Nick grinned into – but didn’t completely break – the kiss. “You’re being naughty.”
An electric charge zinged immediately into Spencer’s balls and tightened them with nervousness and anticipation. “Sorry,” Spencer murmured. “Couldn’t help myself.”
“I’ll keep tabs on your punishment.” Nick drew back and touched his temple with a finger, likely already adding up how often he’d hit Spencer, but Spencer really didn’t care at this point. As far as their scene was involved, any excuse to get beaten worked for him.
Nick traced the side of Spencer’s face with a fingernail. “I’m keeping this one ... simple. I need to find my feet with what I want to do with you.”
“Rather than what I pay you for?”
“Has to do with that, sure. But really, I just want to make it special. For you. And me.” Nick smiled, eyes alight with that wicked ability to unnerve Spencer. “Blow your mind in a different way.”
“I’m game. Whatever you want. I’ll get where you need me to be, if you help me.”
Nick touched Spencer’s face again, trailed his lips with a thumb, which tickled, but probably was meant to remind him of the kiss they’d shared.
Spencer couldn’t wait to know what the sex and kink would feel like when it was real – well, more real than it had been. Nick had got off on what they’d done, no doubt, and often, but that had been at least partly a performance, he assumed.
What would the real Nick be like? The one who cared about him. The man for whom he was special and not just a meal ticket.
Granted, he knew very little about Nick. His personality. His ... did he even know what Nick really liked in BDSM? Probably. Nick hadn’t just been lucky-guessing. It was doubtful that he did this for a living but preferred missionary-with-the-lights-out at home. He certainly didn’t lie back and think of England on the job ... What had he said? Had been approached in clubs and kinda got into it. Sometimes they offered him money, he’d said, so he’d gathered experience and gone full-time. Turned a hobby into a career.
“Haven’t done this in a while. Cared about somebody. It’s weird.” Nick kissed him again, short but tender, and then pulled back. “I think I’ll like it, though. You. Me.”
“Well, you already have me on my knees,” Spencer joked.
“I do. But what happens next?”
Spencer swallowed. “You tell me.”
Nick’s lips pulled into a grin, and he trailed his fingers down the side of Spencer’s face. “Always the sub, aren’t you?”
“That’s what you want. Isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. And I knew from the beginning you were a sub.” Nick curved his hand around the back of Spencer’s neck and leaned in for another kiss. Just before their lips met, he added, “Just never realised you’d become my sub.”
When Nick broke away again, Spencer licked his lips and said, “But I’ve been your sub from the beginning. That was the whole point.”
Nick shook his head slowly. “No. You were my client. I was your ...” He gestured sharply, as if he couldn’t find the word. “Your whore? Your coach? Your Dom on Friday nights and only Friday nights?” His hand came down again and rested on Spencer’s neck, and more than a few muscles in Spencer’s torso relaxed beneath his touch. “I’ve been staying away the last two weeks because I thought I shouldn’t be doing this. And maybe I shouldn’t.” He laughed dryly. “In fact, given my line of work, I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t. But when I saw you with that other Dom tonight, I panicked even more than I did when I kissed you last time, because this, what we’re doing now, seems like the only thing we can do.”
Spencer had no idea what to say.
Nick stood, but kept the skin contact, one hand on Spencer’s shoulder, then walked around him and put the other hand on his back, tracing the line of his spine underneath the skin.
“As unblemished as when I first met you.” Nick scraped his fingernails right down the middle, making Spencer gasp with the unexpected, intense pleasure. “I don’t think that should continue.”
Spencer shook his head.
“Ready to try the single-tail?”
It was an actual question. The tone was much lighter than the one Nick normally used before he started hurting Spencer.
“I thought ... I thought you said we were keeping things simple.”
“We are.” Nick grinned. “For me.” He arched an eyebrow. “So are you ready or not?”
“I’m ...” The single-tail was terrifying. He’d seen videos, and that crack and snap would most definitely send him screaming. After a break of two weeks, would his body be able to adjust to it? He doubted very much that getting used to it was even an option. “I’m scared.”
