautiful again, reverently, spread out on silk sheets and spread open by Fernando’s fingers. He blames the accelerated horniness on the dry summer he’d just had, the time spent at his father’s house with little else to do and no one to hook up with because Lawrence had insisted on spending as much time as he could with Lance. They’d gone to the track to watch a few races, the office where Lance was meant to be shadowing, galas and banquets, and the golf course most mornings so Lawrence could ensure Lance actually had something to show for the tuition he was fronting. Lance knows it was mainly a last ditch effort on his dad’s behalf to maintain their relationship, before Lance slipped off back to Florida and began predictably sending him to voicemail. Which is why he had even bothered enduring it in the first place, when he just as easily could has gone off to the Mykonos with a group of guys from his frat.

He'd refrained from debauchery all summer, was paying the price for his abstinence now. But, like always, the cost was something to which Lance paid very little, until the bill began to raise eyebrows, as Esteban’s now are.

“Lance. Tell me you are joking!”

“Why would I be joking?”

Esteban glares down at him, while Lance sprawls out further across the thin carpet, concrete flooring beneath digging into his shoulder blades, and smiles. It’s wide, lazy, slow to draw across his face. The sort of shit-eating, self-assured, smirk that Esteban hates.

“It was good sex, Este! He did this thing-“

“Stop! No! Stop! I don’t want to know.”

Lance stops, goes quiet, but continues to smirk. In his pocket, he feels his phone vibrate, probably Fernando again. They’re meant to be meeting in a few hours, once the suns gone down enough that being outside doesn’t make him feel like he’s melting. When Fernando can take him to the bar in the shopping plaza nearby and treat him to a beer before he fucks him senseless, as he’s been promising all day.

He doesn’t tell Esteban this, figures he’s maybe traumatized him enough for the day. Instead, he changes the topic to Esteban’s course load, feigns interest in the math still open on his laptop. Esteban is all too willing to explain it to him, to turn his attention away from the phone Lance pulls from his pocket and grins at with cheeks turning red.

Fernando has sent him a photo of his outfit, button of his slacks undone, zipper pulled low, hand holding the waistband below his hips. He has a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, close to his wrist, something Lance hadn’t noticed in the dark of his car last night, but that he now can’t draw his eyes away from. It’s a cross of some sort, produces the sort of sacrilegious thoughts that he can’t linger on for too long for fear of losing his religion.

‘Wear something nice,’ Fernando’s text says, when he manages to read it.

Lance doesn’t own much that fits the description, other than a suit he saves for formals, but he figures it maybe doesn’t actually matter that much. Fernando promises to rip whatever it is off of him anyway.

Esteban throws another pencil at him when he tries to show him the photo, holds his hand up to block the view and then lands the writing utensil right on Lance’s nose.

------------

His dad calls when he’s fresh out of the shower of his own apartment, steam curling in the air around him and his phone vibrating steadily against the granite countertops of his humid bathroom. He answers before it goes to voicemail, figures he owes his dad this because it’s the third time he’s called since that morning, and he doesn’t want to risk pissing the man off too much.

“Hey,” he says as he’s wrapping a towel around his waist, slicking his wet hair back out of his face with his free hand. He leaves the phone on speaker, lets his dad’s voice fill space as he busies with getting ready.

“I’m going to assume you’ve been ignoring my calls because you are going to class.”

He only has one class on Tuesday’s, and it’s finished by noon. Advanced golf merchandising, a pointless elective where he’s meant to be learning the management of a retail location. He takes notes, enough to retain the important bits, but he already knows management isn’t where he’s going to end up. His dad would secure him some corporate position within his company before that was even an option. Which, he doesn’t want either, can’t stand the thought of being forced to wear a shirt with a collar every day.

“Yeah, I just got back from campus,” he lies, he’s been hiding out at Esteban’s since class ended, it’s seven now. The lie comes too easy, but the truth would only hurt the both of them – that Lance is avoiding his father because their conversations hurt more than they help these days. That Lance is growing, but it’s in a direction away from Lawrence, from the idea of who his dad thought he would be.

His dad wishes Lance were still small, and Lance wishes that too, but only because when he was a child hurting his dad only resulted in a brief scolding. Now it leads to awkward silences that neither of them know how to fill.

“Class is going well?”

“Um, easy so far, yeah.” They’re only three weeks in. “Other than this financial accounting class, it’s brutal.” He’s already had to ask Esteban for help, already knows he’s going to need to visit the library for tutoring.

He wipes steam from his mirror with the palm of his hand, catches a glimpse of his dripping reflection. Somehow, he needs to assemble himself into something relatively attractive within the next ten minutes, only for it to most likely come undone the second he slides his helmet over his hair. There’s a twisted sort of humor in him wondering how best to style himself for Fernando, while he’s on the phone with his father, pretending to care about classes that had stopped being fun once Lance realized they were actually supposed to lead to something.

