8
I thought I heard him crying in the middle of the night.
I felt it before I heard it. The tension in his body radiated through the mattress like a seismic tremor, and then he made a soft, hitchy sound in his throat, a sound both distressing and arousing because it could have so easily been one of the noises he made when he had just come and was flinching and sensitive, almost to the point of pain. My cock didn’t know the difference – or care – and it rose to impossible hardness, still pressed snugly in the silky valley between his buttocks. All at once my senses were swimming with wordless memories. The softness inside him. The taste of his skin. That top-of-the-roller-coaster feeling whenever I first entered him all the way and there was no room in my head for anything else but sensations and the prospect of the unbelievable pleasure that was to come.
He shuddered against me and I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming, because my desire had the fierce, implacable texture of a sex dream. He let out a hiccupping sound and I fumbled in the dark for his face. When my hand found his cheek, the skin was wet.
“Don’t cry, darling,” I said. “Don’t cry.”
And I wanted to soothe him, but I was so, so hard, and then I felt him turn his head against my hand and his tongue filled my palm. He was licking and crying and his hips were in slow, gentle motion, rocking his bottom against me and somehow making me even harder, so that as his tongue lapped at my hand I was conscious of every nerve and vein and pulse. He snuffled and sucked my fingers into his mouth, reminding me of the first time I’d fucked him, when his mouth was the only part of his face that I could see. Yes, he was definitely crying, but he was also grinding his hips with a purpose.
I reached down. I think he was even harder than I was. When I wrapped my wet fingers around him he let out two sharp little sobs and bucked into my touch. Oh, lovely. Thick and fleshy and so very welcome in my hand. “I love you,” I whispered, my mouth against his ear. “I love you so much. Your cock is so fucking beautiful.”
He reached behind and put his hand on my hip, trying to pull me in closer. I shifted and slid into the warm little gap at the very tops of his thighs. Once again I could feel the tension in the mattress as he brought his knees together, tightening his thighs around me. I thrust gently and felt the soft underside of his balls as I pushed forward.
“Oh God,” he breathed, as he pushed his cock into my hand. “Are you awake?”
“I don’t know.” I ran my tongue along the edge of his ear, making him shiver and sigh. “I might be dreaming. How do you feel this good?”
He gasped and I felt wetness against my fingers, slicking that little velvet scrap of skin that he had and I didn’t. And I loved it. I loved the thick vein that thrummed under my fingers, the fragile skin, the heft and weight of him in my palm. “Come on,” I whispered, as I stroked him closer to the edge. “Let’s have it.”
It caught me off guard because he was usually so vocal, but this time when he came it was with nothing but a long, breath-held sigh. And yet I could feel the intensity of it by the way he held himself taut all the way to the end. I was desperate to join him. I scooped up his come in my fingers, coated my own cock and finished – slippery and half sobbing – between the tops of his long, white thighs.
“I love you,” he said, as we slowed, stilled and stuck to each other.
“I know.” I kissed the nape of his neck, feeling his breathing slow as we both sunk back into sleep. If we’d ever woken up, that was. If this was a dream, it was definitely one of my better ones.
I woke up in bright daylight, alone. Derek’s side of the bed was empty and I could hear him clattering around in the kitchen, so I pulled on a pair of pyjama bottoms and went to see if he needed anything.
He was standing barefoot in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil and watching a black and white cat slink across the top of the sunken garden wall. As I approached the cat saw me moving and shot off like a rocket.
“Skittish thing,” Derek said. “It’s never friendly. When I lived in Acton my neighbours had this big ginger thing that treated me like a second owner. I miss that cat. Every time I left the door ajar he’d come in, jump on my lap and purr.”
“Well, you’ve got me now,” I said, winding my arms around his waist. He turned around. In the sunlight his bruises looked twice as bad.
“Hmm,” he said, twisting his fingers in my chest hair. “You’re furry, all right, but do you purr?”
“Keep stroking me and find out.”
“Aren’t you cold?” He unfastened his big, fluffy dressing gown and wrapped it around both of us. It didn’t quite come all the way together behind me and I laughed as he tried to tie the belt behind my back. He was naked under the dressing gown. “There,” he said, kissing my sleep-cracked lips. “Now I’ve got you.”
I looked up into his eyes, which somehow looked all the more golden for the purple bruises in their sockets. “Did we have sex last night?”
“I…think so?” he said. “I was half asleep.”
“So was I. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming.”
“A good dream, I hope?”
I tiptoed up to kiss him again. “A lovely dream. Should have that one more often.”
