Ashes Of Memory

by Aiden Bates

  “More specific,” I told him. “What’s mine, Tam?”

  “My cock,” he barked. “Fuck… it’s your cock, sir. You can… y-you can do whatever you want with it because it’s yours.”

  I went on a little longer, just to make the point, before I let up. He collapsed like he might just melt into the bed. “That’s a good boy,” I said, patting him on the belly before I crawled onto the bed and straddled him. I braced myself on both hands above him, and searched his face and thoughts for any sign that he was getting tired of the game.

  He wasn’t. If anything, he was more deeply into it than he had been before. There was real devotion there, filling the undercurrent of his thoughts. “Do you mean that?”

  He blinked through tears to look up at me, and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he breathed. “I… I want you to own me. Own all of me, Vance. My body, my mind, my soul. If you asked me, I’d be yours. You could keep me as a pet.”

  There were hints of the game in his words and the thoughts behind them. Longing, too—for something he knew he couldn’t really have. There were too many responsibilities on his shoulders. Second in line to leadership at Blackstone meant that he would never have the luxury of just giving himself away. Maybe that’s what made the fantasy so attractive.

  I kissed him, slow and soft, exploring the taste of him as he lifted his head to let me. When I was done there, I moved to his eyes to kiss away the salt of his already drying tears, then trail kisses along his brow, down his cheek. He sighed, and moved against me, his hips thrusting to slide his cock along the part of my ass cheeks, grazing my hole.

  “Fuck me,” I told him, pushing his mind to comply. “Go slow. Make me come, like before.”

  He gave a slow nod, and reached behind me to grip his cock and angle it as I sat up to position myself in kind. He held it steady, one hand on his cock, the other on my hip, as I sank down onto it. Like the last time, my body opened for him with only a little pinch of pain that quickly vanished as he filled me.

  There was nothing like being impaled on Tam’s cock. His body was hotter than a human's, by about ten degrees, for a start. But for another, maybe a century of life meant he had enough experience to know exactly how to treat an ass. His cock pressed against my prostate, glided past it, and as his hips moved, he managed to massage just the right spot inside me to make me insane with pleasure.

  I rolled my head back and let out a guttural, undignified sort of sound as my fingers dug into his chest. His knot pressed against my hole, marking the limit of how deep he could get. I wasn’t a dragon, or any kind of shifter—trying to force his knot inside me was asking for an injury. He never managed to get all the way inside before it came out.

  But then again…

  I reached behind me and stroked his knot with my fingertips, and looked down at him. “I want your knot,” I groaned.

  “I… it’ll hurt,” he said. “You’re too tight.”

  “Not if it goes down first,” I teased. “Unswell your knot, Tam.”

  He frowned, even with the compulsion working in his mind. “I can’t just—oh… shit.”

  Under my fingers, his knot flagged, softening until it deflated completely. Tam blinked in surprise. “How…?”

  “It’s all just nerves,” I said, and sank down until he was all the way inside, and I could feel his balls pressed against me. I leaned over, and tangled my fingers in his hair as I kissed him, and whispered into his mouth. “Knot me, pet.”

  Tam gasped as his knot swelled inside me. I flinched from the sudden press of it against my prostate and the electric buzz of pleasure that it sent coursing along my nerves. It made every muscle in my body go stiff.

  It had an unexpected effect on Tam, too.

  His eyes went wide, and his mouth opened. He gasped for air as his hips practically vibrated with the need to fuck me faster. The compulsion in his mind kept him from speeding up, but his thrusts were shorter, sharper. His brow knit. “You… Vance, you have to let me… I have to come, please…”

  I grinned, and bit his chin teasingly as I clenched around the base of his knot. “Oh, do you?”

  He crushed me to him, his powerful arms wrapping around me as he fucked with desperation. Pleasure rippled through me with each graze of his knot, and I finally understood why the shifter couples I knew were so fucking horny all the time. In another minute I was clawing at Tam’s shoulders, crying out against his neck as he muttered and whimpered and begged for me to release him.

