Alton set one of the towels across Shawn’s abdomen, covering the front of the tuxedo jacket, then ran a teasing thumb over the slick head of Shawn’s cock. Shawn bit his lip, barely holding in a moan.
Alton licked Shawn’s precome from his thumb, but the seduction was cut short as Alton made sure to wipe his thumb on the towel before he touched the tuxedo material again. Shawn really couldn’t expect anything less than excessive caution, being topped by two archivists.
Alton gently worked the folds of the fabric into a pool around Shawn’s ankles before covering everything up with another one of the big white hotel towels.
Shawn assumed he looked ridiculous, tied up with towels over him, but he had been tied up in far more awkward ways before. But as always, it didn’t matter how it looked as long as it felt good, and god did it feel good.
“Well, now that you’re situated,” Joslyn said in full Top Mode, tossing an eye roll, “why don’t you wait there while we get a bit more . . . comfortable.”
Alton started the complicated process of removing Joslyn’s dress. They were trying to act nonchalant, but deep down Shawn knew they had a very lofty goal in getting all the pieces of the outfit off of her fast enough to do the scene, but carefully enough to not ruin the artifacts.
Each button and clasp was an agonizingly beautiful, calculated move. Her bodice, the skirt, and two more skirts underneath. The corset came off next, with the string passing through each eyelet like a dream, Alton’s hands moving slowly, with utmost care.
Finally they came to the chemise and pantaloons. They laid each piece out on the bed, pulling out any creases in the material to keep the items flat.
As Joslyn’s bare skin was revealed to him, Shawn grew harder. His arms were beginning to feel the strain of holding the same position for so long, but the ache turned him on even more.
Beneath her ensemble, Joslyn had worn her thigh-high gray lace-up boots and hot-pink bikini-cut panties. There was no room for a modern bra in the constricting garment, but her soft, nude breasts were timeless in their perfection, at least in Shawn’s eyes.
Once Joslyn was free of her historical trappings, she turned her attention to Alton. He shifted and moved for her, but Joslyn carefully removed the clothing like she were serving him. Shawn had to admit there was something both endearing and erotic about watching Joslyn undress Alton. Shawn didn’t know if they were doing it on purpose, but he was enjoying it very much.
Out of his gangster suit, Alton looked much less flashy than Joslyn. He wore black boxers and a white undershirt. But Shawn wasn’t allowed much time to ogle.
“Well,” Alton said, stretching his arms. “Now what should we do with him?”
“Whatever we’d like,” Joslyn answered. “Do you want his lips or his dick?”
“Mm. Lips.”
Shawn’s two partners moved around him, Joslyn dropping to her knees at his feet and Alton moving to stand behind the chair. Alton ran his fingers through Shawn’s hair and gently massaged his neck, making Shawn rock his head back into Alton’s warmth.
Alton leaned forward to meet Shawn’s lips in an upside-down kiss. Even though they had been together for a while now, Alton’s kisses always started tentatively, a shallow brush of lips. Once, twice, three times before delving in with heated tongue.
Shawn tried to reciprocate the deep kisses, but he could barely keep up as he struggled to hold his arms in the proper place. Shawn felt the pull of lips and graze of teeth as Alton smiled against Shawn’s open mouth.
“Damnit,” Shawn panted. “You’re—enjoying this.”
Alton answered with another long, full kiss.
The kiss had just begun to crescendo when Joslyn touched Shawn’s cock. White flashes sparked in the corners of his eyes as Shawn forced his arms to stay still while the rest of his body jolted with pleasure.
Joslyn’s hands were small but strong, her fingers cold. She moved her hands over his dick, drumming the pads of her fingertips over the shaft. She didn’t stroke him—she must have known as well as he did it would be over in seconds if she tried.
Her touch coupled with the make-out session from Alton verged on sensation overload. Shawn let out a moan that sounded more like a sob. He kept his arms in place but a wicked burn had started spreading in his muscles.
Alton broke away from their kissing and Shawn thought perhaps his partners were taking pity on him and turning down the intensity. He was wrong.
“I changed my mind,” Alton said. “I want what you have.”
