Page 9 of For Real

His eyes, his gorgeous fucking magical eyes, never waver. Because I’ve told him to look at me. Even though he’s shaking, and I mean really shaking, like it’s his cock I’m holding, and there’s sweat glistening on him, gathered on the tips of his hair, sliding down his skin, like he’s jewelled in all the tears I want to make him cry.

“And it’ll be on you as well. Because…because…you want it too.”

I’m not expecting anything, but after a moment he nods, blushing again, and that blush is the sweetest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. It makes me feel like I’m a million feet tall. Like I’m a king.

Because it makes this more than the physical. More than simply the act of kneeling down. And suddenly I know what I felt in the club was right: he’s raw in this wanting and in the rightness of it. We’re the same.

And just like that, in these frantic jerks like my cock’s been electrocuted, I come all over him. I try to control it—and where I’m aiming—but it’s all I can do to stop my knees folding up like deck chairs. I’m all over his chest, across his throat and jaw and cheek. I’d be kind of impressed at myself for the porno load if I wasn’t out of my head, fucking delirious and in that kind of weird pre-embarrassment stage. Where you’re still floaty, lost in the sparkly, amazing time-out moment of ohhhhhfuckingyeahhhhh, but you’re starting to get that vague sense that it’s going to be weird and awkward when you blink the stars out of your eyes, and you’re sticky and limp and drippy, and standing over a naked, kneeling stranger who you’ve basically covered in come.

Except that next bit is a long time coming because it’s basically been the best fucking orgasm of my tiny rubbish life. Like recognisably, definitively, memorably good. Like I’d better start a list so it can be at the top good. And all I can do is be stunned and happy and grateful, and at the same time, totally and completely wrung out. I’d probably be crying if I hadn’t spurted, like, literally all my body fluids everywhere.

When my heart stops exploding and I remember breathing is a thing I can do, I open my eyes. He’s kneeling. Still hard as anything. Still looking at me. And suddenly I get really stressed out about what he’s seen: me all goofy and babbling and helpless, coming everywhere.

Very slowly, he lifts a hand to his cheek. Runs one finger through the mess I’ve made.

Then he closes his eyes and sucks the finger clean.

The way he looks when he’s doing it… Fuck… I can’t… And I swear to God, my cock nearly comes back from the dead.

Afterwards, he opens his eyes again and climbs gracefully—always so damn graceful—to his feet. Which has to be some kind of weird little act because if I’d been kneeling that long on carpet, I’d have felt it.

I’ve sort of half forgotten how tall he is. And how remote, locked up again behind his wolf eyes.

“We’re done here.”

That’s what he says to me. “We’re done here.” And we really are. Because that’s all it takes to turn me back into a pumpkin. Not a dom, not a king, not anything special at all. Just some clueless kid who’s somehow got lucky. “Yeah…but…like…what…”

“There’s a taxi number and an account code on the board in the hall. See yourself out when you’re ready.”

He’s still stark bollock naked, but he leaves…he fucking leaves. Sweeps out of there with all the dignity I’ve never had. Leaving me alone in his beautiful living room, limp dick in hand, staring at the spot where he’d been kneeling.

3

Laurie

Thirty-seven years old, and I was hiding in my own bathroom from the teenager I’d brought home with me. The teenager at whose feet I’d just been kneeling. Whose pleasure I wore like a garland, and whose taste still lingered in my mouth, salty, sharp, and sweet. And, oh God, I knew nothing about him and I’d taken that risk. Mild though it was, I should have known better.1

I thought I heard my front door open, then close.

Thank God. Thank God. He could have looted the place for all I cared, as long as he left.

Sinking to the floor, I tried to still my shaking and told myself that what I felt was relief. To a degree, it was. I feared what I might have done if he’d stayed. Crawled back to his feet, possibly, and begged him to touch me, hurt me, use me, whatever he willed. Let myself be utterly undone by a boy who had barely laid a finger on me.

My throat warmed beneath the memory of his hand.

He had left me so full of aches and empty spaces, my skin too tight to contain it all, and I hadn’t even asked his name. I had meant to keep him just another stranger, someone I could allow to wring from my body something of what I craved in return for a shadow play of submission. But what we’d almost given each other was something else.

No wonder I’d fled. What could there possibly be between that fierce, fragile creature and me? Had I ever been that earnest or that helplessly young, so much raw skin and burning need? Making me burn, too, with its strange power.

Against the protests of my knees, I made it to my feet and into the shower, turning the dial until the water beat down like hail. If I had thought I could silence in a clamour of sensation whatever it was he had woken in me, I was wrong. I rested my forehead against the tiles and shuddered and wanted and felt eerily weightless amidst the steam, until I found myself again in the dull familiarity of my own hand. Such a hollow thing, my own pleasure, without something—someone—to give it meaning.2

After everything I’d done, or not done, I didn’t deserve to think of him, and I had that much self-discipline, at least. At least, not until after. And then I caught myself imagining that small, slim figure disappearing into the dark.

He would be fine. There was absolutely no reason he wouldn’t be.

Close to twelve thousand car-occupant casualties in London this year. Five thousand pedestrians, four and a half thousand cyclists. About twenty-three percent of our trauma calls were knife- or gun-related. Last week alone, I responded to six stabbings, one requiring a prehospital thoracotomy, and two shootings, though the first had been a hoax.

But he would be fine. And even if he wasn’t, I would have no way of knowing. We were strangers.

---