  “It hurts,” he whined. “My balls… my knot… please, Vance, I have to come, please let me come, sir, please, please…”

  “I’m close,” I gasped. “Just keep going, Tam, just like that. Keep going.”

  His knot drove against my gland, and my cock twitched between us, rubbing against the rough hair of his belly, slicked with precum and sweat, but he held me so tight that it was the barest kind of grinding, hardly moving. It was enough, though, and while he held me breathless in his arms and hammered slowly at my ass, I finally felt a tidal surge of orgasm reach a peak and come crashing down on me.

  My ass clenched, pulsing in time with each explosion of seed between us. I clutched at Tam’s shoulders and chest, and he howled as my contractions tugged and squeezed his knot. Orgasm struck all my inner barriers, melting them away, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if I was me or him. I felt the keen frustration in his mind like it was my own, and sensed the painful pleasure of being trapped inside me, unable to release. A war went on inside his body, between nature and magic, confusion mixing with pleasure—it was remarkable that it didn’t drive him mad. It almost had.

  I pressed my mind against his, unable to speak while I came. Come now, Tam, I commanded.

  He gave a sharp cry of relief. “Thank you,” he wailed, and his cock burst inside me, flooding me with hot seed. So tangled up with his mind, I felt his orgasm slam against me, hitting my nerves with as much force as it hit his, and we came together, blending dangerously into one another with a flood of pleasure and emotion and memory and—

  “Vance,” he cried, more serious now, it seemed. “Vance… Vance!”

  The world lurched. I grunted, and in a moment of confusion realized that his room was gone, the bed under us flying along a dark landscape. Panic gripped me, and I tried to hold onto him, but suddenly he was gone and I was clutching a bag and somewhere else.

  A flash of fading orgasm left me confused and exhausted, even as my heart pounded in my chest and adrenaline made me momentarily unable to match my surroundings with reality. I blinked through the flashing stars in my vision and looked frantically around the enclosure—a car—to find Tam there with me, in the driver’s seat, breathing hard as he gripped my shoulder with one hand. “Fuck, Vance, wake up!”

  Reality snapped back around me.

  Dreaming. I’d been dreaming… but I hadn’t realized it. I always knew when I was dreaming. I pushed Tam’s hand away. “What…?”

  His hand was shaking as he replaced it on the steering wheel, where it joined the other in a white-knuckle grip. He licked his lips, and cleared his throat. “You ah… you… were dreaming. Loudly.”

  I reached up to wipe the sting of sweat out of my eyes, and then realized that there was a cooling wetness in my pants. Heat flushed through my cheeks, and I pulled the bag down to my lap, but knew there was no way that Tam didn’t smell the fact that I’d had a wet dream. “I… sorry, it must be some leftover… from before, sometimes my dreams are intense.”

  “Tell me about it,” he muttered. “There’s a gas station at the next exit. We should stop and change.”

  I wanted to shrink into the seat. He did know, of course. I started to apologize again, but caught what he’d said. “Er… ‘we’?”

  He glanced over at me, then put the car in drive and pulled away from the side of the highway. “Like I said,” he murmured, “it was very loud.”

  7

  Tam

  One moment, I was speeding up I-20 on my way to 92, listening to the slow,
even breathing of Vance in the passenger seat. The next, I couldn’t stop thinking about the first time I’d let him take control of me.

  I had reached down to adjust myself, and tried to think of other things, something to get my cock soft. But the thoughts became more insistent. Then Vance began to groan, and moan. Then my pulse was racing, and the world seemed to blink, taking me suddenly right back to that night for just a second—just long enough to disorient me.

