After a day of errands, visits, and everyday's drudgery, Johan's first thought when parking his car isn't a thought at all. It's the sound of relief: he sighs mentally. The sigh surges though his muscles and washes away the silt of stress that's clogged up his clarity.
His sense of well-being increases manifold. He's longer numbed to insensitivity.
He grabs his groceries bagged in re-usable nylon sacks, checks for any stray belongings, gets out of his vehicle, and closes the door right after himself. He doesn't slam it but it still echoes in the brightly lit caverns of the building's car park. It echoes, too, when he whistles on his way to the lift.
By now Johan's thinking real, substantial thoughts that have shapes and textures and physical responses, and they all form around the question: what should I have for dinner? There's the pasta from the big batch he made yesterday, but he prefers it eat the leftovers three days after preparation when the taste is more settled and full. So more likely fish tonight, or salad from what he's bought. Baby greens, nuts basil, vinegar and oil he already has, dandelions—
The lift announces its arrival at his floor. It opens its silver passenger door for him. He smiles his thanks at the rickety mechanical system as he passes out of it. It may judder every so often but it has done its job so well for him. all these years he's lived here.
The hallway of his floor isn't carpeted. The linoleum has been waxed recently, though, so the off-white, off-yellow surface gleams under the perpetual lights. There are five doors in all, an access to the stairwell, a clutch of metallic slots in the wall for the post, there's a low pervasive humming, and Johan's flat is at the very end.
There's also someone else in the hallway. This is something quite unexpected.
"Juudai!" Johan exclaims. His thoughts begin to cloud around more spiritual things. At the same time some of his thoughts veer sharply to a raw physicality that warms his skin like walking into the sunlight.
The Japanese boy waves as they both move to embrace. The hall suddenly strikes Johan as too bright, too cold, too small, so he hastens to usher the two of them into his orderly flat, with a loud laugh as he closes the heavy door. Shoes come off. Jackets are removed. Flurries of footsteps and laughed words and smiling eyes carry them around the corner into the main room.
Johan asks what Juudai would like for dinner as he begins to sort through the newest additions to his pantry. He puts aside what will need to go into his fridge. Juudai, plopping down in the one armchair, the spot where Johan most often sits, offers that he will eat anything.
"You know me, after all."
So Johan makes a meal that's enough to satisfy a wanderer's stomach: salad, boiled potatoes with parsley and other garnishes, fish with a creamy sauce to slather on the carbohydrates. Their conversation carries them away to faraway places.
It's so good, Juudai is immobile on the couch while Johan does the dishes. About twenty minutes go by until he's sure that his kitchen's preparation area is properly sanitised. He then crosses the room to join Juudai on the sliver of couch that's been left unoccupied. He's right by the sluggish brunet's head, so Johan reaches over to scratch Juudai's scalp as he looks out over his flat and tries to see its composition through different eyes. Since Juudai's last visit the colour scheme has shifted with the passage of the seasons. The candle's are different, too, he thinks as he feels out the unique dents and dings on Juudai's skull.
Juudai's the one who asks, in very slangy Norwegian, "Do you want to fuck now?"
Johan looks down at him, one eyebrow cocked, because it's rare that both of them are up. That would be his surprised expression. "Don't you want dessert?"
"We can save that for later, hey?"
Johan laughs a bit, a soft kind of sound that goes and gets lost in the distant parts of his flat. He stops massaging Juudai's head, shifts, and they are kissing lightly. Their noses touch.
"Fine. But if we're going to do this before I get my rice pudding, I get to be inside of you."
"Well, I have an idea or two of my own," Juudai tells him as Johan crawls over and straddles his hips.
"And why should I listen to you?" Johan, hovering over him now, smiles.
"Because you're interested in me," Juudai says, and he moves so subtly, they grind together in a way that's more tantalising and less satisfying than the brush of a forbidden lover's touch. Johan's left aching.
"Go on, then."
Juudai sits up and then Johan's sitting in his lap. "I want to ride you into that chair right over there. I know you read there—I'll ride you so hard, no book will be able to come close to giving you the same kind of pleasure. Ever."
"Yeah, well," Johan says as his pupils are in the process of dilating wide, "You're going to be thinking of me days from now when you're saving a llama train in Peru, and you're still walking funny."
"I expect I'll yell really loudly then," Juudai says. He plays with a tuft of Johan's hair.
But Johan looks genuinely contemplative for a bit, his mind is somewhere else. And then he returns. "Okay, but not too loud, okay? I don't want to bother the neighbours."
"What, are they jealous?"
"No, it's lady next door. Mrs Ødegaard. She's the one who keeps bothering me about you. She says that if you're not planning to propose to me, even after all these years, I really need to consider finding someone serious."
Juudai laughs, and it fills the flat like the ominous sounds of oncoming thunder.
They kiss as they part—Johan goes to fetch lube, and Juudai thinks about removing his pants now. He decides they just need to be pulled down. Quick enough Johan's sitting down with a pillow arranged between his angled back and the chair, and Juudai's on his lap.
Johan is easing one, two warm fingers into his behind, and they are necking with a simian kind of contortion.
After acclimatising to the third exploratory finger, Juudai pushes down to hurry Johan along, a signal which leaves Johan frustrated, just as Juudai intends. Johan doesn't consider himself overcautious, he's just considerate. And that's a fact—he's never left bites and bruises on Juudai that couldn't easily be covered up. He could cleave through Juudai right now, but he's slow with their first initial slide, and he plans to quicken only once they've established a rhythm and become more slippery.
But Juudai's insistent—he grinds himself up and forward so that Johan has to take on more of his weight and strength, and all of this movement is on the top of his trapped dick. Johan finds his shoulder clenched for leverage. Juudai's fingers are digging into his skin and bones as his glistening muscles twitch to support his see-sawing weight, and surely here there will be left a number of quite colourful marks.
Johan's knees buckle and he reaches out himself. He wrenches on to Juudai to keep the both of them anchored and balanced. And it's Johan who yells first, his head is knocked back into the chair, and its mauve colour is all that he can see behind closed lids.
Then Johan opens his eyes to Juudai grabbing for him. He thinks that Juudai is going to grip his throat, that really jolts him, and Juudai clenches a fistful of the cushion Johan's being ridden into.
He thrusts, too, but he also has to keep them from falling, this on top of the rest of the day that has left him exhausted. He's hurdling towards fatigue faster than he'd like to believe. Juudai's practically bouncing in his trembling, sweating lap. They kiss again and it's too viscus and things go hazy.
So when Johan sees his orgasm approaching he rushes into it. The sudden impact unleashes a yelp. He shudders into Juudai who's clasped along his body now, and when he has mind enough, he spares a few strokes to finish Juudai off.
Sticky, the two of them pant on each other.
"Gonna be more sore than me," Juudai, smirking now, but muddled by mature affection, whispers as he plants a kiss on Johan's forehead.
"Maybe," Johan whispers back. Already the flat's night air is laving over his flushed skin. He'll need to turn up the heat soon. "But we'll just have to see when the night's out."