“Mike,” he pleaded when he could. His voice was worn to a threadbare croak. Michael had slowed his pace, his breath rasping against John’s ear, but he was still buried deep. “Lover, I’m done. Please… Let go or you’re gonna kill me.”
To his horror, Michael sobbed. He crashed to a halt. “I can’t.”
“What?” John could feel every inch of him, taut and hard, holding him wide open. Ready. “Yeah, you can. Give it to me.” Propping himself shakily on his arms, he ground back against him. “Just let go.”
“No.”
A huge inner movement. Never great to be pulled out of, but not too bad with a spent, satisfied cock. Just a slither, not this sense of being brusquely gutted… Grunting, John braced and got through it as best he could. “Mikey, what the hell’s the matter?” He turned. His vision had adapted to the dark, but sparks were dancing across it now. Through them he saw that Michael had fallen back against the wall. Lifted his hands to shield his face. “Jesus. Mike?”
John hauled up his jeans. He discovered that he still could walk—just about—and he limped over to his partner. He took him in his arms. The still-sheathed, still-rigid cock pushed hotly against his thigh. He kissed Michael’s feverish cheek. “All right,” he told him. “Bed.”
Where they should have started off. For all John’s fantasies about the backseats of cars and dark alleyways, that had been his deeper thought. One day, if the impossible happened, he and Mike would fall into bed together. They did so now, like an avalanche, John landing on top but almost too tired to push home his advantage. The corridor that led from the kitchen to the bedroom had been a long walk, steering Michael passively in front of him.
He pinned Michael down. He was breathing hard, a tremor of exhaustion in his limbs. “Okay, handsome. What’s it take?”
Michael looked up at him. “It would take,” he said distinctly, “for you to tie me up.” The instant the words were out, his eyes and voice became hollow with shame. “Leave it, John. I’m a freak.”
John sat back. It came as a surprise, he’d give Mike that. Doing it with the lights on was about as kinky as he’d ever have imagined his straightforward partner got. But as for
freak
… Mike should have been with him on a few of the wilder Soho nights. He’d have seen things in the back rooms of the bars that might have restored his perspective. “Tie you up, eh?” he echoed, straddling him, not hiding the dawn of a smile. “Sounds reasonable to me. My set of cuffs is in your car, or—”
“No.” Michael shifted restlessly under him, trying to pull his wrists from John’s imprisoning grip. “I can’t wait. Your belt and mine.”
“Oh.” John swallowed, a dry spasm that hurt his throat. His cock couldn’t rise to the occasion again, but a pang of excitement, dark as blood, passed through him.
I can’t wait
… Mike was deadly serious. His face was flushed and wild in the lamplight, his shaft stiff and urgent, swelling the tip of the condom with precome. Fingers unsteady, John drew his belt out from the loops of his jeans. Michael was arching beneath him, lifting his hips. It was the work of a second to slide his belt free too.
And it was sexy as hell, but something inside John ached and cringed as he took the strong, fine-made wrist Michael was offering up to him. He’d played bondage games in the clubs. He didn’t mind tying—or being tied, for that matter. It was fun.
But Mike was crying.
“John,” he rasped. “Go home. I’m not fit for you.”
“What?” Quickly John leaned in, kissed the salt off his cheeks. “Jesus, lover. Don’t make a big deal. This is fine, okay? Nothing wrong with it.” Before Michael could pull away, John drew his arm up and out, slipped one belt round a hoop of the wrought-iron headboard and fastened the leather tight round his wrist. “Not sure how to keep it there. I’ll knot it if you—”
“Nn-nn. I’ll hold the end.”
“Okay.” That was better—Mike’s choice, not his. Mike, at least, regulating this impossible scenario. John reached and attended to the other outstretched hand. And there he was—laid out beneath John, tendons standing, exposed. He was so bloody lovely. It should have been the stuff of pornographic dreams. “It’s fine,” John told him. “It’s hot, okay? Sexy for me too.”
Michael turned his head to one side. He closed his eyes. “Now I need you to hurt me.”
John sat back on his heels. Suddenly he felt cold and tired as he never had been in his life. What the hell was going on here? Wanting Michael had been like a meteor, flashing across John’s inner sky, blinding in its beauty. Getting him—Christ, the meteor had hit the gravity well and was breaking up, fragments dropping in fiery chaos all around. “You need what?”
