Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men, to part three of our futuristic tale of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Two is the magic number in this episode. Robin finds out he’s not the only folk lore droid to walk the wasteland, is there room for two heroes? And Will, well will wonders if he has room to accommodate two bikers, he finds that answer pretty quickly. This is a long one but it’s as long as it is steamy.

Warning for explicit hot futuristic sex on a picnic rug.

Robin should probably have said no to Will’s request to play with another attachment. He should definitely have remembered the edging mode switch was broken. With a two-hour delay and hollow eyes, they headed for the car park.

They stopped at a piece of plastic tarp that must have been a printed banner at some point. Will read in big green letters MAY DAY FESTI and saw a picture of an arrow in a bullseye. Robin strode ahead and pulled back the banner. Then he stood with his hands on his hips, crotch pointing out towards the machine and an expectant look on his face.

“Will, meet Locksley,” he said, beaming like a proud father.

Will had seen bikes on screens, in ads, in the background of broadcasts. He’d never stood next to one.

It was beautiful. Not in the way the city designed things beautiful, with symmetry and approved colours. Beautiful the way a weapon is beautiful. Low and black and scratched to hell. Big knobbled tyres that looked like they’d eat the wasteland and ask for more. A single round headlight behind a brass ring that looked like a Victorian oil lamp. A wide flat seat of black leather with intricate stitching, big enough for two. Will couldn’t see anything a passenger might hold on to.

There was a strip of green duct tape on the tank and a crude arrow scratched into the carbon near the left knee.

“Cool,” said Will.

“Cool? That’s it? Cool?” Robin put his hand on his chest as if wounded. “My dear lambkin, do you know what you are seeing? This is a custom-built adventure rig on a Kawasaki KLR frame, stripped and rebuilt so far from original that the Kawasaki badge is the only thing left from the factory. The tyres are Heidenau knobs, oversized, the front a 21-inch that eats rubble and rutted dirt, the back a thick 18 that grips through mud and ash. The exhaust is a shortened Scorpion can, black ceramic, and...”

“You said we were late?”

Robin huffed. “Typical Sherwood City magcart wanker,” he muttered as he mounted the bike. “Well, hop on to my cool bike then.”

Will didn’t exactly hop as much as awkwardly mount. “There’s nothing to hold on to.”

“Hold on to me and squeeze your thighs together like you did last night when I set my attachment to berserker mode.”

The engine caught. A single deep cough that Will felt in the soles of his feet before he heard it, then a thump, thump, thump that settled into a rough idle he could feel through the seat, through his thighs, through his hands on Robin’s waist. Not the clean electric hum of city vehicles. This was pure analogue roar. Shuddering through each stroke like a heartbeat with a grudge. The shortened exhaust barked on every fire, a hard percussive snap that echoed off the dome.

The bike shook between his legs. A pulse, low and insistent. Will shifted on the seat and the vibration found new and pleasant places. He gripped Robin’s waist tighter and pressed his face into his shoulder because the sound was enormous now, Robin had twisted the throttle and the thump climbed to a roar.

The ride was terrifying and exhilarating. The simple feeling of holding on to Robin, the only thing still and safe in a blurred vibrating world was all he needed. The ancient motorway was a grey scar through brown nothing, cracked and patched and broken, but Locksley ate it. The big front tyre rolled over rubble and ruts and the potholes that opened in the tarmac like missing teeth, and Robin’s body shifted with each one, leaning the bike through the wasteland with a casualness that made Will want to scream and laugh at the same time.

Twenty minutes in, Will was lost in the endless vibration. The pulse of the engine had settled into his body, a low hum that sat behind his balls and wouldn’t leave. He felt brave. He felt stupid. He moved his arm lower and squeezed Robin’s crotch.

Robin flinched. His hips jerked back and his hand twitched on the throttle, the revs spiked and the front wheel, already light from the acceleration, hit a ridge in the broken tarmac and kicked sideways. Will felt the bike go light. Felt Robin’s body tense. Felt the moment where it might still be okay.

It wasn’t okay.

Locksley went down on her left side. Before Will hit the tarmac he felt something grab and bind him. He braced ready to make contact on the side of his body and his head, and he did but it was far more muted than he expected. And his head only tapped the ground with an unpleasant but manageable bump. He had a moment to look down and saw black ribbons withdrawing from his body and heading for the protective hump on Robin’s suit.

The wasteland went very quiet. Will lay on his back on the old motorway and stared at the sky and tried to remember how to breathe. His hip was on fire. His shoulder was on fire. His hands were stinging. Robin was on his back now beside him, staring at the same sky, and Will could see from the corner of his eye that Robin’s mouth was open and his chest was heaving and for a moment neither of them moved.

“Are you dead?” Robin asked.

“Not sure yet.”

“Good. My safety sheath should have stopped any serious damage.” A pause. “That was your fault.”

“I know.”

“You grabbed my crotch.”

“I know.”

“While I was riding!”

“I know, Robin!”

“At speed.”

“I, know, Robin!”

“On a motorway.”

“Give me a break, last week I was a repressed gay virgin who thought jumping off the magcart before it had come to a complete stop was edgy! That vibration! It goes right though all your good bits doesn’t it. It’s like riding sex.”

Robin sat up. He looked at Will and his face scrolled through several emotions fighting for position. Fury was there. Amusement was there. But mostly he was pleased his lambkin understood the power of Locksley.

“You’ll learn,” Robin said finally. He stood up and offered Will a hand. “Come on. Let’s see what you’ve done to my girl.”

Will took the hand and stood. His hip hurt. His shoulder hurt. His pride was in pieces on the road. They walked over to Locksley. The front lever was bent. The indicator was snapped off. There was a fresh scratch on the tank next to the green duct tape.

Robin crouched beside the bike and ran his hand along the scratch and said nothing for a long moment.

“Can you ride it?” Will asked.

“Lever’s bent and she has a few more beauty marks but no obvious signs of a problem.” Robin straightened the bar with both hands, grunting.

He tried to kick the engine over. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing.

“Bollocks,” he exclaimed.

“Robin, I’m so sorr...” Will started.

“Shut up,” said Robin, calmly, “look.”

A dust cloud ahead of them. Rising from the brow of the hill. Getting bigger. The sound of engines, not one but several, the high snarl of smaller bikes, and they were closing fast.

“Robin.”

“I see them.”

“What do we do?”

“We wait,” Robin said. “We don’t outrun them on a bent lever and we can’t outrun bullets. We wait and we find out what they want.”

The dust cloud resolved into shapes. Four bikes, spread across the motorway in a loose formation, coming at them like a hand closing.

The bikes surrounded them. Small, fast, scramblers built for the wasteland, each one a different colour of wrecked. The riders were dressed in a mix of leather and PVC and salvaged gear, faces wrapped against the dust, and they sat on their idling machines in a circle around Robin and Will like they’d done this before.

The one in front pulled off his face wrap.

He was beautiful. Dark hair, long, swept back. A face that was all cheekbones and jaw and eyes that were lined with black. He wore a black PVC dandy jacket, braided across the chest, military but not military, costume but not costume. A white stripe ran through his hair. The bike beneath him was red and chrome and obscene.

He looked at Robin. Robin looked at him. Something passed between them that Will couldn’t read but could feel, a charge, a recognition, the way two performers clock each other across a stage.

“Stand and deliver,” he said pointing a repurposed righteous fire cannon at them.

“We can stand, but I’m afraid we have nothing to deliver friend,” said Robin. He spoke to the man with the same hearty charm he had shown Will on their first meeting.

“Alright, what ‘ave we got ‘ere, then?” the man said, surveying the bike and Will with the same lascivious look. His voice was pure old Essex, loud and certain, every vowel flattened. “A custom Kawasaki, KLR frame and a precious lamb just off his Angel band I’m guessing. One careful owner,” he said pointedly turning his gaze to Robin, “stranded on the king’s highway. Proper result.”

“His name is Will. He’s with me.”

“The bike or the lamb?”

The man swung off his bike with a grace that was theatrical. He bowed. A proper bow, one arm across the chest, the other extended. “Richard Turpin, babes. At your service. Some call me Dick.”

“Of course they do,” Robin muttered.

“And you are, honey?”

“Robin.”

“Just Robin, yeah?”

“Just Robin.”

“Not Robin Hood then, the second most famous outlaw in merry old England?”

“Ha, the arrogance of youth! I stole from the rich to give to the poor, you stole from the rich and stopped there. And you’re invented by a Victorian!”

“Fair play babes, I could point out Robin was a posh boy looking to get his status back because just like me, those Victorians did a job on you. But I was just lookin to get a rise out of you. It’s nice to meet the legend. I’m not bein’ funny, but you’re on my road and you’ve got literally nothing worth taking, which is well embarrassing for everyone.” Dick looked at Will again. The look lingered. “The lamb, though. The lamb’s proper beaut. He’s worth somethin’, ain’t he.”

Will felt his stomach drop.

“He’s not for trade,” Robin said, and his voice had changed. The theatrical warmth was gone. What was left was flat and final.

“Everything’s for trade, babes. That’s the highway, innit.” Dick smiled. “Let me make it simple, right. My boys ‘ave been ridin’ for three days and they need somethin’ to ride that ain’t a bike. Your lamb looks like ‘e’d be a proper good time. Give us an hour wiv ‘im and you both go free. Say no and we take what we want from you and the bike for parts and the lamb gets to be my latest recruit. Simple as that, babes. And before you shoot an arrow out your hair-do think on. You look like a level 6, they never thought to add an EMP protector mesh did they. Leo here carries an EMP grenade with him for luck, see where I’m heading?”

The other three had pulled off their face wraps.

The first one was dark. Dark curls, olive skin, a face that was sullen and pretty. He wore a leather jacket over nothing, the zip open to his sternum, and the body underneath was lean and cut and brown. He looked at Will and didn’t blink. He sat on his bike with an easy slouch.

The second was Japanese. Shaved sides, longer black hair on top, pushed back. He was slight and compact and every visible inch of his arms was covered in irezumi, the old kind, the kind that tells a story. A koi climbing his left forearm. Waves breaking across his right. Storm clouds disappearing under the collar of his jacket and presumably continuing. He was quiet. He was watching Will with a stillness that was more predatory than the others’ staring.

The third was Black. Tall, long-limbed, built like a swimmer. Close-cropped hair. A scar through his left eyebrow that made his face look permanently amused. He was the youngest, maybe Will’s age, and he was grinning. Not threatening. Excited.

“Lamb, meet your new besties, Leo, Kai and Dex.”

Will looked at Robin. Robin’s jaw was tight. His eyes were doing the thing Will had seen him do before, the fast calculation, the weighing of options, the finding of the angle.

“You’re not touching him,” Robin said.

Will was already picturing himself running his hand over Kai’s carp, while Leo and Dex kissed his neck.

“Robin,” he said.

“Will, I’ll handle this,” said Robin, raising his hand.

“But..”

“Lambkin, please...”

Will looked at the four men on their bikes. He looked at Dick Turpin in his braided PVC jacket. He looked at Leo’s jaw and Kai’s tattoos and Dex’s grin. He looked at the wasteland around them, flat and empty and dead, and at the broken motorway stretching in both directions to nothing. He walked over to Kai, who watched him with an amused grin, put his hand to his chest without knowing he was going to and then leaned in to kiss his small, neat lips. Then he turned to Dick.

“If I spend some time with your boys, can you look at Locksley for us?”

Dick put his hand on his chest. “Look at that, the lamb wants to gambol. I will do everything I can to fix the noble steed. Highwayman’s honour, babe. You ‘ave my word.”

“Is that actually a thing?”

“It is today, innit.”

“Okay,” Will said. “Okay.”

“’old your ‘orses though. Protocol dictates we check with your master,” he said turning to Robin.

“All my men are free to do as they wish, but if any of you hurt hi...”

“Yeah, yeah yeah, you’ll run us through with a laser cutlass of summat. My boys are rough, but they do play nice. Literally sorted. Love it.” Dick clapped his hands together. He turned to his boys. “Right, boys, take the lamb somewhere comfortable. Me and Just Robin are gonna ‘ave a little chat about bikes and fings.”

He looked at Robin and his Essex showman face changed into something else for a second. Something knowing.

“You and me,” Dick said, quieter now, the Essex patter dropping to a murmur. “We should talk properly.”

“Laters babe!” Robin said mimicking Dick’s voice exactly and turning to Will.

“Escort Lamkin to a more comfortable venue, we don’t want gravel in his gusset,” Dick said, mimicking Robin’s voice exactly.

Leo killed his engine and swung off his bike. He walked with a loose-hipped swagger. He was taller than Will had thought. The leather jacket was open and he was lean and hard underneath it, the lines of his stomach visible in the gap, a trail of dark hair below his navel. His eyes were dark and direct and he looked at Will the way Robin had looked at him in the alley that first night, with a hunger that made Will’s cock harden.

“Hey, lamb,” Leo said. His voice was low, a smoker’s rasp. “You ever been on a bike before today?”

“No.”

“Thought not.” He smiled. It was a slow smile, the kind that knew what it looked like. “You ever been with three men before?”

“No.”

“Thought not.” He put his hand on the back of Will’s neck. The same place Robin put his hand. Different grip. Robin’s hand was a reassurance. Leo’s hand was a claim. “You’re going to have a good time, lamb. We’re going to make sure of that.”

Dex was spreading a blanket from his bike on a flat piece of ground behind the embankment. He was whistling. He was actually whistling.

They stripped where the blanket met the dirt. No ceremony. Leo’s one piece off, Kai’s arms finally bare, Dex already naked and grinning, and Will pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it and the air on his bare skin felt like a living thing. Three naked men in the wasteland sun and Will wanted all of them.

“Get over here,” he said.

Leo reached him first. He pulled Will up to standing and kissed him, the texture of Leo’s lips, the taste of him, the heat of his mouth, the rasp of his stubble against Will’s chin all sent little electric silverfish shimmying around his body. Leo was warm and hard and the feel of his cock against Will’s hip was a thick weight that Will wanted.

Kai was behind him. Will heard him kneel on the blanket and felt his hands on his hips and then his mouth at the small of his back, and Kai’s mouth moved down, his hands spreading Will’s cheeks. Will pushed back into it. He felt Kai’s tongue find his hole and he groaned into Leo’s mouth, a warm wet pulse went through his whole body. Kai’s tattooed chest was against his back and the ink was warm on his skin.

Dex was beside them. He pressed himself against Will’s side and kissed his shoulder, his neck, his ear, and his hands were on Will’s chest, his stomach. Will reached for Dex without breaking the kiss with Leo and found his cock, hard, and wrapped his hand around it and Dex groaned against his neck and Will stroked him.

They became a tangle of hands and mouths and skin. Will intended to use his freedom and scandalise his old self. He took Leo’s cock in his hand. He was thick, uncut, dark, the head pushing out from the foreskin, wet at the tip, and Will stroked him and felt the girth of him and wanted it. Kai’s long slim cock was hard against Will’s arse, sliding between his cheeks. Dex sank to his knees and sucked Will’s cock. Will bucked up into it and held Dex’s head and fucked his mouth and Leo kissed Will’s neck and Kai’s fingers found Will’s hole, slick with spit, and one pressed in and the entry was a slow bright bloom.

Will pulled off Dex’s mouth. “Leo. I want you first.”

Leo smiled. That slow smile. “Yeah?”

“You’re thick. I need that.”

“Go on, lamb, lad.” said Leo, stepping back from him.

Will lay back on the blanket and pulled his knees up and opened for him, the air on his hole, the visual of Leo’s thick cock pressing against him almost made him cum. Leo pushed in. Will wasn’t ready for the sensation, for a moment all he was was pain but then the pain changed into a warm, buzzing thing and Will breathed and pushed back and the shaft slid in and the thickness of him was a fullness that Will could feel everywhere, in his stomach, in his spine, in the soles of his feet.

“Good?” Leo said, stilling.

“Good. Go harder.”

Leo fucked him. Ignoring his demands, he went slow and deep and every stroke was a thing Will could map, the ridge of the head, the vein underneath, the foreskin pulling back on the pull-out and sliding forward on the push-in. Will held Leo’s hips and pulled him deeper. Leo’s cock was not long but it didn’t need to be, that exquisite stretch was everything.

Kai was beside them. His hand was on Will’s chest and his mouth was on Will’s neck and Will turned and kissed him and Kai’s tongue was in his mouth and Leo’s cock was in his arse and Will was between them and he felt powerful. He was the centre. He was the thing they were all touching and he was telling them where to touch and they were doing it.

Dex was stroking himself, watching, that grin still on his face, and Will reached for him and pulled him closer and took his cock in his hand and wanked him while Leo fucked him. The separate sensations were a chord, Leo inside him, Dex in his hand, Kai on his mouth, and Will was running the whole thing. He was the hub and they were the spokes and every touch was his to direct.

Leo pulled out. Will felt the slide, the emptiness, and his hole stayed open, loose and wet, and he felt the gape of it, the air on his open hole was cooling.

“Kai,” Will said. “Your turn.”

Kai moved between his legs and his cock was long and slim and the head pressed against Will’s open hole and the slide was easy, Leo’s thickness having done the work, Kai pushed in and the length of him was a different kind of fullness, deeper, more precise, and the head found the spot and pressed and Will’s cock jumped.

“Fuck,” Will said. “There.”

Kai fucked him with long, precise strokes, then fast bucking hips and Will could feel every inch, each stroke a journey, the head pushing deep, the shaft sliding through, the pull-out to the tip and the push back in to the root. Will wrapped his legs around Kai’s waist and pulled him deeper and Kai groaned and his tattooed arms were on either side of Will and the ink was moving, the koi swimming up his forearm with every thrust.

Dex lay on his side beside them and his mouth found Will’s nipple and his hand found Will’s cock and Will was full of Kai and being stroked and kissed and he felt like the most powerful person in the wasteland. He was getting exactly what he wanted and the men around him were getting exactly what they wanted and the loop was perfect: their want fed his power and his power fed their want and nobody was taking anything from anyone. Everyone was getting.

He pushed Kai up off him and Kai withdrew.

“I want to ride you,” said Will pushing him back onto the blanket.

As he mounted Kai, Dex moved. He slid down the blanket and Will felt him settle between Kai’s legs. Kai’s rhythm stuttered and Will felt it, the small break in the stroke, “fuck yeah,” moaned Kai, “keep lickin’ my balls.” Will bounced harder on Kai’s cock, trying to restore his grip after Leo, he would meet Dex’s tongue sometimes and the contact sent warmth flowing up his spine. Then his tongue moved up, now on the stretched skin where Kai’s cock entered him, and Will’s hole clenched. Kai groaned and Dex’s tongue was on the junction, the place where they joined, it was too much. Will’s cock exploded and it felt like his body left him with hot strands of cum over Kai’s chest. He didn’t stop. He looked down at Kai and an understanding that didn’t need words united them. Kai fucked him harder and Will’s cock got harder.

Dex’s tongue pressed. Not just licking now. Pressing against the ring of muscle around Kai’s shaft, he felt a finger join it, slick with spit, pressing against the edge of his hole alongside Kai’s cock.

“Yes,” Will said. “More.”

The finger slid in. Just one, alongside Kai’s cock, and the stretch was a sharp thing that focused his whole body around it.

“Another,” Will said.

Dex added a second finger and two spread and twisted and Kai’s cock was still moving, slow now, and Will’s hole was opening around both, the muscle learning a new width.

Will Green was nothing now. Dex pulled his fingers out and the loss was profound. He moved from his knees to Will’s back and kissed his neck as he rubbed his cock against Kai’s. “Let me take a turn,” he said over Will’s shoulder to Kai.

Will stopped on the down stroke. “No,” he said and then leaned forward over Kai. He turned his head to Dex. “Both of you at once.”

“You sure, Lamb?” said Dex, almost laughing.

“Yes, I’m fucking sure, and I’m not lamb, it’s Will, Will Scarlet.”

Dex pushed in slowly and held himself still. Two cocks inside him. Kai long and slim beneath him, Dex long and slim behind him, and the fullness was a different thing to anything Will had experienced. Not just the physical, though the physical was overwhelming, the stretch, the pressure, the impossible fullness of two cocks in the same space. The power, to take what he needed. The way the men inside him panted and moaned was the strongest sensation and the one that made his cock ache with throbbing.

They moved. Kai thrust up while Dex pulled back. Two different rhythms, every millimetre of movement a distinct sensation. Kai’s cock pressing his prostate from below and Dex’s cock pressing from a different angle and the two pressures meeting inside.

Leo was beside them. He’d been watching, stroking himself, and Will reached for him and pulled him close and took his cock in his mouth. Leo’s precum salty and sharp, a new note.

The rhythm built. Kai thrusting up, Dex thrusting in, Leo’s cock in his mouth, and Will was between three men and he was the most powerful person in the wasteland. A loop, feeding itself, his pleasure feeding their urgency and their urgency feeding his pleasure and he was the centre of it.

He came again. This time it wasn’t focused on his cock. A deep pulsing from the movement inside him blossomed in every muscle, he spasmed and for a moment there was no Will.

Leo flooded his mouth and beneath and behind him he was aware of Kai’s and Dex’s cocks both pushed deep into him, still, pulsing, filling him up with two streams of cum shifting with the slow movements of their spent cocks.

When it passed, Will was shaking. Dex pulled out. Will lifted off Kai and lay on the blanket and his hole was open and wet and used and changed.

They lay on the blanket. The wasteland was quiet. The sky was orange.

None of them spoke. There was nothing to say that would mean anything sensible.

After five minutes Dex patted Will’s shoulder. “Good work, lamb,” he said, “I think we all need one of my smokes.” He stood up and headed over to his bike.

“Not lamb,” he managed, “Will Scarlet.”

Dex returned a second later, running and looking worried. “Get up! Now! You all need to see this. Dick and Robin are broken.”

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men. Last episode Marcus began to show his true colours to his new employers. Grab a stiff drink for this one then sit back and enjoy watching him find his feet and his p-spot in the kind of onboarding most of us can only dream of.

The photographer was setting up when I walked through the mirror. He didn’t look up immediately, adjusting something on a light stand, and I had time to take him in before he took me in. Tall, thin, silver hair cut close. A face I had definitely seen somewhere, in a magazine, in a gallery, in a documentary about someone else. He frowned into the screen on the camera around his neck and crossed the studio.

He looked up. Took me in with one glance, the same technical inventory as Theo.

“Good,” he said. “Stand here.”

There was a white seamless sweep. He worked quickly and without direction beyond placement. Stand here. Turn. Chin down. Arms at your sides. No chat, just orders, I was being documented. That was all.

The harness first. Several angles. He moved around me, the shutter barely audible, and I held each position until he moved on to the next.

“Briefs off.”

I stepped out of them. He photographed me in just the harness. Then without it. Front, back, my body recorded from angles I didn’t usually see myself from. He asked for an erection with the same tone Theo had asked for my measurements.

I was already most of the way there. But I obviously wasn’t quick enough for him because he reached down and began stroking me without looking at my cock or meeting my eye. He frowned then he took a small bottle of oil from his pocket and massaged it in.

He photographed it with focused attention, moving around me, adjusting the light once. I was leaking by the time he asked me to turn, and the cool air hit my arse as I held the position. He shot.

“Smile for me,” he said, pointing the camera to my face.

I gave him what I thought was a nice smile. He rolled his eyes and lowered the camera.

