And he showed no inclination to do so.
Every inch of him was relaxed. He only stirred when Aled slid the chest harness under his lax body, and even then it was simply to shift until his breasts were tucked into the right position. Silk covered the harness, then Aled rolled him over to lock his arms over his chest with more leather and another layer of silk, before turning him gently back over and rolling his head to the side on a pillow.
Bound.
Tight, but not painful. Unyielding, but not in itself hard. The idea was an embrace, and Gabriel relaxed within the confines of the fabric in much the same way he relaxed into a cuddle. Quite literally gathered together and strapped into place, the effect was psychologically similar. All the pieces pulled back together and secured safely in a warm layer of softness.
“There you go,” he whispered. “Fan?”
“Please.”
He turned on the fan that sat atop the dresser, turning it until Gabriel’s hair waved gently, then picked up the final pieces of the jigsaw. Blindfold. Gag.
Usually for sex, Aled used a ball gag because Gabriel found it humiliating and therefore hot. But the leather strip was gentler on the jaw and allowed for more comfort. Gabriel sighed deeply when Aled tied it, and his eyelashes fluttered once before the blindfold obscured them.
Then Aled stripped and climbed into bed.
He tucked Gabriel up against his side, laying that dark head on his shoulder and curling his arms around lax shoulders. Trussed, gagged and blinded, Gabriel would be surrounded by Aled. He would be wrapped in a warm security and held by a trusted presence. All he would be able to sense was Aled’s smell, Aled’s heat and Aled’s heart thumping away near his ear.
And sure enough, he sagged in Aled’s hold and relaxed.
His heart slowed. His breathing dropped. He didn’t quite sleep—there was an edge of too much awareness—but Aled dozed with the warm cocoon in his arms and felt the day leech away from Gabriel’s body.
There was little Aled could do about doctors and dysphoria. Nothing much he could say to defend Gabriel from the world. No remedy for what went on inside Gabriel’s head. And for the most part, someone as confident as Gabriel didn’t need to be rescued. For the most part, he could fight his own battles and Aled watched from the sidelines, holding his coat and cheering him on.
But not every time.
And in those exceptions, he could provide this instead. Counteract a little of it with love. Lock him down in a secure shield and hold him until his brain had righted itself. If Gabriel needed to go to Kevin’s later and have the day strangled out of him, then Aled would drop him off. If he needed to be chained to the bed like a breathing sex toy and used, then Aled would do it. And if he needed to be adored—rare, but it did happen—then Aled would gladly worship him.
But for now, he needed to be held. So Aled would hold him.
For as long as it took.
Chapter Fourteen
Summer was turning out to be a long, dry and hot one.
And Chris didn’t like any of those things.
Rain helped cool him off on a long ride. Spring and autumn in the country were more enjoyable than bland summer greenery, especially when it came to colour and clear views. And heat was just…urgh.
But there was a plus side—it meant the hammock in the garden was always available, and they had quickly discovered that rather than fuelling vertigo, the hammock surprisingly helped. It had a lot of excess cloth to cocoon its occupants in security, and the gentle swaying seemed to translate to comfortable and secure even through Gabriel’s head injury. Weirdly, the one thing that should have made the vertigo downright dangerous was the one thing that could lay it to rest.
So even if the midday snooze was a thing of the past, Chris more often than not found himself lying in the hammock, Gabriel’s weight spread out over him from chest to foot, and one of Chris’ legs draped artfully over the side to prod the garden wall every now and then to keep them rocking. Sometimes they lay in silence. Sometimes Chris would read aloud from one of his magazines, or—if Gabriel was having a good day and the hammock hug wouldn’t be needed for very long—they would simply talk.
Rarely did the plans overlap, so Chris was more than a little surprised when Gabriel interrupted a review of a new route being tested out on the Irish coast with, “How long are you going to stay?”
Chris paused, then closed the magazine and dropped it onto the grass. He knew a long conversation when he heard one starting.