“You’re a smart man,” Nick said.
Oh, damn.
“But you think I can do it ...?”
“What do you think?” Nick raked his fingernails across Spencer’s skin again, creating electric currents that collapsed and converged back onto those red hot streaks.
Spencer closed his eyes and took a deep breath, centring himself. “Safeword is still ‘Bonaparte’?”
Gentle fingers ran over his hair. “Still ‘Bonaparte.’”
The safety net was still there. Of course it was. Nick would never put Spencer up on a wire without one. In spite of the money that had been exchanged – the way the business transaction should’ve kept this superficial and fake – Spencer had always trusted Nick. If the pain got too intense, it was in Spencer’s power to stop it. If there was anything left he was afraid of, deep down, more so than getting in over his head with the pain, it was Nick getting scared again and calling it off.
Bonaparte. Nick’s voice echoed in his ears.
If the two of them could get through a scene like this without that word being spoken again, then maybe ... maybe this ran deeper than sex and cash, deep enough to go all the way.
“Well?” Nick urged him, his tone teetering between impatient and the slightest bit uncertain. “Single-tail? Or not?”
“Yes.” Spencer swallowed. He turned his head towards the sound of Nick’s voice. “Yes, I want to.”
The breath Nick released was heavy and long, shuddering a little, like the damning evidence of a shiver he’d tried to keep out of sight. “Stand up and strip.”
This time, it was Spencer who shivered, and he didn’t even try to hide it. He stood and started on the buttons of his shirt. Anticipation made his mouth water as much as apprehension made his hands shake. He didn’t care if Nick noticed. Nick got a charge out of his nerves, a thrill from putting him off-balance, so Spencer didn’t hold any of it back.
As Spencer undressed, Nick unzipped the bag he’d brought with him. Spencer was used to the sounds of a search within that bag: clinking, rustling, clattering. As he set his neatly folded clothes on top of the dresser, he glanced at Nick, and it was at just that moment Nick found what he was looking for. He withdrew it, stood, and looked at Spencer.
Spencer couldn’t decide what turned him on – and freaked him the fuck out – more: the long, black whip coiled in Nick’s hand, or the sadistic, predatory grin that curled those thin lips and crinkled the corners of his narrow green eyes. Fuck.
With the whip, Nick gestured at the floor in front of the footboard. “On your knees.”
Spencer hesitated.
“Now.” The word came out as sharply as a whip crack, and Spencer damn sure obeyed.
Naked. In front of the footboard. On his knees.
Waiting.
Ready.
He glanced behind himself from the corner of his eyes, and how Nick held the whip struck him. It seemed oddly fluid, graceful, hip-high, arm relaxed and shoulders down. Nothing vicious about it, which seemed incongruous with the whole concept of whipping a man. Whipping him.
Nick swung it twice into empty air, and it cracked on the second one, which made Spencer almost safeword. But hell, fear was always worse than the pain, wasn’t it? He’d learned that much.
The whip t
ouched his back. Spencer understood why people said “licks” – it was a long touch, almost languid, drawing a sharp line across his back. Not horrible. No different from, say, a flexible cane. Maybe more pleasant.
The second hit was much the same, just from the other side as Nick mirrored the motion and the strike. Spencer shuddered, but this was all right. The worst about this was what he imagined people might be thinking if they knew –
Crack.
Spencer jumped, but managed to stay on his knees when the whip hit him hard high up on the arse. The pain was actually bad. Really bad. An explosion of pain like getting zapped by a Taser, minus the drooling and cramps.
“Kneel up, hands on the footboard.”
That would bare his arse, his thighs, even the backs of his knees to the whip.
Spencer nevertheless obeyed when the whip cracked in the air, right next to his ear, it felt like. Damn, but Nick’s precision did impress him, though it freaked him out. What if Nick missed?
The tail bit him on the arse, hard, like an indignant, tangible response of Miss? I beg your fucking pardon? A second later, as if for emphasis, it hit the exact same spot on the opposite side.
