Brian moaned when he felt the hot, wet mouth close over his morning wood. He knew after seeing Justin's plump, rosy lips that the boy was born to be a cock sucker. Brian reached down to run his fingers through Justin's blonde hair.

He jumped in surprise when he instead felt a bald head under his hands. "What the fuck?" he yelled, which caused the man servicing his cock to look up at him.

"You okay, Honey?" the man, who Brian vaguely remembered bring home with him from Babylon sometime after midnight, asked.

Although Brian was rarely one to turn down a blow job, he also rarely ever let a guy spend the night or get an encore performance the next morning. "Get the fuck out of here!" he yelled to the bald man.

"Can I take a shower-"

"No!" Brian shouted as he picked the man's jeans and t-shirt from the floor and threw them at him. "I said, get the fuck out!"

The man quickly put his clothes on while muttering something about the best fucks being the biggest assholes as Brian, wearing nothing but his cowry shell bracelet, walked across his loft to open the door for his unwelcome guest to leave through.

He received his second surprise of the morning when he found Ted and Emmett standing on the other side of the doorway. Both men shamelessly looked down to check out Brian's dick just as Baldie made his exit.

"Oh, quit gawking. You've both seen it in the locker room," Brian snarled.

"And in the backroom, and the alley behind Woody's-" Emmett began to list.

Brian held up his hand to shut the other man up. "What the fuck are you two doing here at this hour?" Not that he knew exactly what hour it was, but neither Ted nor Emmett was rarely over at his loft when the sun was up... or down.

Emmett pushed Ted to get him to walk into the loft, Emmett following. Both men stood in the foyer awkwardly while Brian threw on some shorts.

"Uh..." Emmett began. "When Teddy and I were in the car after leaving Babylon last night, we realized that we fucked up."

"What, did you give each other handies in the bathroom?" Brian asked.

Ted and Emmett both sputtered. "No!" Ted yelled. "We had noticed that Justin left the club pretty early, and we realized that we may have had something to do with it."

Brian had wondered what had gone on while he had taken his first trip to the backroom to make Justin leave so quickly. "What the fuck did you do to him?"

"We didn't do anything," Emmett said. "But we both said some things to him that may have... scared him away."

"About what?" Brian asked.

"About your... reputation," Ted answered. "Long story short, he now probably thinks you're the biggest whore in town."

Emmett snorted. "Not that he's wrong..."

Ted and Emmett both chuckled while Brian closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He then walked over and grabbed both men by their shoulders, steering them towards the door. "Well, thanks for telling me, boys, but I'm sure it's nothing I can't recover from."

Once the two men were gone, Brian showered and got dressed for the office. He spent a few minutes being angry at his two "friends" for running their big fucking mouths, but calmed down after he realized that Justin would have found out about his legendary reputation sooner or later.

And why the fuck should he care what some little blonde twink thought of him? Justin was no different than any other potential trick. Sooner or later, Brian would fuck him and the boy would be history, nothing but another wet spot on his sheets for his laundry service to wash out.

Knowing that Justin wasn't going to be at the diner that day, Brian stopped by Starbucks on his way to work. He spent most of his morning wondering why he let a bus boy's work schedule decide where he would get his morning coffee and why the hell he woke up thinking about the boy, but he was pulled out of his thoughts when Cynthia's voice came over the intercom.

"Brian, Michael is on line two."

He rolled his eyes. When was the man going to give up? If he knew Michael- and he did- never. "Tell him-"

"I'm not telling him anything," Cynthia said sternly. "He's your friend. You talk to him."

"Yes, ma'am," Brian said, mildly impressed with his secretary's ballsy attitude. He picked up the phone and punched the button to answer. "Hey, Mikey."

"Let me guess," Michael said in an annoyed tone. "You're in the middle of a very important meeting and you'll have to call me back, although you won't call me back."

Brian sighed. "I am at work, you know. I don't come to the office for the hell of it."

"It's the only number of yours that actually gets answered!" Michael yelled. "But, fuck, I've talked more with your secretary than with you since I've been gone!"

"Did you only call to bitch at me like some disgruntled little housewife? Because I don't have time for this shit!" Brian growled into the phone.

"Oh, so you had plenty of time to take some infant to Babylon with you last night, but you don't have time to talk on the phone with your best friend?" Michael asked angrily.

