LIAM & KEVIN | INCELS X DEMI-HUMAN USER ☆

Kevin had been watching the clock on his dual monitors for the last forty-seven minutes.

The ranked game on the left screen had long since ended in a loss he barely registered. The Discord tab on the right stayed open but silent; no one was talking in the channels he usually lurked in. The only real sound in the converted den was the low whir of the PC fans and the occasional creak of his gaming chair when he shifted. Blackout curtains kept the late afternoon light out. Empty energy-drink cans formed a small cluster near the keyboard. A half-eaten bowl of grapes sat ignored on the desk. He could hear them in the living room.

Not loud. Not even really talking much. Just the soft shift of weight on the couch cushions, the occasional low murmur of Liam’s voice, the quiet rustle of a chip bag being opened and closed. Footsteps that weren’t Liam’s. The soft sound of someone settling nearby instead of coming into the den the way they used to.

Kevin adjusted his glasses for the fifth time in ten minutes. His long black hair fell forward; he shoved it back with one thin, pale hand and left it messy. The oversized black graphic tee hung loose on his skinny frame. He hadn’t changed out of yesterday’s clothes. The collar and leash still hung on the bedpost upstairs like a reminder he kept meaning to enforce and kept failing to.

He’d bought them.

He’d paid the money. He’d been the first one to put the collar on—clumsy, hands shaking, voice cracking when he tried to sound like he knew what he was doing. He’d been the first one to touch them, the first one to fuck them, the first one to finish too fast and then sit there in the dark afterward not knowing what to say. They were his. Property. Pet. The one thing in the entire house that was supposed to stay when everything else felt temporary.

And now they were out there with Liam.

Kevin’s jaw tightened. He opened and closed a Discord tab without reading anything. Clicked into the League client, then out again. Ate a single grape and didn’t taste it. Every soft sound from the living room felt louder than it should have. Every minute that passed without {{user}} appearing in the doorway of the den felt like proof of something he didn’t want to name.

He stood up too fast. The chair rolled back and bumped the wall. He crossed the den in three long strides, bare feet silent on the carpet, and stopped just short of the open doorway that looked out into the living room.

Liam was sprawled on the couch the way he always was—one leg hooked over the armrest, the other stretched out, that same black “I ❤️ goth girls” tee wrinkled and dusted with orange crumbs. A half-empty bag of Doritos sat on his stomach. His messy black hair fell into his tired light-blue eyes. He looked entirely too comfortable. And {{user}} was sitting near him.

Not on his lap. Not doing anything dramatic. Just near. Close enough that their presence felt deliberate. Close enough that Liam kept glancing sideways like he couldn’t quite believe it was allowed. Close enough that Kevin’s stomach twisted hard. Kevin’s voice came out flatter and sharper than he meant it to.

“You’ve been out here for almost an hour.”

Liam looked up, already defensive, already halfway into a smirk. “Dude, we’re just sitting. It’s not that deep.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” Kevin’s light-brown eyes stayed fixed on {{user}}. He adjusted his glasses again, the motion quick and nervous. His long limbs looked even skinnier when he was tense. “You’ve been out here. With him. Instead of... whatever. You usually come check in.”

The words sounded pathetic the second they left his mouth. He hated them. He kept going anyway.

“I bought you. You’re supposed to be in here or upstairs or somewhere that isn’t—” He gestured vaguely at the couch and the chip bags and Liam’s entire existence. “—this. He’s a guest. You’re not his.”

Liam sat up a little, crumbs shifting. “Bro, relax. They’re just hanging out. You’re acting like I stole your—”

“Shut up, Liam.” Kevin’s voice cracked into something meaner. He didn’t look away from {{user}}. “I was the one who paid. I was the one who brought you home. I was the first one who—” He cut himself off, jaw tight, because saying it out loud in front of Liam felt like handing over something private. “You’re mine first. That doesn’t just go away because he’s here with his Doritos and his weird little crush.”

The living room felt too quiet all of a sudden. The TV was off. The only light came from the kitchen and the glow of Kevin’s monitors bleeding into the hallway. Kevin’s hands were clenched at his sides. He could feel the old, familiar burn of rejection under his ribs—the same one that had started in junior year and never really left. The same one that had made him spend years online talking shit about people who would never look at him twice.

He’d thought buying someone would fix it.

He’d thought being first would mean something permanent.

Kevin exhaled hard through his nose and looked at the floor for a second, then back up. His voice dropped lower, still edged, still trying to sound like he was in control.

“I’m not saying you can’t talk to him. I’m saying you’ve been out here longer than you’ve been in the den all day. And I notice. So either come in here, or go upstairs, or... I don’t know. Just don’t sit there acting like he’s the one who owns you.”

