Work Text:
The telephone on his bedside table rang, pulling Greg out of a fitful sleep. He’d been dreaming of a 1,000-foot cruise liner cutting through whitecaps made of Xerox pages, bodies falling off the deck into the churning paper waves below.
He groaned. It was, what, two a.m.? Three? He couldn’t remember crawling into bed after his bender with Kendall. The dude was pretty small but he could definitely hold his liquor. (And, um, coke. A lot of it.) Maybe it was the adrenaline from basically killing his dad in a televised press conference, waving his metaphorical head around on a pike that kept him going. Greg had tried to tap that keg so that he could share in Kendall’s euphoric rush, but it just soured his stomach. He felt sick.
The phone was still ringing, shrill and insistent. Greg fumbled for the receiver with a clumsy hand, almost knocking the cradle off the table altogether. He was jumpy as hell.
“Um, this is Greg? On Greg’s phone?” he managed to say, in a voice thick with sleep.
“Shut the fuck up.” There was a pause. “You fucking intestinal worm.”
Greg sat up, clutched the receiver to his ear. “Tom?”
“Would you stop with the names? How the fuck do I know you haven’t tapped your phone? That you aren’t recording this entire conversation right now?”
“I’m—I’m not?”
“Well, I suppose that’s reassuring,” Tom sniffed. “I guess I should just take your word for it, huh? Like when I took your word for it that the fucking documents were destroyed.”
His heart was pounding wildly in his chest. Fuck, this was bad. He was already a little worried that the cocaine in his bloodstream was gonna send him into cardiac arrest, and this conversation wasn’t helping. “Tom…”
“Stop. Saying. My name.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Greg listened to Tom breathing on the end of the line. It was kind of a shitty connection, crackling with every breath, but there was a certain echolike quality, too. Almost like they were having a conversation from opposite ends of a tunnel. “Dude, where are you calling from right now?”
An embarrassed pause. Tom cleared his throat. “Uh, a parking garage.”
Greg pulled a face. The atmosphere on the yacht had been pretty fucking tense, and it had clearly gotten to Tom, but this was just, like, next-level paranoia. Nixon-level. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fucking fantastic,” Tom snarled. “And you know why? Because this—sentient marionette that I’ve been fucking, this stupid motherfucking Pinocchio? Just decided to fuck me in the press because he sprouted a fucking conscience overnight.”
Greg swallowed. “I’m sor—”
“Shut up.” Tom took a shaky breath. “You’re gonna keep your fucking mouth shut, yeah? Because I had this whole thing worked out in my head, and you’ll ruin it if you stammer over it.”
See, this was the thing about Tom. He could never find the right tone. If he wanted to be taken seriously, he came off clownish. His particular brand of dirty talk was squirm-inducing. And here he was trying to threaten Greg. His Michael Corleone impression was shoddy at best.
If Tom was looking to hurt him, he’d be better off outsourcing his labor to someone who actually knew how to get the job done.
But it was… kind of hot, unfortunately. Greg waited for Tom to rip into him. Call him a weasel, or a cocksuck, or a limp dick, or flip through his compendium of Greg-specific insults that he’d been dutifully compiling for the last year or so. But he just breathed heavily on the other end of the line. Right into Greg’s ear. If it wasn’t for the crackle in the connection, Greg might have convinced himself that Tom was here in his bed. Panting into his ear as he pushed into Greg with a thrust. Breath hot on his neck as he snapped his hips and started to move inside him. Greg bit back a moan at the visual.
“Hold on. Are you touching yourself?” Tom asked. He sounded startled. “Is this—is this turning you on?”
Greg couldn’t stop himself from whimpering.
“You fucking creep,” Tom said, after a pause. There was a wondering note in his voice, curiosity overtaking any residual fury that fueled this call. “This is getting you all hot and bothered. You’re sick, you know that, Greg?”
Oh, fuck. Until he met Tom, nobody had ever said his name like that. It usually sounded like disappointment, or a guttural groan of frustration. Ugh, Greg. Goddamn it, Greg. For fuck’s sake, Greg. But Tom had a way of pulling on it like taffy until gossamer strands of spun sugar melted on his tongue. Greeeeg. It was reverent in Tom’s mouth, in his syrupy Midwestern cadence.
“Okay,” he said, and Greg could just picture him nodding to himself, wetting his lips. “Okay, you know what? Get some spit in your hand. Slick it up for me.”
Cradling the receiver between his shoulder and ear, Greg spat into his palm. He ignored the tiny voice in the back of his head that told him, in no uncertain terms, that this was a colossally stupid idea. As usual, he pushed it aside. Destruction of evidence, blackmail, sleeping with his boss, who just so happened to be married to his cousin—like, he was already fucked, basically, so what was one little extra push over the edge of the cliff?
