Chapter 8 #2
The world inverted. Every expectation, every framework, every architecture of their dynamic—the dom stands, the sub kneels, Marcus commands and Jamie obeys—all of it rotated on its axis.
Marcus Hale was on his knees on the concrete floor of a suburban garage, his hands gripping Jamie's hips, his face level with Jamie's belt, and looking up at Jamie with an expression that had nothing to do with dominance and everything to do with desperation.
"Marcus, you don't have to—"
"Shut up." Marcus's fingers were at his belt. Unbuckling. Working the leather through the clasp with hands that were steady despite everything, because his hands were always steady, even when the rest of him was falling apart. "For once in your life, stop talking."
Jamie's head hit the wall. His hands found the steel shelving unit bolted beside him and gripped, because his legs were already going and Marcus hadn't even touched him yet. He watched—couldn't not watch—as Marcus opened his jeans, dragged the zipper down, and pulled him free.
The sound Marcus made—a low, involuntary groan at the back of his throat, almost pained—did something to Jamie that no amount of explicit contact could have matched.
It was the sound of a man encountering something he'd been dreaming about, and Jamie's cock twitched at the vibration of it, already leaking, already desperate, and Marcus hadn't even—
Marcus's mouth closed over him and Jamie's vision dissolved.
Hot. Wet. Devastating. Marcus took him in slowly—not teasing, not performing, just taking, the way a man drinks water after days in the desert.
His lips stretched around Jamie's shaft and his tongue pressed flat against the underside and he slid down, steady, relentless, until Jamie felt the back of Marcus's throat and his hands on the shelving unit went white-knuckled and the sound that came out of his mouth was not a word, was not a name, was a raw, animal noise that echoed off the garage walls and the concrete floor and the half-finished island and the tools hanging in their precise arrangements.
Marcus pulled back. Slid forward. Set a rhythm that was slow and deep and absolutely, mercilessly thorough.
He knew what he was doing—he'd always known what he was doing with Jamie's body—but this was different.
At the club, oral had been structured: a reward, a component of a scene, delivered with precision and control.
This was Marcus on his knees not because the scene called for it but because he couldn't stand up anymore.
Because the weight of wanting had literally brought him to the ground.
Jamie looked down. The image—Marcus Hale, forty-four years old, architect, fiancé, the most controlled man Jamie had ever known, on his knees on a garage floor with Jamie's cock in his mouth and his eyes closed and his brow furrowed with concentration and need—was the single most erotic thing Jamie had experienced in his life.
More than any scene at Veil. More than any fantasy.
Marcus on his knees, choosing this, needing this, with sawdust on his jeans and his hair messed and his hands gripping Jamie's hips hard enough to bruise.
"God—fuck—Marcus—" Jamie's hips stuttered forward.
He couldn't help it. Marcus groaned around him and took it, took the thrust, opened wider and swallowed deeper and one hand slid from Jamie's hip to his ass and pulled him in, encouraging the movement, and Jamie's brain short-circuited because Marcus was letting him fuck his mouth, Marcus who never relinquished control was giving it, and the surrender was so disorienting and so hot that Jamie felt his orgasm building with a speed that bordered on embarrassing.
"I'm going to—if you don't stop—"
Marcus pulled off. His lips were swollen and slick and his eyes when they opened were nearly black, the brown swallowed by pupil, and he looked up at Jamie from the floor with an expression that was wrecked and feral and absolutely certain.
"Turn around."
The voice. The voice. Not the gentle version from the kitchen table.
Not the careful version from the study. The real one.
The Thursday-night one. The one that started at the base of Marcus's chest and came out with the weight and authority of a man who had decided what was going to happen and expected compliance.
Jamie turned around.
He braced his forearms against the wall, forehead pressed to the drywall, and felt Marcus rise behind him—the heat of him, the breadth, the solid mass of a man built like the structures he designed.
Marcus's chest pressed against Jamie's back.
His mouth found the side of Jamie's neck—the soft place below his ear that Marcus had discovered in their third session and had exploited relentlessly ever since—and his teeth scraped the skin and Jamie's spine arched.
"You want to know what I miss?" Marcus's hand slid around Jamie's hip.
Down. His fingers wrapped around Jamie's cock—still slick from his mouth, achingly hard—and stroked, slow and firm, and Jamie's forehead ground against the wall.
"I miss this. I miss the sounds you make when I've got my hand on you.
I miss the way you shake when you're close. "
His other hand pressed flat against Jamie's stomach.
Holding him in place. Holding him against Marcus's body, where Jamie could feel Marcus's cock through his jeans—rigid, thick, grinding slowly against the cleft of Jamie's ass—and the layers of denim between them were torture and salvation simultaneously.
"I miss the way you say please," Marcus continued, his hand moving in long, deliberate strokes, thumb sweeping the head on every upstroke, spreading the slick, finding the rhythm that he already knew because he'd memorized it, because he'd spent a year learning exactly how to take Jamie apart with his hands. "Say it."
"No." A reflex. The brat in him, the part that resisted even when resistance was futile, especially when resistance was futile, because the surrender was sweeter when it was earned.
Marcus's grip tightened. His teeth closed on the tendon of Jamie's neck—not gently. A bite that would leave a mark, that would bruise, that violated every rule they'd silently agreed to. Jamie gasped.
"Say it."
"Fuck you."
