Ingenious

by Barrie Farris

  “Aw, Max, hurry up and come in my hand. I want to watch.”

  “I’m waiting to fuck.”

  Quiggs’s arms were tiring out. “Did you drink Stefan’s special cum juice?”

  “Twice a day once Beau took over in the vines. Stuff’s not bad. Tastes like—”

  Max’s mouth rounded in a silent Oh as Quiggs engulfed the ruby crown with his lips folded over his teeth and a fist at the root to prevent gagging. His tongue lapped awkwardly, making up for technique with bouncy enthusiasm. Oh, yeah, Quiggs enjoyed the feel of cock stretching his lips. He licked under the crown, along the dark vein, around the hot ring. When Max’s buttocks clenched, the pulses of heat on the ring intensified, throbbing like a wound against his tongue.

  Quiggs’s mouth popped off to pant, “I love sucking dick.” He dove back in, slurping noisily, then popping off to add, “I’ve missed two years of this. I should have swallowed gallons by now. It’s like feeding off your power. It’s like—”

  “Shut up and suck.” Max’s hands gripped Quiggs’s head and held him down. “And remember to worship the twins.”

  Quiggs giggled around his mouthful. He tugged, sucked, twisted, pumped, two-fingered, licked until his jaw ached and tears streamed down his cheeks to mingle with the drool. He tongued the slit, disappointed there was no pre-cum to taste.

  Max cursed, praised, trembled. His balls drew tight to his ass. It became a duel with Quiggs determined to watch and Max determined to wear him out until he begged to be fucked.

  Max yelled, “Can’t wait. Now!”

  Quiggs pulled off to watch. Instead of spurting, Max manhandled him onto the bed on all fours with a pillow under his hips and his braid swept aside. He yanked out the plug with a twist, causing Quiggs to yip.

  “Max? Slow down. Don’t hurt me.” Quiggs peered over his shoulder and found Max’s feverish gaze on his pucker as he oiled his cock.

  Quiggs braced for the invasion. He had always wanted to experience a cock easing inside. The clinic had screened him for penetration, and Max’s measurement was on file. As improbable as it seemed, Max would fit. The oiled tip nudged his anus, and he whimpered as Max pushed in.

  “Breathe out. Don’t clench.” Max pushed harder; the inner ring resisted. He pulled the hard-fought inch out. “Rub your cock,” he panted. “The burn eases if you’re aroused.”

  Quiggs stroked, unable to find a pleasing rhythm. Stefan had warned him first times weren’t euphoric experiences.

  Max gripped his concubine’s ass. “Ready to take me?”

  “Ready,” Quiggs lied. His breath whooshed out as Max pushed in using small rocking motions instead of one deep drill.

  “Tell me if it’s hurting...” Max groaned from the effort of holding back.

  Fuck yeah, it hurt. Quiggs bit the pillow rather than admit the truth and risk Max pulling out and starting over again.

  When he was balls deep, Max stilled, waiting for Quiggs to adjust to him. “How you doing, my baby cadet?” he panted.

  “Burns,” was all Quiggs could manage while he struggled for breath. He couldn’t detect Max’s ring because of the burning stretch.

  “Some burn’s normal. Tell me when I can move.” Max nibbled along the uninjured shoulder, his hands gliding up and down Quiggs’s waist.

  When he could breathe, Quiggs looked over his good shoulder at Max’s concerned face. He remembered yesterday, when he’d wanted his first time to be with Miles. He summoned a weak smile. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  Max began slow measured thrusts. He praised Quiggs’s plump white cheeks and creamy skin. He swore on his honor Quiggs was a treasure. How wonderful his tight velvet glove felt.

  That the fierce quarter-feral Commander was so vocal surprised Quiggs. Where were the grunts, the animal cries, the crude handling?

  Max changed his angle and rubbed over the famed third nut, sending a tingling pleasure up Quiggs’s spine. Cadets raved how intense their orgasms were when a partner pounded the sweet spot. Maybe later, with more experience, he’d agree. Right now, the discomfort overwhelmed the pleasure. And what ass wipe told Max hammering the sweet spot blocked the burn? Any faster and he’d rupture Quiggs’s gland.

  Max reached beneath and discovered Quiggs’s limp cock. “Oh, baby, no. Let me get you hard again.”

