Tenderly Wicked

by Katerina Ross

  Ten minutes later, as Vadim had promised, they went out, both silent. Max was nervous. He suspected Vadim felt the same.

  Vadim guided him to another yard, and into a tiny café, rustically minimalistic, with roughly textured brick walls painted yellow. Quite an unpretentious place to grab a bite and a drink. They settled at a wooden table and scanned their menus, then both ordered something very quickly, just to make a cheerful, overzealous waitress stop hovering around them.

  When they were finally left alone, Max mustered his courage to begin. “You wanted us to talk. So—” he trailed off, unsure what Vadim wanted of him.

  “I thought about what you’d said. I believe you imagine that it’s for my own good, us parting. But I don’t believe you’re right.” Vadim crumpled a paper napkin, in a mechanical gesture, avoiding eye contact. “You’re a good man, Max. Maybe that’s your problem. You’re too good. You’re trying too hard to be perfect.”

  Max huffed out something akin to a laugh. “That’s a quality more often found in subs than Doms, I suppose. Do you think it doesn’t suit me? Sorry, but I am what I am. Yes, I tried to be perfect, it’s true, but I failed. And I’m not as good as you think because I took too long to admit it. I wanted to keep you—and I put you at risk. That’s not what good people do.”

  “It’s not that it was a great risk,” Vadim assured him almost pleadingly. “You told me to think of the times I’d been injured … but it hadn’t been something really horrible, not ever. Why beat yourself up over minor mishaps?”

  “Minor? What is not minor then? Permanent scars? Fractured ribs? I’d rather it didn’t come to that.”

  Vadim’s face contorted with pain. “Are you so sure it will?” He noticed the napkin in his hands became scrunched into a tight ball, and laid it aside, carefully placing it between the salt and pepper shakers, not a millimeter to either side.

  Max caught his hand and squeezed. “I care for you too much to try my luck.”

  Vadim’s voice broke when he asked, “Would you try it on someone else? Not me?”

  Max shook his head. “Probably not. As I’ve said, maybe BDSM isn’t my thing.”

  The waitress brought their food surprisingly quickly. During lunch time, they probably had their usual dishes cooked in advance and only reheated them before serving. The contents of Max’s plate turned out to be quite tasty, but he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy what he ate. It seemed to be the same with Vadim as he picked at his salad. Normally, Max would have made him eat it all, but now he had no right to command.

  At last, Vadim put his fork down, his food still mostly intact, and started tearing another napkin into pieces. “You say that BDSM isn’t your thing. But you liked it. You were happy.”

  Max couldn’t help but stare at Vadim’s nervous, shaking hands, and a bunch of leather bracelets on a slim wrist. “It’s not only about my happiness,” he said slowly. “In a relationship, there are two people to consider. I might be selfish … but not that selfish.”

  “Pity,” Vadim spit out, suddenly angry again. He threw the torn napkin away, this time not caring where it landed, took out his wallet, and rose to his feet. Max’s protest that he should pay his share was dismissed. “No, I invited you after all. Let’s go out. I need a cigarette.”

  “You’re smoking again?”

  Vadim shrugged and didn’t reply.

  In the street, his hands were still trembling as he lit a cigarette. When he pulled on it, he cast a quick glance at Max, like he waited for a harsh command to stop, or maybe a reprimand at least.

  “You don’t have to ruin what you’ve achieved just to spite me,” Max said instead. He felt sad and deflated. Had he done something terribly wrong while trying to make it right?

  Vadim cringed at his words. Then, with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he suddenly rolled up the left sleeves of his coat and sweater, up to his elbow…

  Max caught his hand just in time, before the burning end of the cigarette touched and sizzled the tender flesh in the crook of his elbow. “Please don’t! Vadim, don’t! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I just want to show you—it’s all right,” Vadim blurted out desperately, almost hysterically, their gazes locked, fierce and intense. “If you’re afraid to hurt me—you shouldn’t be—I’m fine with it. Max, please. I don’t mind if it hurts. I don’t mind if you leave marks. Just please come back.”

