Chapter 16

sixteen

He makes me crawl.

In the army, humility is beaten into you, not with impact but with effort and shame. Push-ups until you want to die, insults nasty enough to make your eyes sting, drills so hard and pointless that you want to quit. And always the reasoning is the same—it’s to make you strong, or to make you sharp, or to make you loyal. No matter how convoluted the logic is, it all leads back to those three things.

But here, today, the logic isn’t convoluted at all. It’s a short, straight line.

Why crawl?

Because he wants me to.

The floor changes from carpet to wood to stone as I make my way from the library to the rest of the house, and the shame I feel is delicately balanced by the dazzling certainty I have in this moment, by the gasping arousal that has me by the neck. My cock is a stiff pipe between my legs, swinging and aching, and the cool air reminds me of my nakedness. Of how exposed I am as one knee moves after the other.

Mark follows, lube and condom box in hand, and as we reach the main section of the house—lit by the large glass conservatory at the end, which is currently letting in the dark, silver light of the almost-storming sky—he says in a strained voice, “Stop.”

I stop, unsure of what he means. Stop crawling? Stop this—this—game altogether?

But no, he’s already dropping to his knees behind me, there’s more lube, the tear of a condom wrapper, and then—

“Oh my God,” I mumble, my head dropping between my shoulders. I’d thought earlier, on my stomach, was intense, but like this, on all fours, it’s breath robbing.

“You looked so lovely crawling for me,” Mark explains, one hand curled around my hip, the other making soothing passes on my spine as he forges deeper and deeper. “Your pretty hole still wet and open. I had to. I had to.”

I am more yielding than I was earlier, I think, the muscle worked pliant, but it’s still intense, intense enough to make me moan, to make my cock leak and leak and leak as he fits himself to the glove of my body and makes use of it.

Outside, through the glass of the conservatory, the skies open and rain begins to drop on the glass. Hard, like falling stones. It swallows up the slick noise of Mark behind me, of my choked gasps.

But the sound I make when Mark presses an autocratic hand to my throat and arches me up so that I’m upright and my back is to his chest—that carries just fine. A low, loud moan, rolling like thunder, juddering and breaking as each thrust works me from the inside out.

Mark’s hand stays tight on my throat, keeping me stretched and arched, but his free hand finds my bobbing cock and gives the hot, rigid flesh a squeeze.

“Please, sir,” I manage, knowing I sound pathetic, pleading. “Please.”

“But why,” he says in my ear, “when you are so perfectly sweet right now? Maybe I should leave you like this forever, hard and begging, so you’ll offer up your body whenever I so much as look at you?”

I pant, the agony of his denial and the agony of my lust too tangled to pick apart, and he knows it, he must know it, because there’s a pleased laugh in my ear, dark and low, as he drops his hand to my tightening testicles and cups. My eyes flutter shut—it’s so good—it’s almost enough—if he just kept fucking me, I think that alone would—

“Fuck,” he grunts, and for the second time today, I feel the swell and surge of him inside me. Even though it’s not my climax, I’m shivering like it is, wishing he weren’t wearing a condom so I could feel his cum, so that it could make everything slick and slippery. So that I could carry around a part of him inside me.

So that he’d be leaking out of me all day.

God, just the thought of it nearly breaks me.

He doesn’t loosen his hold for a long minute after he orgasms, his face coming to rest in my neck as his cock stops pulsing.

“You’re dangerous,” he finally says against my skin. “This is why I didn’t—goddammit. I can’t make it twenty feet without fucking you. What are we going to do?”

My erection is a thing of misery between my legs. “I don’t know,” I say, almost nonsensically. I can barely think. I just want him to fuck me or let me touch myself or anything.

A heavy sigh as Mark pulls free and stands. A firm hand to my shoulder stops me from standing too.

“To the bedroom,” says Mark kindly, as if I’ve forgotten.

“Sir” is my response, and this time we finish the journey.

* * *

The sound of rain,steady, drumming, lovely, fills the room. The first thing Mark did when he came into the bedroom was open the doors to a small, magnolia-littered balcony.