Then his shoulders. Left one, then right. Intense beads of pain, red hot spots and stripes, formed everywhere the tail met, everywhere Nick decided to form them.
The stars are coming out. Spencer closed his eyes as his mind started sliding into that dark delirium, where the only light seemed to come from the glowing red constellations that Nick brought to life one bright snap at a time.
His only connections to anything besides Nick, the whip, and the pain were the carpet beneath his knees and the cool footboard he occasionally arched into, brushing against it and drawing himself back to earth for a second or two at a time. Those returns were short-lived. All of them.
Another strike – shoulder, arse, thigh, he never could predict where or when or how hard – would draw him right back into the dark.
Nick wasn’t holding back. Either Spencer’s sense of time had slipped, or there were fewer seconds between hits now. Enough time for the initial bite and the deeper pain that followed each time, but the next strike always came quickly. Sometimes two or three in rapid succession, so he couldn’t grab onto a single one of those fiery focal points.
His grasp on the footboard weakened. Muscles simply didn’t know what to do anymore. Sweaty palms didn’t help. His hand slipped, and the whip narrowly missed his elbow, but he corrected quickly, and Nick stopped. Spencer cringed, expecting a punishment, an admonishment, something, but after a short while – thirty seconds, maybe? – the whip sliced through the air a heartbeat before its tail bit into Spencer’s arse cheek again.
On some distant, visceral level, he was aware that the pain was far more intense now than it had been with those first few strikes. His skin burned in places, throbbed in others. Unscathed flesh tingled with anticipation, and his head spun a little faster, took him a little deeper into somewhere else every time Nick laid that tail on him.
It hurt more, but he didn’t cringe or flinch away from it now. If anything, he arched into it. Sought it out. Silently begged for it. He may have even begged out loud; he thought he tasted the vibration of speech on his own tongue, and the air thrummed with something besides his heavy breathing and the sharp cracks and the whistle of leather cutting through the air, but he couldn’t remember what he’d said. Maybe he’d just moaned.
Something in the room changed. Movement? Lack of movement?
Spencer tried to open his eyes, but every time he did, the light overwhelmed his already overloaded senses, so he squeezed them shut and tried to figure out what the hell was –
Gentle fingers on slick skin.
His neck. The side of his neck.
Soft fingertips sliding over sweaty skin.
That feather-light touch reverberated through him, all the way down the length of his spine.
Movement again. Leather creaking softly. Cool breath on damp flesh. And a whisper, “You’re amazing like this, Spencer.”
The words were like a soft warm glow he could sense all over his body, inside and out, and he drifted in them like in a small, perfectly safe space. Nick’s voice. Nick who’d never been quite that gentle before. This was the difference between before and after. He could taste the affection, the extra care, the gentleness – all in a man who’d just worked him over with a whip, turned him into complete contentment. In this space, nothing else mattered.
“I didn’t do anything,” he protested like in a dream.
“You’re just not aware you did, but that’s fine. You’re beautiful like this. Riveting.” A touch to his arm, and Spencer realised he was sweating, possibly bathed in sweat. What for? Nothing to be afraid of.
“You did so well,” Nick said next to his ear. “I’d really like to fuck you.”
“Sure.” Spencer needed a few moments before he realised that he could possibly have said no, but he didn’t want to. Why would he?
Nick took him by the shoulder and elbow, led him around the bed, though Spencer shuffled on his knees, somehow not coordinated enough to stand and walk. He pushed up a bit and managed to flop across the mattress, opening his legs almost in afterthought.
“Roll onto your back,” Nick ordered, so Spencer obeyed, sucking in a hiss of breath when his raw skin met the bedclothes. Nick pulled off his own trousers while Spencer got used to the throbbing burn that felt no different from abrasions, a whole body full of them, and he guessed he had to be covered in welts. And maybe that was the reason why Nick wanted him on his back: it would hurt more.
But Nick had given the order, so he didn’t resist or hesitate much. It was a constant sting rather than the blooming pain after a hit, no surprises, no anticipation.