“However long you need me,” he said.
“And what happens if—when I don’t?”
“When,” Chris agreed gently, then shrugged. “Then I go home, I guess.”
Gabriel hummed.
“What?”
“What if I don’t want you to go home?”
Chris snorted, even as he silently agreed with the sentiment. “I have to go home eventually.”
“Why?”
“Aled’s not going to pay me to be your boyfriend.”
“That’s about a job. That’s not about going home. We have jobs here.”
Ah.
Chris hesitated, unsure of how to put his thoughts into words without causing offense. Gabriel had lived all over and didn’t seem to feel attached to physical places very often. But Aled had lived in the same corner of Yorkshire all his life and seemed disinclined to move, and Chris—
“I’m not so keen on the north.”
“Why not?”
Chris sighed. “I don’t know. I feel out of place. People are different up here.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “They just…are. The slang’s different, they talk different. If someone strikes up a conversation at a bus stop, you’re not about to get shanked…”
Gabriel laughed. “Oh come on. You live in Bristol, not London.”
“You still don’t talk to strange men at bus stops.”
“Okay, okay…”
“It’s uncomfortable,” Chris said finally. “Here—right here—is great. Being with you. Even with Aled. But outside the front door…I don’t know. It doesn’t fit right.”
He knew exactly where this was going. And he didn’t quite know where he sat on the issue.
“You want me to stay?”
And Gabriel nodded.
Chris blew out his cheeks. On the one hand, he wanted to stay with them. Getting to see Gabriel every day instead of sending constant text messages and snatching moments here and there when one or both of them had time off work, as if they lived in different countries, was getting old. He’d gone from shy and ready for the relationship to dissolve at a moment’s notice to actively missing him and planning a future in his head. He’d almost accidentally found a partner, and he’d been woefully unprepared for the impact on his plans and lifestyle. For the first time, leaving was going to be harder than staying.
But staying here?
The north wasn’t home. Chris had been born and bred in North Somerset, and anything north of Birmingham was a foreign country to him. Gabriel had a mixed accent, tempered by a London upbringing, but Aled’s could be impenetrable when he got going. They ate their food wrong. The houses were built funny. Chris had given up trying to figure out what he was supposed to call a roll. And maybe it was just a Wakefield thing, but who the hell was designing the road layout in West Yorkshire anyway?
The strangest thing was that Chris didn’t even know what he was holding on to back home. He didn’t particularly have friends in the area. He’d quit his job without thinking twice. He and Mum skirted around each other with mutual wariness, and he’d never had a father. His brother was gone. Nailsea itself was boring, and although the cycling scene in Somerset was brilliant, it wasn’t the best in the country by any means.
But something felt—
Off.
The hardest part of the army hadn’t been the endless boredom in Germany, the bullying, or even losing people. It had been the sense of being lost. The feeling that he was
in a place he wasn’t supposed to be, and the itching need to go home all the time. It was losing Tim that had finally made Chris give it up, but the urge to go home had been there from the day he’d caught the train and left in the first place.
And it was here, too. Under his skin, scratching away. He needed to go home. He needed to go back.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I miss you when you go home after a visit. More than I ever expected. I don’t like being so far apart all the time. And I—yeah, okay, I’ve been thinking about whether this arrangement can play out long term. I’m not sold on living with Aled all the time, to be honest, but living with you? Getting to see you every day instead of stealing time and calling in sick so I can get a few more hours before your train home? It’s been great. And when you’re better, it’s going to be almost impossible to walk away from that. It’s going to hurt.”
“There’s a but,” Gabriel whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Yorkshire’s the but.”
“Well, I mean, the north in general. Yorkshire’s nice enough. But it’s—I feel—I shouldn’t be here. There’s this constant pull to go home. This is a nice holiday, but…but that’s what it is. It’s almost like this isn’t real life and, eventually, I have to go back.”
“Don’t let Aled hear you underselling God’s own country like that.”
