Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
“You are more than sufficient. Always.” And a little shit, whose love felt like chili-laced chocolate, more pronounced with every murmured, level direction Robin gave. Kept on until he had Zyr with his back to the headboard and one leg bent, pushed up toward his chest.
“We’re going to bind each leg. Your knees will be tucked up, like this, with criss-crossed ropes to keep them in place.” Robin dropped a kiss to his clothed knee, wrapping a cord at the base of his thigh to his ankle. “Tail around my wrist, Dhanra.”
“I like your wrist.” Zyr sighed as he coiled his tail comfortably against Robin’s pulse. “I can feel your heartbeat.”
Zyr tensed at the first proper wrap, heel pressed back to his thigh, as Robin started the next, muscles tight with effort of staying still.
“I like you, and your fascination with my wrist. Relax your leg, Dhanra.” Robin pressed another kiss to Zyr’s knee once he’d done so and started higher up on his thick thigh.
Robin had planned to move to his next leg. He still did, it was on the list. But there was a certain tail tip playing down his palm, more than a little distracting, and Robin no stranger to giving in to impulse.
Curious, he lifted his hand, fingers curved inward to catch at blue scales. The play of fingertips and tail tip was familiar to him now. Zyr enjoyed the game of weaving it around each finger. The question was, what else he might enjoy.
Robin leaned in and closed his lips around the end of Zyr’s tail, held it gently with the press of teeth and tongue.
“Winter’s rise,” Zyr jerked against his ropes, back arching and tail tightening around Robin’s wrist. “Raven-Robin. Cruel bird. I— Fuck.”
Pleasure feeding on pleasure, with Robin’s first slow suck, and Zyr’s helpless, growling groan. Robin’s clever beithir remembered those were Robin’s noises, only caught the sound behind a bitten lip for a heartbeat, his head back.
He’d wanted more of those tempting sounds since the first time he heard the man’s voice go ragged.
Better now, with the beithir wrapped up so prettily, blindfolded, a squall over warm seas on Robin’s tongue as his bond tried to reach for him. Held fast by the ropes, the knots he’d asked for, giving Robin a raw, needy moan for his trouble.
Robin reached up with his free hand, pressed it flat to Zyr’s chest over the rapid-fire beat of his heart. Sucked and licked to the music of Zyr’s pants and soft whines.
They grew less soft when Robin slowly pulled his tail away, caught with the final scrape of teeth to the very tip.
Robin pushed up onto his knees, pressing Zyr back against the headboard, their legs a mess of knees and rope, Zyr tucked in on himself and Robin, crowding him in and ridiculously distracted.
“Next time, I’m putting you face down, so I can work you over with my mouth and your tail.” He punctuated the low words with a drag of his tongue over those scales, the ones wrapped around his wrist. “Maybe with you stretched over my lap, so I can feel every little twitch of your hips.”
He used his mouth again, a few inches of Zyr’s tail, slick heat and pressure. Just for a moment.
Salt. Lightning. Ancient books on fresh linen. Strong coffee and bitter chocolate, and who knew they could make something so sweet.
(If someone told Robin that he’d eventually consider sucking off a tail, he would have laughed until he pissed himself. Or asked if it were a euphemism. But here they were. He regretted nothing.)
“Is that something I may ask for?” Zyr’s words were broken by panting.
“You can ask for anything, beithir. I might even say yes.” Warm, because that was how Zyr made him feel. Warm like a quiet book in a serene room. Hungry as the ocean was grasping. And apparently, left him poetic like a sappy idiot to boot. “You’re going to feel me everywhere tonight, beithir.”
“You’re all I wish to feel.”
One last taste of Zyr’s scales at those words. A bitchy flick of Zyr’s tail answered the retreat of Robin’s tongue. Then it settled again against skin, where Zyr said he liked it, over Robin’s heartbeat.
“You’re my favorite person,” Robin said.
Because he was, settling under Robin’s skin with a bond neither had wanted until they did.
Robin’s hands working deftly at another binding, and Zyr’s soul was a constant low-key storm in his awareness, close but not overwhelming.
“Ask me why. Do it properly, how I like.”
Smooth silver cloth next, with just enough grip to prevent burn. He slid it under the blue of Zyr’s middle harness, his weight on one knee, working, then, to the love handle ties at his hips, for those long beats between his demand and Zyr finding the words he needed.
“I didn’t think it mattered,” he said, breath hitching each time Robin’s fingers, or the cloth, teased his skin.
“That my affection for you doesn’t require reciprocation.
I was incorrect. You wouldn’t permit me to know you as I do, otherwise.
And … I value your good opinion. Would you tell me why, Raven-Robin? Why I am your favorite person?”
“Well done, Dhanra. You did perfectly. Of course I’ll tell you why.
” A series of tight, square knots, attached with the same flat weave as before.
“You don’t apologize for what you are, even when you think I might be upset about it.
I love that you explain your reasoning when one of us needs to be pulled back from their spiraling thoughts. ”
The next handle, and another kiss to Zyr’s knees, both of them, before Robin continued.
