Chapter Text
Jay McCarrol had a problem.
It became obvious to Matt soon after they started living together. The first night they were in their new apartment, sat amongst the wires from the various consoles that they needed to set up, Jay had made some claim about how he was going to need some time alone, time to decompress after their busy days spent together coming up with (and failing) plans, time without Matt barging in and demanding his attention. It was clearly bullshit that his crazy stupid and crazy hot mom had fed him in another attempt to make him out to be more delicate than he actually was but Matt had shrugged and told him to do whatever he wanted. They didn’t need to be joined at the hip every second of every day. It would get them where they wanted to be a lot quicker if they were but if Jay wanted to be a baby and hide himself away in his room, then Matt decided it would be better not fight him about it and instead let him have his recuperation time.
Only, he wasn’t meditating or reading a self-help book or taking a nap. He wasn't coming back fresh and focused and ready to take on whatever the next step was in the plan that would surely, definitely, one hundred percent get them a show at the Rivoli. Matt didn’t have x-ray vision but he didn’t need to see into Jay’s room to know what was going on behind his closed door. The walls in their apartment were thin, they muffled little to nothing and Jay seemingly had no idea how to turn down the volume on his computer.
On his way to bed that night after battling and failing to connect the Wii by himself, Matt had heard the painfully high-pitched squealing of some girl getting her brains fucked out from all the way at the bottom of the stairs, getting louder and louder as he ascended and drew closer to Jay’s room.
As he walked past to get to his room, he caught the low, breathless grunts which he could immediately identify as being Jay's, a little out of time with the woman's moaning, like he was trying to keep up with the pace she was getting fucked at but lacked the stamina. They'd had plenty of sleepovers together throughout the years, all of which had been at Matt’s house, and at least a handful of times Matt had woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of sheets rustling and soft moans that appeared to have escaped being held back. Any such attempt at subtlety had been disregarded now though and Matt found himself unable to stop himself from imagining what Jay looked like with his hand wrapped around his cock as he forced his feet to keep moving down the hallway and into his bedroom.
He could picture him so vividly, hunched over the desk where his monitor sat while his fist bounced a hundred miles an hour. It wasn't the first time he had thought about what Jay looked like when he was touching himself but it wasn't a gay thing, it was just how Matt's brain worked. Sometimes Jay needed corralling, he needed guidance and to be told what he wanted and in order to do that, Matt needed to know everything about him, even the stuff that seemed inconsequential to their musical goals. Who knew when his masturbation habits and preferences would come in handy but they might, anything was possible, their lives were strange.
It would be a one time thing, Matt determined. He would make a big song and dance about embarrassing Jay, maybe he would perform an exaggerated re-enactment of what he had pictured Jay looking like, his Quasimodo posture at his desk, moaning like a little bitch, and he would learn that he needed to either wear headphones when he wanted to jerk off or wait until Matt wasn't around to catch him out.
Jay did his best to try and hide his embarrassment when Matt brought up what he had overheard the next morning, his eyes pointed down at his bowl of cereal as Matt mimed jerking off while sat on the piano stool, twitching leg up in the air and faced twisted in ugly pleasure included, and then shrugged away the responsibility of apologising or admitting that maybe he had been a little loud. There was no need for him to say he was going to be more careful or considerate because Matt had already gone ahead and assumed that was going to be the case. Jay wasn't a creep, not in that way at least. It was a little misstep, an adjustment that they couldn't have made before they started living together and now they had addressed it and could get back to the important things, like figuring out what order they were going to display their video games in.
Except, that wasn't what happened. That night, Jay went to bed early again, missing the last twenty five minutes of the film they had been watching, and when Matt pulled himself off the couch, he heard a repeat of that awful shrill shrieking he had been made to suffer through the night before.
Maybe he needed to jerk off before he went to sleep. That was normal, by the time Matt found himself in bed he had usually exerted all the energy he had and couldn't be bothered to touch himself but Jay was lazier, he probably needed to burn whatever was left-over before he could drift off. Why he had to watch the most obnoxious porn ever to hit the internet to do that was less clear to him and as he passed by Jay's room, he made sure to pound on his door a couple times to let him know he could still hear his filth.
