5 Laurie

I couldn't tell if it was a sort of irony that my life had been not once but twice bisected. First into Robert and After Robert. And then into Before Toby and After Toby. It seemed a rather harsh fate, to live always in aftermath. That Robert, who had shared my life for over a decade, should have affected me seemed right. Even fair. But Toby Finch, who had burned like a comet for half a night and half a day? That was simply maddeningly cruel.

Over time, of course, I had come to terms with Robert and everything that had happened. I had passed through anger, hurt, and betrayal until only loss remained. And gradually, all there was left to miss was the life we had built and shared. The same life he had destroyed and remade so easily with another. Someone in whose eyes Robert still saw reflected his most idealised self. Whereas at the end I had shown him, what? Too much truth? A single memory he could not bear, one that drove him so far from me he would only find himself again in some other man's arms. Some other man's submission.

Yes, I missed Robert. The boys we had been. The men we had grown into. I missed being known, in the simplest of ways and the most sweetly shameful. In our hubris, for I could only call it that, we had actually pitied those who lacked our good fortune. We had found love first and then, almost by accident—though it felt inevitable—this unfolding enchantment: the correspondences of our natures. It had been so easy then, a slow seduction of trust and pain, submission and service. How limiting it had seemed to us, to go the other way—to wring love from correspondence, instead of finding correspondence in love.

In truth, I still believed it was.

But it was nevertheless where I found myself, just some other empty-hearted fool, waiting for hope beneath the falls of a stranger's flogger.

After Robert, I had tried, at first, to be—for lack of a better word—normal. As if everything we had done together was some expression of us rather than some facet of me. It didn't work. I met men who might have loved me, and I ached for them to hurt me.

Besides, I was busy. Work had its own demands, and looking for a future was a time-consuming business. I could not consciously recall having given up on love. It was never quite so dramatic. I went to the munches and the clubs. I joined the websites. I had the conversations. I learned the jokes. I gave my body to doms in leather to do with as they willed within carefully negotiated limitations. And it was release. If nothing else, it was release, and it was enough.

And then came Toby Finch. Too young, too thin, too earnest, too everything. With his sharp elbows and his knobbly knees. Hair that wouldn't stay out of his eyes. Acne on his collarbones. His sulky, kiss-bruisable mouth and the grin he had not yet learned to temper.

Nineteen years old—nineteen.

I had barely known him, but—as the days slipped into weeks—I realised I missed him too. My cruel and tender god-king, still so lost between all the contradictions of adolescence and adulthood.

And suddenly enough was not enough.

When Grace and Sam asked—as they inevitably did—I told them I'd just made sure he got home safely. Which was true, if you ignored the part where I threw him out of my house in the middle of the night, then let him in again, and then fucked him into insensibility.

God.

Toby.

* * *

In December, twenty-something days AT, we made our monthly pilgrimage to Torture Garden, which required wriggling into my only pair of leather trousers, an indignity no nearly-forty-year-old should have to endure to get laid in the way he wanted to get laid. As ever, it was fifty percent fashion show, forty percent club, ten percent sex party, and one hundred percent annoying. But I would have neither chosen nor wanted to go back to Pervocracy, and while I didn't want to go to Torture Garden either, I was very unlikely to run into Toby, and more than likely to run into someone who would hurt me and fuck me and not leave me missing them.

Over the last year or so, I had preferred to set up my…trysts…online, but with every encounter that had not gone horribly wrong, I was conscious of the mounting statistical likelihood that the next one might. Anonymity and physical helplessness did not seem a fortuitous combination, but even that unhealthy thrill was scant consolation for the inevitable rituals of power and powerlessness, as abstract and arbitrary as dancing for rain or the appeasement of nonexistent gods.

So the music played, and the dancers danced, and we all came round again.

I left my friends grinding slickly at the centre of a sea of rainbow latex and found somewhere, not too dark, not too out of the way, and not too close to the dungeon, where I could wait to be recognised. Inevitably, I was. I'd been around for a long time, but so had everyone else.

Thom? Jon? Tim?

He had a good reputation. And I was relatively sure we'd played (I so hated that word) together before.

So I let him take me home, where we exchanged the usual codes: no unprotected sex, no scat, no piss, no blood play, no breath play, no gags, no blindfolds, no permanent marks or modifications, no kneeling unless I was sucking cock, yellow to slow, red to stop, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No depth. No truth. No meaning.

He made me strip. Call him master. Display myself to him in ways that might once have left me raw.

And all I felt was a certain social embarrassment. A soft, squirmy self-consciousness, devoid of shame's sweet-sharp sting or the self-annihilating rush of humiliation. It had been like this before, but I'd always managed to subvert it. I'd even found it slightly piquant—a private scourging of my self-respect—to be so utterly controlled by my physical needs that I would not only allow this, but seek it, and cede mastership of my body to a man who needed a title to claim it. Far better to find ways to enjoy such a truth, than face it.

He made me suck his cock awhile, condom-sheathed, of course, so it tasted of latex and chemicals and nothing. As he fucked my throat, he pulled my hair, and the gesture seemed familiar. I wondered if it was him I was remembering, or simply someone like him.

Everyone was like him.

I tried to lose myself in my own skin, but the anchor points he had given me were not enough, and I was stretched between them, as thin and tight as a grass whistle.

Toby had also curled his fingers in my hair, his spring-cricket legs hooked over my hips. Pulling me close, so close.

Toby.

A withdrawal left me dizzy with sudden breath, and a slap from his cock left a smear of spit and spermicide across my cheek. "Are you with me, boy?"

I hated it when they called me boy, but I couldn't remember if I'd mentioned it, and it wasn't worth ending the scene over.

"Yes"—my stomach twisted as I forced out the word—"master."

Guilt stuck almost immediately. I had wanted this. I had. I had looked for it and made it happen. And this man had brought me here on good faith.

I rested my palms on my thighs and, squinting up at him through my still tear-burning eyes, I tried to see him. I wondered if he would see me back.

Or if there was nothing but…correspondence.

"Eyes down, boy."

I obeyed without a thought, because it cost me nothing. Technically, I was kneeling to him too, but that didn't matter either. Neither of us were here.

"By the time I'm done with you, boy, you'll be begging for my cock."

There was a time a statement like that would have likely made me feel…something. Defiance, anticipation, a kind of nervous longing to be so utterly overpowered. Robert and I had loved the struggle. And, although it had always ended the same way, with his blissful victory and my equally blissful defeat, it had never felt like a foregone conclusion.

Unlike this prearranged surrender.

My own fault, but somewhere down the years I had made it a choice, the when and how of my yielding. And now I lacked the strength, the trust, to not choose.

"Yes, master," was all I said.

My lapse had not been intentional, but it was an excuse to punish me. "You like that, boy?"

I contemplated the complexity of the question. No and no and sometimes and almost. I wasn't sure "like" even came into it anymore. Dimly, I realised I was probably…in some way…annoyed. At him, at me, at this. He'd done nothing wrong, but everything was wrong. I was wrong. I had been for years.

"I said, ‘Do you like that, boy?'"

"Y-yes."

"Yes, what?"

I unlocked my jaw and delivered the required answer. "Yes, master."

Satisfied, he dragged me up again—I felt leaden, hopeless, a mannequin—cuffed me, and chained me to a Saint Andrew's cross, because it was always a St. Andrew's cross. I leaned into its embrace, enjoying at least the peculiar combination of support and vulnerability it offered.

And then he flogged me. He was good at it. He warmed me up, which was more than I deserved, with something light and supple, until I was blood-flush and sensitive, suspended there on the softest edge of pain.

God. Yes. More. Deeper.

A kind of interior quiet, a sense of bodily peace, made me lean into the restraints. And a sense of waiting crept up my spine like the warmth of touch.

Touch.

If only he would touch me. In desire, as well as mastery, or from desire of mastery, or something, something. Something that would make this more than action and reaction, script and performance. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe this was exactly what he wanted.

