Title:  Instinct
Author:  luceononuro
Pairing : B/J
Disclaimer: all for fun
Warnings: Spoilers to 507

Author’s Notes: Thank-you to lesser_gods and darksylvia for the technical beta and their collective patience! And once again I pay tribute to plumsuede. Although I tried to be quietly dignified while talking to you, I was sqeeing wildly in my head. Thank-you for being such a generous soul.

Dedication: To Michael B. Although you will never read this story, I finally get your letter.



I didn’t expect him to hug me back. I didn’t expect the quiet acceptance. I expected biting sarcasm and nonchalant dismissal. I didn’t expect it to feel so final - although I know it is. I guess I never know what to expect.

When the door closes behind me, I hesitate for a fraction of a second before I head down to the street. I know this is the way it has to be.

At the sidewalk, I stop and lean against the building. The brick feels good behind my back, something solid to ground me while everything else shifts.

I wonder how long it will take Brian to find the letter that I left. But then I remember that he notices everything, which means he is probably sitting, contemplating the envelope, wondering what damage I chose to inflict upon my exit. He needn’t worry. It’s more of the same. I thought maybe I could be more eloquent in writing. Less the whiny, needy person I have dissolved into over the last weeks. I want him to read it but I don’t want to stay to hear his response. Death by a thousand cutting remarks is still death after all.

I know that the events that led to me leaving have evolved over the last four years. But the impetus to finally pack my bags came the other night.

Brian had come home from Babylon, no doubt after having had his dick serviced numerous times. But he was still focused on the fuck he didn’t get. The trick that turned him down.

That’s my Brian. Completely overlooking the bird in hand, so to speak. He tried to initiate sex and I declined. He reacted by calling me a “sulky housewife.” I think my witty retort was “go fuck yourself.”

I can usually spot a volatile situation and walk away, but he was spoiling for a fight, frustrated and fearful over a threat to his supremacy on Liberty Ave. Shocked to have become one of the aging club-boys he mocked. Brian had meant to leave them wanting more. Maybe his timing isn’t so perfect.

He launched into a diatribe about emotion ruining sex. That fucking was about urge and satisfaction. That monogamy was a notion made up by breeders and lesbians to justify otherwise sad and unimaginative lives.

Something inside me snapped. I was angry too. Angry at his insistence that we stay frozen in time. His insistence that capitulating to tradition or stability in anyway was a pathetic sell-out. His insistence that being the best homosexual you can be is about sex and winning, and not about love and commitment.

“I know what I feel, Brian.” I yelled, “I know what I want. We’re more than animals, for Christ’s sake.”

“Sex is about instinct, Justin, you’ve been socialized to think it’s about something else. What we have here works. If the Stepford Fags would stop trying to validate their lives by making ours look inadequate, everything would be fine.” He was being dismissive and had turned to walk away.

He was surprised when I grabbed him by the arm and ground out, “Not for me. Not anymore.”

I should have known that Brian would strike back when threatened, but what he said next still rocked me.

“Well look at you – back from L.A. and you’ve seen the light. And it shines out of the asses of the homos in the burbs. I wonder, Sunshine, if it would all look so good if you were still banging Rage and slurping cocktails with the stars. Don’t try and make your disappointment my cue for rehabilitation. I like my life – just - the way - it is.”

With that, he stalked away to the shower. And I was left feeling…..empty. Feeling like the promise I’d made, to accept him for who he is, was made out of hopefulness, but that all I had left was defeat. Defeat by his resolve, his willfulness and his arrogance. Defeat by my inability to accept him on the terms I had agreed to. Defeat by a situation that had become so polarized there were no gray areas to hide in anymore. I was overcome by the knowledge that I had to be the one to end it.

I finally lay on the bed, expecting him to leave when he came out of the shower, but instead he knelt behind me. I could feel the anger palpitating from him in waves. The shower hadn’t dissipated it at all. He crawled over my back, pulling down the sheets and hovering inches away from me. There’s something completely feral about Brian when he’s angry and desperate. Desperate to assert himself, to affirm his alpha status. Desperate to regain control.

I’d seen it before. The night of the bowling tournament. The night I fucked Ethan and came home to our bed. His kiss had felt like he was eating me alive. His eyes were completely wild, yet focused on regaining what he thought he’d lost. But when he searched for his mark, he found someone else’s. His rejection after that was guaranteed.

I felt like we had come so far from that night, but here we were again. Brian staking out his territory, and me held hostage by the intensity that is his core.

As he breathed me, in I knew that he was beyond wooing me. He didn’t have any capacity to charm me or entice me. He felt threatened and his demeanor was stripped from casual observer of his own seductiveness to insistent and demanding predator. There was no room for finesse. He was going to claim what was his.

