by Aiden Bates
He didn’t stop as he looked up at me with just his eyes, watching my face with interest and a bit of a smile at the corner of his lips. His tongue moved a bit faster, and he massaged the knot with his fingers, his other hand fondling my nuts, tugging and twisting, his middle finger brushing the cluster of nerves just behind them.
My breathing sped up. My cock swelled, firming up in anticipation. “I’m warning you,” I told him, breathless. “Keep going like that, you’re going to end up with a mouthful.”
He chuckled around my cock, and kept going, an impish glint in his eyes as he watched my face twitch with the promise of impending orgasm.
My balls drew up. His fingers tightened around them. I opened my mouth as the first real warning sparks lit up. “Fuck, Vance, I—”
He pulled back, gave my balls a long, firm tug, and reached beneath to press a finger into a spot just behind.
I sucked in a breath, watched my cock jump once, twice, white spots flashing in my eyes. Muscles under his fingers contracted once, almost cramping.
The tide of pleasure receded.
“Didn’t think I’d let you off that easy, did you?” Vance asked.
“You...” I growled, and took him by the jaw to kiss him hard and drive him back onto the bed. He moved with me, nipping at my lower lip as he shifted to his back and pulled me down until he was pinned beneath me on the bed. “You’re fucking amazing, you know that?”
“I guess I have an inkling,” he murmured. “You’re not so bad yourself.”
“I get a lot better,” I rumbled, shifting my knees to press his apart so that I could grind my cock up and toward his ass. He bit his lip, his eyelids drifting as he writhed a bit, moving his hips to give me access. “I really, really want to fuck you. You can feel that, right?”
Instead of answering with words, he kissed me, and I felt need and expectation flow from him. He raised his knees to wrap his legs around my waist, and moved his hips until the slick head of my cock pressed against his hole.
“Go slow,” he warned me. “But go deep, Tam. Deep as you can...”
I spared a hand to reach down between us and steady myself, though I was hard enough that it might not have been needed. I pushed, watching his face, alert to the sensations coming off of him. His hole opened for me by degrees, relaxing gradually as I pressed, until the first ring of muscle finally accepted me and my thick head slipped inside. With my first ruined orgasm so recent, I had to pause as the pulsing heat of his ass gripped me.
Powerful emotion poured off of Vance like a torrent as he clung to my shoulders and buried his face in my neck. “Gods,” he breathed. “Yeah. Slow, Tam... just like that... you feel so fucking good.”
I growled, and drew my hand back up to slip it behind his neck and hold him, bracing my knees on the bed for leverage to push into the second ring. The little shock of pain that came across made me pause at the same moment Vance sucked in a breath and held it, then breathed out slow and tugged at my hips with his heels. “Go,” he said, “it’s okay. You’re just... kind of bigger than I’m used to.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
He kissed my neck. “Only for a second. Please, Tam—I want more, it’s okay. Keep going.”
I obeyed, pressing slowly into him, stopping when the heat and the tightness of his body threatened to make me shoot early. It took long minutes for my knot to press against his opening, and there was no way a human was going to take that easily.
It was enough, though. A drunken, drifting sort of feeling brushed against my mind, and Vance relaxed some as he squirmed, rocking his hips to work me inside of him. “Oh my fucking gods,” he groaned. “Tam... I just want to stay like this forever. Fuck, that feels so fucking good.”
I moved slowly to pull my knees further up, tucking us tight together at the hips, and slid my arm under his lower back to hold onto him. He practically glowed, and I couldn’t take my eyes off his face as I pulled out slowly, and plunged back in, looking for the spot inside him that would set him off. I found it on the third thrust, and he arched his back, pressing his stomach to mine. His arm reached up, grasped at the blanket, and he bit his lip hard as his eyes rolled, before a moan of ecstasy burst out of him.
