The Playboy Doctor Swore Off Love, Then His Best Friend Claimed Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Drawer
On Damon's thirtieth birthday, with the party still going downstairs, his best friend Elias pins him against the study wall and finally says what he wants; Damon says prove it, and the open desk drawer shows ten dated tubes, one for every birthday since he turned twenty-one.
Elias had Damon by the back of the neck, pressed against the study wall, and Damon was still laughing.
The party thumped up through the floor from the level below.
"Okay, you've made your point," Damon said into the plaster. "Let go, Thorsen."
Elias did not let go.
His hand was warm and very steady.
It had held Damon's hair back over a dorm toilet at twenty, and it had never once held him like this.
"I'm not drunk," Elias said behind his ear. "I'm not joking. And I've waited ten years for you to turn thirty."
Damon stopped laughing.
In the black glass of the window he could see the two of them.
Elias's broad shoulders filled the whole reflection, and Damon's face was half hidden behind them.
"Turning thirty doesn't change anything," Damon said. "I'm straight, Elias. You've heard me on the subject for a decade."
"I've heard every word," Elias said. "I know every woman's name. I know what you did with most of them."
His free hand came around Damon's hip and settled flat on his belt buckle.
Damon's whole body went still.
He had stood over open chests for hours without his hands shaking.
They were shaking now, flat on the wall.
"That's a bad idea," he said.
"Say stop and I stop."
The thumb moved once, across the buckle, and Damon's cock answered it before his mouth could.
He was hard, painfully hard, against a wall, because of a man, and he waited to feel panic.
Nothing came.
What came was heat, and under it a plain clear thought: it was about time.
"Say it," Elias said, very quiet. "Just one answer."
"You ass," Damon breathed.
"That isn't the word."
"I know it isn't."
Elias's mouth landed at the side of his throat.
It was not a kiss but a bite, hard enough to hurt.
Damon heard himself make a sound he had never made for anyone.
"There it is," Elias murmured against the mark.
"Don't be smug."
"I've earned a little."
Damon turned around.
He had to shove at Elias's chest to do it, and Elias let him, and then there was no wall between them at all.
Up close Elias's eyes were pale grey, and they were not calm.
They were starving.
Ten years of dinners and ballgames and bad coffee and easy talk.
Damon had never once looked at him closely enough to see it.
"You've been looking at me like that since when?" Damon asked.
"Since the first month."
"Our freshman suite?" Damon asked.
"You came out of the shower with a towel on your head and told me my fish was a bad roommate."
"It was dead."
"It was," Elias said. "I wanted you anyway."
Damon laughed again, helplessly, and then Elias's hand slid into his hair and took hold.
The kiss was nothing like kissing a woman.
It was rough, it was deliberate, and Elias did not ask for anything.
He took Damon's mouth patiently and completely, without once looking away.
Damon bit his lip.
Elias made a low sound, pleased, and kissed him harder for it.
Damon's back hit the edge of the walnut desk.
He grabbed two fistfuls of Elias's shirt and pulled, and the buttons gave.
His palms landed on hot skin, over a chest he had seen a thousand times on the beach and never touched.
"Tell me what you want," Elias said into his mouth.
"You know what I want."
"Say it, Doctor."
It was the voice Damon used on residents.
Hearing it turned around on him made his knees go.
"I want you to stop talking," Damon said, "and put me on this desk."
Elias smiled, slow and pleased.
He lifted Damon by the thighs, set him on the edge of the desk, and stepped between his knees.
Then he reached down without looking, and pulled open the bottom right drawer.
He knew the drawer.
He knew it so well he did not need to look.
Damon looked.
The drawer was full.
Ten small boxes lay in a row, each sealed in cellophane, each with a strip of masking tape across the lid.
The tape was written on in Elias's square block capitals, and Damon could read the first one from where he sat.
OCT 14. TWENTY-ONE.
The next said TWENTY-TWO.
The last, the newest, said THIRTY, and the date was today.
"Elias," Damon said slowly.
"Yes."
"How long have these been in my desk?" Damon asked.
"Nine years for the first one."
Elias picked up the last box and thumbed the cellophane off.
"I bought one every birthday and put it in here," he said. "It was the one place I could keep wanting you where you'd never look."
"Ten of them."
"I've been optimistic."
Damon stared at the row of tape, nine years of Octobers in his best friend's handwriting.
His throat did something he had no word for.
Elias held the last box out and waited.
For the first time in ten years he did not look certain.
Damon took it out of his hand.
"Then open this one," he said.
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