The second thing he did was tie me to his bed.

I regret begging him to jerk me off earlier, because for the last hour, he’s been doing exactly that?.?.?.?except not letting me finish, backing off at the precise moment I’m about to crest and watching with a cruel smile as I writhe and twist against my bonds. My good manners slowly melt away too, until I’m swearing, cursing, calling him an evil motherfucker, a sadistic bastard, telling him I hate him.

Every insult only seems to delight him more. “It’s a shame you’re not being sweeter,” he’d say with a sigh. “Only sweet things get to finish.”

Or: “It’s only just now that you’re seeing I’m evil? And they said you were such a brilliant soldier, my God.”

And then my insults turn into worship, into reverence, as he crawls slowly over my body. The rain washes the stones and ferns and trees outside, sending in a smell that is exactly like him, and the muted silver light is beautiful on his naked form. Long, muscled legs, etched chest and stomach. Broad shoulders that drape me in shadow.

He lays his entire body over mine, and then with his fingers on my jaw, he brushes a kiss over my lips. It’s soft and warm like the rest of me is straining and stippled with goose bumps, and then he parts my lips with his own, dipping his tongue inside my mouth and moaning at my taste. I feel the moan tremble through his chest into mine, and I feed the moan right back into him, trying to arch, trying to chase.

His lips curve as he pulls back, waits for me to accept that he’s in charge of this before he licks into my mouth again. Our tongues slide together, and it’s wet, and God, it feels so fucking good to have him kiss me, and then his hips begin moving.

It makes me burn up from the inside out, how good his cock feels against mine, rubbing and rutting. The chafed skin of my frenulum sends little bites of pain along with it, so that every surge of pleasure is razored with a tiny bit of discomfort, and I’m suspended on the edge, dangling, helpless, keening. The building orgasm in my belly has been so thwarted, so tortured, that it almost doesn’t know how to unfurl itself and bloom, and I’m crying, I realize, hot tears tracking down my face, because it hurts so good, so goddamn good.

And then I remember what Andrea said after I found Mark with Ms. Beroul, that he could effortlessly dominate someone even in a brightly lit grocery store, and I get it. I get it now. He didn’t have anything today but an old ruler and the weight of his body, and he still wrecked me. Tortured me, used me. Made me want to worship him. And never more than right now, with his mouth on mine and a hand slipping down to palm my backside and keep our hips fitted tight together.

“Please,” I whimper into his kiss. “Please, sir.”

“If you can come like this, then you may,” he says, his lower body flexing and flexing. Sweat is wet between our chests and stomachs and is damp on my forehead. I can’t tell the difference between the smell of the rain outside and the smell of him. All there is, all there can be, is him.

I come, my back bowing, my mouth falling open in a silent gasp, the release tearing up my thighs, vicious and biting for all the times it’s been denied. My erection swells against Mark’s and then begins spurting warm jets of cum between us, slicking the way for him to fuck against me even harder, even faster.

He slides both arms underneath me—one under my neck, the other under my waist—and bites my jaw as his hips give a few rough thrusts and then go completely still.

Warm release spills, adding to what’s already there, and with him pressed all the way to the top of me, his mouth against my jaw, I feel everything. His harsh breath, his moving ribs.

The shivering tension in his thighs and stomach as his cock finishes jerking between us.

For a minute, we stay just like this, the ejaculate trapped between our bodies, our hearts trying to collide through our chests. Rain coming down in loud, wet whispers just outside the open door.

And then he lifts himself enough to look down at me, to run a thumb over my swollen mouth. His expression is rueful.

“There go all my careful plans,” he says.

I have no idea what plans he means, but I know he was right in Singapore when he said this would complicate things. How could it not?

But also how could I resist?

He unties me and checks my wrists and ankles, even though the bonds had been expertly tied: tight enough to restrain but not so tight that I lost sensation in my toes and fingers. I’m once again reminded that there is a reason why he might be good at tying people up that has nothing to do with fun afternoons and romantic Cornish rain.

