7.4
Later, we piled everything back into the box, except for a flogger Toby was still holding. He was letting the falls run gently through the fingers of his opposite hand, and the rasp of skin and deerskin seemed both unbearably loud and unbearably sensuous in the quiet, almost empty room.
“What if I wanted to hurt you?” he asked.
“Well, you’d be unlikely to succeed with that. It’s very soft.”
“Yeah, I know. I guess I thought…” He looked flustered.
“I take it you’ve never used a flogger before?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? Comprehensive school. Just wasn’t on the curriculum.”
“Then you’ve got the right instincts because this one is a good choice for you.” That banished some of his sulkiness, his lips tipping into a little smile. I stepped closer. “You’re not…particularly tall so I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit annoying to find floggers that work for you.”
“All the world’s against me.” He put a hand to his forehead and staggered melodramatically.
“I’m afraid so, darling. Most whips will be designed on the assumption you’re not…um—”
“A short-arse?”
I nodded. “But this should work fine. The tails aren’t too long, and the handle should be comfortable.” I put my hand over his and showed him how to find the balance point, and then I adjusted his grip so he was holding the flogger correctly. “It’s all in the wrist.”
Toby made an odd, breathy sound.
“Too much?”
“No, it’s just…insanely hot. You showing me how to…so I can…on you. You have no idea how fucking horny I am right now.”
I slid my free hand into the dressing gown, discovering his cock throbbing among folds of flannel. “I have some notion.”
Then he was wriggling and laughing, and I was laughing too, layering this moment like fresh paint over a lot of cracked, old memories.
“Mind you”—he pressed shamelessly against me—“I’m still not sure I’d have the balls to use this on a person.”
“Do you want me to show you?”
There was a pause. “Um…uh…this probably sounds weird, but I don’t think I go that way. Like, not at all. Same as I know I don’t want to sleep with girls, even though I haven’t tried. Sorry.”
“I’m not asking you to submit to me.”
He twisted his head round to give me an incredulous look. “You’re going to tie me up and hit me with something, and somehow that’s not submissive?”
“I wasn’t going to tie you up.”
“Oh, well, that’s cool, then.”
“It’s up to you, Toby, always. But I suppose it comes down to whether you think dominance and submission are about acts or about people.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I guess I think…power is where you put it.” He looked down at the flogger, his expression slightly wary. “So how would it work? I…I’m kind of pathetically scared of being hurt.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you. I’ll make you feel wonderful.”
“By hitting me?”
“I promise.”
He sighed and slapped the flogger into my outstretched hand. “I must be fucking nuts.”
“Thank you. Can I take off your dressing gown?” After a moment, he nodded. “Okay.”
I undid the knot and pushed the fabric off his shoulders, letting the whole garment flump onto the floor in a pile. It wasn’t cold, but Toby shivered instinctively in his nakedness, and gazed up at me with slightly widened eyes, kittenishly blue, I realised, in natural light.
“Just so you know,” he said, “I’m not feeling all that dominant at the moment.”
I dropped the flogger, took him into my arms, and kissed him. First, his mouth, then his throat, his shoulders, his collarbones, soft and steady worship to remind him that I served him, adored him, wanted only to please him.
When he was hard, gasping, and shivering for quite different reasons, I turned him to face the wall and had him brace himself upon his hands. He made a slightly unhappy noise, almost a whimper, and tightened his shoulders, his enthusiasm visibly flagging. I covered him with my body, caressing him, loving him with my hands and my mouth, until the position felt natural and he was warm and pliant beneath my touches.
I didn’t think he even noticed when I stepped away to pick up the flogger, but when I drew the tails slowly up his back, he jerked and then let out a long, shuddering breath. I did that for a while, letting him grow accustomed to the feel of deer hide against his skin, the weight and drag of the tresses.
“You know where it’s safe to flog someone?”
“Yeah.” His voice was pleasure-thick and husky. “‘S’on the internet. Back, arse, not spine, not kidneys.”
It had been a while since I’d held a flogger, longer still since I’d used one on someone. It felt comfortable in my hand, though, its weight familiar, and its movements predictable. I practiced a little against the air until my arm and wrist remembered how to make the tresses fall as I wished.