Once I had the angle right, I pulled out and hit it again, and again, slow as I groaned with him, tried to keep from finishing by resting each time I pushed inside, and watched the expressions that drifted across his face. The way his eyebrows pinched and relaxed, how his jaw worked, the way that lip disappeared between his teeth, and his nostrils flared. Pleasure and lust mixed in his scent, switching off the ‘human’ part of my brain in favor of primal, animal instinct that made me speed up without even realizing it.
He was tight and silken around my cock, muscles squeezing me each time I thrust into him, and I felt the distant echo of his mind each time he felt me enter and clenched against me. His pleasure and mine began to bleed into one another, until I could almost feel it in my own body when I hit his prostate.
But I couldn’t hold on forever. Not with him sweating beneath me, making those sounds, muttering obscene prayers, his fingers digging into my shoulders, my back, my neck. Not with the way he began to twitch his hips each time I fucked him, taking me faster and deeper. Not with the way his thoughts pressed against mine more deeply, and I could feel how badly he wanted me to fill him.
I took my hand from the back of his neck and reached between us for his cock, slick with sweat and precum, and began to stroke him. He reached for my hand. “Not yet,” he whined, and pried at my fingers.
“Gonna come,” I husked. “Want you to come with me.”
“No, keep going, please,” he begged, pulling again at my hand. But his thoughts sent a different demand. He was close, and wanted to come with me, but loved this game of being in my control, of not being able to help himself. Never mind that he could have switched my brain off with a thought.
“Come with me,” I urged, and stroked him tighter, slower, twisting my fist around him as he gripped my wrist and tried to take my hands from his dick. “You’re so close, aren’t you?”
He whimpered, and pulled, and gasped, and his balls tightened, and his ass pulsed around me, and I could barely see straight as I sped up, pumping against him as he wriggled to take as much of me as he could.
And the sparks lit again, and traveled over my nerves, and boiled in my nuts, and raced to the tip of my cock as the same moment that Vance’s body went rigid, then arched to what looked like a painful curve as his orgasm and mine met somewhere between us and ricocheted off one another, mixing and tangling. A thick rope of white burst out of him, over my fingers and across his chest and belly. My cock erupted, throbbing as I poured out inside him. The scent of his seed caught me, made me ravenous, and I continued to rut and stroke as I bent and licked it from his chest, then moved to his lips and kissed him deep.
The taste of his own seed on his lips drove him mad, and spread that madness to me like a psychic contagion. We growled and devoured one another in sync as the last dregs of orgasm spread and twitched through us, snapping like the aftershocks of a lightning strike, crackling along our bones, arcing from him to me and back.
In those last moments, I caught a flash of something from him. A single image, bright and clear like it was my own imagination.
Him on top of me, my arms lashed to bedposts. His face in ecstasy, and mine in near pain as I filled him, again and again.
It only lasted the space of a heartbeat and then was gone, withdrawing the way the rest of his thoughts did. If he knew that I’d seen it, he didn’t indicate it. His kisses turned languid, lazy, content, and he continued to moan softly against my lips as my thrusting slowed to the same easy, spent pace of his body. We were like that for a long time, rocking together, our hands exploring one another.
I had never felt so at peace.
I didn’t want him to leave. And while that thought was sudden, and a little scary, it felt right. I held him closer, and
didn’t say it out loud. Maybe he felt it, maybe he was still in my thoughts and I didn’t have to. I hoped that he was. Because I wasn’t sure I had the courage to say it, and risk scaring him.
We stepped back from the memory.
Vance stared at the two of us on the bed, tangled together so that it was difficult to tell where one of us ended and the other began. His hand held mine with an iron grip that was somehow soft and warm at the same time.
He looked up at me. “You wanted me to stay,” he said.
I nodded. “From that point on. It never went away.”
“I wanted to stay, too,” he said. “Why didn’t I?”
I kissed his knuckles. “You had responsibilities. So did I. It got... complicated. A little. And then a lot, later on. Do you remember?”