"Please…please will you…"1

But I didn't think he heard.

He swapped to a braided cat, and, oh, that truly hurt. He had left me naked to its sharpness, its scrape and bite and sting, and the sear of my own sweat.

The air was full of noise. His breath, my breath.

Then my cries, though I did not beg for anything again.

He knew when to stop before it got too much. How to let the pain possess me but not break me. And when I was fully its creature, mindless and shuddering, he fucked me, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my hip. When his rhythm turned ragged, he reached round, twisted my nipples until I screamed, and came.

He was done. But afterwards, he kept me there, shoved up against the cross and still impaled on his wilting cock. I tugged on the chains—scene over, fucking scene over, please—but he wrapped his hand round me, forcing me through the pain and exhaustion, the loneliness and the sorrow, until I was hard for him again.

"Let go." His breath stirred the fine hairs at the back of my neck. I almost didn't recognise him because it wasn't his master voice.

The pressure of his body against mine shoved me into his hand. Made me fuck it, as though it was something I wanted. For some reason, that was what tipped me over an edge I didn't even know was there, and I came, moaning softly, the closest to surrender I'd let myself come since Toby.

He pulled up his trousers and let me down, checked my circulation, tended to my back a little. I got dressed again, feeling dazed and empty and restless.

As we left the playroom, he turned to me. "Do you want to do this again? I mean, more than once a year?"

I'd been right, then. We had been here before. "I'm not sure. I don't really do regular or long-term."

"I know you don't."

Something about the way he said it made me stop and look at him. He was probably a handful of years older than I was, handsome, in a square-jawed, iron-haired English way. It was easy enough to imagine him in a boardroom and, if his house was anything to go by, probably not far from the truth.

He shrugged. "It's no skin off my nose. You can do what you like. I'm happy for you to come home with me once in a while, to be hurt and used. That's what you want, isn't it?"

I nodded and told myself I was too old, too familiar with this dance, to blush.

We creaked upstairs in our matching leather club wear. Absurd. Utterly absurd. At the front door, he reached out a hand to stop me. It seemed I'd been having a lot of conversations in hallways recently, a reflection that inevitably made me remember Toby and his not-quite-offered mouth.

It had been for the best. I had done the right thing.

But…damn him. He had ruined me in a single night.

"You obey, D, but you don't submit. And, don't get me wrong, that's your choice too. But"—Master Whatever's eyes caught mine for a moment—"is it what you need?"

I was sure I was usually less transparent. Alarm and a touch of guilt prickled through me and made me snappish. "I don't think what I need is any of your business."

"No, but it could be." His gaze was steady on mine. There was no denying, the man had something, a presence perhaps, now that I was paying attention to him. "I'm willing to make it my business."

I gave him a sharp look. "Why?"

"Why not? I like fucking you, I like hurting you. I want you on your knees, and I think you want to be there."

Presence or not, it was too much. Too much from him, anyway. "What the fuck do you know about what I want?"

"Nothing, but that's only because you've never told me."

I tried to imagine a future with this man whose name I couldn't remember. What it would mean. What it might be like. But I couldn't. It seemed impossibly alien. Even the thought of kneeling to him, of offering him that small amount of power over my heart and mind and will, made bile burn at the back of my throat. And the darkest, most confused and desperate part of me wanted to do it precisely because I hated it, and that would—in some twisted, terrible way—be pleasurable. I dragged my dry tongue across drier lips. "And…and what if I did? Tell you."

"Well, then we'd discuss it." He made it sound obvious, as if getting what you wanted was simply a conversation you could have. He probably had a checklist we could go through together. But how could I explain that what I wanted was not to have a conversation about what I wanted? "I'd expect to push your limits, though."

"My…my private limits are very different."

He nodded. "Most people's are."

There was a long silence.

"I don't—"

"D, I know you were with Robert, and I know you were together a long time, and I think what you really want is something that's gone."

This was getting worse by the second. It was unbearable that he knew these things about me. And equally unbearable to know these things about him: that he was perceptive, that he was kind in his way, lonely perhaps, and that he too wanted more. If only one could safeword out of a conversation.

"You can never have that," he went on. "But you can have something else. If you'll let yourself."

"You?"

"Yes."

"I—"

"Don't answer. Think about it first."

In spite of myself, I swallowed. "And if…if I…"

"Then you come to me, and we'll talk about it. And then you'll get on your knees, and you'll let me give you what you need. Because I don't think I've even come close to your limits, have I?"

I shook my head, exposed in my truths, my loss, and all my lies. For a moment, I genuinely resented him for seeing me and for forcing me to see him. In some way, it made it worse that we had no greater connection than his needs, and my needs, and the barely there boundary where we could force them, inadequately, to meet.

Something must have shown on my face, because he patted my shoulder. "It's all right. Trust is earned, and you've been too long without a master."

Too long without something, certainly. "I should go."

He stepped past me to open the door. Then paused. "I play the alto sax."2

"Uh?"

He smiled unexpectedly. "I just wanted to remind you that I may be a dom, but I'm a person too."

I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this information, so I kept my expression carefully blank. "And you thought alto sax would be the clincher?"

"You've got to admit, it's pretty hot."

"You should have said earlier." I tried to smile back. It seemed the least I could do. "I'd be on my knees by now."

Clearly it was the wrong thing to joke about because he grew serious again. "Think about it, D. I want you, and I'd be good for you."

I pulled on my coat, fastened it so nobody could see I was dressed as a complete prick, and hurried into the night. I could have called a taxi, but even though I was tired and my body hurt, I felt like walking.

It made the pain sing a little. It made it mine.

I took the Tube back to Holland Park, standing somewhat gingerly and watching my own reflection ripple like the moon in the windows of the nearly empty carriage. It took a while before I saw a man I recognised beneath the smudges of someone else's perception.

It would have been easier if he had not, to some extent, been right about me. I obeyed. I did not submit. But how could I, to shadows and charades and strangers? He had understood better than most, and still he had thought what I needed was a firm hand, the right master, discipline.

God. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was all that was left for me to have.

But how could I like myself through his eyes? He had made me weak, as though my needs were not also my choices. The things Robert and I had done had never made me weak. Even as I had wept and screamed and bled and begged for him.

In truth, they had made me strong. Proud, too. And I'd never really separated the drive to submit, to be hurt, and sometimes to be forced, from what seemed to me the most natural impulses of love: to be touched, to be known, to be naked, to be safe.

That came After Robert.

And, suddenly, I found myself thinking of Toby again. He had not made me feel weak either. He had made me feel…beautiful, powerful.

Free.

* * *

When I got home, I found Master Whoever's business card in my pocket, and I threw it away. I tried not to think about what he had said to me. For a while, I even stopped seeking out strangers to hurt me and forget me, and be forgotten in their turn.

I'd made such commitments in the past and never held to them. But I felt the inadequacy of what I would likely find more keenly in the wake of Toby, and it seemed almost like a betrayal of him. Tarnishing the memory of his passion, his sincerity, and his fearlessness with meaningless games and empty pleasure.

So I simply worked, and slept when I could, and gave myself to the familiar routines of my job, the day-to-day hospital business of life, death, and paperwork. Christmas came and went. I spent it with my parents. New Year's with my friends.

Then came my air ambulance shift.

A multiple-car collision. A cardiac arrest. A motorcycle accident. A stabbing, most likely drug-related. A child who had run into a glass door and severed an artery.

It was a night not easily left behind.

I lay awake, long beyond exhaustion, tasting the sour remnants of adrenaline, blue lights flashing in my memory.

Somebody had said to me: "We'll kill you if he dies."

He had. His heart in my hand, his torso spread open like a Rorschach test.

I could still smell petrol, burning skin, and metal from the crash sites.

Marijuana smoke from the house.

Blood.

The next evening, I sat at my computer and logged into the usual places. I looked at my ticks and crosses, my lists, and after a moment I removed blindfolds, and then I removed gags. That would let somebody take my sight. Take my voice. I let the idea possess me slowly until yes, I felt something. A quiver of uncertainty. Fear, unfurling into something else entirely.

