Catching Kit

by Kay Berrisford

  She was right. It wasn’t just his job on the line. Laura didn’t deserve this stress. “Okay. I’ll get him to the van now.”

  “Thank you.” She sighed. “Just don’t feel sorry for it. It’s an EB, Denny. Think of Jen. You won’t get any redundancy pay or references if you’re fired. Use the restraints. Don’t let yourself be screwed.”

  When the line fell dead, Denny’s hands shook. The very notion of taking Kit to the depot made him feel sick. He’d fucked the guy—no, the elf.

  The EB.

  He needed a moment to gather himself.

  The gas fire remained on, guzzling energy from when he’d used it to warm up Kit. The Christmas tree lights blazed too. He rose to switch both off, then opened his drinks cabinet and reached for a bottle of single malt whisky, which Henry had given him at his last birthday.

  Oh God. Henry. His warning about unsound EB policies was the last thing Denny needed to worry about now. And what the hell was he doing considering self-medicating with alcohol? He had to drive to Croydon. A drop mustn’t pass his lips, or he’d be breaking yet more rules and regulations.

  He went out to check the van and to retrieve the handcuffs and some leg irons, placing both in a plain canvas bag. The icy slap of the air helped him focus his mind and face grim realities. How could he have gambled his life?

  He refused to think of Kit’s smile or his arse or those stories he'd spun. Above all, Denny turned his heart blank to that moment during sex when their souls had seemed to touch. EBs had no souls. No bond with one could be real.

  He wouldn’t let himself be screwed. Not again.

  Chapter Five

  Denny held the canvas bag tight against his belly and peeped into the bedroom.

  To his relief, the elf hadn’t moved. Kit pressed his cheek against the pillow, tangling his fingers in his hair. He’d buttoned his shirt completely, but the lower part of his body remained bare. His cock hung soft against his thigh, the tip brushing the black bedding. Denny opened the door wide.

  “Where’ve you been?” asked Kit.

  “Getting some stuff.”

  The elf furrowed his brows. “What sort of stuff?”

  Lingering just inside the room, Denny mustered a wolfish grin. The air tasted thick with sweat and sex, and nausea rolled through him. He’d tried to play by the rules, to be fair to Kit. The elf had bested him every time, tweaking his nipples or forcing mulled wine into his hands. Restraining Kit through pretending it was a sex game felt like a shitty thing to do, but what choice remained?

  “I’ve brought some toys,” said Denny.

  “I love toys. What you got?” The elf pushed himself up onto his elbows, his tense expression melting into a keen smile.

  So far, so good. He’d worried Kit would read his mind and know what was going on as soon as he came through the door. “It’s a surprise. Shut your eyes and promise me you won’t open them.”

  Kit rolled onto his back, letting his eyes loll shut. Denny advanced toward the bed, struggling to keep his tone playful. “If you do, I’ve got a blindfold.”

  “Use it.” Kit’s voice turned urgent, breathy. His golden lashes fluttered.

  Denny swallowed hard. He didn’t have a blindfold among his work gear, but he had one stowed in a drawer along with a pair of furry handcuffs that would be staying firmly put. He put the bag down and retrieved it quickly. When he turned back to the bed, Kit’s eyes remained closed. He’d curved his lips in a perfect cupid’s bow, and his dick had stiffened slightly.

  Denny silently cursed. He’d resigned himself to trickery but had not intended to turn Kit on again. It made him feel like a predator and a total jerk. Reaching the side of the bed, he drew a broken breath.

  Kit lifted his head obediently, and Denny slid the blindfold on. A black PVC version of the kind one got on airplanes, the blindfold had a shiny blood red lining that always made Denny think of vampire role-play. As he pulled the elastic band round the back of Kit’s hair, Denny brushed the tip of one of his pointed ears. This time the sight didn’t salve his conscience.

  The elf whistled. “Feels good.”

  The curving blindfold nestled along the high ridge of his crystal-cut cheekbones, rendering his skin very pale. He drew his tongue slowly across his lower lip, where a hidden nerve flickered.

  In different circumstances, Denny would have been unable to resist endless kinky fun with him. But right then, Kit didn’t look cute or sexy. He appeared horribly vulnerable and didn’t seem to suspect a thing.

