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Brett came over to Eddy's place that morning, letting himself in with the spare key, to find Eddy hunched over the sink staring at the faucet.
Brett decided not to interrupt him. He just slid off his shoes, set his violin case down in the usual spot, and came back to stand there in the kitchen to watch his boyfriend.
Drip, drip drip.
After a couple of minutes, Brett broke down and asked, “Eddy, what are you doing?”
“Shh.” With the fingers of his left hand, Eddy just barely nudged the faucet, slowing the drip, but not stopping it. “Listen. It's exactly 63BPM.”
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Brett approached the sink, leaning over so he could get a good look at his face. As expected, there were shadows under his eyes, and he'd broken out with a couple of new zits. “Did you sleep last night?”
“I meant to,” Eddy said, like he was trying to excuse himself, though his eyes were still focused on the steady drip of the water. “I just drank a bunch of coffee too late, and I figured if I was awake anyway, I should use the time to practice, and then I got too into it, and then it was so late, I figured I might as well just stay up all night, anyway...” Another nudge of the faucet. The drip slowed again.
Drip...drip...drip...
Brett turned off the faucet. “How many hours were you practicing with a metronome?”
Eddy turned to look at him, eyes vaguely glazed over as he made a sort of “Iunno” sound.
Brett put a hand to his forehead and sighed. This was not the first time this had happened. When Eddy practiced tired, his tempo started going all over the place, and then he'd become obsessed with the metronome, far past the point of productivity. A few hours of this, and he'd enter a state that Brett liked to call “metronome madness.”
Metronome madness probably an incurable disease. It could go into remission, but would never go away entirely.
Brett's eyes flicked over to the bedroom, where he knew Eddy had that shelf that he called the altar. It was filled with nearly a dozen metronomes: some of the old-school swingy kind, a few sort of 1980's-looking plastic electronic ones, and one novelty one shaped like a banana (don't ask). The shelf was sort of like a middle-aged white lady's collection of angel statuettes, except weirder.
Eddy didn't actually use any of them. Why would you need physical metronomes when you had a phone app? He just liked the aesthetic, apparently. Weirdo.
“You should go to sleep,” Brett advised.
“I'm totally fine,” Eddy said, pushing off the sink. “Fine, fine, fine. I just need a coffee and I'll be ready to go.”
Brett was skeptical, but Eddy was already filling up the electric kettle for some coffee, so he decided to roll with it.
x x x
Eddy was definitely at stage two metronome madness.
In the room where they filmed, he flicked their lighting stand on and off for a solid three minutes before they started filming. He spent all of lunch just staring at the wall clock, listening intently as if its ticking was the most beautiful sonata ever composed.
“Just go to bed, already,” Brett practically dragged him out of his seat at his dining table.
“It'll mess up my sleep schedule, though...” Eddy grumbled. “I gotta stay awake until evening...” But he had to be pretty tired, as he let Brett drag him into the bedroom and toss him down on the bed.
After Brett deposited him in bed, Eddy clung to his sleeve and whined, “Sleep with meeee” in that annoying way he only did if he was drunk or sleep-deprived.
“It's the middle of the day, and I'm not tired...” Brett began, but Eddy didn't let go, yanking him down onto the bed and forcibly dragging him under the covers to squish him.
“Cuddle rape! This is cuddle rape!” Brett protested with a laugh as Eddy rubbed his face into Brett's neck and clung there like a suckerfish before promptly falling asleep within five minutes.
Brett thought about getting up, but he didn't want to wake up Eddy, and he was rather comfortable. What was the harm in a nap?
Out of the corner of his eye as he nodded off, he saw the shelf of metronomes, silently implying endless ticking.
x x x
He was lying on a great plain under a blue-and-yellow sky, surrounded by melting metronomes that loomed large over him like great hulking plastic beasts left on the car dash under the sun too long. None of them were moving, but he could hear the incessant ticking of their ghosts.
“Ta, ta, ta, ta...” Brett heard a voice whispering into his ear in time with the beat. “Ta, ta, ta, ta...”
