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“Hmm,” V murmurs. “You taste like raspberries.”
My seat creaks a little as I settle back into it, suddenly quite satisfied with my breakfast order. The lemon curd and raspberry overnight oats were decent. I didn’t expect them to leave V staring at my lips in a way that has me desperate to lean over the armrest between us and notch my mouth to his again.
“I like it,” he clarifies.
“Yes, love, that’s clear,” I laugh. His eyes follow my thumb as it drags spit, probably his, from the corner of my mouth. I try to remind myself that no matter how empty this train car is, we’re still in public. “What were we talking about, anyway?”
V shakes his head. A blissful smile appears. “Not sure. Dying, I think?”
“You’re so distracting, honestly. Horny bastard. I never should’ve taught you to fuck.”
“Oh, come on,” he chuckles. “Wasn’t the process fun?”
My hmph is, unfortunately, an obvious affirmative.
Mischief curls his lips at the edges like a fern. “Wanna do it again?”
I laugh, too. It’s a little game we like to play, somewhere between reenacting and reinventing the past: he feigns cluelessness when I ‘introduce’ him to pleasure. Sometimes, when he’s feeling feisty, he even resists a little.
Over my shoulder, I watch autumn sing by at a speed my eyes can't follow, now that the train is sprinting a straight shot through the countryside. I try to name a few trees in the distance, to distract myself from thinking about the things I've taught and retaught him. But really, the game isn’t limited to just retelling that particular event. We play with all sorts of things from our history. Grit included. Most recently, after weeks of cautious discussion, he took the dull edge of a butter knife to my throat — and I pretended to bleed out while he used my body for pleasure.
I still haven’t made sense of how hard we both came that night.
Fuck. I have to fidget in this damn seat to readjust from just thinking about it. Field maple. Common beech. This isn’t helping.
I turn back to V who’s apparently been watching me pinball around thoughts I should not be having in public. The indecent racket in my head eventually returns to the question he’s posed. Do I want to ‘teach’ him today?
Truthfully, I’m exhausted — in part because Ivy and I stayed up talking last night, and also from the emotional drain of confessing our full saga the day we arrived, then weathering Three’s justified bitterness all week. All on top of days of nearly nonstop walking while exploring their city. The whole thing has wrung me dry.
However, V’s offer is enticing. Yes, I suppose I could rally when we make it back to our flat, if it's to boss him around.
Before I can say so, he jumps back in first: “I’ve been thinking you might have a thing or two to learn. Considering you've… never been fucked properly.”
The train jostles me a little, dumbstruck and slack-jawed, as I process the setup he’s proposing. It’s one we’ve toyed with only once before, months ago. I watch him reach into a pocket and withdraw a familiar ring which he slides onto a finger of his right hand.
On its surface, four engraved letters sit dark against the silver — facing outwards today.
“Oh,” I say, eyes glued to the ring and the hand it ornaments, a ridged geography of tendons and a prominent vein with the bending path of a river.
His message is unmistakable.
When donned with the text facing in towards him, the ring signals that V’s in the mood to submit. When he wears it facing outward like this, though, it means he’d like to be in charge.
It means that — if I accept — I’m subject to his control.
A delicious panic flares to life right between my lungs and my stomach. I’m still looking at his pretty fingers, long and lithe, fingers I know every inch of and that know every inch of me, when I agree to play this version of our game, where I’ve supposedly never done any of this before.
“If you’d… be willing to teach me,” I say.
FUCK, the ring reads. And I’m left thinking the same thing in my giddy anticipation. Fuck.
For the rest of the train ride, V gently holds my wrist, instead of my hand.
It shouldn’t feel that different, having his grasp just a few inches displaced, but there’s a dominance in the gesture that somehow feels more suggestive than the earlier kiss I licked into his mouth. He seems perfectly calm — lazily flicking through a few pages of a book on his phone, then abandoning it to watch the autumn landscape pass — but I know he’s thinking about it, too.