“Some,” he said, as if talking as much to himself as to me. He bit his lip, just like the old days, and moved closer to me. He held my eyes, searching them for something he recognized. “Okay. Show me more. What else do you remember?”
“Everything,” I said, and dipped my head cautiously to see if he would let me kiss him. “I remember everything, Vance. I had to, or I would have—”
He met my lips, held them, kissed me soft at first, and then harder.
And for the first time in three years, even if it was just there in his broken mind, even if it wouldn’t follow us out—I was at peace again.
16
Vance
Our first real date. The first time I left a toothbrush at his place. The first time he got me a gift. The first time I got him a gift—it was a copy of Pete’s Dragon, which I thought was hilarious and he sort of endured more than enjoyed.
The time he told me who he really was, and what that might mean if we were going to be together.
The time he took me to the graves of his parents, who had been killed when he was small, during the early days of the FDPA.
The time I told him why my first two partners had left me.
The first time I cried in front of him.
The first time he cried in front of me.
The time he told me he loved me, and I admitted that I already knew, and felt the same.
With each memory that Tam took me to, shared with me, pieces of myself came back, as if he’d been holding onto them like precious little treasures, kept safe from the chaos that had torn me apart. One by one he gave them to me, fit them into place where they belonged. Bit by bit, he helped me rebuild myself. We put the puzzle of my life back together. True, they were memories from his point of view. In a way that was almost better.
Through his eyes, I saw a version of myself that was confident, happy, and in love. He knew me—our period of open connection, mind to mind, ensured that he had no illusions—but to him the truth of me was more than just enough. To him, it was perfect.
As the last memory faded, the night that he’d told me he had to go—that a friend was in trouble, his pups taken by mages that wielded the worst kind of magic—and I had said that there was no way I would let him go alone to face that, I stood beside him in a world that had begun to make more sense. The horizon was still curved, but no longer jagged or impossibly twisted. The houses in the neighborhood all had walls, windows, doors, right where they should be. Grass grew in the lawns where only dry cracked earth had been before. Flowers bloomed. Trees bore fruit.
We stood together, watching the world inside my mind come to life again. I looked up at him when the last flower stretched up to the blue sky and unfurled as if stretching from a long slumber. “How could I have forgotten all of that?”
He sighed, and hung his head. “Because of what happened next. But I can’t show you that.”
“You can tell me,” I urged.
He rubbed his jaw, uncertain whether he could or not. The more we shared, the more our old connection revived itself. He may as well have told me he worried it would be dangerous. But at the same time, he was so tired of keeping the secret, too. From anyone else, it would have been fine. Me? It killed him inside to hide anything from me.
“You think it was your fault,” I said slowly, piecing together bits of what I sensed in him until they took the shape of a deep guilt that hung from his neck like a stone.
“It was,” he said. “Then, and now. I got you involved. But more than that, I... I had a chance to save you, Vance. But it was a choice between maybe saving you, and us being together, or... failing, and losing you forever. I couldn’t risk you dying. So I chose the other. I chose to let you go, so that at least you would be in the world, and I would know it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I took his other hand as well, and pulled them to my chest to hold them close. “Tam, whatever it is—if you did it for me, I understand. But I want to know. You shouldn’t have to bear that alone. Not now, not when I can remember all of this, when I can feel what I did before. I love you, I—”
He kissed me, and breathed against my mouth, a tortured release of frustration. The words bubbled into his mind. He took a breath, eyes closed, to confess.
A shadow loomed up, blocking out the light. We both froze, and Tam’s eyes climbed up something behind me. I turned to look.
It was a wall. Dark, menacing. Made of bricks that were cracked in places, dark red and black, mottled with age or corrosion. “That’s... new,” I muttered.