He has me sit up, gives me a glass of cool water. “How do you feel?” he asks.

I stare at him, knowing I need to speak but finding that the words are floating just out of reach. But the dizzy, well-used thrum in my body needs only a few words. “The fucking best,” I say honestly, and that surprises a laugh out of him. Not a dark one, not a mean one, but something unplanned and delighted. It comes from deep in his chest.

“You’re high,” he says finally. “On endorphins. You can’t be trusted.” He gets off the bed and takes the glass from me, setting it on a small tray he’d brought in. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

In the shower, he’s just as imperial with my body as he was on the library floor. He has me stand with my feet spread so that he can run the warm washcloth up and down the inside of my thighs, the valley of my ass, the soft place just behind my balls. He pays close attention to the aching furl of muscle that he made such use of earlier; he’s careful when he cleans my abused cock, forgoing the cloth to wash me with only a soapy palm. I’m hard almost instantly from this, even though it hurts—it hurts to have an erection after being aroused all day, and the soap stings the sensitive skin. He only snorts to himself when I twitch and stir in his grip, but he doesn’t let me come.

He washes my hair, my hands, the bottoms of my feet until I make sharp, sucked-in laughs against the tile, and then once I’m finally clean, he turns me so that my back is against the wall.

“Stay,” he commands, like I’m a dog that will start shaking out its fur the minute it can, but I don’t mind—it’s a relief to know exactly what to do. Not to have to wonder if I’m supposed to get out or if I’m supposed to clean him the same way he just cleaned me.

All I’ll have to do is listen, and I’ll do the right thing. After what happened in Carpathia, I could nearly cry from the simplicity of an equation like that.

Besides, it’s a lovely view, watching Mark wash himself. Suds track over the ridge of his collarbone and down the faint corrugations of his stomach. The hair on his chest is darker when it’s wet, lying flat, as is the line down his stomach and the hair on his thighs. His penis, even flaccid, is thick and heavy looking, lightly veined. His testicles have lowered in the heat of the shower, some swing to them as he scrubs himself with utilitarian brevity, and his nipples have flattened. I wonder how long it would take for them to stiffen against my tongue or fingertips.

He washes his hair, the motions efficient, not for show, but it doesn’t matter, it’s still a show for me, because it’s him and his body is a work of art under the running water. The muscles, the neatly inked tattoos. The wet arch of his throat and gleaming rise of his cheeks.

The hair—longer when wet, longer than I thought. Long enough that I could spend hours stroking it if he ever let me.

I try not to think about this specific shower, though, or even this specific house. This house with its sweater and rose tucked into a bottom drawer, this house where Mark comes on some sort of yearly pilgrimage to lock himself inside the library and drink. I don’t think I’m the first person to be in this shower with Mark, nor the first to be tied to the bed in the other room.

And I promised myself that I was content being physically available to Mark with no emotional attachment. No matter how hard I fell for him, I wouldn’t expect him to reciprocate, and I’d plan on being alone in whatever cyclone of emotions this churned up. And the promise would of course preclude jealousy because how could I be jealous of someone who owned a club for fucking? Who fucked people on his desk like it had been penciled onto his daily agenda?

But I find thin tendrils of jealousy twisting in my rib cage anyway, because if the man in the picture is the reason Mark comes here every year—if the memory of the man in the picture is worth that—then he must have meant so much to Mark. Been so much for him.

I want to be that much for him.

Ridiculous.

The shower stops, and Mark pulls me out onto a small rug to towel me off. I blink at the abrupt brush of cool air, and then I find myself swaying. He catches me easily with both hands, grabbing me by the shoulders and holding me so he can study my face.

I blink back at him. Water is dripping from the ends of his hair onto his shoulders.

“How do you feel now?” he asks.

I have to reach for the words. “A little?.?.?.?woozy.”

He studies me a minute longer. “You need to eat,” he says finally. “Come on.”

