Risk Aware Read online

  He still wasn’t a sub. I knew that. But he needed to know I had it under control, and I needed to give him that. He went passive beneath me, heavy and still, as if weights were dragging his limbs down, making him helpless and compliant. As if he’d been drugged.

  “Yes,” he whispered, shivering.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes . . . sir.”

  Fuck, that was nice. I hummed softly. “Good. Get up on your knees and spread your ass open for me.”

  I drew my fingers out, and Geoff moved slowly, as if in a trance. He got his knees under him, pressed the side of his face into the pillow, and reached back, pulling his ass cheeks apart for me.

  “Fucking whore.” He jumped as I spat directly on his asshole with a sharp, explosive sound. Muscle and wrinkled skin twitched at the impact, the spittle running down his taint and balls. I rubbed the head of my cock up and down, smearing it across his skin. “You want it, don’t you? Want me to stick my dick in you and fuck your brains out. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” His voice was tight, the back of his neck a deep red. When I reached beneath him, a bead of pre-cum dripped from his cock onto the towels.

  “I think I’m going to enjoy that,” I said cheerfully, and pressed against his hole.

  I didn’t rush, not even a little. Millimeter by painstaking millimeter, I breached him, mustering every shred of control I had to drag this out, when what I really wanted was to lay into him. I leaned forward and curled my hand around the front of his throat, and he melted, going slack before me. God, that was amazing. A moment later, I was buried balls-deep.

  “Fuck, you feel good,” I grated.

  Geoff damn near mewled. It was an effort to pick up my monologue again, to give him that edge of humiliation that would keep him out of his head and far from worrying about what was happening to his body. I could barely concentrate, spitting a stream-of-consciousness trickle of epithets and raunchy promises. They erupted from my lips each time I pushed deeper, harder.

  “Jesus . . . For a whore you’re the tightest piece of ass I’ve ever . . . Fuck. Gonna go balls-deep . . . gonna pound the fuck outta you.”

  “Yes.” He rocked to try to hurry me along. I wrenched back control, restraining him by tightening the hand around his throat again. “Please. Please . . .” he begged.

  That pleading was too much. He was beyond dignity, beyond pride. He’d say anything he had to say to get me to give him what he needed, and fuck that was a heady feeling. I rolled my hips against him, our moans rising in unison, and gradually picked up the pace.

  “Fuck . . . Oh, fuck, you bitch . . .” I grunted, slapping his ass with my pelvis. Beads of sweat dripped off my brow to splatter onto his back and buttocks.

  “Oh God . . . Harder. Come on. Please,” he groaned, once again trying to rush me. Then his knee moved, a small shift in position that distributed his weight differently.

  I went still, reaching past him to grab the knife.

  Geoff froze.

  “Who’s in charge here?” I demanded coldly.

  He whimpered. “You—you are, sir!”

  I laid the point of the knife between his shoulder blades, not quite firmly enough to prick, but enough to make him clench in fear that it might.

  “Don’t fucking forget it again.”

  I used the dull edge of the knife to trace random lines down his shoulders and spine, ignoring the tightening grip of his ass around my cock, watching for other cues from his body.

  Another shift, and I knew it wasn’t impatience or greed but discomfort, seeking a different position. I felt his attention and energy being pulled away from me toward the problems with his joints like a sour note spoiling the heady symphony of emotion and sensation. The longer it persisted, the harder it would be for any of this to feel good for him.

  I stopped moving, not dropping out of character entirely, but backing off enough to give him room to communicate freely. “Your knees are bothering you?”

  I watched the resistance grip him and bleed away. I could have fist-pumped and shouted in celebration when, instead of denying it, he nodded against the pillow.

  “Lie on your side,” I instructed, sternly enough to let him know that I still had this under my control as I guided him down. He sighed and stretched out with his back to me. That sigh told me a lot about how he felt regarding this concession to his physical limitations, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin the scene for us, not after we’d come so far. I slicked more lube on my cock, pressed against his back, and shoved into him roughly. When his moan had faded, I lightly grasped his throat once more and growled, “From now on, if you’ve got a problem and you don’t tell me right away, there will be consequences that will make sitting in a restaurant with a plug up your ass feel like a walk in the park. Got me?”