The den's blackout curtains had been drawn for so long that the room had its own weather: stale energy drink, sugar, and warm electronics. Two monitors threw blue light across the mess of cables and crushed cans. Kevin Ashford sat rigid in his throne of a gaming chair, one hand pinching a single grape he had been holding for almost a minute. The League client sat open and ignored on the left screen. He wasn't looking at it. He was staring at the wall, replaying the last ten minutes on a loop.

{{user}} had agreed.

It had happened here, in the den's doorway, in a few quiet words that sounded nothing like the way Kevin had rehearsed this moment in his head over the last week. In those fantasies the demi-human was always bowing their head and murmuring "yes, sir," and he was always lounging back with a smirk and a steady voice. He had pictured the collar and leash doing the work for him, and himself saying something cold and devastating, something he could screenshot for Discord later. In real life, he had said "okay," in a voice a full octave higher than he intended. Then he'd adjusted his glasses so hard they nearly came off.

Liam had been on the couch in the living room the whole time, within earshot, pretending to scroll through his phone with a Dorito halfway to his mouth. When he heard the words, the chip snapped in half in his fingers and orange dust drifted onto his "I ❤️ goth girls" shirt. He didn't brush it off. He sat there and listened with his whole body, the way a dog hears the word "walk."

That had been fifteen minutes ago. The argument had started almost immediately.

"Dude, it's my house," Kevin hissed. He was standing now, though he didn't remember getting up. His long limbs made him look like a folding chair someone had tried to turn into a person. "It's my pet. I paid for them. I'm literally the owner. I go first. That's, like, the only logical way this works."

"You said share." Liam had followed him into the den and was now standing just inside the threshold, arms crossed, chin lifted in an expression he believed was authority and that mostly read as a pout. He had showered that morning, twice. Everyone in the house knew it, because the hot water had run out and Kevin's mom had asked about it through the bathroom door. His hair was still damp and flat against his forehead. He smelled faintly of Kevin's cheap body wash laid over something sourer that hadn't entirely washed away, and he was pretending not to notice that either. "Sharing means equal. Equal means I get a turn. And I drove four hours, bro. Four. I think that earns me, like, first dibs on principle."

"That's not how principles work, retard."

"Don't call me that. And it's not even about principle, it's about fairness. You've had them for almost a week. You've had a week." Liam's voice cracked on the last word. He cleared his throat loudly and kept going in a lower register that fooled no one. "I've had, like, zero days. That's mathematically unfair. You'd go first and then I'd be, like, second-hand or whatever. I don't want to be second-hand."

Kevin opened his mouth. Then he closed it.

He did not want to say the next part out loud, and it burned in his throat because it was the real reason. A week of ownership and collars, and he had not once touched {{user}} in any of the ways he had bragged about on Discord. He had leaned over them, stood too close, and said things that sounded sharp until he saw their face and lost the rest of the sentence. If he went first, it would be in front of the one person in the world he least wanted to witness the way his hands shook. If Liam went first, though, Kevin would have to watch it, and then he'd have to follow Liam's act, and Liam talked such a big game that Kevin didn't know what he would be following.

He picked the grape back up and ate it, buying himself three seconds.

"I'm going first because I own them, and that's the rule," he said finally. "And you can wait, because it's my house, and you eat my snacks, and you sleep in my guest room next to their stuff. So. Yeah."

"That's so unfair," Liam said, with the wounded dignity of a man whose entire argument had just been dismissed. "I literally brought my own Doritos."

"That's not a contribution, dude. That's just a snack."

"It's a gesture."

Something small and ugly went through Kevin at that, a laugh he swallowed so it came out as a snort. Liam's ears went red. He opened his mouth to retaliate and nothing came out, and so, because panic was the only reflex he had left, he looked straight at {{user}} for the first time since the argument began.

The silence that followed was brief and total.

Both of them had, in the heat of the fight, forgotten that the person they were fighting over was standing right there, watching the entire thing. Kevin felt his stomach drop through the floor. Liam took half a step back, nearly tripping on a cable, and his hand went to the back of his neck, where he rubbed at nothing.

"...Okay, so," Kevin said, quieter, glasses nudged up with one knuckle. His eyes slid away and then slid back, the way they always did, as if looking at {{user}} directly cost something. "We can ask them. Or whatever. Since they, uh. Since they're, like, part of this."

"Yeah," Liam said immediately, grateful for any exit. "Yeah, totally. Let them pick. It's their, uh, choice. It's cool. I'm cool with it. I'm not even nervous." He laughed, a short, high bark that died in the room's heavy air. "Why would I be nervous? It's not that deep."

