[I couldn’t for the fucking life of me keep this to five sentences. Whoops.]

They’d been friends for around two weeks when Keith first agreed to head to an arcade, the two making their way through the swarms of freckle-faced boys with armfuls of tickets and the gaggles of aloof teenagers huddled around the classics with headphones obscuring the younger crowd’s noisiness. There were four air hockey tables in the back, some of the only non-ticket-dispensing games in the blue-lit building besides the claw machines; Ellis bounced on his heels as he took his place opposite of the redhead, leaning low over the air-swept surface with the circular paddle clutched firmly in his right hand. 

Keith had the advantage of being ambidextrous; as Ellis’s thickly scarred inner elbow stiffened with an hour’s use, the redhead was able to change hands with ease, sending the puck back and forth with clattering speed that kept the brunette in constant, scrambled movement. As an hour melted halfway through a second, Ellis was panting, twinges of pain furrowing his eyebrows as old injuries seemed to dig with rodent’s paws at the crook of his arm, sharp and insistent and progressively intolerable.  

“Hay,” Keith said suddenly, catching the puck under his goalie with a smack, “Yew okay, Ellis? Yuh look pale.” 

“Huh? Naw!” Ellis crowed immediately, a guilty flush catching his features as Keith abandoned his side of the table, the brunette stepping back before the redhead could reach him. Keith’s eyes were light with question as they looked him over, searching for the source of El’s discomfort and embarrassment, a slightly wolfish smirk to his scarred lips when Ellis shrunk away further. “Mah arm gits weird when Ah stretch an’ bend uh whole bunch, since s’uh lil’ chilly tuhday,” he mumbled in submission, heat in his face doubling when Keith skimmed a questing fingertip over the knot of scarring that adorned the male’s inner elbow. 

“Damn,” murmured the taller male, leaning his hip against the table to fence Ellis off from the rest of the bustling arcade. He released Ellis’s arm, but the smirk remained, edged with sharp teeth exaggerated by the blue-shadowed lighting and his confident slump in the survivor’s personal space. He was littered with silvered scars himself, stories written all across his face and arms. “Yew need uh break, man?” he teased, raising his eyebrows slightly to further inspire the flustered response his closeness seemed to inspire. 

“Naw,” said Ellis with a roll of his shoulder. “But Ah do gottuh take uh leak.” 

He made a beeline for the bathroom, his short stature aiding in ducking beneath the redhead’s arm to escape his half-lidded midnight gaze and apparently oblivious behavior; Keith had an eye for making Ellises blush, the brunette had noted, but it was particularly predatory when El inadvertently fed into it by not always fighting back. 

The bathroom floor was filthy, toilet paper flung in scattered swirls on the tile, and the single stall beside the urinals was impossible to fully lock, the metal tab not quite reaching its designated slot on the support beam. Ellis gripped the top of the door instead, undoing his pants with exhausted fingers and gripping his dick as firmly as he could manage with already strained muscles. 

He jerked himself off quickly, sweat-streaked forehead pressing into the stall door and his lips parting on silent moans as he shakily stroked himself. The pain in his elbow was piercing, the burn running the length of his arm and crackling white-hot in his wrist and shoulder, making his jerks as sloppy and uncoordinated as his jumbled thoughts. 

Ellis came with a hushed groan, jizz spilling on the toe of his boots where his fingers weren’t quite quick enough to catch its fall. Cursing, the brunette attempted to scrape it off with some toilet paper, but a damp, off-white stain remained on the faded brown regardless, laughing at him in a perfect half crescent of sin. 

“He’s gottuh boyfriend,” he grunted to himself, doing up his pants and washing his hands with an aggression that was usually robbed from him by a shuddering orgasm. His hat was jacked up from the top of his head, the bill pointing upward with a sweaty tangle of curls beneath; beneath, his eyes looked bruised, the soft gray stormy with dark-horizoned thoughts. 

It wasn’t the first, and it wasn’t the last.