He could handle having to listen to Jay's jerk off material for a couple minutes at night because that was his best friend. He was willing to deal with the good, the bad and the ugly if it meant having him around. After a short while of laying in bed, hands clasped over his chest as he imagined Jay's eyes pinned to a pair of plastic tits barely able to bounce on some bitch's chest, he would hear Jay cum with a groan and then shortly after the video would be stopped, leaving the whole apartment in silence. It didn't make him uncomfortable, there was very little Jay could do that would actually be too much for him to handle but it did annoy him that he couldn't keep his hands out of his pants long enough to finish hanging out.
It wasn't only at night though, as Matt was quick to find out. Jay had the impulse control of a child, the second he wanted something he had to have it and if that thing was to go up to his room and watch girls get fucked by dicks as big as their forearms then he was going to do that. Nothing was off limits, no time so precious that he wasn't willing to throw it aside in order to go fuck his own fist. He would ditch in the middle of a rehearsal, claiming that he had to do something and would be right back, only to then make Matt wait twenty minutes before he returned, red in the cheeks and with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. He wasn't slick about it, that was what pissed Matt off the most. Jay didn't care that he was wasting his time. Some whore on his computer screen was more important to him than Matt was and he wasn't even trying to pretend it wasn't true.
One day, while Jay was out of the apartment, Matt snuck into his room to look through his internet history. He wanted names and faces, to be able to identify the stupid girls who demanded so much of Jay's time and stole it away from him. What quickly became clear to Matt after a cursory glance through Jay's history was that his lifelong best friend and new roommate was a certified pervert.
He jumped genres with ease, going from "MILF with Big Tits Fucking her Pool Boy" to "Hot EMO Girl gives crazy head!!!" As he clicked random links in his history, he found a clip of a pretty red-head tied to a bed, gagged and blindfolded while a man double her size drilled her into the mattress, followed by a blurry two minute video presumably filmed on a phone of a woman wearing what appeared to be a McDonalds uniform rubbing her clit furiously in a bathroom stall.
On one instance, a few days before, he had just typed "boobs" into the search bar and cycled through what came up on google images. It was all pretty normal porn stuff from what Matt had gathered from his own exploration of the sites, but occasionally there was something that would take him off guard. One link led him to a video of a man tied up in bed, a similar position to what the ginger girl had been in before, but nothing happened throughout the fifteen minute video. He laid there, erection bobbing like a buoy on the ocean, and waited. There was nothing specifically unnerving about the video but Matt couldn’t see the point of it, or why Jay would have chosen to watch it.
While most of his history was there, there were gaps where Jay had gone through and deleted evidence of certain links he had clicked on. If this was the sort of thing he was okay with Matt accidentally discovering, then what the fuck did he think was too far? It would have been a relief to find out that he was looking up some real weird stuff like girls shitting on each other or whatever, it would have given him some good leverage and blackmail material, but not knowing what Jay would want to hide left him with a world of possibilities to consider, many of which were horrific and borderline illegal.
It had been a while since Jay had spoken about having any interest in a real life girl, so he was probably just pent up, horny and trying to get rid of those feelings of inadequacy Matt could sometimes see him battling with. He'd take him being a porn addict over bringing girls back to the house but neither option left any room for him. Something had to change, if he didn't step in and help, Jay was going to completely fry his brain, break his dick and fuck up his wrist so badly he'd never be able to play the piano again. The entire foundation their life was built on top of was going to crumble because Jay couldn't stop jerking off. He needed to be reminded of what was really important.
Jay was lucky that Matt's entire life revolved around coming up with solutions to problems, both the ones they created and the ones the world shoved upon them. Like a lot of his plans, Jay was going to kick up a fuss and try to back out what needed to be done but he cared about getting a show at the Rivoli and whether he wanted to admit it or not, this obsession of his was a problem and he ultimately would go along with what Matt told him was a good idea, even if everything in him was screaming that it was wrong; Matt had always known how to manipulate his desires into something that could benefit them both.
