The snow has amplified the daylight into startling brightness. Even down on the rug with my head hanging between my shoulders, I can see all the individual twists and fibers, the places under the chairs that a vacuum missed, a forgotten wine cork, the bit of dried cuticle on my left thumb. How strange to see everything with the harsh and rational sobriety of day . . . and then still to feel a man’s shoes settle onto my back. Still to feel the heels of them digging into my skin, still to strain against my jeans with a needy erection at the shame of it all.
“You are a good footstool, Ryan,” Sidney says calmly. I can hear but not see the flipping of papers, the occasional tap of a finger on his iPad as he wakes it up to take notes or snap a quick picture of whatever document he’s reading. I wonder if I’m in the pictures; I wonder if you looked hard enough you’d see the curve of a man’s back under the expensive leather of Sidney’s shoes.
Running after Ash for four years—sometimes running with him if he decided he didn’t want to exercise alone that day—means I’m not unfit, but the position gets difficult fast. Even on my elbows, the weight of Sidney’s legs is enough to start my arms trembling. My cock is pinioned between my hip and my jeans in such a way that even the slightest shift in position is agony. And once Sidney sees I’m suffering, he adds to it for his amusement, pressing down harder with his legs, digging the soles of his shoes deeper into the muscles of my back.
We play this game for so long that I have sweat misting my face, even in this chilly room, and when he finally lifts his feet off my back, I’m breathing hard enough that my sides are heaving.
But I don’t get up. Not yet. Not without his express permission. There’s already going to be pain today, and while I’m a sucker for pain, there’s no sense in bringing more wrath down on my head because I couldn’t be patient.
“So well trained,” Sidney murmurs above me. “I’m envious of whoever got the pleasure of breaking you in. What was their name?”
“Mark,” I say. “At a club called Lyonesse in D.C. He trained Ash as well.”
Then I shut up, because I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to strum the strings of jealousy just now.
“Hmm,” Sidney says in that way of his. And then he sighs. “I’m still not comfortable, Ryan.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Blount.”
“Get on your knees and face me.”
He lifts his feet and I do, kneeling between his legs and looking up into his imperious face. I’ve knelt countless times at the club, in front of Mark or some other Dominant willing to play with me, but the difference between kneeling in a dark club and in a bright library is vast. And kneeling in front of someone who I eventually want to eat pizza with and whose childhood pictures I’d like to see is also unnerving. If I fail to please him here, what does that mean outside these walls? Would he be so eager for me to come to London and stay with him if I don’t satisfy him here, now?
Sidney’s eyes are perceptive and searching on my face, and he reaches forward to run a finger along my jaw. “I can see the worry in you,” he says. His voice is still cool and clipped, but there’s something gentle in it too. He’s being kind—or at least as kind as he’s capable of being. “You’ve already made me very happy. Would you like to see?”
“Yes, Mr. Blount,” I breathe, and he dips his head to his lap in permission.
“Then look for yourself.”
I raise my hand—tentative, still not sure if I’m allowed—and run my palm along his thigh. It’s the first I’ve gotten to touch him, and it’s like the first bite into an apple—punctured anticipation and the explosion of sweetness after.
I could not have imagined it would feel so good to touch him. I could not have imagined the warm sculpture of his firm leg under my hand, or the faint quiver of his body under my touch, proving that he’s just as affected by this moment as me. I couldn’t have known that brushing one hand up his clothed thigh would be enough to make me shudder. If I weren’t already on my knees, I’d be falling to them now.
Other than the repressed quiver of his muscles and the finger still toying idly with my jaw, Sidney stays completely still as my hand reaches the thickness currently stretching all the way out to his hip. He stays completely still as I explore the impressive length of him, the swollen crown all plump and distended, the wide base and the convexity of his testicles underneath.
He drops his hand to cover mine, moves it to the fly of his trousers. “Don’t just feel. I told you to look.”
“At where you’re happy?”
“And at where I’m uncomfortable,” he says, arching an eyebrow enough to tell me we’re back to business.