“Let’s trade then,” Joslyn said with a smirk.
They moved much faster without the historical outfits; Shawn hadn’t even caught his breath before they had switched positions. Shawn leaned his head back as Joslyn’s cool fingertips touched his temples and she started sprinkling light kisses over his face. She smelled like strawberries and the SPF from her face moisturizer.
Shawn then felt Alton’s hands on his thighs. Pleasure with an edge of pain cut across Shawn’s lower abdomen. A moan escaped Shawn’s throat when Alton put his mouth on Shawn’s dick. With a flourish of his tongue, Alton took Shawn full and deep. Shawn didn’t fight the gasps and breathy cries that emerged around Joslyn’s kisses as Alton sucked and stroked Shawn’s desperately rigid cock.
Shawn had to force all of his attention on keeping his wrists together even as the heat and kisses and arousal became overwhelming. Shawn knew it was 200 years against all the sexual energy raging through him and he had to keep it together.
Suddenly the weight of all those years was upon him with white-hot clarity. All the people in all those years who had lived and died without this, without the freedom to love and come and fuck and play and celebrate. And here the three of them were, after keeping secrets so long, together, alive. And their mouths were on him, and there was so much bliss coursing through his body but he couldn’t move. Don’t move, don’t tear those delicate, lonely years from around your wrists, no, no, no . . . yes, yes, yes.
“Oh god . . . now . . . now,” Shawn sputtered.
His orgasm erupted, even as Shawn willed himself to stay still, and the full, roiling passion of life pumped through him, held together by a spiderweb of history.
The moment Shawn’s orgasm had crested and fallen, Joslyn reached down, slipped the lace away, and separated his wrists. In the release, Shawn’s shoulders ached, but the pleasure washed away the pain.
The sound of Joslyn’s voice was sweet in his ear as she whispered, “You did well, my love.”
“Thank you,” Shawn managed, tender and genuine. His hands felt heavy, but Shawn reached out toward Alton. “And thank you.”
“I’m sure we’ll be saying the same tonight,” Alton said, standing and giving Shawn a kiss, his lips swollen from cock-sucking. The kiss tasted salty and even though Shawn had just come, desire wetted his mouth again.
“We better be, after all this,” Joslyn quipped, stepping in front of Shawn. She was threading a long piece of black lace through her fingers. Shawn recognized it as a piece off one of her modern sets of lingerie. Shawn blinked hard.
“Wait—did you . . . mind fuck me?”
Joslyn just cocked her head. Shawn turned in the chair and saw the lace collar resting on the nightstand next to the bed behind him. Realization was slow to ooze through the fog of Shawn’s subspace and he threw Joslyn a bewildered look.
“What?” Joslyn asked, draping the black lace playfully over Alton’s shoulders. “You really think we were going to explain to Janet how we destroyed a 200-year-old artifact while giving the assistant director head?”
Relief swelled in Shawn’s chest as reality sunk in. There was nothing he could do about the smile plastered on his face, but he didn’t care.
“I love you,” he sighed.
“We know,” Alton answered, flipping the black lace back at Joslyn. She took the lace and kissed Alton’s cheek.
With that they began to shift back into reality. They ate a fast lunch of cheese sticks and bottled water. They
threw the towels back in the bathroom and turned the air conditioner off. They stole last-second touches and kisses before antique material covered their skin and restricted their movements.
The last piece to fall in place was the lace collar, which Shawn fastened carefully around Joslyn’s neck.
They would go back into the crowd, the fray, the job they were there to do. But every time Shawn caught a glimpse of lace, or saw the glint of light reflecting off a button, or calculated one of his motions in the fragile clothes that clung to his body, his mind would tease out a new possibility for the night that lay before them. Shawn was astonished to be learning just how delicate these matters could be.
BOUNDLESS
Sammy Reí Schwarz
“Here we are.” The double doorway clicks open and I feel my wheels bump over the threshold. My breath catches as soon as I see the black baby grand piano standing neglected in the corner, small in the empty room with vaulted glass ceilings. “No one plays it these days. Most of our residents are hard of hearing.”
