Page 19 of Bitter Burn
“According to the deal we made before you ran away, I have two more times left with you, and that’s not even counting the entire month you’ve had free access to my wife. Although you are so hard, puppy. Are you sure you’ve been making good use of her?”
I’ve got ahold of him now, running my thumb along the swollen head, finding the sweet little slit by feel alone. He makes a choked noise as I dip my hand lower, and he obediently spreads his thighs so I can cup his testicles. I have to fight the denim, but soon everything is worked farther down his hips, and I can use both hands to play with him. To cradle below as I tease the rigid inches above.
He bucks at the first real stroke I give him, and then embarrassment blossoms on his cheeks.
“It’s been so long since I’ve touched you,” I soothe. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
He’s breathless. “I’m afraid I won’t—I can’t last?—”
“It’s okay. Just let me, my sweet knight. Just let me.”
His lashes, as long as a doll’s, rest on his cheeks as he closes his eyes, and when I murmur, you’re doing so well, you’re so pretty like this, look at how wet it’s getting, he starts shivering like a fevered patient, flushed cheeks and open mouth. When he lifts his lashes, his eyes are glassy.
Like most soldiers, it doesn’t occur to Tristan to move obliquely, sinuously, to meander to a finish. Detours and delays might be inevitable, but they should always be extrinsic; soldiers rarely take the scenic route for the hell of it. It’s the same with pleasure, with fucking—when Tristan jerks himself off alone, he moves himself efficiently to the finish. The parts leading up to release are never savored or studied for their own sake.
So whenever I toy with him—explore all the subtle lines and curves of him, dangle him from the edge of orgasm and yank him back—he is helpless, baffled even, like it’s never occurred to him that pleasure can be greater for having been skirted, unfurled, mapped to the minutest contours. When I stop jerking him to trace the seam of his balls, when I stop tracing to rub my thumb over his head and smear slick arousal across his frenulum, when I stop smearing and lean down to blow a puff of air—every shift in pace or intention has him arching, whimpering, casting me wounded glances, weaponizing a pout that would soften a granite wall.
I’ll take payment for the adultery in wounded glances. I’ll eat his pouts until I’m full.
But he is so starved for it, so desperate to be handled and controlled, that he’s in complete agony before more than a few minutes of this. The skin is stretched so tight on his swollen organ that I can see it gleam faintly in the dark, and he’s so engorged now that I could take a clinical reading of his pulse just from circling him with my fingers.
“Hands behind you,” I murmur as he gets daring, seeking me out. I love and hate his hands. They are strong and beautiful and remarkably graceful for a man of Tristan’s profession; I resent that I crave them at all, these graceful hands that still appear in my nightmares. “I’ve told you before: touching is earned, and you’re a long way from earning anything yet. Be still for this part.”
I shift myself enough that I can bend down and put my lips to the tip of his cock. He freezes, his breath caught right at the expansion of an inhale, and his erection jerks and jerks, just at the barest pressure.
“You’ve never—I didn’t think?—”
“Hush.”
And then I take him into my mouth.
“Oh God,” he breathes. His hands scrabble behind him on the concrete. “What the fuck. What the fuck.”
Delight curls in my belly; I am smug, yes, satisfied in a way that I recognize as vaguely immoral, but also the delight is just…him. Just Tristan, sweet and brave and eternally defenseless in the face of his own desire.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, since Eliot, and I’ve missed it. The ownership of it. The tender manipulation. A swirl of a tongue and he hunches over me. A suck and he arches away. A long pull into the back of my throat and he jerks his hips forward without meaning to. He’s a ship of muscle and loyalty with nothing but my tongue as the rudder.
He is swelling and swelling, already at the edge, and if we had time, if we weren’t in the open, if I wasn’t in the shadow of my enemy’s palace—ah, the things I would do. The razor-thin misery I would dance him along, the sweaty, palpitating, unendurable bliss I would wring from him.
But for now: pity. I brace my hands on his thighs, enjoying their flexing and trembling under my touch, and take him all the way in, a long, swallowing slide that undoes him. A jagged moan tears from his throat as he ejaculates, and he moans again when he realizes he can’t work his way any deeper into my mouth—my hands on his thighs prevent him moving much at all. Not that I’m averse to having him fuck my throat one day—I think it would be fun, actually—but right now, it’s also fun to deny him a little. Fun to leave him wanting something more.
I pull off and give him a pragmatic lick or two to make sure I’ve gotten everything and then straighten up to look at him. I could laugh if everything else weren’t so dire—he’s giving a better performance as a drunk than I ever have.
He sways a little as I tuck him away and hand him his bag of apples.
He blinks with glassed-over eyes, words seeming hard to come by. “Why—but—what about you?”
I glance down at my groin, which is tented with a displeased erection, and then look up to Tristan and shrug. “It’ll keep.”
There’s a flicker of something along his jaw, and he jerks his head to the side. It reminds me of an unhappy horse tossing its head in protest of something.
“Something wrong, Tristan? Are you that offended that I’m not forcing you to your knees right now?”
He doesn’t move his head, but his eyes do slide back to mine. “Just wondering what it’ll keep means. It’ll keep until you get home? Does that mean you have someone at Lyonesse who’s—” Another jump of muscle in his jaw. “Is Isabella Beroul back?”
I’m amused and I’m pissed too. “Are you concerned about my fidelity, Tristan? Worried that I’ll break my vows perhaps? How generous of you. I’ll accept your prayers for my soul gladly.”
Even in the lamplit dark, I can see the flush rising on his cheeks. But to his credit, I suppose, he doesn’t allow me to force him away from his jealousy. “We have a right to know,” he says stubbornly. “If there are others.”
