Chapter Three #3
"I should get going," Sero said, though he didn't particularly want to. The room felt safe. Trevor's presence felt safe. But they'd used their booked time and then some, and Amani would come checking eventually.
"Right." Trevor stood and offered a hand. Sero took it and let himself be pulled upright. The world tilted briefly, then stabilized. He was standing naked in front of Trevor, marked and used and thoroughly wrung out, and he felt... good. Really good. Better than he'd felt in months.
He got dressed slowly. Everything hurt in that pleasant, well-fucked way.
His jeans were harder to get on than usual, his skin was over sensitized, every brush of fabric registering with startling intensity, and pulling denim over the welts on his thighs made him suck air through his teeth.
Trevor watched him dress with an expression Sero couldn't quite read.
Possessive, yes, but with worry threaded through it.
As if he'd found something valuable and was already afraid of breaking it.
"Thank you," Sero said. It felt inadequate. What did you say to someone who'd just shown you a part of yourself you'd never met?
"Come back Wednesday," Trevor said. "If you want to."
"I want to." The words were out before Sero could weigh them. "But Trevor, I need to know this isn't just a rotation. I'm not interested in being another appointment in your day. If I'm coming back, I want this to mean something."
Trevor's jaw tightened. Not annoyance. Guilt, maybe, or the effort of keeping it off his face. Then he nodded.
"Wednesday," he said. "And it means something. Trust me on that."
Sero left the room on legs that barely worked. In the corridor, he passed Amani, who took one look at him and raised both eyebrows.
"He wrung you out good." Amani grinned.
Sero couldn't argue with that. He gave Amani something between a wave and a salute and headed for the elevator.
The lobby was brighter than the club. Glancing up from her phone, Bethany assessed him with a single look.
The parking garage was sunlit and jarring.
Sero stood beside the elevator for a full minute, letting the world settle back into its ordinary shape.
Then he walked home. Four blocks, the same route Amani probably walked every night after closing.
The afternoon air was dry and warm, and the distant sound of the Strip was a low murmur beneath the silence of the warehouse district.
Sero touched the marks on his neck, small, already scabbing. Trevor's claws. Trevor's brand.
He didn't want them to fade.
***
Behind him, in the room he'd just left, Trevor waited until Sero's footsteps had faded. Then he went to the duffle bag.
The machine was still warm. Trevor disconnected the attachments with practiced hands: the dildo, the sleeve, the tubes that connected both to the base unit.
The tubes were the important part. They ran through the base unit's core, where the controller was, and where two small sealed vials sat in a temperature-regulated compartment.
Trevor extracted the first vial and held it up to the light.
Golden. Not yellow, not amber. Golden, like liquid sunlight.
He'd been using the machine for three years.
He'd processed hundreds of samples from dozens of men.
He'd gotten every color on the spectrum: cloudy white, pale yellow, muddy brown, once a faintly blue sample from a snake shifter who had turned out to be worthless.
The color correlated roughly with quality: the more the subject genuinely enjoyed the experience, the richer the nectar.
Fear made it dark. Pain without pleasure made it sour.
The best batches came from men who'd been completely overwhelmed in the best possible way, men who'd been broken open by pleasure and put back together by it.
He'd never gotten gold.
Trevor unscrewed the cap carefully, tilted the vial, and breathed in.
Honey. Sweet, clean, unmistakable honey. It must have been the fruit, Sero's all-fruit diet filtering through his body chemistry and into the sample. Trevor stared at the golden liquid and felt two things simultaneously.
The first was professional excitement. The Grizzly, his biggest client, his most demanding, his most dangerous, had been furious about the last few batches.
The wolf from Halloween had produced a brown, bitter sample that barely lasted an hour.
His other regulars gave decent yellows at best. But this was going to be extraordinary.
One vial of this would be worth three of anything else Trevor had ever made.
The Grizzly would pay a premium. The sharks who handled delivery would stop threatening him.
His finances, which had been precariously balanced for months, would stabilize.
The second thing was guilt.
He set the vial down on the table and sat in the chair Sero had never used.
The room still smelled like Sero: fruit, sweat, cum, and warmth that Trevor's cat brain filed under good, more, again.
He could still hear the sound Sero had made on the eighth orgasm.
Not just pleasure. Not just pain. A sound that came from a place most people never reached because most people didn't have the capacity Sero had.
Eight times. Fifty-three lashes. No safe word.
No panic. Just a man discovering what his body could actually do with someone who knew how to ask it.
Trevor had cum from watching that. He hadn't touched himself.
He'd been standing six feet away, holding a flogger, and the sound Sero made had hit him like a fist and his body had answered before his mind could stop it.
That had never happened before. Not with the wolf, not with any of the dozens of men who'd been in his machine.
He'd always maintained control. That was the whole point.
Control was what a Dom did. He held the flogger.
He set the pace. He decided when the scene ended.
He didn't come in his jeans because a bat looked at him with tears on his face and trust in his eyes.
Trevor picked up the vial again. The gold caught the light.
He should be thinking about the Grizzly.
About the order that was two days overdue, and the shark who'd already called with thinly veiled threats about deadlines.
He should be thinking about the alchemy, the purification process, the refining, the careful magical distillation that turned raw nectar into the serum that kept old, broken shifters functional for another few hours.
Instead he was thinking about the way Sero had said ‘I need to know this isn't just a rotation.’
The phone on the table buzzed. Trevor didn't need to look to know who it was. The Grizzly's people didn't leave voicemails. They called. They called again. And they kept calling until he answered, or until they sent the sharks.
He picked up.
"What's the holdup?" The voice was gruff, impatient. A shark, the one who handled collections. Not the Grizzly himself. The Grizzly didn't make his own calls.
"You'll get it tonight," Trevor said. "I've got a bit of refining to do."
"I should've had it two nights ago. You've been putting me off for days."
"There were complications." Trevor turned the golden vial in his fingers. In the other hand, the phone felt heavy.
"That's what you always say. Make sure I get it by seven tonight, or you'll have sharks on your tail."
The call disconnected.
Trevor sat in the quiet room and looked at the gold.
Then he packed up the machine, put the vial into a protective padded sleeve, then into his jacket pocket, and left. He had work to do.