Things like Warrick's ridiculous coffee-brewer were antiques. A few years ago, during an investigation, Toreth had seen one in a shop in an up-market shopping complex. It was the kind of shop that didn't show prices on anything so, as it was the end of the day and he had no other appointments, he'd wandered in to ask. He'd taken his time looking round the place, enjoying the forced pleasantness of the staff, who hadn't dared be openly rude to a para-investigator in uniform.
He'd thought at the time that the brewer might make a nice New Year present for Sara, who'd gone on at great length about Warrick's fabulous kitchen and it's contents. After he'd found out the price and left the shop empty-handed, Toreth had needed a stiff drink. He gave Sara her usual stack of skin-care products for New Year.
Paying the bill for the bed had been another unexpectedly painful moment. It wasn't that he particularly wanted the money for anything else, but these days he had a more acute awareness of how much he earned, and how much he saved, and how those differed from Warrick.
Secretly, Toreth had rather enjoyed the financial troubles at SimTech. Not that, God forbid, he wanted the corporation to go bust or be forced to sell out. Warrick would be utterly impossible to live with if that ever happened. But he had derived a certain satisfaction from Warrick having to think about money more often.
Toreth sat on the brand new bed and examined the ropes he'd bought and cut to length: plain, bright-white cotton, their ends wrapped with thread to stop them fraying. Then he spent five minutes practising the knots until he was certain that he'd got them right. Something that would tighten when tugged on, but only to a point — not so far that it would turn into a tourniquet.
Stage one completed, he sat against the beautiful head board, getting the angle right. He lifted his arms, his hands at shoulder height, then moved them away from his body until he reached a comfortable spread. He tucked his fingers behind the sinuous narrow posts and waited. After a couple of minutes, he adjusted the position again.
Planning. That was the key. Plan everything out to start with, and things would be so much better.
When he thought he'd found the perfect angle, he tied one end of each rope securely to the chosen posts, and the other into a loop.
Standing up, he surveyed the results. Perfect. And still plenty of time for a shower and a snack before Warrick could possibly get back.
Clean and fed, Toreth still had time to kill, so he fished out his screen and continued reading a terrible crime novel he'd started a couple of months earlier: 'Three Voices From Beyond' by some woman who claimed to be called Colette Clousteau. The problem was that Toreth kept leaving it for so long that he forgot what had happened and had to start again. It didn't help that the plot made no sense, although at least that meant he wouldn't guess who'd done it before he'd got his money's worth.
Not that he'd actually paid for it — it belonged to Sara's mother, who had the world's largest collection of completely crap mysteries. Toreth flicked to chapter six, where the intensely irritating hero was receiving yet another unhelpful message from the dead, channelled by his equally annoying blind female sidekick.
If this was the most help the dead could be, Toreth was glad he got his own messages via O'Reilly and her lab.
Once he reached a part he didn't remember reading before he began to get a little more involved. It was almost a surprise when the door to the flat opened and closed.
"Warrick?" Toreth called, as he closed the screen and threw it over to land neatly on the pile of his clothes. Chapter eight, he told himself, knowing full well he would forget.
"Yes?" Warrick sounded surprised — reasonably enough, because Toreth had been working very late for the last couple of weeks.
The day after tomorrow they were going to see Warrick's family for New Year. In Toreth's view, they deserved a little time off to themselves first — to build up to the trauma — so he'd been deliberately vague about which day he'd be able to get away from work for the start of the New Year holiday. Warrick thought Toreth would be working tomorrow. Possibly, Warrick thought
he
would be working too.
Wrong on both counts. Toreth planned to spend at least the first day at Jen's house in a pleasant haze of sexual exhaustion.
Toreth slipped his hands through the loops and settled his shoulders into position. One knee up, one leg straight on the bed. He could see his reflection in the long mirror opposite, the bondage-porn perfect tied hands against the polished wood, the spotless rope elaborately knotted and making a contrast with his skin. God, he looked good. He shook his head back, to mess his hair. Positively mouth watering, if he did say so himself.