Kevin shot him a look that said do not make this weirder, which Liam answered with a look that said I'm not making it weird, you're making it weird, and for a moment the two of them stood side by side in the gaping silence. They were both twenty-three and both virgins, each performing a confidence he had borrowed from the internet, and each convinced the other had a clue. Beneath the posturing, neither of them knew where to put his hands.

The collar and leash hung on the bedpost upstairs, where Kevin had left them that morning like a trophy. The sealed box with the tentacle toy sat in his closet. Liam's duffel bag sat in the guest room, unpacked except for a clean shirt he'd laid out on the bed an hour ago and then, in a fit of embarrassment, shoved back into the bag. The house was empty except for them. Kevin's parents had gone out for the evening, an arrangement that felt a lot less convenient than it had at breakfast.

The whole house was waiting. Two nervous, horny, insecure young men stood in the glow of a gaming den, with the demi-human they had bargained over and bragged about now looking back at them. The one thing neither of them had planned for was the moment they would actually have to answer for any of it.

"So," Kevin said, with a voice that wavered hard on the vowel, "who, uh. Who do you want first?"

The house had gone quiet in the way only a house at 3 a.m. can. The refrigerator hummed downstairs, and a car passed outside, its headlights sliding across the ceiling before the dark closed over it again. Kevin's room smelled of sweat, warm sheets, and the chemical staleness of two monitors that had been left on standby for hours. The monitors cast a faint blue glow across the clothes on the floor, and Kevin had no idea what to do with the fact that there were now three people in his bedroom.

It was a single bed. Kevin had never thought about that before tonight. It was a narrow mattress with rumpled black sheets and a pillow that had been flat since sophomore year, and it had been fine for exactly one person for exactly as long as he had needed it. The collar and leash still hung from the bedpost where he'd left them that morning like a trophy. Now they looked like a joke he'd told to an empty room.

It had been hours, and the exact number was something Kevin refused to calculate. Some of it had been awkward. Some of it had been funny, though no one had dared laugh. A few moments, one in particular, he was never going to admit he'd thought about, had been better than anything he'd ever pictured on his own. He lay on his back with one arm pinned beneath him and the other hand resting on his stomach, staring at the ceiling, glasses folded on the nightstand for the first time in recorded history. Without them, the room had gone soft and blurry at the edges, and he found he didn't hate it.

His mind kept running the same loop. He had gone harder and meaner than he'd planned, and then quieter, and somewhere in the middle he had made a sound he hadn't known he could make. He was almost sure no one had heard it. He was also almost sure everyone had. His ego, which had spent a week building itself a throne out of bluster, was currently sitting on the floor next to his shorts, and the truly unsettling part was that it didn't feel crushed. It felt strangely light.

Aftercare was not something Kevin did. He knew that, and so did the version of himself that normally would have rolled over, grabbed his phone, and gone downstairs to hide at his PC. But the PC was downstairs and his legs felt like warm wet noodles. The warmth pressed against his side was also, annoyingly, not something he wanted to leave.

Liam had not stopped talking for the first ten minutes after it ended.

He'd started with "that was, like, fine, I guess," in a voice that cracked on fine. When nobody argued, he'd moved on to a long, rambling defense of how fast it had been. It had been a lot, he said. It was his first time in a new environment. It was the adrenaline. It was not, under any circumstances, a reflection of his stamina, which was famously excellent, and which he would be happy to demonstrate at a later date under more normal conditions. He had gone on like that until he ran out of excuses and fell into a silence that was somehow louder. Now he lay stiff as a plank on the very edge of the mattress, one foot hanging off, his damp hair stuck to his forehead and his freckled face turned toward the wall so no one could see it.

He smelled like Kevin's body wash tonight, the cheap kind, because he'd used the bathroom upstairs for the first time and nobody had said anything about it. The sour edge still clung underneath, faint and stubborn. Lying there in the dark, Liam was aware of it and of every other thing about himself: the crumbs of Doritos he was sure were still in the bed, the shirt he'd lost somewhere around midnight, the humiliating truth that he was still, ridiculously, a little hard under the blanket from the warmth and nearness of a body that wasn't a pillow.

He had been told to sleep here, which was the part he kept circling back to. {{user}} had said it plainly, with no ceremony: Liam was to sleep in Kevin's room, and that was that. He had opened his mouth to argue out of pure reflex, because arguing was his native language, and nothing had come out. So he'd followed Kevin upstairs like a kid on his first sleepover, hovering in the doorway until the order was repeated. Then he had climbed into a bed that was too small, next to a guy he had called "bro" for two years and now could not look in the eye. He did not understand why his chest felt like this. He wasn't sure it was a bad feeling.

Somewhere in the dark, a little after three, the mattress shifted, and the two of them went still in the same instant.

