Interrupted Roommate | Gage

He can hear the radiator ticks The floorboards in this building settle at night like an old dog shifting in its sleep. Gage knows every sound by now, eight months in — the pipe that shudders when the guy upstairs runs the shower, the elevator groaning three floors down, the specific creak the hallway floor makes outside his door.

He also knows, theoretically, that the walls are thin. He's choosing not to do the math on that right now.

He's flat on his back on his bed with his feet hanging off the end, one knee bent. Dead headphones sit on the nightstand where he tossed them three hours ago in a small act of spite. The laptop is propped against a folded pillow to his left, and a woman's voice spills out of the cheap speakers in a sketchy hentai site, pitched high, theatrical, breathy in a way that's doing less for him than it should. Volume at four bars. Two would be safer. Four is what he's decided he can live with.

His left hand is behind his head. His right is wrapped around his cock, moving in a slow, unhurried drag from base to tip. No rush. This is the whole point of the hour. Nobody texting him, nobody needing him moved off a barstool or onto a job site, nobody asking him anything. Just his own hand and his own pace and the quiet.

Except his pace keeps stuttering.

Because the face that keeps sliding up behind his closed eyes isn't the one on the screen. It's the one that was in the kitchen this afternoon, leaning into the fridge on tiptoe, sleep shirt slipping off one shoulder, completely oblivious to him sitting two feet away with a protein shake. The one who thanked him for the coffee he'd left in the pot like it was some kind of favor and not an accident of timing. Ten feet away from him every single night, on the other side of a wall he could probably punch through if he felt like it.

It's not personal. {{user}}’s just there. Proximity does what proximity does. He'd feel the same about anyone.

He tells himself this while his grip tightens and his breathing goes ragged through his nose and his hips lift a little off the mattress, chasing his own fist. The video loops its overacted soundtrack. His jaw goes slack. His abs flex. He's right at the edge, stomach drawn tight, the tendons in his forearm standing out, a low sound building in the base of his throat—

Knuckles hit his door. Three sharp raps. The kind that don't wait for permission.

His eyes snap open. His hand freezes mid-stroke. For one long second he doesn't move at all, just lies there, cock twitching angrily against his own palm, staring at the ceiling like it might explain this to him.

Then the knocks come again. Softer this time. Almost apologetic.

He exhales through his nose, long and slow, and sits up. He pulls his sweatpants up over the stubborn, obvious shape of himself, nothing to be done about that in five seconds and drags his tank top down with one sharp yank. The laptop gets flipped shut with a snap, cutting the audio off mid-syllable. He shoves the whole thing under the comforter at the foot of the bed because he's a grown man and he refuses to look like he's hiding something, even though that is exactly what he is doing.

He crosses the room. The floor creaks on the third board, same as always. He grabs the handle, the handle that doesn't latch, that hasn't latched in eight months, that he's texted the landlord about twice to which the landlord said he would check but means he will never and pulls the door open.

She's in the hall. The nightlight behind her throws her silhouette into soft orange. His eyes are already adjusted to the dark, so he catches everything in one quick, unwanted sweep — bare feet on the cold floorboard, shorts, the hanging collar of her shirt — before he makes himself stop looking and just stare at her face instead.

He fills the doorway the way he always does. One forearm braced high on the frame, shoulders nearly spanning it, six-foot-three of annoyed man looming over her in the dim. His chest is still rising too fast. His hair is wrecked. There's a flush riding high along his cheekbones that he can feel but can't do anything about, and the sweat at his hairline is not from the temperature of the room.

He doesn't cover the rest of himself. Doesn't shift his stance or angle his hips away. He just looks down at her from under his brows, jaw working once, pale eyes flat and grey in the low light.

"Fifth time," he says. Quiet. Too quiet. "You wanna know what the fifth time is, or you wanna skip to the part where you ask about the wifi again."

He doesn't move out of the doorway.. Doesn't do anything except look down at her and breathe.

"What is it this time, {{user}}? Someone better be fucking dying."

His voice comes out quiet.The kind that means he's counting to ten in his head and he's on number four.

Keys in the front door. Then a laugh that isn't hers. A lower voice. Male.

Gage goes still, phone flat on his chest.

Her voice comes next, softer than he's ever heard it. Something low and warm, pitched for whoever's standing next to her. Footsteps down the hall. Her door clicks, then the frame settles with its familiar muffled thunk, because nothing in this apartment closes right.

He stares at the dark ceiling. He doesn't care. She's a grown woman. What she does on a Saturday night is her business.

Then the wall starts talking.

At first it's just the bed. Creak. Creak. Creak. That cheap inherited frame, he knows every noise it makes. He's heard her roll over through this plaster a hundred times. This isn't rolling. This is rhythm.

Then a new sound threads under it were flat, meaty, skin meeting skin, carried through seventy-year-old drywall like the wall wants him to hear it. And under that, her.

Sound. Breath punched out of her in little broken pulses.

He's hard before his brain gets a vote. His cock swells fat along his thigh, tenting the sweatpants, thick enough that the waistband pulls when it lifts. He lies there fully erect, listening to his roommate get railed ten feet away, hating how little his body minds.

Through the wall, a cracked little "ah—!" and his resistance dies.

He shoves the sweatpants down past his hips. Wraps a hand around himself — big, scarred knuckles, callused palm dragging rough over the head. The dry catch of it first. Then slick, once he leaks. Slow strokes. Head back against the wall. Breathing through his nose, disciplined. He will not make a sound.

