[0: BODIES LIKE SHEEP]

LOGAN WILDE HAS NEVER BEEN seduced in his life.

It’s never been necessary, really. He’s always been matter-of-fact about his desires, and preferred partners who feel the same. A glance across the room in a smoky club. The dance of mutual gazes, arched brows, lifted chins, parted lips. Shared drinks. A hand on his thigh, and a whispered question followed by a husky yes, the scrape of another man’s beard against his throat, his jaw, his lips in that first testing kiss to see if the chemistry they’d make tonight would be a slow simmer building up to an explosion, or immediate bursts and flares and wild screaming fire roaring everywhere from the very start.

They met. They asked. They kissed. They fucked, hard and deep and purely straightforward. They said their goodbyes in the morning, and occasionally he remembered them by a matchbook from this bar or a condom tossed under the bed and forgotten there.

A simple equation, no seduction or games required.

He is old enough to remember the days when desire was indicated through color-coded handkerchiefs, tucked into a front or back pocket to silently ask this is what I crave, is this what you want? In some ways, now, it is both easier than those days, and more difficult. Back then a simple signal in paisley or blue or red and white checks was all it took, and then that one quick question of consent; no flirting, no dancing about the matter, no playing coy over drinks and wondering if the man eyeing him across the room is thinking about fighting him or thinking about fucking him from the intensity of his gaze.

But in those days, too, had been the fear that had made those color-coded swatches of fabric so entirely necessary, and the shame that turned men into shadows skulking in the darkness, called unclean for being who they were.

If he is honest with himself, some part of Logan misses the thrill of those days. The kinship. He is aging now, and there is no kinship in a meaningless fuck to remind himself that even if his skin is turning leathery and his body is sinking in on itself as years dry muscle into wiry cords, he still has that come-hither stare that makes men half his age line up to corral his hips in their hands and prove to him that age and beauty both can meet in that place where bodies clash.

He finds it soulless. Lifeless. When back then, there had been something beautiful about finding each other in the dark. About the secrets shared in those kisses, the breathless promise made that even if they were strangers they would never betray each other to a world that hated them, that reviled them, that would kill them for the touch of hand to hand. In those nights the clandestine became the sacred, rituals of tongues and flesh that sparked arcane magic in gasping breaths and twining limbs.

He had felt beautiful, back then.

Alive, in a way he has not felt since.

And perhaps that is why he has given in to this seduction game, if only because the newness of it has brought back a thrill he thought he had forgotten how to feel.

His thighs hurt, where they are forcibly spread apart—his legs drawn open and cuffs strapped to his ankles, binding them to the posts at the foot of the bed. The pain is actually pleasant, something he has never truly considered and one reason why he has never dabbled in this particular aspect of sexual expression before. Logan is not one to seek pain, not one who has ever considered that it may be enjoyable to both inflict and receive, and so it is quite an agreeable surprise to realize that the burning, aching strain in his thighs is melting upward to form a knot of heat at the base of his cock, making his flesh tremble with a sort of quivering, sweet anticipation.

His arms, too, are somewhat sore from being bound over his head, spread and cuffed to the bedposts to turn him from a man into a star, five outstretched points radiating out from the center of his body, arms and legs and head. The leather pouch cupping his cock clings to him, and every shallow breath he takes makes his body move until his erection grinds and drags against the butter-soft, warm texture of the leather sealed against his skin. He wears nothing else, save for the cuffs—and a strap bound around the back of his neck, holding a ball gag in his mouth.

It is the gag that is becoming unbearable, in the waiting for his paramour for the night to return. Not because he cannot endure it, but because he enjoys it; the gag stretches his lips apart pleasantly, rests on his tongue, invites him to lick and tease and suck and mouth against it in a pantomime of eroticism that only leaves him frustrated when it is not the real thing. It is not pulsing flesh on his tongue, a thrusting shaft nudging against the back of his throat, lightly furred thighs flanking his head and caging him while rolling hips use him and stretch him and fill him up with the musky taste of man.

It is only rubber, and he wants something warmer, more alive—and if he has any objection to being seduced this way at all, candles ringing the bed and his body primed for the taking, it is that he has to wait when he is accustomed to the satisfaction of instant gratification in grasping hands and the rip and crinkle of a condom wrapper.

The boy has left him here for ten minutes now, give or take, and he is beginning to grow frustrated. Being captive this way is only making his need mount higher and higher, yet he cannot even satisfy himself when the most he can do is clench his fist and jerk against his cuffs, straining and writhing against the bed. Every pull on his limbs only makes him feel more helpless, rousing both lust and frustration to fever peaks until he is almost dizzy with it.

Or perhaps it is the scent of the candles making him dizzy—black things surrounding the bed, laid out on the floor, tall pillars he supposes were arranged for mood. They smell heavily of patchouli, and something floral. Honeysuckle. He recognizes honeysuckle, from his young days in Mississippi, dreaming drowsing summers thick with the drone of bees and the drugged, heady, thickly dripping scent of honeysuckle.

It is strange to remember Mississippi now, when he abandoned the South as soon as he turned eighteen and fled to more tolerant climes, trained his accent away into something more befitting the wine club circle, kept his phone number and his address as private as possible so his past could never come back to haunt him. It is not something he wants to remember, in this moment, when he wants only the promise that had been given to him in stroking, smooth fingers and gleaming eyes and a smile full of cunning teeth.

