Page 66 of Salt Kiss
His thumb finds my bottom lip and rubs it fondly as I finish swallowing, his gaze going from my mouth to my eyes to my whole face, like he’s trying to memorize exactly the way I look right now. I know he doesn’t love me; I know that I’m convenient, available, an animate doll that’s happy to be used and toyed with...butsometimes.
Sometimes when it’s like this, I can pretend.
Finally, he releases me and then looks down at the erection straining between my thighs. He nudges it with a wet, bare foot.
“You can take care of that if you want,” he says, with the air of someone being uncommonly magnanimous. And the shame of it is like a drug, humiliation twisting in my guts as I wrap my hand around my cock and start masturbating on my knees. And of course, the humiliation is everything—it’s like nothing else; it gets me even harder and it might as well be sweet nothings in my ear for how warm it makes me feel.
It’s someone sayingno matter how mindless or messy or weak you might be, I’ll still want you. I’ll still want you at yourworst, your lowest, your ugliest.
I pant and spurt ropes of cum between his feet, making sure to stroke myself all the way through the climax because I’ve learned over the last month that I can never predict when Mark will decide that orgasm deprivation is his new favorite thing, and so I need to make every orgasm count.
After I’m done, Mark looks down at my semen like a king looking at his tribute, and prods my cock again with his foot. I hiss. It’s sensitive now.
He smiles.
“You can finish washing me,” he says, turning to give me his back, the tight lines of his ass and thighs, and I get to my feet to obey.
Mark refuses to discuss even the idea of a nurse, so it’s fallen to Sedge and me to take care of him while he recovers. Not that he needs much taking care of—he’s been patently ignoring Dr. Sutcliff ’s orders to rest and striding around the club with his IV catheter unhooked, taking meetings, answering questions for the police, and overseeing the necessary repairs of the club. It was driving us all wild how stubborn he was being. But halfway through the first day, he realized that he could make me play the part of a Victorian valet and concubine all at once, and after that, he became something much worse than a stubborn patient.
He became an infernally needy one.
Tristan, come dress me.
Tristan, bring me another glass of water.
Tristan, give me your hand, I need—yes, that’s right. Slower.Slower.
But I love it. I love it so much that I almost wish we could live like this forever, with me being even more than a bodyguard, being his valet and manservant and everything. I love it so much that every time Sedge helps in the slightest—even if it’s just to fetch his suit jacket from across the room or to get a pillow to put under Mark’s arm as he works in his office—jealousy bites at my stomach, gnaws in my chest.
I hate that Sedge has known him longer, that he can anticipate Mark’s needs, that helookssubmissive, all quiet and unassuming, the kind of person who will take what he’s given and never ache for more. I hate that I can’t tell if there’s any fondness in Mark’s voice when he thanks him, and I hate that I care that there could be.
I shouldn’t care. I’m the one who gets to run soapy washcloths over Mark’s naked body; I’m the one who buttons his shirts and ties his oxfords for him (even though I know for a fact he can do it himself because he seems to have a superhuman ability to ignore pain).
But I do care. I’m still jealous. I want Mark like he was at Morois House—staring at me with naked, possessive ownership, refusing to let me leave even to get a new pair of pants. Sometimes I get moments of it here at Lyonesse: when we are together at night, alone; in the mornings, when I wake up to find him already watching me with eyes that shift like the underwater light that fills his room.
But for the most part, his attention is claimed by everyone and everything else that comes along with having a place like Lyonesse: members, employees, money, information.
And occasionally Sedge.
I have no idea what I’ll do if he brings back Isabella Beroul to play with. If I’m this jealous of an administrative assistant, I don’t know how I’ll cope with him having a woman tied to his desk again. Fuck.
After the shower, I make Mark go into the kitchen and sit at the table so I can change his bandage and check for signs of infection like Dr. Sutcliff showed me. He makes a noise in his throat when I clean the wound itself but otherwise stays silent.
“Do you want—”
He interrupts before I can finish. “No. It makes my thoughts slow.”
I remember the night of the stabbing, when I woke him up from a morphine-laced sleep to talk to the FBI. How lucid and precise he’d been, quick and perceptive. The only sign he’d been injured had been the bandaged shoulder and the occasional tightness of his mouth. The only sign of the morphine had been his eyes, a pinprick of black in a sea of blue.
“It didn’t make you slow,” I say, although I know it’s pointless. He’ll keep refusing the medicine and pretending he’s not in agony whenever he moves or breathes. I press the new bandage over the neatly sutured wound—which is healing nicely, despite Mark being the most noncompliant patient ever—and seal the edges with my thumbs, being as gentle as I can.
“You’re good at this,” he says. “Nursing.”
“I like it,” I reply. In the field, there was only time for combat gauze and a call for help, and that was it. It’s nice to be able to do things neatly. Kindly.
I think of my hand against Sims’s neck, his last words, bloody and burbling.Family...ease.
“Not that you need it,” I say, trying to shake off the memory. “Sometimes I think you’d wrap a kitchen towel around it and call it a day.”
