karma's a b*tch

♾️

What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck -

Qian feels like he's losing his mind.

What the fuck is happening to him?

It's after 7pm when Qian pushes open the heavy door of his hotel room and stomps inside. He and Yuan had just finished having dinner - alone, just the two of them, at a classy, intimate Italian bistro a couple blocks from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. By that point in the day, Qian had become permanently flustered by the obvious role-reversal he and Yuan now occupy. Yuan hadn't changed in essence, of course - he's as soft-spoken and gentle as ever - but he had developed an air of unshakable confidence that had obviously come with his maturity and, to Qian's never-ending shock, sexual experience.

It's thrown Qian straight into a tailspin.

He drops his keys and wallet on the desk in his room and starts to pace back and forth across the generic institutional carpet.

This must be karma. He does deserve this, doesn't he? Because of how he'd treated Yuan before he'd left? Said a bunch of homophobic shit and kicked him out of their home and basically ignored him for three and a half years? It must be karma, the fact that now, Yuan is basically grown, twenty-three years old and starting his own business - Qian had learned over dinner - with his own credit card and retirement account and fucking pierced nipples.

- which makes sex, especially foreplay, even more fun than usual -

Qian groans. He has to stop thinking about Yuan's nipples.

And the shirt. The whole outfit, really. Qian is used to seeing Yuan in a school uniform, or a button-down, or a baggy T-shirt and baggy jeans. All of which are solidly in the Teenage Clothing and Streetwear category, keeping Yuan solidly in that category as well. But today, that slim, drapey, damn near see-through knit shirt? And those jeans he'd worn, they'd fit him really, really well. So well that for almost the first time in their adulthood, Qian had gotten a sense of what Yuan's body looks like. Without clothes.

Stop it. Stop thinking about Yuan's body without clothes.

That's what Qian tells himself consciously, because he's responsible, and respectful, like the older brother (you're not his brother) he is. But then his stupid subconscious keeps clawing through the layer of responsibleness.

If he's not your brother, what's the harm?

Which Qian can't out-rationalize. He can't explain away the overwhelming temptation to imagine - just for a few minutes, just in his head - what Yuan's body probably looks like under his clothes.

"God dammit," Qian groans in exasperation as his loins start to warm; a predictable physiological response to his imagining another man naked.

Not another man, Qian thinks. Yuan. I'm imagining Yuan naked.

The embarrassment, the sense that he's committing a terrible transgression, is so complete that the blood that isn't currently rushing to his hardening cock is coloring his cheeks, and for the first time in his life, he heads to the bathroom to take a cold shower.

He turns on the shower and strips off his clothes. As he folds them neatly and places them in a pile on the counter, he catches sight of his naked body in the bathroom mirror.

A wild curiosity strikes him.

The piercings enhance my nipple sensitivity...

Qian slides his hands up his stomach and ribs, stopping just beneath his nipples, pausing as his cock throbs gently, reminding him that he's supposed to be under the punishing spray of an ice-cold shower and not touching himself in ways that will only further arouse him -