I considered breath play and then left it alone. I had no wish to become a statistic.

After a while, I fell into an exchange of instant messages. And an hour later, I was calling a taxi to take me to a stranger's address. But halfway there, I asked the driver to stop and turn back.

What was I doing?

Just…what was I doing?

I sent my apologies, but received no response.

Which left me in bed, alone, still seeing blue lights, one hand on my largely disinterested cock, the other resting against my throat, where nineteen-year-old Toby Finch had touched me once.

* * *

For the next few days, I stayed at the hospital until nine or ten, sometimes eleven, at night. There was no shortage of things to occupy me there, and anything else had become almost unbearable.

Sleep came more easily when my body conquered my mind.

One night in early January, as I crossed the road to my house, I noticed an oddly shaped pile of shadows on my doorstep—probably either somebody else's lost recycling or one of those charity collection bags. Annoying.

But then it moved.

For a moment, I was alarmed. And then disbelieving: it was Toby uncurling, getting to his feet, his hands tucked into the pockets of an oversized hoodie. And then I was frantic with a joy I had absolutely no right or wish to feel.3

It was too dark for me to be able to see much more than the outline of him—hunched shoulders, jutting-out elbows, weight resting a little bit defiantly on one leg—but even that was enough to stir me like a touch upon the strings of a long-silent harp.

I wanted to run to him, drag him into my arms, turn his face into the light—see the shape of his mouth, the colour of his eyes, his pointy chin. Because in that moment of recognition, all I could think was how truly and deeply I'd missed him. And while I had never expected to see him again, some unacknowledged part of me had nevertheless grieved and hoped and waited.

"What…" I managed. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you." That was his duh voice. He shifted slightly, hands digging deeper, thin body growing taut and tense.

"Yes, but—"

"Look." His head came up, the moonlight catching in his eyes, making them shine. "You've totally ruined me. And…and I think you should take some fucking responsibility for it. Or…or like at least fucking apologise."4

I stared at him. Some rational part of me was wondering if I wanted to be angry or concerned about the teenage stalker waiting on my doorstep. Apparently I didn't. "God, Toby, what's wrong? What did I do?"

"What did you do?" His voice broke. "You were perfect. Don't you understand? Fucking perfect. And you gave me stuff I've been wanting and dreaming about my whole fucking life. And also the best sex I've ever had. And now I'm just supposed to…supposed to…what? Settle for less than that? Pretend like nothing's changed when you changed everything?"

His hands flew out of his pockets in a pale flash and covered his face. He spun away from me, and I realised he was crying.

Wordless and helpless, I watched his back shake. Then I came up the steps and put my arms around him. Toby. It was all I could think, his name gleaming in my mind like a talisman of hope. "I'm sorry."

He sniffed and gurgled, but didn't pull away from me. "Just so you know, I fucking hate you right now."

His body was so cold against mine. "How long were you waiting?"

"Since I got off work. So six or something."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"You're always sorry, Laurie." He wiped his eyes and let out a shuddery breath. "Seriously, I was this close to building a fucking willow cabin."

"Not many willows around here."

"Jesus." He shook himself free and whirled round, furious and tearful and Toby. "Are you laughing at me? I'm broken, and you're laughing. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"You're not broken, and I'm not laughing at you. I just…" I stumbled and had to stop.

"What? You just what?"

"I'm just so"—something inside me yielded, and it felt effortless—"happy to see you."

He folded his arms and glared. "Well, if you're that happy to see me, why the fuck did you let me leave?"

"Can we talk about this inside?"

"I don't know. It seems like every time I get into your house, you're chucking me out of it."

I sighed. "What was I supposed to do? Tie you to my bed and keep you?"

"You realise there's like a middle ground between kidnapping someone and making them feel like they're completely unimportant to you. Did you not maybe consider saying, ‘Hey, Tobes, why don't we not never see each other again?'"

I squeezed past him and unlocked the door. "As it happened, I didn't. Now, are you coming in?"

But Toby wasn't easily distracted. "Wait? Why didn't you? Didn't it mean anything to you at all?"

"Of course it did, but you're nineteen and I'm not, and I didn't think it was appropriate."

"Well, I'm still nineteen, you're still not, so what's changed?"

I paused on the threshold. The truth was, I had nothing to lose. "What's changed is I don't care. I'm unhappy and I'm lonely, and when I was with you I wasn't. So either go away or get in my goddamn house."

Toby stood there for what seemed like a very long time, his eyes fixed on mine.

I waited for him and tried not to flinch, feeling very far from perfect just then. It was hard not to wonder what he was seeing when he looked at me. If I seemed as old and weary and lost to him as I did to me.

He crooked his finger at me. "Come here."

"Why?"

"You need a reason? Because I'm here. Come on. It's like two steps."

Now it was my turn to hesitate. It wasn't very far at all, but it seemed farther, and it was just a little like a power game, something I had always strictly avoided outside the bedroom. But Toby didn't look like he was playing games with me. He looked small and fierce and terribly, terribly earnest. What was the difference, really, between him coming inside, and me going to him? Maybe it wasn't about power at all. Maybe it was simply about choices and honesty.

I took a step forward, and he grinned his huge crescent-moon grin.

My second step brought us together. He put his hands on my shoulders and jumped into my arms. I caught him on instinct alone, my hands just about getting into the right place to support him as he locked his legs around my waist and clung to me like an overly friendly monkey.

I didn't even think about it. I kissed him. Just my closed lips against his, which were rough and chapped and salty from his tears. Perfect, exactly as he'd said. He tightened all around me, his cock rising almost immediately to press against my stomach. His mouth parted on a very soft and tender moan. And he stayed close enough that I felt the shape of his words before he whispered them. "I'm going to make you so happy."

I kissed the tip of his nose, which was red and a little bit damp. "No promises, Junior."

My arms were already aching, but I carried him inside anyway because it seemed like the romantic thing to do and something about Toby made me want to be romantic.

No fool like an old fool.

Less romantic was the groan of relief I couldn't quite suppress when I dropped him heavily onto the sofa in the living room. But he didn't seem to mind, just pushed the hair out of his eyes and smiled at me again, a little shyly this time.5

I took off my coat and flung it over the arm of a chair. His eyes followed me hungrily. And when I sat down next to him, he reached out, took the end of my slightly crumpled tie and tugged me forward. My gasp roared in my ears, far too loud, far too desperate, as I stared at the blue silk between his fingers, holding me leashed.

"You're always so smart. Are you a lawyer or something?"6

"No," I said dazedly. "I'm a doctor. Consultant, actually."

"Wow, hotshot, huh?" He twitched my tie. He hadn't even touched me, and I was hard for him. "What do you consult about?"

"Emergency and prehospital medicine… And I…I'm with London's Air Ambulance. Toby…I…"

"I work in a café." He pronounced it caff, a touch of East London creeping into his voice. "Just so you know. Started as a kitchen porter, then Hairy, who was the chef, broke his leg, so I got a promotion."

I gazed at him, breathless and aroused. Why was he telling me this?

"I just thought you ought to know what a classy gent you're getting, Dr. Dalziel." Clearly, he thought he sounded terribly cynical. But he just sounded hurt. "What a catch I am."

I slid my hand over his wrist, holding him there holding me. "It's Mr., and I don't want you to be anything but you."

He pressed his spare hand between my legs, stroking until I groaned for him. "I guess you do want me."

"Oh God. I do. It's madness but I do. However you'll have me."

"Then why the fuck did you let me go?"

I'd closed my eyes at some point during the sweet torment of his caresses, but now they snapped open. "Why did I…?"

"Before. You let me go. Would it have cost that much to say, ‘What's your phone number?'"

