Page 18 of Constantly Cotton

Jason resisted the urge to groan and bury his face in his hands. “I’ve spent the last fourteen years of my life in a military barracks, dammit. I donotget pee-shy!”

Randy rolled his eyes. “So! Every dude in this apartment has seen every other dude naked at some point in time, and if you think we leave the door open when we crap, you’re way wrong.”

Jason gaped at him. “There’s an image.”

“I’m just saying. You don’t need to be worried around us, ’cause we’ve seen it all. I mean, unless you got some weirdo hook, or—oh, hey! Are you diphallic? ’Cause that would beawesome! I would totally do you if you were diphallic. Hell, I’d ride you twice!”

“Don’t worry about the bathroom anymore, Randy,” Jason said in horror. “I think the pee has crawled back up.”

Randy gave him an openmouthed grin. “It can do that? But maybe I help you into the bathroom, you sit down and contemplate Dog or your navel or something, and I go put the teakettle on. Lance said we gotta keep you hydrated, and he left this good tea shit for you, so, you know, if you go to the bathroom, you’ll get tea.”

Jason was abruptly tired. “Sure,” he said. “Help me to the john, and you can go make tea. Makes total sense.”

Randy nodded. “Henry’s always telling me to use that. You know, the commonsense thing. Anyway, don’t worry. I’ll wash my hands after I sit you on the pot.”

“Good to know,” Jason muttered, and he found himself manhandled to the small bathroom in the apartment shared by more young men than he could keep track of and sat naked on the toilet, his newly acquired boxers around his ankles.

Randy washed his hands, using lots of soap, then told him to take his time, he’d be back in a few, before disappearing.

Not for the first time, Jason wondered where in the fuck he’d ended up.

As a young man growing up in Seattle, he’d had fantasies about a place like this. Nothing but young, hot gay men for as far as the eye could see. They ran around in their boxer shorts and had amazingly muscled bodies and wanted nothing more than to manhandle his body—scrawny and developing back then—and to see to his every need.

As an adult with nearly ten years of celibacy behind him, someone who had been in the world’s most violent places and seen some truly awful things one human could do to another, landing in his teenaged fantasy felt a bit like a cosmic joke.

It wasn’t that the young men were all too young for him—although they were. The closest one in age that he could see was Lance, but Lance and Henry were very much together, and that wasn’t a viable option anyway. Lance was opinionated and liked giving orders, and that was so much like Jason that he figured they’d kill each other.

But more than the age thing—or the opinionated thing—there was the fact that they weren’t too young for him, he was toooldfor them. Randy’s goofy joy, Vinnie’s sweet willingness to please, Curtis’s crisp competence and surprising bursts of humor—they were all the traits of young men who were fully prepared to go out and see what the world had to offer.

Jason had already seen that; it wasn’t pretty. He needed a companion who seemed to understand that the world was a hard place and that the safety another person could give you—to lick your wounds, to find tenderness in a hard desert land—was sometimes the most wonder you could hope for. Someone who would understand that Jason did awful, painful things, and he couldn’t always save the day, and who could hold him when there was nothing else he could do to fix a broken world.

Which brought him to Cotton.

Cotton was every bit as terrifyingly young as the rest of the house, but there was an age to Cotton, a depth in his eyes. Whatever had happened to Cotton in his young life, he had the markings of a very old soul.

The other men in the apartment were amazingly kind to Cotton, as though he were fragile or somehow damaged and needed to be treated gently, and Jason was curious.

Given that Cotton had stayed steadfastly by his side through some of the worst moments of this last week in recovery, and had obviously been getting his medical training on the fly, Jason thought he might be one of the strongest people he’d met during his career in the military.

But still—that haunted look in his eyes.

Jason wanted to make that better.

Which was stupid, because Jason was the last person in any world who could makeanythingbetter.

Besides, he thought uncomfortably, all of these young men seemed to be exceptionally… well, sexually savvy. They were unashamed in their bodies, and it wasn’t that Jason hadn’t spent his time in frickin’ communal showers or close proximity to other men in the past fourteen years, but this was different. In those situations, he had needed to school himself constantly that sex, touching, sensuality, was a thing to be stomped on, squashed, hidden, because the alternative was a whole lot more painful than being horny.

With the exception of a few gloriously hedonistic years in college, sex had been very much off the table.

Not so in his living situation at present.

Sex was very muchonthe table here. It was joked about, it was referenced, it presented the subtext for all everyday activity. Lance and Henry had their own apartment together sothey could have sex. The young men were constantly preparing for dates in whichthey would have sex. There was talk of modeling, and while they were all beautiful, and he had no doubt they could wear clothes, shoes, or hair products with panache, he got more of a feeling from the guys that modeling wasall about sex.

Sex wasn’t merely on the table here, it was being served up for an appetizer, tossed as a salad, carved up for dinner, and offered as dessert, and the fact that Jason hadn’t so much as had a taste of this particular meal made himveryself-conscious.

And, yes, it made him extremely loath to sit on the commode with Randy watching to make sure he could wipe himself.

He sighed and sagged a little onto the toilet and realized, with surprise and gratitude, that he actually had to go.