“You can do better than that. I see you Mark, you’re definitely one of our boys. Bet you liked Theo’s tight little arse right? I’m sure he’ll be telling me all about it when we get home tonight.” Even though he got my name wrong the sudden familiarity shocked me, and he snapped away as my face moved towards a smile.

When he was done he lowered the camera and nodded once.

“Through there,” he said, and pointed to a door. Then he turned away and left me to put my harness and briefs back on.

The room was larger. Low light, warm. A leather day bed in the centre, long and wide, dark cognac. A curtained window taking up most of one wall, the curtain a heavy charcoal fabric.

The curtains drew back. And behind them: not a window to the street. A room. A lounge, warmly lit, low furniture, men in conversation, drinks in hand, unhurried. They were all wearing the same thing I’d been given: briefs and harness. The youngest wore white, the older ones wore different colours. Some had the same tattoos visible on their forearms.

They knew the glass was there. A few glanced toward it, smiling but missing my gaze. Around the walls of their room I could see the faint outlines of other windows, other panels of glass. Other rooms.

Theo appeared at my shoulder.

“Take your time,” he said. “The wave symbol on the forearm means bottom. The zig-zag is for a top. Both means vers. They have other markings too, but those will be explained at the appropriate stage.” A pause. “We give initiates the chance to experience what they are working toward. You may choose one or two. You’ll have an hour with whomever you select. After that,” he said it the way the whole day had been conducted, with complete matter-of-factness, “you won’t be having intercourse for ten days. So...enjoy.”

I looked at the room.

There was a man near the far window, early twenties, slight, dark blond. He was sitting on the arm of a sofa with his legs loose and apart, one forearm resting on his knee where I could read the markings clearly: wave and zig-zag both. His cock sat full and heavy in the white fabric of his briefs. He was looking toward the glass with an ease that came from somewhere past self-consciousness, and he reminded me of the fresher whose cherry I had popped at uni. Something about the set of his shoulders was an invitation and also a dare and I wanted to see him falter.

And then there was the other one.

Standing near the drinks table, mid-forties, thick through the chest and shoulders. Dark hair going grey at the temples, the markings clear: wave and zig-zag both. He wasn’t facing the glass, turned slightly in conversation, and I could see his arse filling the white briefs and the relaxed weight of his cock from the side, half-hard already. Something about his body language made me read him as arrogant prick.

“Those two,” I said.

Theo followed my look. “Of course,” he said, and left.

They came through a door I hadn’t noticed. The young one first, and up close he was even more precisely what I’d clocked through the glass: green eyes, lips that rested slightly parted and made me want to put a thumb in his mouth to open his jaw. Then the arrogant prick. Close up his muscles looked even more sculpted. I hated him more and wanted him more for it. He looked me over once, top to bottom, and then crossed to me and put his hand on my jaw and tilted my face up and kissed me with a directness that stopped my thoughts cold.

“I’m Edward,” he said against my mouth.

I turned. Seb was already close at my back, his chest warm against my shoulder blades, his mouth at my neck.

“Seb,” he said.

Edward took charge, as expected. He got me on my hands and knees on the day bed with a hand on my shoulder, no ceremony, and I felt him open me slowly with two fingers while Seb knelt in front of me, cock at my mouth, one hand loose in my hair. The configuration arrived whole, as if the three of us had rehearsed it.

I worked Seb with my mouth and watched Edward’s reflection in the mirrored panel opposite. He was controlled, methodical, reading what I wanted and giving me almost enough of it. His fingers worked deep. I pushed back onto them and heard him exhale, quiet and satisfied.

When he pushed into me I exhaled hard into Seb’s hip. Edward was thick, and the first full stroke took a moment to absorb, my body adjusting around him, and then he found the angle and I stopped thinking and just took it.

Seb felt the change in me. His hand tightened in my hair.

Edward set a rhythm. Long, slow strokes with full authority, each one sending a low heat up through my stomach. He started adjusting the length and angle until he felt my body approve by gripping his shaft tighter.

Seb started tentatively, mouth slightly open, watching Edward work. Every time I pushed back hard onto Edward and groaned around him, something shifted in Seb’s face. He adjusted his grip in my hair. His hips began to move. He started fucking my mouth rather than offering himself to it, shallow and testing at first, and then deeper, and then with a rhythm that had nothing tentative in it.

I could feel it happening in real time, the hardening of something in him, and I worked to bring it out, getting my hand up around the base of his cock, squeezing, making him gasp, dragging it out of him. He looked down at me. Whatever he saw there finished the job. He took a fistful of my hair and used it, and the sound he made was no longer young or careful.

Behind me, Edward noticed.

His rhythm stuttered, just briefly. His hands tightened on my hips. He drove deeper, reasserting himself.

It was time to school the old guy. I pulled off Seb and turned around.

Edward read it immediately. He withdrew and I felt the absence of him like a dropped temperature, and then I was pushing him onto his back on the day bed and he went down. He lay looking up at me with an expression that was not quite a challenge and not quite surrender, something suspended between the two, and I got a hand around his cock, still slick, still hard, and held his gaze while I pressed into him.

His jaw tightened. His hands went to my hips but he didn’t grip, just rested there, letting me set the pace. I took my time. Slow strokes, shallow at first, watching his face track each one, the effort it cost him to stay still under me visible.

Then Seb was at my back.

He pressed in carefully, finding the angle, and when he was seated deep I felt the three of us lock into a single line of pressure and the low groan that came out of me. Seb exhaled against the back of my neck. His hands settled on my hips just above Edward’s and he began to move.

Now I had no choice but to move with him.

Every stroke Seb drove into me pushed me deeper into Edward, the certainty of him dissolving layer by layer into something rawer and less defended. I kept my hand around his cock and worked him in time with Seb’s rhythm, long slow pulls. He was trying not to show how close he was. He was not succeeding.

“Look at me,” I said.

He did. That was the last of it.

His whole body tightened, hips lifting off the leather, cock pulsing hard through my fist, and he came in long stripes across his stomach, the sound he made was low and involuntary and nothing like the man who had kissed me with such easy authority twenty minutes ago. The clench of him around me, the grip of his body at the moment he lost it, pulled my own orgasm up from somewhere I hadn’t expected and I came buried in him, both hands flat on his chest, Seb still fucking me through it with short urgent strokes that had lost all their earlier patience.

Seb pulled out. I felt him step back, catching his breath.

We stayed like that for a moment, none of us moving.

“Your turn,” I said.

Seb blinked. Edward made a sound that was almost a laugh and shifted to the side, giving us the bed.

I lay back and looked up at Seb. He was flushed, his cock hard and leaking, and he was looking at me with an expression that had come a long way from the careful watchfulness he’d arrived with.

“Come here,” I said.

He came. Got between my legs, hands braced either side of me, and I reached down and guided him in, slowly, and watched his face as I did. The particular parting of his lips. The slight catch of his breath. He pushed the rest of the way himself and stilled, fully seated, adjusting to the feel of it.

“Move,” I said. “Take what you want.”

He moved. Tentatively at first, then finding it, the rhythm clicking into place as his confidence caught up with his body. I kept my hands on his hips, not directing, just there, and I talked him through it. Encouraging. Specific. Telling him what I felt, what was good, what I wanted more of. He listened. He adjusted. He got better with every stroke.

By the end he was fucking me properly, his whole weight behind it, face down against my neck, and when he came it was with a full-body shudder and a sound that started quiet and didn’t stay that way. I held him through it, both arms around his back, and didn’t let go until he’d finished.

He lay on me for a moment afterwards, breathing hard.

Then Edward made a sound that was almost a laugh.

“Well done,” he said. I still wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

Without speaking they positioned their heads between my open legs and worked their tongues up and down my leaking shaft. Edward slid a finger into me and I felt Seb's cum leak out around it. He slid another in, then Seb did the same. As one pulled back the other pushed in, both of them finding my prostate with ease even as my hips bucked. They focused their tongues on my head now, and the vibration of their breathing hummed through me as I leaked into their mouths. Then as my body began to tense, Seb took my full length and pressed his tongue flat against the underside of my cockhead. I put both hands on his head and pushed deep as I came in long pulses down his throat, his throat working around me, swallowing each one.

He lifted his head, wiped the corner of his mouth, smiled and then left. Edward stood too, he pointed to a door in the wood panelling.

“Shower’s through there,” he said as he turned and returned to the room I’d selected him from.

The shower room was white tile, the good water pressure shocked me. It felt like a massage and I stood under it for a long time.

Something had been trying to surface since I’d walked out of the room.

The thing was this: at some point in the last hour, everything had gone exactly as predicted. Vers, twenties and forties. Virgin-fantasy leaning on the younger, oedipal sub leaning on the older. The profiler had said it on the phone before Edward and Seb had even walked in. She had named them. He’ll land on Edward and Seb.

Not probably choose. Not lean towards. He’ll land on.

I thought about the moment Edward’s control cracked, just enough and no further. I thought about Seb finding himself, the loosening, the way his confidence had arrived in exactly the increments I’d wanted it to. I thought about how quickly Edward had composed himself afterward, sitting at the edge of the day bed with his drink, already returned to himself.

It had felt real. That was the thing I kept returning to. Whatever it was, it had felt completely real. But then the way they got me off. Real too, but that was two men practiced in their art.

I turned the shower temperature to freezing and let it take away all the questions for now.

When I came out, towel around my waist, steam still on the mirror, Daniel was sitting on the bench.

He looked the same as he had at Soho House. Entirely at home. His scent reached me even through the steam: cedar and warm skin, something underneath that was just him.

On the bench beside him: a suit, a phone, and two objects I didn’t recognise yet.

“Get dressed,” he said.

The suit was charcoal, narrow, and it fit like it had been on my body before, which it had, in every measurement Theo had taken. I put it on. The shirt was white, the wool sat clean across my shoulders.

“This is yours,” he said. “There will be a dressing room full of them at your apartment. Suits for every occasion, daywear, formal, off-duty. Underwear. Costumes.” He said the last word without emphasis. “Anything you need to wear, for anything you’re asked to do, it’s there. You won’t need to shop.”

He held out the phone. Slim, black, and on the back was the same geometric symbol that had been on the card and on the brass plate on the door. I took it.

“This is your only phone for the next ten days,” he said. “If it rings or vibrates, you answer. If it messages you, you read it and you obey. Failure to respond within five minutes terminates the contract. No warnings, no second chances. Five minutes.”

I looked at the phone. “I have a job. I’m four weeks into an internship. I can’t just be on call twenty-four hours a day.”

Daniel looked amused.

“Your job is your cover, now. Your manager has been informed that you’ve been seconded to a private project with the parent company for two weeks. He was well compensated for his flexibility. You’ll keep the internship when the ten days are over. Your career path is not a concern.”

“My manager has been...”

“Informed. Compensated. He won’t be an issue.”

Daniel reached into his jacket and produced two jewellery boxes. He set them on the bench between us.

He waited for me to open them.

The first was small, curved, medical-grade stainless steel, with a small padlock at the base. A chastity cage.

“The cage stays on for the full ten days,” he said. “It comes off for hygiene. Five minutes twice daily. That’s it. We’ll be monitoring you.”

The second was a plug. Black, medium, with a flared base.

“The plug is waking hours only,” he said. “You insert it every morning as soon as you are clean. You remove it before you sleep. It’s monitored too. Compliance is not optional.”

He held my gaze.

“The choice to continue is yours, Marcus. It always has been.”

I looked at the two objects on the bench. Inhaled his cedar and patience. Out there, beyond the walls, grey London ground through its day.

I picked up the cage and chose to continue.

Hello my beautiful boys and burly men. Allow me to present part three of our Hartswood Estate story. Toby is being tested by Liam, he’s a smart boy but, does he have what it takes to face down a straight guy with a tag and a porn addiction?

Callum Marsh answered the door in a pair of boxers. He was six foot, lean and wiry. His skinny pockmarked face was framed by a brownish ginger beard. He had a tattoo on his chest that looked like a dragon but was so badly defined I wasn’t sure. There was a tribal tattoo that looked like a bush of sickles covering his pronounced ribs on one side. Van Gogh would look like this if he’d been born on the Hartswood estate and wasn’t bothered about art. He looked at the PlayStation, I looked at the black box strapped to his ankle then he looked at me looking at it, and put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his flat.

He must have been at least ten years older than me, a real man. Ugly hot. I could smell the musk from his armpit and my cock stirred.

The flat was dim, no crew, no one else. Just Callum, a sofa with the stuffing coming out of one arm, and a TV paused on a blurred close up of a woman’s breast. He clocked me looking.

“That’s why I want the PS, I’m gonna rub me cock away if all I can do all day is watch porn and smoke,” he sniffed. His voice came out flat, Mancunian, all round vowels and dropped consonants, it carried Oasis, casual violence and grey skies. “Probs not your thing though right, if you’re one of Liam’s.” He took the PlayStation from me and turned it over in his hands, and put his nose as close as he could to it. He ran his finger along the edge.

There it was.

A scratch across the top. Not deep. Not the kind of thing you’d notice unless you held it to the light at the right angle.

“It’s damaged. Fifty less,” he said. Flat. Final.

“That wasn’t the price Liam agreed.”

“E’s not here.” He set the PlayStation down on the coffee table and looked at me. Not unfriendly. Just certain. “Fifty less. It’s scratched.”

“It’s just a scratch.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Fifty less.”

I looked at him. I looked at the PlayStation. I thought about going back to Liam short.

“That’s not happening,” I said, and something in my voice came out harder than I felt.

Callum moved fast. One second I was standing in his front room with my shoulders back and the next I was face down on the sofa with his forearm across the back of my neck, my cheek pressed into cushion fabric that smelled of him and old takeaway and weed, his weight across my back, one hand pinning my wrist.

“Fifty less,” he said, into my ear. “Or nothing. Your choice.”

I pulled at my wrist and his grip tightened. I pulled harder and he leaned in and the weight of him drove the air out of my lungs. I couldn’t move. I thought about shouting. Nobody would come. I was face down in a stranger’s flat with a man I’d met ten minutes ago who had nothing to lose.

His hips were against my arse and through the thin boxers, I could feel him. Not hard. But there was something there, the thickness of a cock at rest pressed between my cheeks by the weight of him.

I went still. The fear didn’t leave. It sat in my chest and my throat and the base of my skull. But underneath it, something else. My body flushed, hot and buzzing. My cock painfully hard. But a calm in my head.

I pushed back. Ground my arse against him in a slow circle and felt him respond before he’d decided to.

“What the fuck.”

“I can’t go back to him short,” I said, into the cushion. “It’s just us here. I’m guessing you haven’t had a proper quality wank where you cum hard in weeks, have you?”

A pause. The forearm on my neck stayed but the grip on my wrist went loose.

“I’m not a fuckin fag, lad. To each their own, that’s me, but I ain’t into it. I’ve got a girl.”

He hadn’t moved. His cock was getting hard against my arse. I could feel it shifting as it thickened and I held there.

“You don’t need to be a fag, just a lad who needs to cum. And I’m just a lad who needs that fifty quid. I bet she won’t let you do everything you want to her. Will she.” I let it sit. “Stuff you want to call her. The shit you daren’t even ask for. You can do it to me. I can take it. And I keep my mouth shut.”

Nothing. The TV flickering on pause. His breathing, faster now, and I could feel it in his stomach against my back. Then a sound in his throat, something between a laugh and a groan, and his hips pressed forward once, hard, and I felt the full length of him through the cotton.

The forearm came off my neck.

“Get on the floor, lad,” he said.

His voice had changed. Lower. Tighter.

I slid off the sofa onto my knees on the thin carpet. Then I pulled down the back of my new trackies to show off my arse. I let him take in the plug and used my hole to move it back and forth.

“Fuckin’ hell lad, can you do that to me cock?”

I looked at him over my shoulder and nodded, then reached back, pulled the plug out and made my hole pulse.

He pulled his boxers down without taking his eyes off it. Skinny pale cock, thin but long, curving up from a nest of ginger brown hair. The head narrowed and was already wet at the tip.

“Suck it,” he said. He stepped forward and put his hand on the back of my head.

I opened my mouth and he pushed in and I took him to the root on the first stroke. He groaned and his hand tightened in my hair. I thought he was going to ease me into it. He didn’t.

He pulled me off by my hair and pushed back in hard. The head hit the back of my throat and I gagged and he held me there, both hands on my head, and I felt him thicken against my tongue as the gag closed around him. All I knew was the ache of the gag and the noises we were making.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice lower now, rougher. “That’s it. Fuckin take it.” He pulled back and pushed in again and I gagged, again, and he let out a low contented moan. “Me missus can’t take it like that.”

He started fucking my mouth. Long strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pushing back in until my throat closed around him, and I gripped his thighs and held on and breathed through my nose and took it. My cock was hard against the fabric of my trackies. I let it out, moaned, felt the precum slick under my fingers as I stroked myself.

“Love that don’t you,” he said, looking down at me. “Straight lad cock down your throat. That’s what you’re after. “ He spat on my face. It landed on my cheek and ran down.

“Look at me,” he said, and pulled me off his cock by my hair, pulling down so my face turned up to him. I reached for his cock and stroked myself, looking up at him.

“Open wide, slut,” he said.

I opened my mouth and he spat into it. Then he wiped his cock across my cheek and pushed the spit that had landed there into my mouth. “Dirty little bitch,” he said, as I closed my mouth around his cock and took him in again.

I looked up at him and his eyes were locked on my mouth, his jaw set. I took him deeper and swallowed around him and he gave a “fuuuuck, lad”. His cock spurted a shot of precum. He pulled me off.

“Turn around,” he said. Not meeting my eye, gripping his cock at the base. “Get on the floor.”

I got on all fours on the carpet, then dropped to my elbows, arse up. I heard him spit into his hand. Then a finger, rough and dry, pushing into me where the plug had been. I winced and opened for it and he felt the ease of it and made a sound in his throat.

“Already wet,” he said to the room. “Fuckin hell. She never lets me near her arse.” He pushed a second finger in and I groaned into the carpet and pushed back onto his hand. “You’re lovin’ this aren’t you. Dirty little bitch.”

“Fuckin give it to me,” I heard myself say. “Put your spunk in me.”

He pulled his fingers out and pushed his cock, coated in thick gag spit into me.

The first inch burned. He was thin but long and he didn’t pause, just pressed forward in one slow push, and I breathed out and opened and let him in. I gripped him tight and felt the skin moving over the hardness underneath, and when he was all the way in I could feel his stomach against my back and his breathing in my ear, fast, already close.

“Fuck yeaaah,” he said. “That’s a proper tight little cunt that is. Fuckin hell.” He pulled almost all the way out and pushed back in hard and I grunted and he did it again, harder. “Bout time I ‘ad this. A hole that fucking takes it and loves it.”

He kept up the long strokes, pulling out and pushing back in, and I met each one. I arched my back and took him deep and squeezed when he pulled back and he gave me a breathless groan and slapped my arse hard.

“Fuckin take it,” he said. His hand came down on my arse again. Hard. Then again. “Little faggot slut. You love straight cock don’t you. Say it.”

“Yeah,” I said into the carpet.

“Fuckin say it.”

“I love your cock.”

“Straight lad cock. In your faggot hole. Say it proper.”

“Straight lad cock in my faggot hole.”

“Good bitch.” He gripped my hair and pulled my head back and I arched up and he was deep inside me and his mouth was at my ear. “You’re better than her.” I clenched around him and he groaned and sped up, his hips grinding, his cock hitting deeper with each stroke.

“Say it again,” I said but my voice was weak and he was starting to grunt.

His hand came down on my arse again. His rhythm broke and he pushed deep and held, and I felt the warmth of his cum spreading inside me, pulse after pulse, his hands gripping my hips hard enough to leave marks, and his face pressed into the back of my neck and he said something I couldn’t hear. Then louder: “Fuckin take it, take it, take it.”

He pulled out slow. I felt the cum shift inside me, warm and wet, and I clenched to keep it in.

He counted the cash out on the coffee table. Full amount. I pushed the plug back in, pulled up the trackies and pocketed the money without counting. He held a curled up twenty out to me. “Here,” he said with a smile, “little tip for a job well done.” He suddenly looked kind and I knew better than to say no.

He put his arm around me and started walking me to the door. I took the chance to inhale the stink of him one last time. He opened it then stood hand on the frame, half in, half out.

“Thursday, like,” he said. “Me dole comes through. If you wanted to come back.” He scratched his jaw. “Bring that plug thing.”

I stepped forward and put my hand to his crotch, and rubbed at the soaked boxers. I looked him in the eye and said, “I’m not a fuckin whore, you don’t have to pay.”

He stepped back away from my grip and his voice went quiet. “Yeah but I need you to be one. Come back Thursday, yeah?”

I looked at the rough, ugly guy who smelled of sweat and cum. I’d be back Thursday.

He closed the door and I cleaned my sticky palm with my tongue.

Outside the block I stood in the night air. The buzz in my chest wouldn’t settle. My legs were loose, my arse was sore, and the cum was warm inside me. The stairwell light was out again. I’d noticed that on the way in, the bulb smashed and the housing dangling, but I’d been too focused on the delivery to think about it. I thought about it now.

My phone buzzed. And the plug vibrated three times. Liam.

howd it go

I typed back: good on my way back.

A pause. Then: good lad

I was still looking at the screen when they came out of the dark stairwell. Two of them, hoodies up, faces lost in the shadow of the concrete overhang. The one in front had something in his hand that caught the light once.

“Phone and money. Now.”

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men. I am very proud to present part three of House Rules. It’s clear from the response that many of you out there are keen to know what happens next. Almost as much as Chase is. In this installment Grant takes some advice from a friend and applies some discipline. Boy is he a natural. Buckle up, this one is long, hot and wet.

I woke up at six with the hard-on I’d gone to sleep with and a problem sleep hadn’t solved.

Chase was in the guest house, fifty feet across the yard, and the distance between us had not become simpler overnight. What we’d done had settled into my body the way a new injury does, the kind you keep testing in the morning to see if it’s still there. It was.

Last night felt like stepping into a fantasy, a boy desiring me enough not just to give his body to me but his obedience. This morning the reality of it looked massive. I can be confident when my cock is hard and there’s a boy doing a cam show for me but I had no idea how to be with him this morning. I needed help. As I couldn’t speak to Pete about how to train his son I picked up my phone and called Andre.

Andre was responsible for my transformation after the divorce. He taught me how to eat and how to exercise but more than that he counseled and motivated me. He also had a younger husband and he wasn’t ashamed to tell people about it.

He picked up on the second ring. I told him the situation in the broadest terms I could manage. A younger man. Living on my property. Wanted direction. Wanted someone to take charge. I didn’t use Chase’s name.

“This is Buckhaven, Grant,” Andre said. “Nearly every older guy in town is fucking the pool boy. You think you’re special?”

“I’m asking how to do it right.”

“You’re asking how to do it without fucking it up. Different thing.” He was quiet for a moment. “Fortunately for you I’ve made this shit my vocation. Most of my PT work isn’t fitness, Grant. Daddies hand off their boys to me. I keep their bodies fit, keep them in line, hand them back better. Occasionally the boys hand over a Dad that needs firming up. And usually they invite me to be a third as a show of gratitude.”

“We are not there yet! Tell me what I need to do.”

“Structure, not negotiation. Rules that don’t move. The boy pushes at the walls because he wants to know where they are, not because he wants them to fall down. The pushing is calibration. You don’t punish the pushing. You punish the wall moving. You hold the line and you hold it every time. Inconsistency is the only real failure.”

“And the sex?”