“Definitely,” he said, and I felt him hard against me again. Whatever that car accident had done to his brain, it hadn’t put a dent in his libido. “Beats those recurring anxiety dreams about your teeth falling out. Do you ever have those?”
“No,” he said. “Mine are always about being an undergraduate again. Or in school. And everyone knows I’m thirty-seven and that I don’t know the date of the Battle of Marston Moor.”
I frowned. “That seems random. Why that?”
“Double proof of my idiocy, you see,” said Derek. “I always remembered it because it was the second of July.”
“Ah. Your birthday.”
“Decisive victory for the New Model Army. Kicked the shit out of Prince Rupert’s cavalry. By the way, did you know your birthday was the anniversary of the Battle of Naseby?”
“No. Who won that one?”
“Parliament again. Cromwell was on a roll.”
“I’m glad someone had a good time on my birthday,” I said. “I recently found out it was the same as Donald fucking Trump.”
“Oof. Bad luck.”
I shifted in his embrace. We were still tied together. “Are you going to untie me?”
“Not on your life,” he said. “You’re all mine now. I have a doctor’s note that amounts to permission to spend the whole day snuggled up in my love nest with you.”
The ties behind me slithered apart. I reached up and wrapped my arms around his neck, burying my face in his shoulder so he couldn’t see how stupid my smile was in that moment. He made me so ridiculously happy. I kissed him as deeply as morning breath allowed, his day old beard rough on my palms. “I’m so in love with you,” he said, sobering somewhat. “It’s actually kind of scary.”
“I know. I feel the same way.” We held one another there for a second and I thought back to last night and the heat of him clutched in my hand. “Are you all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Last night. I thought I heard you crying.”
He frowned. “Crying? No.”
“Huh. Maybe I was dreaming. I reached out and touched your face, and it was wet. And then you started sucking my fingers and we…”
A slow, dirty smile curled one corner of his lips. “Now that part I do remember.”
“You don’t remember crying?”
Derek shook his head. “No. I might have been asleep. And the doctors did say my moods might be all over the place for a little while.”
“Okay,” I said, although I was sure he had been crying; it had woken me up. But if he didn’t want to admit it then I wasn’t going to press him any further, at least not now. He was in enough physical pain as it was, and didn’t need me prodding around in his psyche.
“I’m fine, Lamb. Stop worrying. And go and put something on. You’re freezing.”
I went back to the bedroom and put on a sweatshirt. When I came back out he was rummaging in the fridge. “Come and help me with breakfast,” he said.
“Help? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. We’ll start simple. Salmon benedict.”
“Uh, that’s not simple, Derek.”
He took out a package of smoked salmon and kissed me on the side of the mouth. “I’ll teach you. Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“You forget. I can’t boil an egg, never mind poach one. I had professionals explain this to me.”
Derek sliced open a couple of muffins and popped them into the toaster. “Well, maybe I’ll do better as an amateur.”
“There is nothing amateur about your cooking. It’s intimidatingly good.”
“You’re sweet,” he said. “But you’re not going to get around me by flattery. Also I offer incentives for success that I’m sure you didn’t get in your fancy cooking class.”
“No, that’s true,” I said, watching him set a pan of water to boil. “It was pretty much all stick and no carrot.”
“There. See? There’s the difference. I’m all about the carrot. Get it right and you get blow jobs.”
“Oh. I like those.”
“I know you do. And I’m not just talking about a quick toothy suck off here. I’m talking slow and sloppy. Lots of attention to the balls.”
“Nice,” I said, bumping my hip gently against him as we watched the muffins toast. “Spit or swallow?”
“Obviously swallow. And two fingers up the arse. Or three, if that’s what you’re into. Everything you want, I’m going to do it. All of it. No matter how dirty.”
“Sounds like one hell of a reward scheme,” I said. “Is your neck up to it?”
“Probably not. I might have to write you a couple of IOUs, but make no mistake – I do deliver on my promises. That’s how I have one of the largest majorities in the House.”
“I believe you,” I said. “Where do I start?”
“Well, first we have to wait for the water to boil. Then we take the salmon and season that with fresh dill and the juice of a lemon.” He took a lemon from the bowl beside the microwave and plopped into my palm. “Want to squeeze my lemon?”
I laughed. “You know this is the part where I set fire to your kitchen, right?”
“Confidence, Toby,” he said. “And think of the incentives. If you nail the hollandaise sauce I’ll massage your prostate. With my tongue.”
My knees actually went weak when he said that. He hadn’t paid too much attention to me in that department yet, I think perhaps because he assumed I was strictly a top. I wasn’t, but Derek was the most sexually aggressive power bottom I’d ever encountered, and I loved to fuck him almost as much as he loved to get fucked.
