Chapter 40
Isolde didn’t cry againafter Mark left or while I took her up to the apartment. He wasn’t there, was presumably back in the hall, and I could sense her misery and her relief that she was alone.
“You shouldn’t be here with me tonight,” she’d murmured. “In case he comes back.” And she was right, of course, but I still hated leaving her. I still hated walking away knowing that she’d be alone with her thoughts, that she’d have to lie down in that empty bed and stare up at the water, not knowing whether Mark was going to come back.
After that, I debate going to the hall—I am still his bodyguard, even if he did just pick up his wife’s panties near my feet—but I don’t think I can bring myself to face him right now. Not in front of all those prying eyes, not in front of Andrea. Not when I don’t even know what I could say to begin to explain myself because I don’t even know. That she was just so pretty and so sad and when I’m not touching her, my breath can’t settle in my lungs?
That loving her feels like loving him?
No. Even I can hear how stupid all of that is. That it happens to be true doesn’t make it any less cheap.
So I go back to my apartment, and I shower and brush my teeth and pull on a soft shirt and drawstring pants like I’m going to fall asleep, and then I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Thoughts don’t come—neither do feelings. It’s just images and sounds, slices of memory all jumbled together: Mark standing up in the garden with the silk underwear in his hand, Mark’s foot kicking mine away from the shattered glass on the ground as he fucked me in two, Isolde looking up at me from the cage of my arms as we screwed slowly in the October sunlight. Mark and Isolde arguing over a chessboard, Mark and Isolde kissing at the altar on their wedding day, Isolde with sea spray on her mouth. Mark at Morois House, the smell of rain on stone.
Mark, Isolde, Mark, Isolde.
Is it really the worst thing you’ve done?a cruel voice asks me. Get in the middle of a marriage? When you let McKenzie die in a dirty puddle behind some Soviet-era opera house? When you shot Sims in the neck? When you killed scores and scores of other people and never even learned their names?
I can’t lie in bed anymore after that.
I get up and find a beer and go out to the shallow balcony just off my living room. It’s brisk outside, but the night air feels good, a reminder that I’m still pumping blood and absorbing oxygen, that I’m still a body and not just a collection of bad decisions.
The fog is a menace now, hanging so thickly over the river that I can barely see the water, and the city itself is reduced to a suggestion of lights in the haze. It’s late now, past two or three in the morning, and everything is hushed, the stillness before Halloween descends on the district and brings with it expensive parties and even more expensive mistakes.
Except…
No. Not everything is hushed. I can hear voices coming from above me, from the roof. Two people—one cold voice and one rich contralto.
I stay completely still, straining to hear.
“…could have told you Andrea was trying to prove something.” It’s Dinah. “She’s literally never suggested we take our high-profile guests on a night tour of the grounds.”
“It was Anguish’s idea first, and does it matter when she was right?” comes Mark’s reply. His voice is tired and bitter, and I want to fling myself into the river after hearing it. “She was right all along about the two of them.”
“She didn’t have to do it so publicly. It embarrassed you and reflected badly on the club.”
“She did it publicly because she knew that if it were revealed privately, I would deal with it privately. And after Belgrade, she doesn’t think that’s enough.”
“After Belgrade… What happened in Belgrade, Mark?”
He doesn’t answer, and I hear Dinah snort. “Only you could make an arranged marriage a kinky fucking mess.”
“I do my best,” he says dryly. Still a little bitter.
“At any rate, it’s no business of Andrea’s. Do you know what Isolde told me yesterday when you got back? She told me that she thought Andrea had been involved with Drobny somehow.”
“She tried to tell me that too. In Belgrade.”
“Tried? You don’t believe her?”
“I believe that she believes it. I even believe that about the club. But Andrea has no interest in fraternizing with anyone like Drobny.”
Dinah makes a noise. “Mark, you know Andrea and I have worked together for five years without issue, and other than her sparkling fucking personality, I’ve had no complaints. But she’s messing with the club’s image now—and clearly messing with your head. Is there some reason I shouldn’t believe she’d fraternize with someone who attacked the club?”
“There is,” says Mark.
“And…that is?”