My leg bounces with a fidgety electricity that’s been building for most of our trip to Manchester. A few nights in, when we’d all gone to bed and V and I sat listening to the constant hum of the city, I’d slid a hand over in the darkness to trace the warmth of his waist. I pressed my lips to his shoulder. Grazed his skin with my teeth.
It’s one of the only times I can remember seeing him a little sheepish about sex. “Two!” he’d hissed, scandalized by my advances. “They’re in the next room!”
“Sorry,” I laughed as I withdrew my hand (and my bite). “Didn't realize you’d feel shy about that.”
“I’m just being considerate.” He blinked at me through the shadows. Sometimes, when his eyes are wide, and his face is so open and sincere, I want to drink him up like soup.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” I said, amused, “but those two messed around all the time near us on tour. Sometimes in the same damn room, when they thought we’d gone to sleep — or if we were all sloshed. Never been particularly, uh, private. Or discreet.”
“Really? That's so rude, and…” He went quiet for a moment, contending with this information. “And… hot? Hmm. But— I don’t know! I couldn’t. They’d hear us.”
So we kept it chaste. It occurred to me, while watching his lips close around a spoon on day four of the trip, that this just might be the longest we’d gone in months with little contact besides the occasional kiss, hand-hold, or cuddle. As a result, each gentle touch from him feels like heaven and torture all at once — including the warm hand he lays across the nape of my neck now, as he stands to retrieve our bags. My tongue feels too large for my mouth. My heart thuds loudly in my throat. I think my ears are ringing.
Soon V is shepherding me off the train, trailing our luggage behind him. I should’ve foreseen the ring facing outward when he wheeled my suitcase into the station for me this morning. Often, actions can signal his dominant moods — on days when he treats me as something delicate, something to guide and protect and control.
It prickles a stubborn blush into my face to concede it, but it’s true: sometimes I quite like being something to control.
Our sunny walk home from the station solidifies the dynamic emerging between us. At each intersection, his hand briefly appears at the small of my back, nudging me forward when the pedestrian light goes green. There’s one corner where his touch on my wrist stops me from stepping out in front of a cyclist I hadn’t noticed. Little by little, I find myself looking to him for cues. By the time we reach our building, I can’t remember when I stopped carving our way home and started just… following him instead.
He unlocks the door and holds it open for me. “In, darling.”
I bite back a smile from the mix of nerves and excitement and dread and curiosity about what I’m willingly walking into. His mouth curls upwards, too, like we’re both in on the secret.
After some time away, the familiar stairwell to our flat is flooded with novelty. What smelled like nothing to me last week now smells like woodwork and sort of like warmth itself, like fresh bed linens dried in the sun. The window in the door that V’s clicked shut behind us paints a golden square at our feet and up the first few steps. He leads me up, a suitcase handle in each palm. I’m treated to a similar wave of comfort at the entrance of our kitchen, midday sun dousing the space in a fond glow.
V sends me to go rinse off while he gets things settled, whatever that means. From the sound of suitcase zippers while I undress, and the aroma that sneaks in under the bathroom door, I guess he’s unpacked our luggage and started cooking lunch. I’m feeling restless and impatient by the time I wander out in nothing but a pair of underwear, as instructed. He only gives me an appraising look, a small smile, and the instruction to kneel while I wait.
“You’re driving me crazy,” I tell him.
His smile broadens. “You’re so cute when you get a little desperate.”
“I’m not cute,” I huff. “Or desperate.” The fact that I lower to my knees as I say it is… irrelevant.
It earns a nod from him, and then he’s back to whatever he has simmering in a pot on the stove. The fuck ring glints on his finger, mocking me. I watch quietly, palms on thighs, feet tucked flat, as he fiddles with the dish some more. Grinds in some pepper. Adds a bay leaf. I think it must be soup.
Eventually, the lid goes on. He turns the burner down, washes his hands, and turns to me. “Why don’t you grab a towel?”
I glance from him to the pot. “For what?”
“You,” he laughs. “I plan to make a mess of you.”
V has always been good at holding back. He thinks before voicing a thought. The silences in his songwriting speak as loudly as his chords. There was even the time he sat so motionless before an audience, they thought he was a mannequin.