  “Drop it,” Max told him. “Drop the cigarette now.”

  Vadim obeyed instantly, automatically, and the still-lit cigarette rolled along the pavement, carried by the wind, casting little sparks. On an impulse, Max pulled Vadim close, their winter coats frustratingly in the way, and Vadim clung to him, utterly careless if passers-by should see them.

  “Listen to me,” Max said urgently, searching for the right words. “It’s not the way it should be. You say ‘I don’t mind’, but you should. It’s your body, it’s your health, it’s your happiness. You shouldn’t sacrifice it all—not for me, not for anyone else. You don’t have to tough out what you don’t enjoy.”

  “But that’s how it works, that’s the way it is,” Vadim protested into his shoulder. “Submission is all about toughing things out, isn’t it?”

  “It shouldn’t be any other way but yours,” Max said firmly. “It’s about making you happy. Why else would you do it if not for being happy? I mean, it’s a thing for two people, this life of submission and domination, but they are equals when it comes to what they want and what they do not want. If someone has told you otherwise, he just tried to convince you of his own wants, that’s all. So think about what you truly need, be just a little bit selfish this time—and you’ll see it like I see it. I’ve spent almost half of a year with you. I know you. I know what you like. And it’s not cigarette burns. It’s not any other kind of mutilation. If you want something harsh, I get it. But you need someone else, not me, to give it to you. Someone who’d fulfill your desires without damaging you in the process. I don’t cope. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Don’t tell me it’s all right to injure you because it’s not.”

  All through his speech, Vadim tried to interrupt him, but in the end he went quiet. They stood like that, pressed against each other, until Vadim finally said, in a deceptively even voice, “So it’s over then?”

  Max sighed. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Why do you think I could ever find someone better than you?”

  “Because you deserve someone better. Again, I know you. So just believe me. You do.”

  Vadim backed off. He looked pale and shaken. “You said… You’re still my friend. What does it mean, exactly? We’ll be seeing each other now and then?”

  “If you want to.” That could be painful, and yet Max couldn’t bring himself to cut the connection between them entirely. He did care for Vadim. He wanted to know what would happen to him.

  “Could you be my ‘insurance’ if I start dating someone else?” Vadim asked even more tentatively. “May I call and tell you where I’m going, for safety?”

  “Absolutely.” Max hoped that his voice hadn’t betrayed him. However much he wanted Vadim to be happy, the thought of him with someone else was excruciating.

  “See you, then?” Vadim said as if unsure how to end their painful conversation. “Should we shake hands or something? What do friends usually do?”

  They did shake hands, and it felt more intimate than it should have been, their palms lingering for longer than necessary.

  Max shouldn’t have turned around as he hurried away, heading back for the pedestrian bridge, but he couldn’t help it. Vadim, in a coat carelessly open, still stood there, as if frozen in place, and watched him walking away, like in a bad dream.

  Chapter Eleven

  Nothing Compares

  A month had passed—and it seemed as if Max still lived in a nightmare. The bleak, characterless landscapes of the Moscow suburbs only made the impression stronger. His personal hell consisted of legendary traffic jams and long commutes. Now
he lived at the end of a metro line and not even close to its last station, so he was cursed with regular trips in a crowded marshrutka, one of the shabby, always fully loaded minibuses cruising in the not-quite-central regions of Moscow.

  People traveling with him to the center and back had clearly gotten used to long distances. They either fiddled with their phones or read e-books, concentrating on being elsewhere in their personal dream worlds. It was an understandable wish, to escape the here and now. There wasn’t much to see anyway if they looked around. Just rows of tower blocks, one exactly like another, in different stages of decay. Ugly hills of excavated earth and piles of dirty snow along the pavements. And then long tunnels between metro stations, eerie darkness behind the train windows, and worn-out, sleepy faces of other passengers, all wax-like in the dim light.