“She hates the same people I hate.”
I hear a steady beeping in the distance, like a truck backing up, and then Dinah asks, carefully, “Is this something to do with the time you worked with her in the CIA?”
“It is.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
He doesn’t reply, and Dinah laughs, sounding unsurprised. “No, don’t give me that look. I probably don’t even want to know.”
“You do not.”
More trucks beeping. Dinah swears. “Last of the deliveries for the Samhain celebration tomorrow. I need to make sure everything’s accounted for before I clock out.”
She waits a minute and then adds, “If you want to crash at my place tonight, you can. I know you’ll probably just take one of the rooms downstairs, but if you don’t want to be alone, the offer’s open.”
“Thank you, Dinah,” says Mark.
“I mean it.” Her voice sounds farther off now, like she’s stepped away from the balcony. “And Mark?”
“Yes?”
“I watch every day as that boy follows you around with puppy-dog eyes,” she says. “I watch that rosary-praying girl let you defile her six ways to Sunday anytime you’ve got the itch. Whatever you decide to do, just…don’t hurt yourself doing it, okay? I think you know that if you throw their love away, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
“Dinah,” warns Mark, and his voice is tight. The kind of voice that’s forced between bloodless lips. “We are not going to talk about this anymore.”
“If that’s what you want.” That’s what she says, but what she clearly means is, Who am I to stop you from ruining your own life?
And then I hear nothing else, as if she’s left. As if Mark is now alone.
I should go back inside. I should finish this beer and lie down and not think about the misery in Mark’s voice. About how Dinah had gotten it right even though she barely knew Isolde and me. If you throw their love away, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
He must know. He must see that we love him so much that our bones have splintered with it. Hairline fractures, infections taking root deep in the marrow.
Does he not know?
I’m moving before I can think the better of it, before I can remind myself that the betrayer has no right to demand attention from the betrayed.
I just—I just need him to know. That’s all.
I go upstairs and through his office, grazing my fingertips over the apartment door as I pass it by, wishing I could get Isolde and bring her with me for this but not wanting to slow down, not wanting to introduce any more reasons why this is a terrible idea. I take the stairs, emerging onto the cool, fog-caressed roof, and search for Mark.
It only takes me a minute to find him, his elbows braced on the railing, his head hanging down. A glass of something amber and neat dangles from his fingertips. Fog dances over the pool and clings to his ankles, and I have the sudden memory of approaching him in the library at Morois House. Intruding on his violent, bitter grief, only to be subsumed by it myself.
He lifts his head and regards me over his shoulder as I draw near. He says nothing, and his face gives nothing away, save for a dangerous flush on his cheeks. The lights set around the rooftop terrace glitter in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I stop a few feet away from him and take a breath. “I know I’m probably the last person you want to see.”
He watches me a minute and then takes a drink. “No,” he says finally. “Not the last.”
It depresses me that the actual last person might be his wife, who wouldn’t be sleeping alone right now if it weren’t for me.
I decide to do it, to break cover, to charge the hill.
“Sir, Isolde loves you. I know neither of you might have planned on it, given how your marriage started, but?—”
“I’d tell you that my marriage is none of your business, Tristan, except that clearly it is.”
The guilt is like a spear through the chest, and I have to gather myself. “Sir, I didn’t mean for?—”
He scoffs over his glass before he takes a drink. “Mean for what? To eat my wife’s cunt? To put your cock inside her? It’s hard for that to happen without meaning for it to, don’t you think, with the layers of clothes and all.”
I nearly concede defeat just then. I’m barefoot and in pajamas, and he’s drinking and mean. He’s pushing me away, and he’ll push Isolde away, and maybe he has every right to, but I can’t let it happen without a fight. When I first came to Lyonesse, I never wanted to fight again. I never wanted to think again. I just wanted to be a toy soldier, wound up with a key and told where to march. I wanted to be Mark’s shadow and nothing more.
But I do want to fight now. I want to fight for him. I want to be a toy, but his toy, and I want to be closer than a shadow, and I want Isolde to be there with me too.
I have lost so much in my life, and I have given everything to my family and my country. Why can’t I have this? This one thing?
