EPILOGUE
Two months later.
Rodney was running late.
That was, objectively, not his fault. There had been construction on Seventh, and he'd stopped to buy scones from the café because they were out of the chocolate chip ones at home and Mordechai liked having one on his desk when he arrived, even though Mordechai would never admit to something as frivolous as looking forward to a scone.
None of which mattered, because Mordechai did not accept excuses. Mordechai accepted results, and the result was that Rodney was eleven minutes late and soaking wet from the rain that had started three blocks from the office and refused to observe the basic courtesy of waiting until he was indoors.
He rushed through the lobby. He took the elevator up. Sarah's desk was empty, she'd retired three weeks ago, to Texas, with a party that had involved a cake shaped like a gavel and a speech from Mordechai that had made everyone cry, including Mordechai, though he would deny this to his grave.
Mordechai was at his desk. Suit jacket on.
Reading glasses on. A legal pad in front of him covered in the precise, angular handwriting that Rodney could now read as easily as print.
He looked up when Rodney entered, and his expression was not angry.
Mordechai's anger was cold and quiet and controlled, and this wasn't that.
This was the other expression. The one that Rodney had learned to recognize over two months of shared mornings and Thursday nights and lazy Sunday afternoons on the porch.
The expression that said: I am going to enjoy what happens next.
"You're late," Mordechai said. His voice was soft. Soft, with Mordechai, was more dangerous than loud.
Rodney stood in the doorway, dripping, clutching a paper bag of scones that had gone slightly soggy. "I know. There was construction, and—"
"I didn't ask for an explanation." Mordechai set down his pen. "I asked for you to be on time. Were you on time?"
"No, Sir."
"Close the door."
Rodney closed the door and locked it. The blinds were already down. The glass wall between the office and Rodney's desk was opaque. They were alone.
"Come here."
He walked to Mordechai, who was leaning back in his leather chair with his legs slightly apart and his hands resting on the armrests and an expression of patient, devastating authority that still, after two months, made Rodney's knees go weak.
He stood in front of Mordechai with his feet together and his hands at his sides and his wet shirt clinging to his body and his pulse climbing the way it always did when the dynamic shifted, accelerating, sharpening, the noise of the world narrowing to a single point. This room. This man. This moment.
"You're shivering," Mordechai observed.
"I'm wet. And a little cold."
"Then you should take off your clothes."
Rodney's cheeks heated. Even after these months, after hundreds of scenes and thousands of touches and a level of physical intimacy that would have been unimaginable to the man he'd been before the auction, standing in Mordechai's office and stripping while Mordechai watched from his chair still made him blush.
Not from shame. From the intensity of being seen.
Of standing in front of someone who knew every inch of his body and wanted every inch of it and made that want known with every look.
He took off his shirt. His pants. His underwear.
Folded them neatly, Mordechai had trained the neatness into him early, and it had stuck, and set them on the floor beside the desk.
He stood naked in the cool office air, and the blush spread from his face to his chest the way it always did, and Mordechai's eyes tracked it the way they always did, and the slight curve of his mouth said there it is the way it always did.
"You think I don't want you," Mordechai said. Not a question. A diagnosis.
Rodney blinked. "What?"
"I can see it in you. Even now, even after everything, some part of you is still waiting for me to get bored. To wake up one morning and realize you're just a panda and I'm a panther and the novelty has worn off." Mordechai leaned forward. "Come here."
Rodney stepped closer. Mordechai's hands found his hips, pulling him forward until Rodney was standing between his knees, and Mordechai looked up at him with an expression that was stripped of all pretense, no Dom, no lawyer, no armor.
Just the man underneath, who loved him and was furious that Rodney didn't fully believe it yet.
"Do you know what I think about when you're sitting at your desk?
" Mordechai's hands tightened on his hips.
"I think about this. About having you in here, like this.
About the sounds you make. About the way your skin flushes when I touch you.
I am hard most of the day, Rodney, from having you twenty feet away and not being able to put my hands on you.
You are not a novelty. You are not temporary.
You are the man I come home to and the man I wake up next to and the man I want for every day I have left. Do you understand?"