“Reward and discipline in the same session. Make failure inevitable. The boy needs to feel both sides of you. Discipline tells him you mean it. Reward tells him why he’s staying. You tell, but you listen to his body. The body says everything his mouth won’t.”

“That’s it?”

“You already know most of this, Grant. You just needed someone to tell you it’s okay. Now go be the man he’s looking for and stop calling me at six in the morning.”

He hung up. I sat with it. The principles were simple because they had to be. Chase didn’t need a system. He needed a man who set the rules and didn’t bend them. I could do that. I’d been doing it my whole career. I’d just never done it in my own house.

He wanted me to run this. That was the thing I’d understood the night before, lying in the dark after I’d left him on the floor. He wanted me to be in charge. Not asked. Not requested. In charge. The difference between those things was the whole problem, and it was also the solution.

Chase needed a man he could feel safe with and the safety wasn’t softness. He’d been pushing past every boundary I set, and I’d been letting him push because the pushing felt good for both of us. But a wall that moves isn’t a wall. It’s a suggestion.

I thought for a moment. Working out what to do next made me hard and I couldn’t wait to try it on the boy. I reached for the intercom on the nightstand and pressed the button for the guest house.

A pause, some rustling, then: “Yeah?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Yes, Sir,” he replied, I could hear the eyeroll in his words.

“Come to the main house. Now. Shower first. Come ready for me in socks and jock. That’s it. You have three minutes.”

I let go of the button before he could answer.

Five minutes later the door from the yard opened and Chase came into the kitchen in white socks and a white jockstrap, skin still damp at the shoulders where he hadn’t toweled off properly, hair pushed flat with water, breathing a little fast. He’d tried. Five minutes was as fast as he could do it and he’d sprinted.

I was sitting on the couch in jeans and a t-shirt, belt on. I didn’t look up.

“Knees.”

“Good morning to you t…”

“Knees.”

He went down. The smart comment died in his mouth and he looked at me from the floor with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before: open, uncertain, waiting. His hands settled on his thighs.

I stood and unbuckled my belt. The leather was warm from my waist. I pulled it through the loops, folded it in half, and held the two ends together in my right fist. The fold made a clean, heavy loop about a foot and a half long.

“You’re going to get this for two minutes because you were two minutes late,” I said. “I have a stopwatch. You won’t know when it’s coming. Each time it lands, you say ‘thank you, Daddy.’ If you miss one, we start the two minutes again. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what.”

His throat moved. “Yes, sir.”

“No. Yes, Daddy.”

The word hung in the air between us. He’d called me sir in bed, and sir in texts, and sir when he wanted to be cheeky. He’d never said Daddy. It was a word you had to mean, and the meaning of it was the thing he’d been circling since he showed up on my doorstep with a duffel bag and a suspended license. His eyes were down but for a second they met mine.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he said. Quiet. Like he was trying it on.

“Good boy. All fours please.”

I started the stopwatch.

The first strike came at eleven seconds. I let the silence build until his shoulders started to relax, then brought the belt down across the meat of his ass, flat, the whole width of the leather. The crack was loud in the quiet room. His body flinched forward and his hands gripped his thighs.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he said. Panting through gritted teeth.

The next one at twenty seconds. Harder. He rocked forward on his knees and caught himself.

“Thank you, Daddy.” He shouted it through the pain this time.

At thirty-five seconds, two in quick succession, right cheek then left, and his voice cracked on the second one but the words came.

“Thank you, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy.” Those ones got me hard.

“You know why you’re getting this?” I said.

“Because I was late, Daddy.”

“You don’t run this, Chase. I do. The sooner that stops being a fight, the sooner it starts feeling good.”

He was quiet. His shoulders were trembling.

“Thank you, Daddy,” he said, and I hadn’t hit him.

At fifty seconds, a hard one low across the sit spots, and he dropped his head back and made a new sound. A moan like pain that carried a hunger with it.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

The minute mark. I gave him three fast ones and his voice shook on the third but he didn’t miss it. “Thank you, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy.”

“You’re doing well.” I said it the way I’d say it to a spotter in the gym. Factual. The effect on him was immediate: his back straightened, his chin came up, his whole posture reorganised around the words. And my cock ached for him.

The second minute was slower. I spaced the hits further apart, let the waiting do the work. Each time the belt came he was ready for it and not ready for it at the same time, the anticipation worse than the strike, his whole body braced and then releasing when it landed, and the “thank you, Daddy” came easier each time, more natural, less forced, until by the last one it sounded like something he’d been saying his whole life.

The stopwatch hit two minutes. I set the belt on the couch.

“Good,” I said. “That’s done.”

He stayed on his knees. His ass was red in two clean bands across the lower curves, the colour that would deepen over the next hour. He didn’t reach for it. He waited.

I crouched behind him and put my hand on the back of his neck. He leaned into it.

“Here’s what happens next,” I said. “I’m going to eat your ass. Your hips are going to want to move. They don’t. If your hips drop, even once, you go on your back and I fuck your throat. That’s not a punishment, that’s a rule. You understand the rule.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Good. Face down on the couch. Arms forward.”

He went. I watched him settle, chest on the cushion, knees on the floor, ass up. The jockstrap framed him perfectly. The red from the belt was bright against the fabric.

I put my mouth on him.

He was clean and warm, and he tasted like soap and underneath it, like himself, that salt-and-skin scent I’d been thinking about since yesterday. I devoured him, broad strokes with my tongue, my chin nuzzling the space beneath. Then circling the rim before pushing in, and his hole clenched and unclenched around me in rhythm.

His hips dropped at fourteen seconds.

I pulled back. “That’s one.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry, I’ll.”

I stopped and went to raise my hand.

“Sorry, Daddy.”

I went back in. Slower this time, my tongue tracing the rim in a deliberate circle, then pushing deep, and I felt him fighting it, thighs shaking, the muscle of his ass clenching to hold his hips up. He lasted longer this time, maybe thirty seconds, and his hips dropped again.

“That’s two.”

“Grant, I can’t, it’s too.”

I raised my hand and let it fall on the belt marks. “There is no Grant right now, boy, just Daddy. You can do this. You’re choosing not to.”

I went back. This time I added a finger alongside my tongue, pressing into him slow, curling, and his hips bucked once and then dropped. Three.

“That’s three. On your back.”

He turned over. His cock was straining against the jockstrap pouch, hard and leaking through the fabric.

I straddled his chest. My knees on either side of his shoulders, my cock in my hand. He looked up at me and opened his mouth.

“Hands behind your head. Don’t move them.”

I pushed in. Not gently. His throat opened around me on the first thrust and he gagged and I pulled back and pushed in again, deeper, and his eyes watered and he breathed through his nose and took it. I fucked his mouth with the same patience I’d used on the belt, finding a rhythm, letting it build, and his hands stayed locked behind his head even when I went deep enough to make him choke.

I slapped him. Once, across the cheek, not hard, just enough to sting. His mouth tightened around me and his eyes went wide and then half-closed. I slapped him again and he moaned around my cock and his hips lifted off the couch.

I pulled out and wiped my cock across his lower lip.

“Good boy,” I said, and his whole body shuddered.

“Get up. On your knees.”

He got up. I sat back on the couch and looked at him. He was wrecked, face flushed, cock hard and leaking, ass still red from the belt.

I reached over to the side table and opened the bottom drawer. The wand was where I’d left it, unplugged, the power cord coiled neatly around the handle. Diane’s. We bought it towards the end when neither of us could be bothered to pretend we could make each other come hard anymore.

I plugged it in. The head was a soft white silicone dome the size of a ping-pong ball. I’d watched Diane’s face enough times to know what it did. The specific pitch of her breathing when it found the right spot. The way her thighs would press together and then fall apart. I knew the machine.

“Now we find out how this ends,” I said.

Chase looked at the wand and his eyes changed.

I turned it on. The head buzzed to life, a deep, heavy vibration you could feel from a foot away.

“Here’s the game,” I said. “I put this on your cock. You don’t come. If you come, the game is over. No good boy, no bad boy, nothing. You’re done for today and you go back to the guest house. You take it as long as you can. When you’re close, you tell me, and you pull your body away from it. However many seconds you last before you have to pull off, that’s your number. That number is how many minutes you get as a good boy and how many you get as a bad boy. You pick which one you want first. Understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

I put the head of the wand against the underside of his cock, just below the head. His whole body locked. His stomach went rigid and his thighs clenched and his hands gripped his own thighs hard enough to leave marks. His mouth opened but nothing came out. The vibration was too much to process into sound.

I held it there. The thought that the same toy had been against my wife’s clit and now was on my boy’s cock made my own throb, hard and sore.

His cock jumped against the wand. Precum was flowing, not dripping, flowing, a steady leak that ran down his shaft and pooled at the base. His ass was clenching and unclenching in the same rhythm, the belt marks reddening as the blood rushed to the surface. He was close already. The belt, the ass-eating, the skull fuck, all of it had primed him. He was standing on a ledge and the wand was the wind.

At ten seconds I started counting and he started whimpering.

At twenty one seconds his hips pulled back. His body moved away from the vibration before his brain could argue with it. His cock slid off the head of the wand and he gasped, staggered, caught himself on the arm of the couch. His cock was throbbing, the head dark and swollen, a thread of precum stretching from the tip to his stomach.

“Twenty-one,” I said. “Twenty-one seconds means twenty-one minutes each for good boy/bad boy. Good boy or bad boy first?”

His cock was bouncing with his pulse, untouched, still right at the edge. One touch would finish him. He knew it. I knew it.

“Good,” he said. “Please. Good first.”

I turned the wand off and set it on the side table. Diane’s toy, sitting next to my belt, in a room where my best friend’s son was on his knees shaking with precum on his stomach. My cock pulsed and released a wave of precum.

I pulled his chin up and kissed him.

Not the way I’d kissed him during sex the day before, hungry and horizontal and headed somewhere. I held his face in both hands and kissed his mouth and felt the resistance in him melt, he had been braced for impact and I stood him down with the kiss.

Twenty-one minutes. I was going to make every one of them count.

I put him on the bed. On his back. I took off my shirt and his eyes went down my chest and stomach and stayed there. I took off my jeans and his eyes went lower. I knelt between his legs and I took my time.

I opened him with my mouth first, gentle now, the kind of slow and patient. Then with my fingers, two, then three, curling to find the spot, and when I found it he arched and I held him there, pressing, not hard enough to make him cum, just enough to make him feel taken care of from the inside. He was already close. The wand had done that. Every touch was amplified. Every stroke of my fingers inside him carried the tremor of a body that had been held at the edge and then pulled back, and now had to survive being touched like this.

He was on his back with his legs around me and his hands on my shoulders and he was looking at me with watery eyes and a half smile. I leaned down and put my forehead against his and stayed there, moving in him in long, deep strokes that were about making sure he felt every inch of the fact that I was here, that I was paying attention, that I was not going anywhere.

“Good boy,” I said against his mouth, and he came up to kiss me and I let him.

“Thank you Daddy,” he whispered.

I put my mouth on every part of him I could reach without changing the rhythm: his throat, his jaw, the corner of his mouth, his ear. I found his nipple with my teeth and worried it gently and he made a sound that was close to crying. I told him he was beautiful and I meant it and I don’t say that word.

I fucked him until his cock was dripping onto his stomach and then I fucked him a little more, slow, the kind of strokes that build without cresting, and when I felt him getting close I wrapped my hand around him and stroked him in time with my hips and he came across his own chest, warm and thick, and I kept moving through it, kept the pace, let the orgasm roll through him instead of stopping it short.

He was glassy and trembling and I hadn’t finished yet.

“Good boy,” I said. “That was your good boy.”

He nodded. His eyes were half-closed and soft.

“Now. Twenty-one minutes the other way.”

The change happened in the space of a breath. I pulled out and flipped him onto his stomach. No warning. I grabbed his hips and dragged him to the edge of the bed and pushed into him in one stroke, all the way, and he yelped and his hands grabbed the sheets.

“Whose ass is this,” I said.

“Yours, Daddy.”

“Whose mouth.”

“Yours.”

I thrust as hard as I could without coming and brought my hand down on his cheek, “Yours, Daddy!”

“Sorry Daddy, yours, Daddy.”

“Whose cock.”

“Yours Daddy, it’s all yours.”

I fucked him hard. Not the patient, measured rhythm of the good boy. This was the other thing, the thing I’d been holding back since he walked into my kitchen, the thing that was hungry and had teeth. I drove into him with my full weight, the bed moving, the headboard making a sound, and I put my hand on the back of his neck and pressed his face into the mattress and he groaned into the sheets and pushed back against me.

I grabbed his hair and pulled his head back and bit his neck and shoulder, hard, and he made a sound that was all air and no words. I slapped his ass where the belt had been and he clenched around me and I slapped him again.

“Bad boys don’t get gentle,” I said. “Bad boys get used.”

“Use me,” he said. “Daddy, please.”

I pulled out, flipped him over again, and pushed his knees up to his chest. I put my hand around his throat. Not squeezing, not yet. Just there. The weight of it. His eyes went wide and then soft and his Adam’s apple moved under my palm.

I pushed back in. Deep. My hand on his throat, my other hand on his nipple, twisting, and his back arched and his mouth opened and I could see him trying to decide whether to push into the pain or away from it and he chose into it, every time, chose the thing that hurt.

I fucked him and I choked him and I twisted and I bit. And he took it all. He wanted to be the thing I used as much as he wanted to be the thing I desired.

I was close now. I pulled his legs wider and drove in. He looked up at me with tears on his face and that broken, loving face ripped the cum out of me. I made a deep sound I didn’t know I could as I came inside him with my forehead on his and my hand on his throat and his legs locked around me, and for a second there was nothing in the room but the sound of it.

I pulled out. I stood up. I pulled on my jeans and buckled the belt.

“Go home,” I said. “I’ll call you when I call you.”

He sat up on the bed. His face was a mess, tears and sex and the red marks from where I’d slapped him. He opened his mouth to say something.

“Don’t,” I said. “Get dressed and go.”

He got dressed. He left. The door to the yard closed and the house was quiet.

I stood in the kitchen and I could still taste him and I could still feel the ghost of his throat under my palm and I looked at the belt on the couch and the wand on the side table and the rumpled sheets on the bed and I thought: what the fuck am I doing.

Not the moral question. I’d stopped asking that one. The practical question. Could I actually do this. Not the sex. The discipline. The consistency. The walls that don’t move. Chase needed a man who could hold a line for weeks, months, and I was a man who had let his marriage dissolve because holding lines was easier at work than at home. What if I couldn’t. What if the next time he pushed I gave in again, because giving in felt good, and what if the time after that.

I poured a coffee and sat at the kitchen table and didn’t drink it. I gave up on thinking about what was happening. Instead I kept seeing it, flashes of our morning together. I brought myself off again, thinking of the way he had looked at me before I came.

My phone buzzed at 11 a.m.

Chase: That was incredible

Chase: Thank you Daddy

Chase: I mean it. Thank you.

Chase: Are you ok?

Chase: You seem quiet

I read them. I didn’t reply.

1:14 p.m.

Chase: Do you need anything from the store? I’m going to Target

Chase: I can pick stuff up

Me: No.

3:40 p.m.

Chase: Should I make dinner for us? I can do the chicken thing

Me: Up to you.

5:15 p.m.

Chase: Dinner’s ready whenever

Me: Not tonight.

6:02 p.m.

Chase: Ok

Chase: Is everything ok

Chase: Grant?

I set the phone face-down on the counter.

The evening went on. I ate leftovers standing at the counter. I watched half a ball game. I didn’t pick up the phone. The discipline wasn’t just for him.

At 10:47 p.m.

Chase: Please let me come over Daddy

I read it in the dark of the bedroom. I was in bed. The sheets were cold.

Me: Come.

At 10:50 the door opened. He came in wearing gym shorts and nothing else, hair sticking up, no shoes. He crossed the room in the dark and got into my bed and pressed his back against my chest and pulled my arm around him and I felt his whole body exhale.

He reached behind him, found my cock, and guided it between his thighs, back, until the head rested against his hole. He pushed back and I slipped in and he made a sound that was just relief. Just the sound of a body settling where it wanted to be.

We moved together in the dark, slow, barely moving, the kind of sex that’s not really sex, just two people breathing together with something connecting them. His hand found mine on his chest and he held it.

“Grant,” he said.

“Go to sleep, Chase.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

I was quiet for a long time. Long enough that his breathing started to slow. Long enough that I felt his body get heavier against mine, the muscles in his thighs stop holding and start resting, his hand go slack in mine.

“Love you, son,” I said.

He was already asleep. I said it into the dark and into the back of his neck and into the warmth of him around me, and I meant it. They were the most dangerous three words I’d ever spoken.

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men. I am proud to present the second part of our tale from New Sherwood City, or perhaps that should be tail. Will meets the Merry Men, grabs his first taste of freedom and finds out that what the hard in hardware really means.

The drone set them down without a sound in the centre of the exhibition hall. A man, early twenties, tall, skinny and black, wearing a pink vest and a leather kilt circled it with a wide eyed grin.

“Arrow worked then,” Robin said.

“Arrow worked,” the guy confirmed, not looking up. He ran a hand along the drone’s flank. “I’m keeping it.”

“You always keep them.”

“They’re always worth keeping.”

“That’s Tink,” said Robin to Will, “my tech genius.”

Robin stepped away from Will and spread his arms at the space around them.

“Welcome to our home,” he said. “The Sherwood Forest Visitor Centre, decommissioned 2031, when the government decided national heritage was a distraction from national productivity.”

The space they were in must have been the main exhibition space. It still had the original displays on the walls in places, an illustrated timeline of Sherwood Forest from 1066 to 2028 running above the wood burner someone had installed in the corner. A long table with maps on it. A bank of screens running dark.

There were other men scattered about. The tall one by the window had a compound bow across his back and was eating an apple. The two on the bench had the same jaw, the same watchful economy of movement. A fourth was at the far workbench with his back to the room, hands moving over components Will didn’t immediately recognise and on reflection decided not to ask about.

Will clocked them in the way he’d trained himself to clock rooms, then spent a moment absorbing what he was actually looking at.

It was the way they moved around Robin. Not deferential. Something more specific that he couldn’t pin down.

“Will, meet my Merry Men,” Robin said. “Much, Stutely, David of Doncaster, DD for short. Those are their names now at least, much better than Lionel Pratt, eh Much!” He winked and Much rolled his eyes. “The folk tale needed a cast.” He gestured toward the workbench. “And that is Gilbert of the White Hand.”

The man at the workbench went very still. Then he turned around. He was Indian, compact, big eyes, high cheekbones, and he exuded stillness as much as Robin exuded chaos. His hands were scarred across the knuckles and the pads of the fingers.

“My name,” he said, with great precision, “is Arjun.”

“Gilbert of the White Hand,” Robin said, as if Arjun had not spoken.

Arjun looked at Will. His shoulders dropped with a practiced, heavy resignation.

“How long?” Will said.

“Three years,” said Arjun.

Robin glanced back at Will. “The folk tale also needed a Will Scarlet. When I found you, it was almost too convenient. Honestly, David Sylvester from your department is probably the best propagandist, but a ready made Will Scarlett? That’s a sign from the universe, and your arse is much more pert than his.” He gave Will a hearty slap on his arse cheek which Will received with surprise then a quiet thrill.

“My name is William Green,” said Will.

“Close enough! Welcome Will Scarlett.”

“Welcome, Will,” said Much. He met Will’s gaze and held it for a beat and a half, which was one beat longer than strangers usually held eye contact, Will took in his hazel eyes and delicate elfin features that contrasted with the spiky metal collar, and the tight green latex shorts he wore. His chest was covered in a large tattoo with a lion and a unicorn on it. It was nano ink and phased through the colours of the rainbow. Will felt a need to press his hand to it but resisted.

The fifth Merry Man, the one who had crossed the room, was already at Will’s throat.

“You’ve still got them on,” Tink said.

Will looked down. The angel on its chain. The virtue signaller on his wrist, the band so familiar he’d stopped feeling it years ago.

“Out of range since the Aldi car park,” Robin said. “But still.”

“Still,” Tink agreed, already unclasping the chain, not looking at the clasp.

He carried both items to the workbench at the far wall, picked up a hammer, and hit the angel twice. The virtue signaller he pried apart with a flathead screwdriver, found the transmission chip, and dropped it into a jar of something that smelled like acetone.

“Better,” Tink said, and turned back to the workbench.

Will stood in the middle of the former exhibition space, under the illustrated timeline of Sherwood Forest, and felt the absence of both devices the way you feel a tooth gone. A hollowness.

“He’s staring,” said one of the brothers.

“Wouldn’t you,” said the other.

Robin steered Will toward the corridor. “Night boys,” he said, “me and Will need some rest.”

“Ha, rest!” said Much, rolling his eyes. “Look out for attachment sixteen,” he called out to them as they headed down the corridor.

His room was small and clean and had a window looking out onto the old car park, where the white lines of the parking bays were still just visible through the weeds. One parking space still had a sign reading RESERVED: VISITOR CENTRE MANAGER. Will stared at the faded lettering for longer than he needed to. His mouth did something small.

Robin sat on the end of the bed and watched Will take it in.

“The others,” Will said, suddenly recognising the intimacy he had seen with the Merry Men.

“Yes.”

“You and them? You all just...sin together?”

“At various points we have fun together. No sin here. When the urge takes us we let it,” Robin said. “Nothing here is a requirement. That’s the point.”

Will sat down next to him. His left wrist kept turning over, skin tingling in the quiet where the hum used to buzz against his pulse. Thirty-two years of that hum, and he hadn’t known it was a sound until it stopped.

“Much,” Will said.

“What about him?”

“He’s...I think I like him,” Will stopped.

Robin looked at him the way his Dad had when he had scored a goal in the school football match.

“Would you like me to call him in?” Robin said.

Will’s virtue-state brain produced its calculation in nanoseconds: unregistered contact, multiple parties, accumulated deficit of, and then fell directly over, because there was no angel, there was no log, there was no accumulated deficit, and the framework that had been running that calculation since Will was fifteen years old had just had its transmission chip dropped in acetone.

“I don’t know,” Will said. It was the most honest thing he’d said to anyone in years.

“That’s fine,” Robin said. “It doesn’t have to be tonight. It doesn’t have to be at all.” He lay back and pulled Will down with him, easy and certain, and Will went. “He’d be up for it. So would the brothers. You’ve been assessed.”

“I’ve been what.”

“You walked in and they all looked at you.” A pause. “You looked back.”

He had. He had looked back at Much by the window and at the brothers on the bench and at Tink’s hands on the workbench. Lying in the dark, untracked, he felt how natural the longing was. How easy.

“I’m not…” he started.

“You don’t have to be anything yet,” Robin said. “You just got here.”

Will waited until Robin was asleep.

This was not a plan. It was more that he was awake in the dark and Robin was warm beside him and after a while the warmth became longing and the longing became a pulsing in his hole that he had never felt before.

He reached out. Carefully. The way you might touch something you weren’t certain was safe to touch.

Robin’s cock was warm and soft, Will wrapped his fingers around it. His hand trembled slightly, expecting an error code to flash on his bare wrist. None came.

He held it and his touch made it grow. And grow. And grow again, it curled around Will’s wrist, then snaked up his arm. He tried to pull himself free but the cock tightened its grip.

“Robin!” Will said, then shouted.

Nothing.

“Robin!” Will screamed.

Much and the brothers burst into the room, the doors banged against the wall and Robin stirred gently from his slumber. The head of his cock was now level with Will’s eyes.

