“Because it was enough.”
I was beyond spent, but I wanted to argue. I wanted more from him. I wanted him to wring every breath out of my lungs with his hands and then fill me back up with air and do it all over again. Riggs had reduced me to the bare bones of my existence, and I was nowhere near ready to be done with that.
“Will you be okay here if I leave you just long enough to draw a bath?” he asked, helping me into a seated position. I rested against the headboard, eyes still closed, and I nodded.
He waited a minute, then climbed off the bed and disappeared. From somewhere else in the apartment I heard water turn on, and with a long breath, I pried my eyes open. The room was darker than when we’d walked into it, the only light still a dim glow from a lamp on the side table. The cane and the rope were on the floor, a bottle of lube opened on the nightstand beside a stack of art books and a leatherbound sketch book.
My fingers hadn’t ached in bondage, but they itched now to peel back the cover and see what sorts of things Riggs drew when he was alone in bed. But before that bad idea could get the better of me, he was back. Still dressed with dried cum staining his thighs and a bulge still visible between his legs, he held out his hand for me and I took it. He held me steady as I stood, waited while I found my balance, then slowly led me down the hallway to a bathroom.
If I hadn’t been drunk on pleasure and lust, I would have been able to better appreciate the vintage green tiles on the floor, the archway that framed the bathtub. But the scent of salt and eucalyptus filled the room and steam rose from the water, and the only thing that mattered was sinking beneath the surface. The searing burn from the water against the welts on my legs brought me straight back into my body, and Riggs was quick to settle me and soothe me until I was righted in the tub with my tattooed forearm resting on the edge.
“I’ll get some arnica on you before you get dressed again,” he promised, fingertips trailing just beneath the surface of the water.
“What’s arnica?”
“Just a gel. Will help with the bruising.” Riggs sat down on the floor outside the tub, arm still over the edge. “How are you feeling?”
“Like you took a cheese grater to my thighs, but honestly, never better.”
He smiled, flicking some water toward my chest.
“You could have…” I groaned, feeling silly saying it out loud.
“Could have?”
“Fucked me.”
Riggs made a weary sound in the back of his throat, drawing his hand out of the water and drying his fingers on his knee. “That’s a limit for me.”
I scooped some water into my hand and let it drip down my chest. Resting my head against the back wall of the shower I regarded Riggs with tired eyes. He was still in that damn hoodie, though now the knot of his dark hair was visible at the back of his head, a dark scruff growing out on his jaw and his cheeks. He lookedtired, in a way I imagined was more than physical.
“I can take you back to bed if you’re not satisfied,” he said, tilting his head to the side and dragging his stare down the exposed parts of my body. Beneath the water, my dick bobbed like it had another round in it after all.
“It’s not that,” I protested.
“My concern tonight was your pleasure, Smith. I wanted to give you what you wanted, what would make you feel good.”
“You did. You did.”
Riggs slid a bottle of soap toward me and pulled a clean washcloth out from the cabinet beneath the sink. He dropped the cloth into the water and swished it around before pushing it into my waiting hand. Together we reached beneath the surface and wrapped the wet material around my dick and stroked.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he murmured. “Maybe it wasn’t enough before.”
Riggs’s expression darkened and he rested his weight against the edge of the tub to get better leverage to stroke me. He leaned closer and instinctively, I swayed toward him. Our foreheads bumped together and our breath mingled, and Riggs dragged the washcloth up and down my cock, drinking down every desperate breath that left my mouth. There was no way for my body to be so close to coming after all the orgasms Riggs had drawn out of me since the bathroom, but there I was; once again on the precipice.
“It hurts.”
Riggs nodded. “I know.”
“Please stop,” I whispered weakly.
The orgasm was right there and I was terrified of it, but I wasn’t going to stop it.
“No,” he answered.
I flexed my fingers against Riggs’s hand and it was on me then, all bark and no bite, just a violent collision of muscles and nerves as I shot into the washcloth. My balls pulsed and hurt for the pressure of emptying nothing into the water, and I cried out, collapsing forward onto Riggs’s shoulder. He wrapped his other arm around me, held me as I sobbed against his shoulder. Even as my hand unraveled from his, he continued to touch me, to stroke me, to tease me.
“Riggs,” I begged.
