Bedside Monster (House Beasts #1)

Bedtime

Oliver, all clad in his white and grey striped pajamas, slipped into his bed after having turned off the lights. He always got in bed at nine-fifteen because his doctor had told him that it would give him quality sleep. Who cared if he got mocked for going to bed with the hens? He was an early bird anyway, always had been, always would be. Nothing in the world would make him stay up late.

Except the thought of what had occurred in the kitchen before dinner.

It made him lay wide awake, pondering. If only he could find a pattern to what triggered his episodes, but he knew that many had come before him with the same dilemma and had not been any luckier. Why now out of all times? Why a male monster with no shirt? Did it have something to do with Oliver's... attractions? Had he imagined the creature the way he had imagined it because he was horny? This made him slightly uncomfortable. With his medication obliterating his sex drive, he had not bothered really thinking about what pleased him in a long time. Maybe that was the key to it, he thought, the creature's abs that was. Well, not literally. It wasn't as if Oliver had wasted any time drooling over them, panicked as he was about getting the poor thing to stop hurting. Not that it had really been hurting, since it was a figment of his imagination. It didn't matter how real it had looked or felt.

Oliver sighed. If only the encounter had been real. He could do with a bit more shirtless men in his life, especially of the buff variety. Not that he was horny, after all, it's not like he was starved for affection. So what if anyone else in his shoes would be? Not him. He had more dignity than that, and he had accepted that he would be a virgin forever without making a drama out of it. There was no way he had conjured the image of a ripped and underdressed male creature because that was the image of what he wanted. No no. At most, it was a glitch where his brain had gone over the top while just trying to visualize something. For crying out loud, he was way past the age where his raging hormones were supposed to make him susceptible to such imagery!

It was just that... well, shirtless men were nice to look at.

He had known about his preference since his early teens. However, while he wasn't religious or irked by homosexuality, he had decided to keep it to himself. Coming out to his friends might have made things awkward, and coming out to his mother... well, let's just say that they weren't on the best of terms at the time. So he had kept that as his little secret, jacked off to gay porn and had decided that he would explore it more in-depth when he was an adult and free to do as he pleased.

Only that by the time he became an adult he had lost all motivation when it came to pursuing any sort of relationship. Sure, he could have hooked up with a stranger to pop that cherry and he low-key felt guilty that he hadn't done that but, at the same time, it wasn't as if he had felt the desire to do so. His medication sort of blew that for him... until he had stopped taking it. Since then, well, his gay porn intake had increased dramatically and he had started to look at the men around him in a different light. But from that to actually making the jump of seeking out a partner? Well, as shameful (and he was ashamed) as it might sound, he was scared that he might have missed the last train for that. Who, in this day and age, had the patience to deal with a twenty-eight-year-old virgin? Partners, believed Oliver, were expected to perform as well as porn stars and he wasn't that.

The mattress dipped under weight, making Oliver's eyes shoot open.

There was a shadow in the dark, big, black and scary, with horns like curved spikes on its head and a tail that whipped the air excitedly. Glowy yellow eyes were fixed upon him, studying his features. When the creature noticed that he was looking back, he crawled over the empty side of the two-space bed, closer to the human, with flaring nostrils and a large grin.