“Hmmm, sorry lambkin,” he said. The cockhead darted forward and pecked Will on the cheek then retracted.

Will didn’t move.

Much and the brothers began to laugh and exited the room.

“Robin?” Will managed.

“Hmmm what is it lambkin.”

“I dunno! Maybe I’m just being silly but your fucking cock just attacked me.”

“You must have set it off. It has independent features when I’m offline.”

“Offline? You’re an android.”

Robin tilted his head, his brow furrowing. “Is that not obvious? I had attachment three inside you for our whole session in the alley, have you ever felt a human cock move like that?”

“No! I only have mine for reference!”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Robin, sitting up in bed.

“How does an android exist in 2089? They were all destroyed after the Uber riots.”

“I started as a class 2, just a Robin Hood for the visitor centre. I was powered down well before the riots, replaced by a better model I suppose. Kept in the storage room in a box under the unsold Labubu bots. Did you know they started out as cuddly toys?” He shivered. “Nasty little fuckers.”

“You are not a class 2 anymore, though? Class 2s don’t have killer cocks.”

“Somehow, I really don’t know how, I powered up. I was damaged, I didn’t know who or what I was, but I had all the books in the visitor centre to tell me. I learned, I changed and I developed needs. I wanted to feel the things I was touching. I’d found something in the ruins they called a library, full of books and a port that could log me onto the Angelnet undetected. I scavenged parts to make a new skin and then, I got curious about the part of me that was missing and why it was missing. So I dragged copper wires and synthetic casings to the desk under the lantern. I built one, rudimentary at first, no ejaculate but a good feel and realistic. Then you know how boys get about their cocks when they first discover what they can do. It became an obsession. I have twenty of them. You’ve met attachment three. I call him Percy.”

He ran his hand over Will’s thigh and squeezed it.

“Would you like to try attachment four? There are beads and a small electric current.”

“No!” said Will. “I’m still a virgin! I thought I’d found a man, I’ve found a sex toy.”

Robin’s mouth flattened. His hand released Will’s shoulder with a deliberateness that was somehow worse than either.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll see about that.”

He pulled Will down flat and started at his throat.

Not his mouth. His throat, the hollow where the angel had sat on its chain for thirty-two years. Will’s collarbone went cold with the absence of it and then Robin’s mouth was there instead and the cold stopped mattering.

He worked down. Will’s skin registered every point of contact with a precision that had nowhere to file itself, no log entry, no deficit accrual, just the raw fact of a warm mouth moving south across his sternum, his stomach, the jut of his hip.

Robin took Will’s cock into his mouth and Will’s whole spine lifted off the mattress.

Something was wrong. Not wrong. Different. There was the heat and the suction, those were familiar enough from his own hand, but there was also something else: a second point of contact, distinct, a flat wet pressure lapping at the underside of his head in a slow steady rhythm while something else, the tongue, surely the tongue, wrapped his shaft and slid. Up. Stopped. Down. Will’s brain tried to reconcile it and couldn’t. He lifted his head.

Robin had his eyes open. He held Will’s gaze and did it again, deliberately, the two motions separating clearly enough that Will could feel each one as its own thing, the lap and the slide, simultaneous, independent.

Will stared.

Robin lifted his head, tongue extended, and Will saw it: split clean down the middle, both halves moving separately, each one its own instrument.

Robin gave him a wink.

Will made a sound, low in his chest, and pushed him back down.

His hands tightened and Robin went where they pulled him, and the two halves of the tongue worked together and separately, the lap and the slide building until Will’s thighs were shaking and his heels were driving into the mattress and he came with his fist locked in Robin’s hair, the orgasm cresting and breaking and pulling everything with it.

Robin lifted his head and kissed Will on the mouth. Will tasted himself on the split tongue, both halves moving against his own, and pushed into it, chasing the strangeness of it, wanting more of it.

Robin moved back down and pressed his thighs apart and put his mouth to his hole. Will felt one half of the tongue thrust in deep, steady, while the other worked the rim in tight circles, and the two sensations ran in parallel and built on each other and Will came the second time with his legs locked around Robin’s head, quieter than the first, a long sustained thing that started somewhere he had no name for and worked outward through his hips and thighs and the soles of his feet.

Robin kissed the inside of his thigh and looked up at him. A slight curve at the corner of his mouth.

“Sex toy,” he said.

Will stared at the ceiling. “I may have been hasty.”

“You were.”

He turned Will onto his front. The first strike of Robin’s palm landed flat across his arse before Will had quite registered what was happening.

“Am I a man?”

“Yes,” Will said.

Robin’s cock pressed against him. Will felt it move, not thrusting, just present, the tip of it tracing slow and deliberate, and Will held still, breath suspended.

It pressed in and Will exhaled hard into the pillow. Not the blunt insistence of a human cock: this was narrower at the tip and it moved as it entered, a slow twist, threading itself in, and the stretch was gradual and then full and then more than full, and Will registered somewhere that this thing was alive in a way that had nothing to do with biology.

“Am I a man?”

“Yes.” The second strike landed, heat blooming down his thigh.

The tendril curled inside him. A slow exploratory loop, finding the walls of him, pressing here and releasing, pressing there, mapping him, and then it found the spot and stayed there, a rolling pressure, dozens of tiny concentrated points massaging his prostate in sequence, and Will’s fingers found the headboard.

“Am I a man?”

“Yes.” Broken. His grip tightened and his cock leaked.

A thrust now, the full length driving in, and the interior motion didn’t stop: the tendril twisted as Robin pulled back and corkscrewed as he drove forward, so that each thrust was a different sensation to the last, the angle shifting, the pressure redistributing. Will said yes and Robin asked again and the tendril thickened, filling him more completely, pressing outward as Robin pressed inward.

“Am I a man?”

“Yes.” Louder.

Harder. The strike and the thrust arriving together, and now the tendril was branching, two points of interior pressure where there had been one, both of them working his prostate from different angles simultaneously, and Will said yes louder and Robin asked again and Will said yes into the pillow, fingernails into the wood.

“Am I a man?”

The tendril swelled. Will felt it: a slow deliberate expansion deep inside him, growing, pressing outward against everything, filling him to a fullness that had no human precedent, and he made a sound that wasn’t a word and wasn’t a number and Robin’s palm landed for the last time and Will said, “YOU’RE MORE THAN A MAN,” loud enough that somewhere in the corridor something fell off a shelf.

Robin roared. The tendril pulsed. Once, enormous, stretching him to his limit and for a moment beyond. Then the warmth hit him from the inside: a wave of heat spreading outward from somewhere deeper than he had known he had, blooming through his gut and into his thighs and up his spine, spilling out of his tender hole and Robin’s mouth was at his ear. That was all Will knew, he couldn’t formulate a thought beyond it.

They lay still soaked in sweat, tears and cum and drifted into sleep.

In the morning, Tink appeared in the doorway with tea.

“You have to tell them sooner,” said Tink.

“It’s such a boring conversation,” Robin said, from somewhere in the register between asleep and awake.

“Well, I suppose it’s funnier this way,” Tink said, and left.

Robin turned to Will. “I take it we don’t need to philosophise whether or not you cumming twice at the end of my tongue was just a pattern matching algorithm?”

“We do not,” said Will, still stretched out against the sheets, his eyes half-closed.

“Good, get dressed. We are going on a shopping expedition, I hope your arse isn’t too sore, we may need it.”

“Okay,” said Will. He ran a finger down Robin’s forearm and gave him a demure look. “Could we maybe try out a different attachment first though.”

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men. Daddy Sauce is proud to present part two of our Gilt Edge story. We get to see what Marcus is made of in this one, and a little bit more about what he’s getting himself into. Hope it passes your assessment!

The QR code sent me an address. Mayfair, naturally. A street I’d walked past without registering. I got showered and dressed and headed straight to the place. I had an instinct that arriving promptly after the code was scanned was important.

The door was black lacquer, unmarked except for a small brass plate with a single symbol on it, the same geometric mark from the card. I stood on the pavement for a moment. Then I pressed the buzzer.

A man answered the door who was not what I’d expected. Late twenties, maybe thirty. Dark eyes, olive skin, the kind of exquisite cheekbones. His face had that rare mix of maturity and boyish charm. He was in a pale grey shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He waited for me to gather my thoughts, the pause seemed practiced, like every man he met subjected him to the same assessment and came out desiring to conquer the innocence in his face. He stepped back to let me in.

“Marcus,” he said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“I’m Theo. Come through.”

The interior was a tailor’s studio. Although it was a sunny day and the light shone brightly through the high windows, the dark wood swallowed it so it shone strongly in a window-shaped shaft and didn’t trespass. It was quiet and smelled of expensive coffee and, underneath it, the faint ghost of old tobacco. Bolts of cloth on shelves. A cutting table. A tailor’s dummy in the corner wearing the skeleton of a jacket. Everything in its place, even the light.

Theo took my measurements without preamble. He moved around me with a tape measure and a practiced efficiency that was neither cold nor warm, just precise. He called numbers quietly to an assistant I hadn’t noticed sitting in the corner with a notebook. Chest. Waist. Inside leg. The back of my neck to the base of my spine. He did not make eye contact during any of it.

“Arms out.”

I put my arms out. His hands worked along them quickly, wrist to shoulder, and he noted something.

“Please remove your shirt.”

I did. The assistant wrote something down. Theo’s eyes moved over me with the same quality of attention he’d given the measurements, technical, unhurried, not unkind.

“Trousers.”

I stepped out of them. I stood in my underwear on a small raised platform in the centre of the room while he moved around me again, noting things I couldn’t follow.

Then he paused in front of me.

“I need to take two further measurements,” he said. “I’m going to need you to remove your underwear. I’ll be handling you directly. This is a standard part of the process.”

He said it the way you’d say the next train departs at half past.

I stepped out of my underwear. He crouched slightly, the tape measure in one hand, and with the other reached forward and lifted my cock clear with two fingers, holding it with the same practiced neutrality he’d held the tape. He measured. Called a number. The assistant wrote it down.

“I’ll need you fully erect for the second measurement,” he said, still not looking up. “This may take a moment.”

He wrapped his hand around me and stroked slowly, methodically, not with any particular interest but with the focused attention of someone completing a task correctly. My body responded. When he was satisfied I was fully hard he measured again, called another number, and released me. The assistant noted it. Theo straightened up.

I didn’t feel desired. I felt assessed. Catalogued. And somewhere underneath the social reflex that had kept me standing still and cooperative through all of it, something had quietly enjoyed being handled that way. I filed that away.

But I was still hard. And Theo had not stepped back far enough.

“I’d like you to finish what you started,” I said.

He looked at me. Not surprised. Just measuring.

“That’s not something I can do,” he said. “There are professional parameters to this process.”

“Of course,” I said. “I understand.”

He held my gaze for a moment longer than he needed to. Then his eyes moved, briefly, to the corner of the ceiling above the door. Back to me. A quarter of a second, no more. Then he was already turning away to note something on his own pad.

I looked at the corner. Then at the assistant.

I started coughing. A genuine enough cough to begin with, then committed to, then theatrical. Theo turned. I pressed my fist to my mouth and kept going.

“My throat,” I said, when I could. “I’m sorry. Do you have anything hot? Tea, anything.”

Theo looked at the assistant, who nodded and left the room.

The door clicked shut.

I wasn’t coughing anymore. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“You understand,” Theo said quietly, “that if this is reported I lose this position.”

“I know, that’s why I’m still hard,” I said.

He looked at me and then looked down at my cock. His lips parted for a millisecond and I knew I had him. I crossed the small distance and kissed him.

He kissed back. That was the thing. For all the professional parameters, for all the stated lines, he kissed back immediately and without ambivalence, his hands going to my hips, and I had him pressed against the cutting table within seconds. He made no protest. A low sound against my collarbone, something between a breath and a word.

I pushed him to his knees and pushed him onto my wet cock. He complied and began bobbing his head, expertly catching the underside of my head with his tongue each time he pulled back and rolling over the top on the back beat. His eyes were closed. I gave his cheek a firm slap. “Look at me,” I said. He opened his wide eyes and I almost came, the way his lips were stretched around my shaft and the wet-eyed struggle to obey me almost drove me over the edge. I wasn’t ready to stop yet. I pulled out, then pulled him up. I turned him to the cutting table and bent him over it. I didn’t wait and pulled down hard on his trousers before he got the belt undone. No underwear and a sculpted arse that parted to reveal a neat pink hole. I spit on it and rubbed my cock, coated in the thick gag spit he’d made when he sucked me, against it. It twitched and he lifted his hips towards me and moaned.

“Make it hurt,” he whispered.

I placed my head against his hole, held his shoulders and thrust hard into him. He cried out. I went harder. Each stroke I went deeper into him until I found a depth that felt like his muscles were massaging the underside of my head. I stayed there, pulling back by just an inch then burying myself at his limit. It only took a minute of rapid strokes before I came inside him, pulse after pulse of heat until I felt empty. I pulled out and watched him quietly pull up his trousers and turn to face me. He took a breath and found his composure. He grabbed a wooden tissue dispenser and held it out to me. I cleaned myself off.

We were standing three feet apart by the time the door opened and the assistant brought my tea on a small tray.

I took the cup. Theo straightened a bolt of cloth on the shelf beside him that didn’t need straightening.

“Thank you,” I said, to the assistant.

I drank the tea. Theo went back to his notes. Neither of us looked at the other.

When the measurements were done he led me not to the changing room but to a smaller room off the corridor. A chair, a low table, a glass of water. A woman already seated on the other side.

She was perhaps fifty, silver-framed glasses, a dark jacket, a yellow legal pad on the table in front of her that she didn’t look at. She gestured to the chair.

I sat.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

Not what I’d expected either. I’d braced for something procedural, a form, a checklist. Instead she just looked at me and waited.

I told her the version I usually told. Bristol, first class, the internship, Elephant and Castle. The career plan. The shape of what I wanted.

She listened without writing anything down. Then: “That’s quite a curated answer.”

I said nothing.

“I’m going to ask you to try again,” she said, “and this time I want the honest version. Not the one you’d give at an interview. The one you’d give at two in the morning to someone you trusted.” A pause. “I should tell you: I’m not a psychiatrist or therapist. My skill is based in reading people, I will know if you lie, I’ll know if you tell me the truth but not the full truth. Honesty is the only thing that matters in this room. Most things you might tell me can be managed, professionally, legally, personally. But dishonesty cannot be managed, because we won’t know what we’re managing. If you’re honest, there’s a very high chance you’ll pass this stage. If you’re not, it’s guaranteed you won’t.”

She said it the way a doctor explains a diagnosis. Not unkind. Just accurate.

I looked at the legal pad. Then I started again.

The honest version was messier. The degree had been a grind, not a triumph. The internship was survivable but not what I’d imagined. The bedroom in Elephant and Castle had a damp patch on the ceiling I’d stopped looking at because looking at it made me feel something I didn’t have a word for yet. I told her about the feeling I got in rooms full of older men who’d already made it, a thing that was equal parts envy and desire and I hadn’t untangled which was which. I told her about Daniel, more than I’d meant to. I told her about the moment on the balcony when I’d held still and let myself be seen, and what had moved in me when I did.

She asked me if I would lie to get something I wanted. She asked me if there was ever a time something turned me on that most people think shouldn’t have.

Then she asked if I was here to please Daniel, or myself. That one threw me a little. I didn’t know the answer at first. “I think, for myself, to prove something to Daniel,” I answered.

She gave a small smile, and looked directly at me.

“This question is different. I will accept as truth whatever you tell me. Did you fuck Theo before you came in here.”

I’d half expected the question but not to be asked this way.

I thought about the honest answer, then the lie. This was still a test. She asked for honesty. The calculation came quickly. Theo made the choice too. If I had to describe the man I would say he was someone who would put procedure and etiquette over everything else. He had obviously worked here for years and I was the one he couldn’t resist?

“Yes. I fucked him, hard over the cutting table. I’m sure I’m not the first.”

She wrote something down for the first time. I watched the pen move.

She capped her pen. Then picked up the phone.

“Profile passed. One obfuscation, there’s a break up, recent and unresolved, might cause the odd bad decision but nothing to worry about. He saw through the tailor test, correct. Definitely. I predict vers, twenties and forties. Virgin-fantasy leaning on the younger, oedipal sub leaning on the older, reversal on both, he’s exploratory when given opportunity.” A pause while she listened to the other end. “He’ll land on Edward and Seb. Questions? Okay.”

“That’s all,” she said, putting the phone down. “Theo will take you from here.”

Theo appeared in the doorway. The same look he’d given me when I arrived. He ushered me back into his area and held out two items folded in tissue paper.

“These are yours to keep. There will be a fuller supply at the apartment. Please change into them in the room at the end of the hall. Leave your clothes on the chair.”

I took them. White cotton briefs, heavier than they looked. And folded beneath: a white leather harness, soft and clean, minimal design. I looked at him.

He held my gaze. “White for initiates. The room at the end of the hall.”

I shook the briefs out and looked at the cut of them properly. Standard at the front. At the back: a clean oval of fabric removed, the opening reinforced at the edge. I stood looking at them for a moment. Then I put them on.

The harness went on over them. Chest straps, a strap running down the centre, connection points at the sternum and between the shoulder blades. It sat against me like it had been measured for it. Which, I realised, it had. Everything Theo had noted: this was what he’d been noting for.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

The reflection looked back. I liked him. He looked confident and competent.

Then a section of the mirror moved. A clean line appeared down the left side of it, and it swung inward on a hinge, a door. Beyond it: light, white walls, the smell of warming plastic and ink.

I walked through.

Welcome, my beautiful boys and burly men.

We are back on the Hartswood Estate, and this time Toby has been invited inside.

Last time he was on his knees in the park for Reece. If you haven’t read that yet, start here.

This time he’s at Reece and Liam’s flat. These brothers grew up sharing everything and nothing has changed.

“u up? come over to mine. i got u something to wear.”

I typed “See you in 10” and deleted it and typed “cu in 10” instead.

I was there in 5.

I could have followed my nose to his place, lifted Scooby-Doo style on the scent of weed. I knocked on the only clean spot I could find on the door. Egg down it in long dried streaks, charring around the letterbox. Someone had scrubbed the word faggots off so hard they’d taken the paint with it, leaving a pale ghost of the letters underneath.

Liam answered. He looked me dead in the eye, grinning, and shouted back into the flat: “Reece. Your poshboy hole is here.”

Reece appeared behind him and smacked him across the back of the head. “Move.”

Liam turned and raised an open hand and laughed when Reece flinched back. Then he turned to me, bowed low. “Welcome to our umble abode, sir Tarquin.”

The TV in the front room was going at hearing-aid volume. Two of the crew in there as I passed. Boots on the sofa in black boxers, phone held up, one hand at his crotch giving himself the occasional squeeze. Kian on the floor in his trackies with no top, rebuilding a zoot that had come apart. He looked up.

“Alright, Tarq,” he said.

The corridor was narrow. I turned sideways to pass Liam, who didn’t move. His phone was up but his eyes weren’t on it.

Reece’s room was at the end of the hall. He pulled me in and the door started to close.

“Door.” Liam said from somewhere behind me.

Reece went still. Then he opened the door back and left it.

“Good lad, lights stay on too” Liam said, footsteps going the other way.

Reece turned back to me. “Ignore him.”

He picked up a white carrier bag from the bed. “Go on then.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and unknotted it. Grey marl tracksuit bottoms, thin soft cotton, tapered. Under them a black jockstrap. And at the bottom of the bag, in its box, a butt plug. Silicone. Black. Tapered to a flat base with a recessed button on it. On the box: a logo I didn’t know, and a row of symbols, usb, 6 patterns, bluetooth.

I looked at him.

“It’s how you dress when you come here,” he said. “Trackie’s for easy access. Jock keeps you tucked up until I want your dick out.” He nodded at the box. “Plug keeps you ready. And connected.”

“Connected?”

He pulled out his phone, turned the screen to me. A slider, a button, a single pulsing circle. “When you’re here. When you’re not here. I can fuck you on remote any time I want. And when Liam wants your attention, he’ll give you three buzzes.”

My jeans went tight.

“Put the jock on,” he said.

I changed with my back to him. The jockstrap was the right size.

“Sit down.”

He took the plug out of the box and set it on the bedside table. Picked up the lube from the drawer, I wondered how many times he’d lubed up someone and my cock strained against the fabric, I wanted to adjust it, but I kept my hands where they were. He held the plug out.

“I can do it,” I said, mostly to myself.

“I know.” He didn’t move.

I took it. He watched with that flat focused attention of his, not blinking, not looking away, and my hands worked slower than they needed to under it. Cold silicone warming against my fingers. I worked lube over the taper, reached back, found the angle, and pushed.

The first ring of muscle gave way. Then a second, tighter, and I held the angle and kept pushing and the widest ridge forced through with a specific bright burn and then the base seated flat against me and I let out a long breath.

He pressed the button once.

A deep resonant pulse started up inside me, not sharp, not loud, just a low hum that went straight through my pelvis and into my cock. I whimpered. No matter how I moved I couldn’t change the intensity of the feeling.

Reece’s mouth twitched. He tossed the phone on the bed, pulled me forward by the waistband, and kissed me. I grabbed his shirt and held on.

His hands gripped and didn’t let go and when he pushed me forward onto my knees I arched my back and pushed my arse up because I wanted more of it. He slid my cock out of the side of my jock and stroked it with one hand as his other tapped his phone screen, taking me through the patterns, gauging my response. Number six was the clear winner, a feeling like waves crashing onto my prostate. My legs shook and it was like I was pissing precum.

When he pulled the plug clear the shock of the loss was brutal. When he pushed himself into me, the change hit all at once. Wider. Warmer. Filling the exact shape the plug had been holding open, and I got both hands up on the headboard and drove back onto him, working for depth, because that was what I wanted and he was giving it to me.

The headboard hit the wall.

I was riding him with both hands on his chest when the light in the room changed. Not much. Just the warm dim of the bedroom cut by something cooler from the direction of the door. I turned my head.

Liam. Framed in the opening, dark corridor behind him. He was taller than I'd clocked in the hallway, broader through the shoulders, the kind of build that makes a doorframe look like it was made to fit him. Sweats around his thighs. His cock was out and hard, long and thick with a slight curve to the left, and he had it in his hand like he'd been there a while. Not hiding. Just there. Working himself in a slow deliberate grip, watching us the way he watched most things.

I looked at Reece. Reece looked at me. A very small shrug. Then both hands on my hips, pulling me back down, firm, holding my eyes until I started moving again.

So I moved. His presence made me work harder.The headboard knocked the wall fast and hard and I came, shaking, spunking across Reece’s chest.

Reece finished with both hands pulling me down onto him. When I turned my head Liam was cumming. The head of his cock was cupped by a white sports sock. He cleaned himself up with his eyes on me.

I lay face down on Reece’s pillow.

“Liam will want to see you now,” said Reece, as he pushed my plug back in.

“I know.”

“He won’t bite.” A pause. “Not the first time, he likes to save that.”

Liam’s room was directly opposite. Dark, blinds down against the afternoon. He was on the edge of the bed in his sweats and a grey t-shirt, as though none of us had just been doing what we’d been doing.

“Sit down, Tarquin,” he said.

I went for the desk chair.

“No.” He patted the bed next to him. “Here.”

I sat. Up close in the dark he was bigger than the corridor had made him seem. He smelled of weed and sweat and something warm underneath. He looked at me sideways.

“You’re a good-looking bloke,” he said. “Know that?”