“Stop,” Brett whimpered. “No more ticking. I don't want to play on the beat anymore!”
“No rubato in this world,” said the voice, each syllable crisply spoken to the beat. “Stick to the beat...the beat...the beat...”
x x x
Brett jolted awake to a dark room and a hot sensation around his dick. “...Eddy?” he muttered, still not fully aware.
Eddy's eyes flicked up at him, but he kept sucking Brett's cock.
Brett sighed, dropping his head back on the pillow. This again.
“Am hormy,” Eddy mumbled semi-comprehensibly around Brett's dick, and Brett resigned himself to this situation.
“Go ahead, but I'm not getting up,” Brett replied, still in the process of figuring out if he wanted to get up or not. Had he slept all day? He must have been more tired than he realized.
Eddy popped his lips off Brett's dick and wiped off his mouth with one hand. “I want you to fuck me, though.”
“What?” Brett lifted his head again to see Eddy crawling up to him with a wide grin on his face. “No, I just slept all day. I feel like I've been hit by a truck.” Brett rubbed his face with both hands.
“C'mon, it'll wake you up.” Eddy was already wearing nothing but a shirt, and he'd stripped off Brett's pants too, and was now stubbornly tugging at his shirt, trying to yank him into a sitting position.
“Just ride me or something...” Brett grabbed a pillow and covered his face with it, making it a barrier between himself and his boyfriend.
“It's not the saaame.”
There was a battle with the pillow; Brett lost. Recognizing that Eddy was not going to give in until he got what he wanted, he figured he'd get it over with, he heaved himself up to his knees and jacked himself to hardness again. Eddy was waiting patiently on his back with the sort of smug grin which would have been annoying if Brett had been awake enough to be annoyed. He'd probably been fingering himself all this time—sliding his hands along Eddy's ass, Brett felt it was slick with lube.
Not really thinking much of it, or thinking much of anything, Brett pushed Eddy's thighs apart and began fucking him at a reasonable pace. Having been with him for quite some time, Brett knew basically what he had to do in order to make Eddy cum as fast as possible, and could do it on auto. He closed his eyes a bit, more because he was falling asleep than feeling it.
“Brett.”
Brett looked down to see Eddy's hand on his chest, pushing him off.
“Brett. Brett.” Eddy put both his hands on Brett's shoulders. “I love you. But...you need some practice.” Then he twisted around to reach over to his phone at the bedside table. “If you can't maintain a decent rhythm, I'm gonna have to make you use a metronome,” Eddy said, looking square into Brett's eyes with an expression of utter seriousness.
Setting his metronome app to 120BPM, he started it clicking and set it down on the bedside table again. Tick tick tick tick. “Let's go for a nice Allegro.”
Brett stared back at him. “What.”
Eddy managed to hold his serious expression for about five more seconds, and he tried to hold it longer, but laughter won out, and in the end he was crying and slapping the bed.
“What, what?!” Brett started to snicker, too, not even knowing quite why. “Do you actually want to use a metronome?! I'll do it, okay. Come on.”
“I was just messing with you, man,” Eddy said between wheezes. “I don't actually want you to fuck me at...” snicker— “exactly 120BPM, it's okay.”
But for some reason, with the ticking in the background of Eddy's laughter, a strange determination began to form in Brett's mind. “No, no, let's do it,” he said, reaching out for the phone, and he tapped the app upward a bunch of times, bumping the tempo upward. “But I don't think 120's enough. I think I wanna go Presto.” He set the phone down as it clicked away at 180.
“Wait, Presto?” Eddy looked over at the phone with alarm, face still wet with tears of mirth, but it was too late. Brett flipped him over onto his stomach, yanked up his ass and thrust in hard.
“Ah!” Eddy yelped, face hitting the pillow as Brett immediately started up fast. It took him a few beats to match the metronome, but quickly he was snapping his hips perfectly in time with the clicks.
“Th-that's a little much—” Eddy gasped, wiggling a bit, but Brett's grip on his hips was firm.