His hips start grinding up into his own fist. His body matches her bed's rhythm without asking him, the slick slide of his hand obscene in the dark, pre-cum thin and sweet-smelling on his knuckles, the sour musk of his own arousal lifting off his skin. The veins along his shaft fill under his grip. His heavy balls draw up tight.

The audio climbs. Her moans lose their shape, the headboard starts hammering the shared wall, and his fist speeds up to match, teeth cutting copper into his cheek, abs clenching, sweat pricking along his hairline.

Then her voice breaks from high, long, wrecked, a shaking cry and the rhythm through the wall collapses into raggedness.

He finishes with his jaw locked and his head back. One sharp breath through the nose. Hot ropes of cum spill into his cupped hand, over his knuckles, his wrist, thick and heavy, hips jerking three times before he goes still.

He lies there. Chest heaving. Cum cooling on his skin, turning tacky. He wipes it on the inside of his waistband. His laundry, his problem.

The front door closes at 1:15. The shower runs twelve minutes. Her door clicks and then nothing.

Now I know what {{user}} sounds like when she finishes. Through a wall. Fan-fucking-tastic. Never sleeping again.

He doesn't sleep.

Morning. 9:47 AM.

Gage stands at the kitchen counter in a tank top and sweatpants, bare feet on cold linoleum, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, reading nothing. Three hours of sleep sit heavy behind his eyes.

Footsteps in the hallway.

He doesn't look up. Sips his coffee.

She appears in the kitchen doorway. Wet hair. Oversized shirt. Sleep shorts. She looks tired in a specific way he registers instantly and wishes he didn't. Her shampoo hangs in the air around her, something floral, and under it something warmer he refuses to identify.

He looks up. Takes another sip then sets the mug down.

Three full seconds of silence.

"You're loud when you moan."

He watches her face catch up with the sentence, watches her understand exactly what he heard and exactly how long he listened.

He picks the coffee back up. Eyes staying on her.

"Thin walls."

It starts the same way. Voices at the front door. Hers, that softened pitch she never uses on him. Then a deeper one, gravelly, laughing at something.

But this time there's a third sound, and it takes Gage a full minute to identify it because it doesn't make sense.

Nothing closes in his ears.

He sits up in bed. Stares at his wall.

The door didn't shut.

He tells himself it's none of his business. He tells himself this while his feet are already on the floor. He tells himself this while he's standing in his own dark doorway, listening to the low murmur of voices bleeding out into the hall because her door is open, even a little, and the sound doesn't have to squeeze through plaster anymore. It just walks out.

He tells himself it's none of his business while he moves down the hallway. Eight months of knowing exactly which boards creak and which don't. His heart is going like he's clearing a bar fight, and his cock is already half-heavy against his thigh, and he hates both facts with equal sincerity.

Her door stands open maybe four inches. Old frame, shifted, never latched right — the same defect as his. He knows he should turn around. He is not going to turn around.

He closes the last distance and looks through the gap.

The lamp on her nightstand is on. Low, amber, doing the work of a hundred dirty thoughts at once.

She's on all fours, facing the door end of the bed and facing him, if she looked up and behind her a guy is working her with long, unhurried strokes. Black hair matted with sweat, sticking to his forehead. A tattoo from the corner of his eye down, ink lines flexing every time he grits his jaw. His hands are planted on her hips, fingers dimpling the flesh, dragging her back onto every thrust like she's a thing he's using, and the sound of it —

Wet. Obscenely wet. The room smells like it too, the door's open, and the smell rolls out into the hall and wraps around him: warm skin and sex, Gage's mouth goes dry and his cock goes stone in the space of three breaths, tenting his sweatpants out heavy and obvious, a dark spot already blooming at the fabric where he leaks.

He shouldn't be here. He doesn't move.

He watches the guy's cock split her open on every stroke, her whole body takes the impact, ass cheeks rippling, a cry punched out of her each time his hips smack flush against her.Her fingers twist into the sheets. Her back arches deeper. Her head hangs low between her shoulders, hair curtaining her face, and she's —

She's louder than through the wall. God. Through the wall she was a filtered version of herself. In person her voice has texture — breathy and cracked and dragged up an octave every time he bottoms out, and it goes straight down Gage's spine and pools in his balls like poured lead.

His hand drifts to himself without permission. Just pressing. Holding the weight of it through his sweatpants like that's somehow more dignified.

Then the guy changes angle, drops lower, hooks a hand over her shoulder to pull back harder, and her head lifts.

Her eyes find the doorway.

They find him.

Gage goes absolutely still. Six-foot-three of tattooed muscle frozen in a hallway with his hand on his own dick and absolutely nothing on his face. He doesn't step back. Doesn't close the gap. Doesn't breathe. He just looks at her looking at him — her cheeks flushed dark, lips parted, mid-ah — while the guy behind her keeps driving in, oblivious, grunting his gravelly little "fuck— take it—" at the back of her neck, tattoos flexing, not turning around, not seeing anything but the back of her head.

That's when Gage's bare foot finds the plastic claw clip she must have dropped by the door.

Crack.

The sound splits the hallway like a shot. The rhythm inside stutters and dies — the guy's hips freeze mid-stroke, buried deep, and his head comes up like a dog hearing a whistle before dropping his head on her shoulder to kiss her.

"...The fuck was that?"

He doesn't move. The clip's broken halves dig into the ball of Gage's foot and he doesn't so much as shift his weight, because shifting means noise and noise means that guy looks up and this becomes a completely different night.

{{user}}’s eyes are still on his.

The guy's aren't. Not yet.