I, on the other hand, am a fidgety mess.
“Don’t move,” he’d said, what felt like an hour ago before he disappeared. Really, it’s probably been about seven seconds. But my knees are wide, where he has me kneeling on the sofa cushions, and my palms feel clammy against the back of it, facing the kitchen. The stance means I can at least see when he strides back into the room — shirtless, bare shoulders gleaming in the sunshine.
I have to strain my neck to look up at him, where he stops behind the couch.
He smiles at me. “Tell me, love.”
“Green is good,” I say. “Yellow for pause and check-in. Red for stop.”
This earns a small kiss, which stokes an immediate heat in me. Fuck, that’s embarrassing. I’m annoyed that kneeling makes me hard. I’m annoyed that he uses this fact to his advantage. I’m annoyed that he’s barely touched me. More than all of that, though, I’m desperate to please him.
“Ready to begin?”
I nod.
“All you need to know,” he says from above me, “is what you’re built for. Look at me.”
I’m not sure when I’d bowed my head towards his bare feet on the carpet. I look up. God, he’s pretty.
“You,” he says, “are built for pleasure. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“This—” He strokes a thumb over my mouth. “What’s this for?”
I blink. It feels like a trick question. “Pleasure?”
“Good boy.” He bends to kiss me. My heart is throwing a fucking rave in my chest. “And your tongue?”
“For pleasure,” I say, a little more certain.
“Show me.”
This time, the press of his mouth on mine is slick, opening to allow the hot slide of us against each other. On the day I taught him to kiss, I can’t believe I told him tongue should be used sparingly. I want him to lick every word from my mouth, every ache from my body, every sorry part of me that was empty until the day he climbed those stairs to bring us together.
“Show me,” he says again, and then his palm is at the back of my head, guiding me down to mouth kisses against his jaw and press my tongue to his neck, his collarbone, his nipple. I draw my tongue back into my mouth to wet it again, but he’s stepped away.
He’s rounding the couch. The sound of his presence behind me now quickens my breath. I know better than to turn around.
Fingertips appear on my left hand, freeing it from my clutch against the cushions.
“What’s this for?” he says, softer.
“Pleasure.”
He guides it to my hip. “Show me.”
Maybe I should feel shy about shoving my waistband down, bent over the couch like this in the daylight. But I’m not. V’s had me hypnotized for hours now. Years, really.
His hand, still laid over mine, guides me to wrap a fist around myself, to bob one slow stroke down and up. A sound escapes me, and I let it. He loves to play me like an instrument. Why deprive him of it? I get louder as he guides the motion again and again. Fuck, he’ll ruin his fun, amping me up so quickly.
But I soon find my hand slapped against the back cushion again, mounting it in place while my chest heaves and my head spins like a hot tub with the jets on full blast. I’m barely given a moment to process the rustle of his motion behind me before he’s dragged my underwear further down my thighs, and his palms are on my ass, and— fuck, his— his fucking tongue is on me.
I guess my forehead’s on the couch now, because I’m using it as leverage to push back against his mouth, which is hot and wet against my skin, indulgent and glorious and rhythmic in his articulation. I can feel my mind peeling away, my body opening up to him like the yawning jaw of a wave. I’m all mounting tension, spiraling infinitely up, while also unraveling for him, all desperate need.
And it’s not just his tongue. There, his lips, a slow-pulsing ring around mine. I exhale a shaky sigh. Was he this good at this the last time that—? Where the fuck did he learn to—? It’s got to be from a memory that’s come back to him. Does he remember being with other—
“You’re thinking,” he says. Even his breath is hot against me. “Stop it.”
I grumble something nonsensical into the couch. Behind me, V fucking laughs. I want to retort with something snarky, but it comes out as just a pathetic sound, because a new sensation appears against my wet skin: the blunt drag of his cock.
“Feel this?” he says. “Do you know where this will go?”
Oh, right. I’m supposed to be playing dumb. “Where?” I say. “Oh, god— in? Inside me?”
“That’s right.”