And then I hesitated, staring at Toby’s naked back, awkward in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Standing there, completely unrestrained, a flogger in my hand, and needing—of all things—reassurance. “This… You would… It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Totally. ‘S’nice.” He pulled his shoulders back, opening his body to me. “I trust you. In, like, all the ways.”11
“Try to keep still in case…I—” Miss. Wrap the tails. Hurt you.
“Promise.”
I moved close behind him and kissed the nape of his neck, because I knew he loved to be touched there. He responded with a little moan, but—true to his word—he didn’t move. Then I stepped away, steadied my hands, and began. It was a tease, a seduction, another act of worship, this time with thirty buttery soft pieces of deerskin free-falling against his upper back.
Toby had tensed initially, the muscles in his arms tightening as he braced himself for the pain I would never give him. But as soon as he got used to the steady rhythm of my strokes, the brush and heavy, caressing thud of leather, and the heat gathering under his skin, he relaxed again, his head falling forward between his outstretched hands.
“‘S’good,” he mumbled. “So good.”
His pleasure settled inside me, as warm as whisky, and banished the last of my uncertainties. I was completely out of practice, but this was so gentle—simply the weight of the flogger and the guidance of my wrist—I could probably have kept it up for as long as he wanted. As it was, it took only about fifteen minutes until my Toby was flushed and supple and moaning softly with every fall of the flogger.
He was beautiful. And as usual, I was desperate for him. For his pleasure. And utterly humbled by his responses, his honesty, everything he gave and made me want to give.
I switched to figure eights, letting the tails land more firmly now on each side of his back. The first strokes drew a deep, blissed-out groan from him, like the first time I’d taken his cock into my throat. I didn’t know how long we lasted, the air full of soft swishes and slaps, my harsh breath and Toby’s, but it was long enough to make me sweat and ache a little. Which felt right too, so very right.
“Laurie…Laurie…I need…” Toby sounded almost drunk.
I dropped the flogger, and he pushed himself away from the wall, swaying into my waiting arms. The skin of his back was burning against my chest, but he was utterly pliant, a molten boy, cast in the shape of all the pleasure he’d taken from me beneath the falls of a flogger.
He caught my wrist with trembling, clumsy fingers and dragged my hand to his cock, which was as hot as his back and straining towards his belly, damp-tipped. I made a fist round him, and he came against the wall a few seconds later, his face turned into my neck, his mouth painting yes and Laurie and I love you, I love you, against my skin.
We finished in a sweaty, sticky pile on the floor, both of us barely able to move. I was half-aroused, half-content, wholly Toby’s.
“Oh my God,” he said finally. “I need to be able to do that to you.” He sat up, still naked and come-splattered, his hair shiny with perspiration and sticking up hedgehog-style from the top of his head. “Teach me how.”
I groaned. “I’m an old man. I’m exhausted.”
But nevertheless, I staggered to my feet and taught a very eager and quick-learning Toby a few basic strokes, including the ones I’d used on him, and quite a few harsher ones he could…use on me.
“Man.” He inscribed several perfect figure eights in the air. “This should have been on the syllabus. I’d have been at Oxford by now with my four As in Kinky Sex and Further Kinky Sex.”
“Toby, why aren’t you at university?”
There was a long silence. Even the flogger was still.
“Meh,” he explained.
And then nothing more.
“‘Meh’? What does ‘meh’ mean?”
“It means I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
I could have pointed out that Toby could be oddly reticent for somebody so insistent on the necessity of caring and sharing and etc. But I didn’t because his eyes begged me not to.
He twirled the flogger loose-wristed, his technique definitely improving. “So. What’s the next step?”
“I’m afraid it’s terribly unglamorous. But you practice.”
“You don’t mean on you, right?”
“On a pillow. Or a wall. Until it’s all muscle memory and awareness, and you can make those tails land exactly where you want, every single time.”
“Wow, that’s not on the internet. Bunch of doms hitting a wall.”
“I’m sorry, Toby. But the truth is kink is no different to anything else. If you want to be good at it, you practice.”12
“You say that but you have no idea how long it took me to make a soufflé that didn’t implode.” He flashed a big smile at me. “I’ve totally got this. Uh, I mean, unless you want the flogger back?”
“No, keep it.”
“It’s not weird, since it was, y’know, your bloke’s?”
“I don’t care if you don’t care.”
“Only thing I care about is all the stuff I want to do with you.” He sidled up close. “Besides, there’s plenty of ways I can hurt you without needing special training.”
