‘Please.’ I didn’t know this man could beg. The sound rewires the inside of my skull. Permanently.
I let him come, time it. The tightening around my cock, the arch of his back, the sound dragged out of him through clenched teeth. I follow. Because once his body does that, I couldn’t hold back if I wanted to.
After: his wrists. Red marks from my grip. I stare at them, evidence like a signature.
Thursday. Same flat, different script.
‘My turn.’
He says it in the hallway instead of the bedroom. The hallway, my jacket still on. His voice is the lecture-theatre voice.
‘Strip. Lie on the bed. Don’t speak unless I tell you.’
The reversal hits like cold water. I open my mouth to joke. Deflect. Reach for the arsenal I keep for moments like this.
‘That wasn’t a request.’
I strip. Lie down, the ceiling. The crack in the plaster. My cock is already hard because conviction doesn’t care which direction it’s coming from.
He takes his time. Stands at the foot of the bed. Looks at me like I’m an unsolved problem, evaluating, deciding where to start. Then he touches me, my ankle first. Works up. The inside of my calf, my knee, the inside of my thigh.
When warmth finally closes around my cock I’m already shaking. He hasn’t hurried once.
He edges me three times. My hands gripping the sheets, every muscle taut, and each time he stops, pulls back, waits, his hand flat on my stomach, feeling my breathing. Laurence has been practising withholding his entire adult life.
I come only when he lets me. The orgasm breaks open. My whole body convulses, and he holds me through it—his mouth on my hip. The aftershock rolls through me in waves that are his now, not mine to stop.
‘You can speak now,’ he says. Quiet. Almost amused.
‘Fuck you.’
He laughs. I haven’t heard him laugh during sex before. The sound cracks open something sealed inside me.
After. The bed. His sheets smell like us.
He plays with my hair, absent. The habit’s stayed.
‘I was with someone. Before.’ His voice is different. Careful. Each word is placed like a foot on ice.
Stillness becomes survival. The smallest shift, and this ends.
‘Another academic. At Cambridge. It ended very badly.’
‘Badly how?’
Silence.
‘I crossed a line.’ Flat. Final. It sits between us like a locked box, and his face is stone, and I know that the line he crossed isthe one I’m standing on. The one we’re both standing on. He’s not going to say it. Maybe not ever.
I wait. He doesn’t open it.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I say.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
I trust this man.
The words stay locked inside where they’re safe. But they’re there.