“You spent all summer looking at the books,” Lawrence says. Which is true, but it had made more sense when things were hands on. Now it’s just a jumble of words and numbers on a whiteboard, a professor who knows the course is meant for weeding out those who are too weak to continue, and who looks at Lance every time he shows up late with a knowing sort of disappointment.

People didn’t used to look at him like that, it’s a growing sentiment the more Lance stumbles.

“Yeah, I know. It’s just- it’s different. All reading and equations and- I don’t know. I’m not a numbers guy, dad, you know this.”

“You got it pretty well while you were here.”

Only because he’d felt his dad’s eyes on him the whole summer, felt the pressure and the weight and need to prove he could do something. His professor doesn’t bother to look at Lance once he’s sat at a desk, which means Lance zones out, doodles designs in the margins of his notes and then wonders why the numbers don’t add up while he’s doing homework later.

“It’s different,” the exasperation in his voice is audible, he pauses where he’d been drying his hair with a towel pulled from under the sink. Closes his eyes. Breathes. “But I’m trying. I’ll- I’ll figure it out.”

“I know you will, Lance. I didn’t say you wouldn’t.”

They’re being careful around each other, the eggshells just beginning to crunch beneath their feet. Neither one of them want a fight and Lance can feel the tension of it through the phone, the tightening of something in his chest that threatens to break every time he speaks to his father now. This is why he lets it go to voicemail.

Fernando texts him, he sees the notification come through as he’s staring at the phone, hands braced on the bathroom sink. Probably asking if he’s on his way. Lance’s hair is still dripping water in cold tendrils down the back of his neck, a puddle forming on the carpet at his feet. He hasn’t even bothered to find an outfit or brush his teeth.

“Look, dad- I- um, I gotta go. I have a, uh, a study thing with Pato-“

“Oh, okay, yeah. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Lance closes his eyes again, bows his head, tries not to care about the hurt that’s audible in his father’s voice and finds that it somehow manages to dig between his ribs anyway. He hangs up before there’s the chance for the line to fracture further, and then he busies himself with texting Fernando back.

‘You are still coming?’ Fernando asks.

Lance says he’ll be there soon, and then he focuses on the toothbrush in his hands, getting himself ready, and ignores everything else.

-------------

“I need a drink!” Lance yells over the music, leaning further into Fernando, who holds him up with ease. “A shot!”

Fernando’s hand on his waist tightens when Lance rocks on his feet. They’re standing in the press of bodies on the dance floor, people on all sides. The crowd makes it easy for Lance to press against Fernando, the flashing lights adding to the disorientation. No one notices the way Fernando’s got one hand gripping Lance’s hipbone, the other on his ass, tucked into the pocket of his jeans and cupping the curve of him.

They’re the same jeans he’d worn last night, pulled from the crumpled heap on his floor and slid back on because he couldn’t find anything else. If Fernando has noticed he doesn’t say anything, too distracted by the white linen button-up that Lance wear, only half done-up and exposing nearly the full expanse of his chest in the multicolored lights. Lance knows it puts the chain around his neck on full display, makes his collarbones stand out, shows how broad he is, and produces the impressed reaction Fernando had exhibited upon first seeing him.

He’d bought Lance his first drink, and then the first requested tequila shot, leaning on the bar top and staring at the exposed column of his neck as Lance tipped the liquor back and downed it with practiced ease. Lance had seen the way Fernando’s eyes had darkened as his adams apple bobbed, looking from the corner of his eye just to see the response that would be elicited with the movement.

“What do you want?” Fernando asks now, hand on his hip coming up to pull Lance down to him so his lips just barely brush over Lance’s ear.

He shudders, breath stuttering when Fernando’s fingers tangle in the hair at the nape of his neck and pull just enough that there’s the promise of something better later. He’s been teasing Lance since Lance first arrived, the ghost of a touch, a tongue tracing over the sweaty line of his neck, enough to have him hard in his jeans but never doing anything to solve the problem.

It’s the most public foreplay Lance has ever engaged in, even if everyone is too drunk or too involved in their own games to even notice.

“Vodka?” Lance yells, knowing he probably seems young for only ordering shots, but he’d only just turned twenty-one last October. Most of his experience with alcohol has been bagged wine fountained before entry to a party or the mix of Kool-Aid and whatever liquor could be procured into a giant tub for jungle juice. Shots are simple, uncomplicated, and he knows he can handle them. Plus they hit fast, or at least feel like they do, give him the liquid courage needed to grind against Fernando as Pit Bull blares around them in the crowded bar.