I step closer, and then I do something I almost never do without permission. I touch him.
He goes still, looking down at where I’m grabbing his arm.
“No,” I say.
He looks back to me, and his eyebrows lift. “No?”
“I’m not letting you do this, sir. You can’t give us nothing and then be angry when we find something with each other. You can’t keep yourself locked away and then be hurt when we don’t have the key.”
“I give you nothing,” he echoes. There’s a sharp twist to his mouth. And then: “I give you nothing? You and Isolde don’t share hours of my day? You and Isolde don’t receive my attention or concern or respect?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” I step close enough that my foot is behind his, and I tighten my hold on his upper arm. I’m trapping him, and it feels strange and a little wrong to be the one in control but also thrilling in a sick way. Transgressive. “You know everything about us, and we know nothing about you. We don’t know any details about your childhood or what you did in the war or what you did for the CIA. We don’t know what the early years of Lyonesse were like, we don’t know what you want its future to be like, and we don’t know how you feel about us beyond…I don’t know. Possessiveness, I guess. For fuck’s sake, Mark, you didn’t even tell us that you were married before.”
He startles a little, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve used his Christian name or because I know about his first marriage.
“Do I love Isolde? Yes. But I love you too, sir, and so does she. Punish us if you must. Make us suffer. But don’t keep yourself from us. Don’t wall yourself away. I won’t survive it, and neither will she.”
His eyes are searching mine. “You are flirting with danger, my knight.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I have a medal that says I do more than flirt with it.”
He huffs a laugh and then closes his eyes. “Where is the quiet little hero from six months ago? Have you changed so much?”
“You changed me.”
He looks sad when his eyes open again. “No. I couldn’t take credit for anything so lovely. You changed yourself.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I say in a low, urgent tone. “About Isolde and me. When I fell in love with her, it was like…getting to fall in love with you again. Like loving you through her. And then it just became her, but you were still part of it, and I don’t know what I’m trying to say except that I don’t want this to be the end. You once said I was yours all of the time—I still want that. And I want Isolde to be yours. And I know that’s what she wants too, and for you to be ours back.”
He doesn’t respond. He just looks back at the haze over the river.
Shutting me out once again.
How many times?How many times can I lay myself bare for this man and then suffer for it? All I’ve ever wanted is a glimpse of the bloody thing beating in his chest, a whisper of his clever, wicked soul, and all he’s ever done is deny me.
Defeated, I drop my hand from his arm and step back.
And then Mark speaks. “His name was Eliot.”
I go still.
“He was my partner my first year out in the field. He was a couple years older than me, but it could have been decades, he was that good at the job already. Born to it. He was—” Another short exhale—a laugh. Like he’s laughing at himself. “He was mesmerizing. It didn’t matter if you were a friend or a foe, a colleague or a target—he could charm you into giving him your wallet and your car keys and the names of everyone you’d ever seen hoisting a Carpathian flag. When I was first recruited into the agency from the Rangers, they warned me about him. He was a little bit of a rake, to use a dated term. A trail of broken hearts from Langley to Lahore.”
I don’t speak. I’m terrified to speak. He’s never told me this much about himself, ever.
“If I met Eliot now, I would have been able to see right away that he had certain appetites that matched my own. Not that he liked fucking more than just women, I mean, that was apparent from the moment I met him, but that he liked power and he liked to play when he fucked.”
“He was kinky.” I quickly close my mouth, worried I’ll scare Mark away from saying any more.
But he keeps going. “The usual kink wisdom would have said it was doomed from the start. You can’t have two Dominants together—someone needs to be a switch at the very least, and neither of us were any less dominant than the other, but…”
He stares out into the night, to where the city would be visible if not for the fog. “I used to think it was being young that made it possible. We were young and adventurous and horny, and that goes a long way. But now I just think that we loved each other, enough that we couldn’t walk away, even if it was pure fucking chaos every time we were in bed together. Every scene was a contest, total warfare. I have a lot to thank that period in my life for, actually, because if I hadn’t been repeatedly made to surrender, I would never have known what it felt like. To be in cuffs or made to crawl or caned until I was sobbing. It made me a better Dominant, and when I started Lyonesse, I’d decided that it would be necessary for anyone who wanted to learn here. If you’re too proud to submit, too proud to experience anything you want to do to a partner, then you’re too proud to wield power safely. But I wouldn’t have learned that without Eliot. Without the messes we made together.”