  Though the firm, squeezing strokes hardened Quiggs, his hole burned. As Max rode the edge of his own pleasure, his grip roughened to a tugging rhythm, leaving Quiggs too sensitized to come. It was not happening for him this time. He didn’t want to spoil it for Max by asking him to stop, not after all the wonderful words of praise.

  He cheated by resorting to the oldest trick in the concubine’s sex manual. When your fuck hole wore out, fake it by squeezing your channel and tilting your man into orgasm.

  Max assumed Quiggs was into the pleasure now. “Yes, yes. I feel you loving it.” Both hands gripped Quiggs’s hips, and he thrust faster, harder, deeper to bring them off together.

  Quiggs squeezed as he moaned, “So huge… so hard. Ohfuckohfuckohfuuuuuuck!”

  Max tipped over the point of no return. His hips locked tightly against Quiggs as he roared his pleasure, ejaculating with a gush of seed instead of spurts. Sated, he pulled out with an achy pop and rolled to his side, chest heaving.

  Quiggs eased onto his back to give his knees a rest. He stared at the ceiling, wondering if he should admit he hadn’t come, or if he should slip away pretending to clean up before Max guessed.

  Max raised up on an elbow. A glimmer of a smile softened his face as he traced a line down the middle of Quiggs’s chest to below his navel. The smile disappeared as he patted Quiggs’s dry belly and cock.

  Max inhaled sharply. “You didn’t come? I thought… you sounded as if…”

  “I… um… sort of faked it.” He waited for Max’s anger.

  Instead, Max sounded hurt. “I wanted you to enjoy your first time with me. Talk to me. What went wrong?”

  “My ass hurt, and you choked my dick like you were milking a goat.”

  Max loomed over him, gripping his jaw and forcing Quiggs to meet the angry gray eyes of the commander who punished insubordination from his soldiers. “You should have told me to stop instead of pretending. Did you lie about sucking my cock?”

  Quiggs grinned. “Believe me. I loved it. I wanted to know if the cum juice worked.”

  The wounded anger fled. Max swiped a finger in the cum leaking down Quiggs’s thighs and held it out for him to taste. “Tell me what you think.”

  Quiggs averted his face. “Eww! Not after it’s been inside my ass!”

  Max licked his finger. “Mmmmm. The juice does improve it. Could use a shake of pepper though.”

  “Eww!”

  Max laughed and enfolded Quiggs in his arms. “It was so damn good inside you. Give me a few minutes to recover, then it’s your turn. Want my mouth on your cock? I’ll do it if you warn me before you come. Tell me what you want. No pretending.”

  Quiggs snuggled his face into Max’s chest and mumbled his request.

  “What was that?”

  Quiggs leaned back. “I said I don’t want your mouth on my cock. I want to fuck you.”

  Max cradled him closer. “Good to hear. I’ll be extra gentle.”

  “I mean I really, really want to be inside you when we fuck.”

  Max pulled away. “Didn’t Stefan give you the talk? I don’t reciprocate.”

  “Just once. I want to cut my braid.”

  “My feral blood won’t let me submit. It’s instinctive. I can’t fight my nature.”

  “We could try.”

  Max frowned. “No. Trust me on this. I’d hurt you.”

  “You sound as if your fuck hole will spring teeth and bite off my cock. You said no pretending between us. Admit you’re blaming instinct when it’s your stubborn pride at fault.”

  In a flash Max straddled Quiggs’s waist. “You owe me a kiss. Twelve seconds, my concubine. Open up for me.” His heavy-lidded eyes watc
hed Quiggs as he lowered his head. He didn’t pin him down. He left Quiggs room to slide from beneath him and escape.

  Quiggs tried to open for Max’s tongue, but his lips shut so tight a greased needle couldn’t slip through the seam. His gut clenched. Bile burned the back of his throat. He couldn’t… he absolutely couldn’t submit to this perversion. Max would never treat him like a man again if he yielded.

  Max’s lips trailed to his ear and whispered, “Not so easy fighting instinct, is it?” He tossed Quiggs a towel before disappearing behind the bathing screen to draw a bath.

  Cum bubbled out Quiggs’s ass when he stood by the bed to clean up, sticky and smelling like mown grass and old leather from Stefan’s juice. He wiped his crease with a towel and kept wiping. And wiping. Copious seed, Stefan had warned. What an understatement. From the amount leaking down the back of his thighs, Quiggs wondered if Max had a third kidney strictly for seed.

