For Real (Spires)

7.6

I took him the scenic route to college, down Broad Street, not Cornmarket, golden towers springing up on all sides, our horizon filled with spires and domes.

“You’re freaking out, aren’t you?” he asked.

After a moment, I nodded.

“Can’t you just…laugh? It’s not a big deal.”

Easy for him to say. “She’s right, you know. I am old enough to be your father.”

“So?”

“So it’s not appropriate.”

We walked along awhile in silence. “Look.” Toby pointed. “A giant gold boob!”

“The Radcliffe Camera was built in 1737 by James Gibbs. It’s very much admired.”17

“Yeah, it’s a good boob.” He was quiet a moment, and then, almost pleadingly, “Oh, Laurie, please don’t freak out on me. This is my minibreak.”

“I’m sorry… I just—”

He cut me off. “Okay, you know what I think is ina-fucking-propriate? People who don’t love each other. People who hurt each other. People who stay together out of fear or habit or apathy. We’re in love, how is that wrong?”

“The disparities between us. It’s an abuse of pow—Ow.” He’d kicked me sharply in the ankle. “What was that for?”

“Because you’re insulting me, right to my fucking face. Do you think because I’m poor and little and nineteen, I don’t know what I want?”18

He was shouting, now, in Radcliffe Square, his free arm windmilling wildly. To be honest, it was probably the place to do it. A student standing by the railing and smoking a cigarette with an air of artistic panic barely gave us a second glance.

“Do you think if I felt abused or exploited or taken advantage of, I’d be with you? Do you think I can’t tell the difference? Do you think I don’t know what love feels like?”

I was going to reply, but he kicked my ankle again.

“Fuck you.” The anger faded from his voice, leaving only pain. “You believed in me. At that club, you believed in me. The only person who’s ever. And you didn’t laugh, and you didn’t judge. You just got on your knees, and it’s the most romantic thing that’s—”

I dropped everything except the cologne, and that was only because I was afraid it would break. But my bag, my suit, the jacket I’d had on my arm because it had been hot in Debenhams—all went tumbling to the ground. Then I dragged Toby into the mess, wrapped him up tight, and kissed him with everything.

When I finally gave him his mouth back, he went on without missing a beat. “The second most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.” And then he smiled his smallest smile, the secret one, the one with all his pain in it.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I do believe in you. It’s just…” I’d been about to say I didn’t believe in me, but with Toby in my arms—smelling pungently of far too many things—it wasn’t a moment for doubt. Just this.

So I kissed him. Again. Again.

Afterwards, we stood wrapped in each other, surrounded by cobbles and centuries and stone. And a gaggle of slightly startled tourists, some of whom were pointing phones and cameras at us.

I glanced at them warily. “You do realise this is probably going to end up on YouTube, don’t you?”

“Then”—he shrugged—“I’ll find it and Like it a gazillion times.”

I gathered up my things again, but as I started walking, Toby slipped his arm through mine. And I didn’t shake him off or pull away.

* * *

College, when we finally arrived, blew Toby’s tiny mind. His exact words. “It’s like…a fucking mansion just off the street. Like that’s normal.”19

“Welcome to Oxford, darling.”

He stood in the archway, staring at St. John’s quadrangle, a small, out-of-time figure, cast in pale shadow by the silver-gold towers. “I’m in goddamn Hogwarts.”

“No, that’s Christ Church.”

I stepped into the porters’ lodge to pick up a room key and almost immediately ran into trouble.

“Well, well, well. Mr. Dalziel.”

Oh God. Behind the desk was Bob, immortal, unchanging, terrifying Bob, who regarded me today with the same too-knowing, slightly disdainful affection he had shown some twenty years ago.20

“Hello, Bob,” I muttered, quiet and lost and eighteen again.

Toby had hustled in behind me, and now he glanced between us with blatant fascination. “You know him?”

Bob’s eyes glinted. “Laurence Jennings Dalziel, 1995, Medicine. Of course I know him.”

“I’ve booked a room,” I tried, before anything worse could happen.

“I suppose you’re here to see Dr. Leigh.”

Dr.Leigh? He’d never called me that even when it was my correct title. Always “mister” and always in this tone of faint exasperation. But I found myself nodding meekly.