His voice is almost fond now, fond and a little melancholy, and it’s so much better than the bitter hurt from earlier, but it still makes my throat ache.
“It was never easy with Eliot,” Mark says, looking down at his glass. “Like I said, he was charming. A rake. That didn’t stop even after he and I started, and we were apart for months at a time. Some of our assignments required—” A breath. “It’s not officially condoned, you understand—but sometimes it’s the easiest way to get what you need. Sometimes it’s the only way to avoid suspicion.”
“You mean having sex?” I ask. “While on the job?”
“Don’t look so scandalized,” Mark reproves, but there’s a faint indentation at the edges of his mouth, like he could be persuaded to smile. “Sex is usually preferable to violence. If I could solve a problem with someone’s thighs around my waist rather than with my hands around their neck, why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t Eliot?” The indentation fades, and his mouth is a straight line once again. “But he was doing more than the job description, sharing his bed even when it wasn’t for work. And I wouldn’t have minded if it was just sex, but…”
Mark’s hand tightens around his glass. I watch as his Adam’s apple moves in his throat, as he forces himself to take a breath and say evenly, “It was more than just sex. It was love too, and affection, and I realized that for him, I was one of several, a chip in a mosaic, while to me, he was everything. I realized that I was absolutely obsessed with him, and he was only in love with me in the same way he was in love with practically everyone he met. That was the secret to his charm, you know. He really did fall in love with you, even if it was only for a day. Even if it was only for five minutes in line at a café.”
A pause.
“I know with every atom in my body that he loved me,” he says. “Just as I also know that he did not love me the way I loved him. Maybe he wasn’t capable of it—maybe being someone who loves that freely and that easily precludes obsession. Maybe I’m made wrong if for me love is being jealous of the air inside someone’s body and of the sunlight for touching their skin. But I do know what it felt like to love him, and it felt like having frost creeping over my lips and down my throat while I watched a fire burn in the distance.”
The words hang in the air, sparkling with the fog.
I want to touch him again—I want to pull him into my arms. When is the last time someone has done that? Hugged him? Comforted him?
“But then why did you get married?” I can’t help but ask. “And why is it a secret? Sedge didn’t know when I asked him. Isolde didn’t know either.”
Mark’s jaw works a little to the side as he looks over at me, like he’s considering a few different responses. “How did you find out?” he asks. “How did you know enough to ask Sedge?”
“The rings in your bedside table,” I admit. “I found them while I was looking for your watch.”
A long sigh. “The distance between sentimental and sloppy is a very short one. Of all people, I should know that.”
“And I found his picture at Morois House,” I add. “So I guessed that he was the owner of the other ring.”
“Snooping, Tristan? Not very noble, although I would have done the same thing in your shoes.”
“He was handsome,” I offer.
“You have no idea,” says Mark, and awful talons of jealousy dig into my chest.
It is a waste of feeling to be jealous of a dead man—of a dead man who makes Mark this miserable. And yet.
“People are correct when they say I’ve never been married, by the way,” Mark says, after he’s come back from wherever his thoughts just went. “Until this summer, Mark Trevena had never been married. Michael Sinclair, however, had been.”
I understand immediately. “You did it for an assignment.”
“Eliot and I were tasked with cozying up to the beau monde lolling around Monte Carlo, and it made for the perfect cover.” A small smile. “But we did the whole thing for real. Married in the chapel at Morois House, had ourselves a little honeymoon. We told our bosses it was so we could build up the provenance of the marriage, of course, pictures and social media posts, but for us, it was the real thing. We picked a date when the magnolias would be in bloom, chose the rings together, went to all the premarital counseling sessions with a minister who agreed to do the ceremony. Pretended to her that we didn’t know what each other’s blood tasted like. And so for the next two years, Eliot was as mine as he ever would’ve been, and we were as happy as we ever would’ve been.”