“The Big Wall of Bad,” Tam breathed. “Master Nkendi warned me about it. Listen—Vance, there are things that you just... you can’t know. You can’t be allowed to remember. I know that’s frustrating, and I know that it’s always going to be something that hurts inside. Maybe there’s a way, one day, but I don’t know what that way is right now. For you to stay safe, stay whole... I think those things need to stay behind the wall.”
I gritted my teeth, frustrated at the thing, and at my own weakness. But Tam pulled me close to him, and held me tight with one arm. His breath was hot on the top of my head as he kissed me there. “Do you trust me?”
“I do,” I admitted.
“Then trust me,” he said, “when I say that I want to be your future. We can let your past stay behind the wall, and build something new. Something more beautiful. Let’s build a house, where we can put all the other memories together.”
There was so much hope in his heart that I couldn’t help but believe he meant it. And at least there now, I could almost see it myself. What did it matter what happened to me before? This is where I was now. I nodded against his chest, under his lips, and hugged him tight. “Okay. So, what now?”
“Now,” he said, “we go back, and finish making you well.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
As if the resolve itself had summoned it, the door appeared again, in the middle of the road. I led Tam to it this time, drawing him along behind me, and began to unlock all the doorknobs.
When I reached the next to the last lock, the air grew cold. The daylight that wasn’t blocked by the Big Wall of Bad dimmed. Instinct made a cold fear trickle down my spine.
“What is that?” Tam asked, his hand tensing in mine.
I sucked back in the breath that had left me. “The night creature,” I breathed, barely a whisper. “Shit. It’s coming.”
“The night...?” he wondered. “I thought you were just, ah... well, that you were just a little...”
“Crazy?” I asked as the darkness seemed to gather in a point several yards to our left and rise up from the ground like a sheet being plucked from a bed.
“Get the door open,” he urged. “Before it... does whatever it’s doing, we should get out of here.”
I rested my hand on the final knob, but hesitated. “Fuck. It... if it’s something foreign, Tam, it could still be inside me when we leave. Before, when that mage—I saw something I shouldn’t have and maybe this thing got inside when I did. I don’t know, I can’t remember. I just was there and then here and—”
“It’s coming, Vance,” he warned me, as if I couldn’t see that the black sheet-form now had long, misshapen arms
and was beginning to protrude spindly, bent legs. The first signs of a craggy mouth were forming at the place I could only call a ‘head’ for convenience.
“Where does the door go?” I asked.
Tam shook his head. “I don’t really know—it’s how I got here. Nkendi, she put me under, and I was in my house, and I saw this door, and she told me to knock so I did.”
“To your mind,” I said, thinking fast as the night creature finally detached from the ground and tested its new limbs. They jerked to motion as it tried to stalk toward us. “You have to go through. Nkendi will know when you’re back. Tell her... fuck... tell her I’m bringing something out with me, that she has to be prepared. She’ll know what to do.”
“She told me to hold onto you no matter—”
“Vance,” I snapped, and pulled him into a kiss. “You helped me remember myself. I can do this. But I can’t risk you. You have to go.”
And with that, I twisted the last lock, pulled the door open, and pushed him through it. Out in the real world, he was easily ten times as strong as I was. But here, in my own mind, where I knew who I was and what my power meant, he may as well have been paper. I let his hand go, and slammed the door shut behind him, locking it to ensure the creature didn’t go through and take him instead.
I turned to bare my teeth at it, and summoned every bit of will I had. This was my mind, all of it. However it looked, whatever form it took, it was my territory, and this thing was foreign.
It managed to figure out walking, and rushed me. I pushed, and pulled, and the street between us curled up and folded over it, crushing it to the ground. The thing became oil, and leaked out the edge of the enclosure to re-form on one side. A crooked arm shot out, stretching to reach me.
I threw myself back, gaining yards in an instant, and raised my hands to the sky as I summoned every bit of fury and fear I could reach for. Those emotions became dark, roiling clouds above us that crackled with energy. I brought a hand down, and lightning forked down from above to spear the thing.