Chris cracked a smile. Gabriel tapped his chest, then hummed.
“What?”
“Just thinking,” Gabriel said. “Don’t tell Aled I said anything, okay?”
“Uh, okay.”
“I think eventually we’re going to pack up and move south.”
That was news.
“What? Really? When?”
Chris hadn’t picked up on that at all, and he almost sat up before remembering the stupid nature of doing that in a hammock. As it was, he physically twitched. Moving? They were considering moving? Aled seemed bound to West Yorkshire, and Gabriel sure as shit wasn’t going anywhere without him. Chris had never entertained the idea of them coming down to him.
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “He’s not said anything about it or dropped any hints, but he’s been…lonely since Suze left. He calls her almost every day, he’s almost quit the gym now she’s not there with him, and he doesn’t really go out anymore. She and Tom were his social circle, really, and he’s not bothered to make a new one.”
“Lots of married guys—well, okay, you’re not married, but same difference. My point is, loads of married guys don’t go out much.”
“Yeah, but I think he misses it,” Gabriel said.
“Has he said that?”
“Of course not. Their nights out involved getting shitfaced, and we don’t talk about the A-word.”
“Ahh.”
“But I expect one day he’s going to decide he wants to live down there nearer to them,” Gabriel said.
“And you’ll go with him?”
“Of course I will.”
“So potentially…”
“I mean, that’s Cornwall, not Bristol, but I don’t know where Aled’s supposed to find a marketing executive’s job in Cornwall, so maybe we won’t go all the way south. Maybe we can stop sort of…Bristol-ish.”
“Bristol-ish,” Chris echoed.
“And I’m like you, I can just find a job whenever,” Gabriel said. “So—what then? What if that happened?”
“That changes things,” Chris admitted.
Having them down south? Closer, if not right there. He wasn’t going to bank on Bristol—Cornwall was still a fair distance from there, if Aled’s goal was to be near his friends—but Exeter was a possibility. It lay close to both, though Chris didn’t have the faintest idea about whether Aled’s kind of work was found there. Chris wasn’t even sure what a marketing executive did.
But what if they went to Cornwall itself? What about Cornwall? He’d been to Cornwall plenty—it was the summer holiday destination as a kid, and Falmouth had been one of his brother’s favourite places, so it had even been a refuge and a place to mourn once he’d gone. It wasn’t home like Somerset, but it wasn’t another planet like Yorkshire. It was—familiar. Not quite home, but not quite alien either.
“If we came south, would you stay?”
“Yes.”
Gabriel slid an arm around his ribs and squeezed. Chris squeezed back, pondering it. He wanted this. He wanted hammock cuddles in the summer and to relocate to the sofa in the winter. Gabriel didn’t really game with him much, but he’d shout encouragement or slag off the other players while Chris did his thing. He wanted to gang up on Aled to persuade him into trying cycling, but to be able to go on his runs alone without Gabriel trying to talk him into shortcuts every five minutes. He wanted to have the room to be antisocial, because there’d always be someone else around to take the pressure off. He wanted his own space, but for the open door to be feet away instead of hundreds of miles.
He wanted—
He wanted them to be home, as well as the south.
“Don’t tell Aled,” Gabriel repeated. “He’s not said anything yet and he needs to figure things out for himself or he gets really tangled up and dithers forever. But I think now Tom and Suze are starting a family, it won’t be long.”
Chris nodded, stroking his nails gently up Gabriel’s arm.
“We’ve got a while yet,” he said. “You can’t even do stairs yet, so I’m hardly going to be packing my bags next week.”
Gabriel grumbled.
“Chill out,” Chris said, kissing his hair. “You’re getting better. You couldn’t even get to the loo on your own when you came home. Or have sex. You’re getting there.”
“Who says I’m having sex? Having a nap while you fuck me doesn’t count.”
“Aled texts me when I shouldn’t come in the bedroom,” Chris said dryly.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“Well, at least you get a warning.”