  Quiggs slipped on a short white robe. Three days confined in the penthouse with Max with nothing to do but eat, sleep, fuck… talk.

  Not so easy fighting instinct, is it?

  Quiggs heard frustrated splashes when he didn’t join Max in the tub to scrub his back like a proper concubine. He ignored them. Stefan had left packets of pain powders and a jar of numbing cream on the vanity. Quiggs applied the cream but left the powders alone. He needed a clear head. Max had promised on his honor to let Quiggs cut his braid. He called him a naive baby cadet, but Quiggs understood the special bond between them would wither if he insisted on visiting a pleasure house.

  The splashing ceased. He peeked through a crack between the panels of the screen and found Max lying in bubbles with his head resting on a folded towel and a cloth over his eyes. A headache? Good. Quiggs had aches everywhere.

  He waddled to the kitchen for something to eat. Stefan had left a tray of cheese spreads and crackers on the kitchen countertop. Quiggs polished it off. Max would have to wait for Cutty to roll in the breakfast cart. He brushed the crumbs off his robe, then slid open the balcony door and stepped outside under the eave.

  Dammit. He hated his braid.

  A brief spatter of raindrops hit his head and rolled down his neck. He stepped further out on the balcony to check the sky and heard a crunch beneath his bare feet. Curling bits of gray like flaking paint littered the balcony beneath the eave. He reached down to pick up a flake, and a raindrop struck the back of his hand. The orange raindrop regarded Quiggs through a cluster of shiny eyes as its legs skittered backwards, then forwards.

  Quiggs froze.

  The orange raindrop was a tiny one-inch scorpion, most of the inch a stinger that delivered a paralytic. Bits of speckled gray shell clung to the hatchling’s back. Any move from Quiggs would trigger a painful sting like boiling oil poured on the skin, earning the scorpions the nickname “boilers.”

  The crunchy debris was the broken shells of hundreds of siblings, which hunted together the first week. A hatchling’s first instinct was to seek out warm-blooded prey and suck its juices. Once a victim was found, the hatchlings closed in, each picking a nice warm dining spot while their prey was unaware. Once the prey reacted to their presence, the hatchlings launched a stinging frenzy.

  The boilers lived in the far outlands. How did a nest of them hatch on the balcony?

  Quiggs stared at the boiler on his hand. If he knocked it off, the rest would attack. A dozen stings incapacitated a victim for days. Two dozen could kill. Three dozen did kill.

  “Quiggs… keep absolutely still.” Max stood behind him. “I’m flicking it off with a towel.”

  Before the towel struck, the scorpion stung. The rest attacked from positions on his chest, back, neck, thighs. Quiggs screamed, his body afire.

  He heard Max curse and was dimly aware Max was being stung also as he ripped off Quiggs’s robe and batted the scorpions off with his claws. Soldiers surrounded them. Shrill whistles sounded. Gloved hands slapped at Quiggs, then rolled him in a blanket.

  “Commander, your arms are swelling…”

  “The guard on the roof is not responding.”

  “They’re swarming the next balcony.”

  “Clear the building. Exterminate every room.”

  Max raced from the apartment, cradling him like a swaddled baby.

  Quiggs screams dried. He struggled to draw shallow breaths. While the rest of his body burned, his chest muscles were numb slabs, barely lifting when he fought for a breath. “My… chest…”

  “Focus on your breathing.” Max’s voice was tight with pain. “We’re almost at the hospital. Focus on each breath. You hear me, Quiggs? Fight back.”

  Max handed him off to medics rushing toward them with a stretcher. “No… Quiggs first. Go.”

  His chest rose, fell, lost the fight. His eyes rolled up, and the sky swallowed him, the clouds closing over him like a burning fleece.

  Chapter Twenty

  Low voices surrounded Quiggs along with a wheezing, rhythmic squishing. His throat hurt. His chest burned as air rushed in expanding his diaphragm. He opened his eyes, confused where he was.

  “Good, you’re awake.” Deep-set blue eyes beneath a pair of bushy eyebrows peered down at him, and brown sideburns ran wild from prominent ears to a pointed chin. “I’m Dr. Knowles, medical field specialist for the military and Commander Bronn’s personal physician. Blink if you can hear me.”

  It took a minute to get his eyes to blink. Every muscle felt sucked down in mud.

  Doctor Knowles waited patiently for the blink. “Splendid. Can you wiggle your left fingers for me?”

