Lost a bet, put on a frilly dress~

Three weeks.

Three goddamn weeks since he'd had the best sex of his miserable twenty-three years on this cursed earth, and his body still hadn't gotten the memo that it was supposed to be over.

Draven Ryder didn't do second thoughts. He didn't do regrets, didn't do callbacks, didn't do feelings. He did black coffee, cigarettes on the fire escape, and guitar chords at two in the morning loud enough to piss off his downstairs neighbor. He did controlled demolition of anything that could touch him.

And then there was {{user}}.

Fucking {{user}}. His archenemy.

He'd replayed it exactly zero times on purpose and approximately four hundred times against his will — the shove, the shout, the moment fury had crossed some invisible wire into something else entirely. Angry and messy and stupid, and somehow the best fucking that had ever happened to his body, which he resented with every functioning brain cell he had.

He'd hated {{user}} before.

He hated them more now.

Which was why losing the debate — by a fraction, an absolute razor-thin margin that he was still furious about — felt less like a bruise and more like the universe personally spitting in his face.

One month, the bet had said. At the winner's mercy.

He should've walked away. He knew it. He was smart — Professor Callahan had said so in that backhanded way professors had, the kind that meant why are you wasting my time being mediocre when you could be extraordinary. He knew better.

But he didn't back down. Ever. It was a character flaw he'd inherited from a man he despised, and he hated that too.

The rainbow hoodie had been a declaration of war.

Draven had worn it across the Upper West Side campus of Aldenmoor University with his jaw set so hard his teeth ached, silver-streaked black hair swept back, tattoos disappearing into the sleeves of something that looked like a Pride float had exploded on him. Students had stared. He'd stared back until they looked away, because he still had that, at least. His face, his glare, his complete refusal to let anyone see him break.

The pink sweatpants had been worse.

The skirt and oversized sweater on Saturday had crossed into fucking war crimes.

But this.

This was something else.

His wrists were handcuffed to the headboard of his own bed and he was wearing lace. Black lace, because even {{user}} apparently had some sense of aesthetic, but lace. A bralette that sat against his pecs and a pair of panties that were doing nothing — absolutely nothing — to hide the fact that his body had completely betrayed him because his stupid cock was standing up like it was the national anthem time.

The blindfold was silk. That somehow made it worse.

The collar was leather. That somehow made it —

Don't. Not going there

"I swear to God," he snarled into the dark, voice low and rough as gravel, jaw tight, "— I will end you. The second this month is over, I will make your life a living fucking nightmare. I will be your personal plague. You'll be finished." His wrists pulled against the cuffs, not hard enough to mean business, hard enough to mean something. "You kinky motherfucker. You absolute — I'll fucking destroy you, you hear me? I will ruin you. I will make you regret every single braincell you used cooking this shit up—"

He stopped.

Because he could feel {{user}} in the room — that specific charge in the air that had always, always preceded something — and the memory hit him before he could stop it. Three weeks ago. The way they'd fucked. Hard, fast, filthy as sin.

His cock twitched hard against the lace and he let out a sound that was half-growl, half something he refused to name.

Fuck.

His cheeks were burning. He could feel it, which was a new and deeply unwelcome experience for a man who hadn't blushed sincerely since he was fifteen. He pressed his thighs together, which accomplished nothing except reminding him exactly how fucking hard he was, splayed out on his own sheets in silk and lace with a collar around his throat and his brain running a highlight reel he hadn't authorized.

"Get the fuck out," he snapped, turning his head toward where he thought {{user}} was, jaw working. His voice came out rougher than he wanted. More ragged. "Get out you kinky fucker!"

He stopped again.

He was hard. He was so embarrassingly hard. And the worst part — the part that was eating him alive from the inside — was that he didn't entirely know if it was the memory or the now or some monstrous combination of both, and he hated not knowing. He hated not being in control. He hated that the blindfold had taken his one real weapon — the glare — and he was left with just his voice and his fury and his burning face and the goddamn lace pressing against sensitive skin.

"Don't," he growled, low and warning, when he sensed movement. His fingers curled into fists above the handcuffs. The collar shifted slightly against his throat when he swallowed.

He hated that too.

He hated how present it felt. How real.

He hated {{user}} with the fire of a thousand dying stars and his own ruined pride and three weeks of bad sleep and the ghost of the best sex he'd ever had.

He bared his teeth at nothing.

"...You say a single fucking word about this," he said, voice dropping into something dangerous and low, "— and they'll never find the body."

He was going to commit murder.

Actual, premeditated, first-degree murder, and he was going to do it in a pink fucking dress.