I'd had reasons, and they'd seemed sound at the time, but now…now I could barely remember them. Or find the energy to care. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Don't do that shit." He huffed out a breath, stirring the tips of his fringe. "It's been crap, you know. Trying to figure this out without you. I've been fucking miserable." He wrapped my tie around his hand and leaned in to meet me, stretching up so his lips could brush mine, my jaw, my cheek, the edge of my nose, the dark circles I knew lay beneath my eyes. "And you've been miserable too. I can tell."

I shuddered and nodded. Was that more acceptable than sorry? All my need and longing and shame, exposed for him.

"You know, I went back to that club looking for you. Twice. The second time they caught me, so I waited on the pavement. You didn't show up."

"No, I was—"

"Avoiding me. I get it. I tried to get over you too. I really did. But nobody else is right."

"I know."

He scowled, tugging on the tie, pulling me in even tighter. "You'd better not do this to me again."

Oh God. I wasn't ready to make promises. I was barely ready for whatever was happening now. Barely ready and desperate at the same time. "I…I'll try."

We were silent a moment, both of us strangely solemn.

He blinked, looking young suddenly, and confused. "So…we're…like…boyfriends? I've never had a boyfriend before. Not a proper one."

"And you don't have one now."

His face fell. "Oh."

"This is…what it is. And, someday, probably quite soon, you'll meet someone who can be your boyfriend. Someone you really want to be."

"And"—his nose wrinkled sceptically—"then I just randomly bugger off with this imaginary guy, do I?"

"Yes."

"And what about you?"

I gave him my sternest look. "I've somehow survived for thirty-seven years without you, Toby. I'll contrive to go on."

"Well, you didn't do very well the last couple of months. I hardly know you and I can see you're wrecked."

"That," I said sharply, "is not the point." I made to pull away, but his fingers tightened on my tie and my cock, and the truth was, I didn't want to be let go.

"All right. All right. We'll just do"—somehow he managed to get sarcastic air quotes around the word without the use of his hands—"‘this.'"

I swallowed and nodded again. The relief was almost unbearable, and I'd put up no fight at all, simply allowed a nineteen-year-old to come in from the cold and sweep me off my feet.

"But no more chucking me out of your house."

I tried to smile. "Mi casa es su casa. You leave when you want."

"And I have to see you at least once a week."

"My job is not forgiving."

"Nonnegotiable. I don't care when it is or what we do or if you just lie next to me completely unconscious, but I want to see you and I want to be with you."

I opened my mouth to protest and then realised it would have been ridiculous. The idea of seeing Toby every week was…delightful. The problems would come when he met someone else, lost interest, or his life took him elsewhere, but I could deal with that when it happened. And, in the meantime, I could simply…simply enjoy him, an unexpected, unasked-for gift from the universe.

And, frankly, fuck everything else.

I deserved a little happiness. A little peace.

"All right."

Toby's eyes flared like twin stars. "Then congratulations, Mr. Laurence Dalziel, consultant in emergency and prehospital medicine, on your acquisition of one slightly used, but otherwise prime condition Tobermory Finch."

"Tobermory?" I asked, trying not to laugh as he swung round and straddled me.7

"Call me that and I'll seriously have to kill you."

Then he kissed me, and I forgot about anything but his hot, eager mouth and his tongue pushing clumsily against mine. If he lacked finesse, he made up for it in enthusiasm and a certain ferocity. It was wet and our teeth clashed more than a few times, but—like the tie he still held—it was undeniably a claiming. And in the midst of all that damp velvet softness, I felt something else, something smooth and warm and hard gliding against me. A tongue stud? God. A rough little secret at the heart of his kiss.

I let him have his way with me, opened for him, offered myself to him, and held him close. In time, it turned a little wild, the sort of urgent, grinding kiss that I hadn't shared with anyone since Robert and I were Toby's age and hornier than we were competent. I'd forgotten how pleasurable it could be, this particular cocktail of lust and uncertainty, how liberating and intoxicating.

Heat gathered between us, between our mouths and at the places where our bodies met, where my hands touched him. Our breaths turned ragged together. And when I dragged him closer so I could drive my cloth-trapped cock between his thighs, he arched into me, moaning and frantic. It was maddening and wonderful in almost equal measure, these rough collisions of mouths and cocks and selves.

I threw him off me, and he landed on his back on the sofa, legs parting instinctively to allow me between them. I came down on top of him, catching his spare hand and pinning it against one of the cushions. His fingers curled into mine and still we kissed and writhed and clung to each other.

At last, Toby tore his mouth away from mine. "Hey. Like…hey…"

I jerked back, releasing his wrist. "Oh. Oh. God. Sorry."

"It's fine." He seized my face and pulled me into another kiss, teeth scraping my lower lip, making me groan again. "It's just…I'm still kind of ticked off at you."

I gazed down at him. He didn't sound ticked off or look it really. What he looked was thoroughly debauched, his mouth swollen, his cheeks flushed, and the blue of his eyes almost entirely lost to pupil. But then I understood, and my cock, impossibly, grew harder still. "I'm sorry." God, I was no better at being sorry than he was at being angry. My voice was thick with longing.

He folded his hands behind his head and stretched somewhat theatrically. His hoodie rode up, showing a gleam of pale skin. "That's just talk, Laurie. If you're really sorry, I think you should show me."

The words sent a dark thrill through me. I straightened. "What do you want me to do?"

He patted my hip. "Up."

It was hard not to remember our previous encounter as I got myself off the sofa and moved into the centre of the room. "All right?"

He nodded his approval—and God help me—that thrilled me too. "Yeah. Now, strip."

I glanced towards the floor-to-ceiling windows, through which the moonlight and streetlight streamed in bands of alternating orange and silver. "Can I…um…close the curtains?"

"God. Fuck. Yeah." Toby flushed and squirmed a little, which was not what I had wanted at all. "Totally."

"Thank you."

He smiled at that, still a little awkward. I crossed the room and saw to the curtains, and on the way back, he gestured me over.

I wasn't quite sure what he wanted, so I went to one knee by the sofa. "Yes, Toby?"

He sat up, crossing his legs, and for a moment, he was silent, just looking down at me. Then he leaned in and kissed me chastely. "No, seriously, thank you. You've got this… You kind of… You make me feel like a fucking prince, you know that?"

Heat rushed over me, gratitude and pleasure and a touch of embarrassment. "I–I sometimes imagine you are one."

"Oh yeah?"

I nodded.

"Like when?"

"When you were in the bath. I imagined you were…a prince and I was"—I suddenly couldn't look at him—"your slave, I suppose."

"Oh my God, really? That's so hot. What kind of a prince was I?"

"Capricious. Spoiled. A little…cruel."

"That's totally the sort of prince I would be." He sounded rather taken with the idea. "Would you mind?"

I looked up again, trying my best to keep the laughter from my voice. "Terribly."

He made a helpless little noise and pressed a hand against his cock. "Yeah?"

"Yes. I'm proud. You'd make me suffer."

"Jesus, Laurie. Don't say that shit. I nearly came."

I rested my head against his knee to hide my smile, and his fingers moved gently through my hair. "One thing at a time, hmm?"

"Yeah, but I've filed it away for later. You should beware of what you wish for."

Oh God. "I already do, darling."

He tugged on my hair, sending prickles of pleasure-pain all the way down my spine. "I hope you don't think you can sweet-talk your way out of this. You're meant to be taking your clothes off, remember?"

I gave him a look of…something. Mock disappointment maybe, but I was feeling too much that was real to manage a pretence of anything else. Then I stood on slightly shaky legs and did as he commanded. I'd stripped for Toby before, but it was different this time. Perhaps because I could no longer claim it was anonymous, or that I was merely indulging him. I wanted this, and I'd chosen it. Him.

When I was naked, trying to not shiver even though I wasn't cold, Toby peeled off his shoes and socks and rose to his feet. I half expected an inspection of some sort—it was probably what anyone else would have done—but he just spanned his hands across my chest and muttered, "Fuck, you're hot." And somehow, that flayed me so utterly that it was nearly a relief when he added, "Now, on your knees."

I went down gratefully.

"And pass me your tie and your belt."

