“Ryan.” He takes a drink.
“Mr. Blount.”
We share a quiet moment together, just watching the snow come down and the laden trees creak in the wind. Then he says, abruptly, “Your President. Did you love him?”
There’s no sense in lying. “Yes.”
His fingers tighten around the glass. “Were you lovers?”
“No. Why are you asking?”
“Because, Ryan Belvedere, I want to know what I’m up against.”
Shock and hope thud through my bloodstream; I have to swallow before I speak. “What you’re up against?”
Sidney takes a step forward, close enough that I can see the reflection of the firelight glinting in his eyes. “Yes,” he says quietly. “Am I competing with the hero you gave your body to, or only your heart? Have I lost the chance to try for you before I’ve even met you?”
I don’t think I can breathe. “Mr. Blount…”
Another step forward. “You didn’t shave today,” he murmurs. “It makes me want to touch your jaw. Is that a problem?”
And I finally get it, finally get that when he asks is this a problem, he’s actually asking if it’s okay, he’s asking if he can.
He’s asking for consent.
That realization sends a hot frisson of need right to my dick. “It’s not a problem,” I say hoarsely.
And he touches my jaw.
His fingers are warm and probing over my stubbled skin, and his stare is so intense that I can barely endure it. He traces along the bone from my ear to my chin, and then he takes my chin between his fingers, searching my face.
“So you weren’t lovers?”
“I never slept with the President, no.”
Sidney hears the subtext in my carefully chosen words, and his mouth flattens. “What does that mean?”
“He sent me to his former Vice President. As a . . . gift. Only once.”
“Hmm. Did you love the Vice President too?”
For the first time, I’m able to say it out loud. “Yes. I loved him. And I loved Ash. I loved his wife too. I loved them all, I wanted to be with them all.”
“And now? Do you pine for Embry Moore and Greer Colchester even as you grieve for your President?”
I take a deep breath, staring into Sidney’s firelight eyes, feeling his warm fingers gripping me. It feels safe. It feels beautiful.
Beautiful enough to let go of something I’ve held onto for too long. “No,” I say. “I don’t pine for them. And Ash—I grieve and I mourn, but maybe I can . . .”
I trail off. I don’t know what words I want, I don’t know what words I mean. How can I explain that I’ll always mourn Ash, but that right here—tonight, with the snow swirling and the firelight flickering in this cathedral of books, tonight with Sidney’s cruel mouth and conqueror’s eyes—I’m ready to set the mourning aside? That I’m willing to consider something new?
Someone new?
Sidney’s fingers tighten once and then he releases my chin. So he can take my hand.
It’s such a simple touch. The warmth of fingers interlacing and palms pressing in a cold room. And yet because it’s him, because it’s this sharp-edged ice god touching me, I feel his touch everywhere. Skating over the furrow of my spine and teasing at the creases of my knees and thighs. Brushing over my nipples and ghosting over secret places no one’s touched in months and months.
My cock, which was gradually stirring in his presence, is now so hard that I know he’ll be able to tell if he looks down, even in the dim room.
“I want to be the one, Ryan,” he says in that crisp, elegant voice of his. “The one you begin to try with, and the one you open up to. I want you to be mine, like you were his.”
My heart is hammering so hard that I feel like everyone in the room must be able to hear it, even as my brain tumbles over and over trying to parse his words. “You want me to be yours, like I was his,” I repeat slowly.
What does that even mean? He wants me to be his aide? He’s offering a job? Or he wants me to love him and serve him, but not share my body?
Sidney bends his head slightly so that our eyes meet again. “Do you understand what I’m asking?”
“No, Mr. Blount.” If he wants to hire me, then why hold my hand? If he wants me to serve him like I served Ash, then why are his eyes dropping to my mouth even now, as if he’s already making plans for it?
He blows out a breath. “I’ve phrased this badly. I shouldn’t have brought his memory into it—but I couldn’t help it. I’m jealous of him.” His mouth twists at the corner with irony. “I’m jealous of a dead man. I’m jealous of how faithful you are to his memory when you didn’t even fuck, and I’m jealous that he had the use of your body at all, even if it was only to give it to someone else. I want that right. I want that faithfulness.”
Our hands are still held tight, and he puts his glass to his mouth with his other hand, taking a sip of scotch. I’m about to do the same with mine, just to do anything, perform any gesture that makes this surreal moment real, but he shakes his head and lifts his drink to my lips instead. The glass is cool, the whisky rich, and when I part my lips to accept it, his eyes darken with pleasure.
It’s so erotic to be fed like this, given something from a powerful man’s glass and at his hand, and it’s so sexy that I don’t even care that we’re not shrouded from view, that Auden and Cremer could look over here at any time and see us holding hands, see us sharing this moment.
Sidney doesn’t seem to care either, because when I finish drinking, he lowers the glass to the stone windowsill and then uses a thumb to wipe the wet trace of whisky from my lips. And then he puts his thumb to his own mouth and licks it off.
I nearly slump against the window.