  Max had once enjoyed the opulent Moscow metro, but that had been when he’d traveled within the circle line that enclosed the central, most prominent stations. He’d marveled at those Muscovites who went by the colorful mosaics of Kievskaya depicting idyllic scenes of rustic life, or elegant bas-relief panels picturing Soviet-era heroes against a blue-sky background at Taganskaya—seemingly not noticing a thing. Now he was very much like these people, exhausted by his long journeys underground. He barely had the time or the desire to look at Moscow’s wonders.

  March was a dreary month to spend in Moscow. Technically, it should have been spring, but it still looked like winter, and in its ugliest state, with heaps of dingy snow on every lawn and dirty half-frozen puddles, sometimes ankle deep, along all the pavements. When cars flew by, you could get an unwanted shower, and then you had to step into this icy black soup anyway, to cross the street, and thus test if your boots really were waterproof. No matter how thoroughly road cleaners did their job, the city looked exceptionally unattractive this time of year.

  Or maybe it was Max’s black mood that made everything around him look so unpleasant. At night, he wriggled around on a narrow sofa, desperately sleepless and unable to find a comfortable position. He’d never felt so alone in his life. Being on his own had always been a kind of adventure after he’d escaped from his small hometown into the big, wide world. Now it was more like a curse.

  Max had colleagues who’d almost become his friends by now, people to chat with, to go to a pub or a café with after work. But at the same time, there was no one to confide in. As Vadim had said, a friend was someone who knew you and accepted your oddities, so that you both could talk freely of what worried you the most—or made you happy. Max wasn’t that close with anyone. He couldn’t find a way to subtly bring it into conversation that he’d been in a Dom/sub relationship and had screwed it up spectacularly. So he talked of appalling weather instead, and other things that didn’t really matter, and listened to complaints about babysitters and housekeepers or discussions of decent gyms and indecent taxi fares.

  Max could have called his ex, but it felt unfair to reduce their Skype talks to pathetic sniveling on his part. Andie had a life of his own, and at the moment, he was in the beginning of what promised to become a happy partnership. He was very excited about it, beaming with joy. Max didn’t want to ruin his euphoria by talking of his own failures and mistakes.

  Max had come out to his other college friends, but being out was one thing and discussing his BDSM fuck-ups quite another. It wasn’t a given that people who seemed to be okay with him being homosexual would want to listen to his proclivities in detail.

  Chatting with strangers on anonymous Russian BDSM forums like bdsmpeople.org seemed to be an option at first, but soon Max found their frequenters mostly wanted either to have a pointless argument on whatever topic, with lots of spat and no advice on the discussed subject, or to find a partner for real-life meet-ups. It didn’t feel like a friendly interaction. Max kept lurking there anyway, but it was just killing time.

  Max had always been sociable, surrounded by all kinds of people. That’s probably why he enjoyed teaching. But in the end, as it turned out, he was just as lonely as Vadim, with no one to ease his soul and soothe his guilty conscience.

  Funnily enough, what he’d said to Vadim was true. Vadim had been a friend to him, not only a lover. The person he was closest to in Moscow. Max could talk of anything to him … anything, it seemed, except for one matter that was the most important of all—his inability to be a good Dom because of his damned ineptness.

  Max wondered if things would have gone differently had he not been so inexperienced. What if he’d gotten through the inevitable first-time mistakes with someone else, a man—or maybe not just one man—who hadn’t mattered as much to him as Vadim did? Could his relationship with Vadim have worked out if he’d had a history of bad break-ups, like Vadim? Would his failures have taught him to be a better Dom? He wasn’t sure. Besides, it felt wrong, experimenting on someone of no importance just to improve your performance and resolve technical issues.

  What if someone decided to practice on Vadim like that, deliberately? It was a nasty thought. Max might have acted in a wrong way, but at least he’d never treated his sub as a crash test dummy. Everything he’d done to Vadim had been meant for mutual pleasure, not just for scratching out another point in the long list of SM practices he’d wanted to try.