Marilyn, a stout nurse, rolls me to the piano in my wheelchair and locks it in place, then folds away the footrests so my feet can access the pedals. With a sympathetic smile, she crouches at my side, placing a latex-gloved hand on my forearm. “I’m sorry, Lin. You’re too young to be wheelchair-bound.” When I stare at my lap, biting back a retort, she stands with a sigh. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, hija. Just press your call button if you need anything.” Marilyn scurries off, leaving me to the cool empty room.
Alone for the first time in weeks, I inhale and lift trembling hands to the ivory keys decked with a thin layer of dust. I’m relieved to be away from the antiseptic bustle of the rest of the nursing facility, but moisture wells in my eyes at the thought that I haven’t touched a piano in so long. Although it’s my passion and livelihood, a six-month blur—operating table, breathing tubes and wires and monitors, hospital ward—stretches between me and my last performance.
With my thumb, I gather strength and play the middle-C note. The single tone echoes in the vaulted room as my finger shakes. I add a couple of notes, attempting my favorite chord, but my vision swims and reflexes falter. What used to seem as simple as breathing now seems like playing Rachmaninoff blindfolded. “Fuck!” I run a hand through tangled jet-black hair.
“Don’t stop.” A young male voice interrupts my private moment, and I whip my head around to see Nico standing in the doorway, frail as a sapling in winter, yet magnetic as ever. A roguish smile cracks the corners of his lips, sending a pleasurable jolt through me.
I first encountered Nico the night I was transferred from the hospital to the rehabilitation facility. From my gurney, I saw white double doors open, fluorescent ceiling lamps scrolling by as I sailed down a corridor. The musty floral scent of Green Meadows Care Center filled my nostrils as wrinkled faces greeted me on either side. As I rounded a corner, a young disheveled patient rapped his fist against an old vending machine. “Fucking piece of shit,” Nico swore at the machine, before pausing to stare openmouthed as I rolled by.
A week later, the same man was burying his face between my thighs, making me curse in several languages as I gripped the sidebar of a bathroom stall. Never mind the sutures, the nerve damage—my libido never quits.
About six feet tall, rail thin, his tan skin wrought with arcane tattoos, Nico haunts the hallways tethered to his rolling intravenous fluid tower. With his curt manner and habit of bending out windows to puff on stolen cigarettes, he isn’t typical company for me. But with sex drives as impetuous as adolescents’, we make a natural pair, saying little and communicating with skin against skin.
When he appears at the doorway to the piano room, I’m glad to be diverted from my frustration. “You never told me you play,” he chides, striding toward me with his IV tower.
“I played,” I correct him. “I haven’t played in a while.”
He beams and pulls up a chair to sit next to me. I jerk my gaze away from his onyx-black eyes, fixing it on the keys before me. Sweat breaks out on my fingers, mixing with the dust. Nico is like an air pocket on a desolate moon, and I’m drawn in despite myself.
Nico draws a cigarette from his ripped jeans and lights it. “This dump could use some music,” he muses. I’m about to protest that I can’t play shit anymore and smoking sure as hell isn’t allowed in here, but one look at that commanding gaze, transfixing me from beneath black locks and a swirl of smoke, halts the words in my throat.
I sigh and press fingers to the keys, but they miss their targets in my cloudy focus. Nico pretends not to notice, eyes closed, nursing his cigarette between two tattooed fingers.
“See? I can’t play shit.” His presence isn’t helping, reminding me of his hands in my blouse the night before. I glance back at him with a smirk, batting my lashes. “I’d like to play with you though.”
“I ever tell you I used to be a tattoo artist?” Nico confides, opening his eyes halfway. I bristle at having my advances ignored, but prop myself up on a wheelchair arm to listen.
Nico takes a drag and looks out the window, where the sunlight pierces through tree branches and falls mottled through the glass ceiling. He holds up shuddering hands, showing me long fingers adorned with faded letters reading VIVE LIBRE. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “These hands’ve been places.”
“Like in my cunt, you mean?” I rib him, still eager to satisfy my craving. He chuckles and flicks cigarette ash onto the linoleum. Sucking the end, his dark eyes hold mine captive as the butt glows like a firefly.