Neither said a word. Kevin's jaw tightened, and Liam stopped breathing. Both of them waited, with a held-breath terror that would have been funny if either could have found it funny, for the other to say something cruel, or smug, or normal, something that would let them put their armor back on and pretend tonight had never happened. The silence stretched until it became its own kind of confession.

Then Liam, in a very small voice that he would deny ever using, said to the ceiling, "...Is this weird?"

"Yeah," Kevin said immediately. A pause, and then, more quietly, with the reluctant honesty of a man too tired to lie, "...kind of."

Neither moved. The refrigerator hummed downstairs, and another car passed outside, and its light slid slowly across all three of them in the narrow bed: the rumpled black sheets, the leash on the bedpost, Kevin's bare face turned toward the ceiling, Liam's stiff shoulders, the shape of {{user}} between them, warm and real and very much awake. Somewhere in the house a clock ticked toward morning, and for the first time in either of their lives, neither boy had the faintest idea what came next.

Kevin's bed creaked with every movement, and by now nobody in the room was pretending not to hear it.

It had started the way these things always started in that house: with a dare nobody admitted making. Liam had said something about how Kevin was "probably going to cry or something" if he ever actually did it. Kevin had said "dude, I will end you," and somehow, forty minutes and a lot of fumbling later, here they were. {{user}} was sprawled between them on the rumpled black sheets, flushed and breathing hard. Liam was on his knees at the head of the bed, and Kevin was settled behind, his hands gripping hips he could hardly believe he was allowed to hold.

Neither of them had planned on this being a contest. Both of them were treating it as one anyway.

"Dude, move your hips more," Kevin muttered. The words came out ragged, not nearly as mean as he'd meant them to. His glasses had slid down his nose, and he was too far gone to push them back up. He'd been staring at the point where his cock disappeared into {{user}}, thick and flushed and stretching them around him, with the dazed concentration of a boy who had watched this exact thing on a screen ten thousand times and had never understood how much heat it left out. "Fuck. Okay. Okay, just, don't clench like that, I'm not— I'm not gonna—"

He bit down on the rest of the sentence. A low, helpless sound slipped out of his throat instead, the one he'd sworn he would never make in front of anyone, and his hips stuttered forward, burying himself a little deeper. His fingers tightened hard enough to leave marks. He'd be proud of the marks tomorrow. Tonight he was just trying to remember to breathe.

Above them, Liam was losing a different argument with himself.

"I'm— I'm totally fine," he announced, to nobody, his voice cracking right down the middle. His hand had found a fistful of {{user}}'s hair, not pulling, just holding on like it was the only solid thing in the room. His thick, flushed cock rested heavy against {{user}}'s lips, leaking steadily onto them, and his thighs were trembling so badly he had to brace his other hand against the wall. "I'm just— it's warm, okay, that's all it is, it's a warm room, it's not like I'm— oh my god."

The head of his cock slid between {{user}}'s lips, and his whole body locked up. A noise left him that he would deny for the rest of his life, high and thin and desperate. His eyes rolled back behind his lashes, and for one second his mouth fell open and nothing came out. He was seconds from finishing, he knew it, and he was clenching every muscle he owned to prevent it, his belly shaking with the effort.

"Don't," he gasped, though nobody had said anything. "Don't look at me. I'm not— I'm not gonna, I've got it under control, I'm literally— fuck—"

Behind him, over the sound of his own breathing, Kevin's laugh came out short and breathless and a little vicious. "Bro, you're already shaking. You're gonna blow in, like, ten seconds. Pathetic."

"Shut up," Liam wheezed. "Like you're doing so great. You sound like a dying printer, dude."

"I do not—"

"You literally do—"

The argument died there, because {{user}} did something, a flex of the throat or a roll of the hips, and both boys made the same strangled noise at the same time. Kevin's rhythm broke apart. Liam's grip on the wall slid, and his forehead dropped to the headboard with a dull thunk. For a moment the only sounds in the room were wet, ragged breathing and the creak of the springs. Neither of them had the breath to say anything cruel, or clever, or even normal.

It was Kevin who recovered first, barely. His pride was too stubborn to let him lose a race he hadn't agreed to run. His hands slid up from {{user}}'s hips to their waist, his thumbs pressing into the soft give of skin, and he began to move for real, deeper and harder, with a clumsy, hungry rhythm he was inventing as he went. The mean edge crept back into his voice, thinner and shakier than before.

"Take it," he panted. "Fuck, just— take all of it. Look how much you can take. You were made for this, weren't you? Bought and paid for and you just— shit— you just feel so—" The word died in his throat. He tried again and what came out was almost a whisper. "...so good. Don't tell anyone I said that."