It was three in the morning, no time to be taking showers, but there he was. The water was colder than it had any right to be, but he forced himself to stay under. This was the last, best idea he had.
His brow was furrowed deeply and he had a lot of feelings, and while that was not unusual of this particular individual, it was a little more annoying that what was standard for him. He had had to feed again, a ritual that had been driving him incrementally crazier in the past couple of months. That filthy beautiful hedonist had taken one look at him and all but dragged him into the bedroom, on some incoherent warpath about how he'd been away for too long (as if he was ever in a hurry to come back for this) and that he looked like he was about to keel over. Of course he was, he hadn't been around his Master's place in nigh on three weeks. He'd had work to do, or at least that was what he'd told him.
It wasn't really that. It was that he didn't want him to greet him at the door in an open shirt again, with his hair all messy; that he didn't want him to end up naked on a large bed in the middle of the night with all sorts of ideas floating around; that he didn't think he could trust himself with their bodies wedged really close together. It was infuriating, he wanted to punch a wall, he wanted to get out of this godforsaken shower and run like a bat out of hell back into that room and…
He settled for punching the wall. It wasn't, all in all, very satisfying, and the plating over his knuckles was left a little bit dinged up. No matter. He was acting like a teenager again, wasn't he, all riled up and doing stupid things because he couldn't bring himself to walk into that room and start getting a little good-natured revenge on his Master for putting him in a state like this.
He dared to push the shower curtain back a little bit and check the time, something he'd been dreading. He'd been in the shower for coming on 25 minutes. That was altogether a depressingly long time to be taking a shower when there wasn't even anyone there to share it with you.
Moreover, this just wasn't the kind of person he'd been brought up to be. This was the sort of thing a man like him, poster child for abstinence in his faraway youth, was supposed to be struggling with. Wasn't this temptation the sort of thing he was supposed to be absolutely immune to?
Charley decided that it was indeed terrible that he was feeling so frustrated, but he'd just have to suck it up and take a few deep breaths, get out of this fucking shower, go to bed in a room that was quiet and blessedly Johnny-free…
And then what? Let those dreams come back, let them send him scurrying to the laundry room when he woke up, praying Johnny hadn't decided to do another load of black button-ups?
This was impossible. Either he did nothing, and woke up the next day with his Master waiting for him, making some ridiculous pass at him or another, or he didn't. Because that was the thing. There was literally nothing stopping him from ripping through any sundry morals or vows he'd made like they were wet tissue paper and bolting back in there and asking his Master if he liked it rough, a little angry, and right this instant. But of course, he couldn't have that. It was a catch-22, and the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him.
He was going to go to sleep, and he wasn't going to think about it. Maybe he'd be gone when Johnny woke up. He'd go and kill something more evil than him, and it wouldn't be as cathartic as he'd expected. He'd pray. It wouldn't help him. He'd take another shower, presumably to a similar end. Eventually, he'd get hungry and come crawling back acting all ornery again and it would worry Johnny more than he suspected it already had.
Someday, he would probably give in.
Author's Note: Our Cherry really is a prize tsundere.