Page 31 of Salt Kiss
“I do want it,” I say, my voice shaking.
He shakes his head. “I will use you like a toy. Like a thing. I will make you cry and like it. I will take you more often than you think a person could need to fuck.”
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. Those words in his cool voice—like a fist around my penis, like teeth on my throat.
“Whatever idea you have about being...thisfor me is incomplete, badly informed. This is not a good idea, and—” He passes his hand over his face and looks back at me. “It’ll complicate things. In the future. If I’m fucking you.”
“I don’t care,” I tell him quickly. “And I want—I want all that.”
His eyes search mine. “When you first came to Lyonesse, you seemed to find the idea of submission degrading. Tristan: I will degrade you. I will enjoy it. Unless you are wired to feel more like yourself, more alive, morehuman, when someone is tearing you apart, then I would be a bad Dominant and a bad brother-in-law to Ricker to use you like that.”
He steps away, and the new space between us feels like a warning. I’m losing this.
“Please, sir,” I say. “I—”
My pride is gone, my reason gone. There’s only desperate, lonely need.
“I want it. I promise. I promise.”
“Even if I believed you really knew what you were asking for, it doesn’t change anything. Fucking you would have consequences that I can’t entirely predict. It would be exceptionally foolish of me to let my craving for you derail a year that’s been as deeply planned as this one.”
It is still a rejection, I’m still hurting with it, but my mind lights on those words:my craving for you. On the words that came before them.
He does want me. He does.
Mark shakes his head and turns. “Please forget this. Find someone who will take all that lovely, selfless nobility and give you something lovely and selfless in return. It’s not me.”
I mean to speak, I mean to stop him, but by the time I figure how to open my mouth and tell him that I don’t want anything lovely and selfless, that I want all the things he said with the using and the tearing apart, he’s gone.
Twelve
The next morning,I wake with my usual erection, deciding to take care of it in the shower. Before, my mind was filled with images it had conjured from scenes at the club, from the kinky porn I’d started watching, but I don’t need any of that this morning. Only Mark’s face, lit by Singapore at night, studying mine. Only his voice, cold and level.
I will use you like a toy.
I will degrade you. I will enjoy it.
Normally, I masturbate like a soldier. Fast, efficient. A quick hand on my cock, the shortest road to release. But this morning, I imagine what Mark would do to me. Nothing as easy as a quick orgasm, I don’t think. Nothing as obvious as steady, tight strokes. He’d touch the inside of me until I was squirming. He’d press against my prostate until I was mindlessly fucking the air. And then he’d edge me until I became nothing but swollen, aching flesh, so full of cum and need that I’d let him do anything, any depraved thing he wanted to do to me.
When I finally climax, a hoarse noise tears up from my throat, my stomach muscles seizing as semen erupts from my jerking, pulsing organ. My heart is hammering against my ribs. I press my forehead to the cold tile of this way-too-opulent hotel shower and tell myself to stop.
Just. Stop.
Maybe he wants to fuck me, but there’s enough in the way that he won’t, and I don’t know if I can handle him saying no to me again. I’ve been through hunger and fire, blood and death, but there’s still a part of my heart that’s soft and easily bruised. Offering Mark what I offered last night...it’s too close to exposing that delicate, beating tissue to him.
When I dress and emerge into the main area of the suite, I find Mark fully dressed and taking a virtual meeting by the window, his watch glinting in the morning sun as he drinks his cappuccino. There is an open newspaper next to his plate, and another folded neatly by his mug. It should be quaint, the paper, the analog watch, but Mark as a man resists even the idea of quaintness.
Instead, it feels purposeful, sophisticated. Intentional. I think if I asked him why the physical newspaper, why the old-fashioned wristwatch, he’d have answers so obliquely logical that I’d feel like an uneducated jackass for even asking in the first place.
“So Hill, Avendano, and Hodges,” Mark says. “With Collier as a possibility.”
“I’ll make it worth your time,” says the other person in the meeting. They sound arrogant and a little desperate. It only took a few weeks in combat for me to learn what a bad combination those two things were in a person.
Mark laces his hands together, his eyes leveled on the screen of the tablet propped in front of him. “There will be several favors I’ll have to call in, and lots of collateral information used up in the process, so it won’t be cheap. It also might not be possible.”
“Ten as a down payment that you can keep no matter what, then,” the man says. “Ten more for succeeding.”
Mark’s face doesn’t change, but I notice his toe taps a little impatiently under the table. “And then thirty more in stock.”