He doesn’t sound happy describing it. He sounds wretched.
“What happened?” I ask quietly, almost not wanting to know. There had been no happy ending for him and Eliot, according to Isolde.
He doesn’t answer at first. He stares into the wet autumn dark like it will answer for him.
Then he drains the rest of his glass. “Want to see him?” he asks suddenly.
I don’t say that this doesn’t answer my question and that I’ve already seen him. Because truthfully, I do want to see him. I want to see more than just one picture; I want to see everything and anything connected with him because Mark loved him. Mark loved him, and I’m jealous, and maybe if I see enough pictures of Eliot, it’ll cure my jealousy.
We leave the roof and the ghostly fog behind and go downstairs. We walk past the apartment door, which surprises me a little, and straight to his office, which is lit by a single floor lamp in the far corner. He sets his glass down on his desk and walks over to a wall where a black-and-white picture of a magnolia tree hangs. I haven’t looked at it closely before now, but I realize I know that tree. Or rather the blurry outline of the chapel and cemetery behind it.
“Is that from Morois House?” I ask.
“Eliot took it,” Mark says as he swings the picture open on concealed hinges to reveal a safe set into the wall. “He was a gifted photographer. For the same reasons he could make anyone fall in love with him—he saw things other people didn’t. Details, negative space, colors and light. He could see inside a person’s heart as quickly as he could see the way a flower was catching raindrops.”
“Did he see inside your heart?” I ask. It’s nosy of me, but I’m curious, and I think he’s just drunk enough that he might tell me.
Mark holds his wrist up to the front of the safe, and a light flashes green. His watch is some kind of key. “I believe he did. Yes.”
“And you still don’t think he loved you like you loved him?”
“I think he regretted that he didn’t, if that’s worth anything,” says Mark as he pops the safe open and reaches inside. He pulls out a slim wooden box and walks over to his desk. “But what could be done? I would have asked the world of him; in fact, I tried. It wasn’t in his nature to give himself like that or even to receive that kind of oblation from someone else. So you see that some Dominants are normal, reasonable people, Tristan. Just not me.”
He hands me the box and then goes to get his glass, refilling it from a decanter in his credenza. I rarely see him drink whiskey, and I think it’s hitting him harder than the gin normally does—the crystal lip of the decanter clinks loudly against the rim of his glass.
It’s a reflex to glance in the direction of the apartment, even though I know sound doesn’t really travel in or out of those soundproofed walls. Even if she’s still awake, it’s unlikely that Isolde would hear us in Mark’s office, which maybe I prefer.
I want to have this open, talkative version of Mark all to myself.
God, what a selfish man I am.
I go to the desk too and set the box on its surface, opening the lid to see a shallow velvet-lined interior. It is without question a lover’s box, keepsakes that make no sense without the context of devotion. What is striking about it is how…ordinary it is. Two spies, both of them kinky as hell, and I’m looking at a ticket stub for a concert, a receipt for two ice cream cones, and a hotel key card. A stray button tucked to the side. A scribbled sticky note that looked like it was stuck to a mirror or a door before someone left town. A handful of pictures.
Of course, the concert was a symphony in Vienna, and the hotel key card is for a hotel in Macau—and the button is probably some expensive Savile Row button that I wouldn’t appreciate—but still. It makes a strange, tender feeling unfurl in my chest. The jealousy is still there, but so is love. Love for this past Mark, who saved another man’s button, even when the other man couldn’t requite the consuming crush of Mark’s love for him.
Mark finishes pouring his drink and then turns to face me with the glass to his lips. He takes a drink right as I discover a newspaper clipping under the other mementos.
CIA Agent Given a Star on the Memorial Wall as Langley Closes Death Investigation, reads the headline.
I read the article as Mark strolls back over. “Friendly fire in Ko?ice,” he says. “He was supposed to meet with informants, and somehow wires got crossed. Someone else was hunting those informants and thought he was one of them.”
I look at the date on the article. It was the year of my first deployment. Around the time Eliot’s body was being shipped home from Ko?ice, I was in Krakow watching McKenzie die in a puddle. “It’s nothing like losing a husband, but I—I had a hard year that year too. I was too late to save a friend, and I had to watch her die.”