For a moment, I was frozen, caught between instinctive surface resistance and the deeper-set, more powerful desire to do whatever he asked. Bend my will to another's pleasure.

As always, desire won, leaving me filled with a strange energy and an even stranger peace.

I'd left my clothes in a pile nearby, something only a nineteen-year-old dom would likely have let me get away with. I leaned over to pick up my tie and—

"Uh, Laurie, did I say you could use your hands?"

I shuddered, freshly aroused and freshly shamed, and bent down to lift my belt between my teeth. Toby made another of his breathless, excited noises, which gave me just enough strength to go through with it. A handful of seconds later, he was taking it from me, his thumb stroking over my lips in praise and reassurance, soothing the sting of mortification.

"Now your tie."

I struggled again, but he didn't push me or rush me, and so—somehow—I did it. The repetition didn't make it any easier, but it took me a little deeper, drew me away from myself, towards Toby and the submission I wanted to give him.

He draped my tie over a shoulder and stood for a moment, turning my belt between his fingers, sliding the end through the buckle and twisting it this way and that. "Right." He frowned. "Okay."

He didn't seem to be talking to me, but he'd given me his patience, so I gave him mine. In truth, I would have been content to wait at his feet as long as he wanted. Even the rub of the carpet was fading into the experience—the pleasure of pleasing and the sharp edge of anticipation.

"Right," he said, more decidedly this time. Then he stepped behind me, still holding my belt, and crouched down.

The heat of his clothed body rushed over my naked one, and heedlessly, I leaned back, seeking him. I expected a rebuke—I surely deserved one—but his arm went round me, steadying me, holding me tight. I trembled against him, as helpless in the face of kindness as command. I turned my head a little, his name spilling from my lips before I could stop it.8

His mouth grazed the corner of mine. "I'm here. Can I have your hands?"

I gave them without a thought. Just then, I would have given him anything.

I had no idea what he'd managed to do with my belt, but the cool glide of leather encircled one wrist, then the other. He pulled somewhere, and both loops tightened, cuffing me, trapping me. I drew in a short, sharp breath that seemed to bring no air to my lungs.

God. Naked and helpless. The fear went straight to my cock.

Toby kissed my neck. "This okay?"

No. No. No. But all I uttered was a breathy, lust-soaked groan. And when Toby reached around to drag his hand up the straining, dripping length of me, what I said was, "Oh yes."

He released me, and I whimpered, rocking my hips in pursuit of his touch.

"Fuck." Toby's breath was hot against the skin of my shoulder. "You're fucking amazing when you're desperate. But you don't get to come, okay? Not until you've shown me you're sorry."

Perfect. Yet again. I nodded miserably, my cock already aching.

His nails scraped lightly over a nipple, and it was all I could do not to beg. I had no idea what for, but it would have been a release, of a kind, to unravel mindlessly all over him.

Then he slipped the tie over my eyes, and I lost everything in silk and darkness. "T-Toby…I–I don't want—"

"I know." His voice shook like mine, the same mixture of excitement and trepidation.

He didn't move, holding the tie rather than knotting it, leaving me a moment to accept the powerlessness he was giving me. "I don't… I'm…" Afraid. But I couldn't say it. In case he stopped.

I wanted to be afraid for him.

"I know," he said again. "But I want this, so you'll let me."

I closed my eyes behind the blindfold. Darkness within darkness. "Yes."

He pulled the silk tight and tied it into place, kissed me again, and stood. I tugged at the belt wrapped around my wrists, testing. It held. That comforted and frightened me in almost equal measure, swirling into the gathering maelstrom of desire and submission.

"Laurie. I can totally see what you're doing."

What was wrong with me? I never fought, never pushed. At least not for years. Not with the strangers to whom I had given, in retrospect, so little. I had with Robert, but that had been different, part of the rhythms of what we did together. And now it was different again. Not some hollow performance or the shadow or something I'd shared with someone else.

With an effort of will, I settled. The stillness brought with it an almost unbearable awareness of myself: blind, restrained, hopelessly excited. And how good it felt, how right, to be that way.

Usually it was pain that brought me deep into my body, but tonight all it took was Toby.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It totally turns me on when you struggle, but I'm not sure it'll hold. I got an F for my Design Tech GCSE."

"They should have let you make bondage gear. You'd have got an A." I moved my wrists again but more carefully this time. "It's secure."

I heard the scrape of a zip and the drag of fabric against skin. "Yeah?"

"Yes." Of course, I couldn't see him, but I turned my face to where I thought he might be. "I'm at your mercy."

"Good. That's where I want you." The air stirred as he stepped closer. "Now show me."

Show me.

The command flared hotly across my skin, and I felt him everywhere, like a kiss or a hand on my cock, in the silk across my eyes and the leather round my wrists. And I groaned in eagerness and shame, knowing how sweet it would be to obey him, abase myself for his pleasure and deny my own.

I leaned forward, seeking him, clumsy and uncertain, desperate to please, and terribly, terribly vulnerable. He did nothing to help me, but that was right too. At last, I brushed his thigh with my cheek, and I couldn't hold back a soft sound of relief and connection. His fingers curled gently into my hair, and my heart filled with gratitude. And, suddenly, I wasn't helpless or afraid. Or rather, I was, but tucked inside all that, cocooned in my private darkness, I felt infinitely tender, warm, and safe. I felt like I was his.

I could have nuzzled my way to his cock. It was what I had intended and probably what he expected, but the impulse of the moment took me down, not up. It was awkward without my hands and perilously like falling but it seemed as foolish to cling to grace as it did to cling to pride, and I trusted he would catch me if I needed it.

As my mouth touched the arch of his foot, a shudder ran through him, and I heard him gasp.

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I'm so very sorry."

"Holy fuck."

Beneath my lips, I could feel the individual ridges of his metatarsal bones, sleek beneath the skin. Feet had never particularly been one of my preoccupations, but these were Toby's feet, and when I touched them, he responded so very sweetly, lavishing me with murmurs and sighs, and at one point, "Oh my God, that has no right to be this good," followed by "Don't stop" because I'd had to smother my laughing against his toes, consumed by the sudden joy of simply being where I was.

I licked the taut spaces between all those fragile bones and kissed my way across his toes and up again—intermediate cuneiform, navicular, talus—until what had started off as little more than whim and humility became something more. Something I had long believed lost and forgotten.

At last, I levered myself back onto my heels and rested a moment against his thigh. The muscles of my back and upper arms were burning faintly, and the edge of the belt was pressing into my wrists, but these small aches filled me as brightly as fireflies. Because I was aching for Toby. I turned my head and kissed the side of his leg.

His hand returned, his fingers stroking me gently, sliding on the sweat that had gathered beneath the tie.

"Will you turn round?" I asked.

He stilled a moment. "Uh…yeah. I guess so."

He did it carefully, shuffling close so I didn't have to find him again, and I brushed my lips over the backs of his thighs, kisses that were not quite kisses. I learned the textures of his skin—the cool, smooth places behind his knees, the rougher, hair-stippled ones above, and then the smoothest of all, right at the tops of his thighs, where the curve of his arse began.

And I realised I didn't need my eyes to know he was beautiful. Or, from the noises he was making, to know I was pleasing him.

I dragged my tongue up the seam between his thighs, and he jumped. "Jesus. That feels obscene. Do it again."

I did, nuzzling as much as my position allowed into the supple, tender places of his flesh, making them slick and hot. He spread his legs, moaning, and thrust himself against me.

God. The things I could have done to him if I'd only had my hands.

"Toby?"

"Yeah?" It was little more than a gasp.

"Can… Will…you help me?"

"What do you want me to do?"

"Will…you hold yourself open for me? So I can… So I can—"

He actually yelped. "Fuck. No. I can't do that."

I pushed my tongue into the crease of his arse, and the sound he made this time was definitely not a yelp. He wriggled helplessly against me, his body practically begging for more, and for one terrible moment, I thought I was going to disgrace myself and come.

I pulled away, trembling, and so did he.