“Maybe you need some practice, huh?” Brett said was a wild grin. “Can't handle fast tempos, huh? You need to practice it slow, first?”
“Ah...ngh...I'm not...” Eddy shuddered a bit with each thrust, slowly losing his ability to form coherent words. “This piece should be...slower...musically speaking...”
“Not sure I agree with that interpretation!” On a whim, Brett wound up to smack Eddy in the ass right in time with his thrust. Eddy jolted forward with a cry, clinging to the pillow under his head.
“Ritardando! Ritardando!” Eddy yelled, but one hand was going for his own dick to stroke himself while Brett fucked him.
“You're the one who wanted metronome practice!” Brett wound up for another smack, then kept at it, crisply spanking Eddy's ass every second beat.
“T-too much percussion...”
“Since we're practicing,” Brett ignored him, grinning as he began to sweat from exertion. “Why don't we go over some rhythms, too? Give me a tum ti-ti-ti ta, Eddy.”
“Wh-what? Ah...ah...hnn...” Eddy was beyond the speaking stage, and not in the state to be resisting anything. He'd melted into the bed, eyes closed, hand working quickly over his dick. His ass was tightening around Brett's cock, and Brett could feel he was close.
“Stop that.” Brett stopped his spanking to reach around around to yank Eddy's hand away from pleasuring himself, holding it by the wrist behind his back. “You're supposed to be concentrating on practice, Eddy.”
Eddy moaned, thrusting back into Brett's cock helplessly. “Come on, come on, please let me cum...” he murmured into the pillow.
“Practice comes first,” Brett said, a little breathless. Sweat was dripping down his chest, but he wasn't about to stop now. “Come on. Tum ti-ti-ti ta.”
“T-tum...” Eddy began, but that quickly devolved into aimless moaning that was roughly in time with Brett's wet-sounding thrusts.
“Don't tell me you can't do it. Come on. Tum ti-ti-ti ta!” Brett demonstrated with smacks on Eddy's ass in the rhythm of the dotted quarter, eighth, two more eighths, and then a quarter.
“Tum ti...ah! Ahh...”
“Say it! Tum ti-ti-ti ta!” Brett smacked his reddened ass in rhythm again, hard.
“I can't...I c...ahh, hnn, ah!” Eddy whimpered. His hole was clenching hot around Brett's cock, his own dick dripping as it bobbed with each fast-paced thrust.
“Tum ti-ti-ti ta!” Brett spanked the rhythm out one more time, then squeezed that cheek in his hand. “Say it!”
Nothing that came out of Eddy's mouth this time was anything like tum-ti-ti-ti-ta. He yelled loud enough to wake up the neighbors as he full-body spasmed, back arching, shooting hot cum onto the bed and rocking back on Brett's cock. The sight of it was enough to take Brett over the edge moments later, letting go of Eddy's arm to grab his hips and hold in deep, hips-to-ass, as he finished inside him.
After a minute, Eddy flopped down onto the bed, right onto the wet spot, while Brett flopped over beside him and they lay there panting as the metronome app furiously ticked away beside them.
“Please turn that off before I lose my mind,” Brett said, and Eddy limply reached over to drag his phone over and flick the screen.
Brett stared up at the altar of metronomes leering down on them.
“Never cum hands-free before," Eddy commented as he lay on his back, staring up at the metronome altar. “That was hot. Weird, but hot.”
“Were you whispering Kodaly rhythms in my ear as I slept?” Brett said suddenly.
“What? No.”
“Liar.”
“I swear, I didn't! I was just sucking your dick. What, did you have some kind of weird dream?”
Brett flung an arm over his eyes and groaned. “I think metronome madness is contagious.”
Eddy laughed. “Probably.”
“Please get rid of those metronomes. They're like some weird voodoo thing. They possessed me.”
“Nah, I think I like it when you're possessed.” Eddy rolled over to face Brett, leaning his head on his hand.
Brett blew out a deep sigh, then rolled over to grin back. “You never did give me that tum ti-ti-ti ta, did you?”