  Vadim’s ex-lover, Gleb, had called Max a service top, like it was a bad thing, a role no Dom who had a tad of self-respect would agree to, unless paid or bribed with presents. Now Max was positive if he had the necessary skills and thoughtfulness, he wouldn’t have minded being one. A caretaker rather than a harsh master. He enjoyed tending to his sub’s needs, chiding him for bad habits, and changing his life for better. It felt more important than fitting into the label of a true Dom, whatever that meant.

  But now it was no use thinking about all this.

  There was still the possibility of staying on good terms with Vadim. For Max, the biggest fear had been that Vadim would discover he was a fraud as a Dom. He thought Vadim would never forgive him for lying. But Vadim never came to this conclusion, so the big black moment of their break-up hadn’t been as terrible as it could have been. Max should have felt relieved about it. Instead, though it wasn’t exactly logical, he would have preferred if it had been Vadim who’d confronted him about his neglect, called him out on his bullshit, and decided to leave. Vadim would be angry, not devastated then, and maybe more cautious about his further SM endeavors. Most probably, he would have banished Max out of his life completely, but he had all the right to. It would be fair.

  Max felt tired and useless. It had been a long journey for him, in a way—a journey to his inner self, but now it looked like he had to turn back, defeated, without having reached what he’d longed for and well aware of his failure.

  Perhaps it was better to change things even more drastically, danced a thought at the back of his mind. To go elsewhere, to head for another quest. Wasn’t it what he dreamed about—traveling, meeting new people, exploring his proclivities? Even if he scratched out the last wish, as he’d decided the fine art of SM wasn’t meant for him, the first two options on the list remained available.

  Anything would be better than his current dull routine. At the moment, he was stuck in place, and it wasn’t a very likable place, to be honest, so why stick to it? Instead of looking for a better apartment, he should look for another job, in a different city. Saint Petersburg possibly?

  The problem was, he felt no boyish excitement anymore when thinking of a new adventure ahead of him—a life in an unknown city.

  He longed for something else. Or more exactly, someone. Jade green eyes with hazel speckles. Unruly auburn hair. Milky-white skin, so easily marked. Exquisite grace in every movement, the lithe body so familiar, so responsive to every touch.

  It seemed unrealistic he’d ever had that, all at his disposal.

  Max tried to persuade himself that eventually, given time, he’d meet someone else, but that seemed an unlikely prospect too. He’d never fallen for any one of his partners so deeply as he had for Vadi
m. Maybe it was because of the SM component of their relationship. Maybe something more than that. It was self-torture, trying to analyze what he felt, because it didn’t matter anymore. Wasn’t it ironic he should leave the one he cared so much about precisely because he cared so much?

  Though it had been his idea to part ways, and he still thought he was right in his decision, perhaps he was disappointed Vadim made no more efforts to get him back. On the other hand, their final meeting had been so charged with emotions that it was worth a dozen attempts.

  Max had told Vadim they would remain friends—he managed to stay on good terms with all his exes. But Vadim was so much an exception compared to them that Max couldn’t bring himself to call him. He was afraid of giving in to temptation if Vadim asked him to come back one more time.

  ****

  Again, Vadim called him first, and with a request Max hadn’t expected, though they had spoken about it.

  “Will you be my insurance?” Vadim asked. And added, with what seemed very much like a challenge, “You promised you would be.”

  Confused, Max said that yes, of course it was fine with him. Had Vadim gotten over their break-up so quickly? It hurt even more than Max had anticipated, and along with pain, there was a good deal of anxiety. He wanted to ask Vadim all kinds of questions about the guy he was about to date. It took all Max’s resolve not to be that indelicate. He’d promised Vadim his friendship and he had no right to control him now or question his choice of partners.

  Vadim was going to send Max a message saying he was safe by an agreed upon time the next evening. “I’ll put the spare keys into my letter box, as you did, in case something goes wrong. Its slot is large, it’s easy to fish them out if you know that they’re there. But I’m sure it’ll be okay,” he assured Max cheerfully. He sounded very confident about that, but Max couldn’t stop imagining various dreadful scenarios, each worse than the previous one.