Chapter 17

seventeen

The morningafter our first day, I wake up to him stroking the skin around my opening. I arch instinctively.

“You’re awake,” he says, and nothing more as he reaches for the lube and condom box. He uses his own body to fix me to the bed while he works his way inside, and when I start moaning, he sticks his fingers in my mouth and orders me to suck. I come so much faster than him that I’m already hard again by the time he finishes.

“You’re so goddamn tight,” he mutters through his final thrusts. “Fuck. I’m going to need this so much.”

We come at the same time—me for the second time—grunting and messy. The only thing that would make it better would be if it were even messier—if there’d been no condom at all. Only him, marking me, making me wet and sloppy with his pleasure.

Afterward, as he’s pulling out, I tell him so, that we don’t have to use a condom, seeing as he’s tested so often and I was a virgin until very, very recently.

“You want to be bred, sweet thing?” he murmurs, biting my earlobe. “You want me to leave my cum inside you?”

I groan, fresh desire unfurling in my gut. “Please, sir.”

A kiss on the back of my neck. “I promise to think about it, my pretty Tristan.”

But he never does take me raw.

He cooks for me, he washes me, he takes me around the grounds and fucks me in his favorite spots. He pushes into my body on a magnolia-petal-strewn blanket in the graveyard, comes down my throat on a footpath near the topmost ridge of the valley. When we get caught in the rain on a walk, he shoves me against a tree and kisses my mouth like it’s the only good thing left in the entire world. My lips are swollen for a whole day after.

When he’s not cooking or fucking me, I’m still the entire locus of his attention. He makes me read to him while we sit under his favorite hazel tree with bottles of cold, crisp cider nearby. He annihilates me at chess and then grumbles about how my generation knows an embarrassing nothing of strategy, subtlety. He takes me to watch the lambs bleat and scamper in the field a mile to the north and listens while I talk about the animals back home. How we leased our farm when I was a kid but how the new farmer let me help with the calves and baby goats, how it was my job to feed them bottles of milk while they headbutted me with their tiny heads.

When the spring evenings get chilly, he lights a fire in the library and watches me with flames reflected in his stare.

I have no way of proving it to myself, of verifying it, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is really him, that this is the real Mark. Not the indolent devil of Lyonesse or the cold former killer, but the man who watches me eat with a possessive interest, who scolds me for bad chess moves, who can identify all the tiny, temporary wildflowers that crowd up around the gravestones.

It’s not that his eyes glitter less when he’s sprawled in a chair; it’s not that he’s any less ruthless. It’s just that it’s all there together, stirred up together, and it’s all completely fixated on me. Playful cruelty and utter possession, and I am at the center of it all.

Which is not to say that I don’t still see the ghost of whatever haunts him here at Morois House. There are moments after the welts, the orgasms, the glasses of water put to my lips, when I see something lost in his face, the same expression I saw when I came into the library for the first time. Burning and bleak.

Dead but still dying.

I fall asleep with him trapping me to his chest, and I wake in the morning with both of his arms around me and his legs tangled in mine, his face against the nape of my neck. But sometimes in the middle of the night, I come out of sleep to find that he’s sitting on the side of the bed, cradling a plastic-wrapped sweater in his hands, or that he’s gone to the library and shut the doors.

Sometimes when we’re in the graveyard I look over to see him rubbing a magnolia petal between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the fragile pink flesh of the flower, his chest moving fast.

I don’t disturb those moments and I never ask about them later. Whatever I am to him, I don’t think I have the right to. Even if little brambles of jealousy prick the insides of my ribs when I think about how devoted he is to a mere memory.

* * *

Mark isquiet on the drive to the airport and during the flights home. In the first-class lounge at Heathrow, he drags me into a single bathroom, shoves a wad of paper towels in my mouth, and proceeds to lash my ass with the end of his leather belt—not nearly as painful as it could be if he’d actually slid it from its loops and properly worked me over, but painful enough that I’m moaning around the makeshift gag as he fucks me after, his clothes rubbing against the newly welted skin.