“You back up your claims with sources, or admit to bias and stand by them. Also with sources. You’re curious.
You change what you call me based on where your head is, so I don’t need to guess the best way to approach you.
” Handle done. A tug to one, then the other, and both at once.
“I admire how you care about how your treasures are treated, make sure they’re handled correctly. You’re funny.”
A harder pull, less experimental. Heated, like the edge of Robin’s words, to keep Zyr near. Nearer.
“I know you can feel how much I love you through the bond, and you know me well enough to realize that my liking you, my favorite person, having my respect, is a better mark of my regard than a single emotion.”
Zyr’s own emotions settled like the slow closing of a good book after a first read, something sweet waiting at your elbow.
An awareness that murmured, but didn’t demand, didn’t push Robin into acting like anyone but himself, offering only the welcome bite of a cool breeze off the ocean on a too-warm day.
“I’ve spent all my life, searching the past. Trying to build a version of it in my mind, a world I might have understood.
Belonged in.” Zyr’s words remained unsteady, but their sincerity was unmistakable.
“I belong now, Raven-Robin, I belong with you. To you. Here, in your sacred dark, where it all makes sense. And I should enumerate your virtues, but it will take a considerable amount of time, and I very much want you to fuck me.”
Robin laughed in surprise. Short and sharp, and what were ropes for if not to pull a sexy as fuck beithir closer and do whatever he wanted with him?
A funny damn beithir, perfect as Robin wrapped one hand around his horn, and pushed his thighs apart with the other.
Gave himself space to move in, press close between those gorgeous thighs, and kiss Zyr for all either of them were worth.
Hard and hungry, deliberate and wild, any sounds from his beithir swallowed before they could be heard. Robin tucked his hips in tight, the ache of his cock pressing against his jeans not stopping him from rocking in closer, lips parted and pulse racing.
Fucking mushy, cavity inducing saps, and Zyr made it stupidly hot instead of something Robin might overthink.
This was the part where Robin pulled back. Where he made Zyr ask for what he wanted. Ask properly. He’d done it before. He would do it again.
This time, he had Zyr held fast, unable to do anything more than squirm, subject to Robin’s wants and whims. There were other things he wanted other than hearing those asks. To kiss him, for one.
Rock in again, feel the whole of him.
Zyr’s jaw, next. Lips to neatly trimmed beard and, a little higher up, teeth to skin.
“That’s right, Dhanra,” Robin said. Want no longer held to the outskirts of his voice, not while he kissed and bit the side of Zyr’s neck, skin and scales and line where they met, as Zyr bared his throat for more, to let him taste those eager groans before they even reached Zyr’s lips.
“Keep letting me hear you. Those are my desperate, hungry noises. The ones that tell me how much you need me to fuck you. Care for you. Lead you deeper into the dark, fuck you through it.”
Eager fingers trailed over his handiwork while he talked. Over Zyr, rope, petting skin and catching on blue cords. Tracing nails over where the two met, as if they were scales. His.
Zyr tried to move closer, Robin could feel his helpless attempts to touch and rock and take. Tried, but couldn’t, held just how Robin wanted him to be. The beithir growled. And he meant it. A rumble of stifled need, filling the bond with storm winds.
Robin bit, lovingly, just over one nipple in reply. The growl trailed into a needy moan, Zyr’s tail tracing up Robin’s forearm, clinging and hungry to hold more of him.
“Cruel bird,” he gasped. “I need you.”
“I’m right here, Dhanra.” Robin caught that wandering tail with hooked fingers, pushing it back down toward his wrist. “Touching you. Talking to you. Tasting you. And I like being cruel, just as much as I like being asked.”
That, he punctuated with a slow line of his tongue at Zyr’s shoulder, skin and scales and skin again. Zyr fucking keened, licking his lips, jerking again to no avail.
“I wouldn’t like you, were you else,” Zyr admitted, even as his tail settled against Robin’s wrist with a sulky flick.
“May I ask for that? Your cruelty? I want to break for you again, Raven-Robin. To go deeper than I can bear and deeper still. I wish to cry for you, if it would please you to hear me.”
Wouldn’t have liked him, if Robin weren’t the sort of person to boss a dragon around and grab hold of their horns. It took someone with an edge, who liked dangerous things, to do something stupid like that.
Robin liked dangerous things, when he knew how to handle them. Ropes and auditors. Dragons and sports fans.
And here he was, with one of the most dangerous men he had ever met, tied up and asking for his cruelty. To cry for him. Break for him.
“‘Pleased’ is a drastic understatement of how I feel about having you crying for me, Dhanra.” He could control his breathing, keep it calm, but that did jack shit for the raw need in his voice, the keen edge of Robin with a new puzzle and a beautiful man, being offered everything that he’d gotten off to since they’d met.
“Yeah. You may ask for my cruelty, and for all that comes with it.”
Zyr would sob and break, and Robin would hold him, fuck him, whisper him back. He would show his relentless storm of a bond what it meant to give himself over to the man who treasured him.