“God, you’re beautiful,” Vance moans, and beneath him, Prophet lets out a sharp, bitten back grunt – he’s bent over Vance’s desk with his forearms braced underneath him, and Lord, there’s something beautiful, something perfectly delectable, about how his sweet little arsehole opens up so wide for him. Vance has been made aware over the past few months of his début that his cock is on the larger side, and he really could believe it, seeing how Prophet’s hole is forced to stretch to accommodate him. “You must have been— You really must have been something in your younger days, hm? Men must have really worked to get into you.”

The sound Prophet makes is harsh and sharp and breathless, his whole body shuddering, and Vance grips his hips and draws him down in one sharp movement. The tight, wet vice grip around him is astoundingly hot, but better than that is the noise Prophet makes, the whimper.

There’s something animal about it, sex with men – there’s a visceral nature to it, a sense of the primal, and there’s something truly freeing about it. He’d always struggled a bit with Meredith, of course, which in retrospect makes sense given their… or, well, his incompatibility with her, ah, feminine nature…

But even still.

Fucking a man, being with a man, there’s something so intense about it all – the smells, the physicality, the hair—

He says something like this, sort of voices it out loud – it’s perhaps less eloquent than it was in his head, because in the aftermath, he doesn’t exactly recall how he phrases it. It does not make Prophet shudder beneath him, as he’d hoped it would – his body sort of goes still under Vance’s, and then he braces one arm on the desk, picking up his glasses with the other hand and sliding them onto his nose.

Turning his head, he looks at Vance over his shoulder, and the severe expression on his face reminds Vance of being a young man and feeling a blistering heat run through him when one of his older teachers had mildly complained about not being able to cane the boys anymore.

“You know, Vixen,” Prophet says in a long-suffering voice that actually reminds him of Meredith, “at some point, we’re going to have to discuss your issues with women.”

“I don’t have issues with women now that I know I’m gay!”

“That could not be further from the fucking truth. In the meantime, I want you to do me a fucking favour. Can you do that for me, Vixen?”

“What favour?”

Prophet’s arse clenches around the head of Vance’s prick, which is still inside him, and he lets out an aborted noise, feeling heat in his cheeks.

His hand is gentle as it comes to slide over Vance’s hand, fingers touching over the back of his fingers before they come to gently grip at his wrist. Some part of Vance flutters inside, and he feels as though he’s waiting on bated breath for whatever small fraction of affection Prophet might begrudgingly offer him next. “I want you to fuck me, and tug on my nipples,” he says softly, “and keep the misogyny inside until I get off. Can you do that for me?”

Vance gulps, and says, “It’s very arousing when you condescend to me like this, Prophet.”

“I guessed by how hard your prick is. Want to fucking use it?”

“I don’t know,” says Vance, and then shoves forward, sinks it as deeply in as he can get it, until his bollocks are kissing Prophet’s perineum, and Prophet’s face is a thing of beauty, the way his mouth opens, his scarred lips shining in the light, his eyes closing shut. “Do I?”

Prophet takes in a shaky breath, and Vance gently reaches out and eases his glasses off his nose again with one hand, folding them and neatly setting them aside. There’s a trace of vulnerability in Prophet’s face, Vance can’t help but think – does it mean as much to him, Vance wonders, as it does to Vance himself, the little bits of intimacy, the accidental affection?

Vance craves to ask. It’s not as though Prophet Shulman is the sort of man one really imagines as being married, least of all to a man – is his husband younger than him, older than him, the same? Is he as rough-looking as Prophet is himself, does he also have scars or tattoos? Is he Jewish too – one of those traditional sorts, maybe, with the beard and the, the curls and so forth?

Vance suspects that asking that question will be even less well-received than his musings on the pros of homosexuality over heterosexuality, so he bites them back and focuses instead on nudging Prophet to face forward again.

He moulds his body against Prophet’s back, feels the weight and strength of him underneath him - he feels the muscle on his body, packed over his narrow shoulders and hips, around his broad but flat arse, feels the muscles of his thighs and the heat that radiates off them. His tits, when Vance reaches for them, at least have a bit more meat to them – this is the only real place on Prophet’s body where the fat seems to settle, here and where his belly comes over his belt. There’s two nice handfuls of them here, dusted with soft white hair – it’s even curlier than the grey hair on his head, which must be half a dozen mottled shades between the onyx black it presumably had been when he was young and the white thatching his chest.

