Beautiful Torture

Claude

Okay, well, I accidentally fell in love with Sonny. So, yeah, that might present a problem. For me though, not for Sonny. I wouldn’t let it affect him.

In three weeks, he’d be heading back to Remy and leaving me for his old but very important life. I couldn’t let anything dissuade him from that.

It was his calling. His destiny.

And mine was here. I knew that now.

Fucking him had been a mistake. But let’s face it, I’d already fallen in love with him before I’d fucked him. It wouldn’t have made one iota of difference.

I wasn’t sure when I figured it out, or what was the tipping point. I had wanted to fuck him from the front so I could watch his face as he fell apart. I’d wanted to see him bouncing up and down on my cock, wanted him to shower me with his release again, but a thought popped into my head at the last second—we wouldn’t be fucking, we’d be making love. So I flipped it... him. Flipped him over and took him from behind.

It didn’t work, didn’t stop the rising emotions. Though I wasn’t sure anything would have.

And now I was truly fucked.

I’d thrown myself into a well of feelings for him, no ladder or rope to climb out with. I was likely stuck here forever.

I had three weeks. Three weeks until the twentieth. And three weeks left with him.

I shouldn’t encourage any kind of sexual encounter. It would unfailingly make things worse. But how could they be any worse? I was setting myself up for heartbreak no matter what. Why shouldn’t I enjoy the last few moments of Sonny’s almost undivided attention?

He was still asleep. Naked in my bed, half on his side facing me and half on his back, his knee bent, jutting up towards the ceiling. The sheets were curled over his one flattened leg, his hip, and his stomach. His hair fanned out on the pillow, shining blues and greens and purples like a pretty little oil spill. His mouth was parted, and he was snoring. Loudly. And it was fucking annoying. I was glad for it.

I tried to tell myself I couldn’t put up with that gods-awful noise every night for the rest of my life. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to utter those words out loud. It would have been a lie.

I’d woken thirty minutes ago, propped myself up against the headboard, and grabbed the closest book in case Sonny opened his eyes and caught me staring at him. That way, I could pretend I’d been reading instead of counting the freckles on his torso.

The book happened to be one of Sonny’s. Yes, it held many pictures of his muddy fingers. There was a reason out of all his books, I’d chosen this one for my nightstand.

Sonny smiled at me from the cover. His raven hair was shoulder length here, and he wore an uncharacteristically plain, forest-green T-shirt. He held is hands out in front of himself, showing the camera a bunch of stringy white mushrooms. Beside him stood another guy.

Impossibly, the second man was a couple of inches taller than Sonny, and an entire foot wider. Furry, pointed ears poked out from his mop of shaggy blonde hair. His elongated canines glinted at the corners of his beaming smile, and his piercing green eyes were crinkled and trained directly on the camera. He was undeniably werewolf and disgustingly gorgeous. Intimidatingly so. His arm was slung over Sonny’s shoulder, his unnecessarily muscular body flush to Sonny’s. Their smiles were genuine, born from true friendship, maybe more.

I hated him.

Sonny’s book was titled A Woodwide Network: How Trees Communicate Underground Through Fungi. The man standing next to him was Dr Mash Cassidy.

This was who Sonny would be returning to.

This man.

With his stupid perfect face, and his stupid chiselled cheekbones, and his stupid cleft chin, and his stupid, stupid, stupid muscles.

The real Sonny stirred, huffed a soft waking-up whine that almost made my heart explode, and dropped his arm to his waist.

He peeled open his eyes, and they immediately found me. His face cracked into a smile. “Morning,” he said, his voice groggy with sleep. “I am very naked.”

“Me too,” I said, because for some reason anything requiring a higher number of syllables wasn’t possible.

Sonny rubbed a hand over his chest. “I had so much fun last night.”

“Me too,” I said again.

He reached over and took the book from my hand to peer at the cover. The sheets tumbled down his stomach, not enough to expose his cock, but enough to give me a glimpse of the sparse petrol-coloured hair trailing down the taper of his torso.

“We’re working on the second edition of this one.” And then he leaned right over me to place the book on my nightstand.

I had no other option but to wrap my arms around him and bring his lips down to mine.

“Mm.” He pulled away. “Morning breath.”

“I don’t care. Do you?”

“No,” he said, so I kissed him again, pushing my tongue into his mouth, sliding it along his. Unashamedly taking everything I needed.

Three more weeks.

I flipped him onto his back, the sheets tangling between us, and rolled my hips against his. He was half-hard, growing harder by the second.

“How is everything, you know, down there?” I asked.