He still doesn’t speak after, whatever demon not fully exorcised, but he does crouch behind me and check the welts, running his fingertips over them to test how puffy they are, if the skin is broken at all. He helps me clean up and then when we emerge back into the lounge, he goes to the bar for a glass of ice water and brings it back to me, watching to make sure I drink it all.

It’s a long flight home with my ass that sore, not just from the lounge but from days of punishment and sex. If I’d thought Mark needed the toys stocked in the rooms of Lyonesse to work his craft, I no longer think so at all. Anything from kitchen towels and wooden spoons to earmuffs and painter’s tape were put to work on me, and often enough, he just used his own body. His cock or fingers to gag me, his arms and legs to hold me down. His teeth to punish me until my tears brimmed over and then he licked them up like they were some kind of payment owed to him.

And always, always, I was hard and panting for it.

Always, always, I was falling deeper and deeper in love.

So healthy.

We get to DC bleary-eyed and vaguely disheveled in that hard-to-pinpoint way of long travel, and my stomach is gnawing on itself as Jago drives us home to Lyonesse.

What will happen when we get there? Will Mark want to pretend that we weren’t together in Cornwall? Will things continue as they were? But even if Mark wanted to continue, it couldn’t be the same, not with his schedule. It couldn’t be days of doing nothing but making sure I’m so thoroughly devirginized that I can hardly walk in a straight line.

When we step across the bridge to the club and go through the doors to the elevator bank, Mark turns to me and says, “Do whatever you need to clean up. Then come to my apartment.”

I nod, the gnawing feeling growing worse.

I don’t know whether he’s calling me up to fuck me again or to—well, break up is probably the wrong way to put it, since we’re not truly together, but whatever the Cornish Grief Fling equivalent of breaking up is.

I drop my things in my apartment as soon as I walk in, take a quick shower to wash the plane off, and then brush my teeth and get dressed. As I do, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Bite marks in various stages of healing dot my skin, front and back, a particularly defined one on the place where my neck and shoulder meet. My ass and thighs are welted and bruised, as are my shoulders and upper back, from the ruler and wooden spoon and kitchen towel. I have scrapes on my knees from the times he took me in the woods, and a grass burn on my forearm from a particularly vicious screw under the branches of the hazel tree. Mark had been right that first day together. He really couldn’t go more than twenty feet without needing to fuck me.

I didn’t mind.

I run my hands over the marks the way I used to run my hands over battered maps in Carpathia, like I’m committing important information to memory. I need to remember every single time he touched me. I need to remember how it feels to see my body as living proof of his desire.

Even if I’ll never have his love, I’ll know I had that. His hot stare under the hazel tree.

Once upstairs, I move through the empty lobby area in front of his office and through the office itself, into the hallway that leads to his apartment. Despite working here almost two months, I still haven’t seen the inside of his private living space; he’s always in his office when I come in the morning.

One of the doors is open—I still knock, feeling strange, wishing we were back at Morois House. Things were so simple there: I was his to hurt or to fuck, and he was mine to adore. And there was nothing but time for all of those things.

“Come in,” he calls from somewhere in the apartment, and I enter, momentarily surprised by what I see. I’d expected something as stark and minimalistic as his office, glass and glossy wood and then more glass, but his private rooms are the furthest thing from stark.

The floors are made of wood, running in wide, pale planks, and the walls are the green of bay leaves or dried sage. A velvet couch and two overstuffed chairs set off a living area; botanical watercolors hang on the wall. Lights are everywhere, lamps and sconces and pendants, and built-in bookshelves are crowded with books. Just beyond is the kitchen, its butcher block island covered in bowls holding oranges, onions, and apples. Well-loved copper pots hang on a rack.

It’s stylish and expensive, but it’s not cold. There’s something of him stamped on this place, and it reminds me of who he was at Morois House—not only a hedonist nor a murderer but something more than both.?I could spend days here, just exploring his things. Him.

I start with the books, which are mostly medieval history and ancient philosophy, with a smattering of cookbooks and slim volumes of poetry. And oddly enough, there’s an entire shelf of yellowing paperback mysteries that claim to be coauthored by a cat.

“In here, Tristan.” Mark’s cool voice comes from deeper in the apartment, and I pass into a hallway to find an open door to a large bedroom. The floors are the same wide-planked wood, but the walls are painted a soft white. There are more bookshelves, a large bed with a white cover, and a door out to a narrow balcony with a glass railing.