“Charming gentleman, Dr. Leigh.” Bob pulled a large, leather-bound book out from under the counter. There was a computer two steps away, but of course it would be the book. He opened it and began squinting down page after page of spindly, handwritten entries.

“How’s Mrs.…” Fuck, I’d forgotten his surname. “How’s your wife?”

“Why, she’s dead, Mr. Dalziel.” There was an awful silence.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m only joking. Sheila’s doing very well.” He turned a page. “Ah, yes, you’re in the New Building, third floor.”

Toby had both hands fisted over his mouth, but high-pitched little giggles were escaping anyway.

Bob turned to the vast grid behind him and with great ceremony lifted a key from its hook. He turned the tag over, subjecting it to a level of scrutiny probably not witnessed on earth since Moses got his hands on some sort of tablet. And finally he slammed it down on the counter.

Heaven forefend he actually give it to me.

I sighed, picked up the key, and pocketed it. “Thank you.”

I had my hand on the door handle and my foot on the step when he called out in a nasty sort of singsong. “Oh, Mr. Dalziel?”

“Yes?”

“You wouldn’t be having an overnight guest, would you?”

I spun round. “For the love of God, I’m thirty-seven. I’m…I’m…I’m allowed.” In my head, that had sounded more assertive and less pathetic.

Bob blinked, just once, and then waved me off imperiously.

This time I was almost out of the door. “Oh, Mr. Dalziel?”

I gritted my teeth. “What?”

“Welcome back.”

In the quad, Toby had hysterics, and I waited with what I thought was impressive forbearance for him to calm down.

“This place,” he gasped, “is fucking nuts.”

“It has its ways.”

He wriggled his hand back into the crook of my arm. “You really like it, huh?”

“There’s always going to be a part of me that calls Oxford home.” We walked across the quad, past the chapel, and into the honeyed gloom of the cloisters, our steps echoing together upon the flagstones. “It’s where some of the most important things of my life happened to me. I grew up here. Learned who I was here. It’s where I first fell in love. Had sex. Got drunk. Took drugs. Stayed up all night talking with people who understood me.”

“Jesus.” Toby was staring again. The last sunlight of the day was spilling down the stonework and across the pristine lawn. “This is so beautiful it hurts. I’m never going to have any of this stuff, am I?”

“Oxford?”

“Everything you said.”

My heart squeezed painfully. The truth was, I didn’t know how to have a conversation like this with Toby. I’d been alive for longer—a lot longer—so I should have had some answers for him, but I didn’t. And regardless of what had been said in Radcliffe Square, trying to offer him…what? guidance?…felt perilously close to parental.

“Those things aren’t about where you are,” I said, as gently as I could. “They’ll happen naturally because you’re nineteen and your whole life is waiting for you.”

He ran his fingertips along the wall. “I don’t feel like it’s waiting. I feel like it’s fucked off.”

“Why? What happened?”

He just shrugged.

And I didn’t want to ruin our—Damn it, it was not a minibreak or a holiday of any kind. But I still didn’t want to ruin whatever-we-were-having by insisting on answers he didn’t want to give me. There was no rush, after all. I could try again some other time.

We emerged onto the New Building lawn, and Toby drew in a sharp breath. “That’s the ‘new’ building?”

We gazed across yet another gleaming grass-scape to the Georgian symmetry of the New Building, with its arches and its tall, leaded windows. “Well, compared to the fifteenth century, the eighteenth century is new.”

“This place.” Toby shook his head again. “Fucking nuts.”

“If it would help, I could show you Waynflete. It’s across the river, behind the Sainsbury’s, although in my day it was behind an off-licence.”

“Is that where you lived?”

“Yes, for my first year. It’s a concrete monstrosity from the sixties. All the colleges have them, but some hide them better than others.”

Toby smiled, and something that had knotted itself inside me unravelled again.

As we trooped along between the glass-smooth lawns, heading for the building, he muttered, “‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’”

“Hmmm?”

“All this grass you’re not allowed to walk on. Doesn’t it just make you want to like…run all over it?”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“What happens if you do?”

“Go on the grass? I don’t know. Bad things probably.”

He slipped away from me and ran towards the grass in exaggerated slow motion, humming “Chariots of Fire,” “La-la-la-la-laaaaah-la. La-la-la-laaah!”