  Denny retrieved the leg irons from the bag, self-loathing jarring his innards. He moved back to the bed slowly as a snail, so the chains wouldn’t chink and betray themselves as real. There was no fluffy tiger-fur trim on these.

  He touched Kit just above his knee. Kit jolted, and Denny realized his fingers were freezing cold from being outside. He must have shocked the elf, as if Denny had pressed an ice cube to him. Gently he parted Kit’s thighs. Then he closed his hand about Kit’s right calf. Kit flinched again and opened his lips in a silent gasp. Denny placed the thick cuffs about one ankle and then the other, turned the key in each, and edged away.

  “Oooh.” Kit widened the gap between his ankles until the chain dividing them pulled taut, about a foot and a half long. He laughed shakily. Denny reached to squeeze his arm, to reassure him. Kit’s cock was nearly full-on hard again.

  Denny closed his eyes and found the dark as comfortless as the light. What had possessed him to think this could be a good idea? There was a reason he played by the rules. He was a decent man; at least he’d been one until today.

  “Just a game, Kit.”

  He sidled up the bed. Picking up one of the elf’s wrists, he locked a cuff about it. When he let him go, Kit’s arm flopped back onto the pillow with a light thud.

  “It’s really heavy.” Kit’s blindfold twitched, suggesting his eyes flew open beneath. “These are toys?”

  “Yeah.” Denny slammed on the other cuff, turned the key, and dropped Kit’s wrist above his head. The elf couldn’t fight back now. Denny just had to get him to the van, but the prospect afforded no relief.

  Kit appeared to be working it out, finally reading his mind, or… Hell, it didn’t matter anymore. Sitting up suddenly, Kit shook the chains and then twisted to clang them against the cast-iron bedstead.

  “These are the ones you put on me earlier. I remember. They dragged; they were heavy. You…you bastard.” His voice grew metallic in its resonance. “After everything…after… We had sex, and you’re still taking me in?”

  “Shhh, not so loud.”

  Denny dragged him down the bed so he couldn’t make so much noise near the wall. He gripped Kit’s shoulders and leaned toward him, eking rasped words from a constricted throat. “Calm down.”

  “No. Damn you.” Kit raised his linked hands to rip off the blindfold, the anger in his eyes diminished only by the glitter of fear. He tried to get up. Denny pressed him down again, and Kit ended up sitting awkwardly with his legs tangled in front of him, steadying himself lest he tumble from the bed.

  He thudded the side of a fist against Denny’s chest but saved his venom for his breathless words. “Fuck! We’re perfect together. How can you be so blind?”

  “I’m sorry. I know what you’re doing.” Holding Kit at arm’s length, he stared above him at the wall and recited facts he’d learned in his training, as if they were a script. “You’re leeching my mind, my desires. You’re a parasite.”

  “When we made love, did you honestly believe that? You fucked me, and that’s all you thought I was? A parasite?”

  No. It hadn’t felt that way. Little by little, doubt whittled his resolve. Getting rid of Kit hardly seemed an easy plan when talking to Laura, but now that they were close again, it proved impossible.

  His knowledge of Kit’s body as his lover made this deeply wrong.

  “Say something.” Kit sounded like he wanted to spit. “At least look at me.”

  He relinquished his bruising hold and
sat down beside him, fixating on the patch of gray carpet where the discarded condom wrapper had come to rest.

  “I’m scared,” said Kit, quietly now. “No elf ever comes back when the government gets them. I learned about it in the sixties, when we went on the marches.”

  Denny squeezed the bridge of his nose. Recalling Henry’s warning note did not help. The government put elves in humane storage facilities. That was what he’d been told, and he had to cling to that knowledge now.

  “Don’t do this. Don’t keep making this stuff up. It’s not fair.”

  “Not fair? I’m only thirty-seven. That’s no age for it all to end.”

  The elf was contradicting himself, which helped, didn’t it? “Earlier you told me you were about in the time of Shakespeare, in the Blitz, and now the sixties. If you’re thirty-seven, you’re not even old enough to have been a flower child, mate. Stop lying.”

  “I’m not. For what it’s worth, I’ve been alive since the time of the Crusades, on and off. In nearly a thousand years, thirty-seven is all I’ve had.”