I unbutton his trousers, wondering how an action that I do several times a day can be so clumsy when I’m doing it with someone else. And then I cease to wonder anything at all as I part his zipper and see his naked, erect cock.
It’s thicker than I originally thought, and long enough to rest obscenely against the cashmere covering his most of his torso. There’s a light, masculine fur of hair on his lower belly, and the crisp hair around his root has been kept neat. It’s the cock of a calculating and fastidious man—but an arrogant one too. Even the way it juts up from his groin and beads with precum at the tip seems vain and demanding. Just like Sidney himself.
“If you put your mouth on it,” he says. “I might feel better.”
I glance up at him through my lashes, just to confirm, and whatever he sees in my face has him fisting his hand in my hair.
“Fuck, you’re pretty,” he hisses through his teeth, yanking my face down to his waiting erection. “You know what I thought when I first saw those eyelashes? Those pretty, dark eyes of yours? That I couldn’t wait to have you on your knees, just like this, looking up at me through those doll’s eyelashes while I fed you my cock.”
“Yes, Mr. Blount,” I moan. And he does as he says and pushes himself past my lips and into my waiting mouth. I make sure to look up at him, catch his gaze as he rubs himself against my tongue. His eyes are hooded, burning on mine, and if I was nervous earlier about pleasing him, it’s all gone now. There can be no doubt that he wants me, that he’ll want me again after. I’m even better than the Roman artifacts in the glass cases; he’s appraised me and now he wants to keep me.
He’s clean, soap-scented, with just the barest trace of salt to his taste, and I moan again as I manage to take him deeper, into the tight clench of my throat.
“Ah, again,” he says, using the fingers twisted in my hair to force the issue. His hips thrust up as he pulls me down, and soon he’s fucking my throat with just enough consideration for my breathing that I don’t pass out—but not so much care that I don’t have tears streaming fast and hard down my face.
“Those tears,” he grunts, and I know what he sees. I know he sees them glinting on the long fans of my eyelashes. I know the bright sunlight pouring in through the windows must be making them sparkle. “Fuck, Ryan. Those tears.”
And then he comes. Pulsing, thick, hot—all down my throat, all while his cruel hand forces me down against him. My own cock throbs in response, it aches. It keens. I think I might be able to come too if I swivel my hips just right to rub my tip against the inside of my jeans, but I don’t even get the chance to try because Sidney stands up and hauls me to my feet, even as I’m still swallowing the very last of his spend.
He doesn’t bother to zip himself up—instead he leaves himself exposed, still mostly hard and still wet from my mouth—as he drags me over to the long library table.
“Wrists out,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument.
Not that I would argue.
My wrists are tied quickly, with the expertise of someone who’s done it countless times before, and he checks my circulation with the detached efficiency of a nurse. Then my jeans are unbelted, the leather making a slow, sinister hiss as it slides from my loops, and my jeans are unbuttoned and unzipped.
Sidney tugs the waist of them down and my cock hits the cool air, final
ly free to throb and swell as much as it wants, and I make an involuntary noise when I see his hand move up, like he’s going to touch me.
“Please, Mr. Blount,” I say when his hand moves away. It’s everything I can do not to start crying again. “Please.”
“Please what?” he asks indifferently. He’s already turning toward the table, towards the other things he laid out for us today.
“Please t-touch me.”
“Touch you? You mean touch your cock?”
“Yes, Mr. Blount.”
“And make you come? Is that what you want? That’s a very selfish thing to want, by the way.”
“I know, Mr. Blount, but please.”
“It does look like it hurts an awful lot,” he observes as he reaches for his leather gloves and starts pulling them on. “Does it? Hurt?”
“Yes,” I whimper, my eyes on his hands. Those gloves—the gloves I asked for last night because it turned me on so much to think about being handled by him while he wore them. It feels like all of the blood in my body has gone to my groin, like there’s a fist at the base of my spine just squeezing and squeezing and squeezing. I’m terrified I’m going to erupt all over myself without even being touched.