  I knew, then, that I wasn’t just reminiscing. Vance’s mind was opening up, pouring into the area, bleeding into mine like it had before. I slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the road, but by the time I stopped the car, whatever Vance was dreaming had me in its grip. I saw him on top of me. Felt his body clenched around my knot as if it were happening again. My throat was raw from begging him, my heart swollen with the first taste I ever got of handing someone control so freely, of being momentarily nothing more than my essential self. The smell of Vance surrounded me, crushed my will, the taste of him drugged me, the feel of his mind gripping my thoughts was like being swaddled and safe and frustrated in the most pleasurable way imaginable.

  And then my cock filled the leg of my jeans, my knot flared, and I gushed cum along my leg. Just like that night, it wouldn’t stop. I could hear Vance’s voice in my head, telling me to keep going, keep coming, keep emptying myself, on a loop. Torn between an imaginary world and the real one, I reached out blindly to find him and gripped his shoulder, shouted his name, trying to wake him.

  And then, all at once, it stopped. That other world from his mind winked out of existence. I sensed a brief flash of confusion before he managed to put whatever wall he needed to in place to contain his mind.

  The musk of cum was probably eased for him when I rolled the windows down, but for me it was an ever-present scent that followed us to the next exit and to the gas station. We rode in silence. Probably, Vance was just as mortified as I was about what had happened. For my part, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, and wasn’t even ready to process it.

  We pulled into the gas station, and he left the car with a muttered, “I’ll be quick,” before vanishing around the back of the building where a sign pointed toward the bathrooms.

  I wasn’t about to go into the gas station in this state. I waited until Vance was finished, then went to the trunk to collect my bag and go get changed. My cock was still half hard and sore when I peeled my jeans and boxers off and cleaned myself up. I was shaking as I did.

  Once I was as cleaned up as I could manage, I pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and leaned on the edge of the sink for a moment and watched myself in the mirror. I had revisited that memory so many times. The first time I’d let someone take over. The first time I had indulged some part of me that craved submission. We had switched over the year we were together, a few times. And it had been shortly after that night when Vance suggested that he would keep his mind open to me all the time. “Just so you always know how I feel,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t just tell you but… I know what we did was a big deal. That it required a lot of trust. So this is just a way for you to always know that you can trust me.”

  It had seemed like an odd suggestion to me at the time. It wasn’t like I didn’t trust him, especially after that. It wasn’t until later that I realized it wasn’t about me. It was about him.

  Espers spend their entire lives closed off from other people. More so than even mortals. There are a million little ways in which people are psychically connected without ever realizing it. An esper is just capable of using that connection on purpose, strengthening an inherent skill with magic. All mages are like that, for that matter. The only difference between a necromancer and anyone else is that a necromancer can see a ghost on purpose.

  For Vance to offer me that—an unedited, open, vulnerable connection to his mind—meant that he could finally just be. I had wanted him to take control of me so that I didn’t have to be the second son of Blackstone; he wanted to open up to me so that he wouldn’t be Vance the Esper Mage. He could just be Vance. I could just be Tam. More honestly than either of us had ever been allowed to be.

  It ached. The memory of him, of what we had, even of the games we played in bedrooms or camping out, or pretty much in any place where we wouldn’t be seen—except the one time we had a witness on purpose—hurt, now that I knew it was forever in the past.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, and washed my face before I gathered my bag and returned to Vance. There was no time for moping around.

  When I got back to the car, changed and at least partially free of the smell—I would need an actual shower, with soap, before my nose couldn’t detect it—Vance was staring ahead, stiff and quiet.

  I sighed, and rubbed my jaw, trying to think of what I could say that would lessen the awkwardness. “Uh… it happens,” I said, and regretted that choice immediately. This wasn’t a teenage wet-dream scenario, and I wasn’t Vance’s father. “That is—look, it’s no big deal—”

  “It is,” Vance said softly. He bowed his head, and put his face in his hands for a moment before he rubbed his eyes and then folded his arms tight over his chest. He didn’t look at me. “I don’t even know what to… I’m so sorry, Tam. It was an accident. I would never do—I don’t even know where that came from, I promise I wasn’t thinking about that before, I wasn’t fantasizing about you while I was trying to find Baz or anything, you have to believe me.”