His voice, then the snap of a bottle, and the cold sensation of his lubed fingers against me, which get shoved inside — I don’t have multiple senses anymore, just one: the awareness of everything he does. I’m tuned to him like a dial. To the sound of his breathing, the eventual withdrawal of his fingers, then the press of his cock against me again, this time slick and insistent.
“Come on, love. Open up for me.”
He’s rocking against me in little pulses, until — I’m a sunrise, a front door, the first note of a concert. A beginning. I open and he enters and it never fails to catch my breath, how this part feels like worship, like something grander than I’m meant to process.
I’m clutching the couch fabric in my palms, writhing desperately, since he didn’t do all that much to prepare me for this onslaught of divinity.
“Hold still,” he chides. “You can take it, love. It’s what you’re built for.”
So I sit here and grip the couch and take him in like a good little vessel to be filled, like something to be controlled, something built for pleasure. Oh, fuck, he’s drawing little sounds from me again, as he starts to rock in and out, and I feel each part of me starting to melt like a candle. My arms go first, heavy and weighted, then my legs, and suddenly I’m pliable in his hands which have closed around my waist as he pushes deeper into my mantle, my core. I think of earth diagrams in textbooks and wonder which layer it is when someone goes deep enough to meld with your soul. He arrives there on one thrust and then the next, to the blended harmony of our voices sighing together.
“Oh, that’s it,” he murmurs. “God, that’s good. My favorite toy.”
“Fuck.”
“Mm.” There’s the long drag of him withdrawing, and then his touch is gone completely. “No coming yet, love.”
I want to protest, to insist I wasn’t about to — but sometimes with him, I find myself at the edge so suddenly that it's happening before I realize.
He’s settled onto the couch beside me, slouching lazily atop another part of the towel which already shows messy evidence of the time I’ve spent above it. With his guidance, I shed and discard my single layer and swing a knee over to straddle his lap. Somewhere along the way he’s shed everything too, and here we are, skin to skin, my thighs around his hips, my cock dragging across his stomach.
Beneath my palms, his shoulders feel hot like sun-baked pavement. I notch my thumbs parallel along his collarbones. I’m always finding new ways we fit together. It’s an endless list.
I’m reminded this is supposedly the first time, though, when he says, “This angle will feel different.”
“Will it hurt?” I ask, playing my role for him.
He smiles softly. “Not at first.”
Before I can ask what the fuck he means by that, his hand is guiding me by my hip, forward and down, down to where his other hand aligns himself with me. He clutches me tighter when I start to lower onto him, halting me in place before I get too far.
“So eager,” he laughs. “Go slowly.”
No stubbornness left in me, I do my best to abide. This time, I’m a sunset, the way V has me sinking imperceptibly lower, a beautiful descent. He watches my face and I get to watch his, the way his lips part and his brows knit and his breath hitches, as I bring him inside of me again.
He slides through me until I’m seated on his lap.
Whatever speed I lift up, I know, will be corrected as too fast. I try anyway.
As predicted, his hands dig into my hips to pause my ascent. He shakes his head once and says, “Stay.”
So I sit, full of him, complete, feeling my body adjust to the state of us together. Feeling his occasional involuntary twitch within me. God, his body responding to mine will never get old.
I lean forward and press a soft kiss to the scar on his cheek. Against it, I say, “I love you.”
A smile blooms across his face. “You doing alright, love? Color?”
“Green. But I’d be better if you would just fuck me.”
He clicks his tongue. “Someday you’ll learn to be patient.”
“Oh,” I sigh, only because his hands have started rocking my hips. Forwards, back.
“Until then,” he says, pestle to my mortar, “I’ll teach you what you’re good for.”
“Ohh.” I blink slowly, savoring the lazy rhythm he’s setting. Thoughts tumble away like foliage.
Unlike me, V can still form coherent sentences. He’s started murmuring all sorts of possessive things against my neck: “You belong to me. No one else gets to touch you like this. To see you like this, to have you like this. Right, baby?”