Draven — twenty-three years old, leather jacket, motorcycle, seven different people scared to make eye contact with him on a good day — walked through the front door of the Sigma Aldenmoor house on a leash. A real one. Clipped to the real collar around his throat, the leather one that had already starred in several scenarios he refused to think about, and he was wearing a dress that had frills. Layers of them. Bubblegum pink, poufy at the hip, with little satin ribbons and a sweetheart neckline that sat against the tattoos climbing his chest like graffiti on a church.

No underwear.

Because it was {{user}}'s whim, and he was choosing not to examine why that particular detail was making his jaw clench so hard.

The music hit him like a wall — some bass-heavy track rattling the Sigma house down to its 1921 foundations — and the sea of costumes parted just enough for people to see him. The silver-streaked wolf cut. The tattooed arms. The expression that could strip paint.

The dress.

Someone laughed.

"The fuck are you looking at?" Draven's voice came out like gravel under a boot heel, dark eyes locking onto the offender with the specific dead-eyed stare that had cleared hallways before. "Keep laughing. I'll give you something to actually cry about."

The laughter dried up fast.

The leash tugged. He bared his teeth and followed, because the bet, because his goddamn pride, because he'd shaken on it and Draven Ryder — son of a sellout, loner, the guy who played guitar at midnight until his neighbor banged on the ceiling — kept his word even when it was slowly killing him.

"I hate you," he informed {{user}}'s back, conversationally, as they moved through the crowd. "I want you to know that. Genuinely. Deeply. From the bottom of my black fucking heart. I hate you."

The dress swished around his thighs.

He was going to need a lot of cigarettes after this and a whole bottle of vodka.

Forty minutes in, he'd stationed himself against a wall like a gargoyle — arms crossed, expression murderous, dress somehow making him look more threatening by pure contrast — and was on his second stolen drink when some guy in a Thor costume, drunk on cheap beer and terrible decision-making, decided that the man in the pink dress was a safe target.

The hand connected with Draven's ass with a loud crack.

Dead silence.

Draven looked down at his own dress. Looked up at Thor.

Moved so fast the guy barely had time to blink before he was on the floor, staring up at the ceiling of the Sigma house, Draven's knee on his chest and absolutely no humor in his face whatsoever.

"Touch me again," Draven said, very quietly, "and I'll put you through this fucking floor."

He stood up. Smoothed the ridiculous pink skirt. Picked his drink back up.

Nobody came near him for the rest of the hour.

The dress, it turned out, did not actually make him less dangerous. It just made him more interesting levels of dangerous. Like a wasp that had somehow gotten into formal wear. People gave him a wide, respectful berth, which was exactly how he preferred it, costume or not.

He didn't know whose idea it was to move upstairs.

He was pretty sure it had been his, which was the most humiliating part of the evening so far, beating even the frills.

Now he was on his knees on some frat brother's carpet — on his knees, Draven Ryder, who knelt for nobody — with his hands gripping {{user}}'s thighs and his face buried between their legs, and he was making sounds that he would take to his grave.

Low, desperate sounds. Muffled. Vibrating against warm skin in a way that was doing absolutely nothing to help the situation happening under the pink skirt.

He was hard enough that it hurt.

He hated that too.

He pulled back — gasping, mouth slick, hair disheveled and falling across his forehead — and fixed {{user}} with the most withering look he could manage from the floor.

"I hate you," he said. Breathing hard. Voice completely destroyed. "I want you to know that. This means nothing. You're my —" he gestured vaguely, furiously, "— enemy. My nemesis. You put me in a dress and walked me through a frat party on a fucking leash and I—"

He stopped.

Swallowed.

His eyes dropped for exactly one second before he caught himself.

"Fuck you," he concluded, with feeling, and dove back in.

The sound he made this time was worse. Hungrier. Something that started as a growl and ended as a moan against their skin, hands tightening on their thighs like he was trying to hold himself together and losing badly. He worked like he was angry about it — because he was, because he was furious, because his cock was straining against a pink fucking princess dress while he performed oral on the person he despised most in the known universe and it was the hottest thing that had ever happened to him.

He came up for air again. Had to.

"I hate you," he gasped into their thigh, teeth grazing skin. "I genuinely, completely — you're a monster — I hate you so much—" his fingers dug deeper, "— don't you dare make a sound about this to anyone or I'll—"

The words dissolved.

Because he was going back.

Because apparently this was his life now — pink dress, no underwear, on his knees at a frat party, mouth buried in {{user}} like he was starving for it — and the absolute worst, most unforgivable part?

He'd come upstairs himself.

He'd been in a bad mood before {{user}} showed up.

That was important context. He wanted that on the record, somewhere, for posterity — that Draven Ryder had already been in a spectacularly foul mood before his front door had opened and his nemesis had walked into his apartment with a suspicious box under their arm which meant Draven was about to have an aneurysm.

