“Unh?”
I lifted my head, snickering at the sleepy grunt that somehow still managed to carry an inquiry. “I said I got my own place. I never said where. I just closed on a space about two blocks from your gallery for my artisan tattoo and piercing studio.”
I gave the pretentious name the wry twist and eye roll it deserved. I was a damned good body artist, yes, but I had enormous respect for others in my trade (with the exception of that jackass poser, Rogier). The affectation of the branding I was planning to do with the studio was entirely for the benefit of a snooty—and hopefully very well-paying—upper-middle-class clientele.
Robin gawked at me. “Holy shit. Really?”
I shrugged, my face heating up. “I figured, regardless of how things worked out with you and me, I’d be able to distinguish myself better in a small town than in the city. Studios in vacation towns can do quite well. Something about being out of their usual element makes people impulsive, ready to try something new or take risks they normally wouldn’t.”
“Where are you staying?”
“There’s a studio apartment above the shop, or at least that’s what the space will be when renovations are done. But while my leg is out, I’m staying at a motel where I can have a ground-floor room. No stairs to climb.” I hesitated, then made myself speak. “I need to go back early. Until my leg is healed, I need to infuse every day.”
“I’ll drive you whenever you have to go,” he offered calmly, with the perfect balance of solicitude and respect for my independence. “If you’d prefer, I can pull the car up closer to the marina, so you won’t have to walk as far.”
“Thank you.” I realized my heart was racing and put my head down quickly, trying to slow my breathing.
“Can I make a request?” he asked carefully.
Oh God. Dread settled in my gut, and all my efforts to slow my heart rate went out the window. “What?” I put a lot of effort into not snapping.
Wow. This hard adrenaline response was seriously unexpected. Was that what the anger and lashing out had been about? Keeping myself from experiencing this sort of generalized anxiety?
“I know you said you weren’t comfortable with it before, and if that’s still the case, I won’t push yet, but sometime I would really like to see you infuse.”
I pulled away from him and closed my eyes and made myself count until I could speak without snarling. “It’s not exactly a spectator sport,” I got out between gritted teeth.
“I know that,” he said shortly, and that made me stop and open my eyes. When I started to hit the asshole place, Ling usually gave me censuring looks. Jace let it roll off him, or sometimes quipped about it until I realized that I was being a dick. No one pushed back like Robin did. “This isn’t idle curiosity.”
“Then why?”
He tilted his head. “Because someday—I very sincerely hope—we’re going to play together again. What if you get a bleed while we’re playing?”
“Then I’ll handle it.”
“Okay. But here’s the thing: You get sort of shaky and unsteady when you’re coming out of that headspace. Being abruptly yanked out of it tends to make that reaction even worse. A lot of subs and masochists can find it very disorienting to go from flying to a sudden stop with no period of easing out of things. Do you really want to be trying to stick a needle in your vein when you’re in that state?”
I blew out my breath in a rush. “Okay, that’s a really good point,” I reluctantly admitted. His shrug spoke volumes. “I’m sorry.”
“I get it, I do,” he said. “I’ll wait for you to be ready, but I’m going to insist that I be proficient at doing it for you before we start playing again. Hard limit.”
I gave him a long look, but he wasn’t flinching. Instead, he rolled me under him and settled his weight over me, nestling his exhausted dick next to mine.
“Besides,” he purred, lacing our fingers together and using the grip to pin my hands down on the pillow. He dipped his head and slowly licked the scarred and bruised skin over my antecubital vein with a broad, flat swipe of his tongue. My breath caught in a gasp, my entire body flushing hot, and holy shit, maybe my dick wasn’t so exhausted after all. How the fuck was that even erotic? “There’s something phallic about a needle, don’t you think? You’d watch me sliding it into you, knowing there’s no part of you I can’t penetrate. Nothing off-limits. There’s no reason it can’t be part of our play if we want it to be.”