“Thank God. I don’t want to see your boyfriend’s arse…”
Gabriel laughed. “It’s a nice arse!”
“Says you. It’s fat and white and ginger.”
“Ginger? Try again. The carpet hasn’t matched the curtains for a while now…”
“Oh, gross—”
They bickered a little, then Gabriel settled back down and Chris resumed stroking his arm. The contentment was making him drowsy. Or maybe that was the sun.
“You’re getting better,” he said. “But I’m not going anywhere just yet.”
And despite his anti-north convictions, maybe the pull of the south and home weren’t strong enough to drag him free anymore.
Maybe.
Chapter Fifteen
Chris was right, though.
He was getting better.
When he’d been in hospital, the vertigo had been so severe that he could barely open his eyes when lying flat on his back, but here he was, propped up on the pillows on Kevin’s sofa, a bowl of Judith’s special—and sinful—carbonara in his lap, and watching a Disney movie with the girls. He’d never been into Disney, or kids, but even Gabriel thought it was quite cute when Grace tried to sing along with Jeremy Irons.
Just like being in his own house was being at home, so was being in Kevin and Judith’s. Judith—Kevin’s wife and his main submissive—was a warm and welcoming presence, and like an aunt even though she was only a few years older than Gabriel. Kevin would beat him senseless in the workshop, roleplay the most violent rape and torture scenarios imaginable with him, then text him selfies with the girls on days out, pick him up from work if it was raining, have him round for dinner just to check in that everything was okay. He’d finally succeeded in ditching the alcohol because of Kevin and Judith. Hell, he was probably alive because of Kevin and Judith. And so it was that Gabriel felt perfectly at peace on their sofa, Lily sitting between his feet as though he was an extension of the chair, with a man who’d given him literal scars crawling around on the floor with Grace pretending to be a hyena an
d his heavily pregnant wife breastfeeding their youngest in the armchair.
“Did you pick a name in the end?” Gabriel asked. Judith had miscarried their very first baby—Rose, whose tiny handprints had been cast in plaster and were still on proud display on the mantelpiece, six years after her loss—and so they had a tradition of not naming the babies until they’d passed the seventh month. It had been coming up when Gabriel had been put in the hospital. Now, she couldn’t be more than two weeks from her due date.
“Well, we were thinking Leah, but this little lady is far too active for a Leah. She’s going to be a boxer like her daddy.”
Kevin fist-pumped the air, and Gabriel laughed.
“Definitely a girl, then?”
“Oh, they couldn’t work it out from the scans, but I know,” Judith said loftily.
“You can’t know,” Kevin said. “It’s a boy. Kevin Junior.”
“Have I been wrong before? No. Shut your mouth.”
Gabriel grinned. Judith was a sub like he was a sub. All right, so they were a little more lifestyle than Gabriel liked for himself—if Aled tried to control his money or tell him what to wear every day, there would be serious problems—but Judith ruled the roost. Kevin might be the one in charge in the bedroom, but he was completely controlled by her in every other aspect.
In any case, the kids didn’t have a clue. They were too young to understand BDSM or polyamory yet. Gabriel was just Dad’s friend from work. The garden shed was just full of boring old junk. Dad sometimes worked evenings as well as during the day. They had no idea, and Kevin intended on keeping it that way for as long as possible. Gabriel supposed it made sense. It would be too easy to teach them they needed a man to slap them around if they got the wrong idea about how it all worked.
Although watching Grace dragging her father around by the hair, he wondered if kink wasn’t genetic.
“So if she’s not Leah, who is she?” he asked.
“Zoe. Still has a lovely sound, but a much more active sort of girl,” Judith said.
Only three names were outright banned, as far as Gabriel knew. One was Rose, for the simple fact that they couldn’t forget their firstborn and didn’t want to try. The second was his deadname, although it had a double protection in that Judith thought it was a hideous name anyway. And the third was Victoria, Judith’s racist sister who refused to acknowledge her nieces’ existence due to their black father.
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