  “You what?” Denny examined him sidelong. Kit set his every muscle rigid, his cheeks dark hollows. He looked gaunt, careworn.

  Like a thirty-seven-year-old who’d been told his time had run out too soon.

  “No elf taken by the government has ever come back,” said Kit. “Not in the same life, not ever.”

  “So…you think they destroy you at the depot? That’s not true. They look after you, mate, till you fade.”

  What a horrible notion. This guy he’d made love to, wasting away.

  “I don’t know. I’ve heard rumors they do something that means you can’t come back, but I haven’t a notion what. It takes a lot to destroy an elf for good. Usually after I fade, a few years will pass, maybe a few decades, even a century. I’ll rematerialize somewhere, and it all begins again. I make friends, and I become more and more real. I start to breathe properly; my blood flows. I get close to somebody. I grow strong, more human. And then they see things that scare them, the signs I’m…different, and…then the rejection comes. It’s the lovers that finish me every time.”

  A few hours ago, Denny could have believed this was rubbish. Now the words merely bewildered him. That distant glaze returned to Kit’s eyes, and it felt impossible to believe those memories—damn it, that pain—were all a lie. Kit had been great in bed. He seemed experienced, more so than Denny. And something had passed between them, an understanding of each other’s needs that eclipsed any of his long-term relationships.

  His bedside clock ticked loudly. Kit shivered. “I’ve been accused of being a witch, a devil, a fairy. In this day and age, you’ve decided on vermin and mutants, emotional leeches and mind invaders. You’ve not come a long way in nearly a thousand years, although at least you’re not trying to burn me at the stake. That was almost… Oh heavens.” He shuddered again, more violently.

  “Sorry,” said Denny. His insides went numb, his mind blank. He squeezed Kit’s arm. Denny’s palm grew hot now, and the elf had turned cold. “I’m sorry people have hurt you.”

  “It’s okay. That wasn’t your fault.”

  The second hand on the clock struck forward three more times, and then Kit leaned into him, his shoulder brushing Denny’s bicep. Denny started, but then they shifted as one. Soon Kit’s back rested against Denny chest, his knees pulled up in front of him, his head against Denny’s shoulder. Denny folded an arm across the front of Kit’s body. He could feel the elf’s breaths coming fast and ragged.

  “It’s not your fault,” repeated Kit. “But please don’t turn me in. We could be good together.”

  “It’s impossible.” Denny’s words contradicted the murmur in his soul. Yes, we could.

  “It’s not impossible. I like you, you like me, and we both like things a little…kinky. When I looked in your drawer, I nearly expired with joy. Most men just want to push me around, but you’re different. The thought of a gorgeous great bloke like you wearing suspenders and a corset… I…I want to see you in it all.”

  Denny, possibly the least confident cross-dresser in history, bit his lip to the point of pain. His women’s underwear had only ever been put on for the benefit of his mirror. “Kit, you say this, and it’s all too perfect. How do I know that—”

  “I can’t leech your mind! Honestly! I fiddled with that condom because I thought it would please you, although I didn’t need it, and now I wish I hadn’t bloody well bothered. Yes, I need human contact, but does seeking that make me so bad? Or so different? All you fools ever do is write songs about how much you need love.” Kit jolted out of his arms, slamming his hands against his knees in frustration. Denny jumped up, and the true awfulness of the chains dangling from Kit’s wrists struck him like a ten-ton truck.

  He’d trussed Kit up like a condemned man. What was more, he’d been idiot enough to put the leg irons on the elf while he remained sans trousers. Kit’s white shirt barely covered his modesty. The thought of dragging him to the van half-naked and chained set Denny’s skin crawling with shame.

  The prospect of taking him fully dressed was nearly as bad. Was that what a good dad did for a living? Was this the action of a decent man, whatever Kit was? He drew his hand across his eyes.

  “This is me speaking,” said Kit, staring to his lap. “I love big men who dress glam, I always have, and I want to share and play and love, with you. I get you. At least I thought I did.” His voice petered off until it became little more than a croak. “It’s such a shame you find my body as repulsive as the rest of them did.”

  “Nothing about you is repulsive.”