  “Yes!” he gasped, clutching a handful of bedding.

  “You didn’t think I was done with you, did you?” I taunted. I thrust my top arm between his thighs, lifting the upper one, spreading him open while supporting the weight of his leg so he didn’t have to.

  “N-no!” Anything else he might have said was lost in the hard pace I set, hammering into him. I could tell by his yelps each time I nailed his prostate. I could feel him hanging on the edge.

  “Your ass is still mine.” I scraped his shoulder with my teeth. Not a bite, no, but a threat. Menacing. I could bruise him or make him bleed. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop me.

  But I also wanted him to know that I wouldn’t.

  I think the message got through, because his groans and shouts became more desperate. My dick was so hard and tight it ached, driving into his clenching ass. His cock dripped, the fluid drying into tacky trails down his foreskin.

  “What a slut.” I slammed into him over and over. “Threaten you with a knife, damn near choke you, and you’re still dying for it, aren’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  I rammed him hard enough to jolt his whole body.

  “Yes, what?” I snarled in his ear. “Am I going to have to teach you some manners?”

  “Yes, sir.” He sobbed, bordering on incoherent. He really was on the edge, but it didn’t look like he could come without being touched. Just a little bit to put him over the top. He hadn’t done it himself, though. Was he waiting for permission? Had it even occurred to him to finish himself off without it? “Please! Oh Jesus, please!”

  “Jack yourself off. Do it now.” Another driving thrust. And another. “Show me what a whore you are, that you’ll come for the man fucking you, whether you want it or not.”

  Practically sobbing with frustrated need, he unwrapped his fingers from where they’d twisted in the sheets, and located his rigid dick. I was right; a few strokes was all it took before he gave a ragged shout, hot cum spurting through the ring of his fist to splash onto the bed. It felt like lava was building up at the base of my spine, ready to surge along my nerves the moment I let go.

  And I did. Lightning erupted behind my eyelids. My grip on his neck and thigh tightened, and I shuddered behind him, groaning.

  When I could think again, Geoff was limp against me. With my sweaty brow resting on his back, my breath exploded against his skin in sharp huffs.

  Awareness began creeping tangibly back into his body. I brushed a kiss on his shoulder, holding him. As I pressed close, Geoff’s tension began to bleed away.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “I think so.”

  He shivered.

  “Stay right there.” He shook harder when I moved my body away from his. Wanting to get him warm and comfortable as soon as I could, I made quick work of getting rid of the towels and pulling the covers up over him. Then I held the bottle of water to his lips. “Here.”

  “Sorry.” He gulped it down as I curled myself around him from behind. After a minute, his shivering subsided and his voice grew steadier. “I don’t know—”

  “It’s okay.” I kissed his shoulder again. “Did I take it too
far?”

  “I don’t think so.” He closed his eyes and sighed, his expression blissful. “I just wasn’t expecting . . . It was intense. But I liked it.”

  “Good.” Of their own volition, my fingers traced the curve of his shoulder and trailed down the length of his arm, like they couldn’t get enough contact with his skin. “Enough to want to do it again?”

  “Right now?” He smirked over his shoulder.

  “Tempting, but I don’t think I could manage yet.” I kissed the side of his neck. “If you’re interested, though, I’d like to keep going while you’re here. There’s a lot more ground we could cover.”

  He laughed, a soft, self-conscious sound. I tucked my face against the back of his shoulder and took an emotional inventory of myself. Most of my interactions with him so far had been driven by instinct and impulse, by the signals I was reading from him. I needed to figure out what I was asking for, here. How deep was too deep to get involved, considering he’d be gone in a few days?

  Right now we were both high. Probably not the best time to make any decisions. Geoff’s body was heavy with lassitude, but there was also tension in him, as though he was feeling echoes of my own doubts.