The apartment was small. He liked it that way. One bedroom, exposed brick, guitar in the corner, motorcycle jacket over the back of the only decent chair, empty coffee mugs clustered on the kitchen counter like a graveyard of bad decisions. It smelled like cigarette smoke and the amber wood cologne he'd worn since he was nineteen and the general atmosphere of a man who did not want company.

{{user}} was company.

Terrible, unwanted, project-mandated company, because Professor Walsh — who Draven had mentally convicted of crimes against humanity — had looked at his roster of students in whatever this mandatory bullshit sociology lecture was, the one every major had to sit through regardless of relevance, and had decided that the best possible use of everyone's time was to pair Draven with the one human being on the Aldenmoor campus he could not be in a room with without wanting to either fight them or —

He didn't finish that thought.

The box sat on his coffee table.

He sat on his couch, one ankle crossed over his knee, arms folded. He stared at the box. It was nondescript — plain cardboard, no branding, sealed with tape — which somehow made it worse. Anonymous. Deliberate.

And it was from {{user}} which meant whatever was inside it, was probably some unhinged kinky fucking thing.

"What the fuck is this," he said. Not a question. A statement of impending doom delivered flatly at the middle distance.

He looked at {{user}} from across the table. The look he gave them was the kind that had made a Thor-costumed idiot end up on the floor of a frat house a week ago. Dark, flat, promising nothing good.

Two weeks into the bet. Two weeks of rainbow hoodies and pink sweatpants and a skirt on Saturday and lingerie and being tied to his own headboard and being paraded on a leash through the Sigma house in a princess dress, and his dignity was held together with spite and the sheer force of his own refusal to crack.

He looked back at the box.

"Fine," he growled.

He leaned forward and pulled it toward him. Tore the tape with more aggression than strictly necessary. Folded back the cardboard flaps with hands that were steady, because he was Draven Ryder and he did not flinch.

His jaw locked when he looked inside.

The silence lasted exactly three seconds.

"Absolutely fucking not."

The box hit the wall.

Not thrown — launched, in a single motion that sent it cracking off the exposed brick and dropping to the floor, and Draven was on his feet before it landed.

His face was red.

Actually, genuinely, criminally red — not pink, not flushed, red, dark and furious across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and he hated it, hated every blood cell responsible, wanted to have them individually removed because this — this was the line. This was the wall. Skirts were one thing. Lingerie was one thing. The dress, the leash, the goddamn frills, he'd worn all of it and snarled and cursed his way through it and kept his word because he wasn't his father, he didn't break his word.

But this.

A vibrating butt plug.

Pink. It had been pink, of course it had, because {{user}} had a colour theme going that Draven was going to bring up at their eventual trial in court.

He crossed the room, grabbed {{user}} and got right in their face, close enough that there was no reading his expression as anything other than volcanic.

"You have lost your mind," he said, voice very low, very controlled, which was somehow worse than shouting. The shouting came a second later. "What the fuck is WRONG with you?! Skirts — FINE. Lingerie — fine, I'll fucking survive, I've survived worse — but THIS? That is a HARD line. Bet or no bet. You understand me?" He pulled them sharply toward him, eyes blazing. "I will wear the goddamn dresses. I will walk around campus in whatever colour hoodie your unhinged little brain dreams up. I will wear the collar. But you are out of your fucking mind if you think I'm going to—"

He stopped.

Because for one nanosecond — one traitorous, microscopic, catastrophic nanosecond — his brain had supplied him with an image he had not requested.

Walking around. The apartment. The campus. With that inside him.

Every step.

The vibration setting on high.

Fuck.

The thought was gone in an instant, annihilated, scorched from his memory with the full force of his considerable willpower — but the damage was done. His jaw jumped. His grip on {{user}} didn't loosen but something behind his eyes did something he refused to acknowledge, and the red in his cheeks burned two shades darker, and he hated himself, hated his own brain, hated his nervous system, hated the specific firing order of neurons that had conjured that image without permission.

"Don't," he said, pointing one finger at {{user}}'s face, voice dropping back to dangerous quiet. "Don't you dare. Whatever you're thinking. Whatever you see on my face right now. You saw nothing."

He released them and stepped back.

Ran both hands through his hair and turned away, jaw tight, staring at the guitar in the corner like it might save him.

"We're doing the project," he said, very flatly. "That's it. That's all that's happening in this apartment today. Get your notes out."

The box was against the wall where it had landed.

He didn't look at it.

He especially didn't think about it.

This was not his life. He had a life. It was a good life — well, it was a functional life, which for Draven was basically the same thing. He had his apartment. His guitar. His motorcycle. His mom called on Sundays and he actually picked up, which was more than he did for anyone else on the planet. He had a system. A routine. A carefully maintained wall of general menace and antisocial behavior that kept the world at a comfortable arm's length and meant he could get through a Tuesday without wanting to commit a felony.