“Toby, don’t.” It was hard to sound stern when I was laughing. “Behave yourself.”

Reaching out with straining fingertips, he very carefully brought his toes down on the edge of the lawn and froze, as if expecting the heavens to rain down thunder and retribution. Then he relaxed. “I seem to be okay.”

“Yes, well, it’s a slow-acting poison, you little git.”

Finally, we found the right staircase and located our room. This building was primarily reserved for fellows—and Jasper, who had God’s own luck in the room ballet—so it was quite luxurious compared to what I remembered of student life. It was, however, fairly basic in its facilities.

I put down my bags. “You know, I should have booked a hotel like a normal person. I just didn’t think.”

“No way. I love seeing a piece of your past. And the view…holy shit. Look at the sky. I’ve never seen anything like that. That’s crazy sky.”

There was a large desk in front of the window, and Toby was stretched almost all the way over it, streaked gold and orange and pink and purple in Oxford’s brightest, boldest light.

“It is a spectacular view,” I agreed.

He spluttered, scrambling off the desk, and returned his arse to its usual position. “How long do we have before dinner?”

“Well, if we want to see Jasper before the reception, about an hour.”

“About an hour?” He tapped the side of his chin thoughtfully.

I nodded, anticipation, yearning, and pure, simple lust pooling slickly in my stomach.

“I want you over this desk.” He slid aside to make room and smiled invitingly.

I hesitated because I always did. A different dom would have snapped at me, or forced me, but Toby never did. He never made it easy. He made me choose.

Made me choose submission. The quiet humiliation of doing something simply because he had told me to.

I crossed the room. Step by step, step by step, and bent over the desk, bracing myself on my elbows. Instinctively, I turned towards him seeking, oh, who knew? Reassurance. Approval. Just his eyes upon me.

“Yeah.” His hand drifted gently over my hair. “Just like that.”

He’d barely touched me, barely asked anything of me, but suddenly I was shuddering, my cock aching. I forgot how to care about anything except Toby and whatever he wanted me to give or have taken.

He pushed away from the desk and came round behind me, his fingers trailing the length of my spine through my shirt, and then ghosting across my arse. I dropped my head between my arms and pushed up against his touch.

I heard his breath catch, and then his hands were sliding under me, fumbling with my belt and the buttons of my trousers, tugging them down with my boxers.

God. Oh God.

Half-naked always felt so much more naked than naked. I swallowed a moan, rested my cheek against the desk, letting gold burn softly behind my eyelids.

“Hey.” Toby’s body curled over mine, his breath warm against my ear. “I kinda…brought something with me.”

“What?”

“From the magic box. Just a tick.”

I couldn’t tell whether it was organisation or disorganisation that made him leave me there on the desk, partially undressed and unrestrained by anything but his wishes—but, regardless, it was exquisitely mortifying. I was too hot and too cold and too covered and too exposed all at the same time. And aroused, unbearably aroused.

He was back in moments. Something thudded onto the desk. I opened my eyes and—

“Toby. No, I—Ah.”

His fingers, warm and slippery with lube, parted, and then pressed into me. It was a shock—he rarely took me with quite such confidence—but the relief of that swift, certain touch after the day’s teasing was sublime. I arched off the desk, fucking back against his hand, groaning shamelessly.

As if he hadn’t just put a vibrating butt plug down beside me.

“Fuck yeah.” Toby. All husky and breathless. “Fuck me.”

And I did, driving myself not-so-slowly mad on his fingers, while the meadows and cloisters of Magdalen shimmered pink and bronze beneath the last rays of the setting sun.21

“More?” he asked, curling his fingers deep inside me, making me burn and twist and want.

“Yes. God, yes.”

But he pulled out. Leaving me gasping, empty and bereft. “Okay, good, so here’s the deal.”

“No, please… I need—” He wasn’t holding me down, but somehow—in that agony of loss and longing—I forgot, and struggled frantically, as though he were.

“Shhh.” He leaned over me again, pushing sweaty hair back from my brow. “This is the deal. I let you come now and you wear that for me tonight. Because…because I think it’ll be totally hot. Or you say no, and that’s okay too, but you don’t get to come till I see you next week.”