Sometimes I’m amazed at how much he’s able to say while we play. I suppose it’s the same skill as being able to perform under pressure, to wander a stage and nail all his notes and give subtle cues to our crew for what he needs, all while riding the waves of emotion that come to him with a performance. He’s still muttering filthy things to me as he starts to shift our motions vertical, nudging me with his hips, encouraging my lift and fall with his hands.
“Oh, god,” I pant.
“Has your mind gone blank, love? Does pleasure make you a little dumb? That’s perfect. You don’t need to think. You don’t need to be anything else right now but a toy for me to fuck.”
My fingertips dig into his shoulders as our speed increases. With his hands gripping my thighs, he pulls me down onto him over and over again. No use trying to withhold the moan that falls from my mouth, a long tone that jumps in pitch and volume each time he ruts up into me.
“You’re hot when you’re all worked up like this. Loud and fucking shameless.”
“Shit,” is all I can manage in response. God, he’s really going for it now. “Ah— Shit—”
“What, are you gonna come? You like being used that much, it’s gonna make you come untouched?” he goads. “Go on, then. Make a mess of yourself for me.”
I do, I really fucking do — though honestly I sully him as much as myself with hot relief and waves of lust. The towel has shifted so much beneath us that I’m pretty sure the white trails dripping down V’s hip are headed straight for the couch itself. I’d care, if I had any thoughts left in my head.
But my mind is still blank because somehow I’m still fucking coming. Maybe because V hasn’t slowed his pace a bit. At this point, I’m just bracing, thighs shaking, as he slams his hips against me from below. Just when I think I must be spent, there’s one last trickle. I groan brokenly. The spot he was hitting that felt like heaven starts to feel like I’m a rocky shore getting outright pummeled by waves.
“Christ,” I hiss, clutching the living hell out of his shoulders. “Jesus Christ, Vessel—”
He doesn’t acknowledge the outdated moniker. Just stays his rhythm, panting heavily now, as he huffs, “Be good.”
“What?” I choke out.
“I do what I want with— what’s mine,” he says between breaths. “And you’re being so good, letting me— use you like this.”
There’s something hypnotic about the overwhelm, an ecstasy in enduring what he wants to use me for. Aside from my grasp on his shoulders, my body’s giving out on me, jostled with each thrust, nothing but a sheath as he chases his own pleasure.
I surrender to it. I receive. There’s hardly me anymore; just rhythm, and pressure, and submission.
But the rhythm slows. My eyes crack open. V lets go of my hips, in order to lift my gaze to him by the chin. I missed what he’s said to me, so he asks a different question.
“You still with me, love? Color?”
I sigh, and lean into the lovely warmth of his palm. I’ll gladly receive that, too.
The sound he makes just might be a chuckle. “Okay, tap twice if you’re good… Three if you want to stop.”
With my left hand, I tap his shoulder twice. I’m not sure how to ask him to keep going. I’m grateful he’s given me a way to.
“There he is,” V says, smiling as he pulls me in for a kiss. “What a good boy.”
“Mhm,” I hum, and we’re nodding at each other now, his pace picking up again, my head crackling with all the unbearable pleasure of overstimulation. “Mhm. Mhm.”
It’s a beautiful sight, his torso glossy with my own release, the muscles in his stomach forming ridges for it to slide across, as he surges into me, more frantic this time.
God, I fucking want it. Toys are meant to be used.
“Oh, that’s it,” he groans over the messy sounds of our rhythm. “That's it. Take it, take it take it—”
I’m not sure if I’ve fallen forward or if he’s pulled me to him, but my face is buried in V’s neck as he pours heat into me now with thrusts that stutter and falter like syllables of thunder. His words have fragmented to just a strained moan against my temple, a sound that cracks and shatters into a dazed laugh. I’m jostled again by another erratic pump of his hips. The next one’s more gentle, accompanied by a grunt from him. Then we’re still.
My head feels full of fog. I’m vaguely aware that V is peppering kisses to the side of my face and rubbing my back with a broad palm. The room’s gone so quiet, aside from our heaving breaths as we both calm down, pressed hot against each other.
Once he’s caught his breath, the world shifts. He’s lifting me, unbothered by the bit of come that drips from me onto his thigh in the process. My arms loop around his neck out of sheer muscle memory. Carrying me has become much more common recently. Maybe someday I’ll admit that I love it. For now, I say nothing and neither does he.