We dress—me in some borrowed sweatpants from Mark because he seems reluctant to let me out of his sight, even for the handful of minutes it would take for me to get my own clothes—and go to the kitchen, where Mark tells me to sit on a stool by the counter and then starts opening fridge and cupboard doors.

“Is there anything you can’t eat?” he asks. He pulls out a cutting board and a knife.

I shake my head.

“Is there anything you feel like?”

“I like meat,” I offer, and to Mark’s credit, he doesn’t make a joke of it.

“Steak it is, then,” he says, and gets to work, pulling out the raw steak, butter, salt, potatoes, and greenery.

“Do you want help?” I ask, and he points at me with a potato.

“I will get that ruler and make good use of it if you move from that stool. Stay.”

I stay, a little torn, because the instinct to help is pulling at every nerve in my body. But the pleasure of watching him at work is drugging in its own right: the competent way he washes, cuts, and preps; the thoughtful way he brushes his knuckles over the surface of the skillet before he spins it by the handle and sets it on the hob.

Dazed as I still am, I can’t push away all the curiosity and fascination with him that I normally hide. I’ve just let him see me in agonies of pain and lust both—and I’d do it again in a heartbeat if he asked—so why not let him see my curiosity too? My yearning to know him?

I take a drink of the cool water Mark pressed into my hands after I sat down, and then I ask, “Why don’t you use the submissives at the club? For yourself?”

Mark has just dumped potato chunks into a pot of salted water to boil, and he turns to face me, throwing a kitchen towel over his bare shoulder. His hair, unstyled after the shower, is a tousled blond mess, the damp parts dark, the dry parts a pale gold streaked with platinum.

He doesn’t seem to find my question invasive at all. His expression is relaxed when he says, “It’s bad business to fuck the people you pay.”

And then he adds, with a small smile, “Except for my bodyguards, I suppose. I’m making a habit of that.”

“But really,” I press, not understanding. “If it’s about time or convenience or any of the other reasons why Strassburg was good for you, surely the people at your club would be the best?”

He sets to stripping kale leaves from their stems with deft flicks of his knife.

“There are other considerations,” he says. “No matter how transactional a scene is, no matter how straightforward the fuck, there is intimacy there, wouldn’t you agree? Shared vulnerability.”

I think about his teeth in my shoulder, his surprised laugh. His admission: I used to dream of having a submissive like you.

It was intimate; it was the definition of intimate. No matter how desperate or unplanned it was, no matter how unemotional I’d vowed myself to be?.?.?.

“And,” Mark continues, now rolling the kale leaves and slicing them in a chiffonade, “I think you’d also agree that I am the keeper of quite a bit of information. Information that many people would like access to. Intimacy and information”—the thinly sliced kale is transferred to a bowl, replaced on the cutting board by cloves of garlic he peeled earlier—“do not mix. Which sounds alarmingly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people think they are somehow immune to hormones and neurotransmitters. Limerence.”

“So you’re worried that you’d be compromised somehow? By a club submissive?” No matter what he says, it’s impossible to imagine him divulging something confidential to a club submissive just because the sex was good.

“I hear your doubt,” he says, putting the minced garlic in another bowl and then going to check on the potatoes. “And I have news for you. Doubt is informed by confidence. And confidence is informed by experience. And experience is a goddamn liar almost all of the time.”

“So you don’t trust yourself.”

“Or anyone,” Mark says. The potatoes are rescued from the pot and go on a roasting pan with salt, rosemary, and garlic, and then into the oven.

He sighs, facing away from me. There’s something resigned in the set of his shoulders. “Except I have decided to trust some people. Strassburg. You. You were both already as deep into my life as I’d let anyone, so there was no compounded risk.” I see the grim set to his mouth when he turns back to the salad. “Although I may have risked other things. The next twelve months do not account for an?.?.?.?entanglement.”

I don’t want to encourage this line of thinking; the thought of him deciding we need to stop, that we can’t do this again, has my throat closing.

“What about Ms. Beroul?” I ask, more to ask anything, to say anything, to pull him away from thoughts of risk and entanglement. “You don’t worry that she’d compromise you?”