“You’re a finely honed thing, aren’t you?” asks Vance, and his breath must tickle over the back of Prophet’s ear, because he shivers.

“I was once, maybe,” Prophet mutters. “Going to fuck me yet?”

“I’m enjoying you,” Vance replies, and he really is – there’s something spellbinding about having a body like this underneath his own, feeling Prophet’s strength, his muscle, knowing that Prophet is letting Vance fuck him, that he wants it, craves it just as much as Vance craves to be buried inside him when he sees him stalking back and forth through the office corridors. “Your husband doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

“Ha!” says Prophet, and his laugh is a bitter thing that Vance can feel around the base of his cock. “Yes, he fucking does, but the flattery doesn’t hurt me none.”

He squeezes Prophet’s nipples now, pinching both of them between thumb and forefinger, and Prophet lets out a harsh, whining noise that wrenches out from his throat. Vance pulls and tugs on them, alternates between the two of them, and fuck, but it’s like he’s setting the man alight.

Suddenly, Prophet is writhing and gasping under him, his hole clenching, and fuck.

“You really weren’t joking about these, were you?” he asks, and he can hear the tension in his own voice, feel how his voice has dropped to a huskier tone. “If we ever fuck in a bed, you should ride me, let me suck on them.”

“Ungh,” Prophet whines, and Vance shifts his position to start to thrust inside him, and God, but it’s fucking glorious, feeling the wet heat of him and the way he yields for Vance’s thrusts, even at this angle where he can’t pull back as much as he wishes he could. What he can do, though, is sink in as deep as he wants and fuck into the other man hard, each thrust making a loud sound that claps through the office and feels like it should be rattling the windows in their panes.

It's like something takes hold of him, like his brain evaporates into some sort of blissful miasma, the sort of steam made and inhaled by Dionysus’ mad maenads, and then he’s just—

Fucking.

He’s like a feral animal, is running on pure instinct alone as he keeps on grabbing at Prophet’s fat little tits beneath him and fucking into him like he’s a stud desperate to breed the bitch beneath him. His senses become full up with him, the hot weight of Prophet’s muscular, lean body beneath him, the roughness of his scars and his hairy weight under the grab of Vance’s hands, the scent of him, of his sweat and whatever modest scented deodorant he wears, and the noise—

Prophet is making out stuttered, gasping noises as Vance keeps driving into him and forcing his cheeks apart, forcing him to take it as Vance cleaves him open and feels the weight heat of him again and again and again – he pulls and squeezes on Prophet’s nipples and they must be bruised, and that’s not enough. The first time he bites down on the juncture of Prophet’s shoulder, Prophet actually howls, and Vance didn’t know he had it in him, but he speeds up.

He can feel it when Prophet comes.

The other man stiffens up like a coiled spring, gripping tight and hard at the desk with his thighs quivering apart and his cock sputtering beneath them, his hole clenching tight, and Vance can feel the sweat soaking his own body, is grateful for all the cardio he does – Prophet himself is slippery with it, his hair soaked, and Vance can no longer grip at him quite so easily.

“Please,” he chokes out, a whine in it. “Vixen, I can’t, I can’t— I can’t keep, fuck, fuck, it’s too much, it’s too much—“

“You wanted longer than forty-five minutes, Prophet,” Vance says, and with one of his hands he reaches under the other man’s throat and grips loosely at the underside of it, uses the position to hold him more stable as Vance shifts his angle. “I’m nowhere near my peak, anyway.”

“Your peak,” Prophet wheezes.

“If you have enough in you to be sardonic, Prophet,” Vance says, sounding a little out of breath, though not as much as Prophet himself, “I’m not fucking you hard enough.”

He squeezes at his throat and shoves Prophet’s lower back down at the same time, and Prophet’s response is to spasm, let out a blubbering whine and to just keep shuddering beneath him.

“Please, Vixen, Christ—”

“Vance, please,” Vance replies, “or sir, if you want to—”

“Sir,” Prophet gasps out, and Vance feels as though he’s been lit aflame, it makes his body feel so incredibly warm and tight, his cock hard, his orgasm building more, more… He’s got a good bit of stamina. He doesn’t ordinarily like to get himself off quickly – he’d never used to really indulge in actual gay porn, when he was still married, but what he had done was delve into anything that could be attached to men, that was adjacent.