  It was the truth. Denny hated how he’d reacted earlier when he’d touched Kit’s belly, but the problems the elf presented still loomed insurmountable.

  The silence between them escalated. Denny lowered himself to his knees and unlocked the cuffs at Kit’s ankles and then his wrists. Without meeting Kit’s gaze—he just couldn’t take it—he rose and turned away, putting the restraints down on his bedside cabinet.

  Yet hope flourished. He’d thought of a way of testing the truth of one of Kit’s claims.

  “The front door’s on its latch,” he told him. “You can walk away right now. Or you can stay the night and go in the morning. I’m going in the bathroom…to get dressed.”

  Kit rubbed his wrists, his face a blank mask. “Thank you.”

  Denny took a few items from his drawer, some shoes from the bottom of his wardrobe, and left the room. In his heart, he said a silent prayer.

  It would be easiest if the elf left.

  His every sinew ached for Kit to stay and prove he really did desire a tall, shy transvestite.

  In the privacy of his bathroom, Denny stripped and then splashed water on his face. Blinking into the little round mirror above the sink, he rubbed his cheeks and squared his jaw. The makeup would look best if he shaved, but he didn’t have time. He dared not hesitate long enough to think too hard about anything beyond his soothing ritual of cross-dressing.

  Under the merciless fluorescent strip light, he dragged black eyeliner about his narrowed silver-blue eyes, hoping it drew attention from the shadows beneath. He smudged a little cherry gloss on his lips. It tasted cheap and saccharine sweet.

  He thought he heard a soft creak from the bedroom and turned so sharply he knocked the bony part of his wrist against the porcelain of the sink. He hissed in pain. Were those Kit’s footsteps? Had he left already?

  Denny tried to feel relieved, but he couldn’t help clinging to a wisp of hope that Kit had told the truth. That Kit might truly wish to see him like this.

  Breathing ever faster, he pulled on a pair of panties with ruffled scarlet silk at the front, dragging them up his long legs until they nestled over his groin. At the back, a thin thread lifted and separated his angular buttocks. He recalled when this underwear first arrived in the mail. He’d put the panties on late one night after work, admiring the glossy fabric cutting across the hard planes of his body.

&nbs
p; Back then, he’d hoped they’d make him feel like a million dollars. But while he’d been wonderfully horny and relaxed when he first admired himself, he’d felt weird and desolate after removing them, retreating to an empty bed. Any minute now, if Kit had left, he might experience that loneliness a hundred times worse.

  No. Don’t be an idiot. Just relax and enjoy this alone.

  He pulled his black corset tight and fastened its little silver hooks at the front. The fit snug, he sucked his breath in to do it up beneath his ribs. He grimaced as he fixed its top, a shallow V shape across his chest.

  His glance in the mirror ignited the glimmer of a smile. The steel bones—and his solitary health routines—had worked their magic. A series of red cords ran vertically down the stays, emphasizing the trimness of his waist and his taut stomach. His pectorals formed hard cleavage, and his upper arms were buff, in proportion with his chest. He looked good, and he felt sexy.

  His nerves waned a little. Transvestism always did wonders for his stress levels, and the faintest prospect of Kit admiring him like this made his dick throb against the silk.

  Quickly now, he pulled on some red and black garters that matched the panties, and rolled a sleek black stocking up each sinewy leg. He hitched them together and then slipped on his patent-leather shoes, rising up onto their thin two-inch heels.

  He tottered out of the bathroom before his misgivings could return. As he pushed the bedroom door open, he held his breath, and not just because of the tightness of the corset.

  Kit remained on the bed.

  On seeing Denny, he sat up sharply. His gasp drew his fingers to his lips, and light leaped in his eyes. “You look…amazing.” He shook his head, wistful.

  He stayed. Oh God, he stayed.

  Suddenly clueless about what to do, Denny ducked under the doorframe, then struck a self-conscious pose, pursing his lips and thrusting out his hips.

  Kit laughed. “You need some practice at that. I’ll show you how to strut your stuff. Tomorrow, maybe.” Before the blood had rushed halfway across Denny’s cheeks, the elf stretched his arm toward him. His expression turned serious, deadly seductive. “Come here, gorgeous.”