we're gonna win this time!

No, he tells himself, stop it, while rising beneath his panicked thoughts is a chorus of rotten, rotten, rotten, rotten. He has his answer, he supposes. Secretly he knew he wouldn’t like it.

The cheating is bad enough—God, cheating, he’s a fucking cheater, it burns like acid in his mouth—but to do it with a contestant? To do it with Sascha? Hasn’t he fucked up Sascha’s life enough already? With the cheating scandal—which he should probably call the other cheating scandal now, Jesus fucking Christ, Griffin—and Underground Wastebasket, and the challenge, and—

Griffin is really struggling to see a single reason Sascha should even want to be around him after this. Except, of course, for the fact that Griffin desperately needs him to still want that. He’s gotten a taste of him now and he already knows he won’t forget it. For all the good that does him.

Vic shifts in her sleep, sighing, and the guilt is briefly so overpowering Griffin might throw up.

He needs to get out of this bed. He needs to—to leave, to clear his head—he needs to—

—see Sascha—

Griffin flinches and shuts his eyes. No, he does not need that. That is dead last on the list of things he needs. That either of them need. It’s definitely too late to start caring about his duties as a mentor now of all times, but if he doesn’t pull back and try to get a clear head, to think for once in his fucking life, it scares him to think of what might happen.

The worst part is how easy it was.

He can’t. He can’t do this. Griffin pushes himself up, flinging the duvet off his body. Stifling. Too hot. He turns to place his feet flat on the floor, trying to pull the coolness of the hardwood up into his body. He looks down and immediately wishes he hadn’t—the sight of his cock half-hard in his boxers is that extra bit of condemnation he really didn’t need. Griffin groans quietly and covers his eyes with a hand, leaning back. Fuck me.

“Griffin?”

His stomach tries to leave his body by way of his ass. “Shit,” he hisses, glancing over his shoulder. Victoria blinks drowsily at him from her side of the bed, her red hair pouring over the pillow like spilled wine. His heart doesn’t slow any, a nervous patter sitting high in his throat. He tries to look normal. “Sorry,” he says in a whisper, voice tight. “Can’t sleep.” He shifts his weight forward, teetering on the edge of standing, hands curled tight into the sheet beneath him. He wants to bolt. “I think I’ll… go check on Allegra.” He can’t even meet her eyes as he says it. God, Vic.

“Mmkay.” She relaxes back into the bed, shutting her eyes. “Don’t stay up too long…” Her voice trails off as she drops away again.

Griffin watches her for a long, quiet minute, practically unblinking, until he’s sure she’s asleep again. Then he stands, tiptoes to the door, and slips out into the hallway.

He breathes easier once he’s out of the room and hates himself for it. For a lot of things, really. What’s one more to add to the list?

He walks softly to Allegra’s room, avoiding all the spots in the hall where he knows the old floor makes a racket, and peeks inside. She’s just as they left her, flat on her stomach with her head turned to the side, mouth wide open. She snuffles and smacks her lips as Griffin watches, rubbing her cheek against the duvet before she settles back down with a contented sound. He smiles despite himself, fondness like a bruise in his chest. The decorative throw from the foot of the bed has slipped a little from where Sascha draped it over her.

Sascha. And Griffin’s right back to square one. His smile dies.

How many more people will he fuck over? How many more lives will he ruin before he’s through? Why can’t he ever be satisfied with just ruining his own? He has to drag everyone he cares about down with him. It doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore—it’s gravitational, a fucking riptide around him that sucks everything out to sea. He ruins things. He ruins people. He knows this. Why can’t he stop?

Why is Sascha what makes him want to stop?

He leaves Allegra where she lays—door cracked so he can hear if she calls, just in case—and drifts through the house like a ghost. He runs his hands over the walls, blank eyes roaming unseeing over the picture frames. He doesn’t come here often. He can’t remember the last time he did. So many memories crowd the place, some so close that sometimes he feels like he could reach out and touch them as they pass.

And now another memory joins their number. Sascha, in his childhood home. Sascha, kneeling between his thighs. Sascha, laughing and pressing their shoulders together.

His hands, his mouth, his breath, his taste, his voice. All inextricable now. Fuck. Griffin hadn’t meant to let him in like that—he hadn’t even known it was happening until it was too late.

