Page 39 of For Real

With an effort of will, I settled. The stillness brought with it an almost unbearable awareness of myself: blind, restrained, hopelessly excited. And how good it felt, how right, to be that way.

Usually it was pain that brought me deep into my body, but tonight all it took was Toby.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It totally turns me on when you struggle, but I’m not sure it’ll hold. I got an F for my Design & Tech GCSE.”

“They should have let you make bondage gear. You’d have got an A.” I moved my wrists again but more carefully this time. “It’s secure.”

I heard the scrape of a zip and the drag of fabric against skin. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Of course, I couldn’t see him, but I turned my face to where I thought he might be. “I’m at your mercy.”

“Good. That’s where I want you.” The air stirred as he stepped closer. “Now show me.”

Show me.

The command flared hotly across my skin, and I felt him everywhere, like a kiss or a hand on my cock, in the silk across my eyes and the leather round my wrists. And I groaned in eagerness and shame, knowing how sweet it would be to obey him, abase myself for his pleasure and deny my own.

I leaned forward, seeking him, clumsy and uncertain, desperate to please, and terribly, terribly vulnerable. He did nothing to help me, but that was right too. At last, I brushed his thigh with my cheek, and I couldn’t hold back a soft sound of relief and connection. His fingers curled gently into my hair, and my heart filled with gratitude. And, suddenly, I wasn’t helpless or afraid. Or rather, I was, but tucked inside all that, cocooned in my private darkness, I felt infinitely tender, warm, and safe. I felt like I was his.

I could have nuzzled my way to his cock. It was what I had intended and probably what he expected, but the impulse of the moment took me down, not up. It was awkward without my hands and perilously like falling but it seemed as foolish to cling to grace as it did to cling to pride, and I trusted he would catch me if I needed it.

As my mouth touched the arch of his foot, a shudder ran through him, and I heard him gasp.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Holy fuck.”

Beneath my lips, I could feel the individual ridges of his metatarsal bones, sleek beneath the skin. Feet had never particularly been one of my preoccupations, but these were Toby’s feet, and when I touched them, he responded so very sweetly, lavishing me with murmurs and sighs, and at one point, “Oh my God, that has no right to be this good,” followed by “Don’t stop” because I’d had to smother my laughing against his toes, consumed by the sudden joy of simply being where I was.

I licked the taut spaces between all those fragile bones and kissed my way across his toes and up again—intermediate cuneiform, navicular, talus—until what had started off as little more than whim and humility became something more. Something I had long believed lost and forgotten.

At last, I levered myself back onto my heels and rested a moment against his thigh. The muscles of my back and upper arms were burning faintly, and the edge of the belt was pressing into my wrists, but these small aches filled me as brightly as fireflies. Because I was aching for Toby. I turned my head and kissed the side of his leg.

His hand returned, his fingers stroking me gently, sliding on the sweat that had gathered beneath the tie.

“Will you turn round?” I asked.

He stilled a moment. “Uh…yeah. I guess so.”

He did it carefully, shuffling close so I didn’t have to find him again, and I brushed my lips over the backs of his thighs, kisses that were not quite kisses. I learned the textures of his skin—the cool, smooth places behind his knees, the rougher, hair-stippled ones above, and then the smoothest of all, right at the tops of his thighs, where the curve of his arse began.

And I realised I didn’t need my eyes to know he was beautiful. Or, from the noises he was making, to know I was pleasing him.

I dragged my tongue up the seam between his thighs, and he jumped. “Jesus. That feels obscene. Do it again.”

I did, nuzzling as much as my position allowed into the supple, tender places of his flesh, making them slick and hot. He spread his legs, moaning, and thrust himself against me.

God. The things I could have done to him if I’d only had my hands.

“Toby?”

“Yeah?” It was little more than a gasp.

“Can… Will…you help me?”

“What do you want me to do?”

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