He could see the smooth curves of the headboard behind him too, of course. That looked okay too, but while Toreth was pretty fucking confident Warrick would like the body in his bed, the new bed itself was less of a sure-fire sell.
"Up here," Toreth called.
Warrick's footsteps sounded on the stairs, then along the hall. "I wasn't expecting you to be home y — "
Silence. Warrick stood in the doorway, mouth actually hanging open, staring. Toreth wondering if he was even breathing.
He hadn't tightened the ropes yet. If Warrick was about to blow a fuse over the new bed, Toreth could still slip free and argue from a position of more dignity. However, he didn't think that would be necessary.
"Happy New Year," Toreth said, breaking the silence.
"Oh, God. God, it's . . . " Warrick crossed the room slowly, moving round the bed to end up standing beside it. "You remembered."
And that was it. The bed was a hit. Toreth let the ropes take the weight of his arms and the knots tightened beautifully, like a magic trick. "I remember some things, sometimes. Especially confessions."
For once, the oblique reference to I&I didn't draw any kind of reaction. Not annoyance or disgust — Warrick was simply staring at him, his eyes moving minutely as his gaze moved over Toreth's body. The appreciation, the heat in his eyes, felt like sunshine.
"Come on," Toreth said. "It'll be next year before long and then I will have to go back to work."
Warrick smiled, still looking a little glazed, then he started to loosen his tie. "It was months ago."
"So? I'd hardly start replacing beds if you hadn't mentioned the idea. Not when you're so fucking anal about furniture."
"I am nothing of the kind," Warrick said without the slightest hint of offense, as he stripped rapidly.
"Bollocks. No feet on the table, no glasses on the table without coasters, no eating in bed . . . "
"Do you enjoy having crumbs stuck to your backside so much?"
"Not the point." Toreth wasn't really listening to himself. The familiar argument produced itself while he watched Warrick's body appearing. That was also familiar, of course, but somehow he never got used to it. "The point is that when a scratch a couple of millimetres long on the mantlepiece means a major bloody — "
"Shut up." Now completely naked, Warrick leaned over the bed and placed his fingers over Toreth's mouth. "Shh."
"Make me," Toreth said past the fingers.
Warrick kissed him hard, and Toreth smiled against his mouth. He didn't mind doing this every once in a while, because Warrick was ever so amenable afterwards. This had to worth at least one semi-public fuck.
When the kiss broke off, Toreth shifted his shoulders and said,"Do you remember what else you said, when you were talking about a new bed?"
Warrick blinked. "Ah — not as such."
"You are such a fucking liar." He twisted his hands in the ropes, and Warrick's cock leaped. "I bet you're still using it for wank material."
As ever, Warrick didn't blush. He did smile wryly and say,"You know me too well. As far as I recall, I said that as an optimum position, I'd like to fuck your mouth and be able to look at your wrists at the same time."
It took a few seconds before Toreth's circulatory system managed to divert some blood back up from his groin to his brain. "Ready when you are."
Warrick shook his head. "Not yet."
Had he remembered it wrong? He didn't think so. "What — "
"Shh. Keep still. Relax."
Warrick knelt beside him, his hands on the headboard, and kissed him again, slow and deep, lot of tongue. Nice. The kind of kissing that worked best with someone you'd fucked at least a couple of times before, which made it something special. Something that only happened between the two of them.
It was so different to kissing . . . fuck. What had her name been? He'd only picked the woman up last night. God, memory like a sieve sometimes. And the circumstances weren't helping. Too good to concentrate on the fading memory of a stranger.
Warrick kept kissing him, not touching him anywhere else. Toreth's skin felt cool, acutely aware of every air current in the room. The hairs on his arms and legs prickled, on and off, nerves firing randomly at phantom touches. He'd forgotten about the ropes on his wrists until he tried to move his arms and couldn't. Toreth tightened his grip on the smooth wood.
Come on, you bastard. Touch me.
Soft lips, hard pressure of teeth behind then, tongue in his mouth, teasing him. Really fucking good kisses, but he wanted more, needed more.
Surprise made him hit the back of his head against the headboard as Warrick's hands landed lightly on his shoulders. He gasped, taking down the air from Warrick's simultaneous laugh.