…but he had meant to. He had known. He had… wanted it. Griffin presses his knuckles into his eyes so hard that stars spot and flare against his eyelids. Good. Maybe they’ll burn Sascha out.

“Does your acceptance expire?”

“Nope.”

Jesus.

He lowers his hands, tilting his head back to blink at the ceiling until the spots disappear. He drops his gaze, and there it is. Waiting for him.

Griffin hesitates. He glances in the direction of his room. His bed. His wife. Then—dreading it, unable to do anything else—he moves toward the basement stairs.

This is pathetic, he tells himself, feeling his way down in the dark. This is really a new fucking low, Caruso. What is he even hoping to find? He knows what’s there. And he knows who isn’t.

He hesitates again in front of the door. It’s slightly ajar. Griffin hasn’t been back down since—

—Sascha’s hand curled around the base of Griffin’s cock, a lewd trail of spit connecting the tip of his tongue to its head, his hair falling in his eyes as he glanced up—

—since they left.

He breathes in deeply. There’s nothing, no lingering trace of Sascha’s cologne. He grinds the disappointment down between his back teeth—pathetic, fucking pathetic—and pushes the door open.

It’s as they left it, open boxes and memorabilia scattered across the floor. Griffin’s eyes go straight to the couch and he feels his skin heat, a wave of goosebumps rolling down his arms. He clears his throat and looks away, and it’s just as much a performance as it would have been if there’d been anyone in the room with him to see.

He starts cleaning up, tossing items back into boxes without much care. He doubts Victoria will find her way down here—no one does except for him (and Sascha, his asshole mind whispers)—but he’d rather not have to explain… anything, really. And if he puts everything back just the way it was, maybe it’ll…

Be like it never happened? Yeah right.

Putting aside the fact that’s impossible, Griffin doesn’t even know if that’s what he wants. He knows it’s what he should want. But the gulf between what Griffin should do and what he does has always been a wide one. He should have pushed Sascha away. He should have kept his distance. Instead, he chose to keep getting closer. He chose to touch Sascha, to encourage the blatant flirtation whenever he could. To linger. To look. At first he was intrigued. Then, a little enamored. Now—now he doesn’t know what he is.

Rotten.

Well, so fucking what?

He glares at the tour t-shirt in his hand, working his jaw slowly back and forth. So what if he’s an awful person? A cheater? Everyone obviously already thinks the worst of him no matter what he does. Would anyone be disappointed to learn this about him? Would anyone even be surprised? Or will they just shake their heads and say “ah, what did you expect, it’s Griffin Reign”?

Fuck them. Fuck all of them.

He throws the shirt into whatever fucking box and shoves the lot of it away against the wall. There. Good as new. He never got his dick sucked down here at all.

Griffin stands in the middle of the empty studio, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to leave. So he flings himself down onto the couch, jaw set, and glares at the opposite wall. He rubs at the deep furrow in his brow, then runs a hand down his face.

He’s exhausted, emotionally and physically. He’s tired of thinking. He needs a drink.

He is also, it must be said, still fucking horny.

“God damn it,” he mutters. He leans back to rest his head on the back of the couch, gaze pointed at the ceiling. Griffin shifts in place, trying to get comfortable, and pointedly folds his hands over his stomach. There. Nothing untoward. He’s just… reflecting. Anyone could walk in and take one look at him and say, oh look, there’s Griffin Reign, being pensive. Fondly recalling past glories, surely. Let’s leave him to it.

In reality his mind has already drifted back to the heat of Sascha’s mouth. He didn’t even last five seconds.

He shuts his eyes and there Sascha is, just as he’s been the whole night, tortuously close. Even before they left the club with Allegra, Griffin had been watching him. He looked good and he knew it, with a sheen of sweat from the dance floor and pants that clung to his legs like a second skin. Griffin knew he loved to dance but it was one thing to watch it on a stage, another thing completely to watch it in a club among a thronging mass of people: the touching, the sliding hands, the eye contact. He was in his element. He’d looked up and spotted Griffin at one point—Sascha might as well have been the only person in the entire place—and he’d smiled.

Griffin knew he was fucked then. Really knew it. And all it had taken was a smile.

