He began to move his hips, thrusting his cock inside my mouth. I held my head steady, letting him fuck my head that way while I tried to caress him with my tongue. He fucked me down below as well, with his tongue, while his fingers walked down the taut skin and circled my asshole. I clenched there, nervous and willing.
He pressed one finger against the puckered opening and slid only barely inside. It still felt like too much, too full, enveloped now by his body, swallowing his cock, fucked by his tongue, and invaded at that one forbidden point. Too much, and I bucked against him, making everything worse until it became suddenly better, bursting into a thousand sun-bright rays and drifting back to the shadows that had made me.
He turned, moving over me with stealth and a quickness born of necessity. His body was beautiful in the moonlight, made of some foreign substance, silver and bright. His cock reentered me with his knees on either side of my head, with him facing me.
He looked down at me as he fed me his cock, muttering, “Take it. Fast now. That’s right, good. Yes.”
I opened my mouth and accepted every hot pulsing inch. He was close. I could see it in the jerkiness of his movements and the flare of his nostrils. He was an animal facing death, fight or flight, and for his choice he pressed his hips against my face, rubbing the crinkly hair at the base against my nose. I swallowed around him. It hurt, but I barely noticed in my haze. The world went dim with the loss of breath. Black spots in front of my eyes. Then his cock flexed once, twice, and something liquid and warm slid down my throat. As he pulled back to let me breathe, the last drops of his come trailed over my tongue, sharp and sweet.
The taste of him lingered long after the liquid was gone. His expression was dark and severe, unreadable in the shadows. He didn’t tell me I pleased him, but I knew anyway. I knew from the way he didn’t correct me, and he would have. I knew from the tender way he pulled me into his arms.
Whips and chains seemed suddenly superfluous, so much wrapping around a gift already given. His command and my obedience, both implicit in our actions, too firmly rooted to need words. He didn’t need to bolt me down when I would stay by his side. And if I wouldn’t, if I flitted away, if I betrayed him after all…well, then I had never really been his.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He was flipping through a stack of CDs when I came back into the room. He lifted one. “Do you mind?”
“Why would I?”
He’d already beaten and kidnapped me. His sardonic expression said he understood the subtext of my shrug. Well, fuck him and his smugness. I wanted him to come back to bed. We had slept for a few blissful hours and then had woken to make love again. A clinging, bruising love that might have scared someone else. Instead, I found the answers to questions I’d had my whole life. Since I’d let my foster brother “get lucky” with me at age fifteen, and then a senior at school the next year, I’d known something was missing. This.
I had lied to myself, pretending I could be normal, pretending I even wanted to be normal. But why would I want to be someone different than I was? Did normal people secretly yearn to be deviant? I didn’t know, but I could no longer pretend. No longer hide when a man who felt the same way stood in my bedroom.
With the press of a button, the sweet strains of “The Music of the Night” drifted from the stereo speakers. Something hollow inside me began to fill, an emotion, an understanding.
When I’d first met Hennessey in that conference room, I’d thought he was like Police Inspector Javert, on a lifelong quest to uphold the law at any cost. That would mean that Carlos was Valjean, the criminal, the hunted. Two separate men.
And then later, after I’d met Mia, I’d thought he was like Dr. Jekyll, the well-intentioned doctor with questionable means. And his other face, Mr. Hyde. A monster. Two sides of the same man.
But now, the man who had found me in the shadows, who had dragged me to bed and wrapped his body around mine…now I knew he was the Phantom of the Opera. Always hiding, always wanting.
One man. All along he’d been one man, and I could see all of him now, whole and unbearably human.
I shivered, and he must have felt it, because he pulled a blanket up to my chin. It wasn’t cold out, though. It was a warm Houston summer and the A/C in this old house could barely keep up. His body burned like a furnace, but I wouldn’t have moved for anything. I didn’t want the cold reality to intrude on the peace we’d found. So fragile, that peace. Like the human body. Like hope. He didn’t like the cold because he longed for a connection as much as I did. We were too different to find that at some corporate holiday party or an awkward first date. But we found it here, with each other.
“What happened to your partner?” I asked into the dark.
There was a pause. “He got too close. Started asking questions, so many questions. I told him to back off. I told him.”
“Did you kill him?”
His body turned rigid. “Fuck. Is that what you thought?”