“You heard me. I keep a knife—back of the drawer there, wrapped in a shirt. I can’t get off otherwise. Please!”
“You want me to…” John couldn’t get his mouth round the words, much less his head round the concept. He wouldn’t have batted an eyelid anywhere else but here. Men needed what they needed—didn’t they?—though he stopped short of such games himself. This flesh, though, the beautiful skin he would have laid down his life to keep intact on the street… “You want me to cut you?”
“I warned you. I’m a freak. Now do it, or—”
“Shut up.” John couldn’t bear to hear the end of the command.
Do it or forget it. Do it or leave me alone
. Part of him wanted to bail. He felt sick and utterly lost, glad of his shagged-out excuse for not getting it up.
Couldn’t leave Michael like this, though. They were partners; they saw to one another. And as for
I can’t get off otherwise
, John hadn’t spent three years on the London scene without learning some quick, efficient methods of release. Michael was holding on to the ends of both belts, pinning his wrists into position. John kissed his damp brow, one last effort of benediction on this bizarre scene. Then he eased down the bed. He was too tired and sore to take him into his body again, but he had it on good authority that he gave the best head this side of Soho.
Michael flinched as he peeled the condom off his straining cock. Murmuring vague reassurance, John knelt between his thighs. He leaned over him, trying not to set this experience against his dreams of it, and drew him into his mouth.
Briefly he thought it wouldn’t work. Michael bucked underneath him, muscles of his backside and thighs locking in resistance wherever John tried to place a soothing hold. What the hell was holding him back? He was ready—desperate, if his bitten-back moans were anything to go by—and yet he felt to John like some beautiful car revving against an intractable hand brake. John rippled his tongue up and down the length of him, circled the head in a motion that had driven past lovers wild. He opened his throat, stilled his gag reflex, and let him slide all the way down, squeezing; reached strong fingertips into the crease of his backside and massaged hard around his opening.
Oh yes. There—a giant, speared-fish convulsion in the body he held. A spurt deep in his throat that made him forget his technique and choke before he got control and began to swallow, carefully, methodically. Two, three more of the huge whole-body spasms, as if Michael were dragging down on his restraints with all his strength. John grabbed him, hearing his climaxing shout with wonder at the fear and pain in it. Oh, he’d get it right next time with him—whatever his demons, chase them off or learn to love the bastards. Hanging on, John drank him down, forbidding himself to let go until his last drop was expended and Michael’s cock was softening, freeing John’s airway at last.
He sat up, gasping. Already Michael was struggling away from him. “Hang on,” John rasped, then broke off coughing. “I’ll undo those.”
“No. I’ve got them.” Twisting, Michael freed one hand, then curled up on the bed, turning his back on John to reach across and untie the other. He was breathing hard and unsteadily, as if he were only just holding back sobs. Tenderly, frightened, John said his name, and ignored his evasive flinch, taking hold of the other wrist to help him.
The skin was wet. Sweat-soaked, yes, like the rest of him, but sticky too. Dark streaks painted his arms.
Blood went black in streetlight.
“Shit,” John whispered and snapped on the bedside lamp. Mike tried to haul away from him, but he’d yanked the belt too tight through its buckle and the leather had turned sideways and caught. Had cut so deep, John saw, snatching the other hand—the one doing its best to shove him away—that its edge had ground into and then torn the flesh. Michael was bleeding. “Mikey, what the fuck…?”
“Let me go.”
“Okay. Let me unfasten that and—”
“No. Back the fuck off. Now!”
The free hand landed hard on John’s sternum, and he fell back, too sick and bewildered to resist. He watched with a sense of nightmare as his partner and best friend tore his bloodied wrist free of the restraint. The belt—John’s, of course—was a fashion accessory, not needed to hold his trousers up, and just as well; he’d never be wearing it again. “Michael…”
“What?” Michael turned on him. “I asked you to cut me. You wouldn’t give me the pain, so I had to find it for myself. You happy?”
John scrambled back to him. He put both hands on his chilly, rigid shoulders. Michael tried to jerk away, but he was backed against the headboard. “Listen,” John whispered, resting his brow on top of the bowed skull. “You listen. I’ll tie you up if you want. I’ll tie you up, tie you down, fuck you seven ways to sunset. But don’t ever ask me to hurt you again. Not like that.”