“A little sore.” He laughed. “But sore in a good way, I suppose. Sore in a way that reminds me how incredible last night was.” He laughed again and his cheeks flushed bright pink. “I’ll recover enough for us to do it again sometime if you’d like that.”

I went from half-hard to almost painfully full. “Have you recovered enough to take my finger now?”

Sonny’s breath left his lungs in a whoosh. “Yes.”

“Perfect.” I kissed him. “Jenny?”

No response. The house had been suspiciously quiet this morning.

“Jenny?”

“Oh my gods, what?” it said finally.

“Don’t watch, okay? Go count ants again.”

“Fucking hell, you woke me up to tell me not to watch? Fuck off.”

“What did it say?” Sonny asked, propped up on his elbows, his chest heaving between us.

“It seems a little grumpier than usual,” I replied. “But I don’t think it’ll pay us much attention. Can I... ?” I paused my hand over the sheets tangled around Sonny’s hips.

He nodded, and I tore them free, unwrapping him like a gift. I sat on my knees between his and simply stared at him in all his magnificence. Naked and beautiful. Pale skin and iridescent black hair. Lean, scrawny, veins tracking down his abdomen to his now fully erect cock. Fucking perfect.

I pressed my face into his stomach and breathed him in. That mossy incense scent. I would never get enough of that. I wondered if I could sneak into his rooms and see what brand of soap he used so I could rub it all over my pillows once he’d left for Remy.

“Claude,” he said . . . whimpered.

I wrapped my fingers around the base of his cock. Sonny caught my eye, his expression pleading.

“Is this okay?” I asked, my lips poised above him.

“Yes. Yes,” he said, his breath heavy, his hips rolling upwards as though the sudden desperation was too much.

I placed a delicate kiss on the head of his cock, eased his foreskin back a little, and licked away the precum beading at his slit.

“Oh, fuck,” he huffed and dropped his head back to the pillow, as I swallowed his cock all the way to the base and began sucking. He whined and writhed beneath me. I tried to memorise every sound he made, every curve and angle of his body. His hip bones, the line of hair from his belly button to his cock, the feel of the tender flesh behind his knees, everything.

I pulled off him long enough to say, “Lube.”

Sonny tossed me the bottle, and I spread some onto both of my hands, making sure the fingers on my left hand were especially well coated. Then I took him back into my mouth and drew circles around his hole with my middle finger, eventually sinking it in and feeling the tight heat of him. I took myself in my other hand because the intensity was too much. I needed friction or I would pass out.

What I did to Sonny last night was borderline cruelty—though I heard no complaints from him—but I’d atone for it now.

I curled my finger against Sonny’s prostate and he cried out, so loud it echoed through the beams, and I shot dangerously close to finishing.

“Fuck, Claude. Holy shit, it’s too much... too good. I’m gonna... I’m so close,” he said through staccato breaths. “Can I... fuck. Can I come in your mouth?”

“Mmm,” I said, because I didn’t want to break the connection to answer him, but I wanted nothing more.

He must have taken it as a yes, because the next second his hands fisted in the sheets, his chin tilted up as he whined through his orgasm. My mouth filled with spurt after spurt of Sonny’s cum. I swallowed each one down and sucked him gently through the last of his aftershocks.

Then I rose to my knees, took his mud-stained fingers and thrust them into my mouth as I pumped my fist furiously on my cock. I swallowed down my groan, his fingers still buried in my mouth, and sprayed his naked torso with my release as he had done to me by the pool. He watched me, jaw slack, brow furrowed.

I collapsed next to him, and we lay still and silent together until our breathing returned to normal. Sonny traced lazy shapes in the mess I’d left on his chest.

“Oh, fuck, I’m sorry. Let me clean you up.” I found the towel I’d used last night to cover the wet patch. In the night, it must have worked its way to the foot of the bed.

I wiped him down.

We said nothing for a few minutes. Occasionally, laughter bubbled between us like we couldn’t believe what had just happened and how good and natural and right things felt.

“I think I’m gonna jump in the shower before breakfast,” he said. He leaned over and planted the softest, gentlest, most heart-pulverising kiss on my lips. Then he hopped out of bed and I watched his flawless, naked ass disappear down the spiral staircase.

I fell back to the bed and let out a breath.

This was torture. Perfect, beautiful torture.

Below me, the grandfather clock chimed nine times, letting me know, in no uncertain terms, another hour in Sonny’s company had irretrievably passed. How many did I have left?

Eventually, I dragged myself out of bed and stripped off the sheets, replacing them with clean ones, and headed into the shower myself.

“So, now you’re in love with him?” Jenny said, as I fastened the buttons on my shirt after my shower. “And don’t bother to say you’re not. I felt the shift in your soul.”

