Page 16 of Branding the Bat

"I'm always on time. You're always early."

"Cat thing. We like to set the stage." He stood, and Sero watched the motion with the helpless attention of someone who'd been thinking about this body for three days. Trevor crossed the room and took the food from him. Same as last time: deli tray aside, grapes to the floor, a kiss on the cheek.

But then he didn't pull away. He stayed close, his lips near Sero's jaw, and said: "I thought about you every day since Saturday."

"The grapes-and-anglerfish Saturday?"

"The Saturday where you sat on your couch and let me be near you without expecting anything. That was… " Trevor pulled back, and his expression was open in a way Sero hadn't seen before. Undefended. "That's not something I get a lot of."

"What, someone who doesn't expect anything?"

"Someone who's fine with just being in the same room. Most guys want the scene. They want the machine, the flogger, the session. They don't want to sit on a couch and watch documentaries about fish."

"Anglerfish aren't fish. They're deep-sea—"

"They're fish, Sero."

"They're technically—"

Trevor kissed him. Not on the cheek. On the mouth. It was brief and warm and tasted like the deli chicken he'd already been picking at, and it shut Sero up completely.

"They're fish," Trevor said against his lips. "Now take off your clothes."

***

The second session was different from the first.

Not the mechanics: the handcuffs were the same, the pole was the same, and the machine emerged from the duffle bag with its familiar assemblage of attachments and tubes. But the energy between them had shifted. The first session had been exploration. Trevor testing. Sero discovering. Both of them mapping terrain that neither had known existed. The second time they knew where they were going. The unknown had been replaced by anticipation, which was its own kind of electricity.

"Same rules." Trevor tested the cuffs on Sero's wrists. "Colors for pacing: green, yellow, red. Lioness or the air horn to stop everything. Three ways out. Always."

"Got it." Sero pulled against the cuffs once, felt them hold, and settled.

Trevor started with his hands.

Not the flogger, not the whip. Just his hands, running over Sero's body with slow deliberation. He traced the lines where the welts had been, as though he could feel the ghosts of the marks his flogger had left. His fingertips found the spots on Sero's ribs that made him shiver, the stretch of his inner thighs that made his breath go ragged, the small of his back where pressure became something indistinguishable from tenderness.

"You healed fast," Trevor murmured, his mouth close to Sero's shoulder.

"Three shifts. That's all it takes."

"Hmm." Trevor's fingers lingered over the spot on Sero's neck where the claw marks had been. Faded now, pale pink lines, barely visible. "These too?"

"Almost. Another shift and they'll be gone."

Trevor's jaw tightened, a flicker that looked like loss. As if the fading of his marks meant something he hadn't expected it to mean.

"I'll make new ones," Trevor said. Then, softer: "If you want."

"I want."

The flogger came first. Trevor built the warm-up faster this time. He knew Sero's baseline, knew the first twenty strikes were just preamble, and moved through them with efficient precision. By twenty-five, Sero's skin was humming. By thirty, the inner door was open.

Then the single-tail. Sharper, meaner, each strike a bright thread of pain that wove itself into the warmth the flogger had built. Sero tracked the pattern Trevor was creating: alternating sides, varying intensity, never the same spot twice in a row. It was methodical and beautiful and it hurt in exactly the right way, which was to say it hurt in a way that made his body say more instead of stop.

"Color," Trevor said. Not a question this time, a command. He was checking, but he was also demanding honesty.

"Green."