My eyes searched his, my breath coming faster, my heart pounding. I had one of those moments of revelation that kept happening when I was with him, where everything I thought and felt about myself and my hemophilia was reframed, reconceptualized. Suddenly my prophy, which I’d always resented and done with reluctance, was something I thought I might . . . really want to do?
“Okay,” I rasped, tugging against his grip on my hands. “Let’s go. Now, before I overthink it and forget why I might want to do it.”
He studied me, then nodded decisively. “Okay. Let’s go.”
By the time we got to my motel room, the sexy had worn off and been replaced by nerves. I didn’t really know why.
I made him practice on himself first, going through several butterfly needles in the process. My veins were in bad enough shape without him doing multiple sticks. Then we had to deal with the false start as he went through the vein, and the shock when he pulled too far back and the needle came all the way out, resulting in a spurt of blood because he hadn’t released the tourniquet yet. When it finally seemed he’d gotten the hang of it, I prepared my factor and gave him another new needle.
It had been two decades since I’d let anyone infuse me if I wasn’t in the hospital. Once I learned how as a kid, I’d refused to let my mom do it anymore. I understood now that her nerves had made me tense, which made everything more unpleasant.
Now, I had some tension, but it wasn’t because of any nerves on Robin’s part. He went about cinching the tourniquet and swabbing the alcohol wipe on the crook of my elbow with the same calm confidence he seemed to approach most things. He was too intent on doing it right to eroticize it, but even so, my whole awareness of what was happening had shifted. I was eroticizing it: the slide of the needle into my flesh, the small stab of pain upon entry that quickly faded. The courteous check-in: was I okay to proceed?
Yes, definitely. Pleasure might not have followed immediately after, but now the process was intense rather than the tedious and annoying chore it had always been.
And safe. How ridiculous was that? To be able to trust someone with doing this for me?
When he withdrew the needle and dropped it in the sharps box, I noticed a sheen on his forehead. He’d been more nervous than he’d let on. But his pale-blue eyes were hot and fierce with triumph.
He quickly shrugged out of his clothes and skinned me of mine, pressing me back onto the motel bed. He kissed me until I hooked my uninjured leg around the back of his thigh and ground against him. He gripped our cocks in his large hand and jerked us off in tandem, pinning me with his stare as much as his body. I held out as long as I could, holding his gaze until orgasm slammed my eyelids shut and pulled my whole body taut, then released, leaving me limp and depleted as our cum slid down the hollows of my pelvis onto the sheets.
No, I definitely wasn’t with him just for the kink. In fact, feeling the gusts of his breath against my throat and his weight on top of me, I thought I could be perfectly content even if we never went there again. As long as we could stay just like this.
“Is that your equipment?” Robin asked after we’d napped and showered and gotten off again.
I nodded at the carefully packed boxes in the corner. “Yeah. Having a few renovations made on the space before I open up shop. Might be another month or so, which is good because it will hopefully mean my leg is healed before I have to start working.”
“Will you show me?”
“Sure.” Limping on my cane—I really had done too much walking the previous night—I dre
w the chair from the pathetic excuse for a desk over to the boxes and sat to open them. I gave him a tour of the tools of my trade: my liner and shader machines, the needles and grips, a full spectrum of pigments, some preordered and some I’d mixed myself.
Then, feeling more self-conscious than I usually felt about my work, I gestured to the sketch pad on the bedside table. “I, um, did a few designs with you in mind over the summer.”
I didn’t move from my chair, and he didn’t bring the pad over to me. Instead, he flipped through it as he sat on the edge of the bed, and I could tell he recognized which designs were meant for him. The nautical and kinky tableaux that were intended to cover the whole back, and a number of smaller arm, shoulder, and chest designs as well. He studied them like a man with an eye for aesthetics—which of course he would have to be in his line of work—nodding slowly.
“This one,” he said finally, tapping a finger on the one with the purple velvet drapes backdrop.