“Ah, Ms. Beroul. No, I don’t worry. Isabella lives in Montreal and belongs to the owner of a club there who loves to share her. She’s not in a position to leverage her proximity to me for more, given that the proximity is so limited.” Mark juices a lemon with his bare hands, juice and pulp dripping around his strong fingers. “So you remember her, do you?”

“Hard to forget,” I say dryly, and he laughs as he squeezes the other half of the lemon.

“Just wanted to make sure. Now, what about you, Tristan Thomas? How is it that you’ve made it to twenty-nine without some monster like myself claiming you for his own?”

I watch as minced garlic, olive oil, and grated pecorino are whisked together with the lemon juice and then tossed with the kale ribbons. “I—it wasn’t on purpose,” I mumble, looking down at my hands. “I wanted to. But it’s like I said before, I get attached.”

I’m embarrassed to say it again, in the context of what we’ve shared today, because I don’t want him to think I will get attached to him.

And yet I almost do want him to think that because I already am attached.

Stop. Don’t imagine he’ll feel the same way about you.

The salad is set aside and the steaks are put on the pan to sear.

“I still don’t understand how this is an impediment to fucking,” says Mark, and that’s the thing, that’s what’s so hard to convey about it.

I remember being interviewed once after the ceremony for my Distinguished Service Cross—the reporter had been more interested in me as an eligible army bachelor than in McKenzie’s death or even in what I’d actually done to merit the award. The reporter had asked why I was still single, and I had no way to answer that wasn’t honest because I’d never been good at lying. I told him that I was ready to fall in love at a moment’s notice, and what he wrote after quoting my stupid little answer was that I was a romantic at heart. Something that was and is true, and yet is such an easy phrase to bat around, like it doesn’t come anchored to an anvil of hammered infatuation.

“I guess it was more that I craved something from a connection that I couldn’t seem to find. Not love or anything like that,” I say quickly, a total lie, but I don’t want Mark second-guessing taking me to bed. “But just something. Respect or a shared intensity. I needed to know that we were”—the words feel colorless and clumsy in my mouth—“together in something. Wanting it as much as the other. I didn’t think I would like to share a bed with someone and find out that they’d only said yes because they were bored or I was an easy option or because they felt bad for me. I don’t like being alone in a feeling. I want to share it.”

I shut my mouth, abruptly feeling like a jackass. But Mark’s face after he puts the steaks in the oven and turns to study me doesn’t seem like he thinks I’m a jackass. He looks thoughtful.

“I would say that the army did a number on you, but maybe it turned out that the army was ready to place all of that exactly where they wanted it—directed at itself. It was happy to be your lover, and dare I say—”

But he doesn’t dare say, it turns out.

He presses his lips together. Shakes his head. “Never mind. But I’m honored it was me.”

“I’m the honored one.”

It’s too honest, maybe, my voice too rough, speaking less of honor and more of that blood-simmering rightness as Mark held me down on the carpet, left welts and bites and everything else on my skin.

His eyes change at my words, going bluer. There’s something else mixing with the fond lust in his expression now. Something rigid and haunted.

I think it’s grief.

“The steaks should be done,” he says, and indeed, within ten minutes, we are eating the best steak dinner I’ve ever had in my life.

We dine in the conservatory as the long spring twilight darkens around us, a light rain still pattering on the glass ceiling. The valley is beautiful in the wet twilight, but it’s the shirtless man next to me who steals all of my attention. His long fingers on the fork, the flex of his jaw as he chews.

“This is amazing,” I say, holding up a potato chunk like it’ll explain something to me. “How did you get so good at cooking? Surely not in the army or the CIA?”

He cuts a piece of steak and then nudges it critically with the tip of his knife. “It was in the CIA, actually. A long assignment in Vienna. My SAC partner and I were posing as businessmen with ties to mercenary groups—positioning ourselves to be courted by what was then the nascent rebellion against the new Carpathian government—or perhaps I should say, a rebellion hoping to push the government into a more extreme stance. People who wanted to go even further than Melwas Kocur but still idolized him.”