“How about this?” Sidney suggests in a silky voice. He has his gloves on and my belt in one hand. “Let’s trade one hurt for another.”
Oh God, please don’t let me come right now, please let me hold out. Please, please, please.
Sidney hikes up my cardigan so that my entire ass is exposed. The leather glove brushes against the skin at the small of my back and I shudder. “What color are we on, Ryan?” he asks.
“Green,” I answer.
And a second later, the belt stripes leather-thick pain across my ass.
“And now?” Sidney inquires calmly.
“Green.”
Another stripe. Another green. After the fourth strike, he stops asking, although he pauses between a couple to give me a moment to speak if I need to. I don’t need to, even though I am crying by the tenth stroke, and my cock is so hard that it hurts too, and everything hurts and I’m dizzy and breathless.
He drapes the belt over a chair and comes to stand behind me.
“Still green?” he asks gently.
“Yes,” I mumble. “Green.”
A cool leather hand fists my organ, and I gasp, my knees nearly buckling. But Sidney is right behind me, strong and tall and sure, his fully erect cock nestled against my welted ass as he grips me and begins to stroke. I slump against him.
“I got you,” he says in my ear. His hand on me is tight and mean, and so, so, so good. He jerks me like I need, he jerks me fast and hard and without mercy, jerks me with those leather gloves I’ve been thinking so many filthy things about. The friction is vicious, and there’s a bite to the bliss he’s giving me, but I don’t even care. I’d rather have this from him than undiluted pleasure from anyone else.
“You can come for me,” he says. His cock burns hot and hard against my ass as he grinds himself closer. “You’ve earned it, haven’t you? Haven’t you earned it?”
Fuck, fuck, I have, I have earned it—it’s all I want, to make the people around me happy and better and to earn all the good things I want—
My back bows as raw, primal release scissors up from out of me. Something deep in my groin is flexing, pumping, even as my cock flexes and pumps on the outside, spurting seed all over Sidney’s fist and onto the table, more and more and more until I’m shaking and drained and everything is incandescent, electric sensation. Pleasure, pain, bliss and ache—everything, everything.
Sidney’s lips are on my neck as I gradually come down, and like the pleasure he gave me earlier, the sweet sensation of his mouth is threaded through with the sting of pain as he nips at my flesh. Then I feel him laughing against me, the vibrations of his laughter sending delicious tingles through his lips to my throat.
It’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, realizing I sound drunk. I also realize I don’t care. It feels too good to be like this, warm and beaten against such a stern, handsome man. Even if he’s not so stern right now.
“I came again,” he says, still laughing a little. “All over you. Like an adolescent.”
He’s right, and now that I’m coming down a little, I can feel it, slick and growing sticky where his pelvis is still slowly grinding against my ass.
“Don’t feel bad,” I say, smiling myself.
“Why would I feel bad? It was your fault for getting me so worked up.” And with a final bite to my throat, Sidney unties me and together we go about the business of getting cleaned up.
7
That night, we fuck by the light of the small fire in Sidney’s room. Because our rooms are so close to Auden’s, I’m gagged, and Sidney amuses himself by scratching his nails over the still-raised welts from earlier and listening to me whimper. I’m also blindfolded, although there’s no real reason for that—no reason other than that Sidney wants it and I want to give Sidney what he wants.
Sidney fucks like he does everything else—with cool, ruthless grace. He takes me on his bed, with me on my stomach and my head pillowed on my arms, and just before he comes into his condom, he flips me over and pulls down both the blindfold and the gag to my neck.
“Just wanted to see those pretty doll eyes,” he breathes. And then he orgasms with a gorgeous sigh, the firelight revealing the clenching, glistening muscles of his belly as he fills the latex with his seed.
It’s enough of a sight to send me right to the edge, and I am writhing against the air as he pulls out.
“Mr. Blount,” I beg. He’s gotten up to throw away the condom, and he comes back to the bed with a wicked look on his face.