When Jay was an hour later home than he said he would be, Matt started to worry that his proclivity for putting his hand down his pants was not only an apartment dwelling problem. Maybe he was in some public bathroom stall now, jerking off into a toilet bowl while he looked at some poorly drawn depiction of a penis graffitied onto the wall. He was going to end up on the street if he wasn't careful, cock out for everyone to see, a laughing stock he was going to have to walk past and pretend he didn’t know. It made Matt's skin crawl, picturing his best friend having fallen so far from grace.
"This is an intervention." The words shot out of Matt's mouth like bullets the second that Jay's scruffy visage rounded the corner from their front door. With only a small bag of groceries, Matt's fears about Jay's public perversions felt immediately confirmed and he threw himself up from the couch where he had tried to position himself looking as serious and stern as possible. "Sit down."
Years of friendship with Matt had taught Jay to be prepared at all moments, to never fully let his guard down. His childhood jumpiness was something that had to be wringed out of him in order for him to be able to exist alongside Matt, he had to be trained into being comfortable around someone prone to volatile outbursts and mood swings; it wasn’t always genuine but false comfort still had the ability to soothe, it was just a hell of a lot easier to shatter.
"An intervention?" Despite being awake for hours, Jay still looked tired. He had a perpetual sleepiness about him, his fluffy, unkept hair made it easy to assume he had just woken up and deep set, down-turned eyes had the same effect. He always looked like a grumpy cat who had been awoken from a four hour nap and was looking out for the nearest soft spot to curl himself up on. He put down the plastic bag that appeared to have a couple of frozen pizzas, a bottle of Diet Coke and a carton of milk inside and tucked his hands into the front pouch of his hoodie. "For what?
"You're an addict."
"A what?" The seriousness of Matt's tone was almost as astounding as the words he had spoken. Usually there was an edge to even his most sombre of confessions, his inability to be actually vulnerable without picturing how it looked from the outside and turning it into a joke made it so they had had very few earnest conversations that didn't end with Matt begging to break the tension with ill-timed references and plots pulled from thin air. It was a little scary to hear him sounding so solemn about something so otherwise ridiculous.
"An addict. You're addicted to porn." If it was embarrassing to hear, it was twice as embarrassing to say out loud. The look on Jay's face would have been funny in any other situation, his bugged-out eyes and comically gaping mouth would have told Matt that he was on the right track, he was saying something so outrageous that he must have been treading new and exciting ground but he didn't want to battle with Jay to be taken seriously. There was nothing funny about what their futures had the potential to look like. "Don't try and deny it, I've already looked through your browser history and it's disgusting, Jay. It's— I'll admit it. I'm worried for you. You've got a serious fucking problem."
"You did what?" Jay's voice had always been whiny but it rose a couple more octaves in horror, the kind of disgust Matt had only heard from him a handful of times in all the time they had been friends. It made him feel like a dog being scolded for pissing inside, but instead of feeling guilty, it only made him want to act out more. "Matt, that's so—"
“You’re gonna rub the skin clean off, dude. What girl is going to fuck you with a dick like that? She’s gonna think you’re a burn victim. She’s going to see your fucking schlong and she's going to think what the fuck? Ew! That’s fucking disgusting. This dude fucks open flames. You’re going to pull your pants down and bang— the sight of your dick has made that girl a carpet muncher. Think about it, bird. You have got to chill the fuck out and learn how to control yourself."
Humiliation hit Jay in two stages. First, he tried to convince himself that he was misunderstanding the situation. He was known to miss the mark, to take things too literally or not enough, sometimes Matt could watch Jay's brain work as he tried to dissect a situation into its most basic elements and figure out how he was supposed to react from there. When it was impossible to pretend that he wasn't being made an idiot out of, the shame would take over and drape a full body red flush over him, clinging in particular to the apples of his cheeks and his chest which Matt couldn't see but the red hoodie he was wearing did a good enough job of re-enacting what colour his skin was underneath. He continued to stare, maybe in an attempt at trying to intimidate Matt into shutting up but when had that ever worked?