“Okay.”

“Not a compliment. A fact.” He reached over, hooked one arm around my neck and pulled me across his lap in a single smooth movement, face down, hands catching on the mattress. His forearm settled across my shoulders. Not pressing. Just there.

“You done this before? Any of this?”

“Done what.”

“Answer the question, Tarq.”

“Not like this.”

“But some things.”

“Some things.”

“With lads?”

“...yes.”

“Girls?”

“A couple.”

“You prefer lads.”

I said nothing.

His hand cracked across my arse, loud enough that I was briefly glad of the TV in the front room. The sting came half a beat after the sound, bright and spreading, and the plug shifted with the impact.

“You prefer lads,” he said again.

“Yes,” I said into the mattress.

“Good. Easier for everyone.” He resettled. “How many?”

“How many what.”

Another crack. Same place. My breath punched out and I was hard against his thigh.

“How many lads.”

“Four.”

“Anyone on the estate.”

“You know who.”

“Say it.”

“Reece.”

“Anyone else.”

“No. Well, two more, no one whose name I know.”

“Fucking slut. Done anything online?”

“Some things.”

I went still. He felt it.

“You just told me you got fucked by two blokes in the park,” he said. “And now you’re holding back?”

“Just chatting. Looking.”

“You sent pictures.”

I said nothing. He didn’t hit me. Just waited.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Right.” His hand moved to the small of my back, thumb moving in a slow circle. “And you like being watched.”

Nothing.

“There’s no wrong answer.”

“Tell that to my arse cheeks.”

“You like being watched.”

“Maybe.” And then, because the thumb kept moving and something in my back went loose: “Yeah. I liked you watching me just now.”

He reached to the bedside table. Something was pressed between my lips. Cotton. Warm. I identified it about two seconds after it was in my mouth, and the blood that wasn’t otherwise occupied went straight to my face.

His sock. From the doorway.

He held it in place. Without being told, I opened my mouth. He took the cue and pushed it in.

“Ten, then this bit’s over.” He said. “Count.”

The first one landed and I made a muffled noise into the sock. The second made me grip the duvet. The third I felt coming a half second before it hit, and I pushed my arse up to meet it.

He paused.

I kept still.

He hit me harder. By eight the sting and the heat, the taste of what was in my mouth and the plug shifting with each smack drowned out any thoughts. My cock was hard against his thigh, and I wasn’t quite sure what numbers were.

At ten. He lifted his hand. The sock came out. I breathed.

His forearm stayed across my shoulders.

“Good,” he said. “All my lads get that, shows em who’s the boss. Here’s how it works. You want to be with Reece, you’re one of us, with all of us. Loyal. Do what’s needed. No drama through that door. And the plug stays in.”

He said it the way he said everything else.

“When you’re here, when you’re not here. You take it out for the toilet, you put it back. When I buzz you it means I want a word. When Reece buzzes you it means whatever Reece wants. And sometimes I might do it cause I’m bored and want to fuck with ya.”

“Boots got all the patterns at his nan’s funeral,” he said. “Held it together till the first hymn, had to use the order of service to hide the fact he was bricked.” Something crossed his face. “Good lad.”

He pulled me up and I sat up next to him, hot everywhere.

“We need to see how you do out there. There’s a lad on the estate. Callum Marsh, Birchfield block, flat twelve. You’re taking him something.”

He picked up a Sports Direct bag for life from the end of his bed. It had a Playstation 4 in it.

“So that’s sto…”

“Callum’s now. You’re delivering it.”

I looked at the PlayStation, then at the phone on the bedside table.

“Go on then,” he said. “And Tar,” he grabbed my jaw with one hand and squeezed. He pressed his forehead against mine.

“Don’t get cocky. Just because you can ride cock like a pornstar slut doesn’t mean you’re in. You wuzz out on us or fuck this up we’ll do ya.”

I really wasn’t feeling cocky until he called me a porn star slut.

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men to the next installment of House Rules. If you haven’t found part one yet, you can read it here. The action picks up where part one left off. In the kitchen with Grant, Grant’s best friend and Chase, who moments ago was naked by the dryer ready to be taken by Grant. Chase picks up the story for this part.

*Warning for explicit, wanton, glorious gay sex

My dad stayed for forty minutes.

I know because I counted every one of them from the chair in Grant’s kitchen, wearing his dirty robe. My dad talked about a golf tournament, a neighbour dispute, the state of the housing market, and whether I might benefit from community college. I nodded at the appropriate intervals. Grant leaned against the counter with his coffee cup and looked to anyone but me like he hadn’t just been about to slide into his best friend’s son. It was hard to tell if he was being deceptive or just calm in a crisis. He did have a stillness about him. I’d clocked it the first time I walked onto his property. If I was honest with myself I would have realised that’s why I found it so hot to tease him. Breaking that composure felt like a win that was bigger than just making one man break.

When my dad’s car finally reversed off the drive I let out a breath I’d been holding since the front door slammed.

“I need a drink,” I said.

“You need to go home,” Grant said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. He was rinsing his mug at the sink, the set of his shoulders doing the work his voice was too controlled to do.

I didn’t move.

He turned around. He has grey in his beard and crow’s feet and the kind of forearms you only get from twenty years of actually using them, and standing in his kitchen in his bathrobe with my hair still wrecked from where he’d had his hands in it, I understood I was completely and entirely screwed.

“Chase.”

“You told me to stop,” I said. “I stopped. You said yes. You kissed me first.” I held up a hand, ticking off fingers. “You put your mouth on me in three places Grant. I was the one being quiet about it.” A pause. “You’re the one who has a problem.”

He looked at me the way he had in the laundry room, assessing. Like I was a problem he’d decided he was going to solve correctly or not at all.

“Your dad is my oldest friend.”

“You said that already.”

“It doesn’t stop being true.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s not what I’m asking you.”

The kitchen was quiet. Outside a car passed. Grant set down the mug and crossed his arms over his chest and looked at me with a pained expression. I could see his face shifting as he argued with himself.

“Go home, Chase.”

I went.

Three weeks later my dad’s Escalade was upside down in a ditch off Route 9 and I was sitting in the back of a police cruiser with a smear of blood above my eyebrow and a bag of ecstasy and a block of hash in police evidence bags. Nobody was hurt. I think this was the most important detail, but the cops and my dad focused on the other stuff.

He made the problem go away, because that’s what my dad does. He is a man of money, connections and solutions and had plenty of each. He also had a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old at home. There was also a secret address, that housed a secret piece he’d been keeping on the other side of town for six months that I wasn’t supposed to know about. I’m not going to lie, I was ready to play that card, but when I heard his solution, I decided to keep it close to my chest.

He didn’t yell. He got quiet instead, which is so much worse, and he told me very calmly that I needed somewhere to be for a while that wasn’t his house, and that he’d already spoken to Grant. Grant had a guest house, and that I was going to use it, and I was going to stay out of trouble, this was my last chance saloon before he looked at cutting off the cash pipeline.

I said fine. And rearranged the semi boner in my shorts that the mention of Grant inspired in me.

Grant met me at the gate with his arms crossed, it was not a welcoming face.

“Your dad called.”

“I know.”

“You could have warned me.”

“I didn’t know he was calling.” I hefted the bag on my shoulder. “Are you going to let me in or what?”

He stepped aside. I walked past him and felt the air pressure shift the same way it had the day I’d first showed up with my lawn mower, that specific drop in the atmosphere that meant we were both aware of things we weren’t saying.

The guest house was behind the garage, a single storey addition with its own door, a double bed, and a small kitchen that hadn’t been used in long enough that the coffee maker still had the manual sitting next to it. Grant stood in the doorway and talked me through it with clipped efficiency. Where the spare key was. Where the bins were. What the internet password was. I put my bag down on the bed and turned to face him.

“Rules,” he said.

I waited.

“You eat your own food, I’m not running a catering service. You tell me if you’re bringing someone back, I don’t need surprises. You don’t borrow anything without asking, including the tools in the garage. You pick up after yourself.” He looked at me directly. “And you leave what happened in the laundry room in the laundry room.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“You’ve been thinking about that since it happened,” I said.

“Chase.”

“I’m not trying to embarrass you. I’m saying you’ve been thinking about it and so have I and those are two facts that are both true right now in this room.”

“They can both be true and still be off the table.”

“Why?”

“Because your father is coming over for dinner on Sunday and I’m not having that conversation.”

“He doesn’t need to know.”

“He’s my oldest friend.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it keeps being the reason.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. He was still in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame. Grant Sutherland, fifty-four years old, who had done something to himself post-divorce that had made his shoulders a different shape than I remembered from childhood, who looked at me like I was something he was trying very hard not to touch. Who had crouched down on the laundry room tile and put his mouth on me with a patience that had made me feel, for the first time I could remember, like there was no rush anywhere.

“Okay,” I said. “Rules. Fine. I understand the rules.”

He exhaled. Nodded once. Started to turn.

“Grant.”

He stopped.

“If I break them,” I said, “what happens?”

The silence stretched a beat longer than it needed to. He looked at me over his shoulder with an expression I was learning to read, the one that lived just underneath the one he was showing. Then he said, “Goodnight, Chase,” and pulled the door closed behind him.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought, methodically, about exactly how and when and in what order I was going to break every single one of them.

I was good for forty-eight hours.

I want that on the record. I had eaten my own food, I had not borrowed anything from the garage, I had not brought anyone back. I had not knocked on the door of the main house for anything except to report that one of the bins had blown over, which was a legitimate concern and not a pretext.

But the laundry room had not left me. The details were too specific to fade, the weight of his hand in my hair, the patience of his mouth, the exact quality of his voice when he’d looked up at me from the tile and said “you’re sure?”

As I laid on my bed with a bottle of beer, the scene playing again like a ticktock I couldn’t scroll past, I got angry and desperate. And, as usually happens when I have beer and the horn, I made a bad decision.

The message said “Grant, I need some help.” The photo said all this can be yours. I was a master at nudes, I even managed to make the light reflect off the bead of precum leaking from my head.

“STOP” was his answer. From the window I saw the living room lights go out.

Why I needed him so badly wasn’t clear to me, but it caused a heat inside me that matched the heat of that summer night. I decided I needed air, I took my beer and stretched out on one of the recliners by the pool. A cool breeze caressed my body and it felt good to be naked in the night air. I lit a joint, and idly ran my hand over my skin, enjoying the sensation of giving myself goosebumps. When I finished the smoke, I got my hand around myself and let the kitchen scene run again from the beginning. In my head I didn’t stop at the almost of it, I let it go further. In my head he didn’t stop when he did, he stayed on his knees and kept going until I was loud and wrecked and done, and then he stood up and told me to turn around and let me feel what I didn’t know I’d needed for so long.

Sometimes a man needs a quick tug to release the pressure and sometimes he needs to make the act a piece of art. It was one of those nights. I spit on my fingers and teased my hole as I stroked but my spit was thin and dried up. I needed lube, which meant going back inside. I untangled myself from the lounger and crossed to the guest house door, shoved it open, rummaged in the washbag on the bathroom shelf, found what I needed.

I didn’t notice the red light on the camera on my way out the first time.

I settled back on the lounger, got myself comfortable, got my hand working again, and picked up exactly where the version of Grant in my head had left me. I was thinking about his hands, the specific way he’d gripped my hip on the tile like it was a decision rather than a reflex, and I was close enough that my breathing had gone shallow and my hips were moving, when I shifted position and the camera caught my eye.

It was mounted on the corner of the garage, angled to cover the back of the property. Standard enough. Except I’d been on this patio every evening for two days and I’d never clocked it pointing quite this direction before.

I went still.

Lay there for a long moment, hand still wrapped around myself, thinking.

Then, slowly, I turned my head and looked directly into the lens.

It didn’t move. I watched it for ten seconds, fifteen.

Then it did. A small, precise adjustment, the kind a camera makes when someone is operating it manually rather than letting it run on a loop.

I held the lens for one more second. Then I slid off the lounger, dropped to my knees on the patio, put my forehead to the ground and my ass in the air and waited for what seemed like an hour.

The kitchen light in the main house went on.

I heard the back door.

His footsteps came across the yard fast and heavy, this was not the Grant who has everything under control. He came through the patio gate and stopped. I didn’t move. I stayed exactly where I was, cheek to the cool stone, breathing carefully, and waited.

He was silent for long enough that I started to wonder if I’d miscalculated. Then he said my name in a voice that had nothing of the kitchen stillness in it, rough at the edges in a way I’d only heard once before, in the laundry room, right before he stopped being careful.

He took hold of my hips and lifted me up off the ground.

For one suspended second I thought he was going to put me inside and close the door and that would be that. He turned me around to face him. His jaw was set and his eyes were dark and he looked he wanted to say something firm and had already forgotten what it was.

“You were watching,” I said.

“Chase.”

“You watched the whole thing.”

“I check the cameras before bed, it’s a habit, I didn’t.” He stopped. Looked at me. “You knew.”

“No,” I said. “I could never imagine Grant, the patron saint of vanilla, doing something so sketchy and hot.”

Something crossed his face. Then he took a fistful of my hair, tipped my head back, and kissed me so hard I felt it in my back teeth.

He walked me backwards into the guest house, mouth still on mine, kicked the door shut behind him, and pressed me against the wall with the full weight of him. All the stillness converted into something else entirely, purposeful and absolutely certain of itself.

“I can’t stop thinking about your body,” he said into my jaw, “since the laundry room.”

“I know,” I said.

“It’s a terrible thing we are doing.”

“I know.”

“Your father’s my...”

“Grant,” I said, “if you say my father is your oldest friend right now I will actually die.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Then he pulled back just far enough to look at me properly, both hands bracketing my face, and said, in his usual calm voice exactly what he was going to do to me, and in what order, and what I was going to say when he got to each one.

I listened to all of it. When he finished I said, “do it.”

“Good boy,” he said, and meant something completely different by it than he had in the yard all those months ago, and also exactly the same thing.

He said it the way he’d said everything else that evening, in his usual calm voice, like he was reading from a list.

“I’m going to use my mouth on you until you’re close enough that you ask me to stop.”

I opened my mouth.

“Don’t,” he said. “You’ll ask. You won’t be able to help it.”

He was right. He worked his way down me with the same patience he’d had on the laundry room tile, only this time there was no Pete coming through the front door and no reason to rush and he knew it. He got his mouth around me and took his time about it, tongue working the underside in long slow drags that built and built and didn’t stop building, one hand wrapped around the base of me to control exactly how much I was getting and when. I kept my mouth shut for longer than I’d have bet on. Then the hand shifted and his thumb pressed firm into the skin just behind my balls and my whole spine went liquid and I heard myself say Grant, please, stop, I’m going to.

He stopped. Lifted his head. Looked at me.

“Good,” he said.

“Second thing,” he said as he pushed me to the floor and laid beside me. “I’m going to open you up until you stop trying to rush me and actually let it happen.”

“I’m not,” I started. He put his hand to my mouth and covered it firmly.

“You’re pushing back into my hand already and I haven’t touched you yet.”

He was correct. I made myself go still. His hand moved from my mouth to my neck, he held it with a firm pressure. He took his time, working one finger in slowly and just staying there until my body made room for it without being asked, then two, crooking forward with a precision that suggested he’d done this before and knew exactly what he was looking for. When he found it I made a sound I wasn’t expecting, something low and involuntary that came from somewhere below conscious decision-making. He worked that spot with careful attention, I watched his face, he was savouring this and the thing about Grant is he’s patient in a way that doesn’t feel withholding, it feels purposeful, like every second of the wait is loaded, like he’s building something and he knows what the finished thing looks like. I stopped trying to rush it. I stopped trying anything. I just lay there and let it happen and made whatever sounds came out.

When I was loose and slick and had stopped knowing what I was saying, he withdrew his hand and I heard myself make a noise of objection that was genuinely embarrassing.

“Third thing,” he said. “I’m going to fuck you until you tell me you love it.”

“I already,” I said. “I already love it.”

“You’ll say it properly,” he said. “When you mean it the way I want you to mean it.”

He pushed inside slowly, all the way, and stayed there. The full weight of him settling against me. Both of us not moving. I could feel every inch of him and he wasn’t doing anything, just watching my face with that careful expression, the one I was starting to understand meant he was collecting information.

“How’s that?” he said.

“Good,” I managed.

“Be more specific.”

“It’s good, Grant, it’s, you’re,” I stopped. He raised an eyebrow. “You’re big,” I said, which was not what I’d meant to say and was also completely accurate and he knew it and the corner of his mouth moved in a way I was going to think about for a long time.

He started moving. Slow at first, drawing back and returning with a thoroughness that I felt in places I hadn’t known were connected to this, steady and deliberate and absolutely not what I needed and also exactly what he was going to give me until I said the thing correctly. I tried. I pushed back. He held my hips still with both hands and kept the pace exactly where he wanted it. I pulled at him. He didn’t change anything. He just kept going in that unhurried way that was somehow more overwhelming than anything faster would have been, and I heard myself starting to talk without quite meaning to, saying his name and saying please and saying things that were not sentences, and then he shifted the angle slightly, one small adjustment, and I heard myself say it, loud and unguarded, that I loved it, that I loved him inside me, that I didn’t want him to stop, ever, please, Grant.

“There,” he said, and gave me what I’d been asking for.

I came apart completely and quickly and without any dignity at all, which I choose to believe says more about his skill than my stamina.

He was still going when I finished. Still had both hands on my hips, still moving, watching me with an expression that was warm and focused and deeply pleased with itself, and something about being held down and used after I’d already come was its own specific thing, a new submission, and I lay there and let him and felt every second of it.

The quiet warmth felt new to me. I did something he wasn’t expecting and surprised me more.

I put both hands flat on his chest and pushed. He went, more from surprise than anything else, and I went with him, got my knees either side of him before he could reorient, and sat down on him with my full weight and watched his face do something it hadn’t done all evening, which was lose the composure entirely.

“Chase,” he said, and it came out unsteady.

“You were saying something,” I said, “about who’s in charge.”

I started moving. His hands came up to my hips on instinct and I picked them up and put them on the floor either side of him, which he allowed, which told me something important about him. I rode him properly then, finding the angle that worked for both of us, and the thing about being the one on top is you can watch his face, which I recommend, which I intend to keep recommending, which was worth every second of the wait.

He came with both hands gripping the floor and my name said in a voice I’d never heard from him before and I filed it away carefully, the specific sound of Grant Sutherland losing a negotiation he’d started.

Afterwards we lay on the guest house floor and the night was warm and quiet and the camera was still pointing at an empty lounger outside.

“New rules?” I said eventually.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Tomorrow.”

“Not tonight?”

“Tonight,” he said, pulling me in against his chest with the ease of someone who’d already decided this, “you stay here.”

We lay there for a while. His hand was moving slowly up and down my back, the absent-minded kind of touch, like he was exploring a new bit of land that was his now.

“For the record,” he said, into the top of my head.

“Mm.”

“When we do this. I’m in charge.”

I opened one eye.

“You were saying that when I was sitting on your cock,” I said.

“I know.” A pause. “It’s still true. You took the lead tonight and I let you because I chose to. That’s not a precedent.” His hand stilled on my back. “If you take the lead again without being told you can, there are consequences.”

I considered this.

“What kind of consequences,” I said, keeping my voice entirely neutral.

“The kind,” he said, “that you will not enjoy nearly as much as you think you will.”

Something went through me that was not quite sleep and not quite anything else. I pressed my face into his chest and closed my eyes.

I was definitely going to enjoy it more than Grant predicted.

Then he stood up and left.

I went to sleep, hard, thinking about it, which is, all things considered, an excellent way to go to sleep.

Are you ready, my beautiful boys and burly men? Robin Hood is back. He’s older now, sharper, and considerably more augmented than the last time anyone told his story. New Sherwood City is a surveillance state run by priests, where every sinful thought is logged, scored, and punished by drone. Robin wants it burned to the ground and its people free to do whatever they like with whoever they like, which is, frankly, a political position he’s uniquely qualified to hold. He has a mohawk, glowing purple eyes, a padlock collar, and attachments where other men have limitations.

He also needs a bard and, it’s not a spoiler to say, poor repressed Will doesn’t stand a chance.

From my new realm, I give you The Filthy Adventures of Robin Hood: A New Sherwood Tale.

*Warning: Explicit story - in case you hadn’t guessed!

Will’s side still ached where they’d taken the kidney. Not badly, the clinic had been efficient about it, better than the black-market places that left you bleeding in a car park, but every few steps a dull pull reminded him he had paid for his sins.

It had been three weeks now, the price of the kidney had bought him enough contrition to lift his VirtueSignaler three hundred points. He’d slipped a couple of times, mostly burned on an idle fantasy about his boss. But his score sat fat and green at the top of his vision, higher than he’d seen it since he was a teenager. The man at the clinic had done the maths for him without being asked: three hundred points, careful spending, that’s two years easy. Unless he was deviant.

He’d been offered more for a testicle. Considerably more. He’d sat in the chair long enough to hear the number before he said no, and the no had surprised him, quiet and immediate, like some part of him still had a line. There were whispered stories that the Cardinals ate them as a delicacy.

So: two years. He walked home through the rain deciding what two years of margin was actually worth spending on. A drink somewhere unlicensed. A thought he didn’t immediately have to punish himself for. Maybe, if he was reckless, a kiss. He was so tired, the cold pressing in under the glow of the Adscreen towers. For one stretch of wet pavement he considered simply lying down on it.

A stranger bumped into him from behind. How he’d collided with anyone on a street this empty was its own small puzzle.

“Forgive me,” said the stranger from under a black latex hood, and Will felt the air leave his lungs as the man drew it back.

Mohawk, dark and sharp, rising off a shaved scalp. A septum ring catching the neon. Eyes that glowed purple, actually glowed. Latex and leather clung to a chest and arms glistening wet in the streetlight, and around his throat sat a padlock collar, heavy, industrial, the kind of thing built for cargo, not a man. He carried himself like a man who would burn through a boy’s virtue in seconds, hip cocked, mouth already curling like he knew exactly what he was about to ruin.

“You’re beeping,” the stranger said, easy, like remarking on the weather, and reached over to touch two fingers to Will’s Angel, silencing it mid-tone.

He was already four points into imagining pulling down the zip on the man’s latex bodysuit.

“You’re walking like a man protecting something he paid a fortune for.” His hand didn’t move. “Three hundred points, was it? Should give us ten minutes in the alley.”

Will should have run. But he was tired of fighting himself, tired of not letting himself find the answers to all his questions, how men taste, how it feels with their lips on his neck.

“A kiss,” the stranger said, reading something off Will’s face. “That’s what you decided to spend it on, isn’t it? Just a kiss, and maybe a bit more, and you’d still have plenty left for two years of behaving yourself.”

“That’s exactly what I decided,” Will admitted, hating how steady his own voice sounded doing it.

“Then let’s find out what a kiss actually costs,” the stranger said, and pulled him into the mouth of a side street, out of the camera line thrown by the corner Adscreen.

He kissed like he owned him, one hand fisted gently but absolute in Will’s hair, tilting his head exactly where he wanted it, tongue sliding deep and unhurried, like neither of them had anywhere else to be. Four points, gone, and Will barely registered the number falling because the stranger’s mouth had moved to his jaw, his throat, teeth grazing skin just hard enough to promise more than it delivered.

“I’m Robin,” he said against Will’s ear. “You’ll want to remember the name. Somewhere around a hundred points you won’t be able to think of anything else to say.”