It’s a tight fit to maneuver us both through the bathroom door, but he manages. Even as he bends a little to start the shower, and then stands, swaying absently, waiting for the water to heat up, he doesn’t put me down. For a moment, he supports me with one hand in order to abandon the fuck ring on the counter, judging by the little metallic thud. My thighs are still wrapped around his middle when he eventually slides the shower curtain aside and steps into the steam and the spray.
I’m not ready to leave the safe little cave I’ve nestled into at his neck, so I let him hold me here with water running down my back. His breathing lifts his chest against mine, steady.
When my arms get tired, I reluctantly slide my way down his front. My feet hit the tub basin with a splash. My legs feel like panna cotta.
“He lives,” V teases.
I scrub my face with a palmful of water, then peer up at him through the steam. “Who are you?”
“Oh, piss off. That’s still not funny,” he says, betrayed by his own laughter. He leans down to kiss my lips and then further down to kiss the key on my neck, his favorite tattoo of mine. “How’re you feeling?”
I’m busy rubbing the hell out of my eyeballs, but I still manage to answer, “Well-fucked. And, uh, well-educated.”
“What?” he laughs. “Oh. Right. Forgot my role for a bit there. Got carried away. Hey, don’t do that.”
Gently, he pulls my hands from my eyes, interrupting the eye rub I was indulging in. My vision dances with static that fades to reveal V's chest before me, blushed pink from the water’s heat. I find my palms turned upwards, so that he can kiss them.
The soup is ham and lentil, and it’s delicious. Somehow, over a few months, V’s become a better cook than I have in thirty-something years.
“Hey,” I say between bites, “how much would you say you remember now? From what you’d forgotten.”
His pensive squint appears as he assesses. “I don’t know. Eighty percent? Ninety?”
“Okay, so… statistically…” I stir my bowl casually. “Haven’t you remembered sleeping with other people by now?”
When I look up, he’s smiling into his own dish. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You fucking liar,” I laugh. He shrugs. “Come on. You must remember something…? There’s been plenty.”
“Darling, are you calling me a slut?” he says. I can’t decide whether to cackle or to defend my question, but his smile’s only grown. “As far as I’m concerned, love, it’s only ever been you.”
“Okay, that’s very sweet and all, but you don’t have to pretend. I’m fully aware that you’ve— V, I’ve heard you fuck other people. It’s really okay.”
“What?” he says, genuinely startled this time.
“No, it’s— You know how I said we had to hear Ivy and Three? Well, I had to hear you too, sometimes. Just part of life on the road.”
His face has fallen into a pout. “Oh, love. Fuck. I’m sorry. That must’ve been difficult.”
“It sucked,” I agree. “It was also frustratingly hot.”
He looks at me. I look at him.
“We could play with this, couldn’t we?” he says slowly. Deviously.
“You do always find a way to.”
“I won’t fuck anyone else, though.”
“No, me neither,” I dismiss with a wave of my spoon.
“But we could find someone who might want to listen. Or someone we could listen to. Hey, when did Three and Ivy say they’d visit us, again?”
The wide-eyed stare I give him requires setting down my spoon for full effect.
“What!” he laughs. “I’m just saying. Now that your old room’s officially a guest room, we should… have someone put it to use. That’s all.”
“Right.”
“Perfectly innocent.”
“Of course.”
This is all I know: my boyfriend is a freak, and I like it. He smiles at me over our lunch, and god dammit, I smile back. I want to bite into him like a pastry.
Outside, a finch has begun whistling a tune in the sunshine, even though it feels like midnight to me. The shower and the warm meal seem to have only deepened my exhaustion. I honestly can’t wait to get in bed tonight and pass out.
Tomorrow we have no plans — a day left intentionally blank as we settle back in from our trip — but one is quickly forming in my mind.
A more rested version of me will greet the morning and stretch and roll to my side.
I’ll wake V with a kiss, and I’ll slide that ring onto his finger — this time, facing inward.