“We’re never going to get a show at the Rivoli if you can’t keep your hands out of your pants." From the other side of the room, Matt stood in preparation for an assault. That was another way that Jay showed his anger, he got physical. He was stronger than he appeared and despite him being the one dressed in red, he looked more like the bull getting ready to charge than the matador. Matt teetered from the balls of his feet to his toes, getting ready to jump out of Jay's way if he tried to lunge for him. "You're going to get us arrested for public indecency. We're going to be up on stage and you're going to get the urge to jerk off and then your dick is going to be on everyone's phone for the rest of time. I'm not going down with your sinking ship, buddy. I won't do it. We're taking care of this once and for all."
Jay's comebacks were never all that good but usually he tried to push through, letting Matt win without any sort of fight allowed for his ego to get too big and even if he failed at coming up with anything even remotely smart to say, trying showed he wasn't as submissive and placid as Matt liked to make him out to be. There was so much he could've said, a million insults he could have pulled out of his ass about Matt's own gross behaviour, even shit that was made up still had some merit in their fights so long as it was said in the right way but Jay stood there and clamped his mouth shut, lips pressed so tightly together that his mouth was one thin, straight line.
Matt had been anticipating more fight from him and being shown none threatened to shake him off balance. He thought about sitting down again, maybe climbing up on the couch to write out his plan on the whiteboard, yet all he found himself capable of doing was standing there, staring Jay down. There was no better time to rip the band-aid off, once it was over they could go back to doing the things they were supposed to be doing, hanging out as friends without the threat of Jay running off to masturbate looming over them.
"From now on... you're allowed to jerk off once a week." Matt paused in anticipation of Jay interrupting, then thought better of giving him an opening to try and argue and continued to lay out the rules. "I'm thinking... Thursdays? No, you can jerk off on Wednesdays. You'll be all pent up with excitement, the weekend's almost here, it's update day, perfect time for you to exorcise those perverted demons."
“I’m not doing that, Matt.” Jay finally spoke up, his words only barely escaping from between his tightly shut lips. His hands were still hidden in the front pouch of his hoodie but Matt could tell that he had clenched them into fists. He was probably thinking about what the nearest thing was to him that he could throw, or whether tackling him to the ground and pummelling the shit out of him for making such a degrading and unfair accusation was possible. They had fought over less, never needing a reason to get their hands on each other in a show of strength, perhaps not masculine vigour but something along those lines.
Hearing his voice calmed Matt's growing nerves and his shoulders relaxed from their place near his ears. He recognised this Jay, this guy was his. The scaredy cat, the little boy who had to wear headphones cause the world was too much for him to handle. This was how they had always been, Matt having to make the hard decisions, to take the first steps because Jay was a follower through and through. What even was there to be worried about? It was the uncharted territory that was making him antsy, that was all.
"I heard you jerk off six times yesterday, bird. Six times. That's—I don't know how you even produce that much cum, dude. This might be a medical phenomenon. You might have something majorly wrong with your balls. I'm trying to save your life."
"I said I'm not doing that." A little firmer, though he still lacked any real venom to cut through his obvious embarrassment. He sounded like a kid on the playground who had finally remembered he could stand up to his bullies but lacked any skill in cruelty. "Do you know how gay you sound right now?"
It wasn't gay, in fact Matt saw it as the opposite of gay but he knew better than to try and defend his intentions. Jay would cling onto anything to try and gain some control back and he needed to knock him off the high horse he was trying to climb upon.