Robin went to pull at his own zip but Will placed a hand on Robin’s and pushed it aside. It was the first decision he hadn’t doubted in ten years. Inch by golden inch Robin’s chest came into the streetlight properly for the first time, and Will’s hand was on it. Warm. A body, skin, and sculpted muscles that yielded to his touch but stayed firm under it. The faint hitch of Robin’s own breath catching under his touch told him he was doing this right.

“You’re staring like you expected something else,” Robin said, delighted.

“I don’t know what I expected.”

“Good. Keep not knowing. It’s better that way.” He caught Will’s wrist and guided it lower, over the latex stretched taut across him, thick and filling further with every second Will’s hand stayed there. Twelve points. “Go on then. It doesn’t bite.”

Will dropped to his knees on wet stone without deciding to. He pulled at the zip and Robin’s cock sprang free into the streetlight, and for one strange, unguarded second Will’s first thought was surprise, the cock was smaller than Will’s, thin, neat, hard enough but it didn’t match the monster cocks he fantasised about, he’d braced for something built to match the rest of him. He filed the thought away almost as fast as it arrived, there wasn’t room left in him for anything but want.

Firm, warm, human. He wrapped his hand along the golden skin and placed his lips gently against the wet pink head. His Angel beeped loudly and he took the length of Robin’s shaft into his mouth urgently. The taste of him was sweet and human and nothing like guilt, precum spreading warm and faintly salty against Will’s tongue, and Robin’s hand settled at the back of his skull, not pushing, just resting there while his hips rocked forward in small, testing motions, encouraging without demanding.

“There,” Robin murmured, watching him work with those impossible purple eyes gone half-lidded. “Nobody ever tells you real touch costs so much more than imagining it.” The readout in the corner of Will’s vision was falling properly now, ten points, then twenty, freefalling in a way no thought had ever managed, like the meter had finally found what it was actually built to punish.

Robin pulled him up by the hair before he could finish him, turned him bodily to face the wet brick, and undid Will’s trousers. He knew precisely how many points were left to spend and intended to use every last one of them. He got two fingers slick from somewhere, worked Will open with a patience that felt cruel given how far the numbers had already fallen, and Will heard himself begging for exactly the thing he’d been telling himself for a week he could afford to want.

“You’re gorgeous like this,” Robin said, low, the curve of Will’s arse pressed back into his palm, wanting. “Absolutely nothing wrong with any part of you.”

When he pushed inside, it was slow enough that Will felt every inch of the stretch. A pulse, deep inside him, a wave of pressure that swelled and released and swelled again in a rhythm that didn’t match any heartbeat or any thrust, like being filled by something that breathed on its own separate clock. Will’s whole body seized around it, a moan tearing out of him before he could stop it, and somewhere in his ecstasy, distant and half-formed, came the thought that an average cock could never have done this to him, that if this was what disappointing felt like buried to the hilt, he had no idea how anyone took a big cock without the need for corrective surgery afterward.

“Don’t you dare stop,” Will managed, voice wrecked.

Robin laughed low against his shoulder blade and gave him more, hips snapping harder now, one hand braced flat on the brick beside Will’s head and the other wrapped tight around Will’s cock, stroking him in time with every thrust, and the wave came again, stronger, and Will’s vision actually blurred at the edges of it.

The VirtueSignaler hit zero right as Will felt the first unstoppable pull of his own climax gathering low and total, and the piercing tone of the empty meter and the whirr of a Sheriff Drone arrived close enough to his climax that he didn’t care if it ended him on the street.

“Remain still,” said the drone, flat and total. “Non-compliance will result in street cleansing.”

Robin didn’t stop. He remained inside Will, and somehow, although his hips stayed still, it felt like his cock was moving back and forth in him regardless.

“Trust me,” Robin said, calm as anything, right as the net fell around them both. “Everything’s about to get so much more interesting.”

A laser scanner rippled red as a whooshing sound announced the falling net, and the two of them jerked, still entwined, rising into the night sky.

“Duck,” Robin said, conversational, like this happened every week.

Will ducked. A mechanical whir sounded from somewhere above his head, from Robin’s own mohawk, and an arrow shot past his ear and into the drone’s flank. Not through it, into it, a small precise strike at a housing Will hadn’t clocked as anything but decoration.

The drone’s status light flickered, died, and came back green.

“There we go,” Robin said, satisfied. “Hub link’s severed. She’s ours now.”

The drone, docile under new ownership, banked smoothly and began carrying them, still tangled together, away from the rooftops rather than down onto them.

“Now then,” Robin said, rocking his hips slow against him, unfinished business plainly still on his mind, “where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?” He wrapped his hand back around Will where he’d left off, and it took embarrassingly little before Will was spilling over his fingers with a strangled sound lost to the wind forty feet above the rooftops, Robin murmuring filthy encouragement against his ear the entire way through it.

“I should introduce myself properly,” Robin said afterward, unhurried, like he hadn’t just made a man come while flying. “I am Robin Hood. Delighted to finally be meeting you, Will. We have a great work to perform. Changing the world and all, don’t you know.”

“Are you sure it’s me you want? I’m just a scribe. Where are we?”

Robin placed a finger to Will’s lips. “One question at a time, lambkin. I do want you. We’ve seen the glorious stories you create for The Catechism, and we know you keep a more truthful notebook and pen hidden in your mattress. Those stories, Will, how many points did they cost! They made me blush. You are not a scribe, you’re a bard, and that is what I need. As to where? My home, the Deadlands.”

“You’re lying! No one can survive the Deadlands.”

“Cardinals lie, about almost everything. I will always tell you the truth.”

They began to descend.

“Ah, home sweet home,” said Robin as a large white dome with a smashed glass roof came into view. “Welcome to the heart of Sherwood Forest.”

The hijacked drone lowered them gently into the dome, and set them down without a sound.

Robin’s erection still pulsed hard against Will’s back, and for the first time in his life, Will had no idea what would happen next.

Adapted image. Original photo by Romain Taupiac on Unsplash

Hello my beautiful boys and burly men. Daddy Sauce has a story from another realm; Gilt Edge. It’s a place where everyone is beautiful and brutal. A world of men in business suits who run trading-floor plays in the bedroom. Trust no one, even when they’re on their knees in front of you.

Marcus, a graduate at the bottom of the ladder. A night with an older man, meant to ease his heartbreak, turns out to be the hottest experience of his life and if he takes the bait, there’s guaranteed to be more.

Claire actually meant it this time.

“Soho House, Thursday, everyone’s going,” she’d said, tapping the invite into the group chat rather than just mentioning it at her desk the way she usually did when I wasn’t meant to be included. Four weeks into the internship. A first from Bristol. A bedroom in Elephant and Castle where the shower pressure was a daily negotiation. I read the message twice to be sure it said what I thought it said. Then, with a different kind of nervous energy than I was used to, I put on my good shirt and headed out.

I saw Callum before he saw me.

He was leaning against the bar with a pint he hadn’t touched, and my whole chest did something complicated and fast. Three years since university and he still stood exactly the way he used to when he thought no one was watching, weight on one hip, head slightly down, bracing for something. He’d filled out through the shoulders, his shirt sitting differently across them than it had when I could get both hands flat against his chest and feel his heartbeat under my palm. Some detail from years ago surfaced without permission, the exact weight of him over me, the sound he made right before he lost control of himself. I had to look away for a second just to get my footing back.

He saw me. His face did the thing it used to do.

“Marcus.”

“Callum.” My name in his mouth still landed somewhere low.

He crossed the room in about four steps and for one unguarded second neither of us said anything, just stood close enough that I could smell the expensive citrus cologne he had always worn. The smell flashed images of my head buried between his legs drinking in the scent of the aftershave and his cum as I lovingly cleaned him up with my tongue. A charge passed between us that hadn’t gone anywhere in three years, hadn’t faded, hadn’t been resolved, had just been waiting.

“You look good,” he said.

“You too.”

Neither of us moved. I was aware of my own pulse. I was aware that if he’d taken one more step I wouldn’t have stopped him, right there, in front of my whole team, and I think he knew it too, and for one long moment it looked like he might actually do it.

“Callum.” A woman’s voice, pleasant, unhurried, entirely unaware of what she was interrupting, or possibly not unaware at all. She arrived at his side the way water finds a gap, without seeming to move quickly, just suddenly there, her hand landing on his arm with the specific ownership of someone with a ring on her finger. “Are you going to introduce me?”

Something shut behind his eyes. He became the version of himself when he was with anyone but me.

“Sophie, this is Marcus. We were at Bristol together. Marcus this is my fiancee, Sophie.”

“Lovely to meet you.” She smiled at me, genuinely warm, entirely oblivious, and I understood in that moment with total clarity that I had never been worth this for him, not really, not enough to risk a scene like the one that had almost happened, not enough to be introduced as anything more than a university friend to a woman who had no idea he used to fall asleep with his face pressed into my neck.

“You too,” I said, trying to mean it.

I didn’t stay long after that. Told Claire I had an early start. Told myself several things on the walk that I didn’t believe. By the time I reached the tube I’d had every imaginary argument that I needed to have with him but all it did was make me angrier. I knew, even if the arguments were real I would never penetrate deep enough to make him see himself. I changed my mind about going straight home, and by the time I came back up into the night air I’d found myself somewhere else entirely, some club I didn’t know the name of and didn’t care to learn, loud enough that I couldn’t hear myself think, and I ordered a drink at the bar with the specific intention of being touched by someone until I stopped feeling anything about Callum at all.

He found me within twenty minutes.

Mid-thirties, white, dark-haired, with the kind of jaw that looked like it had been designed with purpose. He gave me the same feeling I used to get seeing my best friend’s dad in a suit, back when I was younger. Something about the belt and the untucking of the shirt made me horny before I knew what horny was. He was not pretty, better than pretty. A face with actual structure to it, laugh lines already starting, and eyes that were assessing me. Unhurried. Like he had all the time in the world and had decided to spend some of it looking at me. He was wearing a dark open-collar shirt and he moved through the room like he owned it. When he got close enough I caught his scent, cedar, something darker underneath, clean skin. Not a lot of it. Just enough.

“You look,” he said, settling beside me at the bar without preamble, “like someone who came here to prove something to himself.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only to me.” He ordered a whisky without consulting the menu. “I’m good at reading rooms.”

“Now I’m here, I’m not sure what the point was anymore. That I can be alone in my flat as well as out of it?”

“Well you’re not alone now,” he reached out a hand, “Daniel,” he said.

“Marcus,” I said, taking his warm hand in mine. He held my eyes a beat too long and lightly traced his thumb along the side of my hand as he took it back. There was something so inevitable about that gesture. I knew I would be riding this man’s cock very soon, my fate was sealed and it thrilled me. I felt my cock twitch in my jock.

I caught his eyes move to my crotch as it did, although I was pretty confident it couldn’t be seen.

“What do you do Marcus?” he asked.

“Intern, Shafer and Green.”

“Why?”

I was taken aback by the question.

“They are the best company to work for, a lot of opportunity, they have branches all over the world and they make a shit ton of profit year on year.”

“So it’s the money, not the satisfaction in investing rich arseholes money and creating profits for them?”

“Absolutely! I intend to be one of those rich arseholes eventually. What do you do?”

“Recruitment,” he said, waving off the question. “Well you’re not a rich arsehole yet, but you are a cute one,” he leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “I bet it’s a tight arsehole too, room 712, finish your drink and tell them to put it on my tab.”

I felt something low in my stomach tighten pleasantly and my cock throb.

“Yeah,” I said. “Alright.”

He kissed my cheek as he passed me. I finished my drink in one shot then waited for just long enough to look like I was taking my time.

The room was on the seventh floor, facing west. Curtains open, the city doing its glittering below, up here there were no overflowing bins or people sleeping in doorways, just glass and light and beauty. There was an apartment block across a narrow courtyard, windows lit, the ordinary architecture of rich people’s evenings.

Daniel poured two glasses of whisky, good stuff, the kind that settled in your chest with a slow burn rather than a shock, and handed one to me. I sipped it and savoured the warmth.

He set his glass down and crossed to me and put both hands on my face and I felt my breath catch. Thumbs along my jaw. Eyes moving over me carefully, like he was confirming something he’d already half-decided. Then he kissed me, slow and thorough, and he tasted of whisky and something underneath it, faintly salt, and his mouth was warm and I felt the kiss move through me the way the drink had, settling somewhere low and certain. One hand slid to the back of my neck.

I responded without thinking, my hands finding his waist, the fabric of his shirt warm from his body. I wasn’t thinking yet. I was just there, following the shape of the moment.

We moved to the bed. Shirts first, then the rest of it, and I became aware of his body properly, the broadness of his chest, dark hair across his sternum that I pressed my face into briefly and breathed, a stomach that was solid and tight, the kind of body that had grown more through using it than bulking at the gym. His cock was already half-hard when my hand found it, heavy and warm, and he made a low sound that I felt more than heard. I stroked it slowly, savouring the way it was hardening with each pulse and how it made mine do the same. It wasn’t the longest I’d seen but it was thick, he was cut, the shaft started thick at the head then widened and narrowed towards the base. My hole twitched hungry to know how it felt to take a shape like that.

His mouth moved over me slowly. Collarbone. Sternum. The flat of my stomach, his stubble catching as he went. I lay back and let him, feeling the attention as something precise, careful and thorough. His tongue traced the groove of my hip and my cock jerked against my stomach, I was already leaking, a slick heat at the tip, and he paused there and breathed against my skin, warm and deliberate, and I understood without knowing how I understood that the pause meant something.

I reached down. Threaded my fingers into his hair, thick and slightly damp at the roots. Not guiding. Just present. Communicating something I didn’t have words for. His mouth moved lower and I exhaled hard against the ceiling.

When he took me in I felt it like something opening, the heat of it, slow and sure, and the particular intimacy of being tasted, of feeling him take his time with me, and I heard myself make a sound I hadn’t planned to make. My hips lifted. My hand in his hair tightened. I said fuck quietly to the ceiling and I meant the whole word.

He pulled off. Looked up at me with that steady expression.

“Turn over,” he said.

I don’t know exactly when I started reading him.

It wasn’t conscious. I just found myself responding to things, the slight shift in his breathing, the way his grip on my hip changed, the quality of the stillness when he was waiting for something. When his fingers worked into me I pushed back against them with a hunger that genuinely surprised me, my face in the pillow, breathing in clean hotel linen and underneath it the smell of him, cedar and sweat and something sharper, and he said ‘good’ very quietly and I felt that word like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades.

When he fucked me I had my hands braced against the headboard and I felt every increment of the push inward, the stretch of it, unhurried, the pause at depth where he held still and let my body understand what it had taken. He was thick and he didn’t rush. My whole body narrowed to a single insistent point. The headboard creaked. His chest was against my back, the hair there rough and warm, and I could smell us now, both of us, something that had become specific to this room and this hour.

“Look at me,” he said, and I turned my head, and his face was close, dark eyes steady, and I held his gaze and felt something pass between us that I didn’t have a category for. Not just bodies. Something else.

I came without being touched. The friction and the fullness and his breath humid against my neck, hit me in waves that started somewhere deep and rolled outward and I made sounds I’d never made before, unguarded, completely genuine, no management of them at all, and he kept moving through the whole of it, steady and unhurried, until I was loose and shaking against the sheets.

Then he turned me over.

I looked up at him. Sweat-damp, chest heaving, cock still hard and dark between his legs. He looked at me with that same unhurried attention and something shifted in me, not a thought exactly, just a movement. I sat up. Put my hands on his chest and pushed him down.

I moved over him. Felt his hands grip my hips and heard his breathing change, shallower now, less managed, and understood that this was wanted, that I was wanted, that whatever this was it required this of me specifically. I rode him slowly and then not slowly and his head went back and his hands gripped hard enough to mark me and he came with a low sustained sound that I felt from the inside, the pulse of it, the spreading warmth of him, and I kept moving because I wanted to, because his hands were gripping me like I was the only solid thing in the room.

The balcony door was floor-to-ceiling glass.

He opened it without announcement and the London air came in, June-warm and dense with the city, exhaust and food from somewhere below and the faint persistent sound of traffic that never fully stopped. He took my hand and led me out and I went, bare-footed on the stone of the balcony, still carrying the weight of what we’d done in my body.

Then I saw the window opposite.

Two men. One older, sixties, silver-haired, substantial, standing very still. One younger, thirties, dark, leaning slightly into the older man’s shoulder. The light in the room to the left of them flicked on and illuminated a bearded man, he looked Arab. He was sitting on a leather couch facing the window, a boy my age sat beside him. He whispered into his ear and the older one nodded before leaning down towards the guy’s crotch. On the other side a light flicked on and three men, all about my age, naked, sat on another sofa, they all had their legs spread wide, they were stroking their cocks and sometimes each other’s. All looking directly across the courtyard. Not pretending not to.

I went still.

“They were watching” I said. It should have felt like a violation but my disapproval was miniscule compared to my excitement.

“Yes.” Daniel stepped behind me. Hands on my hips. His mouth at my neck, lips first, then the edge of teeth, “they want an encore.”

My hands found the balcony rail, metal warm from the stored heat of the day. And something landed in me then, clear and sudden. This was a test. It had been a test from the moment he’d appeared at the bar. The conversation, the careful attention, the moment he’d waited, actually waited, for me to take control. All of it. Assessment. And now this: would I flinch from being watched? Would I pull away, go small, apologise with my body for being here?

I kept my hands on the rail. I let myself be seen.

His cock pressed against me from behind and I reached back to guide him and he pushed in slowly and I exhaled hard into the night air. The lights in the rooms all went out again.

The city spread out below us, seven floors of London, hundreds of lit windows, thousands of separate evenings happening all at once, and I felt the heat of him, the fullness, his breath against the back of my neck.

“What is this?” I whispered as he found his rhythm.

“I told you I was in recruitment, this is your assessment.”

“I’m not a fucking rent boy.”

“Fuck, you’re so tight, no you’re not, that isn’t what I’m offering.”

The sounds of the city rose up from below: a car horn, music from a window somewhere, the low continuous hum of a place that doesn’t sleep. And underneath it the sounds we were making, skin and breath and the soft rhythmic impact of two bodies that understood each other now.

“Then what?”

“Access. Access in return for some great fucks with some great men, who all started out like you. Travel, money, influence and a fuck ton of cock.”

It sounded crazy but mostly it sounded hot. “Will it be you I’m with all the time?”

“No, but I’ll be your handler. Handlers are allowed to fuck their stable boys. I’ll definitely be taking advantage of that privilege. I want to make you cum so hard you forget your fucking name,” he said, biting down so hard on my shoulder it took my breath away and made me squirt a string of precum.

I began pushing back hard on his cock, meeting his strokes, turning them into hard thrusts. I thought of each man watching and tried to look into their windows like I was making eye contact with them. I didn’t look away until Daniel was finished.

When he came he pushed deep and held there and I felt the warmth of it spread outward from my core, intimate and precise, and I made a sound that went out into the London night without apology.

In the windows opposite: the lights flicked on. Off. On. Off. On. Off.

Three flashes of men flushed and sticky with cum, cleaning themselves and each other.

He pressed his mouth to my shoulder. His lips were warm and dry and the kiss was hard enough to make the bitemark sting a little.

“That means you’re in. No more questions tonight,” he said. “The room’s yours if you want it. Speak to the concierge if you need anything. I have to go.”

He dressed without making eye contact and left without saying goodbye. The door clicked shut and the room settled into quiet.

I stayed. The bed was damp and warm and smelled of both of us and I didn’t care. I pulled the sheet over me and slept better than I had in months.

In the morning the light came in off the courtyard, pale and clean. My body ached in specific places. I lay there taking stock of it, the particular pleasant inventory of someone who has been thoroughly used, and felt, for the first time since arriving in London, entirely unworried about anything.

I ordered breakfast. When the porter arrived he set the tray down and then, almost as an afterthought, placed a card on the white cloth beside the coffee pot.

Cream stock, heavy, slightly textured under my fingertip. No name.

A symbol I didn’t recognise, a bull’s head on a column with a stylised cock underneath. Cheesy but somehow sexy too.

A QR code on the back.

I sat with it for a long time. Turned it over. Then I picked up my phone, opened the camera, and pointed it at the code.

Photo by UMY Raw

Hello my beautiful boys and burly men. The stories just keep coming with Daddy Sauce, I’m hoping you do too. This entry is from the Hartswood Estate realm where hard-bodied boys prowl the pavements looking for trouble. Not a place you want to be after dark, unless you’re a posh lad with anger issues pushed down the social ladder by a white-collar Dad caught doing white-collar crime. Toby isn’t sure what he’s looking for but when a gang of lads humiliate him outside his tower block, he begins to understand.

The library closed at nine. I’d been there since four, A-level history coursework spread across the desk like it mattered, like anyone at Hartswood College gave a shit about the economic causes of the French Revolution. But it was either the library or the flat, and the flat was a boxroom in a tower block with mould climbing the bathroom wall and my mum crying through the partition wall when she thought I couldn’t hear.

Eighteen years old and my life had been reduced to a postcode.

Seven months ago we’d had a house. A proper one, detached, in a village. None of that matters now. Dad had been something in finance, the kind of job where nobody at dinner parties understands what you actually do. Turned out what he did was fraud. Big fraud. The kind that makes the local paper, then the national ones, with photos of old women looking tearful because their retirement is fucked. He got eight years. Mum got nothing. The house went to pay back what he’d taken, what he’d spent on the car and the holidays and the life that was all, apparently, built on stolen money.

So. Hartswood Estate. A flat the council found for a woman they described as “displaced.” Two bedrooms if you were generous about what counts as a bedroom. A kitchen so narrow the oven door blocked the way when it was open. A balcony that overlooked a car park and the chip shop and the whole estate fanning out to the ring road like a concrete circuit board.

I walked home the long way because the short way involved going past the shops, and the shops meant groups of lads hanging about outside them, and I hadn’t yet figured out the rules of that. It was July, still warm even at half nine, the sky doing that thing where it holds the light after the sun’s gone, everything dimmed to blue and amber. The estate was quieter at this hour. Anyone with sense was indoors. Nine o’clock on Hartswood was when the joyriders, dealers and any chav who wasn’t tagged came out to play.

I knew this, I knew me walking alone was like Red Riding Hood to the wolves but recently there was this feeling growing in me. A fizzing anger I didn’t know how to defuse. I wouldn’t have admitted it then but I wanted trouble, pain even, anything to stop the searing disappointment at the world and the people in it who were meant to be looking after me.

I cut through the walkway between Fenwick House and Dale Court, the covered bit that smelled of piss and weed, and that’s where I found the way home blocked.

Five of them. Leaning against the wall and the railing, sitting on the low wall by the stairwell entrance, taking up the whole path. Not doing anything. Just there. Being there in a way that made the space theirs.

I recognised one from college. Liam. He was in the year above me. I’d seen him in the corridors and the canteen enough times to know his name without ever having spoken to him. You noticed Liam. You noticed him the way you notice a good-looking person in a room, involuntarily, the fact of him landing before the details: dark curls that looked damp even when they weren’t, sharp features, gym-built body that he put on display whenever possible. And that dark outline around his eyes that looks like you’re wearing mascara that only the fittest and roughest looking guys seem to get. He was leaning against the stairwell wall with his arms crossed, grey sweats slung low enough to show the V of his obliques, his belly flat and ridged with abs that looked aggressive. He stood like the whole walkway was his living room and I’d wandered in without knocking.