“I don’t want you to be my aide,” he says, giving his thumb a final dart with his tongue. “I don’t need a servant, and I don’t want you to be either of those things for me, at least not in the way that you have been in the past. When you serve me, when you act as my squire, it will be a choice and a game we play. I want to be your master and your only king, I want you to belong in my keeping, I want to fuck you and to care for you and to learn about you and share your time and your body and maybe your heart after enough time has passed. Is that a problem?”
Which means can I?
He can. If he’s asking what I think he’s asking.
“It’s only been two days,” I say, as I consider what I really want to say. What I really want to ask.
“I don’t need longer,” he says with an arrogant lift of his head. “I want you.”
“And do you have anybody else in your keeping?”
“Do you think I’d be spending my Christmas sorting through art provenance papers if I did?”
“Why isn’t there anyone else, then?”
He lets out a long breath. “Because I’m cruel and I’m cold, and sometimes I like to make the people I love cry. Any other questions?”
“Yes,” I say. “We haven’t put a name to this . . . we haven’t said the words. But I’ve only ever done this before in a formal setting.”
“In a club, you mean.”
“Right. I’ve never done this in real life. I’ve never had a Dominant who was mine for more than a session, I’ve never had a man who wanted my heart and my pain.”
Sidney’s eyes look impossibly tender. “Never? You are so young.”
“And you’re not,” I say. “You’ve done this before? You know how it works?”
“You mean, have I had men that I took to the movies and out to dinner and that I also flogged and humiliated? Yes.”
Now I think I’m a little jealous. How ridiculous that we should be jealous of each other’s pasts when we’ve known each other for less than forty-eight hours, and yet . . . I can’t lie to myself. The jealousy is invigorating, it’s potent and intoxicating. It feels like being alive, wanting what I can’t have, wanting total and complete occupation in the heart of a near-stranger.
“You’ll
find that it’s not so different,” Sidney says. “The club and real life. You’ll tell me your limits, and you’ll tell me what gets you hard. You’ll tell me what you desire most and what you’ll do to earn it . . . tell me how far I can go, and tell me what you expect in return. And then we’ll begin.”
“And when I find the book and have to leave?”
His hand tightens on mine, as if he’s already trying to keep me from leaving. “You don’t have to go, you know. Not if you don’t want.”
“Mr. Blount.”
“What has you so eager to return?” he asks. “If there’s not a job or a lover waiting, then why not tarry with me?”
I don’t have a good answer to that. The truth is that after four years of doing nothing but attending to someone else’s needs, I have plenty of savings and no real urgency to find another situation. The lease on my tiny D.C. studio is up next month and I still haven’t decided what to do about it. My life is as shapeless as candle smoke right now.
The interesting thing is that Sidney’s offer makes my candle-smoke life seem like a good thing, an exciting thing, as opposed to the burden it felt just a day ago.
I feel free instead of lost.
“I’d need a place to stay.”
“You could stay with me,” he says, and I know the caution in his voice is because he doesn’t want to spook me. “I have plenty of space, plenty of room.”
“You’d want me to stay with you?”
He tilts his head. “Does that bother you?”
“I don’t know.” The words are uncomfortable in my mouth.
I’m just like everyone else: I grapple with uncertainty, nuance, ambiguity. The only difference is that for the last four years, I wasn’t allowed to say I don’t know, I was always expected to have the answer. Or to find the answer as fast as possible. It feels oddly good to say it again, the initial discomfort disappearing into the soothing power of the words. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to know,” Sidney assures me. “As long as you tell me when you do.”
“And until then?”
“Until then, I want to guide us. I want to lead us. Is that a problem?”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not a problem.”
6
Sidney wants to wait until the next day to start, much to my painful, physical frustration. Every part of it, from holding hands to him licking his thumb for the mingled taste of whisky and my mouth, has me so hard that walking back to my room is uncomfortable, much less showering and trying to sleep.
But like any good sadist, he wants me to choose his cruelty with a clear mind and after a full night’s sleep.
“Anyone might say yes like this,” he told me before we rejoined the others. He gestured to the snow and the fire and the books. “It’s easy to say yes like this.”
Meaning, I suppose, that it’s harder to choose pain and shame while the sun is shining on every crack and flaw in the room. I admire his caution, although I admire it less as I burn alone between my sheets because, of course, his only prohibition as my provisional Dominant was to forbid me to come.
Dammit.
Luckily, the specter of Proserpina Markham, whoever she was, had Auden so agitated last night that he and Cremer seemed wholly unaware of what Sidney and I shared by the window, and when I bump into Auden in the kitchen this morning, he seems distracted and not at all like he suspects I’m going to his library to be spanked by his art surveyor.
“Everything okay?” I ask as I get some water. I’m too nervous for coffee and I’d rather wait to eat until after Sidney’s used my body.
The young master of the house just pulls on his hair a little. “Everything’s fine.” He gives me a forced smile. “I’m fine.”
“Ah. Okay. Let me know if I can help with anything?”
“No one can help,” he murmurs, as if to himself. And then he tries a cheerful change of subject. “Should be a quiet day. Cremer left early to get to London, even though the roads are still terrible, and the weather’s too awful for the renovation work to continue. I’m planning on holing up in my study all day to work, if you need me for anything.”