“Again?” Michael choked. He raised his head, and just for a moment his eyes met John’s with such an abyss of pain in them that John almost cried out. “There’s not gonna be an
again
for this. And—I could never let another man fuck me. Let me go, Griff.”
John, on his hands and knees on the bed, watched him stumble out of the room. It was his instinct to go after him. Get the first-aid kit out, wash the grazing and weals—which, now John came to think about it, were new wounds on old, faded scarring he had often wondered about but never dared ask—and bandage them up.
There’s not gonna be an again for this.
He had sounded disgusted. Miserable. And what did he think of men like John, who did let themselves be fucked?
Exhaustion caught up with him, a merciful wave. He subsided onto the bed, flat on his stomach, burying his face in the quilt. The flat remained silent. After a brief struggle against exhaustion, he slept.
Chapter Six
The surface under him was his own sofa, not a bunk in a cell.
Michael sat up. The sun had laid a fiery sword into the room. He squinted into the light, shielding his eyes. Why the hell had he slept here? Courting nightmares, apparently. Sometimes he would have the cell dream anyway, but sleeping elsewhere than his bed, in narrow, uncomfortable places, was a good way to wake up screaming.
He got to his feet. His mouth was dry, his limbs heavy and stiff. He’d made a job of it, hadn’t he—facedown on the couch, not bothering with a rug or duvet, naked from the waist up. He was still in his trousers from yesterday, and these were unfastened, barely pulled up over his hips, as if he’d staggered off to lie down after…
His wrists were sore. Michael looked down at them, at the grazing, the deep-scored weals—and his heart tried to stop.
He knew that his mind, although still efficient, didn’t work in the way it had before his mission to Zemelya. He thought he remembered his time there, but, joining event to event, it didn’t add up. His memory was full of dark matter, lost weeks and months, a terrifying failure to account. His dreams tried to fill in the blanks. And his waking mind was sluggish, often substituting dreamtime for reality until he had a shower and woke up. He would forget what had happened the night before.
He tried to say his partner’s name, but no sound came. Slowly he made his way across the living room. As always he felt pleasure in the press of his bare feet to the silky Afghan carpets he’d put down. The flat smelled agreeably of coffee and leather, the sofa warming fragrantly in the sun. He loved his home. He’d bought good things on his MI5 wage and installed them here, when Last Line security had passed the place suitable, with desperate energy. He needed the link between the past and now, needed a refuge. He took his bearings from his own four walls when all else failed—and all else had. Without the familiar textures and scents, he would dissolve into nothing this morning, blend into the sunlight and be gone.
What the fuck had he done?
He eased open his bedroom door. The back of the flat overlooked an alley, and sunlight didn’t make it until late afternoon. The curtains were wide open. He hadn’t even done that much to protect John’s privacy and the thing that had happened between them. He flashed back to the kitchen and what he had done there, and he had to bite back a moan. The bedroom was shadowy. John was an abstract pattern on the duvet, his long loose limbs hard to pick out. He’d fallen asleep where weariness had dropped him, one hand hanging limply off the bed. His T-shirt had ridden up, exposing the stretch of his spine.
He’d fallen nearly to his death the day before. Michael therefore wasn’t responsible for the dreadful bruising, black as grapes, marking that tawny skin that kept its golden warmth all through London’s darkest winters. Nevertheless he had forgotten about it—obliterated his memory of the damage in lust, banging John up against the wall, pinning him to the kitchen table. Unsteadily Michael went to crouch by the bed. Fuck, how did he even dare touch him? For a moment he couldn’t, only extending one finger to the waistband of his jeans, drawing it a little lower. Remorse and mortification tore through him. Whispering his name, he put out a shaking hand and stroked his hair.
John lifted his head. Briefly he stared straight ahead, his eyes dark and blank. Then he rolled stiffly onto his side. “Mike?”
“Yeah. Jesus, you really did break your fall with your arse.”
“You haven’t even seen my—” He shut up, meeting Michael’s eyes in consternation, memory impacting on him in visible shocks. “Oh God.”
Michael swallowed. “It was dark. I couldn’t see, or I’d have never…”
Thrown you down and screwed you. In my right mind I wouldn’t have done that, or ordered you to hurt me, then for want of your compliance pulled on my restraints until at last the pain and the pleasure met hard enough inside me to let me come
. “I’d never have done any of that.”