Rodney's throat was tight. His eyes were hot. "Yes, Sir."
"Good." Mordechai's voice shifted, warming, but not softening. The Dom was back. "Now. You were eleven minutes late. That's eleven. Over my lap."
Rodney draped himself across Mordechai's thighs. The position was familiar, the warm solidity of Mordechai beneath him, the slight shift as Mordechai adjusted his weight, the anticipation building in the pause before contact. Mordechai's hand rested on his ass. Heavy. Still.
"Count," Mordechai said.
The first strike landed, and the sharp crack of it echoed in the soundproofed room. Rodney sucked in a breath. "One."
The second. Harder. "Two."
By six, the pain had bloomed into the warm, buzzing heat that meant he was approaching the edge. By nine, he was floating, the endorphins pulling him down into the warm, quiet space where nothing existed except sensation and Mordechai's voice and the steady rhythm of his hand.
"Ten." His voice was shaking. "Eleven."
Mordechai's hand stayed on his heated skin, rubbing in slow circles. "Good boy."
The two words dropped into the warm space inside him like stones into still water. He felt them spread. Felt the quiet settle. Felt the last stubborn fragments of doubt, he'll get bored, he'll leave, you're not enough, dissolve under the weight of those two simple, devastating syllables.
He was enough. He was here. He was Mordechai's.
"Over the desk," Mordechai said. "Elbows down. Legs apart."
Rodney slid off his lap and positioned himself over the desk.
The wood was cool against his flushed, spanked skin, a sharp contrast that made him hiss.
Behind him, he heard the soft sounds of Mordechai preparing, the drawer opening, the click of the lube cap, the slick sound of Mordechai coating himself, and then Mordechai was behind him, one hand spreading him open, and two slicked fingers pushing inside without preamble.
Rodney groaned into the desk. After two months, his body knew Mordechai's fingers, knew their length, their thickness, the precise way they curved to find the spot that made his legs shake.
Mordechai didn't ease in. He fucked him with his fingers, hard and deliberate with the efficient authority of a man who knew exactly how much his sub could take and had no intention of being gentle about it.
"You're already open for me," Mordechai’s voice was low and rough.
"Two months, and your body still clenches around my fingers like it's the first time.
Do you feel that? How tight you are? How wet you sound?
" He twisted his wrist, pressing deep against Rodney's prostate, and Rodney's cock jumped against the edge of the desk, already leaking. "You're dripping on my floor, Rodney."
"Sir, please—"
"Please what?" A third finger. The stretch burned, and Rodney moaned, a broken, guttural sound that echoed off the soundproofed walls.
Mordechai spread his fingers wide, and Rodney felt himself open, felt the burn transform into the aching, desperate need for more that two months had not diminished.
"Please fuck me. I need your cock, Sir, please—"
Mordechai withdrew his fingers. The emptiness was immediate and devastating, and Rodney whined against the desk, his hips pressing back, seeking what had been taken. Then the blunt, thick head of Mordechai's cock pressed against his stretched rim, and Rodney's breath caught.
Two months, and the size of him was still a shock.
The thick press of him demanding entry, the stretch of Rodney's body opening around him, the slow inexorable push as Mordechai fed himself in inch by inch.
Rodney's fingers curled against the wood of the desk.
His mouth fell open on a silent moan as Mordechai seated himself to the hilt, the full, heavy length of him buried deep, his balls flush against Rodney's ass, the thickness stretching Rodney's rim in that way that was pain and pleasure braided so tightly together they'd stopped being separate things months ago.
"God," Mordechai breathed. His hands gripped Rodney's hips hard enough to bruise.
"You have no idea what you look like right now.
Bent over my desk, stretched around my cock, your ass still red from my hand.
" His voice dropped. "I think about this every time you answer my phone.
Every time you walk past my door. I think about bending you over this desk and fucking you until you can't remember your own name. "
He pulled back, the drag of his cock against Rodney's inner walls slow and exquisite, and then drove forward, hard, and Rodney cried out. The thrust shoved him forward against the desk, papers scattering, the pencil holder rattling.