“For the next fifteen minutes, I want you to call me Sidney,” he says, and without further preamble, he dips his head and sucks my needy cock right into his mouth.
“Mr—Sidney,” I gasp, trying to buck deeper into him. “Oh my God, Sidney, oh my God—”
I haven’t felt a mouth on my cock since college, haven’t felt the heat or the suction or the brush of someone’s jaw against my thighs as they adjust their position in years. My toes curl, my back arches, and then Sidney looks up at me through his eyelashes, and I can see why he likes it so much, why it’s such an erotic sight. There’s something about the faux-demureness of the angle, the vulnerability of it. Innocence and mischief peering up while you compel them to service the rudest parts of you.
And that it’s Sidney—sophisticated, arrogant Sidney—with his lips wrapped around me and his silver eyes glinting with amused power—it drives the pleasure of the act past what I can bear.
I ejaculate into his mouth with a soft, ragged noise, forcing myself to watch every single second of him swallowing me down. He lets me finish completely—he takes every pulse of me until I’m entirely spent, and then he arranges us on the bed so that we’re laying side by side, with my head pillowed on his shoulder.
We were mostly clothed today, and I had my blindfold on for most of tonight, so I revel in simply getting to look at my new lover by firelight, spread out in a delicious length of muscle and dark hair.
“Can I touch you?”
He turns to me, his hair ruffled and his cheeks still splotched with exertion, and his expression the loose and satisfied look of a man who’s had his needs tended to. “I’d like that,” he says, and indeed, he does seem to like it. He likes when I stroke my fingers along the corrugations of his belly and when I explore the wide planes of his chest. He watches me with glittering, approving eyes when I press my lips to his nipples and explore the damp well of his navel with a darting tongue. And I get a very male purr when I tuck my mouth against the curves of his testicles and suck and lick until I’ve memorized their topography.
In fact, he likes me touching him so much that I end up getting fucked again, and neither of us can last much longer than it takes for him to get inside me and for me to grip my cock. We com
e, we clean up, and we fall asleep the way I’ve wanted to fall asleep for years—tucked safely into a master’s arms, sleepy and welted and adored.
I find the book two days after Christmas. It’s a slim volume tucked between two different amateur histories of Thornchapel, and it crackles ominously when I take it into my hands.
Sidney—who I’ve learned over the past few days is uncannily attuned to my movements—is up and peering over my shoulder at the book in seconds.
“Is that it?” he asks, and then takes it into his sure, expert hands once I’ve nodded. He examines it thoughtfully for a few moments.
“I’ve never heard of this publisher,” he says, pointing to the title page. “And these endsheets are beyond luxurious. This must have been a very expensive book to own.”
I search in vain for a date on the front. “How old do you think it is?”
“Books aren’t my area of expertise,” he says, frowning down as though it’s the book’s fault he spent years studying paintings instead. “But it looks mid-eighteenth century to me. Maybe a decade or two older.”
He hands to book back to me with a “hmm.”
“‘Hmm,’ what, Mr. Blount?”
“Tristram and Iseult of Lyonesse? Wasn’t your kink club called Lyonesse?”
I look down at the book, surprised. “It was. I mean, it is. What an interesting coincidence.” Although even as I say the word coincidence, I somehow know it’s got to be more than that. With Merlin, it always is.
Sidney puts me in touch with a company who can courier such a valuable item to Merlin, who is not in America, as I thought, but in Wales on some kind of romantic getaway with Nimue. And although we’ve spent the last four days in a heady fog of punishment, sex, and faking polite, disinterested conversation whenever Auden Guest is around, I do feel a bolt of trepidation as I sign the book over to the delivery service. I really no longer have a reason to intrude on Auden’s hospitality, and what I have with Sidney feels too delicate to force into real life. I’m suspended in an awful limbo as I walk back from the front door to the library, and that limbo becomes hellish when I get to the library and see that Sidney is packing up boxes of provenance papers.
American Squire Page 4