Brow furrowing, he keeps his eyes firmly shut as one of his hands drifts down his stomach. He touches himself through his briefs, hissing as he finds his dick almost painfully hard. Just thinking about Sascha’s smile. What is wrong with him?

Plenty of people before Sascha have tried it with Griffin, even knowing he’s married. It started feeling actually insulting after a point—like they thought, just because of who he was, he’d fall into bed with anyone who batted their eyelashes nicely enough. Yeah, he’s a flirt, he likes the attention, but Griffin prided himself on staying loyal. It was bare minimum, sure, but it felt like a small moral victory. He isn’t allowed many of those. See? I’m not so bad. I’m not as bad as you all fucking think.

Turns out he is. He’s exactly that kind of scumbag. All it took was—what? The right circumstances? The wrong ones?

The right person?

Griffin’s breath shudders in his chest as he palms himself. God, this is so fucked. He shouldn’t be doing any of this. He shouldn’t even be entertaining it.

Too late for that, though, isn’t it? Damage is done. He might as well—

“Fuck,” Griffin whispers, throat bobbing as he swallows.

Might as well—

He looks down through his lashes at the empty space between his splayed knees. If he lets his eyes unfocus he can practically see Sascha kneeling there again. His tousled golden hair, always an oddly artful mess. The pink plush of his bottom lip, spit-slick and swollen from kissing. The cute little gap in his front teeth. He’d tasted like strawberries. Chapstick, or something. Griffin swipes his bottom lip with his tongue as if he could recapture the taste.

His thoughts float away from him, along with everything that exists outside this room. For the second time that night his awareness of the world shrinks to the four walls of this basement and not an inch further. Nothing else exists. All that matters is the warmth humming under his skin and the way he feels. The way he wants to feel. Here, in this moment, Griffin is someone who knows how to be happy. And it’s simple. Easiest thing in the world.

As far as lies go, it’s an intoxicating one. Familiar, too.

His hand slips beneath his waistband, practically with a mind of its own. Griffin rolls his head back as he curls his fingers around himself, imagining it’s another hand, imagining Sascha is here—he’s come back, or Griffin has followed him to his hotel like he desperately wanted to, like the stupid smitten idiot he is. But it’s not right, not close enough. Sascha’s hand is more slender than his, softer on the fingertips—the shape is all wrong, his calluses catching and setting his teeth on edge.

One handjob and now his body rejects any other touch. However amazing the handjob in question, that’s fucking ridiculous. Griffin yanks his hand out, spits in his palm, and impatiently shoves it back in.

Part of him just wants it over with. Maybe it’s a spell that needs to be broken. An exorcism. He’s still wound up because technically he didn’t finish, though, god, he’d been close. So, okay, he’ll jerk himself off and then it’ll be out of his system and whatever localized fucking madness he experiences when Sascha is in a room with him will stop. Fine. Better for everyone, probably.

Though Sascha doesn’t even have to be in the room, does he? He’s not in this one. There’s just the memory of him, the faintest suggestion, and Griffin is jerking off to it with verve and determination. He would laugh at himself if his breath weren’t coming quicker, heated desperate pants, his teeth locked to keep any errant sounds caged behind them. His free hand clenches into a fist on his thigh, nails biting into his skin.

“Fuck.” He spits in his hand again, desperate, angry at himself, but it’s not enough. He’s just spinning his wheels and going nowhere. He tosses his head back hard in frustration and nearly cracks his neck on the couch.

Okay. Not that fucking serious.

He takes his hand off his dick, folding his arms and stewing in the silence, one knee jogging uselessly in place. He goes to stand, rocks back down, then makes up his mind and gets to his feet. It makes the tent in his boxers even more obvious than it had been sitting down, and he grimaces at himself. He goes to the door to the studio to check that it’s shut, then turns the lights on, blinding himself momentarily with a hiss.

Blinking as his eyes adjust, he finds himself looking at the boxes against the wall. Maybe…

He takes it back. Yanking boxes of his own memorabilia out to dig haphazardly through them, effectively undoing all the work he just did, is the new record-setting low. He can’t even imagine what it might look like from the outside. He must look deranged. Possessed. Certainly far too self-obsessed, which—okay, fair. It’s here somewhere, it has to be, he just fucking put it away—

Griffin drags the tour shirt out with a victorious sound, then immediately feels insane. Rather than dwell on that any longer than he needs to, he paces back to the couch, falling onto it and kicking his feet up onto one of the arms. He gnaws on the inside of his cheek, holding it bunched to his chest.