"God," he muttered. "I can't. I've never… I just can't."

I adjusted my position, still a little shaken, and far too conscious of the moisture that gathered at the tip of my cock and then slid tauntingly down its length. I'd been with some people who liked to give me orders I couldn't obey, simply for the excuse to shame and punish me, and I hadn't particularly objected to such games. But it had been a long time since I'd come so close to losing control.

"You don't have to do anything with me you don't want," I told him.

"Oh, I want to. It just…feels weird. Embarrassing."

"I'll never embarrass you, Toby. It's always up to you."

"But what if I'm hairy? Or I taste icky?"

"You're not hairy. I've seen you, remember. And…the thought of tasting you just nearly made me come, so I don't think you have to worry."

"Seriously?"

I kissed him rather playfully on one delicious little cheek. "Seriously."

"So like, while that's flattering, if you come, I'll be super cross."

"I know. I won't. I won't let you down." I leaned into him, ragged and needy and blissfully unashamed to be that way. "But please let me…please you. However you want."

He moaned in answer and trembled under my mouth. I kissed him again and teased him with my tongue, seducing, inch by slow inch, the reluctant line of flesh at the centre of his arse, until he was leaning forward and arching his hips to allow me deeper.

"Fuck it," he wailed. "I'm doing it."

I felt his hesitation as his hands came round, but suddenly he was open to me, and I pushed forward into all that soft, hidden heat.

Toby's whole body was rigid with anxiety. "This better feel fucking amazing."

Before he had a chance to protest or change his mind, I pressed my tongue inside him, breaching that tight ring of muscle in a single damp and ruthless thrust.

He howled and spasmed wildly, some frantic movement rippling all the way down his spine. "Omigod-it-does-feel-amazing."

From that moment, everything became blissfully impossible. Toby couldn't keep still and couldn't stay silent, and—bound as I was—I couldn't do anything to settle him. Not that I wanted to. It was pleasure enough to kneel there and let Toby writhe and grind and fuck himself against me, moaning and babbling like he was losing his mind.

I wished I could have seen him, tousled and sweaty, twisting wildly upon my tongue.

But I could feel him, hear him, taste him.

And he tasted deeply and simply of himself, sour-sweet, and intimate.9

He was panting barely coherent obscenities, but they fell upon me like kisses. I hurt—my wrists, my jaw, my knees, my balls, my cock—I hurt for him, I hurt with desire for him. But it was how he touched me, this pain he gave. How he touched me without touching, turning absence into caresses.

"I seriously wish I had another hand… My cock is going to… Oh fuck…Laurie…"

Suddenly there was nothing but his silence and his stillness. Then he shuddered uncontrollably, uttered the softest, most broken cry I'd ever heard, and…and…I wasn't entirely sure what happened next, but he was limp, sweaty, and mostly naked in my lap, his arms around me and his face pressed into my shoulder.

Oh God. Too much. Too much skin. Too much Toby.

I bucked frantically against him. Terrified I was going to fail him at the last possible second. Not sure if I was coming or coming apart. "I can't. Don't." I hardly knew what I was saying, only that I was clawing at a cliff of need, and I was going to fall. He pushed the tie away from my eyes, and I flinched, light-blinded. "Please. I can't."

"It's okay." Toby's voice was smoky from yelling, but so gentle, so very gentle. "You can."

I couldn't. I couldn't. The pleasure was tearing me to shreds.

I struggled to breathe.

To not disappoint him.

Couldn't stop the tears. Or maybe that was just the light.

Toby's eyes were a blur of blue forever.

But I did it. I held back, though it felt like dying.

Because he'd said I could, and—right then—I believed him, and it was all I needed. And he held me while I gasped and sobbed and didn't come.

Afterwards came a deep silence, nothing but our skin and slowly steadying breath. A paradox of fulfilment and frustration, and I never wanted it to end.

He did at last untangle us, though when he undid the belt and released my wrists, I groaned, for freedom just then was perilously close to loss. He tucked himself around me, and rubbed my arms until some of the stiffness eased.

"Laurie?"

"Yes?"

"Uh, do you really like those books over there? Like, are they valuable?"

I blinked through moisture-heavy lashes. "Well, sentimentally, perhaps. Why?"

"I kind of…" He picked at a bit of fluff on the carpet. "I kind of…projectile ejaculated all over them."

Sore or not, I pulled him into a hug and laughed myself breathless against the side of his neck.

"It's not funny. Have you got a tissue or something?"

"Oh, don't worry about it. Let's go to bed."

* * *

It was strange, after what we'd just done, to gather ourselves and go about the very ordinary business of getting ready to sleep. Toby got me a glass of water—which I had no idea I needed, but drank almost in one go—and I got him a spare toothbrush. He watched me see to my laundry. I watched him futilely attempt to comb the tangles from his hair.

It was banal.

It was intimate.

And while I was turning off the hall light, Toby—still naked and minty-fresh—flew past me, dived into bed, and snugged himself up in the duvet until there was only his head poking out. He gave his happy little purr. "I missed your bed."

"I knew you were after something." I yanked a corner of the duvet free and climbed in next to him. My shoulders throbbed. I was going to pay for tonight, but I wouldn't regret it.

"I missed you." He rolled over and curled into a tight little ball. "Hold me like you did last time."

"Whatever your highness desires."

He laughed and wriggled into my arms, curving himself into the space of my body that seemed designed to accommodate his.

My poor cock twitched pathetically, and I stifled a whimper of thwarted longing.

"Wow, you're…really hard. And hot."

"No shit, Junior."

"And grumpy."

"See previous."

He stretched languidly, rubbing himself against me, his arse parting as sweetly as a peach around my shaft.

"God. You're cruel."

"You like it."

Tormented, entranced, I kissed the nape of his neck. "Yes." He shivered in response, goose bumps gathering instantly under my lips, and I…I broke. "Oh, Toby, please. When will you let me come?"

He didn't even hesitate. "Tomorrow. In me."

I opened my mouth to answer, and only a groan came out.

"Cruel," he murmured, "and also merciful."

"Perfect," I told him, catching his wrist and holding him tight.

"Only to you." His drowsy, husky voice. "But it's fucking amazing."

I wasn't sure if I would manage to sleep, my cock heavy with promises of tomorrow, but somehow I did, lulled to it by Toby's warmth, his steady heart, and his every long, slow exhalation.

But something roused me a few hours later. Nothing I could have identified, but somehow I knew Toby was awake beside me, his body sticky-hot and tense, his breathing not quite steady.

"Toby? Are you all right?"

He turned, burying his face against me. "Kind of… Yes… No… I don't know."

Dear God. He regretted me. I'd grovelled on my knees and sobbed in his arms, and now he despised me. I pushed away sleep and panic and my own ugly fears. "What's wrong, darling?"

He was quiet for a long time. Then, so softly I barely caught it, "I'm scared."10

I wasn't sure if I should be touching him—if that was what he wanted—but I dragged my fingertips down his spine and he relaxed, just a little. "Because of what we did?"

"Yeah. Kind of."

"It wasn't what you'd imagined?" Somehow I managed to say it without cringing. What had he imagined? Some pretty fantasy, far removed from the messy reality of me in pieces at his feet.

"Oh, it was way better than I imagined." He lifted his head and repositioned himself more comfortably against my shoulder, arching into my touch. "It's just massively different to want something, and have it, y'know?"

Relief, such relief. "Yes. I do know."

"And I was just thinking that maybe wanting it means something different now."

I kept stroking him, my hands drifting over his skin like leaves on water, soothing myself as much as him. "How?"

"Because…because I really like you, Laurie."

Once again, his fearless honesty left me defenceless, and I found myself blurting out, "I really like you too," as if we were children exchanging vows in the playground.

I wasn't sure he heard me, though, because he didn't reply. He just nuzzled into me, pleasure-soft noises falling from his lips. Contentment crept through me in return. I was tired and not precisely aroused, but he had left me with a quiet awareness—of him, of my body, the needs he had fulfilled and the ones he had left to throb and burn and build inside me.