The light is tinted blue, with strange patterns waving and dancing over the floor and walls. I look up to see three skylights in the ceiling, and above them, the clear water of the rooftop pool, shot through with refracting sunlight.

Mark emerges from the bathroom in gray trousers and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up, feet bare and hair still damp. When he sees me, his eyes hood a little in a now-familiar gaze, a dark and burning stare that usually precedes some humiliating command. In Cornwall, I privately thought of it as the mine stare, the look of a dragon gazing upon his hoard of gold, a conqueror looking over his bloodstained spoils.

It never fails to make my mouth dry, to send heat and blood down deep into my belly.

Yes, yours, I hope my gaze says back.

He rolls his lips inward, briefly, as if stopping himself from something. And then he says, “Let’s have a drink on the balcony, shall we?”

After a long flight where I stayed conscientiously sober as a weak gesture toward my role as a bodyguard—as if having a constant semi and being distracted by Mark’s mouth weren’t just as bad as being soused on first-class champagne—a cold beer sounds great. I tell him so and he leaves to fetch one for me, returning with the ?ywiec porter I like and his usual glass of gin, and then together we go out onto the balcony. It’s small, but there’s enough room for the two of us to lean against the railing and look out over the Potomac.

It’s warmer here than it was in England, but not hot. Just warm enough that the beer is nice to drink. The air smells like water and concrete.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I breathe out, unable to hold it in any longer.

“You do?” asks Mark, looking over at me. His arms are on the railing, his glass dangling carelessly from his fingers.

“You’re going to say that we should stop, that I don’t know what I’m getting into, that this will only make things messy since I’m new to kink and was still a virgin as of last week, and then you’ll say that we should go back to the way things were—and—and I don’t want to go back to the way things were, sir,” I finish in a rush. “I want to be yours. Like Strassburg was. Please.”

“Tristan,” he says. It looks like he’s fighting a smile. “I don’t want to stop.”

His words hang in the air like light, there but not there, and I have to breathe, have to swallow, before I can speak. “You don’t want to stop?”

“I don’t, however selfish that makes me.” His eyes are very blue out here in the sunshine. “But I do owe you an apology.”

I have no idea what he could mean. For food and orgasms and the only nightmare-free nights I’ve had since I killed Sims?

Maybe?.?.?.?maybe the stuff with the rulers and spoons and library carpet?.?.?.

“Mr. Trevena, I liked everything we did. Please don’t say you’re sorry for it. If you say that you’re sorry for it, it makes it seem like it’s worth saying sorry for.” And if it’s worth saying sorry for, it makes me feel ashamed for having wanted it in the first place.

“I’m not sorry for what we did,” he replies after a minute, his eyes searching mine. “And I want to do more of it. But I am sorry for how it was done. I should know better.” A bitter laugh. “If nothing else, I should know better. But I wasn’t thinking clearly this week.”

I remember seeing him in the library, every muscle standing out in harsh relief, bleak anger turning his face into that of a vengeful god. Haunted by whatever haunts him there.

“I used you selfishly,” he goes on, “and while I am a selfish man, I prefer to be so on purpose. And whatever this week was, it wasn’t on purpose.” He looks away from me. The breeze lifts and pulls at his hair, streaks of gold and platinum glimmering in the sun.

“Okay, then,” I say slowly. “Well, if you feel like you need to apologize for that, then I accept your apology. Although isn’t this how most people do things? Not on purpose?”

“Most people don’t gag their lovers with paper towels,” Mark replies mildly. “We’re not most people.”

I roll the beer bottle between my palms for a moment. “Are you saying that it needs to be on purpose from now on?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then it’s on purpose. I agree. I’m in. Whatever other consent you need, it’s yours.” My words are quick, eager. Now that I know he’s not going to make us stop, all I can think about is getting back to it. About him dragging me inside and making me his plaything again.

He looks back at me, a small bracket on the side of his mouth like he’s fighting off another smile. “You’re not very good at self-preservation.”