BDSM, costume things, roleplay, the sort of themed porn that ended up having as much of a focus on the men as the women, but more than that, there were also certain things he got interested in – games or toys, a bit, and then… Then the tantric sex.

In retrospect, he supposes it was just a matter of deflecting the blame – if he found it hard to come with Meredith, he might make a point of it, say it was to do with the tantric method rather than some sort of aversion – but even with Prophet, one of the most attractive men he’s ever laid eyes on, let alone fucked, he’s—

He’s lasting.

He could get himself over the line, he knows he could, get himself off and fill the condom and think desperately about what it might be like to pump Prophet full of come and leave himself leaking out of him, but he’s enjoying this.

He enjoys the power of it.

He wishes he had the space to flip Prophet over and fuck him from the front, to see his chest bounce and wobble, to lick and suckle at him, bite at him – he’s left marks all over his shoulders, the back of his neck.

Faintly, he thinks of Prophet’s husband, and instead of feeling fear at the idea of getting caught, all he experiences is a fresh wave of arousal and desire, at the idea of Prophet going home and getting caught marked all over with his hole cleft open by another man.

“Daddy,” Prophet squeaks out, so quiet Vance can barely fucking hear him, and Vance is hit with such a wave of want and need that his vision all but fucking goes black.

He comes.

It’s one of the most powerful orgasms he’s ever experienced, feels like it’s exploding out of him, his cock pulsing, his balls tightening up so much they ache with it, his hips shuddering and his hands tremoring where Vance is gripping and grabbing at him.

Vance collapses forward, his weight on top of Prophet, and he breathes heavily, trying to catch his breath. He’s aware of Prophet breathing heavily underneath him, the tremble of him—

The noises he’s making.

“Prophet?” Vance asks, pushing himself up off of Prophet’s body with arms that ache, and Prophet makes another one of those noises – those sobs. “Prophet,” he says seriously, pulling out and quickly tossing the tied-off condoms aside. The other man is standing to his feet, soaked with sweat and red-faced and on shaky feet.

His knees buckle beneath him, and Vance grabs him around the middle to keep him from hitting the floor, and he catches the side of his cheek to see his face, the tears on his cheeks and the quiver of his lip and the scars through it.

Prophet is a frightening-looking man – it doesn’t seem possible that Vance should be able to so reduce him to this, that he should—

“Get the fuck off me, Vixen,” Prophet spits at him.

“If I get the fuck off you, Prophet, you’ll fall down again,” Vance tells him gently, and that makes Prophet let out another sob, his shoulders wracked with it, his face buried against Vance’s chest. “Oh, darli— What happened to calling me Vance, hm? Or, ah… the other thing?”

“Fuck off,” Prophet chokes out against Vance’s chest, and then he’s crying again in earnest, sobbing against Vance’s chest.

“Should I take this as an exceptionally bad review, or an exceptionally good one?” Vance asks – the sound is very wet, but that makes Prophet laugh is hoarse, ragged laugh, and Vance cups his cheek as gently as he knows how to tilt his head up, to get a really good look at his eyes, see the colour of them, as wet as they are. “This isn’t a question, Prophet – I think perhaps I should drive you home.”

Prophet, going against the natural instinct of a lifetime, doesn’t argue with him.

* * *

All the lights are out in the office building by the time they walk down to the car park – the cleaning staff don’t start until late in the evening, because they start on the other offices in the block first. He isn’t quite permitted clearance to carry the other man down the stairs – although the idea is so thoroughly romantic that he aches to be allowed to try, even if only to see how much his weight-training can serve against Prophet’s density and his modest bulk – but he does support him until his thighs stop quaking.

In the passenger seat of Vance’s 4x4, wrapped in a spare blanket from the back of his car, Prophet curls up really very small indeed, his arms crossed loosely across his chest, the seatbelt over him.

“Was it—” Vance asks as they start to pull out, “was it the, erm, daddy thing? Did that draw out some bad memories for you?”

“Asking if I got molested as a lad, Vixen?”

“Did you?”

“No,” Prophet murmurs. His eyes are still teary.

“It’s the, ah. It’s the things at home, I take it,” Vance says, and Prophet sighs and looks out of the window, not looking at him directly.

“The things at home,” Prophet repeats dully. “The fuck’s that, then? My shattered fucking marriage? All the dishes I’ve not done, and he won’t have one either? The filthy laundry?”