Marcus laughed. Low, dark, against Jamie's skin.
The laugh that meant I love when you fight me.
His hand slowed. His thumb circled the head of Jamie's cock with agonizing precision—too light, too slow, enough to keep him on the edge but not enough to push him over.
Jamie's hands curled into fists against the wall.
"You can be stubborn all night," Marcus murmured. "I've got nowhere to be."
"Your fiancé's retirement party—"
"Don't." Marcus's voice dropped a register.
Not playful anymore. Raw. "Don't mention him.
Not now. Not while I'm—" His hand stilled.
His forehead pressed between Jamie's shoulder blades.
Jamie felt his breath—ragged, hot—through the cotton of his t-shirt.
"I know what this makes me. You don't need to remind me. "
Jamie's bravado cracked. Under the defiance, under the brat, under all the armor: the boy who just wanted to be held. He reached back. Found Marcus's hip. Pulled him closer.
"Please," Jamie said. Quiet. Honest. Not because Marcus told him to, but because it was the only word he had when the walls came down. "Please, Marcus."
Marcus's arm tightened around him. His hand resumed—faster now, harder, the careful precision giving way to urgency.
His hips rocked against Jamie's ass, grinding through denim, and his mouth was on Jamie's neck and his breath was ragged and he was saying things—half-words, broken phrases, Jamie's name and god and I can't and I can't stop—and Jamie pushed back into him and let go.
The orgasm detonated at the base of his spine and blew through him like a demolition charge.
He came over Marcus's fist and the garage wall and his own t-shirt, his whole body seizing, his vision whiting out, his mouth open on a sound that he pressed into his forearm to muffle—a cry, a groan, something primal and wrecked that echoed in the garage despite his efforts to contain it.
Marcus held him through it, stroked him through the aftershocks, his hand gentling as Jamie's body shuddered and quieted.
Then Marcus pressed hard against him—one arm locked around Jamie's waist, the other braced against the wall—and ground against his ass with a rhythm that went from desperate to frantic in the space of three strokes.
Jamie pushed back into it, giving him the friction, the pressure, and Marcus buried his face between Jamie's shoulder blades and came with a groan that was more like a wound—low, broken, muffled against Jamie's spine—his hips stuttering, his whole body locking tight.
"Fuck," Marcus breathed. "Fuck. Fuck."
His forehead stayed pressed against Jamie's back. His arm stayed locked around Jamie's waist. For ten seconds, fifteen, they stood like that—braced against the wall, breathing, shaking, held together by gravity and the aftermath of something that had just changed everything.
Then Marcus let go.
He stepped back. Jamie heard him moving—the rasp of a rag pulled from the workbench, the rustle of clothing being adjusted.
Jamie turned around, leaning against the wall for support because his legs had the structural integrity of cooked pasta, and watched Marcus clean himself up with the methodical, mechanical movements of a man on autopilot.
Marcus wouldn't look at him.
The silence was enormous. The radio was still playing—had been playing the whole time, the bass line and the drums providing a soundtrack to something that didn't deserve background music. Marcus turned it off. The quiet that followed was absolute.
Jamie pulled up his jeans. Buckled his belt with hands that shook so badly he needed three attempts. His t-shirt was ruined. His neck was throbbing where Marcus had bitten him. His hip, where Marcus's hand had gripped during the blowjob, was already blooming purple under the skin.
"That can't happen again," Jamie said.
"No," Marcus said. He was standing at the workbench, his back to Jamie, his hands braced on the wood. His shoulders were rigid. His head was bowed.
"I mean it."
"So do I."
Jamie looked at Marcus's back—the broad, solid, familiar expanse of it—and knew, with the same certainty he knew his own name, that they were both lying.
That this would happen again. That the line they'd just crossed was not a line at all but a door, and doors, once opened, didn't close just because you wished they would.
He left the garage. Walked through the mudroom. Climbed the stairs. Entered the guest room. Closed the door.
In the bathroom mirror, he cataloged the damage.
Bite mark on his neck, dark and unmistakable—he'd need a collared shirt tomorrow or Tom would see.
Sawdust in his hair. A smear of something on his jaw that he wiped away and didn't identify.
And on his hip, visible when he pulled down the waistband of his jeans: Marcus's handprint, four fingers and a thumb, bruising into purple against the pale skin.
Jamie pressed his thumb into the bruise.
The pain bloomed, sharp and specific. He pressed harder.
Felt the ache radiate outward, felt the shape of Marcus's grip preserved in his skin like an impression in wet clay, and the sensation was so immediate, so real, that he closed his eyes and breathed through it and felt, underneath the guilt and the fear and the certain knowledge that he was hurtling toward a wreckage that would touch everyone he loved, something he hadn't felt since the last Thursday night at Veil.
Alive.
He felt alive.
He showered. Changed. Got into bed. Pressed his face into the pillow and breathed and did not think about the fact that in approximately two hours, Tom Cole would walk through the front door and kiss Marcus goodnight and sleep beside him in the bed they shared, and Marcus would lie there in the dark with Jamie's taste still in his mouth and the memory of Jamie's body still imprinted on his hands, and neither of them would sleep, and neither of them would stop, and the beautiful house on the tree-lined street was now a structure with a crack in the foundation that no amount of architecture could repair.
He pressed the bruise on his hip one more time.
Then he closed his eyes and waited for the sound of his father's car in the driveway.