It felt strangely indulgent to be awake. Nights were for sex, sometimes, and sleeping. Blue lights and urgent skies. Death. And sudden, unlikely life. I couldn't remember the last time I'd stayed up simply to talk. Perhaps with Robert, at university, when we were young and in love and time had meant nothing.

"It's just," he said, after a while, "how will I know it's okay? Like when I put the tie round your eyes, you said you didn't want it, and"—an odd, hesitant note crept into his voice—"I did it anyway, and it turned me on. It turned me on a lot." His cock stirred between us, and he gasped and tried to shove it out of the way. "God. I'm sick."

It had been a very long time since I'd thought my sexual preferences worth questioning. And, while I understood his concerns—and, to an extent, I was glad he had them, as the alternative would have been worse—I was also faintly exasperated. Excavating one's navel for lint struck me as a futile and uniquely adolescent pastime. I didn't want him to feel guilty about what he did with me, but I didn't particularly want to analyse it either. "You know that's not true."

"I think it's not true. But sometimes I…forget." He sighed. "Don't you ever worry about it?"

"One of the few advantages of getting old is that you come to realise some things just aren't worth worrying about. I'm gay. Submissive, if you want to call it that. Masochistic, in my way. Some people like clay pigeon shooting or Coronation Street. What the fuck does it matter?"11

"So, what we did tonight…what I did to you…that was really, honestly, completely okay?"

Toby Finch and the Infinite Tenacity. I steeled myself for honesty, a blunt knife for a complicated knot. "More than okay. I wanted you to blindfold me. Or rather, I didn't want you to blindfold me, but I wanted you to do it anyway. I wanted you to do whatever you wanted. That was what I wanted."

He was quiet for a while, his fingers tracing idle patterns down one of my arms, making the blood dance under my skin. "I don't know how I'd live with myself if I actually really hurt you."

I should have been expecting that. Yet somehow I wasn't. A badly healed crack in my heart split a little but did not bleed. There was only dust. "I hope," I said softly, "it would be with me, rather than without me."

"But would you still want me? Trust me?"

Would you believe I did?A shadow of the past. I closed my lips on that answer and chose another. I chose hope. "Oh yes, Toby, yes." I tightened my arms about him. "There's risk inherent in most things that matter."

"Yeah, but most people aren't tying each other up and stuff."

"Physicals risks. Emotional risks. Who's to say where the lines are?"

For a little while we said nothing. It was enough simply to touch and be touched, to feel the heat of him beneath my hands, the roughened patches on his skin and the smoothness of the rest, and softly ache.

"You really get it, don't you?" he whispered. "Get me."12

I should have told him I didn't know him. That this was simply sexual compatibility. But instead: "I've had a long time to think about these things, and believe me, there are many ways of thinking, but the way you spoke to me at the club? You didn't give me much choice."

He gave a muffled little groan. "Urgh, don't remind me. I was such an idiot."

"You were irresistible." The words were out before I could stop them. Utterly sentimental, none the less so for being true. I'd forgotten the aftermath of submission sometimes had the power to do this to me.

In answer, he slid a knee gently between my thighs and increased the pressure until I swallowed a groan. "How do I know you're not just indulging me?"

I should have known he wouldn't let me escape my earliest transgression. My first lie. I couldn't have repeated it now, even if I'd wanted to. "I shouldn't have said that. It was cowardly. And wrong. And…not true." The merciless little bastard had got me hard again. And with no hope of release until morning. Unless I begged? God.

I caught the gleam of his grin in the darkness. "You'll just have to prove it to me."

His leg nudged at me tauntingly until resistance crumbled, and I began to move with him, desire mingling sweetly with despair. "Anything. I'll do anything." And just then, I meant it.

"I'll hold you to that."

"God…Toby…"

"Something you want?"

"Getting to come might be nice," I muttered.

He laughed and tucked himself in even tighter. "You're extra tormentable when you're grumpy."

I gritted my teeth and lay there, anguished with wanting. His fingers skated lightly over my chest. Found a nipple to circle like vultures. I teetered, desperate to be touched, desperate to stop him. "Oh fuck. Fine. Please. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Please what?"

"Please let me come. I don't care…how. Just…please. I really need to—"

"Nope." Such awful, beautiful glee. "I just wanted to hear you beg. Wanted to know what it sounded like."

"Did it live up to your expectations?"

"Well, it was kind of grudging. So I'd give it maybe two out of ten."

I wasn't sure whether or not to be insulted. I caught his wicked hand and brought his fingers to my lips to kiss them. "Then you'll have to try harder."

"Or you will."

"You know"—God, what was I saying?—"there's a box in the spare room. I think… I think there's something in there you could use to…to…"

"To what?"

"Make sure I didn't—" I felt hot and awkward in the darkness. This was certainly a new level of something. Asking for a chastity device. "It would ensure my obedience."

"God, no. I'm not helping you." Toby's hand slid between us, enclosed me blissfully, and the sound I gave him was pure, heedless gratitude. "And I like being able to touch you when I feel like it."13

"What if I come by accident?" I might have actually whined.

"Well, we'll figure that out when you do. Either way, it's going to be fun." He was quiet a moment, still holding my cock with maddening tenderness. "Um, this is kind of a whole lot more than you kneeling on the floor while I wank. Are you absolutely sure we don't need a safeword?"

It was getting increasingly difficult for me to think at all, let alone keep up with him as he jumped from topic to topic, from instinctive control to confessed uncertainty. "Yes, I'm sure."

"But aren't we supposed to?" He let me go, and while my body regretted him, my mind cleared a little.

"They don't come round and check, Toby. Confiscate our sex licences." His silence suggested he wasn't amused, and I realised I was being too glib. Taking too much for granted. "If it would make you feel safe, then of course, we can have a safeword."

"Fuck my safety." He whacked a hand against my shoulder. "You're the one who comes off worst if something goes bum end up over a barrel."

"And you think," I asked as patiently as I could, "a magic word is going to protect me?"

He sat up abruptly, dragging away the duvet and much of our shared warmth with him. "I don't think you're taking this seriously."

"I take your comfort very seriously indeed."

"And I feel the same way about yours. The fact you think I don't is, like, fucking insulting, Laurie."

It should have been absurd—a nineteen-year-old worrying about my safety. But all I felt was helplessly touched by it. "Oh, darling." I caught his face between my hands and pulled him into a kiss, our bodies falling together once more. "Safewords are useful—necessary even—when you play with strangers, but the rest of the time, I–I don't know."

Light was beginning to creep into the room. Toby was a pale punctuation mark on my dark sheets. I swept my hand from his shoulder to his thigh, learning his curves and angles, his harmonies and awkwardnesses. Beautiful. And, in this moment, mine. He shivered sweetly under my touch. "Wouldn't it stop you getting hurt, though?"

"Believe me, the things that have hurt me in my life have had nothing to do with whips or chains."

His hand groped beneath the duvet and found mine, his fingers curling protectively round me. "I just don't want to…do anything bad to you. Like ever."

What could I do with a boy who had brought me to my knees twice, yet still held my hand in the dark? What could I give in return for such kindness? Such faith? I would so gladly bear all the pain he gave me, intended and incidental, and the loss of him when his inclinations took him elsewhere. "You might, but I trust you, Toby."

He was silent for a very long moment. And then, very solemnly, "I trust in your trust," leaving me naked and breathless, bound and on my knees all over again.

Unable to find a sensible answer, or at least one that wasn't too much, too revealing, I babbled. "It's my responsibility to communicate to you what I'm feeling and what's too much, and it's your responsibility to be receptive to that communication. I don't necessarily believe the best way for that to happen is me saying ‘banoffee pie.'"

"That's your safeword, is it?" asked Toby, when he had finished laughing at me.14

It had been largely an accident, but the lighter mood came as something of a relief. My wary heart and my sense of self-preservation could only countenance so many truths and confessions. "Yes. ‘Lemon meringue pie' to slow down, ‘banoffee pie' to stop. I'm not particularly keen on lemons—though I can tolerate them—but I really hate bananas."

