Ajar
[ ???/dm, dm/ew implied ] CLM voyeur first line challenge
PG-13
"Even watching him feels like being a voyeur."
This is what Elijah tells you one afternoon with hushed tones, leaning over the kitchen table all conspiratorial-like. As he does so, the shirt that he is wearing balloons loose and threatens to dip into his half-eaten lunch, buttons first. You usher him back into his seat with a gentle push at his shoulder. You're both sitting in your apartment, pretending not to watch as Dominic washes the dishes a few feet away with his hips cocked to the left.
Elijah continues, un-phased and unaware. You're not surprised.
"Even now. It's the simplest things that are the worst. Doing his laundry. Sitting on this ass in front of the television." Elijah scoots his chair closer to yours and the feet drag upon the floor with the rough, hollow scrape of wood. Dominic glances over his shoulder, uncharacteristically quiet for a moment like this, but does not turn around. Instead, he looks over at a magazine left open on the counter, while his hand creates soapy circles on the face of one of your plates. Elijah's voice drops an octave and he's reduced to whispering the words with wide, over-exaggerated gyrations of his mouth. "I can't watch him brush his teeth without jerking off."
Your face contracts and shows teeth. Elijah thinks you're smiling because you think the situation's funny. Which, you suppose, it is.
You smile because you know exactly what it's like to watch Dominic brush his teeth in the morning - bent, almost doubled over the sink with his long fingers bracing themselves on the white lip, wearing your boxers. His rings make sharp, metallic noises against the porcelain whenever he spits.
You know what it's like to lie in Elijah's bed and watch Dominic spit peppermint green spit because you visit Dominic whenever Elijah likes to play at bi-costal. He has trouble sleeping in an empty bed and you've grown accustomed to the recycled air on the flights, the shrink-wrapped meals, and the hush-hush kind of secrecy such a situation demands. When Elijah calls your mobile you tell him the muffled voices in the background are just the telly turned up too high and no, you haven't spoken to Dom recently. Before he hangs up, Elijah always tells you that he'll say hi to Dom for you.
You think it's rather sweet.
Dominic likes to wank in the mornings when you visit, when you're still tangled up in Elijah's sheets and half-asleep - still loose and warm from the night before. He says it gives him the proper motivation to shower, but you know better. Eyes are an aphrodisiac for Dominic, and the more aware he is that you're watching, the harder he manages to come every time. He won't admit to it, but he doesn't have to. You know, you both know so very well.
He likes to leave the bathroom door partially open; it gives himself a proper eye-line to where your head touches the pillow and it heightens the overall sense of taboo-ness surrounding the act. You've learned that it's about shame and it's about sex and where the two intersect with Dominic. The closed doors of his life are being constantly left slightly ajar to give you a peek, a taste, a tiny glance at things forbidden and meant to be unseen.
You never touch yourself during these episodes, no. You're not like Elijah; you can watch Dominic brush his teeth and wank and do plenty of other things without having to "jerk off". (Your eroticism lies in your self-control, Dominic tells you one morning, silhouetted in the doorframe of the bedroom, but you know better. If you had self-control - real self-control - you wouldn't find yourself in LA in the first place.) You just allow the sounds he makes to pull you into wakefulness. You draw yourself out of the sheets and sit back on your heels, kneeling upon the bed, and wait for Dominic to finish. His figure moves in and out of focus in the tiny sliver of view allowed by the obstruction of door; his hand flickers and his arm tenses and when he finally sees you watching, his lips twitch upwards in a little smile. His pace never falters. When he's done, Dominic slinks his way back into the bedroom with feverish skin, feigning sheepishness with his come all over his hands and his orgasm still pulsing in his belly.
He goes down on you without asking.
Whenever Elijah comes home, the house is ten times cleaner than when he left it. Dominic never picks him up at the airport either, but rather lounges about in bed naked, trying to get the scent of him onto the freshly laundered sheets. Elijah never notices, and if he does, he never mentions it.
"Look, Lij," Dominic says, sliding into Elijah's lap, pressing the splayed magazine into Elijah's attention. You watch as Dominic points with an over-eager, slightly waterlogged finger at one of the high gloss articles; his other hand skitters across Elijah's chest, searching for the skin exposed by the V of his collar. Dominic's left the water running in the sink, but you don't intend to get up and shut it off. When Dominic speaks again, his eyes slide sideways in your direction, the grays blurred with the sudden movement. His shiny curved lips brush up against the shell of Elijah's ear.
"Look," Dominic says again, and Elijah does, thinking that he's the one being asked. It's a natural assumption to make; you don't blame Elijah, he's a good kid.