I slumped over the desk, defeated. “Toby, I can’t.”

“It’s your choice, love.” He kissed the top of my ear, and I trembled helplessly, as though he’d whipped or cut me.

“Please don’t make me.”

“You don’t have to.”

I writhed in an anguish of lust, pushing my cock clumsily against something that was probably a drawer handle.

“Don’t hump the desk.” One of his hands closed around me from behind, and it felt so good, so perfect, so exactly what I needed that I couldn’t stop the rush of tears. “Have me.”

My mouth tasted of salt. God. I was actually crying.

He’d made me cry with nothing more than a choice. “I don’t want… I can’t let you—”

“Yeah, you can.” His palm was still slick with lube, gliding over too-taut, too-burning skin. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to come.” Weeping. Shaking. Pressing into him.

Afraid if he stopped touching me, I’d stop breathing. “Okay.”

He put his lips against my shoulder and bit—not hard, just enough to feel the blunt pressure of his teeth and the heat of his mouth through my shirt. I cried out, claimed. And then he slid his fingers back inside me, and tightened his grip, and claimed me again.

It was surely a devil’s bargain, but oh, he made it sweet.

He didn’t tease me, but he drew it out, forcing pleasure upon pleasure, working me with his hands, his mouth, and words that soothed and inflamed me all at once.

I was gorgeous. He loved me. It was okay.

And I believed him. Sprawled over a desk, trousers down, arse up, ruthlessly finger-fucked in a pool of my own tears and sweat and pre-come, I felt…cherished. It was that, in the end, that sent me flying. Surrender and release, the accompanying orgasm almost incidental.

I was still bliss-struck and gasping when Toby rolled me over, straddled me, and kissed me hard. I probably tasted dreadful—raw and bitter from my tears—but his tongue took me even to the deepest corners of my mouth. He was ferociously hard and smelled musky with sex and too many colognes.

I reached for him, but he caught my hand and bore it down to the desk. Leaned over me, flushed and smiling, damp-haired, his eyes blurry with desire. “That was just for you.”

I could barely move my lips. “Thank you.”

We lay on the desk, neither of us wanting to move despite the discomfort. It was dark now—a tawny, Oxford dark, fat-mooned and starless, the night sky gleaming with silhouettes of spires.22

Then I caught a glimpse of the time—oh fuck—and limped off on wobbly legs to shower. When I came back, Toby was sitting in the room’s only chair, one leg crossed over the other, and for a tiny shocking second I almost didn’t recognise him. He was also freshly washed and wearing a double-breasted tuxedo with a satin shawl collar that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a film from the forties. It gave him a strangely timeless look. All he needed was a cigarette between his fingers, and I could have been on a date with the young Dirk Bogarde.

“You look—” I didn’t know how to finish, and then I did. “Stunning.”

He blushed and was Toby again, his hand drifting self-consciously towards his perfect bow tie. “Yeah? Not like a knob?”

“Not even a little bit like a knob.” God help me, I couldn’t work out if I wanted to lick the shining patent leather shoes of this elegant young man, or just fuck him senseless. Maybe both. “Where did you get a vintage tuxedo?”

He shrugged. “Granddad.”

I finished towelling my hair and began unzipping my suit carrier.

“Uh, Laurie…” I glanced over my shoulder to find the elegant young man holding a most inelegant object and grinning. “Forget something?”

I froze. “Toby, do I have—”

“No, you don’t have to.” Relief. “But you’d kind of be wriggling out of a deal.”

My thoughts turned anxiously. Maybe I could renege now, and he could punish me later. That would be fair? And then I wouldn’t have to… Then he wouldn’t… “What if I do?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just didn’t think you would.”

Fuck. “Fine. Give it here.”

I strode towards him, making him tilt his head back to meet my eyes. A power game, a pathetic one, but Toby just looked up at me as if he didn’t care and pulled his hand back. “I’ll do it.” His gaze flicked briefly about the room and then settled on his own knees. For a terrible moment, I thought he might have wanted me over his lap, and that might have been too much. I wasn’t sure I could do that for him…or maybe I could… I didn’t know— But then he jerked his head towards the window. “Over the desk again.”