“You’re a filthy, filthy pervert,” I said.
He nibbled the top edge of my ear. “I can’t help it if every last inch of your body is delicious.”
“Okay, now you’re getting into Hannibal Lecter territory,” I said, carefully slicing the lemon.
“It’s salty, I’m told.”
“What is?”
“Human flesh.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Cannibalism for breakfast. Go to work on a leg.”
He laughed and tapped me lightly on the bum with a wooden spoon. “Get squeezing, you. I’m going to need you to butter my muffins in a minute.”
After breakfast I ran him a hot bath in his huge, claw-footed tub and wandered around gathering up laundry while he – with a hand-towel within close reach – caught up on some of his messages and phone calls.
“No, I know,” he was saying, as he reclined beneath the bubbles. “I saw it. Priceless. ‘Have to be prepared for snap elections.’” He laughed. “I know. Twats. Yes, because elections have a habit of sneaking up on you, especially when you yourself call them and then piss away a twenty point poll lead with a manifesto that’s basically ‘We hate you and we want you to die’…I know, right? I haven’t stopped laughing since that first exit poll. Wait. One second.”
He reached out a hand and grabbed me by the leg of my trousers as I walked past.
“You,” he said, holding the phone against a towel with his other hand. “Naked. Now. Why do you think I spent so much money on a double-ended bathtub?”
I dropped my trousers, yanked off my shirt and stepped in.
“That’s better,” he said, as I gingerly lowered myself into the water. He picked up the phone again. “You’re not here to do my laundry.” Someone spoke and he laughed. “Yes, he’s here, and no, you can’t talk to him. He’s here to look beautiful and give me foot-rubs, not to spy on the Tory Party Conference for scumbags like you.”
I slowly sank down into the bath. The water was fiercely hot and smelled strongly of eucalyptus. Derek, still with one ear on his phone call, shoved a foot into my lap and grinned. He was flushed and damp and sexy and I was almost embarrassed by how much I loved hearing him talk about me to other people. It made us feel official, somehow. Toby and Derek. Derek and Toby. A real couple.
“Yeah, all right,” he said, down the phone. “Talk to you later, scumbag. Bye.”
“I thought you were supposed to be relaxing?” I said, as he carefully lowered the phone to the floor. The water sloshed and his foot slipped out of my lap.
“I am relaxing,” he said, repositioning his foot and wiggling his toes hopefully. “I don’t usually talk to my shadow cabinet colleagues while naked and covered in bubbles, you know.”
“I should hope not,” I said, taking hold of his foot and gently pressing my thumbs into the underside, just below the ball. “Who was that?”
“The shadow Home Secretary.”
“Oh my God. The shadow Home Secretary knows about us?”
He shrugged. “That’s Westminster, baby. It’s a gossipy little village. People know I’m dipping my dick in the fourth estate, so they want to see what information I can get out of you.”
“I hope you told them nothing.”
“Of course. I’ve made it explicitly clear to the leadership that I am – in fact – fucking you purely for fun.”
I worked my thumbs down the arch of his foot. “Really?” I said. “You got them all together and explained this to them, did you?”
“Yep. Booked a committee room and everything. You would have enjoyed it. I did flowcharts.”
“Flowcharts?”
“Uh huh,” he said. “Although in the interests of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that most of the arrows on the flowchart did eventually lead back to your penis.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. It just sort of ended up monopolising the whole presentation really. Kept coming back to that pink, perfectly rounded cock head and how it’s just so fucking suckable.” He groaned as I pushed my thumbs back up from his heel. “Owww-ooh.”
“Sorry. Does that hurt?”
“Yes,” he said, scrunching up his nose. “But in a good way. Don’t be afraid to go hard on my arches. They’re totally fucked – and that’s just my podiatrist’s opinion.” He sighed. “Although he’ll probably be delighted to know that I’m not allowed to run for a while. That’s going to piss on my marathon training.”
“You’ll be fine,” I said, kissing his toes and reaching beneath the water for the other foot. “It might even do you some good to rest your feet. Or just rest, period. You never seem to stop.”
“That’s how it is,” said Derek, wincing a little as I started on his other arch. “Contrary to popular belief we don’t just sit around fiddling our expense accounts and drawing up plans for luxury duck houses. Some of us are actually trying to do things, like get into government and pass legislation.”
“And some of you need to relax.”
“Then keep rubbing,” he said, stretching his toes. “Oh God, yeah. That’s amazing. You have such lovely strong hands.”
“And the beginnings of carpal tunnel.” The tips of his toes were raspberry pink from the hot water, their perfect roundness somehow inviting and biteable. I lifted his toes to my lips again, but this time I let my tongue explore the tips. He caught his breath and I saw his eyes darken. Things were just about to get interesting when the phone rang again.
