Ruaan stepped out of the registration office and immediately pressed his back against the wall.
He covered his face with both palms.
His cheeks were burning. He could feel it. Twenty-six years old, standing in a prison corridor, face red like a teenager.
Yesterday he had spent midnight in a bathroom watching Seo do unspeakable things with a LEGO box full of horrors. Today he had gotten properly, thoroughly, completely fucked in a storeroom by Harolin Crowe.
He had believed his entire life that sex was just pain dressed up as pleasure.
He did not believe that anymore.
The pain had come. And then it had gone. And what was left was something he didn't have a clean word for yet, something warm and heavy that was still sitting in his chest even now while he stood in a corridor trying to make his face behave.
He shifted his weight.