  His swollen hand made a universally crude and unintentional gesture, but it was all he could manage.

  Dr. Knowles chuckled. He was definitely military by the manner in which he ordered Quiggs through a series of movements when all Quiggs wanted was an explanation of where he was and how he got here.

  “Your vitals are stable. Your musculature is slowly reviving from the paralytic in the venom. Amazing how you survived thirty-eight stings.”

  The mention of stings brought back the memory of the tiny scorpions crawling over his body, of Max racing him to the hospital. He tried to ask if Max had survived, but a tube in his throat prevented speech. The squishing sound came from the manual intubation pump a medic squeezed at the head of the hospital bed. Ironically, Quiggs had adapted the hose and pump from a device in an ancient medical tome. He’d substituted a simple manual pump in place of the power cell. Skipping athletics in favor of inventions had saved his life.

  Okay… so vitals, muscles, and his memories were intact.

  Quiggs stared down his nose at the tube taped to his mouth, then cut his eyes to the doctor.

  “Yes, I believe you can breathe on your own. Please relax as I remove the tube. Commendable device, thank you. What is this territory coming to wasting you as a concubine? I’ll convince Commander Bronn to let you work with my medical team.”

  Max was alive. At Quiggs’s agitated blinks, the doctor added in a soothing tone, “Max is recovering from twenty stings. He never experienced breathing problems, but he’ll spend days recovering from the unpleasant side effects. He’s threatened to carve me up for fishing bait for not putting him in a bed beside yours, but he’s bedbound in the next room in no shape to make threats.”

  After the tube was removed, Quiggs couldn’t breathe, and he panicked. A vise gripped his chest, preventing him from drawing a breath. Black dots floated across his vision. His hands flapped; his legs kicked weakly. Was the doctor going to stand there and watch him suffocate?

  His chest expanded with a loud hiccup, and the rush of air was like sipping flames through his raw throat. His chest caved on an exhale. He hiccupped, caved, hiccupped until an automatic rhythm took over. A foul odor pervaded the room. Had he soiled himself?

  The doctor checked his pulse. “You’ll smell like rotting meat until the venom clears out of your system. The smell attracts other scorpions to the feast. But you’re alive, and nothing vital appears digested. O
xygen disables the digestive chemicals delivered with the paralytic, and you had taken your last able breath when the medics intubated you. A nursing team pumped twelve hours keeping you alive.”

  Quiggs watched the smooth rise and fall of his bare chest. His skin looked like burnt butter.

  The doctor applied a salve to Quiggs’s eyelids, then coated his cracked lips. “The fight’s not over yet.” He spoke in the pleasant voice a doctor used before delivering a nasty surprise to his patient.

  The doctor removed the sheet covering Quiggs’s lower body, exposing his burnt butter dick. He ignored the questions in Quiggs’s eyes as the medics wrapped padded straps over his waist and legs and secured them under the bed.

  And why the fuck were they fitting him with a cock cage? Masturbating his ugly orange dick was the last thing on his mind. His greased eyes bugged as they slid a ring over his cock and behind his scrotum, then fitted a cage over his penis and connected it to the ring.

  The doctor’s voice grew kindlier, a bad omen. “The cage prevents priapism when the muscle contractions begin. You don’t want to spend days with a stubborn chubby, do you? Max refused to wear one. He regrets it now.”

  Dr. Knowles shared an evil chuckle with his medical team.

  Quiggs felt restless, as if bugs crawled under his skin. His scalp tingled.

  “Dig in your heels,” the doctor warned.

  The first wave felt as if he were basted with fuel paste and someone cracked a sputternut on his skull. When he opened his mouth to scream, they inserted a leather strap between his teeth.

  When the flames and smoke cleared, he expected to find his skin charred black.

  The doctor kindly explained. “Anything touching your skin increases the intensity of the spasms, which is why you are naked. The straps are necessary to keep you from running away.”

  Why would he run away?

  By the fourth wave, Quiggs would have bolted from the bed and jumped out the window had he not been strapped in. His eyes pleaded for the doctor to kill him or administer a pain reliever.

  The doctor started to pat his hand, before catching himself. “Sorry, Quiggs, nothing stops this pain. The nerves in your body are reacting as the paralytic breaks down and unblocks them. This causes the cramping in your muscles. The cramps will decrease in frequency over the next two days. Ride the spasms out—don’t fight them.”