For Real (Spires #3)

by Alexis Hall

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. John Donne, “Holy Sonnet XIV”

I hated being forgiven almost as much as I feared rejection. It felt too much like a debt you couldn’t pay.

I’m making such a bloody racket I only half notice he’s saying my name. I say…everything. Yes. God. Fuck. There. That. Harder. Deeper. Yes. Yes. Ohhhhhhh yes. Embarrassing porny stuff I can’t even believe is coming out my mouth. I think I maybe tell him I love him. Because, right now, I do. I totally do.

At some point, God, it’s not even like it crests, but something happens to the pleasure. It pulls in tight as a universe, and then it’s everywhere like falling stars, and I’m just taken by it. By him. Little death, my arse. It’s a fucking massive death. And I die for ages.

Wow. He can still do words.

My balls do this weird sort of spasm thing—like they’re checking their pockets for anything else they can squeeze out my cock—and come up empty.

And to say I’m in a wet spot would be to seriously underplay the enormous ocean of come he’s amazingly fucked out of me.

And all I felt was a certain social embarrassment. A soft, squirmy self-consciousness, devoid of shame’s sweet-sharp sting or the self-annihilating rush of humiliation. It had been like this before, but I’d always managed to subvert it. I’d even found it slightly piquant—a private scourging of my self-respect—to be so utterly controlled by my physical needs that I would not only allow this, but seek it, and cede mastership of my body to a man who needed a title to claim it.

Somebody had said to me: “We’ll kill you if he dies.” He had. His heart in my hand, his torso spread open like a Rorschach test.

But that’s sort of what love is, I guess. A perpetual state of semideranged partiality.

“Yes, yes, I’m yours.” Mine. My heart melts into blood and rubbery tube bits and wet candyfloss. “You should probably stop, by the way.” He makes another amazing sound. Pure despair. “Toby—” “Stop.”

The worst thing about being old enough to know better was the realisation that you weren’t.

His eyes flew wide. “God no. I want to hurt you because I love you.”

“Once in Africa, Granddad’s whole unit got killed or scattered so there was just three of them left, starving and ragged and desperately trying to get back. But there was this minefield between them and the British Army, and they were all like, ‘Well this is it, curtains.’ But he was like, ‘No way. I’m a Jacobs; I’m going to be first against the wall when the Germans catch us.’ So he just, like, leads them over this…this fucking minefield, y’know. This kid from East London whose name nobody is going to remember but me.”

I dropped the flogger, and he pushed himself away from the wall, swaying into my waiting arms. The skin of his back was burning against my chest, but he was utterly pliant, a molten boy, cast in the shape of all the pleasure he’d taken from me beneath the falls of a flogger.

So we put our arms around each other again. I lead and Laurie follows and Jasper sings, and there’s moonlight, and we dance and dance and dance until we fly and my heart is so zing. I can’t even.

“I’ve got a lemon meringue pie to finish.” “And…” My lips were dry, my body spread and aching, pain gathering intimately both inside and out. “What do I do?” There was nothing but love in him as he told me, “You suffer for me.”

God. I hurt. I hurt. There was something relentless about it, the steady heartbeat of pain and the slow drop-drop of time.

Perhaps a stranger would look at Toby and see little more than a skinny postadolescent with a shockingly bad haircut. But he was my boyfriend, my dom, my fragile prince, and he was nothing less than beautiful to me. I loved the tender spot at the back of his neck and all the whisper-soft hairs that would stir beneath my breath. I loved his narrow feet and his disproportionately large toes. I loved the small, flat mole that lurked beneath his left earlobe. I loved the place between his collarbones and the hollows beneath his clavicles where sweat gathered and gleamed. I loved the slim and gorgeous cock that tasted so much of salt and him.

These were the rosary beads of my submission. Though my only god was love.6

The truth was, the years between us mattered. Not—as I had thought—because of how other people would judge, but because while some of the bridges between us were instinctive and effortless, love and sex and faith, others had to be carefully built. And I’d failed not just to build them, but to notice they were needed.

“This isn’t submission.” “Isn’t it?” “No.” He looks up at me, tired as well, but he’s never looked more beautiful to me than in this moment, strong and open and unafraid like when he surrenders his body. “It’s love.”

The point is…the point is…the future is terrifying because it’s full of stuff, not because it’s empty.1