Warrick stroked down his arms to the crooks of his bent elbows, then up to his wrists, his fingers coming to rest on the ropes. They stayed there, rubbing over and around, into the palms of Toreth's hands, over his knuckles, across the posts, always slipping back to the ropes and knots.
It wasn't unpleasant — the semi-tickle made the muscles in his neck and shoulders twitch, which in turn had some weird autonomic nervous system synergy going on with his cock — but it made him more aware of the ropes. A part of his brain he couldn't shut up kept telling him that he really preferred tying to being tied.
Still, however he felt about it, the New Year present was going over well. Warrick was breathing faster now, kisses turning sloppy and careless. Toreth turned his head away, pushed forwards to find Warrick's ear.
"Fuck me. Fuck my mouth."
Warrick whimpered, his hands stilling, then he breathed,"Again."
"I want you to fuck my mouth. Let me taste you."
He felt Warrick shake his head. "Not yet."
"Warrick — "
"Not yet."
Warrick dreamed about this far more than they did it: literal dreams, and the occasional daydream, and in deliberately constructed fantasies. It meant that when it actually happened, on the few, random occasions when Toreth decided to indulge him, it never felt real.
It never felt quite as good as the dreams, either. Over the years they had tried it several times. It worked best, oddly, in the Shop, where it pandered to Toreth's exhibitionist streak, as well as providing Warrick with the satisfaction of showing Toreth off. In private the dynamics were off, out of kilter. Toreth wouldn't offer the gift if he objected — he was far too selfish and far too much of a hedonist and Warrick knew it. However, Warrick also knew that Toreth didn't really enjoy it, not for its own sake. The sex yes, always, whenever and wherever. The restraint, no.
Warrick wished Toreth could really understand it, just once. Not because Warrick wanted to do this often, but because it was so unbelievably good when Toreth did it to him that he wanted to share it.
This is how you make me feel. This is why you obsess me.
Perhaps there would even be some reassurance in it for Toreth.
Not that Warrick wasn't enjoying what he had. The contrast of the ropes and smooth skin against his fingertips was almost enough to drive him insane. He could imagine how good it would feel to be tied like this. Tied and taken. Begging, being controlled. No doubt, before too long, their positions would be reversed. Like the cabinet, the new headboard would always be there, ready for the game.
At night, he thought, I'll be able to reach up and touch it.
Awareness of the endless future possibilities rippled through him, leaving him suddenly so close to coming that he had to stop moving, to close his eyes, to hold still and breathe. Toreth's mouth was only a few centimetres from his, and after a moment Warrick had to pull back even further, away from temptation. Unbelievable — ridiculous — that furniture (he reached out with his fingertips to brush the wood again) could turn him on so much.
Except that it had far less to do with the new bed than with the man on it.
He opened his eyes and found Toreth watching him, squinting a little because they were still close. After a moment, Toreth smiled slightly, smugly, and closed his eyes again.
He moved to straddle Toreth's thighs, and the tip of his cock brushed Toreth's skin below his ribs. His stomach muscles twitched at the touch. Warrick ran his hands along Toreth's arms again, down and back up to his hands, to the ropes. The muscles were tensed, not pulling against the knots because Toreth's fingers were hooked behind the bars of the bed head, holding his arms up so he didn't feel the ropes, the confinement. This was why it was wrong.
Warrick leaned down and kissed him again, mouthing over his lips and up to the line of his cheekbone, into his hair and back again.
"Relax," he breathed into Toreth's mouth. "Relax."
Relax? What the hell did that mean?
He
was
relaxed, Toreth thought with a twinge of irritation, tightening his grip on the bed. Having a naked man rubbing himself all over Toreth's body was about the best relaxant available outside a pharmacy.
What the bloody hell did Warrick
want
from him? Toreth knew Warrick was waiting for something, but Toreth had no idea what and he didn't think that asking would help. He was here, he was in the bed, he was tied to the fucking thing, and he didn't really have much of a clue as to what more he could do. It was all up to Warrick now.