Melwas Kocur had been the leader of the Carpathian separatist movement, and the first president of the new country?.?.?.?although president implied he’d been a more benevolent ruler than he was. He hadn’t been too interested in the democratic process, to put it mildly, and had instead been more interested in murdering dissidents, hoarding resources for himself and his top supporters, and agitating to start another war. And then an old video from the first war had emerged of him sending children out to die on a burning boat in a lake—a ploy to divide the American soldiers’ attention, which had worked at the time. The soldiers sacrificed a village to save the children, and it had been a severe blow to both morale and strategy. But years later, it had finally become Melwas’s undoing. He’d been exposed, deposed, and imprisoned. It had been hoped his legacy would end there, but the radicals who had continued to fight and raid in his name grew emboldened, their small conflicts flaring into a cohesive resistance against their own government that no one could douse the flames of no matter how hard they tried.

“Anyway, they wanted what all groups like that want,” Mark goes on, “money and weapons and friends in high places, and so it took some time to establish ourselves as those people. You’ve got to start slow, you see, if you really want to manipulate people. It’s no good just to appear like a mirage and expect things to go the way you want—you have to be subtle. Let them think all their ideas and feelings are their own, slowly twist things up so that they unwind in precisely the right way. And then as everything is falling apart, your hand is nowhere to be seen.”

He takes a long drink of scotch, sets the glass down as his throat moves. “All that to say, the first few months of the assignment were hardly movie material. It was mostly being seen, making introductions, planting stories about my wealth and my connections, and my mission partner and I didn’t overplay our hands. We went slowly, creating a depth to the identities, a history to the stories, something you can only do with time. And so we had a fair amount of free hours in those days. It was either learn to paint watercolors or cook. I hate cleaning paintbrushes. So I chose cooking.”

“Did you already like doing it? Cooking?”

“I like good food, but I went straight from making ramen in my college dorm room to eating cafeteria food at basic training. I never learned how to cook much beyond spaghetti.” His mouth twitches. “I think I went through about fifty pounds of butter in those early days, just trying to figure out stuff that middle schoolers learn how to bake in school. I was truly bad at it.”

I try to imagine Mark fussing with measuring spoons and internet recipes. The legendary spy in his expensive suits and perfect hair looking down at a tray of ruined chocolate chip cookies in dismay. “It’s hard to imagine you bad at anything,” I say, and it comes out sounding besotted. I want to punch myself in the mouth.

“I could say the same about you, Mr. Prom King and Distinguished Service Cross,” says Mark mildly.

“Oh, that’s—” I don’t know what I want to say. Just that all of my achievements are so contextual, so caveated. Sure, I was prom king, but that’s because the other guys were dicks that year. Sure, I have that cross tucked under a roll of socks in its new drawer at Lyonesse, but it might as well be a plastic toy sheriff ’s badge for all the good it does McKenzie and her family. “I’m bad at lots of stuff.”

Namely not falling in love with my boss.

After we eat, I’m less woozy, but I can’t stop yawning. My cock aches, and there’s a sweeter, more tender ache inside my body that makes me blush to feel. Mark watches me a moment, and says, “Bed.”

“Yes, sir,” I say, standing, bracing myself for what comes next. He’ll say that this was a good day, but that it wouldn’t be smart to do it again, and he’d be right, of course, and then we’ll sleep in separate beds, spend the rest of this trip avoiding each other, and then go back to Lyonesse as two polite but distant men.

“I’ll take care of the dishes,” Mark says. “Brush your teeth and do whatever else you need to, and then I expect you in my room by the time I’m finished.”

My breath catches as I meet his gaze. It’s dark, intense. His mouth is set in a hungry, grim line.

And he wants me in his bed tonight. I have no intention of arguing.

“Yes, sir,” I say.