“Okay.” I took the sketch pad from him, looking it over to see if there were any changes I wanted to make before we finalized it.
“What do you need to make it happen?” Robin asked.
“Once I have my shop set up, nothing.”
“What about before?”
I blinked. “What, you mean here? Today?”
He nodded. “Sure, why not?”
“You don’t want time to think about it?” I looked around the motel room with a critical eye. “This place is probably a sanitation nightmare.”
“What about my boat?”
“The rocking could be a problem.” I shook my head, frowning. “My studio space is a disaster right now. The wires are hanging out of the walls while they bring the electrical up to code. Okay. Here it is: I need a whole bunch of bleach-based cleaner, aerosol disinfectant, some clear plastic sheeting to lay over the bed and carpet, bulk quantities of sterile gauze—we can get that at the beauty supply store—and we’ll need to set up my magnifying glass on its stand and my lamps, because the lighting in here is for shit.”
“Will do.” He reached for his jeans, grinning. “I’ll be back soon.”
Doing the whole design in one session was out of the question, of course. A massive piece like that would take hours. It would have been too exhausting for both of us—especially for him, since he’d be dealing with the pain—to do more than an hour or two at a time.
While he was gone, I worked on replicating the outline of the design on transfer paper. Like Jace’s red-rock design, the folds of the velvet drapes and some of the implements of pain and pleasure would be shaded to give the illusion of three dimensions. But today would be about getting down the lines that defined the entire picture.
We disinfected every possible surface and laid layers of plastic down for good measure before I let any of my equipment touch any part of the room. Then Robin helped me assemble all my gear. I had two high-intensity lamps that I shined on his back like spotlights. I put the pedal of the machine under the foot of my uninjured leg. I took a couple of nonnarcotic pain relievers to make sure I had no distractions, and gave him a couple as well, since it would take the edge off the sting when I was working on particularly sensitive places.
Then I turned on my machine and got to work.
I’d had my black-gloved hands on the skins of hundreds of people, including Jace, working this way. In most respects, working on Robin wasn’t any different, and yet it was far from business as usual. Even for Jace, it had never felt this personal, this meaningful. This was the needle I wielded, penetrating his skin. When I sponged away blood and ink with the gauze, it wasn’t just blood—it was his blood.
The air was filled with the buzzing of the machine and his purposely steady breaths. Despite his best efforts, occasionally that steady rhythm would stutter or fracture on a gasp. His skin was warm through the nitrile gloves, twitching and rippling and smoothing beneath my hands.
During one of the regular intermissions I called to allow him a break from the consistent discomfort, and me to work out any tension or muscle kinks the work had given me, I couldn’t stop myself from kissing the back of his neck, tasting the salt of his sweat there.
When we went to bed that night, the black lines that scrolled across his back from shoulders to waist were edged in a deep pink that would fade soon. He was too drained from coping with the pain and too unwilling to move for sex, but it didn’t matter. He slept on his stomach and didn’t press against me and use me as his grown-up teddy bear like he normally did, and that was okay too. I fell asleep feeling satisfied that we had cleared several hurdles, confident for the first time in years that I was where I needed to be and going where I needed to go. I was pursuing this whatever-it-was that had chanced upon me unlooked-for, to whatever conclusion it would come to.
Robin
The weeks that followed were sublime and also a hard dose of the reality that was Geoff’s life, as I watched him struggle to heal his leg injury and set up his body-art studio.
The healing was a long, slow process full of setbacks, forcing him to go slower than he really wanted to. Until I watched him work through it, I hadn’t truly grasped how badly an injury most people wouldn’t think twice about could fuck him up. Tripping over a stupid box and bruising his thigh had put him in the hospital and left him with months of recovery time. What would have happened if he’d hit his head?