“They gave you the ARCOM for saving everyone else,” says Mark from next to me. “I know.”
I feel stupid suddenly. “It’s not the same, a husband dying and a friend dying, I know it’s not. But I guess I just feel like…I wanted you to know that we share that year.”
“Don’t diminish your own grief for mine, Tristan,” Mark says softly. “Yes, we share that year.”
The picture in the article is only of the starred memorial wall at Langley. There’s no mention of Mark in the article at all, although there wouldn’t be, since Mark and Eliot hadn’t married under their real names. I do register a bolt of recognition when I see John Lackland’s name in the article. Apparently before he was the director of the NSA, he was part of the Langley bureaucracy. He had been Eliot’s boss at the time of Eliot’s death and had delivered a little speech when they unveiled his star.
I set the article aside and reach for one of the pictures. It’s a selfie of the two of them in a place with high blue skies and azure water. Monte Carlo, I think. Those rings would be brand-new on their fingers. Mark is kissing the cheek of the grinning man next to him, his eyes half-hooded and his hand around the back of the other man’s neck. Eliot, for his part, is smiling a dimpled, knowing smile into the camera. I have to wonder how they were together—Mark in his icy sharpness, Eliot the captivating playboy. Both Dominant, but as different from each other as they could be.
But as I find picture after picture, I understand more and more why Mark fell in love. “He really was beautiful,” I say again.
“Beautiful. And never entirely mine.” Mark has finished this glass now and sets it on the desk with a clunking gracelessness. “And then he was dead.”
I put the pictures back in the box and rearrange the stubs and key cards how I found them. When I close it and dare to look back over to Mark, he has both his hands planted on the desk, and his head is down. His eyes are shut—squeezed shut.
“You say I give you nothing, Tristan. Once I gave a man everything, and then he took it with him when he died. So go easy on me, my knight. I never planned on having someone I wanted to possess again. Much less two someones.”
My lungs are instantly in my throat.
“You want to possess me?” I ask in a whisper. “Still?
His face is heavy with desire now, lashes low and lips parted. “Can you doubt it?”
I think of him picking up Isolde’s panties, of his hands bruising my hips in Belgrade. “I doubt everything when it comes to you, sir,” I admit.
He lifts a hand and grazes his fingertips over my lips. “Sometimes I can’t believe my own jealousy,” he says in a low voice that doesn’t feel meant for me. And then: “How many times do I have left with you until I’m even with my wife?”
Oh God. “Two more. Three if we count…the garden tonight.”
Why am I saying this? Going along with this?
“Say your safeword if you need it,” he tells me, and then shoves me to my knees.
I go with no resistance; I go like my knees have never belonged anywhere but on the floor. His shove is rougher than usual, his hands fumbling on his belt, and I’m sick in the head because I love him like this, out of control and vulnerable and almost angry about it.
He’s half hard when he pulls himself out of his pants, and he holds himself out for me to lick and worship, his head falling back as he stiffens against my tongue.
“Your mouth is criminal,” he hisses as he pushes the head onto my tongue and rubs himself there. “So goddamn wrong how good it feels. Open up for me, I want your throat too—yes, just like that, puppy. God, so good, keep letting me have it. Good boy.”
My dick is pushing against my pajama pants, tenting them embarrassingly, but there’s no time to be humiliated when Mark is filling my mouth, pressing into my throat. I can’t breathe, I’m swallowing fruitlessly against my own gag reflex, which makes him growl as my throat squeezes him, and my lashes are caught with tears. The shadows behind him blur into him through my wet eyelashes, and it’s almost like being face-fucked by a shadow itself, by an incubus. His hand is unyielding on the back of my head now, and he lets me pull off for a few sucking, wet inhales, and then he pushes back in. All the way, until the crisp hairs on his lower stomach are tickling my nose. His free hand is stroking the hair back from my face, wiping the tears off my cheeks, so impossibly tender even as he suffocates me with his erection.
I see stars when he pulls out this time.
“Show me yours,” he demands suddenly. In the faint light of the lamp, his cock is wet and shiny. “Pull it out for me.”