The door opens, and his heart beats harder. Surely now this will end; surely his chosen for the night has tired of torturing them both with the deliciousness of waiting, and will bring them both to the final culmination. He tries to speak around his gag, as the young man moves to stand at the foot of the bed—but he can manage only muffled moans that deepen as he sinks into the pleasure of tracing his tongue against that thick, stretching rubber ball.

The young man watches him with the same coy, catty, knowing smile that had enticed Logan in the bar. The light of the full moon falls through the window, and turns the young man’s skin into ivory and gold. He is naked, shamelessly so, gloriously so, and his body is lissome and beautiful, graceful as nodding lily-heads, strong as twining, corded oak roots. He is Logan of thirty years ago; he is the promise Logan made to himself that he would live forever, while Logan himself is the answer to that promise, looking back through the past at a self he will never be again.

Yes, he knows the confidence in that smile. The belief that he can do anything, and never know a single consequence. The ache of seeing it is enough to almost cool the heat in his blood, replacing it with a sudden melancholy.

He will never be that young, that confident again.

In this boy is everything of himself that he misses, and will never have again.

But he can pretend, for one night of this sweet and forbidden play.

As if he can read Logan’s thoughts, the young man’s smile widens. He slinks forward, climbing over the footboard of the bed with consummate grace, and prowls his way up Logan’s body. When he settles astride Logan’s hips, his rock-hard cock resting against Logan’s leather-clad erection and nudging up against Logan’s belly, Logan sighs with pleasure around the gag in his mouth and lifts his hips in willing surrender. Those smooth, confident hands stroke over his chest again, tracing the lines of his ribs, flicking his nipples. The young man leans over him, bringing his mouth close, close as a kiss.

His breath, too, smells like honeysuckles when he whispers, “Do you remember being a child, and collecting magnolia seeds?” His voice is a silky thing that slithers, slithers, crawling into Logan’s brain. “You would gather them all up like little red hearts all captured in your hands. One for every heart you would eventually break. And you would bring them to your mother, and show her all your hearts…”

Logan is cold now, cold and shriveling inside, and something is wrong. Something is very wrong, and his skin breaks out in sweat, and this boy—this boy with his hair as red as violence, his eyes as green as envy—is perhaps twenty-two, perhaps twenty-three, and when Logan was small and staining the knees of his summer pants with grass and gathering up his little red soft hearts fallen from their brittle flaring cones this boy would not even have been conceived, not even a thought, his parents still flirting and making eyes and wondering if this person, here, would be the one.

Yet the boy speaks as if he knows. He speaks as if he was there, and his voice changes as he brings his mouth to Logan’s ear. It is not the boy’s voice he hears, but a low and slurring drawl with a hint of Mississippi twang, and he knows the words before they come out as they whisper and crawl and wriggle into his ear like a centipede.

“…and she would tell you ‘I don’t want to see that, boy. Get the fuck out of my sight. You’re too damned soft, is what you are.’”

Logan whimpers. It’s an old pain, a pain he has forgotten, but somehow this boy has stuck his fingers between Logan’s ribs and twisted the slurry of flesh around inside him until it opens all his sealed-up scars. The boy laughs, and it is a seductive thing, but Logan is no longer seduced. He is sick, he is broken, he is cold, he is frightened. His skin is a map of prickles and sizzling lines, and his bladder is a tight thing pulled and twisted about by his withering cock.

How, he wants to ask, but he is whining around the ball gag, rolling it to try to speak. How do you know?

The boy sits up, then, and that smile is a sickle, and his teeth are too sharp, and his eyes are not green, but yellow and strange. He presses a hand over Logan’s stomach. His fingers are tipped in metal claws, jointed and hinged; like a glove with no palm, only fingers, and they curl and drag their tracing, terrible, ticklish needle tips down Logan’s vulnerable, exposed stomach. He sucks a breath in, belly tightening, and the boy laughs.

“You are soft,” the boy says, “but I like that.”

Then his fingers curl, and pain stabs deep into the most tender viscera of Logan’s body. He feels himself pop like a wet flesh balloon, and with the scent of honeysuckle comes the scent of blood. Sweet and salty, honeyed and coppery, mingling together and blending with the heavy choking musk of patchouli until it makes him dizzy—dizzy, dizzy, spinning, sinking down. It hurts, as those pretty fingers dig deeper. It hurts enough to bring tears to his eyes, and all he wants to do is scream to vent the pain, but his voice has been plugged up inside him and cannot escape his throat.

The boy blurs in his vision, but still Logan can see as the boy throws his head back, breathing in deep, as if drunk on his own cruelty. His hand is a burrowing tunnel snake working deeper and deeper inside Logan, shifting his inside parts around until he is a stew, devoured by the grasping dragon teeth of that terrible hand. Every new pain is not a stab, but a deep blooming explosion, a bursting thing inside him, a penetration, a violation. He screams and screams against the gag, as the boy paints his own chest with Logan’s blood, marking a five-pointed star on that lovely unblemished skin.

Then he gouges his hand into Logan’s open gut again, and thrusts upward, searching through the meat of him.

“I love you, pretty Logan,” the boy says—the boy Logan never told his name, the boy whose name Logan never knew, the boy whose face, covered over in shadow and turned into a black and twisted mask of demonic frenzy, is the last thing Logan will ever see. “Goodnight.”

Goodnight, he says, and for a moment Logan sees stars as something touches the vulnerable places inside his chest, and strokes his awful, fearful heart.

Then they wink out one by one, and for Logan Wilde there is only night.