“Oh, but you are. This is how things are gonna be from now on, bird. If you try and jerk off again outside of your allotted time, I’m going to break your door down Jack Nicholson style and fucking..." He paused for a second, then for a couple more. "...kill you." No, that was too far. It was ridiculous, impossible to use as an actual threat. Better to bite back with something Jay would actually feel sensitive about. "You sound like a girl when you cum. You're loud too, I'll hear it from anywhere in the house. And I know what you're thinking, oh, whatever. I'll just wait until Matt leaves and then I'll start—" He pumped his hand a couple of times in front of his crotch and scrunched up his face in faux pleasure before continuing on. "—But I thought about that and I've changed the Wi-Fi password. I'm gonna turn it off when I'm not here, so you won't be able to access all your... your material. I can't stop you from jacking it completely but I've got a feeling you need that stuff. You've got no imagination left, Jaybird. You've cooked your fucking brain."
"I don't sound like a girl." It was easier to grab onto one specific detail in Matt's tirade than try to break down and dismantle every point he made. He could have called out Matt's control freak behaviour or his botched murder threat but trying to emasculate him was a favourite tactic of Matt's, something he did all the time knowing that it irked Jay more than most things and it was too obvious an attempt at hurting his feelings to ignore. "How would you even know that, huh? You haven't—"
"What happened to you, bird? Did your mom not let you jerk it in her house? Or did she find one too many of your jizz socks? You used to get girls!"
"I get girls!" Finally baited into action, Jay pulled his hands free from his hoodie and jerked one accusatory finger in Matt's direction, all while Matt hopped back onto the couch in preparation of an attack.
"Oh you do, huh? We've been here for like, what, a month? The only girls I've seen in here are the ones on your computer. Prostitutes, Jay. Hookers!" Jay lurched forwards and went to grab him, though not before Matt could jump to the other couch and then leap to where Jay had been frozen in the kitchen. Instinctively, he thought about picking up a knife. He didn't, but he thought about it. "You know you're better than that."
"Dude, it's porn! It's not... not heroin." Like a dog with a squirrel, watching Matt dart away from him only made Jay want to catch him more. Thankfully their apartment was small and there was only so much space for him to try and keep in between them, making it so that when Jay tried to grab at him again, Matt had nowhere to go but towards the front door or to try and hop over the piano stool. He opted for the latter and miscalculated the speed he needed to be going at to escape, leaving an opening for Jay to grab him by the front of his t-shirt and yank him over to him.
Matt was smaller than Jay was but not weaker, he also possessed a certain amount of grace and dexterity that seemed to have missed every other part of Jay's body but his hands. Instead of just letting Jay shake him about, he too got Jay by the front of his hoodie and pulled, using all of his weight to try and throw him across the room, which looked more like forcing him to stumble a couple inches to the left where he then lost his balance and fell over. There was nowhere to go but to follow after him, landing on top of Jay who made a sound far too similar to the ones Matt had been listening to barely muffled through the wall for the past month.
"Whose to say it won't get that bad?" Matt let go of Jay's hoodie and fought to grab his wrists. For a moment they scrambled like teenage girls who didn't know how to fight before Matt managed to pin Jay down, pressing all of his weight down through his forearms against Jay's biceps. It wasn't the smartest position as it let Jay have his hands free and gave him access to try and pull at his hair and slap at his face but it worked for the moment and gave him the opportunity to keep on trying to sell Jay on his anti-porn pitch. "You've got a problem, bird! We shouldn't tempt fate!"
"This is insane. You're insane." Jay squirmed beneath him and grabbed a chunk of Matt's hair but before he was able to pull it, Matt sat up quickly, yanking himself out of Jay's grasp, then shuffled up his wiggling body and sat on his chest. All of the air was pushed out from Jay's lungs and his hands immediately flew up to try and force Matt away, to little success. "Fuck you! I'm not doing this."
"You don't have a choice." With the added advantage of being on top of him, Matt took hold of Jay's skinny wrists as he tried to reach up and shove him off of him and used all his strength to push him down till they were pinned to the floor. This was how they always ended up. If Matt were willing to deal with the consequences of what it meant, he would have realised that maybe Jay was letting him win some of their fights so he could be held down and have the illusion of choice taken away from him. With Jay writhing beneath him, Matt leaned down so their faces were only an inch or two apart, crowding himself into Jay's personal space. "You're doing it or I'm out. I'll leave, Jay. I can't live with a sex pest like you. You know your mommy isn't going to cough up enough to pay both my rent and yours. We're at a fucking... it's checkmate, bitch. You have to do what I say."