His breath hit my back in hot puffs as I lay watchful and waiting. He ran his nose through my hair and down my back, and then buried his face in the crack of my ass. He bit my left cheek, hard, and then butted me with his head. I was stunned at how demanding he was. How insistent he was in asserting himself. He wanted me to respond. Wanted me to rut and moan.

He sunk his teeth into my lower back and I arched and twisted away from him, my anger flaring like a bright flame. But some part of me responded to his dominance. To his claiming me. And fuck the scientists that say humans don’t respond to pheromones, because everything he exuded spoke to me in a way more primal than I can understand. So primal that it overrides my ability to think.

It’s why I need to get away from him.

When he rolled me over, I met his look defiantly, but my body had already betrayed me, my erection arching away from my body – answering his call. He growled in the back of his throat, and on anyone else it would sound affected, on Brian it sounds intrinsically menacing. I wanted to cover my ears but instead I closed my eyes and struggled to breathe.

He began licking and biting me again – my neck, my nipples, my belly – then rolled his face through the spit on my body so that he and I were both marked with our combined essence. When we finally looked at each other I was shocked at the rawness of his gaze, how untamed and frantic he looked. It’s like the mask he always wears had slipped and I could see what drives him. I wanted to soothe him, to tell him that what was forcing us apart was the same thing that holds us together. I felt the tears well and I reached out to touch his face. But he moved faster than I did, cloaking his cock and driving into me so hard that I arched and screamed his name. The pain of unaided entry burned through my body as I gasped for breath while clutching him to me. His presence was so visceral I could think of nothing else but finding some place to scramble to…to gain some purchase…to regain some power.

He pushed deep into my body, enveloping me and growling into my ear, “We are animals, Justin. We’re all animals. When we strip away the emotional shit…we need this like we need air, and food, and water.”

He licked the sweat that pooled in the hollow of my throat. Rubbed me in all the spots inside that only he knows….and I told him that… “Only you know me like this, Brian. I only feel this way when I’m with you.” And then it was all too much, I felt my orgasm sweep over me in waves while I clutched at him and bellowed my frustration and hurt to the beat of my hammering heart.

He barely lost a stroke, flipping me over and thrusting in again. Pulling me back and up against his chest, spreading my legs with his thighs, entering me with deep strokes that had my mind screaming at me to run at the same time my body was heating beyond human endurance. He rolled my balls and I sobbed, lolling my head against his shoulder, feeling my erection growing again, knowing what he was going to do. Knowing that he was ruining me for anyone else.

“This is our nature, Justin,” Brian hissed. “This is my nature.”

He pulled back and began tapping my prostate. It hurt, too much, too soon, but I came anyway, thrashing on him, incoherently pleading for this to be enough. For me to be enough. He slid out of me and rolled me onto my back, and while drawing deep, shuddering breaths, he covered me with his cum, rubbing it into my skin.

I will always bear his mark.

But even as I lay there, staring back into his now sated gaze, I knew what I had to do.

As long as I am with Brian, I can never fully be me. I’m tired of being his prize, I want to be his mate.

Which brings me to this wall, with my bag at me feet and my resolve slowly growing stronger.

I know better than to think he will fly down the stairs and profess his love. But I hope his heart has enough room to hear what I wrote:

Brian,

I suppose this letter is all too painfully predictable in that you will think it marks my pendulum swing back to where we were three years ago. And I know that I promised that I understood what you expected of me - it’s just that I forgot I had expectations for myself.

I’m more than the boy who wanted romantic picnics on the floor and whispered, heartfelt sentiments. I’m a man. Ready to share the joys and sorrows of life with someone who is prepared to make that commitment as well.

And I know you wonder why anyone brings any ounce of importance to intimacy and sex? Why be impaled on some out-dated, hetero-sexual and inhibiting need for a bond built on faithfulness? Why have this sickly sentimental idea that there has to be a productive, meaningful relationship first or that sex degrades? So what the hell – fuck the trick – because easing the pressure in your balls is enough?

I believe it’s so much more than that. More than the animalistic act you’ve reduced it to. But you’re right, Brian, we are like them in so many ways.

Who needs magic and mystery? Well maybe it’s magic and mystery that an Antarctic penguin will hunt all over hell and gone to find the right pebble to carry in his beak and lay between the feet of his intended, hoping for their favour.

Maybe sex is a simple bodily function. But bald eagles fly as high as they possibly can , up into the thinnest air, making the elegant flight patterns of intended mating all the way up, then cleave to each other and fall , fall , fall, mating as they fall, fluttering, plummeting down towards the great rock mountains.

Maybe it is all about nature and instinct, but the Tibetan bar-headed goose and his gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the ether; wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky, time and time again making great bugle sounds. The behaviourists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns so they don’t call this ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live up to fifty years and they mate for life. They celebrate this same way year after year. If one dies the other never mates again

Perhaps we are animals, Brian.

It’s just that while you were so busy stalking your prey, you didn’t notice that I had dropped a pebble at your feet.

J.