The Keys is a mixed sort of space, half occupied by college kids who were too lazy to drive all the way to Rusty’s and half-filled by the locals who are looking for fun outside of their mansions. It means he and Fernando don’t draw attention, Lance fits in with the group of kids in their backwards caps and low cut shirts, Fernando blends with the guys in their pressed button-ups and black slacks. He just looks hotter than the others, the pants hugging his waist and ass well, clearly tailored. And the peak of a tattoo Lance gets on the back of Fernando’s neck as he follows him back up to the bar, Fernando’s hand around his wrist towing him through the crowd, separates him enough from the older guys smoking cigars outside on the patio. He wants to know what the tattoo is, slide Fernando’s shirt off his shoulders and trace the ink with his tongue.

But that’s for later, for now he lets Fernando guide him, lean him against the bar top, slide a hand back into the pocket of his jeans because the shape of his palm over his ass is becoming familiar. He flags down the bartender, orders two shots of Vodka and then they tip them back together. Lance can feel how flushed his neck is getting, wonders if the red of it is spreading to his chest, his cheeks. His hair that was still slightly damp from the shower is frizzing in the humidity of the packed space, falling over his forehead.

Fernando stares up at him, lips wet with vodka and his own spit when he licks them, Lance follows the movement, starts to lean forward like he intends to taste the lingering alcohol himself. Fernando stops him with a hand on his chest, fingers splayed across bare skin, index finger dipping into the hollow of his clavicle. Lance shudders, Fernando feels it.

“Let’s get out of here, yes?”

“Yes.”

Lance can’t drive his bike, just drunk enough that he knows he couldn’t keep his balance. Instead, he climbs into the passenger seat of Fernando’s Aston Martin, and deposits his own keys in the cupholder, casting a forlorn look back at his gear in the backseat. The same seat he’d come undone in last night, now occupied by his motorcycle helmet with the sticker of a cat waving the Canadian flag – something Pato had found online and ordered because ‘it’s Canada, Lance! You know, you!’. Fernando had asked him about it when he parked earlier, traced the outline of it before Lance had taken his helmet off, lifted Lance’s visor so he could see his eyes more clearly as he did so.

When he looks back at Fernando in the driver’s seat the man is staring at him. Lance knows what it looks like when someone wants him. He knows the way Pato gets all slack jawed and dopey-eyed, eyes flicking to Lance’s lips every two seconds even though he wouldn’t even try to kiss him. But Fernando’s look of want is different, more demanding and all-encompassing. He looks like he’s plotting the best course of stripping Lance out of his clothes before they’ve even reached their destination, like he is thinking of the best way to take him apart.

Maybe it’s because he’s more experienced, or maybe it’s because he’s less. Lance doesn’t know enough about him, anything really, to know if he is the first man Fernando has hooked up with or not. They still haven’t found much time to talk, or maybe just haven’t wanted to make the effort. Lance is okay with that, his idea of foreplay is not long discussions and get-to-know-you’s. He doesn’t have the patience for that, much prefers Fernando’s method of cutting to the quick and easy of it. Which Fernando does when he leans across the console enough to grab Lance by the chain around his neck and pull him in for a kiss.

Lance is still not used to the kissing, just opens his mouth and lets Fernando’s tongue slide into it because he’s not practiced enough. He’s okay with letting Fernando take control, likes how he doesn’t have to think about it, just follow. Fernando tastes like vodka, and Lance swallows the familiar taste of it when their spit mixes and he can no longer tell whose is whose.

When Fernando pulls back Lance tries to chase him, is stopped again by a hand on his chest, firm and unyielding.

“You are still okay with coming to my place?” Fernando asks, and something in the way he says it is slightly sobering. It makes Lance remember his bike two spots over, prepared to be abandoned for the night and hopefully still there come morning.

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“I will drive you home, instead. If you want. Up to you.”

“No. No I’m good. Trust me.” He’d prepped himself in the shower and everything, knew what he was getting into before a drop of alcohol ever touched his tongue. “I’ve been thinking about this since last night.”

Fernando eyes him, glances down at his chest where his skin is still red and hot and bare against his hand.

“Okay. God, you are beautiful.”

The praise shoots straight to Lance’s cock, has a quiet moan escaping him, something he only just barely manages to bite back with the press of his teeth into his bottom lip. Fernando catches it anyway, grins like he’s realized the praise wasn’t just a one-off from the hand job last night, but something Lance actually enjoys.

"Don’t worry, pretty boy,” he promises, “Make you feel better soon.”

#strollonso #strollonso fic #a lesson in braking #a lesson in braking fic #my fic #gang they make me maybe a bit unwell #also!! don't say anything about it lowkey being toxic rn #I know!#(it's intentional)#I have a path #let me stroll along it

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