Nick climbed onto the bed, preparing himself. He prodded Spencer’s legs apart, and Spencer let him, not aware of arousal or pain, though he figured there had to be both of them. They just didn’t seem to matter.
Nick moved on top of him and started to push in; Spencer gasped at the blunt sense of pressure, the steady burn, but he knew by now how to take Nick, and Nick had used plenty of lube on himself.
“Look at me.”
The hard part. Spencer pried his eyes open with sheer obedience rather than determination. Nick’s young sharp features were flushed, green eyes gleaming with mischief, maybe, or pleasure, as he slid all the way into him, triggering that electricity again and hilting himself completely. Spencer couldn’t help it – he smiled.
So did Nick. And then Nick leaned forwards. Down. As soon as Spencer realised what Nick was doing, he raised his head and met him halfway, grabbing onto the back of his neck as Nick crushed his mouth in a demanding kiss. No holding back now. No pretending they shouldn’t or wouldn’t, just giving in and letting go, and kissing him like this was the way things were supposed to be.
Nick groaned against Spencer’s lips and thrust harder. Spencer could barely keep his grip on Nick’s neck, and every time Nick’s cock slid across the hypersensitive spot deep inside, Spencer was a little closer to forgetting how to kiss him. Hell, how to breathe.
Nick pulled back, and Spencer’s hand slid off his neck as Nick pushed himself up onto his arms. He was going for broke now, fucking Spencer harder, faster. The bed frame groaned and protested underneath them, threatening to come apart if Nick gave Spencer even a little bit more.
The bedding was coarse under Spencer’s raw skin, every motion sending burning reminders through his nervous system of the spectacular beating Nick had given him, turning him on even more. He might not be able to move tomorrow, but he didn’t give a fuck.
Spencer struggled to keep his eyes open. They kept tearing up and trying to roll back, but damn if he was missing a single second of Nick like this: sweaty, dishevelled, every cord and vein standing out in his neck and shoulders. Jaw clenched, muscles tight, all hard, sinewy power, he was the very picture of control even as he pushed Spencer towards that moment when control was out of the que
stion.
Nick closed his eyes. “Oh ... fuck ...”
And Spencer lost it. His raw shoulders dug into the bed, and his eyes rolled back, and somehow he found Nick’s sweat-slicked arms and grabbed on, and hot semen landed on his chest as Nick whispered curses and .. fuck, fuck, Spencer’s senses couldn’t take any more, couldn’t get enough, couldn’t take another damned second, please, please don’t stop ...
Nick forced himself as deep as Spencer could take him, shuddered, and cursed one last time. Spencer blinked his eyes into focus just in time to see Nick in suspended animation, that frozen couple of seconds between release and collapse.
And then Nick exhaled. Let his head fall forwards. And slumped over Spencer.
So, Spencer thought idly, half-heartedly waving away the idea of sleep, that was what Nick looked like when he didn’t fuck for money. Softer. Trusting. It felt like a privilege to see him like this. He closed his arms around Nick, felt him breathe heavily, chest pumping while he rested on top of Spencer.
Right now, holding him felt natural, right, as if they belonged together like this, and the pain and the sex were really the same thing, each heightening the other.
Spencer kissed Nick’s temple, something he’d never done before, and relaxed for a few more minutes, shifting just enough to lower and stretch out his legs and for Nick to slip free. Nick disappeared briefly, likely taking care of the condom, and then returned.
After Nick cleaned them up, they lay in silence for a long time, Spencer idly stroking Nick’s shoulder with an open palm, somehow managing to stay awake. The pain in his back helped.
Eventually, he rolled to the side and set Nick carefully down next to him. Their legs were still tangled, and all Spencer did was pull the covers up to their hips.
More time passed while Spencer watched Nick rest, studying the veins on his lower arms, the faint lines of his now relaxed muscles – the same that had wielded the whip with so much precision and power for God knew how long.
Nick’s eyes fully opened. “What are you thinking?”
“Just wondered how you got so good with that?”