Now he chooses to get in his head about it?

“Ooh.” Sascha held the tour shirt flat to his chest, chin dipped as he visibly tried to gauge whether it was his size. Griffin, watching him, smiled.

“I’ll notice if it goes missing,” he warned him lightly. He didn’t actually know if he would.

“Oh, please.” He tossed the shirt casually over his shoulders so it hung around his neck. “I wouldn’t stoop that low. Now, could you stand over there and close your eyes for a second?” His grin was blinding, and he got what he really wanted: Griffin laughed.

Griffin might have given it to him if he’d asked, but he hadn’t. The night went in a different direction soon after.

He thumbs the collar of the shirt, rubbing it between his fingers as he thinks. Then he’s in danger of thinking too much, so he drags the shirt up to his face and breathes in. His eyes slide shut. There.

He’s fucked. He’s really, really fucked.

Griffin has always taken too much notice of Sascha, from the first moment he saw Back to Strangers’ audition tape. It’d been the first one to make him sit up in interest, to such a degree that his band members immediately noticed and ribbed him for it. I think I know what he likes, Dionne had said with a sly grin, eyes cutting from Sascha on the screen making bedroom eyes at the camera to Griffin’s riveted stare. He’d shot her a dirty look and made sure to pay less attention after, which wasn’t hard to do; Back to Strangers was the only band that stood out at all that day. And it wasn’t even all due to their pretty frontman, which was high praise.

He doesn’t know colognes, he mostly just wears whatever’s been picked out for him, so Griffin can’t name the smells that are making his whole brain light up. Something citrusy, something kind of woodsy, like the overpowering smell of incense in a new-age shop with crystals and fucking… gongs in the window. It doesn’t matter; it’s not the smell itself that’s doing it for him. He’s never even been a scent guy before this moment, which just goes to show the unique weirdness Sascha inflicts upon him. He’s not himself, and in the same moment the most himself he’s felt in a long, long while.

He wants more of it. It also freaks him the fuck out, when his head is clear enough to think that way.

Around Sascha, usually it’s not.

He doesn’t even realize he’s touching himself again until a particularly good press of his palm has him arching his hips up into it, a startled noise punching out of his throat. “Oh, shit,” Griffin says, too loud, and rolls onto his side. He keeps the shirt by his face, clutched in his fist, while his other hand works furiously in his boxers.

There’s something wrong with him. There has to be. But right now Griffin’s beyond caring, and thank god for that.

His mind tumbles away, grabbing frantically for anything that will help him as he falls. Sascha by the pool, tugging his shirt off over his head and shaking his hair out of his eyes, catching Griffin already staring and shooting him a smirk. Sascha onstage across from him, mic to his lips, looking at him like he and Griffin are the only two people in the entire world. Sascha holding the hem of his shirt up, head turned just enough to look back at him over his shoulder, the arch of his spine and the tattoo nestled in the small of his back he really should’ve warned Griffin about before lifting his shirt.

Sascha. Sascha. Sascha.

He whines low in his throat, his pace quickening. Fuck, he’s close. He bites the shirt and his fist through it, acting on frenzied impulse. Just a little—

Sascha sitting pressed to his side, knee to hip to shoulder, looking at him with a little uncharacteristic pinch of worry in his brow. “We’re friends, aren’t we? Friends care.”

What?

He comes like a blow to the gut, blindsided and gasping. What the fuck?

Griffin trembles in the aftershocks, dazed, as the quiet of the house reasserts itself. He feels cold and hyper-aware of himself. He’s drooled on the stupid shirt; he spits it out of his mouth, his heart still hammering in his chest. He tastes cotton and dust. He makes a face, rolling his tongue about his mouth.

He was supposed to get Sascha Rose out of his system. Or try. Now he feels like Back to Strangers’ lead singer has only burrowed his way deeper into him somehow.

He turns his face into the couch beneath him and thumps his forehead into the cushion. “Fuck.”