Work Text:
Daniel wakes up with a shock, a crash, a Gatorade shower post-Super Bowl, congrats coach we just won the big game, the bone-deep chill of heroin on first push.
His dreams, since he started treatment, are vivid, but in Dubai they’re even more so: flashes of old memories on a flickering film reel. He’s producing enough cortisol for a team of heart surgeons, which makes him feel the best he’s felt in decades, high on adrenaline all the time and hurtling toward the ultimate come-down of death.
He’s elbowed himself halfway to sitting up, asking what’re we celebrating? when he realizes his dick is hard.
It stares up at him accusingly from the tent of his pajamas: hey, Danny, remember me? Remember all the fun we used to have? Remember when I could stand up straight at will? Remember, remember, remember?
Daniel’s doctor, when he’d started treatment, had offered him a backup prescription of little blue pills. “It’s routine,” he’d said, not looking away from his computer monitor, anticipating the insecurity of no longer being rock-hard virile that’s common with increasingly infirm patients. “You’ll notice decreases in libido, reduced sexual performance. You may find it difficult to get or keep an erection.”
“My sexual performance took a steep and indefinite decline after Y2K.” After two divorces, after the slow dropoff of his career, after he accepted his status as a washed-up, burnt-out asshole. “I’m good.”
Daniel is prideful and they both know it, which makes it worse. That’s the game of getting old when you spent the first seventy years fucking up: shame’s at the end of the road, every road. Shame because he can’t get it up, shame because he won’t take a fucking pill to help himself out. Shame because there’s no reason to take a pill, shame because he wants there to be one.
“Okay,” his doctor had said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
He feels ridiculous, adolescent. What is it, the high cotton count sheets? The possibility that he’ll go viral on Twitter, or worse, fucking Bluesky, before he kicks the bucket? Is he getting a thrill out of being the biographer-therapist of an apex predator?
There’s a pump-bottle of lotion in the bathroom that costs more than he paid for his most-worn dinner jacket. His brain conjures the image of Rashid standing primly with a plush towel draped over his slim wrist. “For your jizz, Mister Molloy,” he says.
Daniel snorts and spits onto his hand.
He flicks through the Rolodex of usual fantasies, loath to lose momentum. Ex wife? No thanks, only when he’s feeling really depressingly sentimental. Other ex wife? Only if he wants to feel like shit after. Old flame? What is he, a girl on prom night? One night stand— he might as well be flipping through a Playboy. Drug-addled fantasy, drug-addled fantasy, drug-addled fantasy. Next.
Leather gloves, searching eyes, Botticelli curls. Yes, Mister Molloy; do you need anything else, Mister Molloy?
Great work, you lecherous creep, he thinks, but shoves his hand down his pants anyway.
He expects the shame to crash over him, evaporate his hard-on in a second— he’s younger than your daughters, you sick fuck, it was cute when you fucked your subjects when you were twenty but it’s just sleazy now, don’t even get me started on the power imbalance— but it goes blissfully quiet. Just he and his quick breath, his slick fist, the suctioned smack of skin on skin.
It’s too easy, the sleek dark perfect Jeeves routine tailored to perfection. The gloves, an undoubtedly unnecessary but nonetheless eye-catching accessory to his uniform, pressed to Daniel’s thighs. Curled around his dick. Sticky come coaxed out methodically, dripping down the dark length of his fingers. Big eyes, placid smile. Will that be all, Mister Molloy? He groans into the open air.
It’s a schoolboy fantasy, okay, making the pristine thing dirty. No points for creativity. But he can’t help it, can he, in brutalist heaven. Even the goddamn vampire eats like a model on the first date, barely-restrained hunger tucked away behind good manners and cleanliness.
The years and the drugs have made the memories hazy, but he keeps the scar as a reminder of the alternative. Fangs digging into flesh, sharp and ringing pain, the clarity of near-death, the guy in the drug den who’d told him “you were fucking drenched in blood, man,” when he was finally lucid. There’s something more appealing about that way of things. No droplets of blood on cloth white napkins— rivulets of it, pooling in the divots made by his collarbones. The messy, wet slurp as blood flows from a wrist into a waiting mouth.
Stained clothes, bright eyes, iron in the air. A laugh like a clear bell that lulls him deeper.
It isn’t about the power, really, or some fucked up grasp at waylaid youth. He’s a C-list celebrity in New York, still clinging to the notoriety of his youth successfully in the right circles. He could give a guest lecture at any J-school in the city and walk out with an inappropriately young girlfriend, if that’s what it was about.
