Page 46 of Branding the Bat

Sero could feel everything. Trevor's cock inside him, filling him completely, the head pressed against his prostate with a precision that the machine had achieved mechanically and Trevor achieved by knowing his body. Trevor's hips flush against his ass. Trevor's weight over him, held up on shaking arms. Trevor's heartbeat, fast and hard, transmitted through the cock buried inside him like a pulse through a wire.

"Move," Sero said.

Trevor pulled back slowly, almost all the way out, then pushed back in. The friction was devastating. Sero felt every inch of it, the drag of Trevor's cock against his inner walls, the pressure against his prostate on the inward stroke, the ache of emptiness on the outward. His cock throbbed between them, untouched, banging steadily onto his stomach.

Trevor found a rhythm. Slow, deep thrusts that bottomed out with a grinding pressure against Sero's prostate that made his vision blur. Not the mechanical precision of the machine, not the relentless programmed rhythm of a device designed to extract. This was human. Imperfect. Trevor's hips stuttered when Sero clenched around him. His rhythm broke when Sero gasped. He adjusted, compensated, read Sero's body the way he read it during flogger sessions, but with his cock instead of a whip, and the intimacy of it, the vulnerability of both of them, was staggering.

"Harder," Sero said.

Trevor's restraint snapped. His hips drove forward, faster, deeper, and Sero arched off the bed with a sound he didn't recognize as his own. The angle was perfect, every thrust nailing his prostate, and the pleasure was building like a flogger warm-up, layer on layer, each one thicker and hotter than the last.

"Touch me," Sero gasped. "My cock. Touch me."

Trevor shifted his weight to one arm and wrapped his free hand around Sero's cock. The grip was firm and sure, slicked with the precum that had glistened on Sero's stomach, and the combination, Trevor inside him and Trevor's hand on him, was too much and exactly enough at the same time.

Sero grabbed Trevor's face with both hands. Held him there, close, foreheads touching, breath mixing. Eye contact. The thing that was theirs.

"I'm going to cum," Sero said.

"Cum for me." Trevor's voice was wrecked. "Cum for me, Sero. I want to feel it."

Sero came. His orgasm crashed through him, his cock pulsing hard in Trevor's fist, his ass clenching tight around Trevor's cock. It wasn't the machine's forced extraction or the flogger's untouched wave. It was a man's body responding to another man's body, simple and devastating, and he cried out with it, a sound that was all vowels and Trevor's name.

Trevor lasted three more thrusts. He swelled inside Sero. His hips stuttered. Then the moment where control became surrender. Trevor came with his face pressed against Sero's neck and his hand still wrapped around Sero's softening cock and a groan that vibrated through both of them like a struck chord.

They lay in the wreckage. Tangled, sweating, breathing hard. Trevor was still inside him, softening, and neither of them moved to separate. The evening light through the blinds had shifted from gold to amber to the first blue of dusk.

"That," Sero said, "was not terrible."

Trevor laughed against his neck. "High praise from the man with the eight-orgasm record."

"One is plenty when it's real."

Trevor lifted his head. His face was flushed, his hair wrecked, his eyes bright and wet. He looked like a man who had been given something he didn't know how to hold. "Was it real?"

Sero touched the bite mark on Trevor's chest. The crescent scar. His mark. "What do you think?"

Trevor kissed him. Slow, thorough, unhurried. The kiss of a man who was not in a scene, was not counting reps, was not maintaining professional distance. Just a man in his own bed, kissing the man he loved, with nothing hidden between them.

They cleaned up. Trevor brought a warm cloth from the bathroom and wiped Sero down with the same careful attention he'd used applying arnica salve to flogger marks. Sero let him. The aftercare wasn't scene-specific anymore. It was just how Trevor loved: with his hands, with precision, with the quiet devotion of a man who had learned that tenderness required as much skill as a single-tail whip.

They lay in the bed, Sero's head on Trevor's chest, Trevor's arm around his shoulders. The bite mark was under Sero's cheek. The claw marks stung gently against the sheets. Outside, the first lights of the Strip were coming on, turning the distant skyline into its nightly performance of electricity and promise.

"Wednesday?" Sero said.

"Wednesday."

"Bring the arnica salve. And grapes. And Trevor?"

"Yeah?"

"This too. Not just the scenes. This."

Trevor tightened his arm around him. "This too. Always."

Sero closed his eyes and listened to Trevor's heartbeat beneath the scar he'd left, and the evening settled around them like a blanket someone had draped over two people who'd finally figured out how to be still in the same room.

Chapter Seventeen