  Shit. Of course; he didn’t remember. I reached out and put a hand gently on his arm. “I know,” I told him. “That, uh… that dream, or memory, or whatever, was from me. Or us, maybe.”

  He blanched, and cringed away from my hand. “Oh… my… gods—y-you saw that?”

  I withdrew and turned back to the steering wheel. “Yeah. But it’s okay. It’s not like it didn’t happen, or anything.”

  “So we really did that?” he asked. He peered at me, finally working up the nerve to look in my direction. “Like, all of it?”

  I cranked the car and pulled out of the parking spot. “We did. It was fun. I never regretted it. So don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but… I don’t remember. Or, I didn’t, anyway. I’m not sure I do now, either.”

  I made the turn back onto the road to the highway. “I know, Vance. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “I mean, yes; you’re okay with me having made all that... happen. The specific memory, I mean. But what if I had dreamed about something worse? Something dangerous. That’s never happened before. Projecting dreams in my sleep—I don’t do that. I’m worried something is wrong. Maybe Mikhail was right.”

  That made the pit of my stomach cold. I wasn’t certain I could find Baz on my own. Still, if Vance changed his mind… that was his right. “If you want,” I said, “I can let you take the car back. I’ll take wing, keep going the direction you said—”

  “No,” he said, miserable. “I can’t just abandon you. I just don’t know what else might pop up that I wasn’t expecting. Maybe it’s a side effect from before.”

  “Could be,” I agreed. But maybe it was something else.

  Vance shifted in his seat, pulling one knee up to his chest. “Could be?” he asked.

  I shrugged one shoulder, unsure whether I should tell him anything that might cause a problem. “We’ve got history,” I said. “Maybe it’s just… leftovers. I’m not too worried about it. Honestly. It’s not like it was unpleasant, after all. Next time you need to sleep, though, maybe we should stop at a motel or something. Just so I don’t crash us in case it happens again.”

  He was pensive for a time after that, right up until I made the turn for I-92. I tried to keep my attention on the drive, and on why we were driving. Vance seemed to space out—maybe looking for Baz’s trail again, or maybe just wallowing in embarrassment. I wished that I could find out which it was, and maybe alleviate the latter if it was that, but to do that I might have to tell him more than was safe.

  “It’s dangerous,” h
e said finally, almost an hour later. “Using compulsion on someone, I mean. I shouldn’t have done it, if I did.”

  The break in the silence was so sudden, and I’d been so focused on driving, that I almost didn’t realize he’d spoken. “Huh?”

  He glanced up at me. “Controlling a person’s mind,” he said, as if I hadn’t understood what compulsion was. “It’s dangerous. And it’s illegal. Did I… I didn’t make a habit of it, did I?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, thinking of all the other times we’d played that particular game, thought better of it, and shook my head dismissively instead. “I don’t think we should talk about it. But you never did it against my will, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it at all,” he said. “That person in the dream—I don’t know that person. I can’t imagine ever agreeing to violate someone’s mind, even if they wanted me to. If the cabals ever found out…”

  He didn’t know that person. Vance. My Vance, before I got him hurt. It made an empty pit that had never really been filled since I lost him seem to open wider, reminding me it was there. “They won’t,” I assured him, doing my best to keep any emotions from getting into my voice or out of my head. “But you saw, didn’t you? That I wanted it? That it gave me something. Something I haven’t gotten since.”

  When he didn’t respond, I looked over to see him peering at me as if trying to figure out who I was, his brow pinched.

  “What?” I asked.

  He looked away, hugging his leg, and rested his chin on his knee as he gazed out the windshield. “I just can’t imagine trusting anyone that much,” he said quietly, “or having that kind of trust from someone else.”

  That made a knot tighten in my throat. I swallowed past it and gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I’m sure you will,” I said. “One day. When you find the right person.”