I groaned out loud and scrubbed a hand down my face. “I guess I am. Out of curiosity, when did you notice the change?”

“When you came back from the lagoon,” it said.

“Yep.” Sounded about right. I wanted to ask if Sonny felt the same, if Jenny could sense the shift in his soul too, but I bit my tongue. I wasn’t a masochist. Either answer would hurt beyond anything I was capable of tolerating. Either my love was unrequited and Sonny didn’t feel the same, or he did, but was still planning on returning to Remy.

Not that it was a choice for him, but it would kill me to know he would ache as I would.

I needed to stay here and protect the house and its occupants from greedy developers like Mr Greene, and Sonny needed to go off and save the Eight and a Half Kingdoms from self-destruction. We would lead separate lives, down separate paths. This was how it was meant to be.

But I still had three weeks with him. Well, just under three weeks. I would make the most of those days.

I practiced lightning magic at the ley lines. Day after day. From the second I left the breakfast table to the moment either Oggy, Willow, or Sonny came to fetch me for dinner. I practiced in the heatwaves and in the rain, and everything in between. I was getting better. Could conjure clouds and the accompanying thunder, and I could make the lightning crackle from one palm to another. But I was yet to create a powerful enough burst to strike the stone tablet like before. I’d get there. I was sure of it.

I hardly saw the residents of the guest house, which was both a blessing and somewhat disconcerting. Occasionally, John sat with me in the paddock and made indecipherable notes into his jotter. Sometimes he would tell me about Mrs Ziegler and Mr Dupont’s antics.

Mr Dupont had not taken well to the pissy hay stuffed into his mattress and had responded by boring an inch-wide hole in Mrs Ziegler’s bedroom wall, feeding a pipe through said hole, and pumping a metric tonne of methane into it.

In return, she had drugged him and filed his two front teeth into stumps. Consequently, he was now talking with a lisp. John said it was surprisingly endearing.

Mr Dupont’s revenge came in the form of a priest, whom he’d paid to follow Mrs Ziegler around Stinkhorn Manor, continually absolving her of her crimes. Mrs Ziegler found this maddening enough to smash Mr Dupont’s monster truck into a mangled pile of black and red metal.

He’d cried, apparently. I tried to imagine a lisping, nine-foot fire daemon weeping. Failed.

I was always thankful when I’d created enough magic to make it rain, and John, not wanting to get his “life’s work” wet, would huff and return indoors.

Sonny spent his time in the library with his head buried in ancient tomes. Or in his lab, his neck bent over the microscope. Or on his laptop, chatting with his students. Or in the allotment, tending to the veg. This, he claimed, was to decompress. Though he said he enjoyed everything and loved it here at Stinkhorn Manor.

So, I didn’t get to see that much of him during the day.

But after dinner, that was our time.

We wasted not a second of it. Exploring every ridge, every divot, every angle of each other’s bodies, with our fingertips, our tongues, our cocks.

Jenny complained every single time we asked it to make itself scarce, yet it never failed to supply us with a romantic atmosphere. Mood lighting, candles, music, gallons of lube. It provided us with interesting settings for us to fuck in. Not only a bed or a couch, but a beach, a snow-stranded cabin with a roaring log fire, the open-block shower cubicle of some team-sports locker room, the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie theatre, a stopped-mid-air cable car.

Sonny enjoyed being tied up, I’d learned. And edged. He fucking loved being edged until he was shaking, crying, begging for release. And he loved it when I took care of him afterwards. Cleaned him up and stroked his hair, and carried him back to the bed.

“You’re stronger than you look,” he’d said.

“It’s all the eggs royale I’m eating. So much protein.”

And then in the morning, after waking up in my bed in each other’s arms, we would slow fuck. With the sheets pulled right over our heads, blocking out all the early sun, making a space that was only for Sonny and me.

Except we weren’t fucking. Again, we were making love. And neither of us pretended it was anything else.

Sometimes Sonny woke up with a full beard and other times he didn’t. It was odd and there was no rhyme or reason to it, but we’d come to accept it as just another weird phenomenon that happened in this house. He looked incredible either way.

Over the last few weeks, Jenny seemed quieter than before, more withdrawn. It didn’t make as many snide or sassy comments, didn’t ask random questions as frequently, didn’t seem to want to talk about my dick as much.

I figured, like everyone else, it was feeling the sorrow of Sonny’s impending abscondment.

“Can we trick him into staying?” I whispered to Jenny one morning after Sonny disappeared to shower before breakfast.

But Jenny never replied. And I didn’t hear from the house after that.