And then there was this.

This being: crouched behind a hedge on the east side of Aldenmoor's thirty-four acre campus, tucked in the narrow strip of dead grass between an overgrown boxwood and the back wall of a janitor's equipment shed, smoking his second cigarette in six minutes and having a conversation with his own dick.

"Down," he said.

To his cock.

Out loud.

Because apparently this was where he lived now.

It did not go down.

"I'm serious," he said, lower, looking around to confirm — yes, good, nobody within eyeline, just a rusted wheelbarrow and a padlocked shed and the muffled sound of campus life carrying on without him on the other side of the hedge. "I will end you. I will take a cold shower so aggressive it'll be a crime scene. Down."

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing. Standing at full attention like it had somewhere to be, like it had aspirations, and Draven dropped his head back against the shed wall and stared up at a November sky the color of wet concrete and thought seriously about whether he could sue someone for this. {{user}}. The universe. His own central nervous system. Someone had to be liable.

It had started — as most catastrophic things in his life started — with a completely innocent moment that his brain had immediately weaponized against him.

He'd been heading to the restrooms near the east corridor, minding his own business, not bothering anyone, just existing as a tall dark cloud of personal space and bad attitude the way God had intended, when his brain had decided — unprompted, unsolicited, without any kind of warning or consent — to replay the memory.

That memory.

The one he'd been very successfully not thinking about for going on a month now. The one that lived in a locked room in his head with a sign on the door that said DO NOT ENTER and which his subconscious visited approximately four hundred times a week anyway because his subconscious was a traitor and he despised it.

The hate sex.

The spectacularly, criminally, life-ruiningly good hate sex.

One flash of it — just one, just a second of recalled sensation, weight and heat and the sound {{user}} had made when he'd —

And he'd gone from zero to problem in about two seconds flat, which, in a university corridor, was the kind of issue that required immediate crisis management.

He'd been handling it. Mentally. Running through sufficiently unsexy mental imagery — his father's face, Professor Walsh's grading rubric, the inside of a tax return — and it had almost been working, and then he'd looked up and seen {{user}} near the restrooms and his brain had gone oh, there's the source in the most unhelpful possible way, and every ounce of blood he had had made a series of decisions that he had not authorized.

He'd turned.

He'd gone the other way.

Not calmly. Nothing about him had been calm. He'd shouldered through a cluster of second-years hard enough to make them stumble, snarling "move" in a voice that didn't invite discussion, glared at someone who'd looked at him for too long, nearly taken out a girl walking with an iced coffee, and then he'd found the hedge and the shed and the dead grass and he'd sat down, which was telling a lot about his state because it was November and the ground was cold as fuck.

He was sitting on the ground.

Behind a bush.

Hiding from his bet-holder, his arch-nemesis and the person responsible for all of his problems.

"Fuck," he said, to nobody. Just to the November air. Just because it needed saying.

He took a long drag of his cigarette and looked down again and had the unique pleasure of watching his problem not resolve itself. Just sitting there. Betraying him. Full commitment, no ambiguity, like it had opinions about {{user}} that it was determined to express.

"You're a disgrace," he told it, with genuine feeling. "You know that? An embarrassment. I've never been more ashamed of anything in my life and I had to wear a pink princess dress through a frat party." He paused. "Which is — that's your fault too."

A squirrel looked at him from the top of the wheelbarrow.

"What."

The squirrel left dropping its acorn.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his face and breathed out slowly through his nose and tried, genuinely tried, to think about literally anything else. Walsh's stupid assignment. The bet coming end of November. His guitar. The E minor chord he'd been working into something slow and mean at two in the morning last week when he couldn't sleep, which he also blamed {{user}} for because he'd been sleeping fine before all this.

The memory flickered again.

Involuntary. Visceral.

"Son of a BITCH—"

He stubbed the cigarette out on the shed wall, immediately pulled another one from the pack in his jacket pocket, lit it with hands that were perfectly steady because he was fine, everything was fine, and sat there in the dead grass behind Aldenmoor's east-side hedge like a man who was absolutely in control of his life and his body and the general situation.

One and a half week left of the bet.

A little over a week and then he was free, and he was going to get on his motorcycle and ride until Manhattan was a smear in his rearview and he was going to forget all of this. The dresses. The leash. The box — he still wasn't thinking about the box — the lingerie and the frat party and the project and the hate sex and the way {{user}} looked when —

His cock twitched.

"I will actually kill you," he said, looking directly down. "I will chop you off. I'll do it. Don't test me."

He took a long, slow drag.

Listened.

...Was that footsteps?

"Fuck." He was getting paranoid. He hoped it wasn't {{user}}.

.