I nudged behind his knee until he kicked a little, and I laughed, delighted, because he was finally, finally allowing himself to be petulant. “You have been a model guest. Long as you promise not to bolt, I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a little sun on your face.”
He let the moment hold, cracked it with a sideways smile. “You trust me that much? And don’t think I missed how you just told a fucking joke, mister. I’m never forgetting that.”
“Mhm, laugh all you want.”
“But, really, do you trust me to not run away?”
“Are you asking if your leash is off?” I said, pitching my voice into that low, secret register I knew made his pulse accelerate. “Or do you want to know what happens if you test the boundaries?”
He made another of those pretty little, involuntary sounds, muffled by the pillow, and I wondered if he realized how easy he was to read, how every inch of his skin telegraphed, a living Morse code just for me.
“I—I would be good,” he murmured, arching his back with a cat-like stretch.
“Would you,” I said, my fingers pausing, splayed with theatrical hesitation just above his tailbone, “or would you let your curiosity get the better of you?”
He looked at me sidelong, his eyes half-closed and heavy with the dreamy, reckless confidence of someone who had finally gotten a taste of the thing they’d starved for.
“I’m curious,” he admitted, as though confessing to minor theft, “but it’s not the same. Not since—” He cut off, biting down on the rest, tugging the pillow closer.
I waited, as any good handler does. The best training is patient, gentle, and absolute. He would finish the thought, eventually, or let it seed some later conversation, when hunger or nostalgia or night-fear pushed it to the surface.
Instead, it was me who broke, who reached between his shoulderblades to push the mess of hair away so I could see his face, pale and moonlit.
“Not since what, Cove?”
His lips parted to deny me, but I waited, hands still and warm on his skin. He shivered, not from cold, but from the intensity of the lay-bare stare I fixed on him. When he did finally answer, his voice was so faint I had to lean in, drink the words off his tongue.
“Not since it stopped feeling like a prison,” he whispered, and glanced away as if ashamed.
For a brief moment I let myself savor it—the admission that he was changed, that my shaping of him was working, had worked, was ongoing and inexorable. Then, I kissed the nape of his neck. Never a quick, consumptive thing, but instead the slow pressure of ownership.
I left him marked, the ghost of my mouth pressed into his skin, and rose from the bed. He made a protest—quiet, wounded, a noise designed to summon me back—but I ignored it, striding over to the bag that had sat, pointedly, on my armchair all evening. Its contents reflected back with a muted gleam in the lamplight—the coil of silicone, a narrow vial, and stainless-steel gleaming against velvet.
When I returned, his gaze flicked from my face to the implements and back. He swallowed, the column of his throat moving beneath the red bloom I’d left. He didn’t speak, but his body performed a kind of question—half-turned, prepared to be pulled, arranged, even dismantled if that was what the evening required.
I pressed the length of the beads—longer and more impudent than anything I’d used on him before—against his lips, not to be coy, but to test the degree of his willingness to be filled, to be claimed. He didn’t flinch, not even when the largest sphere nudged at his mouth. He opened, and took the first bead between his lips, letting the feel of the first bulb linger on his tongue before he drew it away and began, gently, relentlessly, to work it further into his mouth.
Cove’s jaw flexed, tongue flattening as if to steady it, eyes already gone glassy with anticipation and, just beneath, a tiny hint of self-alarm. When I stroked a finger along the seam of his lips, he let the bead rest heavy on his tongue, waiting.
“You know what I want?” I asked, softly. I didn’t need to. He nodded, the motion barely perceptible.
I let the string drop with a little flourish onto the duvet, then thumbed the lube open. He watched, silent, as I worked a slick rope down the beads, watching the way the viscous shine caught and magnified even the faintest tremors in my hand. It was not nerves. It was precision.
I was greedy for the way he looked when I surprised him, how he tensed to receive, how quickly he acclimated and learned to want it. My hand drifted to his waistband, and he made a sound, high and sweet, as I drew his shorts down, exposing the pink-white of his hip. He was hard already, as needy as any animal caught up in its conditioning, his cock leaking and flush against his belly. I held him by the back of the neck and guided him upright, settling him between my knees, so that his back pressed to my suit and my chin could rest on the jut of his shoulder. He was breathing shallowly now, eyes unfocused, knees drawn up.
Even through my shirt I could feel the heat radiating from him. I pressed my mouth to his shoulder, teeth grazing the skin in a way that made him seize, then melt, boneless, onto my lap. I didn’t have to urge him down; he rolled his hips back into me, as if desperate to erase even the memory of space between us.
It was a simple thing, then, to lift his leg and guide the first bead to his entrance, circling, teasing, until he quivered, not from uncertainty but from appetite. I pressed until it slipped past, the resistance yielding in a shudder that traveled all the way up his spine. I waited, counting slow breaths, before advancing the next. He made a sound when he felt the second, a pleased, greedy sigh that made my pulse spike. By the third, he was pushing back into me, hips twitching in a silent, involuntary plea for more.
There was a moment, halfway through the string, when I felt him falter, something reflexive, a coiling of muscle that expressed both his limits and his willingness to have them moved.
I palmed the fourth bead, then the fifth, inserting them in increments, and with each new trespass his body adapted, accepted, and craved. By the time I coaxed the entire string into him, Cove was trembling, a fine sweat beading on the back of his neck, his fingers digging into my thighs through the thin fabric of my slacks.
He made a sound then, something that started as a whimper and blossomed into a wet gasp, so pure and guileless that it nearly undid me. The beads had length and were reaching deeper inside him than anything else had before; the beads, impossibly long, curved up inside him, their outline distending his pale, freckled belly, made him look both obscene and impossibly fragile—a specimen stretched to its maximal, beautiful limit.
I slid my palm over the soft swell, and he keened and twisted, half in protest, half in ecstasy. He squirmed, hips wriggling as if he wanted to crawl up out of his skin.
I held him tighter, molding him back into my chest, one hand still flat over the bulge that marked the beads’ deepest reach. There was a part of me, monstrous and delighted, that wanted to force them deeper, to see how much more he could take before the whole fragile ecosystem of his body snapped, but I resisted, content to feel him shudder and moan as I kneaded the fullness behind his navel. He was a trembling, gasping, open thing, and it was all for me.