I do as he asks, unknotting the drawstring and pulling the waistband of my pants down and hooking them under my balls.
“Shirt off too,” he says, and I obey, a vain and petty part of me eating up how his eyes trace hungrily over my arms and chest and stomach.
“Now stay there,” he says, “and let me look at you.”
He jerks himself fast and hard, his big fist flying, his eyes burning all over me, on my naked torso and my face and my blood-dark cock.
“Can see why she couldn’t stay away,” he grunts. His hair has curled the tiniest bit at the edges, possibly from the fog on the roof, and his jaw is raspy with stubble, and his cheeks are flushed from alcohol and memories and lust. “Can see why she needed to fuck you. Both of you were made to fuck—made for me to fuck?—”
The last word is bitten off as his whole body seems to clench and he gives a ragged curse. White ropes, thick and hot, erupt from the slit at the end of his erection, and paint my chest and stomach. He leans forward a little, not purely out of mindless pleasure, I realize, but so that his seed lands on my own erection, so that my sex is glazed white with his orgasm.
He strokes every last drop out of himself, not wasting a single bit, even the very last pearl, which he wipes free with the pad of his thumb and then makes me suck clean.
My erection jerks in the air, untouched by anything except his semen, and I whimper around his thumb. The pressure between my hips is torture, and even though I’ve already come tonight, my body is primed like I’ve been deployed for nine months.
Mark lets go of himself, zips back up. He looks down at where my hips are stuttering, like I’m trying to fuck the air. And then he lifts his knee, so that the underside of my dick is now rubbing against the top of his dress shoe.
His lashes go even lower as he watches me buck against the gleaming leather, and he says my favorite words.
“If you can come like this, you may.”
I waste no time, stroking my cum-wet frenulum against his shoe, gasping, garbling I don’t even know what kind of fucking nonsense, that I love him, that he’s everything, that I want to come for him whenever he wants. That he can do whatever he wants to me, please will he do whatever he wants to me, please will he give me his wife to fuck too, because I’ll be so good, I’m always so good for him. I’ll treat her right, she’ll always come so hard, I’m such a good puppy, please, please, please?—
The orgasm is rough and long and messy, all over his shoe and the cuff of his pants and the floor, and still he holds his shoe up, and still I rub my needy cock against it, needing to empty myself completely, fully, needing to show him what a good boy I am?—
The last dry pulses of it have me shuddering, slumping, and then he sets his shoe down.
“I think you know what to do now,” he says kindly, and I do, I do know. I lean forward on my hands and lick every last drop off his shoe and the expensive wool cuff of his trousers.
When I finish, I look up at him, my vision static-filled and my fingers and toes tingling. Adrenaline and norepinephrine. Oxytocin and dopamine. I’m flying high and about to crash fast.
He gets to his knees too, unheeding of the cum on the floor now staining his trousers, and he presses his lips to mine. He doesn’t waste time mapping my lips or sharing air—his tongue seeks mine right away. He tastes like whiskey, and it’s so novel, and I moan into his mouth, my fingers curling into his jacket. I never want him to stop kissing me. I never want this night to end.
He pulls back with closed eyes and a heaving chest. “Go to bed, Tristan,” he breathes.
“Sir—”
“Drink water and get an extra blanket and then go to bed.”
“But—”
He’s getting to his feet and stepping back. Going to the box and putting it back in the safe. Closing it. “We will have a long night tomorrow with the Samhain celebration. We all need to sleep.”
I’m getting to my feet too, tucking myself back in my pants and feeling foolish. Like I’ve misunderstood something.
“Mark,” I say, and that stops him. He swings the magnolia picture closed and looks at me.
“Yes, Tristan?”
“I meant what I said on the roof. Punish us. Give us cruelty since we deserve it. But don’t make this the end.”
He looks away, his throat working, his entire body a bowstring of tension now. His hand flexes by his side. And then he turns away, to the door that leads to the elevators outside his office. I think Dinah was right earlier. He’s going to sleep in one of the rooms below.
“Good night, Tristan,” he says, and he shuts the office door behind him.