It’s maybe the opposite. Louis is the master of the house, but Rashid is in control: cognizant of every whim, every shift of air. Tucked in the corner of the room on his tablet, when he can get away with it, or otherwise just out of sight. The way he touches Louis, on rare occasion— the power to restrain, to subtly redirect his behavior.
They’re fucking, right? They must be fucking.
Which is pretty fucking unfair, all things considered, Louis looking the way he does and Rashid looking the way he does and the fact that Daniel can hardly begin to remember his own ill-advised tryst with Louis even when he really tries—
It also means, he thinks, that he could get on his knees no problem. He doesn’t mind a little power play, and he’s a useful lover. Prove how much you want him, prove you’ve still got it—
No problem? The immediate, disbelieving thought. You got on your knees to pull out under-the-bed storage and had to drag yourself to your feet again. Your joints are like puff pastries that have the power to kill you. You pop ibuprofen like candy, and it’s just getting worse.
You could once, and you did, his mind supplies, unusually kind.
So he imagines it: Rashid backed up against the windows of the sitting room, awash in the burnt orange glow of the early afternoon, hips canting off the surface of the glass as he fucks into Daniel’s mouth. Fingers carding through his hair, praise murmured down at him in the same voice he uses to pray.
Way to defy expectations, he thinks, as he grunts and pushes through the circle of his fist. Fuck the patriarchy. You can take the cocksucker out of San Francisco but you can’t take the cocksucker out of the man.
“Almost there now,” Rashid tells him, tilting his chin up. “Let me take care of the rest.” The sun casts a halo of light around his head, and Daniel paws up the sharp planes of his abdomen, and he’s hot-hard-horny but it’s wrong, he’s not an angel, he’s—
They’re in the dark. Daniel on his side, Rashid curled behind him.
Why the dark? It must be his fantasy, why wouldn’t it be, but there’s a grating dissonance as he slips into it. Daniel wants to look at him, hardly gets enough glimpses as Rashid slips silently in and out of the room, hovering at the edges of his periphery. Isn’t the point that he’s infuriatingly beautiful?
That laugh again, this time pressed against the shell of his ear, and Daniel shivers with it.
Rashid fucks him slowly, deeply, arm curled tight around his abdomen and fingers wrapped around his dick. His pace is excruciating, slow and, if he didn’t know a better word, caring.
Daniel’s own hand is rough, unforgiving— almost there now. The dark seeps in, curls its tendrils around him, makes his insides hot. His thighs twitch in a relentless dance. His eyes are squeezed shut, his jaw clenched tight.
Rashid kisses his temple, his jaw. Daniel bares his throat, writhes backward against him. Teeth scrape the skin, don’t bite down. “My beloved,” Rashid tells him, no accounting for the way it makes his stomach curl, and Daniel begs, “Have me, it’s okay, have me,” and he snaps his hips up once, twice more before he spills into his hand, releasing a stifled groan.
It’s near-impossible to drag himself out of bed to clean up, does it out of sheer refusal to let come dry in his pajamas. Back in bed, he’s loose-limbed and exhausted, the most relaxed he’s been in weeks.
He sleeps a dreamless sleep at last, peaceful in the dark.
A knock on his door, in the early evening. Before sundown. He pads to the door. Rashid, of course, looking serene.
“Mister Molloy,” he greets, tilting his head down in a small nod. “Your breakfast awaits.”
He looks over Daniel’s shoulder into the bedroom, which isn’t much changed. Daniel, as though ready to run, has left most of his clothes in his suitcase. His clothes are washed, dried, folded, placed neatly onto his bed. They go directly back into his suitcase until they’re worn and washed again. It’s the most comfortable bed he’s ever slept in, but the environment is worse than a Motel 6. Two and a half stars. Would return, only under extreme duress or existential crisis.
As if on cue, Rashid: “Your sheets will be laundered and replaced during today’s session.” Then he turns and slips gracefully down the hall.
What the fuck?
“Is that standard after three days?” Daniel calls after him. What the fuck. “Do you have me bugged?” Of course they do, which is why he hasn’t been taking any confidential calls he doesn’t want overheard.
Rashid disappears around the corner without another word.
Daniel snaps, “I’ll see you at breakfast after I grind the fucking bugs to dust,” before he shuts the door. Rashid doesn’t laugh, hardly even smiles, but if he did—