It was strange seeing him here. Strange because he did A levels, same as me. Not many lads on Hartswood did A levels. Most of them left at sixteen or fucked off to the training schemes, and the ones who stayed mostly did BTECs. Liam doing A levels was a fact I’d filed away without knowing what to do with it, a council estate lad on academic track who didn’t look like he belonged there any more than I belonged here.

Beside him, a taller lad I didn’t know, skinny in that way that hides how strong someone is until they move. Black hair, thick and wavy, an undercut with the top hanging down over his forehead in curtains. His face was rough, acne scars pocking his cheeks and jaw, and one arm was sleeved in black ink tattoos that ran from his wrist past where his rolled-up sleeve stopped. He was smoking, hand to his mouth, and when he looked at me his eyes were flat and assessing. The trackies he wore hung off his hips and the bulge at the front was obscenely obvious, heavy and unapologetic. He caught me looking and his mouth twitched.

On the wall sat a smaller lad, bleached blond hair, dark tan, full lips and sharp striking features that might have been pretty if he’d leaned into it. He didn’t. He was watching me with the kind of idle attention you’d give a pigeon that had landed too close.

Another one stood slightly back from the group, darker hair swept back off his face, light stubble along his jaw, lean and athletic with a defined chest visible through his unzipped tracksuit top. A bold geometric tattoo banded one bicep. He had his hands clasped behind his back, chest pushed out, watching me like he was deciding something.

And the fifth, sitting on the low wall with his legs wide, a black Nike cap tipped up off his face. Shaved buzzed head, full pouty lips that made him look like he was permanently sulking, ears that stuck out slightly and should have made him look silly but somehow made him look more real. He wasn’t handsome. He was something else, something that made me look twice and then look away. His eyes tracked me as I approached and there was a lazy knowing in them that made my neck hot.

Liam spoke first. “Where the fuck are you going, you’re not Hartswood?”

It wasn’t aggressive. It was worse. It was bored.

“Sorry, could I just squeeze past?” I said, and immediately winced at how it sounded, my mouth defaulting to village politeness like a reflex I couldn’t kick.

“Squeeze past,” the bleached one on the wall repeated, mocking, putting on a la-di-da voice. “Oh yes terribly sorry could I just squeeze past, I don’t think so, mate. Listen to him. You sound like you’re asking for fucking tea.”

The one with the curtains, smoking, didn’t say anything. Just watched.

I could have said “fuckin move” and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I knew that. The gap wasn’t there to let me through, it was there to see what I’d do in the space between them, and whatever I did was going to be wrong.

“He’s the new kid, innit,” the stubbled one by the railing said. Not a question. “Moved into Fenwick. The posh one whose dad got done.”

Something went through the group at that, a shift, a shared recognition. Liam uncrossed his arms.

“Fuck yeah, I remember now, what was it, fraud?”

“Yeah,” I said. What else was there to say.

“How much?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bollocks.” That was the stubbled one. “Course you know.”

I didn’t, actually. The number had been in the papers but I’d stopped reading them. I shrugged, which they didn’t like.

“Go on then,” Liam said, stepping aside just enough that there was a gap between him and the railing, “Tarquin Fucknut the third.” He gave a low bow and a wave of the hand.

I moved through the corridor they made. The buzzed-head one on the wall stuck his leg out as I passed and I stumbled, caught myself, kept going. Then someone’s foot hooked my ankle and I went down, hands smacking concrete, palms stinging, the breath knocked out of me.

Laughter. Not cruel exactly. Lads laughing. The kind of laughter that’s just what happens when someone falls over and you’re bored enough to find it funny.

I was on all fours, shaking the sting out of my hands, when Liam dropped onto my back with his full weight, his chest against my back, his hips against my arse. The lads erupted. This was a bit they knew, one of them dropping on another one when he’s bent over and giving it the full treatment. Liam ground into me and threw his head back.

“Oh yeah, that’s it, baby, take it, take it you filthy bitch,” he said, in a voice so over-the-top pornographic you could almost hear the boo chicka wah wah. The bleached one was howling, actually sliding off the wall. Liam thrust again, exaggerating it, all hips and noise. “Yeah, you like that, don’t you, oh God, oh fuck, right there, right there.”

“Give it to him, Liam!” the bleached one shouted.

“Take it, bitch, take it all,” Liam growled into my ear, and the lads were in pieces, and I was trying to push up, trying to get him off, my palms scraped raw on the concrete, and then I felt it.

He was hard.

Underneath the comedy performance, Liam’s cock was rigid against my arse through his sweats and my jeans. I could feel the length of it pressing into me, the heat of it, and my stomach dropped and my body went still because the joke had a real thing living inside it and we both knew it.

But the show carried on. That was the thing. The show didn’t stop, it just carried him over the moment, the way performance does. His hips kept rolling and the porno dialogue kept coming and the lads kept laughing and underneath all of it his cock was hard against my arse and I could feel every inch of it and my body was doing its own thing in response, my cock filling against the inside of my jeans, pressing into the concrete, and I couldn’t stop it.

Liam felt it against the arm holding my waist as I struggled. I know he did because his hips stuttered, lost the rhythm for half a second, and his breathing changed against my ear. But he recovered.

“OH GOD, OH FUCK, I’M GONNA CUM, I’M GONNA CUUUUUUM,” he bellowed, and did one final theatrical thrust, then went limp on top of me, fake-spent, making a noise like a dying whale, and the lads absolutely lost it, the bleached one whooping, the curtain-haired one even cracking a grin behind his spliff.

Then he was off me, standing up, brushing his sweats down like nothing had happened. “Welcome to Hartswood, cunt,” he said, and his voice was steady but he wasn’t looking at me.

I pushed myself up. My palms were bleeding. My jeans were dusty. And my cock was still half hard, visible, a distinct line down the leg of my denim, and the bleached one saw it first. The laughter died in his throat and came back different.

“Oi, oi,” he said, pointing. “Lads. Lads. Look.”

All five of them looked. The curtain-haired one raised an eyebrow. The stubbled one smirked. The buzzed-head one on the wall tilted his cap and his mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“Proper hard and everything,” the bleached one said, delight and disgust in equal measure. “Fucking loved that, didn’t you, Tarquin.”

I ran. Up the stairs, fumbling for the key, not looking back, their laughter following me up the stairwell, echoing off the concrete.

The flat was dark and empty. Mum was at her sister’s. I locked the door behind me and stood in the hallway, breathing hard, palms throbbing, the ghost of his weight still on my back, the heat of his cock still imprinted on my arse through two layers of fabric.

I was hard. Fully, achingly hard, and I hadn’t even noticed it happen. The grinding. His weight on me. The pantomime. The real thing underneath it. The way his hips had stuttered when he felt me getting hard. The way he’d covered it with a fake orgasm that fooled everyone except the two of us.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and put my face in my hands and tried to think about anything else. Coursework. The French Revolution. Bread riots. Anything.

My hand was on my cock before I’d decided to put it there. I didn’t last long. I thought about Liam’s weight on me, the grind, his cock hard against my arse. I thought about the way they’d all been watching, all five of them, and how none of them had stopped him, and how the buzzed-head one had been looking at me with those lazy knowing eyes the whole time. I thought about the one with the curtain hair and that obscene bulge and how he’d caught me staring at it. I thought about what would have happened if Liam hadn’t got up. If the fake orgasm had been a real one. If he’d pulled my jeans down right there on the concrete and finished what the grinding had started. If they’d all watched.

I came into my fist, hips bucking off the bed, biting the sound off behind my teeth.

I lay there afterwards, breathing, my hand sticky, and I felt sick and relieved and sick about being relieved. But in the moment and for a while after I wasn’t angry.

The anger came back though and only went away when I replayed the scene.

Three days. Three days of walking to college and back, taking the long way, avoiding the walkway, avoiding the shops, and every night the same thing. Lying in the dark with that encounter playing on loop, adding to it each time, the fantasy growing teeth and hands and cock. Three days of catching myself daydreaming in a lecture, losing the thread of a paragraph, going hard at my desk thinking about Liam’s hips against my arse and the real thing hiding inside the joke.

I’d never been with a man. I’d barely thought about men before this. I’d had a girlfriend. She dumped me as soon as my life collapsed. We had fucked, she made me hard, sometimes it was good sex, but I never came as hard as I had when I thought about being fucked by a chav on the floor of a tower block.

On the fourth night the heat in me got too much, it stopped me asking myself if I was gay and let the need be the thing I was chasing. I found an app, you didn’t even need an email to sign up. You just put in your age and up popped a map. I added a torso pic, the bathroom mirror shot I’d taken at the gym back when the gym was something I could afford. Slim, smooth, the faint outline of my abs, the waistband of my briefs just visible. I was fit enough. I knew that. It was the one thing the move hadn’t taken from me.

Within five minutes I had messages from a lot of guys Dad’s age. But then someone interesting popped up. A body shot: lean, defined, trackies pushed down to show the cut of his obliques and a thick cock held in one hand, half hard, a cock that made my stomach flip. His bio said three words: “no time wasters.” The DM was one, “interested?”

I messaged back. We exchanged body pics, nothing more. His legs, my arse. His chest, my stomach. A negotiation conducted entirely in skin, no names, no faces, just the parts of ourselves that wanted something.

He said: “Hartswood Park. The far bench by the pond. Half eleven. Don’t be late.”

Hartswood Park wasn’t a park. It was a strip of grass and trees between two tower blocks with a pond in it that was mostly shopping trolleys. But at night, past the lampposts, past the path, in the dark under the trees, it was something else. I’d heard the lads at college mention it. I knew what it was after dark. The bushes, the trees, the dark gaps between them where men went who didn’t want to be seen doing what they were doing.

I got there at half eleven exactly. He was already on the bench, smoking. I couldn’t see his face properly in the dark with his hood up, just the shape of him, the glow of the spliff, the pale blur of bare skin under an unzipped top.

“You came,” he said. Not surprised. Just noting.

“Yeah.”

“Follow me.”

He led me off the path, into the trees, past the first line of bushes to a clearing I’d never have found on my own. Hidden from the path, hidden from the lampposts, the light reduced to faint amber filtering through the leaves. The ground was dry, earth and dead leaves. It smelled like summer dirt, weed smoke and the pond.

He turned to face me. In the near-dark I still couldn’t see him but I could see enough.

“On y’ knees,” he said.

I knelt. The earth was cool under my knees. He stepped forward and pulled his trackies down, his cock hard and heavy in front of my face, and I could smell him, skin and sweat and the musk of someone who’d been hard for a while.

“Suck it.”

I took him in my mouth. The taste of skin, the salt of precum on my tongue, the weight of him resting on my tongue. I’d never done this before and I was clumsy, my teeth catching, my mouth too dry, and he put his hand on the back of my head and guided me and I found the rhythm of it, the slide, the way to open my throat so he could go deeper.

“You done this before?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Loads of times.”

He laughed. “Alright. Keep going then. Watch the fuckin’ teeth.”

I kept going. My jaw ached and my knees were sore and I was rock hard in my jeans and I loved it, the fullness of him in my mouth, the sounds he made when I did something right, the control of it that wasn’t control at all, it was service, it was wanting to be good at something I’d never done before.

He pulled out of my mouth and stepped back. “Jeans down. Bend over that tree.”

There was a fallen trunk at the edge of the clearing, thick and smooth with age. I undid my jeans, pushed them and my briefs down to my thighs, and bent over it. The bark was rough against my stomach, the night air hitting my bare arse, my cock hanging hard between my legs.

His hand ran over my arse, squeezing, spreading. Then his thumb was pressing against my hole, dry, just pressure, just the promise of it.

“You’ve been fucked before?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I lied again. “Loads.”

He just laughed again and spat into his hand. Then again, directly onto me, warm and crude, and his thumb pushed in. Just the thumb. Slow. Working me open. My cock jumped against the tree trunk.

“Relax,” he said, “or it will hurt.”

He worked on me like it was routine for him, two fingers, then three, spit and precum, rough and quick, not gentle but not cruel, the kind of prep that was about getting to the main event, not my pleasure. I didn’t want him thinking of me. I wanted what was coming.

He put it in.

He pushed in slow and I felt every inch of it, the thickness of him opening me up, my body resisting and then giving, the burn that wasn’t pain exactly, something closer to being filled in a way I hadn’t known I was empty.

He fucked me hard and fast against that tree. Both hands on my hips, pulling me back onto him, the sound of skin on skin and his hips against my arse and the bark biting into my palms. I was braced against the trunk, head down, taking it, and the thing that shocked me wasn’t the pain or the dirt of it, it was how right it felt. Like my body had been waiting for this specific thing and was finally getting it.

“Good cunt,” he said, and the word went through me like electricity.

There was rustling in the bushes. I tensed. He didn’t stop.

“Leave it,” he said. “They’re just watching.”

I turned my head and saw two shapes in the gap between the bushes, standing still, watching. My cock throbbed. I was being watched. Strangers were watching me get fucked against a tree in a cruising ground and I was hard and dripping and the shame of it was just fuel, just more heat piled on heat. Something about being seen like this, being known for what I was, made my cock jerk against the tree trunk and a bead of precum hung from the tip.

“Oi,” one of the watchers called, low. “Can we have a go on him mate?”

The bloke inside me slowed his hips. Leant forward, his chest against my back, his mouth near my ear. “You want that?”

I didn’t say anything. He pulled my hair, gentle, tipping my head back.

“Asked you a question, cunt. You want them to have a go?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

He pulled out. Stepped back. “You can when I’m finished with him,” he said to the watchers. He slid back in and fucked me properly, deep and deliberate, and I knew what he was doing. He was going to finish first. He was going to be the first one to put his load inside me and that mattered to him, that was his right, and I didn’t understand why but I felt it, the weight of it, the meaning of it, and I pushed back into him because I wanted him to have it.

When he shot inside me I felt the pulse of it, the heat spreading outward, filling me up, and he swore through his teeth and his hips stuttered and he held me still on his cock while he finished, deep, every last drop. I wanted every drop too so I used my muscles in a way I didn’t know I could to squeeze it out.

He pulled out. I felt the warmth of his jizz starting to leak out of me and run down my inner thigh.

“Go on then,” he said to the watchers, already lighting a spliff.

The first stranger took his place. Older, rougher hands, a thicker cock that went in easy because I was already open and slick with someone else’s load. He fucked me in short urgent thrusts, hands gripping my shoulders, and came fast, pulling out to finish on my lower back, the warmth of it spreading across my skin.

The second stranger was thinner, longer, less confident. He fucked me for what felt like forever, his breathing ragged above me, and I pushed back into him because that’s what I’d learned I could do, I could move toward it, I could take what I wanted by giving them what they wanted.

The whole time, ‘my date’ leaned against a tree nearby, smoking, watching. Occasionally his free hand would reach over and wrap around my cock, stroking me slow, keeping me on the edge, and I’d gasp and the stranger inside me would groan because he felt me clench.

When the second stranger finished and left, it was just me and him again. He dropped his spliff and stepped back to me.

“Alright,” he said. “My turn again.” He slid back in and this time he took his time, long deep strokes, his hand reaching round to stroke my cock, and I could feel it building in me, that thing I’d never felt before, something deeper, something that was going to ruin me.

“Spunk for me,” he said, “I’m about to blow so it’s now or never, you dirty little cunt.”

I spunked all over the tree trunk, all over his hand, my whole body shaking and clenching around him, and he swore and fucked me harder through it and then I felt it again, the throb of him, the heat, and he held me still while he finished a second time, deep inside me, and I stayed bent over the tree with my eyes closed and my chest heaving and the night air cooling the sweat on my back.

And in that moment came the calm I needed. There was no thought I could hold, just the tenderness of my body, the ache in my hole and my cock, sore from pulsing so hard for so long.

He pulled out and pulled up his trackies. Then the lighter flicked.

I stood up on shaking legs, pulled my jeans up, and turned around.

The lighter flame lit his face and I knew him immediately. The buzzed head. The full lips. The sticky-out ears. The ugly-hot face from the walkway, the one who’d been sitting on the wall watching me with lazy knowing eyes while Liam ground against me on the concrete.

“You,” I said.

He looked at me. Took a drag. Held it. Let it out.

“Reece,” he said.

“I’m Toby…You knew it was me,” I said. “On the app. You knew.”

He didn’t deny it. He passed me the spliff. I took it because what else was I going to do. I sat down on the ground with my back against the tree, still sore, still leaking, still warm, and I smoked.

“You tell anyone about this,” he said, and his voice had gone flat, “and I’ll fucking end you. You understand?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Three blokes just came in me and I only know one of their names. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Good.”

We sat in silence for a while. The spliff going back and forth. The trees above us. The distant amber of the lampposts on the path. I could feel their cum inside me, warm and heavy, and the soreness and the graze on my palms and the ache in my jaw and I felt more alive than I’d felt in seven months.

“You took it well.”

“Thanks.”

He laughed, a short sound, almost surprised. “You’re a posh cunt, ain’t you. Even the way you say thanks.”

I didn’t say anything to that. We smoked.

“That was your first time, wasn’t it?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement with a question mark bolted on. He already knew.

I looked at him. His face in the faint light, the pouty lips, the sticky-out ears, the cap tipped back. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the ground.

“Yeah, it was,” I said.

He stared at me. Then he laughed. A proper laugh, full, not a taking-the-piss one, the kind that comes from somewhere unexpected.

“Your teeth caught on me cock and you need to work on opening your throat when I go deep.”

“I tried my best.” I noted that last statement and how it sounded like we might do it again.

He took the spliff back. Drew on it. “Why’d you lie?”

I exhaled and thought about it. “I think maybe, I didn’t want you to go easy. I needed to stop thinking.”

He turned his head and met my eyes quickly then turned away. He went quiet. The spliff burned down between his fingers. When he spoke again his voice was different, softer, the flat edge gone.

“I want to do it again,” he said. “Properly. Not in a fucking bush with strangers watching. Somewhere with a bed and some lube and…You know.”

“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t really know.

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a yes.”

We sat there a while longer, not talking, the night settling around us. The pond glinted through the trees. Somewhere on the estate a dog was barking. I could feel his cum inside me, cooling now, and the bark-print on my stomach and the ache in my jaw, and on the walk home I’d feel it shifting with every step, warm and heavy, a reminder of what had happened that I was carrying with me.

He stood up first, tipped his cap at me, a proper mock gesture, “have a pleasant evening Tarquin,” he said in a royal accent and walked off into the dark toward the estate. I sat there a while longer, then walked home a different way, the long way, through the streets, feeling invincible with the night air on my face and the ache still inside me, a mess of spunk and soreness and something I didn’t have a word for yet.

I slept properly that night for the first time since we’d moved.

The next evening I opened up the app and waited. Just when I was about to close it and go to sleep he popped up.

“come over to mine. i got u something to wear.”

Photo by Taras Kots from Pexels

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men.

You want to know what a Keeper does around the solstice? I’ll tell you. I have been up to my elbows in tent poles and ice buckets and a spreadsheet Pip made me use, because apparently my handwritten lists were, in his words, 'as legible as glyphs on the Ancient Dildo of Carpastia.’ I have argued with three separate suppliers about the correct ratio of protein to carbohydrate for men who intend to be inside other men for approximately eighteen consecutive hours. I have personally tasted every single snack destined for the bottoms’ table, purely for quality control, purely, and I stand by every calorie of that decision.

They are calling it the Pride Ride, which is a name I take no credit for and can’t quite talk them out of. Pride isn’t a thing every realm keeps, not the way some of you do, but the solstice is, and although the dates vary, for the last few years they’ve all decided to have a summer celebration here, on my own land, because apparently a Keeper’s meadow makes for excellent devotion space. Several hundred men from all the realms, one continuous day of pleasure, from the moment the sun clears the ridge to the second the clock tips into the next day, and somebody has to make sure there is enough lube and not enough small talk.

I stood at the top of the meadow with my coffee going cold in my hand and watched them arrive. Bodies already energised and prepped, morning light catching a brass buckle of a harness, the loose sway of a cock not yet tucked into anything because clothes were understood, today, to be a temporary arrangement.

The top’s table went up first, long trestles under the big oak. I watched a broad-shouldered thing from the Suburbiana realm, jock strap band pulled up over the band of his shorts, eat four eggs standing up with the particular focus of a man conserving something for later. He was built like a door, thick through the chest with a dusting of blond hair narrowing to a line below his navel, and when he shifted his weight I caught the outline of him hanging heavy and half-interested already against his thigh, the kind of cock that announces itself before the man attached to it says a word. He caught me looking. Didn’t stop eating. Just held my eye and grinned around his fork like he already knew exactly what and who he was saving himself for.

The bottoms had their own table, tucked in the shade, a table full of salads and light snacks. I noticed a houseboy from Stag Valley, dark curls, permanently flushed like he runs a few degrees hotter than the rest of us, slight through the hips in a way that pulls your eyes down to his perfect ass. Round and high, even sitting down, as juicy as the peach he was devouring, legs open just enough to be a decision rather than an accident. He wasn’t waiting to be chosen. He was choosing, and something about the way he held himself, loose and confident and utterly unbothered by his own nakedness, told me his hole would take exactly as much as it was given and ask for more before it was done.

I met the Stag Valley contingent properly a little after that, and I’ll admit I’d been putting it off, some part of me knowing exactly what would happen the second I walked into that particular corner of my own field. I had met the House of Rutgard before and Wulfric, the lodge master, brought out the sub in me.

He was easy to spot. Grey-bearded, built like something you’d want at your back in a storm, dark hair thinning silver at the temples, a chest carpeted thick enough that you’d lose your fingers in it, standing with the specific unhurried authority of a man who has never once had to raise his voice to be obeyed. I went to announce myself, hand extended.

I did not get the hand out. I had forgotten the tradition.

My knees found the ground before my brain had finished processing the impulse. Head down. Waiting. Close up like this I could see the thick, heavy shape of him tenting the front of his leather shorts. He was unhurried the way everything about him was unhurried.

He crouched, put two fingers under my chin, and tipped my face up. “You could get up,” he said, amused. “You’re a Keeper of the Realms. You don’t owe me this.”

“I know,” I said. “I’d still like to.”

That got a proper laugh out of him, low and warm. “Then don’t let me stop you.”

I hadn’t looked past him yet, but I felt the Valet before I saw him properly, a presence at the Master’s shoulder, watching with a stillness that had heat underneath it. When I looked, properly looked, I understood immediately why my knees had gone so willingly. Dark, tousled hair, a face that was open but hinted at a deeper mind always assessing the situation. Younger than the Master by a decade at least, lean where the Master was broad, a swimmer’s build with a cock that hung longer than I’d expected on a frame that lean, already thickening where it lay against his thigh, and an ass behind him I only caught a flash of as he shifted his weight, high and tight and clearly, obviously trained to take exactly what it had to. I felt all of it land in my chest before it landed anywhere lower, which for me is rare enough to notice.

I did what tradition asked of me, unhurried, thorough, tasting salt and heat and the particular weight of a man who has never doubted his own welcome, the Master’s hand settling loose and approving in my hair while I worked, not directing, just present. When he finished he pulled me up by both shoulders, kissed my forehead of all things, and held me back to look at me properly.

“You want him,” the Master said. Not a question.

“I’m not subtle, apparently.”

“No,” he said, with real fondness in it. “You’re not.” He glanced sideways at his Valet, some whole conversation passing between them in half a second. “He’s had his eye on you since you walked the field. Go on. Let him have you properly. You’ve been giving all week, Keeper. Somebody ought to make you take it, for once.”