"Oh man, you just haven't had the right lemon meringue pie."

I was smiling foolishly, even though he couldn't see it. "I'd eat lemon meringue pie for you, darling. Any day."

"If you tasted my lemon meringue pie, you'd get down on your knees and thank me for it. People do, you know. Well, not the knees part. But they tell me it's the best they've ever had."

"That's a low bar."

He gave an outraged little squeak. "You are so going to regret that."

"I look forward to…regretting it."

"God, Laurie, you fucking kill me." He arched into me, moaning, his suddenly very hard cock sliding against the groove of my hip.

I swallowed a gasp. "Oh, to be nineteen again."

"It's not funny. You think I like being perma-horny? How am I supposed to sleep now?"

"You don't have to sleep. Use me." Invitation. Command. Plea. "Let me help you."

He stopped squirming for a moment. "You mean I get to come twice, and you not at all?"

"Revel in your power, princeling."

"And you don't mind?"

"I mind not coming. I mind a lot."

"Ha-ha, not that. You're stuck with that. Like you don't…mind me…all the time?"

God. He really had no idea. "It would be my delight and my privilege to get you off whenever you want in whatever manner you want." I'd been going for dryly humorous. It didn't last. "It'll drive me insane…but God…yes, please. Take your pleasure from me."

There was a power too at the heart of powerlessness, and he had never once withheld it or denied me. If anything, he had lavished me, drowned me, seduced me utterly with it—my power to affect him, arouse him, satisfy him.

"Yes." The word was little more than a rough sigh.

I wrapped a hand around him, his cock jerking at my touch. "Do you want my palm? My mouth? My body?"

"Oh fuck. Wow." He scrambled off me, and this time, there was more than enough heat between us to leave me full of warmth and wanting. "Grab the headboard."

I reached up and closed my hands around one of the crossbars. The carvings were intricate but smooth. It was partly why I'd chosen the bed and something I'd almost forgotten until now.

"I love the way you look when you're all stretched out."

I shivered, taut and—in some very small way—vulnerable. Toby knelt over me, his thighs enclosing me, and dragged his cock over my lips. It was a sensation I'd always found compelling in its contradictions, soft skin and blunt pressure, at once tender and intrusive. I was eager to taste him, to please him, but I let him force me to it.

"Open. Oh…shit…wait… Do I need a condom?"

"Fuck the condom." Knowing better, apparently, did not preclude actually giving a damn. I wanted him, and I wanted him bare.

"I haven't… I'm like totally—"

"Please, Toby, just let me suck your fucking cock."

And then he was inside, with a groan. He didn't give me much chance to adjust, but I let him take everything: my mouth, my breath, control. He didn't brutalise me, but his eagerness was its own roughness and claimed me just as surely. He came in less than a minute in a crescendo of breath, babbling wildly, his cock nudging the back of my throat and his body shuddering above me, all skin and shadows, making me wish I'd thought to turn a light on so I could see him properly.

He collapsed next to me, leaving me gasping and full of the taste of him. Then he rolled into his usual ball and tucked himself in tightly, nestling against my once again painfully desperate cock.

"That was awesome. Like…best ever. Wish I'd been able to make it last more than a nanosecond."

I pressed my tongue against the corners of my mouth, gathering up the last traces of him. "My pleasure. Always. And…thank you."

He twisted round to look at me. "For what?"

"For"—I kissed him lightly, my lips still throbbing a little—"letting me suffer for you."

He said something that sounded like ngh, cuddled, if possible, even closer, and once again, we slept.

* * *

I woke close to midday with a strange, jittery, Christmas-morning feeling. And then remembered why. Toby was stretched out on his front, legs and arms spread like a wanton starfish. Very quietly, I groped around in the top drawer of the bedside table until I found a tube of lube and a condom. When I was ready, I covered him with my body and slid a slick finger into him.

"Good morning, darling. You owe me, and I intend to collect."

"Oh fuck, yeah." His voice was hoarse from sleep and burgeoning excitement, and he spread his legs even wider, bucking up against me. "Yeah."

The muscle was a little tense, but I eased him and aroused him and got two fingers into him while he twisted and gasped and pressed himself into my touch. He was bed-warm and supple, a sprawl of floppy hair and languid limbs, and he smelled of sleep and sex and a little bit of me.

I kissed the tops of his shoulders—he had some acne there as well, small constellations of bright stars—and the back of his neck through the fall of his hair, fucking him with my fingers until he was writhing, breathless, and incoherent.

"Fuck. Yeah. That's good. That's so good." Though when I nudged him with the head of my cock, he cried out sharply. "Wait, wait, want to see you. Let me see you."

"Any way you want me."

I rose to my knees and dragged him onto his back. He flung his legs around me as I thrust into him, without finesse, without control, my breath falling harsh and ragged against his skin. I'd prepared him, but his groan had an edge of pain, and through the haze of desperation, I flinched for him and at myself. I hesitated, deep in his body, trying to be more careful, but then he threw back his head and arched his body, offering himself to me.

"Yeah, yeah, like that, just like that." His voice caught in the impossible space between command and supplication. "Come on, Laurie, fuck me. Fuck me. Really want it."

Undone again, I obeyed.

I seized his wrists in one hand and pinned them over his head, stretching his body into a line of heat and urgency, and fucked him, hard and fast and frantic, holding him there against me, under me, so I could somehow bear it, all the pleasure, relief, and sheer extraordinary joy. Not a reward for last night's submission and humility and denial, but a part of it, an extension. A culmination.

"Touch me," panted Toby, twisting beneath me. "Want your hand on me."

And of course, I did. I would have done anything he told me. Anything he wanted. His every delirious command was a spark beneath my skin. And I was going to ignite like a phoenix.

His cock was hot and damp, straining between our bodies, and he came with a ragged cry the moment my knuckles clumsily brushed him there. I fucked him through it, my responses lost in his and his in mine, along with all the boundaries of give and take, dominance and submission, conquest and surrender. Leaving only us and this, our bodies locked in ecstasy.

He gave a final, shuddery groan and went utterly pliant, his eyes opening after a moment to focus hazily on me. "Your turn. Want to watch you come apart."

So I gave him that as well. Those last ragged moments of clinging to control, to self, to anything, and then the helpless fall. The pleasure was starless, annihilating and terrifying, the deepest surrender of all.

Soft touches—Toby's hands on my shoulders, his mouth at my brow, the warmth of his breath—brought me slowly back. He held me through my silence and my shaking, murmuring things I shouldn't have needed to hear, until I felt at least a little like myself again.

And while I lay in bed—my mind and body temporarily soothed to still water—he made me eggs and brought me tea. Showed me the bruises I'd left upon his wrists and, grinning, made me kiss them.

* * *

He left not long after. I didn't think to ask him to stay, but everything was quiet without him. I wandered around the house in my dressing gown, a stranger of the moment, lost and almost at peace.

I thought about catching up with my reading, except Toby had left his mark even there, albeit accidentally. Not over my journals, thank God, but in a wild splash across The Acceptance World, Books Do Furnish a Room, and Temporary Kings. For some reason—though it shouldn't have—it made me smile.

I carried the books into the kitchen—left contrastingly spotless by Toby—with the vague intention of cleaning them. They'd been Robert's favourites all the time we'd been together, and I'd failed repeatedly to get into them, even taking A Question of Upbringing to Iraq in the hope I would be desperate enough to care. But I had loved that he loved them. I liked listening to him quote them and talk about them, leaning close to me, a laughing fanatic, trying to share his passion.15

He could have only have left them to forget. And I could only have kept them to remember. Bundling up the whole twelve-volume set, I took them to a charity shop, returning from a grey afternoon to a house that seemed to be full of new spaces waiting for Toby to fill them.

At least on Monday the realities of life and death would take over, and I would not have to think about him until he was here again.