“Oh shit,” he said, quickly fumbling for the hand towel. “Sorry. Got to take this.”
I sighed and subsided into the water.
“…no,” he said, as he stepped out of the tub. “Head is still very much attached to the top of my neck. Well, mostly. Whiplash is a fucker…”
“So is work,” I muttered, sinking deeper, but he didn’t hear me. He was already out of the room.
“…seriously? Oh shit. I’m so sorry. Completely slipped my mind. What the hell is wrong with me?”
I sighed again. His departure had left the water a lot lower and me feeling cold. My bum was still scalding while my dick – sticking up out of the water like a periscope – was chilling in the cold air from the open bathroom door. I lay there for a moment, wondering if I could be bothered to top up the water, then Derek came back in, a plum-coloured towel wound tightly around his beautiful narrow waist.
“Sorry about that,” he said, but then the phone rang again.
“Work?”
He glanced at the display. “No. Friends. I do actually have those. Honestly. I’m not just a politics robot.” He raised the phone to his ear. “Hi, Gabi. No…I’m fine…really…”
‘Are you coming back in?’ I mouthed, pointing to the water. He shook his head and wandered off, so I pulled the plug.
I heard him laughing in the other room. “Just crop me out of the photos. I won’t be offended if you don’t want my airbag face in your wedding pictures.” He laughed again. “Snapchat filters. I love it. Can you get that one that makes me look like Bambi?”
I dried myself off and went into the bedroom to dress. The bed was still unmade and the sheets were messy from last night, although I wasn’t sure he’d changed them since I left for Eastbourne. He’d probably been expecting to get back on Tuesday night and change the bed so that it would be fresh for me on Wednesday night, but then he’d gone and driven into a tree and making the bed had slid down his list of priorities somewhat.
He had stopped talking. I wandered out and found him in the kitchen, texting someone.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s it.”
“What’s what?” he said. How did he manage to make a towel look so good? It even matched his bruises.
“You. I’ve had it. You need to relax.”
“I am relaxed.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You’re running around fielding phone calls and worrying about work when you’re supposed to be sitting on your arse. I’m afraid you give me no choice.”
Derek put down the phone. “Oh?” he said. “And what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m busting out the nuclear option. Where’s your e-reader?”
He stared at me for a second, his mouth open, and then led me into the living room. He picked the device up from the coffee table and handed it to me, still wide eyed. “Is this it?” he said. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”
I tapped in the search terms. “Told you,” I said. “Nuclear option. Clearly the only way to make you sit down and relax is to give you something to read.”
“Tentacles?”
“Yes. Tentacles. Now sit down.”
He sat. I handed him back the e-reader. He squinted at the screen. “L. Bloom? This is you?”
“Yep. Remember what we talked about, the first time we had dinner? How it was possible to be both high-minded and freaky at the same time?”
Derek groaned. “Like James Joyce. Who wrote Ulysses.”
“And the main characters of Ulysses?”
“Stephen Daedalus,” he said, with an incredulous shake of his head. “And Leopold Bloom.” He laughed. “And thought I was being so clever when I thought Squidward’s Ho was you.”
“Sorry, honey. It was under your nose the whole time.”
He laughed again. “L. Bloom. Fuck me.”
I leaned over the back of the couch and kissed the top of his head. “Maybe later. Where do you keep your clean sheets?”
He didn’t look up from the screen. “Drawer under the bed,” he said, reaching for his glasses. I could see he’d gone past the table of contents and I squirmed, but his relaxation was far more important than my embarrassment.
I went into the bedroom and pulled out the first storage drawer I saw. It was not the linen drawer.
He was organised. I had to give him that. He’d clearly had it custom made, a tidy drawer organiser in dark red felt, each with neat little slots for each item. There were a couple of paddles, several canes, what looked like a cat-o-nine-tails and a large selection of cock rings.
“Okay, then,” I said, out loud, and closed the drawer.
I peeked into the living room, wondering if I should say something, although I wasn’t sure what. He was glued to the screen, so I left him to it, and closed the bedroom door behind me. My phone was on the bedside table and I wondered if I should open the drawer and take a picture, just for reference, just to give Cerys some…
…oh shit. Cerys.
Yep. She’d been blowing up my phone and I hadn’t answered. I quickly rang her back and prepared to grovel.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Where have you been? Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m so sorry I didn’t call. I’m at Derek’s.”
“Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s okay. I finally showed him that tentacle porn thing he was bugging me about. He’s not going anywhere for a while.”
“What happened to him? I heard he was in an accident.”