“Are you sleeping?” Vance asks, and Prophet actually laughs – it’s not the laugh Vance had managed to shock out of him earlier, but a more powerless, bitter laugh, exhausted and really rather pained. “Insomnia, is it?”

Prophet doesn’t say anything, and before he pulls out into the lane, Vance looks across at him, at the dark expression on his face, the shadows in his eyes.

“It’s not work with ours?” he asks. “I’ve particularly asked to be told when you stay late – I’ve been asking Svetlana and Stefanie to tell me if they see you, because I know you’ll hardly always log it. Have they been—”

“We own a bar,” Prophet says.

“Beg pardon?”

“My husband and I, we own a bar,” says Prophet. “The Crows, that’s ours. I finish work at Friars, I clock out, I drive to the Crows. I work. I work some fucking more. I go home. I try to sleep – my alarm goes off. I come here. Maybe I see my shitfuck of a man – maybe he’s asleep, maybe he’s off on another bender, maybe he’s balls deep in some pretty painted faggot he’s picked up off of the street. I do the fucking gardening. Argue with the neighbours. I do overtime here, Vixen, just to avoid either my house or my business, and then I bite the bullet and go and withstand one or the fucking other.”

He feels like the base has dropped out of his stomach, he’s so abruptly nauseous – he sees it, is the thing. In retrospect, he sees it. Prophet is known for refusing social invitations out, and not only Vance’s invitations for dates or just to come and have a tumble with him outside of the office – he’s frequently early or late leaving, but he’s been…

There are bags under his eyes. He’s pale. He drinks a lot of coffee, but sometimes he almost spaces out – Vance has noticed it sometimes, the way his eyes defocus, the way his head tips slightly forward as though he’s going to drop off, and then he doesn’t.

“How long’s it been since you and your husband…?” Vance asks, and Prophet’s shut-down expression shuts down further, somehow, tightens. His scarred lips become a thin line – albeit a thin line with a great many rough crosses through it.

“I won’t let him fuck me without a condom,” Prophet murmurs, “not without him passing his tests first. He doesn’t like condoms.”

“He’s not on PrEP?”

“PrEP protects against HIV, Vixen, it doesn’t shield you from the rest – syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhoea, hepatitis, herpes, fucking, trichomoniasis.”

“I knew that,” Vance says indignantly, largely to disguise from the fact he hadn’t been thinking much about it. He’s been using condoms with his hook-ups, of course, although it hadn’t really occurred to him, the idea of getting ill from sex with another man in some way that wasn’t HIV. “I just meant— Well. Does he… Does he touch you?”

“A little,” Prophet says. “Not— Not in a long fucking time. Not like that. Not with me…”

“Reciprocating?” Vance offers. “Um, I don’t know your address, Prophet, should I…?” The other man looks so fucking lost that Vance really aches to see it. How can such a mean old bastard look so very small, and so utterly lost? “I’m bringing you home.”

“Home?” Prophet repeats, and then sits up straighter as Vixen takes the turning toward his. “Vixen, you can’t fucking just— The fuck am I, a stray cat?”

“I can’t think of many differences,” Vance mutters.

“You can’t just bring me home.”

“Of course I can,” Vance replies. “What should I do, bring you back to your husband?”

“He won’t be home,” Prophet says.

“He won’t notice if I bring you back to mine, then,” Vance replies.

Prophet opens his mouth, closes it. Flushes red, his lips shifting, his eyes still a little damp, and then he… softens, somehow. Seems smaller, but not in such a sad way.

“You deserve it, you know,” Vance murmurs. “Better— better treatment than you’ve been getting.”

Prophet says nothing, and then when Vance’s hand comes away from the gearstick, Prophet’s hand slides across and touches his before he can grip the wheel again – doesn’t hold his hand, doesn’t stop him from driving, but just touches the back of his hand, squeezes gently, before he takes it back.

“Thank you,” he whispers. “… Vance.”

“Daddy?” Vance tests the waters.

“D’you want me to crash this fucking car, Vixen?”

“No, thank you, Prophet, I’d rather you not,” Vance says – Prophet’s laugh is low and husky and makes his spent cock twitch in his trousers. He wonders if they might go again, once they’re back. “How, um— Do you mind, if I, er… how many times did you come tonight?”

“Twice.”

“You can make it to three, can’t you?”

Prophet doesn’t say anything, but before he hides his face in his hand, Vance is sure he can see his lips twist into a smile.