The building he’d leased for his studio was taking longer to get set up than he would have liked. He was in my office, working on his laptop, as I closed the gallery for the day, which meant I was just coming upstairs and caught his grimace.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” He shut the laptop decisively. “I’m just worrying about the gamble I took opening the studio. I knew I’d be running in the red for a while, opening in the off-season. I figured it would give me time to put together a portfolio of local work on top of my experience out in LA. But if things don’t pick up enough in the summer, it could get ugly really quickly.”
“How ugly?”
His voice was heavy with disgust. “My factor costs about forty thousand dollars a month.”
I choked on my own spit. “A month?”
“Twenty-seven hundred per dose times fifteen doses a month if I do my prophy every other day. Right now it’s more, since I’m infusing every day. Then there are the hospitalizations and frequent doctors’ visits.” He smiled ruefully. “When I was a kid, my dad had to change jobs every few years because we kept maxing out what our insurance would allow us to spend. Hopefully President Obama will actually manage to reform health care and that won’t be an issue much longer. But for now, if the studio doesn’t start turning a profit come summer, I’m going to have operating costs on top of medical expenses, and it won’t be good.”
“Opening the studio was quite a leap of faith,” I observed, sitting on the arm of the sofa to stroke his hair back from his face.
“Ling kicked me in the ass until I went for it.” His eyes took on the fond, tender expression he got every time he spoke of his sister. “She was right; I needed to take the chance. But I still have a panic attack every time I check the balances on my accounts and see the money my parents left me dwindling faster than it should.” He blew out a gusty breath, grabbing his backpack and shoving the laptop in. “It’ll work out. It has to.”
Luckily, I knew how to relieve his tension, though the dominant inside me was prodding me to do something more effective to get him out of his head. It was getting harder to ignore the inner voice that pointed me at a sub in need like a compass to true north. Geoff never complained, which surprised me. He’d been so keen to play when we first met. I thought he’d be chomping at the bit to get back into it, but he was treating my request to keep things vanilla for a while with absolute respect. If he felt he was missing out, I never knew it.
Which, ironically, made me question myself more. Was he getting frustrated and I wasn’t picking up on it? One of my goals was to learn to read his unspoken signa
ls, but the apparent absence of those signals could mean I just wasn’t catching them.
I was doing his infusions most mornings, and Geoff allowed it without argument. I was becoming more comfortable with the process and more skilled at hitting the vein on the first try. Sometimes he was very clinical about it, offering me instruction and critique. Other times he was silent, intent on watching what I was doing, and I knew he was replaying what I’d said to him about the symbolism of this act.
That, too, was making my inner dominant restless. And giving him ideas.
I kept him at bay as long as I could. It wasn’t hard for a while; even in the off-season, I was busy with my gallery, and Geoff was still working on healing and getting his studio set up. But we made time for dates, whether I took him out for the evening or we had a quiet and simple dinner on my boat. He stayed with me more often than not, unless his leg was bothering him particularly badly, in which case I could usually be found in his motel room.
Sometimes there was sex; sometimes there was pain medication, television, and an early bedtime. It didn’t really matter. I was getting to know the man behind the restless masochist who had first caught my eye. A man with a quick, dry wit that could easily lapse into scorching, scathing derision when he was provoked. A man who was so deeply loyal and sensitive to the moods and emotional currents around him that he’d spent a lifetime shouldering other people’s baggage, to his own detriment. A man who was deeply devoted to the people he had left in his life: his sister and Jace and increasingly, I liked to think, me.
There was also more work to do on the tattoo taking shape over the entirety of my back. Geoff was keeping the sessions spaced out—every couple of weeks, for no longer than two hours.
Our third session took place in his studio, which was nearly ready to open. It was light and bright enough to appear reassuringly clean and sterile, but decorated well enough to feel comfortable. Rather than pinning up a hodgepodge of snapshots, he blew up and framed his best designs, and consulted me on the best way to display them. His portfolios were clean and well-kept, the photos mounted neatly on the pages. He kept the space warm in deference to the seminude state of many of his clients, with an optional privacy screen that would protect clients’ modesty while allowing him to greet anyone coming through the door.
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