It was a low blow, bringing his mother up and highlighting Jay's lack of financial security but Jay had been the one to escalate things, he knew Matt played dirty and if he didn't want to get his feelings hurt, then he should have just agreed from the start and saved them both the hassle of fighting for dominance. Matt's dad was more than happy to keep sending him money because it kept him away from the rest of the family, he didn't consider himself lucky in that regard but at least his parents were upfront with him about their disinterest, Jay's mom was stringing him along with the promise of love one day that they both knew would never come. Jay needed him because no one else cared enough to want to help him. Matt's disgust was a sign of love.
"This is so stupid." Jay brought his knees up a couple of times to try and jam them into the small of Matt's back and force him off but he was a brick wall, completely impenetrable. "You're a fucking asshole. You're a control freak. Get the hell off me!"
"Having a porn addiction is more stupid." Matt pointed out, pulling away from Jay's face long enough to turn and wipe his nose against his shoulder. He could feel sweat beginning to bead at his hairline from the unexpected physical exertion. "I'm trying to help you, be fucking grateful."
"Get the fuck off of me!"
"Promise that you're gonna do what I tell you." They could stay there all day if Jay really wanted to keep putting up a fight, pretending that he wasn't the porn-rotted freak that Matt now knew him to be. They had other things they could have been doing but Matt could be painfully stubborn when he needed to be, never for very long because he didn't like not feeling good and not having Jay under his thumb felt like shit but this wasn't a fight over who cheated on Mario Kart, he was going to be worried about Jay till he was back acting like he was supposed to, obedient and eager to follow whatever Matt told him to do. "Swear on your mom's life— on your grandma's life. If you jerk off at any time I don't say you can, you're gonna kill your mom and your grandma. That's real, Jay. Swear it!"
"Get off!"
"Promise me!" He felt like a crazy wife in an old movie, getting all up in his personal space, driven to insanity by the salacious acts of her husband and the women he was obsessed with. He was tearing their family apart with all the thinking he was doing with his dick instead of his brain. Didn't he care? Didn't he want to be better? Matt refused to be the other woman while Jay was off thinking he was the main character. "Promise me, Jay!"
"Fuck off."
"Swear it!" Jay's body grew limp beneath him and Matt wanted to grab him by the shoulders and jerk him around like a ragdoll. He hated it when his toys didn't act the way they were supposed to.
"Matt!"
"Say you swear!"
"Okay! I swear! I swear, Matt. I swear." Like a dam, Jay broke. He began to babble and squirm again, like he had realised playing dead was not going to work and like an animal caught in a trap chose to believe instead that frantic fighting might save his life. When he got this way, something deep in Matt told him to keep pressing forward, to try and push Jay to his breaking point just to see what it looked like. He liked to roughhouse and sometimes Jay did too, usually only when he knew he could win.
"Bird—"
"I fucking swore, okay? I promise! Can you let me up?" Jay was many things but a good liar was not one of them. Maybe he would change his mind later on but in that moment, fighting for his freedom beneath Matt’s weight, he appeared to be honest. He may not have agreed with Matt’s assessment of what was going on with him but that was just their life together. They were one half of the same person and then different species at the drop of a hat.
Finally, Matt let go of Jay's wrists and dismounted him, falling into a heap beside him as Jay scrambled to get up and made a dart straight for the stairs.
"No jerking off! The clock starts now!" Matt called after him, only to be met with a distant “fuck you” from the top of the stairs before Jay slammed his door shut.
It was Friday afternoon, meaning that Jay had five days till he was going to be allowed to cum again. He may have promised that he was going to do as Matt told him but that was because he was desperate and when he got desperate he'd do anything to get what he wanted. It wasn't going to be easy for him to kick this addiction but until they did, nothing could go back to normal.