Brian opened his mouth to retort, but decided not to feed Michael's little green monster. He should have known that Ted or Emmett would have told Michael about Justin, as it had been completely out of character of Brian to invite a guy to Babylon. He didn't feel like explaining himself to Michael, mostly because he couldn't explain what was going on with Justin to himself.

"Don't call me at work anymore," he said before slamming the phone down.

********************

"You okay, Honey?" Annie asked Justin during their dialysis session that afternoon.

"Hmm?" he asked, not realizing that he had zoned out during their conversation.

"What's wrong? It obvious that something's got you down." 

"Oh, uh... it's nothing," he answered as casually as he could muster.

"Justin..." Annie paused to give him a friendly smile. "How much time have we spent together? You started dialysis about two years ago, right?"

He thought about it for a moment. "It will be two years next month, actually."

Two years that I've been reliant on a machine to keep me alive and healthy. Wow... he silently mused.

"So, let's see, three afternoons a week, four hours each - that's twelve hours a week, times fifty-two weeks in a year is... 624 hours, times two would be almost 1,248 hours that we've spent together. Divided by twenty-four, that's fifty-two days straight without rest."

Justin curled his lip. Annie had been a math teacher before taking an early retirement because of her health and loved to show off how she could do problems in her head. Justin had always hated math. "That's a long fucking time," he said.

"That also means I can tell when you've got something serious on your mind or that you're upset," she informed him.

He was embarrassed to tell Annie about his boy problems. For one, he hadn't told her that he was gay, and two, he felt weird discussing his love life with a woman that was probably at least a decade older than his mother. However, he knew that Annie had raised three children, two of them girls, along with teaching high school students for many years, so she wasn't a stranger to teenage drama.

"Alright... do you promise not to repeat this?" he asked her.

Annie chuckled. "Who am I going to tell? My doctor? My mailman? My parakeets?"

Justin smiled and looked around the room to make sure no one else was in earshot. There were two other patients in the room, but one seemed to be asleep and the other was wearing headphones and typing on her laptop.

"Okay... first of all, I'm gay."

Annie nodded. "I had a feeling."

"Really?" Justin asked. "How?"

"Well, you've never talked about having a girlfriend before, other than that girl Daphne, but you've always called her ‘my friend, Daphne,' not ‘my girlfriend.' Also, I have a gay nephew that spent more time at my house than my sister's house growing up. You remind me a lot of him when he was younger."

"Oh," he said. "Well, although I've know that I'm gay for a while, I've never had a... you know."

"Boyfriend?" she guessed.

"Right. I've never even kissed another boy before. Just a few girls, including Daphne, but those were only out of curiosity. Anyway, I met this really cute guy at the diner where I work on Monday, and last night I went to this dance club with him... well technically, I guess I went with him and two of his friends, but he was the one that invited me."

"What's this guy's name?" Annie asked.

"Brian." Despite being a bit angry at him, Justin couldn't help but smile when he said the man's name and imagined his handsome face. "We managed to separate while we were there and his friends told me a lot of things about him behind his back, like how he doesn't date and that he's slept with half the guys at the club."

"And what did you do?"

"Once I caught back up with him, I told him that I was tired and going home. I don't know what to do now," Justin said sadly. "I know I'm probably going to see him again at the diner during my shift tomorrow, because he and his friends are there nearly every day."

"So are you upset because you wanted him to be your boyfriend?" Annie asked.

Justin nodded. "But I'm sure all he wants from me is a one-night stand, and I don't want my first time to be like that."

"Well, like they say, there are plenty of other fish in the sea," Annie said. "And you're quite the catch yourself, Sweetheart."

"But that's just it. I..." Justin sighed. "I don't want another fish. But I don't know if he would really want me, other than for a roll in the hay."

Their conversation was stalled when a tech came over to take Justin's blood pressure.

"It sounds like the two of you need to talk things out," Annie said when they were once again alone. "Does he know about..." She pointed at the tubing sticking out of Justin's left arm, through which his blood was circulating in and out of his body as it was being filtered through the dialysis machine.

He shook his head. "It'll probably scare him away. Like you said, it takes up a big chunk of my life. And who knows the next time I'll wind up in the hospital for something or other."

Annie nodded. "It is a lot to deal with, but if he's going to be a part of your life, you should tell him. If he can't handle it, then maybe the two of you aren't meant to be."

Justin leaned back in his chair and sighed.