“Fox,” I said, sliding open the drawer with my toes. “Ran out in front of the car. He swerved and hit a tree.”
“Oh my God. The poor thing. Do you want to cancel tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Tomorrow was Friday. Somewhere between the car crash, the conference shenanigans and pissing off the editor of the Independent I’d forgotten that I’d booked myself a session with a dominatrix. You know. Like you do. “Right. Tomorrow. One moment.”
I went back into the living room. Derek – now in his dressing gown and glasses – was lying on the sofa with the e-reader. “Sorry to interrupt your tentacle porn,” I said. “But can I just…?”
He peered over his glasses at me. “You’re a freak,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“Yes. We’ve covered that, but you when you were on the phone earlier? Are you serious about still going to Bath for this wedding? Because I’ve got a thing tomorrow morning.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “We can’t check into the hotel until three anyway, so there’s no point leaving London before lunchtime.”
“Okay,” I said, and briefly returned my attention to Cerys. “No, it’s fine. I can squeeze you in.”
“Does he know what you’re up to?”
“No,” I said, but Derek was waving from the back of the couch. I covered the phone again. “What?”
“Is it weird,” he said, “If I rub one out to the octopus?”
“Only if I don’t get to watch.”
He gave me the thumbs up and I hurried back into the bedroom. “Okay,” I said. “Should I tell him? Now you’ve got me worried.”
“It’s up to you,” she said. “It’s not like we’re having sex. It might be that you really, really hate it and you have to go back to him and tell him it’s something you’re not going to be able to do in a relationship. I don’t know how it is between you two, Toby.”
“There’s tentacle porn,” I said. “And cock rings. It’s safe to say this is not my average relationship. Listen, can I show you something?”
“As long as it’s not your penis, yes.”
I snapped a quick picture of the inside of Derek’s bondage drawer and hit send. “Is this normal? I mean, whatever normal is, in this case.”
“Yeah. I’d say. It’s pretty standard. Between you and me Derek is relatively vanilla.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he’s not writing porn about tentacles,” she said, with some asperity.
“Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean to kinkshame. I’m just a bit apprehensive about tomorrow.”
“It’ll be fun. Don’t worry. I’m not going to break out the big Indiana Jones whip on your first go. We’ll go slowly and you’ll have a lovely time.”
“Can I get that in writing? Some sort of legal document?”
She laughed. “No can do, Lovey. You know British law doesn’t recognise that people can consent to being smacked around. Now, I must go, because I’ve got a viscount coming round and I have to put him in a cage and call him a worthless slut for the next hour.”
“You lead a truly majestic life, Cerys. You know that, right?”
She laughed again and hung up. I went back into the living room to find it darker; Derek had closed the curtains. He was still reading, lying on the sofa on top of his discarded dressing gown, his skin white and looking lustrous against the fluffy blue, the way pearls seem to shine brighter when you put them against velvet. He was wearing nothing but his reading glasses and he was already lazily stroking himself from root to tip. There was a pump dispenser of hand lotion on the coffee table.
“There you are,” he said, peering at me over the rims of his glasses. He nodded to the armchair opposite. “Take a seat. Show’s about to start.”
I sat down, somehow restraining myself from jumping on him there and then. This was what I’d asked for, but I realised now that it was going to be a delicious form of torture, sitting six feet away and watching him get off. I just wanted to lick him, kiss him and come all over him.
“This is a very dirty book, Toby,” he said, putting down the e-reader and squirting out a couple of pumps of hand lotion. “The level of detail…I mean, it’s really filthy.”
“Thank you, I think.”
He winced briefly at the chill of the lotion and then – as he pulled his fingers upwards – gave a faint, shuddering sigh. “The girl coming back to bed with sucker marks on her upper thighs,” he said. “And how she tastes brackish and muddy when the boyfriend goes down on her, so he knows she’s been up to something weird down by the lake…” He bucked into his touch. “How do you even come up with these things?”
“What can I say? I have a dirty mind.”
“I’ll say. You’re wasting yourself on non-fiction.” His glasses slid down his nose as he shifted a pillow under his hips, reminding me of the way he often did this in bed when he was hitching up his heels and begging me to fuck him. The pulse in my cock thrummed as I shifted in my seat. I wanted him so much. I knew we weren’t supposed to have energetic sex, but we could go slow, the way we had last night.
I went to stand up but he said “No,” so sharply that I dropped back down into the seat, surprised. “Sit,” he said, with an imperiousness that spoke of the canes and implements I’d found in his bedroom. I was shocked by the degree that my body responded to it.
“This is what you wanted,” he said, without a trace of his usual playfulness. “And this is what you get. Now watch.”