“And, ah. Don’t touch yourself yet,” Tom told him. “Not until I say so. That’s the punishment, see?”
He sounded pleased with himself. Clearly, he’d lost the thread here. Greg could imagine Tom brooding on the flight back from Croatia, running through a litany of vague threats and cribbed lines from shoot-em-up crime films. I know it was you, Greg. You broke my heart. But Tom was enjoying this a little too much for it to be much of a power play. And Greg was pretty sure that he wasn’t supposed to be into it, either.
“You fucked me,” Tom said. His voice was dark, soft as velvet in Greg’s ear, at total odds with the words he was saying. “Bent me over a barrel and fucked me. But it’s your turn now, isn’t it?”
Was he supposed to answer? Was it safe to say anything at all? Greg didn’t really trust himself to say anything intelligible.
“Put your hand on your dick,” Tom instructed, and Greg complied, sighing audibly into the phone. He dimly registered Tom’s laughter on the line. It wasn’t quite a cruel sound, but he kind of got the impression that Tom intended for it to be. “Yeah, like that. And, uh, I want you to—to fuck your fist like it’s my mouth.”
Greg’s lips parted on a moan. Like, who was this punishing, exactly? He dragged his hand along the length of his shaft from base to tip, forming a tight circle with his fingers.
“Nice and slow.” Tom made an approving noise when Greg whined in frustration. “Yeah, that’s right. Teaching you some fucking respect for your superiors. You can’t just have your way with me and expect me to just fucking take it. This isn’t fucking Deep Throat, Greg.”
He laughed at his own shoddy reference, a sharp bark that echoed through the garage.
As far as punishments went, it could have been worse, Greg supposed. He let Tom tell him what to do, let the words wash over him. His spine was melting with every stroke. And, like, was Tom gonna find out if he wasn’t completely paying attention to the half-hearted threats to have someone break his legs? He was pretty sure Tom liked his legs the way they were, in one piece. Couldn’t keep his eyes off those coltish legs of his when Greg was lounging on the top deck in nothing but his swim trunks a few days ago, could he? Like, Tom hadn’t said anything to him directly, but when he tugged Greg into an empty guest cabin to fuck a little while later, trailing his hands up and down Greg’s calves, it wasn’t exactly hard to guess what he was thinking.
“Close?” Tom asked. Greg could hear the dark grin in his voice. “Well, come on. Hurry it up a little. I don’t have pockets full of quarters here, buddy.”
He sped up his thrusts. Imagined Tom on his knees with his mouth full and his ice-blue eyes stinging with tears. Tom flattening him to the bed in an unclaimed guest cabin, helping him draw his knees up to his chest. Sluicing down in the attached shower afterwards, Tom’s warm hand curling around his cock and wringing another orgasm out of him with a wicked grin.
Tom cut into his thoughts, clicked his tongue. “You know, on second thought?” He hummed, mock-thoughtful. “Maybe that’s enough. Hands off.”
Greg stilled his hand. Gasped for breath before he could put up much of a protest. “Um, what?”
“You don’t get to come,” Tom said, enunciating each word with care. “Don’t you get it? I made you, motherfucker. And you think you get to call the shots? No. I don’t think so.”
Greg swept the sweaty hair off his forehead with his spit-slick hand. “Uh,” he said, in a tremulous voice. “Like, what does this have to do with the whole, um, the press conference thing?”
“You’re a fucking imbecile.” Tom’s voice was cold. “Fuck you.”
“Wait,” Greg begged, before Tom could slam the receiver down. “Tom, please. I’m—I’m fucking sorry, man. For giving Kendall the papers, for lying to you. For all of it.”
He heard Tom’s breath hitch. Imperceptible, almost, but it was there. “You’re sorry?”
“I’ll make it up to you,” Greg breathed, gripping the phone hard. “I’ll—like, I’ll talk to Kendall. I’ll do whatever you want, dude.”
Tom was quiet. Then he snorted.
“‘I’ll do whatever you want, dude,’” he sneered, in a rough approximation of Greg’s voice. “Yeah, I don’t think I trust you on that. But maybe, ah.” He paused. When he spoke again, his voice was thick. “Maybe there’s a way for you to start earning it back.”
Greg swallowed. “Anything.”
“Don’t touch yourself,” Tom said. “I’m coming over.”
He hung up.
Greg released a shuddering breath as he replaced the phone on the cradle hook. His dick throbbed, ached for attention, but he held out, folding his arms behind his head while he lay in his tangled, sweaty sheets and waited for the knock at his door.
He might be a bit of a backstabbing Machiavellian fuck, but hey. He kept his promises.