  I squeezed him, trying to tell him it was all right. I knew exactly why he felt so adrift, and I didn’t want him to batter himself with his insecurities about how to behave or what came next. I didn’t want to see him retreat, and then in a day or a week go back to trolling for an unsafe facsimile of what we’d done.

  “It’s okay,” I murmured, but I couldn’t stop his withdrawal as he sat up.

  “Sure.”

  “Rest.” I settled for rubbing his back. “It’s okay to be exhausted after that.”

  He pushed himself up. I rose to help in case he was unsteady on his feet. Considering his medical issues, I didn’t want him taking a spill on my watch.

  He moved gingerly and frowned as if confused.

  “All right?” I asked, hoping I was striking the right balance between solicitude and stepping on that pride of his.

  “Everything just feels . . . strange. I get why my skin’s sensitive, but why would my muscles— They don’t really ache, but I don’t want to move much right now?” He ended on a raised note, like he was asking a question rather than making a statement.

  “Release of tension. Adrenaline. It’s all right. As long as you’re not in pain or distress?”

  I watched him do his own inventory. “No. I’m okay.”

  I considered it something of a victory that he leaned heavily on me as he shuffled to the bathroom. We brushed our teeth together. He took a moment to stare at the fading pink blotches all over his pale skin. He evicted me while he took a piss, but by then he seemed steadier. I remained right outside the door, just in case.

  “I feel drugged,” he said muzzily when he emerged, wrapping himself around me. I blinked and had to check my surprise. I’d been worried that he was going to react badly once he finally felt more stable, but instead he just . . . went with it.

  I hugged him back, engulfing him as best I was able, and kissed his temple. God, I’d missed this part of being in the scene. I’d missed taking a guy to a place where macho posturing and pride had no relevance, where he wasn’t ashamed to require comfort and support.

  Maybe Geoff, more than most men I’d met, needed that.

  I chuckled. “You pretty much are. I should have realized; you haven’t really researched this at all, have you?” He shook his head as I slid an arm around his waist and escorted him back to his room. “Shit. I should have stopped to explain it a bit more.”

  His voice was an indistinct slur. “Didn’t want to stop.”

  I tucked the covers around him again after he crawled back into bed, and located the spare blanket to lay over him from the bottom drawer of the dresser. I slipped under the bedding to draw him against my chest. He was still shivering.

  “Tomorrow, do some research,” I urged, breathing into his rumpled hair. “Especially about the effects of pain endorphins. That adrenaline rush from the fear play probably isn’t helping, either.”

  “’Kay.”

  I pulled away to reach for the water bottle, and by the time I rolled back over, his breathing was already evening out. I didn’t have the heart to wake him and push more water on him.

  Instead, I settled in beside him and smiled, then let myself drift away.

  Geoff

  The next two days were a lot more mundane. Robin had meetings with his mortgage broker and realtor, and teleconferences with people back in New York, so somehow it ended up that the wealthy playboy I’d landed for my vacation fling was too busy for days of marathon sex. That was okay. It gave me time to do my prophy and hang with Jace.

  My next-to-last day of vacation, the weather was gorgeous, so Robin took me out on his boat, navigating from the marina on Kalamazoo Lake along the short remainder of the Kalamazoo River to where it drained into Lake Michigan.

  It was an afternoon full of lazy conversation, perfect except that Robin somehow seemed to divert any discussion about him back onto me. I don’t think he did it intentionally. He just had a habit of steering things that way. I finally had to say something.

  “Let’s change things up and try to have a conversation that isn’t about me. Let’s talk about you for a while.”

  He laughed at that, ducking his head self-consciously. “Was I grilling you? Sorry. Old habits die hard, I suppose. I used to sort of do that for a living. Get people to talk about themselves, I mean.”

  “Let me guess. You were a cop and that’s where all this interrogation comes from.”

  “No!” His smile widened for a moment, then faded as his eyes grew wistful. “I used to counsel homeless LGBT youths at a shelter. Street kids.”