“And you’re not going back to London for Christmas?”
“My parents are dead,” Auden says bluntly, so bluntly that I almost miss the glimpse of shy pain in his eyes. “And the rest of my life is . . . complicated. I think I’m just going to stay here and go to Mass.”
“Mass?” I say. I didn’t expect to encounter another Catholic out here in the British countryside. “Are you Catholic?”
Another forced smile. “Also complicated.”
“Ah.”
I want to ask him more, I want to ask him about Proserpina Markham and why his life is so complicated, but I also really, really want to be alone with Sidney. So I take my water and take my leave.
The narrow corridor leading to the library is lined with arched windows—one side facing the front of the house and the driveway, and the other facing an inner courtyard with some lonely benches and a fountain. Everything is blanketed in storybook bluffs of snow, thick and white and blinding.
But there’s no storybook prince behind this door. Only a man with a snow-cold heart and a voice like ice.
I can’t wait.
When I push inside, Sidney is predictably already at work. Today he’s in another turtleneck and trousers, but his sleeves are pushed to his forearms and I can see a large watch glint on his wrist. Next to him on the table are a bottle of water and a necktie. And next to those are his leather gloves, their presence both playful and ominous.
“Close the door, Ryan,” Sidney says without looking up from his work. “And put those door wedges against the inside of the doors so they can’t be opened from the outside. Then come here.”
Last night, he came to my bedroom after everyone retired to bed, and he sat in the corner chair and made me answer all kinds of sordid questions. Did I like spanking? Whipping? Bondage? Did I like to crawl and beg? How did I like to be praised? How noisy was I when I came? What were the things I imagined when I jerked off that I didn’t want anybody to ever, ever know about? Could I describe them in better detail? Would I move forward into the light so he could see my ashamed blushes as I did?
We talked for nearly two hours, deciding on the common green-yellow-red system of safe wording, since Sidney admitted that he’s not unaroused by discomfort and protests, and this would allow him to enjoy the occasional plea for mercy while still giving me a way to safe out. And we also decided on an adaptable but mostly full-time arrangement . . . at least for the next couple of days. After spending so many years as a body man, I find the idea of moving from power exchange to normal lover time and back again unnerving. I’d rather stick to the former and then have some grace and flexibility around the edges.
So I already know as I approach him that I’ll be safe, that he won’t demand of me anything I’m not willing to give, and I can be present in the moment. I can be horny and vulnerable and excited and nervous and ready.
I can just be me.
“I’d like to work by the fireplace,” Sidney says once I reach him. He still doesn’t bother to look at me. “Will you carry my work over to the wingback chair?”
He’s uncomfortably beautiful from this angle. His hands, large but sophisticated, look like a lover’s hands. The tip of his strong nose is caught with the morning light while shadows gather in the tiny well in at the top of his upper lip. He’s the kind of beautiful Ash was, the kind Embry and Greer and even Auden Guest are; it’s the kind of beauty that compels devotion not because it’s visually flawless but because it promises untold mysteries beyond itself. The beauty is only a gate, a threshold to a secret inner world only a privileged few ever get to see.
I arrange Sidney’s work into batched piles, which I stack in perpendicular sections so he won’t lose any of the organization he’s done. I can see that he notices this and is pleased by my care, and that has me smiling as I set it all on the table next to the chair
and go back for his pen and iPad.
He’s sitting when I return, his firm lips pressed together in fresh unhappiness. “It’s not as comfortable as I’d hoped.”
“I’ll get you a pillow for your back, Mr. Blount.” Which is ridiculous, since a man as fit as Sidney doesn’t really need a pillow for his back, but it doesn’t matter why I’m moving around the room at his beck and call, only that I am. It’s all part of the game we decided on last night, and it’s almost unnerving how quickly the game relaxes me, even as it arouses me.
The pillow’s fetched, and then Sidney decides he’s too chilled, and makes me light a fire for him. And then he’s thirsty. And then he’s too warm after all and wants me to angle the chair away from the flames.
“I think I’ve finally found the reason I’m not comfortable,” Sidney says after a moment. “I need a footstool. Could you find me one, please?”
Only in Sidney’s voice could politeness sound nothing like politeness. The please only underscores the command that came before it, the slight touch of condescension making it clear that every courteous or genteel moment I have with him is an allowance given only at his pleasure, and I have no right to expect or demand otherwise.
That coolly uttered please is like leather stroking down my back. I want to purr.
Despite the scatter of plush leather and damask seating around the fireplace, the library is quite bereft of anything that would make a decent footstool. The wooden chairs around the long tables would be too high and the coffee table nearby would be too low. And even though I knew where this little play was leading the whole time, I still feel a shiver of foreboding and excitement when I think it’ll have to be me.
I dressed in jeans and a cardigan today, figuring my nerd-casual look would serve the dual purpose of being comfortable and also underscoring the difference in power between me and Sidney in all his restrained polish. I try not to be embarrassed when I again feel the jeans pull tight around my ass and thighs as I get to my knees and lower my head to the ground. I try to remain calm as I curl myself into a serviceable footstool and hear Sidney’s murmur of pleasure.
American Squire Page 3