“Yes.” It was a sigh of longing and surrender.
He curled his hands into claws, put them against my chest and dragged his nails across my skin. They weren’t sharp, but the touch was still too harsh to be a caress, its message unmistakable. I looked down in time to see the white lines he had given me fading slowly.
Which was when he did it again. And again. Until his fingers left a wake, a cold burn that gathered and deepened with each new journey.
“Please.” I didn’t even know what I was asking for. It certainly wasn’t cessation.
He leaned in and licked fresh fire over the places he had left raw. “Something to remember me by.”
I gave him a startled look.
“I mean till next week. Sorry, that came out way melodramatic.”
It must have been that promise of pain, making me light-headed. “You’re in me deeper than my skin.”
He pressed himself against me, bringing his lines into hot, bright life. “I wish I didn’t have to go. But, y’know, boy has to earn a pittance.”
I almost told him to quit his job, take a sick day, anything really. Just stay with me. But I was nominally supposed to be the grown-up here, so I kissed his brow and watched him scamper away in search of clothes.
I picked up his discarded dressing gown. Nothing had changed, the box was back in its usual place, but the room felt different. It smelled of us.
“Oh, Laurie,” Toby called out, his voice drifting up the stairs, “I forgot to say. You’ve got a letter. I think it’s from the Queen.”
I went down to the bedroom. “What?”
Toby was wriggling into his jeans, an activity that took a while and tended to be diverting. “It’s on the side. Like, who sends letters these days?”
“Is that what led you to conclude I’m in correspondence with the Queen?”
“Hah. No. It’s just all fancy. Gold and shit.”
He’d left the letter on top of the chest of drawers. I recognised the style and laughed. “It’s not the Queen. It’s an old friend of mine.”
“You’ve got weird friends, dude.”
“Tell me about it. He’s an academic.” I sat on the end of the bed, eased open the wax seal on the envelope, and slipped out the invitation. It wasn’t the first I’d received, so I knew what it would say: Dr. Jasper Leigh requests the pleasure of your company at High Table, and so on.
Toby pulled his T-shirt over his head, emerging from it, if possible, even more floppy and tousled, and padded over. “What is it? A wedding?”
“Just dinner.”
“That must be some dinner. Can I see?” I passed him the piece of card, which was tastefully cream, edged in gold, and embossed with the college crest. “Um, is this for real?”13
“I’m afraid so.”
He gave me an odd, slightly anxious, slightly hopeful look. “It says you can bring a plus-one.”
“Yes, but—”
“Can I be your plus-one?”
“You don’t want to come to a college dinner,” was my instinctive answer.
“With you? I totally do.”
I gazed up at him and offered rather pleadingly, “It’ll be boring, Toby.”
“‘It’ll be boring, Toby,’ or”—he glared—“‘I’m ashamed of you, Toby’?”
“God, I’m not ashamed of you. If I’m ashamed of anyone, it’s me.”
He put his hands on his hips, like a very small but very determined fishwife. “That doesn’t help. I don’t want you ashamed of anybody. I just…” He sighed, the anger fading from his voice, leaving it full of tenderness and a kind of yearning. “I just want you to be as happy to be with me as I am to be with you.”
I could too easily imagine Jasper’s smirk as I turned up at college with Toby on my arm. The malicious bastard had a face designed for smirking, all thin lips and glittering eyes. Why darling, he would say, how terribly Uranian of you. And then I would have to remind myself he was one of my oldest friends. It was that or punch him.
A stricture that, in the past, had not always been successful.
But that was the strange comfort of long-standing friendship, ribbons of familiarity and old love woven through your life.
I took Toby’s hands, tugging him closer. “You mustn’t blame me if you hate it.”
“I won’t,” he breathed. “Hate it or blame you.”
“Also, it’s black tie so you’d better let me take you to—”
“Oi, I’m not a complete pleb. I can do black tie.”
“Really?”
He laughed and kissed me. “No need to look so scared. I won’t embarrass you.”
“And,” I went on sternly, “you’ll need a note from your parent, teacher, or guardian because we’ll be staying over.”
“In Oxford?”
I nodded.
“Like a minibreak?”
“No, Toby. Like spending a single night in a different city.”
He squirmed between my knees. “That totally counts. And you’ll show me all the sights, right?”
“Yes,” I heard myself say. “Yes, I’ll show you all the sights.”