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“Unh-” Richard says uncertainly. “Is everything- okay?”
“Of course,” Gavin says.
“Right. It’s just- if you scoot over any further you’re going to fall off the bed?”
Gavin doesn’t say anything, just lies perfectly still, frowning furiously at the vaulted ceiling. His facial expression is the only thing giving him away: based on his steady, patterned breathing and the careful way his hands are folded over each other, Richard could almost believe that he was meditating.
“Look,” Richard tries again. “If you’re worried about what you said- I know you don’t- people say all kinds of crazy stuff during sex. Erlich once called a girl the emperor of Japan-” Gavin looks at him curiously.
“I mean, not that I heard him,” Richard clarifies. “He told us afterwards. Anyway, the point is, everyone knows you get a free pass for the two minutes before and after an orgasm. I know you didn’t mean it.”
“I did,” Gavin says. “I did mean it.”
“Um,” Richard says, and valiantly chokes down the wave of anxiety nausea until it passes. He’s not sure what the correct response is when the billionaire business rival you’ve been having casual hate sex with for the past ten months says he loves you during sex and won’t take it back afterward, but he’s pretty sure vomming on him and his $50,000 mattress is not it.
“What?” he says instead.
“Same time next week?” Gavin says in a weird tone of voice, getting up and heading into the bathroom. Sometimes he wants Richard to follow, but today he shuts the door emphatically behind him. Richard mulls over the fact that Gavin fucking Belson just dismissed him like a high school history teacher.
--
Gavin prides himself on being self-aware. It’s part of what makes him such a good CEO, the reason he insists on keeping his spiritual house in order through an extensive mindfulness practice; no one knows Gavin Belson like Gavin Belson knows Gavin Belson. In fact, it would be reasonably fair to say that no other person currently living on the planet knows Gavin Belson, the real Gavin Belson, at all.
The point being, it’s rare for Gavin to surprise himself. Rare or not, though, it had happened today. He hadn’t meant to send Richard away so early- his schedule today is uncharacteristically open, and he had been looking forward to extending a sort of experiment which he has been conducting over the past few weeks, testing Richard’s limitations. Today he’d worked him over patiently, easing in a third and then a fourth finger, massaging his prostate until Richard came, dry-sobbing and sweaty and red-faced, without a hand on his cock. The angelic look of him, all golden curls and wide blue eyes, blinking, dazed- Gavin felt it a fitting reward for his own self-control in waiting this long to bury himself inside and take what had been offered so freely. Knowing that sex is always enhanced by mindfulness, Gavin surrendered himself to the moment, not bothering to censor himself. Anyway, after this long there is a certain level of- well, partially trust between them, but also a fair helping of mutually assured destruction- either way, he hadn’t really imagined that Richard could hold anything he said against him, could sell anything to Gawker without implicating himself and his company in equal measure.
“You are fucking exquisite,” he had said, as Richard screwed up his eyes in embarrassment and turned to bury his head in the pillow. He’s stroking Richard a little, gently, and watching how he jerks around, oversensitized but still desperate and needy.
“Please,” Richard said, and “please, harder, I can come again, Gavin, please-”
“You’re doing so well,” Gavin had said. “You take it so well. I’ve got you. Trust me.”
“Okay,” and Richard met his eyes. Gavin felt himself getting oddly choked up, a feeling of spiritual warmth sort of washing over him. He leaned down to kiss Richard’s mouth, berry-pink and swollen, then pulled back and spoke directly into his ear.
“You should be proud of yourself, Richard. Truly. Oh. Fucking Christ, you’re gorgeous. I love you.”
Richard cried out, spilling a meager second load over Gavin’s fingers, and for the two additional minutes or so it took Gavin to finish, he kept whimpering and gasping, fucked out and shivery and perfect.
Afterwards, Gavin can't help but to fixate on that moment. He never says anything he doesn’t mean, and he had meant this, but that in itself necessitates reflection and analysis. The last time he’d said those words out loud had probably been to his mother, who died something like sixteen years ago. As far as any kind of sexual or romantic iteration? Well.
It’s strange how large Peter still looms in his life, nearly two years after his death and nearly two decades since the last time they’d been together. For years they’d met only incidentally, briefly, once or twice a year- the old wounds had never begun to heal, not really, and despite the bad blood Gavin would be hard pressed to name a person who was more important, held a more prominent place in his life during those years, than Peter. Peter had been everything to him once- business partner, confidante, something between a mentor and a best friend, first love. Traitor. Nemesis. In a lot of ways the person Gavin is today is a result of his defining himself in opposition to Peter. Not having that opposite pole had left him feeling pretty unmoored for a long time.
Now, though. It maybe shouldn’t come as such a surprise that after being isolated for so long, sharing intimacy with the same person, consistently, over the course of months- and not just any person. Finally, someone else who was truly an intellectual equal, a challenge, sharp and difficult and beautiful (Richard hates to be called beautiful, thinks it’s demeaning, but it’s true)- this is perhaps the inevitable outcome. Nonetheless, Gavin feels deeply apprehensive. He’s only done this once before, and it had taken a lot out of him. When things fell apart between him and Peter- he’d almost let himself fall apart, had felt so tired and defeated and lost- and he had been a young man then, had had a lot of time to recover and much less to lose. If he had thought this through, done a SWOT chart or consulted Denpok or anything, he would have seen that the risks greatly outweighed the potential rewards. As it is, there’s no way to neatly extricate himself now. He’s going to have to see this through.