  “Ah.” A lightbulb came on. “So that’s what you meant when you said you’d had experience with people acting tough.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. It’s a story that comes with a lot of things that were said in confidence. I can’t get into it much.”

  That I understood. “How did you go from that to wanting to open a gallery?”

  The wistfulness in his eyes redoubled, veering toward melancholy. “Um, it started when the shelter was hit hard during Hurricane Sandy. Some of the reconstruction money went missing, and it turned out my boyfriend, Kyle, was the one embezzling. I had no idea and was cleared of any wrongdoing in the investigation, but there were a lot of politics and guilt-by-association from the donors. It was better for the program for me to leave.”

  A dozen questions crowded my brain.

  He held up a hand, forestalling them. “Can we not talk about all that? It’s still a sore spot, and there are legal resolutions pending. My lawyer probably wouldn’t want me discussing it with anyone.”

  I frowned, stung by his evasiveness. I could understand the legal stuff needing to be kept under wraps, but it seemed unfair that he could prod into all my most painful shit and declare his off-limits. What about this trust he said we were building between us?

  Licking my lips, I nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.” I could make a big deal of it, or I could let it go. With my boundary issues, the latter was probably the better option. “So you decided to open a gallery?”

  He leaned back against the sofa in the outdoor lounge. “My parents did well selling art, so I figured I could be most helpful to the center by making a lot of money and donating as much of it as I could.”

  “And your parents?” I was picking through potential conversation fodder, trying to find something that wouldn’t force him to talk about the circumstances under which he’d left New York. “Aside from running them ragged when you were young, how do you get along with them?”

  “They’re great. They didn’t bat an eye when I came out in high school, and they’ve always been supportive. You don’t need to tell me I live a charmed life. I don’t mean to brag, but it’s true. Some of my friends haven’t been so lucky.”

  “In what way?”

  His mouth
tightened, like he was going to shut me down again. Then he blew out a long breath and answered instead. “When I came out at fifteen, I did so as part of a pact with my first boyfriend. We were going to tell our families together so we wouldn’t have to hide. We went to my parents first, and that couldn’t have gone better. Then we went to his family.”

  “They didn’t handle it so well?”

  “No.” He pulled his knees to his chest. “Never in my pampered, innocent little life could I have imagined parents calling their child the things they called Isaac. His dad stormed out. Then his mom took over, trying to convince him he really didn’t mean it. Why was he playing such a cruel joke, and was he sure he wasn’t just confused? And I could see he was about to give in and agree, but his dad came downstairs with an armful of his clothes and threw him out, right there on the spot.”

  “Oh shit.” I reached for him without thinking about it, almost drawing him to me before I decided the intimacy of that was still too much. I settled on squeezing his shoulder.

  “He stayed with us for a while, but he never really healed. Having his family discard him like that broke something inside him. He began drinking, partying. We broke up when I was sixteen, when I told him I didn’t feel I was ready to have sex with him. Truth was, I just didn’t feel comfortable being around him anymore.”

  He set his chin on his knees, his words coming faster as the rest of the tale poured out.

  “My mom put her foot down and told Isaac if he was going to continue to live with us, he’d abide by the same rules I did, and for a while it seemed he’d cleaned up his act. Then I learned he’d been prostituting himself around school, giving blowjobs to closeted jocks under the bleachers, that sort of thing.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I’m having a hard time talking about this. I’ve told the story before to kids I’ve worked with, to show them how I can relate to what they’ve dealt with.”

  “It’s different here, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” He gnawed his lip for a second, then continued. “He tried to blackmail a teacher who may or may not have fucked him, and the guy lost his job. Then Isaac got caught in an online prostitution sting while making dates with johns in chat rooms. While my mom was down at the courthouse, bailing him out and delivering his laptop so they could find out who his clients were—because, of course, he was still a minor—my dad searched Isaac’s room and found drug paraphernalia. He’d started doing meth.”