* * *

He usesme one more time that night, after he comes in and finds me kneeling on the floor next to the bed. I have no idea what I’m doing, just groping for memories of what I’ve seen submissives do at Lyonesse, but it must be something close to right, because when he sees me, he hisses a sharp breath through his teeth. Shirtless, I can see the quick heave of his ribs as he stares at me on the ground.

“I didn’t treat you like a virgin today,” he says. “I should go easy on you tonight.”

“I don’t want you to go easy on me.”

“You keep saying this, but it isn’t altruism on my part,” Mark says. “It’s caretaking what belongs to me, especially because”—he’s very close to me now—“I’d like to fuck you again tomorrow. Come here.”

He pulls me up onto the bed on my back. My pajama pants are taken off and so are his. And I think, as he’s crawling over me, that he wants to use my mouth again. My blood is hot at the very idea.

“Such an exquisite mouth,” he murmurs. But he doesn’t move the way I think he will; he’s turned to straddle me facing my feet. “You can touch me now, just for now,” he says, like it’s the utmost kindness he can bestow. And then he lowers himself over my face.

My hands go instinctively to his hips just as I realize what he wants. A shiver rips through me. “I’ve never done this,” I manage on an exhale.

“I know you haven’t,” he says. “Just let me have your mouth and I’ll do all the rest.”

And that’s all he says before he’s sitting fully on my face. He still smells like our shower, soapy and fresh, and when I open my mouth and kiss—gently—the delicate, muscled ring of his opening, I taste a hint of soap too. Above me, he makes a satisfied grunt, and I can feel when he takes himself in hand and starts masturbating.

I kiss his entrance again, giving him my tongue as he told me to, and I’m rewarded with another grunted exhale. When I slide my hands from his warm hips to his hard thighs, I feel goose bumps all the way to his knees. Each shuttle of his fist on his length I feel in my own body. My erection is bone-achingly jealous; it bobs against my stomach as I start swirling my tongue on Mark’s skin. Precum leaks from my tip and starts wetting my stomach, and it hurts being turned on again after being edged so mercilessly earlier, after the carpet, but the pain feels so strangely good. Like the soreness after a long workout, earned and satisfying.

He likes when I push my tongue inside him, or when I hold it flat for him to rock against, and I find it’s all unbearably arousing, having him move over me, his thighs caging my face, the firm curve of his ass pressed against me. The goose bumps betraying his pleasure, the unfairly easy way I can get this fierce man to buckle and grunt with just an indecent flutter of my tongue.

And he’s letting me touch him—freely, constantly, and I can’t get enough, my hands are roaming everywhere, the slim lines of his hips to his ridged stomach to the hard wings of his shoulder blades.

His thighs obsess me the most. The muscles shifting under my palms as he rocks over me, the crisp hair, the grace of them. It’s like stroking the flanks of a predatory cat or a wild horse. Powerful and beautiful and deadly.

He comes fast and hard riding my mouth, his hand jerking a merciless orgasm from his cock. It lands mostly on my belly, but some of it streaks across my own erection, and I can barely think, my breath and my body are wound so tight. I could come from the feeling of his semen on my skin, on my dick, hot and thick and wet—

He lifts from my mouth, a large hand wraps around my rigid length. It only takes three strokes, lubricated by his cum, and I’m gasping, twisting, trying to fuck my hips up into his hand as I throb out an agonizing climax. Pulse after pulse—tingles tracing from the soles of my feet to my fingertips—static bright and fuzzy at the edges of my vision.

He doesn’t give me any quarter, jerking me through it all, not stopping until he’s satisfied I’m finished, drained. I’m panting like I’ve run a race when he climbs off me and returns with another warm washcloth.

I gaze up at him as he cleans me, feeling like my arms and legs are made of lead. And then somehow my eyelids are heavy too, and my blinks feel slower and slower. I blink once and he’s cleaning me; I blink another time and he’s gone. Another time and he’s moving me, moving the covers, until we’re both under the crisp sheets and he’s tucked me into his arms, my back to his chest. Our skin presses together everywhere.

That night, I don’t have a single bad dream.