And that, of course, had its own resonances. My body stirred a little under the memory of his touches, and I hesitated, staring at the space where I’d lain before.

Not a word from Toby. Not even an unsteady breath.

In a welter of furious ambivalence, I arranged myself for him, braced again on my elbows, legs spread, though perhaps not far enough. Not enough to seem willing.

Of course, I could have stopped him. I wasn’t restrained. Even if I was. And his little deal was nothing but a smoke screen.

I hated plugs. I hated how they made me feel. Humiliated. Out of control. Weak in the most specific of ways. Nothing like a cock.

I had trained…forced…willed myself to a kind of carelessness for scenes with strangers. I hadn’t given them this, this vulnerability, this fear, this raw shame.

But I gave it all to Toby. Because he wanted it.

There were a thousand ways this could have gone, all of them more or less annihilating. He could have made me beg, he could have made me hold myself open for him. But, instead, he came up behind me and kissed his way down my spine, soft touches that made me tremble and feel almost like weeping again.

Because he was going to do this to me.

Because he had made me want to do it for him.

He slid the thing into me easily enough, everything prepared, and I knew my own body too well to allow it to struggle or resist.

I couldn’t quite hold back a sound of distress, and Toby groaned in answer, deep and rough. Then he helped me up, turned me round, and stared at me, lust-drunk, not so urbane now.

“All right?” he asked, quite serious suddenly.

The plug wasn’t uncomfortable. It was just there, unyieldingly, undeniably there, a constant reminder of Toby, and myself, the things we did, and were, together. Damn him. It was a far-too-stirring thought.

I glared down at him. “Not remotely. I’m manipulated…violated…mortified—”

“Now you’re just trying to turn me on.”

Trying? I followed the hectic flush as it slipped down his throat and under the wing collar of his dress shirt. “Oh, yes. I’m not going to suffer alone.”

“I might’ve”—he choked on an indrawn breath—“misjudged this.”

I gave him what I hoped was a haughty look—well, as haughty a look as a man with a foreign object lodged up his arse could manage. “Live with it, Junior.”

Toby grinned and casually smoothed the breast pocket of his tux.

It must have been where he’d secreted the remote because the fucking plug began to vibrate. I was still a little sensitive, so it was on the edge of pain…but oh God…the good edge, flinging me into an intense, tingling state of full-body awareness. It made my skin dance. My head fell back, and I moaned, surrendering to sensation, to Toby’s will and caprice.

“Shit.” I felt Toby’s eyes upon me. “That seriously didn’t help. You’re not going to do that at dinner are you? Because, Jesus, it’s a little bit When Harry Met Sally.”

“No.” I smiled down at him. “That was just for you.”

He put a hand between his legs. “You fucking bastard. Fuck, you’re hot.”

I was thirty-seven years old and wearing nothing but a butt plug. But there was 1940s film-star Toby, looking about to spontaneously combust from sheer desire. It was probably hysterical, postpubescent hormones, but still, it felt so good. So ridiculously good.

We were running late, of course we were, so I had to dress in something of a rush, which meant several fraught minutes in front of the mirror, my bow tie getting worse and worse and worse as I tried to make it better. Then just make it not awful.

“Dude, what are you doing?” asked Toby, in a tone of profound pity.

I turned away from the mirror, two bands of crumpled silk hanging loose around my shoulders. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

“I honestly have no idea. It looks like a car crash from here.”

“Why,” I snapped, “is yours on a string?”

“No way. Some of us are classy and know what we’re doing.” He crooked his finger at me. “C’mere.”

Infinitely worse than the plug was kneeling between Toby’s legs as the classy nineteen-year-old expertly tied my bow tie for me.

Except it wasn’t embarrassing at all.

It was intimate. Toby’s fingers at my throat, his breath against my cheek, like the moment of a kiss.

It didn’t stop the little monster buzzing me as I stepped into the hallway, making me gasp and steady myself on the wall.

It was going to be an interesting evening.

Jasper had rooms on the next staircase. We should have been there twenty minutes ago, so I knocked and pushed open the door without really paying much attention to whatever was happening inside.

“Um,” I said, “hello, Jasper.”

Toby came in after me, and then came to an abrupt halt. “That”—his eyes had gone comically wide—“is so not black tie.”