“Why would I want to be?” I whisper, staring at him. His golden skin and hair, his sharp gaze. His strong throat and long-fingered hands. The part of me that signed up to go to war, that went back to it over and over again, is his in this moment.

The rest of me already was.

“You will want to be better at it, because I can’t be trusted. If I had even a shred more sense, I’d stop this, but I don’t and I can’t. I want it too much. But if we’re going to do the wrong thing, we at least need to do it the right way. I should have made sure of that at Morois House, and I’m very sorry that I didn’t.”

He holds up a hand when I open my mouth to argue. “You’re going to say that you didn’t need anything else this last week, but one day you might, so we must.”

My expression goes a little mulish, and he smiles again. “You saw me with Isabella. She liked struggling, reacting—she could do that knowing I wouldn’t do anything she hadn’t already agreed to do, and she could do that because she knew she could stop me at any time. Wouldn’t you like that?” He comes a little closer, his hand on my wrist. Even through the cuff of my button-down, the warmth sinks right into my skin. “To fight me a little bit? To struggle underneath me? To have me pin you down and take something away from you?”

I’m breathing harder now. He squeezes my wrist until I gasp, my knees going soft, his eyes missing nothing. Surely not the flush blooming on my cheeks or the heavy pulse pounding against his wrapped fingers.

“I want that,” I say. “A lot.”

“I want to do it to you. But on purpose means a safeword. Limits.”

“I don’t have any limits,” I say automatically.

“So I could peel a piece of ginger root and put it in your rectum before work tomorrow? Make you walk around with it inside you?”

My mouth is open. “What?”

He laughs. It’s a small one, but it’s real. “I would happily fig you if you wanted. But this is why we have to talk about limits beforehand. You remember all the terms and acts you had to review before you even worked here—how much more does it matter now that you’ll be on the receiving end of things?”

“This is like the army,” I mutter. “Paperwork where there shouldn’t be any.”

“It won’t be filed away in an HR drawer, Tristan. It’s just to help me.”

I take a drink of beer and then look down at the river. “Fine. I’ll go over the list of things again. Probably not the?.?.?.?the ginger thing though.”

“Whatever you prefer. Now, your safeword—it needs to be something you can easily remember but not the kind of thing you’d say casually or spontaneously.”

Isabella Beroul’s had been lamer, and the papers I read through prior to working here had used red, yellow, and green as a safe-wording system. I like the simplicity of the last option, but something about it feels too impersonal, clinical somehow. I want this to be mine and mine alone.

Magnolia petals flicker through my mind, white and pink, but with them comes the memory of Mark’s fingertips on a petal, rubbing and rubbing, his eyes blank in a graveyard.

No, not magnolia then. But something else there, something else at Morois House.

I think of the hazel tree we sat under. How safe and lovely and adored I felt as he watched my mouth while I read him Marcus Aurelius and Musashi.

“Hazel,” I say softly, and his gaze goes to my face. I see something flicker through his expression before he carefully shuts it away.

He nods. “Hazel it is. There is one more thing—”

I think I must be pouting now because there’s a crook to his mouth again. “I promise it’s short, but it will help me be good to you.”

I tilt my head to show I’m listening.

“I want to know what you like about it. Us.”

Being yours are the words that push against my lips, but I swallow them back. I can’t say that. I don’t want the humiliation of him knowing how far I’ve already fallen for him. I don’t want his pity as he tries to find a way to tell me that he doesn’t feel the same.

And I don’t totally understand it myself. When I first came here, just the idea of a male submissive disturbed me. Now the thought of going a day without Mark pushing me facedown onto the nearest convenient surface has both my chest and my dick hurting.

So I try for the next most honest thing.

“When you’re with me, I don’t feel heavy anymore. I feel light inside of my own skin, like?.?.?.?like my heart is so light it could float away.”

And then I stop. I still don’t know if that made sense, and I definitely don’t know if that exposed too much of what I can’t ever expose, and I have no idea what Mark is thinking right now as he studies me, his gaze piercing, a line drawn between his brows.

“I promise not to let your heart float away, Tristan,” he says. Quietly.

And then he steps close enough for me to smell him, to smell the rain and wet earth, and it’s the smell of Morois House, I think, rich and hidden, and then his mouth is on mine, driving away every other thought.