take the first shower?"

I nodded and wiped the cum from my cock, still smiling.

He pulled on his robe and left the room, his cock still hard enough to make an obvious lump at the front of it.

******

Over the next week or so I noticed that Peter's habits were becoming a lot less predictable: he'd often push his duvet away and start playing with his dick in the evening even if he'd already masturbated in the morning. Moreover, his visits to the pub no longer seemed to dampen his appetite: on the contrary, when he came in smelling of alcohol I noticed that his briefs tented upwards even while he was undressing and he seemed unable to get into bed fast enough to get things started.

We were obviously both aware that we were enjoying having a bit of company while we did our thing but, like I said before, not a word was ever spoken about it between us. We just both accepted that if we were together in the room and in bed, one of us would initiate things, and the other would invariably follow his lead.

One day around that time, in the kitchen, one of the other guys in the flat was talking about a couple of guys he knew from dentistry. They'd done something to piss him off - I wasn't really listening to him but the gist was that they were both in it together - and he started going on about them.

"They're a pair of complete fucking wankers," he was ranting. "That's why they're so friendly with each other. 'Cos they're both fucking wankers. Fucking wank-buddies."

Peter was in the middle of turning his toast over on the grill-pan but I saw his eyes glance over at me from the side. I was pouring milk into a cup of tea and I smirked without being able to stop myself. He got on with what he was doing but I noticed that he was smirking too.

******

It turned out that, while I like to use my left hand to caress my balls and touch my arsehole while I wank, Peter was more excited by playing around with the dense fur of hair on his stomach and over his chest. He just loved running his left hand through it, stroking it and teasing it between his fingers, while his right went to work assaulting his cock. He didn't leave his balls out altogether, of course, but once he'd discovered how good it felt to run his fingers through his chest hair, he never showed them quite the same attention as he had on that first night.

I often found myself wondering, while I was at work or around Helen's waiting for her to get ready to go out, why he'd never before ventured to use his left hand on his body while he masturbated. Surely it was a perfectly natural thing to do: inevitable even. I surmised, from odd comments he'd made, that his family was pretty traditional, perhaps religious. This would explain why he had, in his shared bedroom with his brothers, become used to masturbating in a coldly functional rather than sensual way. Enjoying his release, but reticent about finding pleasure in his own body.

I loved to watch him making up for his lost time; discovering the