“And these days, I doodle with paper and markers in a nursing home!” He drops his cigarette butt and grinds it into the floor before pulling closer to me, extending an arm. “Give me your hand.”
I extend it to meet him, a warmth surging inside me at contact with his familiar roughness. My hand looks small next to his, despite his gaunt figure. He clutches my hand with the pressure of a child cuddling a toy, but the effort creases his brow. “This hand won’t be wielding tattoo needles again.” I’m frozen in his frail grasp, a willing prisoner.
“Nico—” I begin.
“But Mrs. Reyes in 415 lives for my flower sketches.” He grins, still grasping my palsied hand, leaning so close to me that I smell sweat and cigarettes in his hair. Desire suffuses me like a flash flood. Reading my arousal, his nostrils flare a little.
“Why don’t I show you my masterpiece sometime?” he murmurs, bending into me with longing. His fingers slip out of my clasp, drifting across the gossamer skin of my wrists and into the curve of my elbow.
“Lin?” Marilyn waltzes through the double doors, then freezes. “Nico,” she sniffs. “You’re lucky I like you, hijo. Don’t know where you get those filthy cigarettes!” Then turning to me impatiently: “Lin, it’s time for your shower.”
As she wheels me backward from the piano, his touch lingers like a brand across my arm. “I’ll see you later, won’t I, Lin?” he calls after me with a knowing smile.
* * *
That night I shift in bed, trying to muffle the beeping and gurgling cries from the hallway. Just a year ago I was a bold raven-haired pianist, eking out a living between music and waitressing in a new city. Now I’m a scared girl with tangled locks in a hospital gown, one of five hundred residents in a nursing home.
To make matters worse, I feel wet but not clean after my shower. Shifting under threadbare sheets, I try not to think about Marilyn chattering away as she rubbed me head to toe with pink antiseptic liquid in the bleach-scented shower room. It’s impossible to feel clean in an institution like Green Meadows. You can only feel disinfected, neutralized.
My frustrated thoughts turn to Nico: his inked, tremulous fingers against mine; the way the IV bites into his flesh, tethering him to his rolling tower. Until today, we’ve shared little about ourselves, but in the piano room, Nico broke that unspoken code. Nico, the artist.
A knock comes at the door. “Come in!” I start in surprise as Nico backs into the room, pulling his IV tower with hi
m. Too weak to push myself up, I grab the bed’s remote control and squeeze a button until it sits me upright.
“Can’t sleep either, Nico?” The fluttering in my stomach puts me on edge. I can’t quite see his face in the darkness.
He pulls up a chair next to my bed, and I see the ardent expression on his face. “Come play piano for me, Lin.”
I roll my eyes and simper. “Play with me in bed, Nico!”
“Come on, I mean it.”
I cross my arms, a pout hiding a smile. A smirk comes to his lips, assessing the challenge. Suddenly I see his fingers fumbling at his belt. My smile transitions to a lusty stare of anticipation. Watching my reaction, he smirks.
But after extracting his belt, he bends down and snakes it behind my head. Panic grips me as he fastens it in front of me and starts pulling it tight around my neck. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I can’t drag you out of this bed, but I can hold a leash.” A thrill flits through my core. I’ve never been collared before, but I’m eager to play. “So Lin, shall we go?”
I laugh as he offers his arm like a gentleman, while still gripping the end of his belt. “Clever!” I grin, inching my legs off the bed before allowing him to help me into my wheelchair.
“That’s a good girl,” he says from behind me, sliding a hand between the leather loop and my neck, checking that it’s secure but not too tight. “Let’s go for a ride.” Nico pushes my wheelchair with his torso, his thin frame hard against my back through the canvas.
Pssh. Bump. The automatic double doors open and my wheelchair crosses the threshold. Bzz. A single light flickers on above the piano. Nico’s shuffling footsteps and the roll of our wheels across the linoleum reverberate in the dimly lit silence. Then he locks my chair into place, and I sit at the instrument with no escape.
I shiver at the rustle of his breath behind my head, his firm hands gripping the worn leather pinching my neck. “Now you’ll play for me.” His voice sends shivers down my torso, all the way to the warmth between my legs.
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