I looked at the Valet and he looked back at me. I don’t usually offer up my hole, especially to younger men, but something about the way Wulfric ordered it and the predatory eyes of the Valet locked on mine made something in me go entirely quiet and pliant.

He took my hand and led me toward the trees, and under the shade he turned me, hands finding my jaw, and kissed me slow and deliberate. “You don’t usually do this,” he said against my mouth. Not a question either.

“Not in a long time.”

“Good,” he said, something proprietary and pleased in his tone. “I like being someone’s first in a long time.”

He undressed me with an attention I wasn’t used to receiving, and when he finally had his hands properly on me, working me open slow, one finger and then two, patient in a way that made my whole body loosen by degrees, I felt the wet slick heat of him already leaking against the small of my back where he’d pressed close, that first blunt insistent pressure of him rubbing against me before he ever pushed inside, a promise rather than a demand. When he finally did push into me I made a sound I hadn’t made in years, and he stilled immediately, forehead against my spine, letting my body have the time it needed.

“There he is,” he said quietly.

He moved slow at first and then not slow, and I gave myself over to it with a totality that startled me, hands braced against the bark, nothing but his weight and his voice and the particular unravelling heat of being fucked properly, the drag and give of him inside me building into something that had my whole chest go tight. When I came it was without a hand anywhere near me, just the fact of him, a long shuddering release that seemed to gather in my chest and my legs at once and meet at my aching cock. He followed shortly after, and I felt the exact moment he let go inside me, warmth blooming through me in slow widening pulses, his teeth at my shoulder and a groan that travelled the whole length of his body into mine.

We stayed like that a while before he finally pulled free, turned me to face him, kissed me once more, softer, and grinned. “The Master will want a report.”

“Tell him it was thorough.” I panted.

He laughed, smacked my ass. He grabbed a towel from one of the hay bales I had scattered around the field, wiped his cock off, winked and threw it at me. He had disappeared before I had cleaned myself up.

By mid-morning the swap meet had opened. Men who came paired off, standing in a loose circle with their houseboy’s hand in theirs, looking at what else the day had to offer, and then, some of them, letting go. Actually letting go. I watched a silver-haired man kiss the boy he’d arrived with, a tender goodbye, and walk him by the hand to a younger daddy, who immediately handed over his boy to the silver fox.

The houseboys moved through the day with a hunger that put the rest of us to shame, chasing down anyone willing, not for status but for the simple accumulation of it, as much seed as the day would give them. Knowing the seed energy of the Heart Flame carried in it kept them young and hard.

Pip disappeared around midday, which I expected. I found him myself, later, at the edge of the Feast of Ass, before I even knew I was looking for him.

He was flat on his back on the special table with stirrups, head tipped back, dark hair damp at the temples and stuck there, and I had the strange familiar-unfamiliar experience of seeing my own boy the way a stranger might see him for the first time. Slim through the waist, a soft trail of hair leading down from his navel to where his cock lay hard against his stomach, curved slightly, the head of it wet and shining, twitching every time someone’s mouth found it. His thighs were spread wide and shaking faintly, his hole, framed by the tight round curve of his ass, was already slick and open, worked loose by whoever had gotten to him first, clenching rhythmically around nothing in the moments between men. He looked debauched and utterly delighted by it, a slow helpless smile on his face even as his hips rolled up to chase whatever mouth or hand had just left him.

I watched a broad quiet man settle between his thighs and Pip’s whole body arched up to meet him, actively, hungrily, not waiting for it but pulling it toward himself with his heels dug into the man’s back. I stood there longer than I meant to. Long enough to see him find his release once, back bowing off the table, mouth open on a sound I knew the shape of even without hearing it over the noise of the field, cum spilling up over his own stomach in quick pulses before he went boneless and grinning back onto the cushions, already reaching for the next hands that found him.

I didn’t stay to watch more of it, I had my own pleasures to seek. I spent a frenzied twenty minutes with a very handsome British boy from the Hartswood Estate, skinny, tattooed and in need of some hard discipline. And then a good hour with a football player known around Buckhaven as the best tight end.

Pip came to find me around four with grass in his hair and that same loose, wrecked smile still on him. I put my hand on the back of his neck and let him have his minute. Then he grinned up at me, filthy and delighted, and went straight back in.

He found me again as the sky went properly dark, and this time he didn’t sit down beside me. He took my hand instead, and there was a look on his face I’ve learned to be wary of, the particular delighted look of a boy who’s been planning something for days and is very pleased with himself about it.

“You’re not sitting this one out,” he said, “everyone wants to thank the host. The Summer Seeding is the best part of the day.”

There's an old belief, no one agrees which realm it started in, that if enough men finish together in the same breath the solstice turns, the land drinks it and blesses whoever's ground they're standing on for the coming year. I've never asked too many questions about whether it's true. I just know that every year, without fail, several hundred men do their level best to time it perfectly, and every year it's somehow both completely ridiculous and the hottest thing I've ever heard.

I opened my mouth to argue, out of habit more than conviction, and he simply pulled me toward the clearing at the centre of the field, where I discovered exactly what my houseboy had been arranging during the hours I’d assumed he’d been recovering.

He’d picked them himself. I never got an exact count, and I’m not sure I could have managed one if I’d tried, a loose, laughing knot of twinks, the youngest and hungriest of the whole gathering, every one of them handpicked, apparently, by a boy who pays a great deal more attention to who’s watching me than I’d realised. And waiting at the centre of it, with the same unhurried patience I remembered from that morning, the Lodge Master.

I didn’t get a vote, not that I’d have used one differently. Mouths and hands everywhere at once, finding my throat, my chest, working lower with a kind of coordinated hunger that had no interest in taking turns, and behind all of it, the solid, settling weight of Wulfric easing into my hole the way he had my mouth that morning, except this time there was no formality left to observe.

They kept me right at the edge of it for the better part of an hour. Every time I got close, someone would ease off and someone else would take over, a slow, patient relay of mouths that made a mockery of the word “edge,” because there was nothing rough about it, just thorough, expert denial delivered by a dozen sets of hands that could all read my body better than I could. The Master never hurried either, that same unshakeable rhythm underneath it all, and Pip, somewhere at the edge of my vision the whole time, watching his own surprise unfold with an expression of pure, smug delight.

I’ll tell you that when midnight actually arrived, the sounds of men grunting and moaning as they all came harder than they had all day were exquisite. Each boy and the Master whispered a thank you to me and we drifted into a warm doze together.

That’s as much as you’re getting from me tonight. Perhaps Pip could report in more detail next week. He was watching the whole thing with a great deal more attention to detail than I had at the time.

All in all a very successful Pride Ride.

I’ll sleep for a week. Worth it.

That’s all from me today but there is a brand new tale from Buckhaven in our Suburbiana realm. It’s a saucy one about a silver fox and his best friend’s son. It starts at scorching and only gets hotter. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Make sure you subscribe, more tales are on the way. A lost young man recruited by a secret society and a horny group of lads from a UK council estate who take great pleasure in helping a posh lad explore his sub side.

Keep it saucy!

Daddy Sauce

New here? Welcome, read Daddy Sauce’s origin story here.

*May not be true in this realm

Photo by Deivis Sandoval from Pexels

Welcome my beautiful boys and burly men, to Daddy Sauce’s first tale from the realms. Today we visit Buckhaven, Suburbiana. A realm of endless picket fences, thirsty boys with girlfriends too straight-laced to give them what they need, summer jobs and daddies willing to take up their services.

This one belongs to Grant, a man freshly divorced and freshly built, who thought hiring his best friend's boy for yard work was the least important decision he'd make all summer. He was wrong, in exactly the way we all hope to be wrong. Chase came with a filthy mouth, filthier intentions, and no interest whatsoever in behaving himself, and Grant found out just how far a house full of empty rooms and twenty years of trust could bend before it snapped.

Pete had asked as a favor, the kind you don’t really weigh before saying yes to. His boy needed something to do with his hands that wasn’t sitting in his old bedroom eating cereal at 2pm, so Pete had set him up in business as a gardener. I had a half-acre that had gone feral since Diane left and took our gardener with her. So I said sure, send him over, and didn’t think about it again until Chase showed up on a Tuesday morning in cutoffs and work boots and absolutely no shirt, and I understood within about four seconds that I had made an error in judgment somewhere.

The last time I saw him he was seventeen, pale, lanky, awkward and had the all-adults-are-idiots scowl perfected. Now he was twenty-three, he still looked at me like I was an idiot but now he had the confidence of a young man who knew his smile could get him out of trouble. He swaggered out of his black GMC Sierra Denali, and extended a hand to me.

“Mr Sutherland, is that you, you look different with your beard, post divorce glow up I guess,” he said appraising me with his bright blue eyes. There was something about the way he said it that didn’t sound like a compliment, more an assessment of my entire history of failings as a man.

“You look different too Chase, guess the yard work helps with that.”

“Actually you’re my first client. This…,” he waved a hand up and down his body, “is just being young and lucky, I don’t even work out.” He said with a smug grin.

It seemed like nothing this kid could say that didn’t give away that he felt like your superior. I felt a strong urge to give him a left hook but I chose words instead.

“I’m glad to give you the opportunity, your Dad said you have been a little lost since you dropped out.”

He locked his eyes on mine and told me without speaking that he knew what I was doing.

“And I’m grateful to you sir, this is a big property, must be hard to handle, alone.”

I was done, “can you start by mowing the lawns and then work on the flowerbeds at the front please.”

“Yes, Mr Sutherland,” he said. Delivered with a tone that couldn’t quite be pinned down as sarcastic but was.

“Good boy,” I replied. The moment I said it the air pressure around us dropped, neither of us quite knew what to do. We locked eyes for a beat, he gave a small smile and turned to get his backpack out of the truck. I retreated to the house.

I tried to work but I was distracted. I told myself I needed to check he wasn’t ruining my lawn without him seeing me watching him work. His blond hair was long enough to fall into his eyes when he bent to the mower, sun-lightened in a way that had nothing to do with a salon, I drank the shape of his body, broad through the shoulders and cut hard through the stomach. Skin gone golden already from however many days he’d spent lounging by Pete’s pool. He worked the way young men work when they know they’re being watched even when they haven’t confirmed it yet, a little more show in the swing of the mower, a stretch that arched his back and dragged the waistband of his cutoffs low enough that I got an unearned glimpse of what sat underneath, full and heavy even at rest, shifting against denim gone dark with sweat.

I made myself a coffee I didn’t want just to have a reason to stand at the kitchen window.

By the third week I’d stopped pretending the coffee was the reason. He caught me at it on a Thursday, straightened up from the flower bed he was clearing, looked dead across the yard at the window like he’d known exactly where to look, and grinned. Not embarrassed. Delighted. The grin of someone filing something away for later use.

“Morning, Grant,” he called, like nothing had happened, and went back to the flower bed, and I stood there with my coffee going cold and my pulse doing something I hadn’t asked it to do in longer than I wanted to admit.

I told myself it would pass. Fifty-four years old, freshly divorced, putting the home gym to use for the first time in twenty years, and none of it changed the math, this was Pete’s son, this was a line so wide it had its own zip code. I told myself that on the Friday I came home early from a coffee date with a divorcee who couldn’t help but drag her ex into every topic of conversation. The house was too quiet, no radio going in the yard, no scrape of the mower, and then a sound from the utility room that didn’t belong to any chore I’d ever assigned him.

I went to check before I understood what I was walking into.

He was on his knees on the tile, back to the door, leaning awkwardly against the dryer, one hand working himself hard and fast, the other up to his face. He paused and gave a deep audible intake of breath, as he did he turned his head slightly. His face was pressed into something balled against his mouth and nose that took me a full second to place as mine, my white jock, pulled straight out of the hamper I hadn’t gotten around to running yet. He was breathing it in like it was the only air in the room.

I must have made a sound, because he went rigid all at once, twisted around still holding himself, my underwear falling from his mouth to hang forgotten in his fist, and for one long second neither of us said anything at all.

“That’s,” he started, and stopped, twenty-three years of practiced confidence failing to produce a single usable sentence.

“Don’t stop on my account,” I said, and meant it more than I expected to.

He didn’t. That’s the thing I keep coming back to, that he held my eyes and kept his hand moving, slower now, deliberate, like he’d decided if he was going to be caught he might as well be caught doing it properly. I crossed the tile and crouched in front of him and took the underwear out of his fist and put my mouth where his had been, and he made a sound like something had finally given way in him.

“You’ve been staring at me for three weeks,” he said, breath uneven. “Figured I’d get caught doing something about it eventually.”

“Your dad is my oldest friend, Chase.”

“My dad isn’t in this room.” He reached for my shirt, pulled me down to him on the tile.

“You’re sure,” I said, giving him one more door.

“Yes, Mr Sutherland,” he replied with a sly grin and a wink.

I kissed him first. That much I take responsibility for that, how could I not? I needed to show that cocky shit I was in charge, so I told him to lie back. He obeyed. His mouth opened under mine eager and a little clumsy, all the practiced confidence gone for a second into something rawer, his hand fisting in my shirt like he needed the anchor, and I felt twenty years fall off me in one exhale.

I worked my way down him slowly, cataloguing him with my mouth the way I hadn’t let myself with my eyes, his collarbone, the flat plane of his stomach jumping under my lips, the sharp cut of his hip where I bit down gently and felt him buck up off the tiles with an unguarded moan. I made myself stop there for a second, just to look. An already slick golden brown shaft and a leaking flushed pink head, thick through the middle and an upward curve to him like he’d been built specifically to find the spot that mattered most, a vein along the underside pulsing like it had its own heartbeat separate from his. Beautiful, in the plain unembarrassed way young men are. When I took him into my mouth he went silent for a full second like the air had been knocked out of him, then cursed, low and disbelieving, hips lifting into it before he caught himself and forced them still, and I could taste that he’d been thinking about this for exactly as long as I had, the salt of him already sharp on my tongue.

He pulled at my hair when he was getting close and I would ease off and kiss his thighs. When I was sure he understood he was only coming when I let him, I turned him over. I heard him make a sound into his own forearm when my tongue found him, that same startled swearing, hips grinding back to meet me shamelessly, no hesitation at all once he understood what I was giving him. He tasted like soap and salt and the particular clean heat of a body that had spent the morning working outside, and the noise he made when I worked him open with my tongue was the kind of sound a man makes when he is forgetting who he is and becoming his sensations.

“Grant.” My name from him sounded different than it had all summer. “Grant, please, I need.”

“Call me Mr Sutherland,” I ordered. My desire speaking for me now.

I got him up off the tile and onto his knees. I used my cock to slick his hole, enjoying his moans, I got as far as working the tip into his hole, when the front door slammed downstairs and a voice I would know anywhere shouted up through the house.

“Grant? Chase? You still working or did you die out there, buddy?”

Pete.

We went absolutely still, the two of us, Chase’s eyes gone wide and for once entirely unguarded, all the cockiness burned off in one second flat, and I understood in that frozen half-breath that I had maybe a minute before my oldest friend looked into the laundry room and found his son poised to take my cock.

We both dressed silent and fast. I pulled a shirt over my head and was two steps out of the room before Pete made it into the kitchen. I greeted him, a dirty coffee cup I grabbed from the sink in hand, my heart going so hard I was sure he could hear it.

“He’s in the laundry room,” I said. “His clothes were caked with grass cuttings and sweat so I said he could wash them.”

Pete grinned, easy, oblivious, clapped me on the shoulder the way he had for twenty years. “He wore clothes? Good, I told him the cut off jeans and nothing else were unprofessional. If they are dirty that must mean he’s working. He giving you any trouble?”

Chase walked in wearing my dirty bathrobe from the laundry basket. Smart kid, I thought. And then I thought about the taste still on my tongue.

“No trouble at all,” I said. “None so far!” Looking towards him with a grin that meant two things depending on who you were in the room.

Hello my beautiful boys and burly men.

My name is Daddy Sauce, and do I have stories for you! But just as only bad tops don’t prep their bottoms, it would be a poor storyteller who didn’t set the scene first. So here it is. My origin story.

I’ll be honest. I was a grumpy gay elder.

I’d had my fun in my younger days, the clubs, the backrooms, the bushes in the park at 1am. But I grew tired. I worked hard and grew hard, bought my little house on a little bit of land, and greeted guests with suspicion and sometimes a shotgun. I wasn’t one for technology. The thought of a phone that could ring wherever I was horrified me. Text messages were an affront. I liked things fixed and quiet and mine.

I was a solitary bear, getting by on memories and occasionally hiring a local college kid to do the gardening. I’d watch them take off their tops when the sun beat down and then take care of myself with a fleshlight in the cool of my bedroom when they were gone. Unhurried. Private. Sufficient.

It was my toys, actually, that changed everything.

I had always bought from a place in the city. Twice a year a catalog arrived and I would treat myself: something for my birthday, something for Christmas. But eventually the catalogs stopped. When I called to find out why, they explained that it was all online now. No more mailing. No more phone orders either.

I was disappointed but unsurprised. All things change. I had always meant to get a home computer. There was only one thing to do: head into the city and sort it out. A two-hour round trip I didn’t really want to make, but I spruced myself up a little and headed out.

I had to pass through Main Street to reach the highway, so I thought I’d stop at old man William’s general store for a cold drink and something for the journey. I bought what I needed, tucked it under my arm, and was heading back to the car when I felt it.

A change in my body. A strange tingling that fizzed on my skin and sent little pulses directly to my cock.

I picked up my pace. A boner in the middle of town was not the impression I wanted to make. I crossed the road quickly, got to the car, and discreetly adjusted myself. Rock hard. Hard like I was a teenager checking out the underwear models in my mother’s catalogs. The naughty urge to find a restroom and handle it was strong. The Lamplighter’s bar was across the street. The diner was closer. I scanned the street, backpack already moving to cover my front.

Then I saw it.

A sign, down the alley next to the diner. Hand-painted letters: Faunara’s Second Hand Store.

My cock throbbed so hard I nearly came right there on the sidewalk. I didn’t question it. My body knew, with a certainty I hadn’t felt in years, that I needed to be in that store.

I walked with a slight limp to the alley, bag held strategically in front. But once I was in the cool shade of the brickwork, away from the street, I straightened up, slung the bag over my shoulder, and walked properly. The window was dusty, full of the things you’d expect: toys, books, tea sets, a cracked mirror, a china dog. Nothing that should have sent my pulse racing. But it had.

The door gave with a little push. A bell tinkled.

A boy appeared from the back room. Tall, lean, dark hair. A short blue t-shirt showed off arms that were still boyish in their lines but clearly on their way to something more. He had that particular quality of a man in his twenties who hasn’t quite arrived yet. The face still soft, the body already committed. He stopped when he saw me and broke into a wide, genuine smile.

My cock throbbed. I felt no urge to cover it.

“It’s you, sir,” he said, with real excitement, like I was someone he’d been hoping to see for a long time. “I’ve been waiting so long for you to find this place.”

He looked me up and down with absolutely no attempt to disguise it. His gaze paused at my crotch for several beats before coming back up to meet my eyes. He adjusted himself as he did. We were, it appeared, in the same condition.

“Do I know you?” I asked. My voice came out higher than I wanted.

“Sort of, sir. You will.” He smiled. “I’m Pip.”

“Nice to meet you, Pip. I’m -”

“Daddy Sauce,” he said. “Keeper of the realms.” He bowed low and held it. “Welcome, Master.”

I considered asking whether we’d skipped the part where we agree to role-play. But the boy clearly wanted me, which was not something a silly old codger like me was in the habit of taking for granted, and the throb in my cock was exquisite. I decided to go with it.

“You’re looking for a computer, yes?” he said, straightening.

“I am.”

“Good. I have it set up for you.” He gestured to a desk in the corner. On it sat what appeared to be a laptop, except the casing was made of dark polished wood, carved with small symbols I didn’t recognize. It looked like something a craftsman had built from a fever dream about the future.

“I need one I can do online shopping on,” I said. “Can it do that?”

“No, sir. But that isn’t what you need.”

“I think it is, young man.” The words were meant as a mild correction but came out sounding like foreplay. He shivered with what was clearly pleasure.

“Allow me to show you.” He pulled out the chair in front of the desk and looked at me. I sat. He moved into the narrow space between me and the laptop, turned his back to me, and lowered himself with perfect precision onto my lap, his thighs bracketing mine, the firm curve of his ass settled deliberately around the length of my cock. I gripped the arms of the chair. He leaned forward and turned the laptop on.

The screen was dark for a moment. Then a single symbol appeared: a red flame. Below it, two words.

Start here.

“Tap it,” he said softly, taking my hand and guiding my finger to the touchpad. He tilted his hips as he did it, slow and deliberate, squeezing my cock between his cheeks. I could feel myself leaking into my shorts: a slow, insistent pulse of heat that made it very difficult to focus on the screen.

I tapped.

The screen bloomed. A warm yellow light, like late evening sun, poured out from it. Not just illuminating the desk but spilling into the room, filling it, pushing into the corners, swallowing the shelves and the dusty window and the china dog until the shop was gone entirely.

We were somewhere else.

Stone walls, high and ancient. Where the far wall should have been there was open sky: night sky, extraordinary and close, full of stars and slow-turning planets. The air smelled of pine and smoke. Pip rose from my lap and turned to face me, eyes bright.

A voice came from behind us. Deep and unhurried. “Welcome.”

I turned.

A man stood at the edge of the stone floor where it met the sky. Tall, muscular, red-haired, with a full red beard and antlers rising from his head like a crown. He wore a long green robe trimmed with dark fur. As he stepped forward the robe parted, and I registered, in order: his extraordinary confidence, and then his cock. Thick, long, slightly curved upward, the head pink and full and already glistening.

Pip dropped immediately to his knees. I remained standing, uncertain.

The man walked to Pip with the unhurried ease of someone who had done this many times and expected to do it many more. He placed one large hand under Pip’s chin and tilted his face up.

“Blessed be the Heart Flame,” he said.

“Blessed be the Heart Flame, Jack of the Realms,” Pip replied, his voice steady and reverent. “I am your servant.” Then he opened his mouth wide.

Jack guided himself to Pip’s lips. The boy didn’t hesitate. He took the head and sucked hard, drawing a slow exhale from Jack, whose eyes closed for just a moment before finding mine again. He began to move his hips. Pip moaned, his hands gripping Jack’s thighs, and I could see from the tension in his body that he was already close to the edge, wound tight by whatever had been building in him since I walked through the door.

“Not yet,” Jack said quietly. “Your first seed should be his.” He nodded towards me.

“Yes, Master Jack.” Pip pulled back, breath ragged, lips slick.

Jack placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me gently to face the laptop. The wooden casing glowed faintly in the dark.

Pip rose and pressed himself against me from the front. He kissed me, hungry and deep and with both hands in my beard, and I forgot entirely that I was confused about what was happening. His hands moved to my shirt. Jack’s moved to the back of my collar.

Between them the shirt was gone in a single motion. Pip made a low sound at the sight of my chest and dropped his mouth to my nipple, sucking hard on it while his free hand finally, mercifully, wrapped around my cock. It was soaked. The head was slick and swollen and he ran his thumb over it and brought it to his mouth without breaking eye contact, tasting me. Then he sank to his knees and pulled my shorts down in one clean move.

He didn’t tease. He took my full length in one long slow descent until I felt the head press against his throat, then drew back with a suction that dragged his tongue along the underside, pressed the head against the roof of his mouth, and held it there. I felt another slow surge of fluid leave me, which he swallowed before releasing me entirely. Then down again. My legs were shaking. Jack held me upright from behind, his chest warm against my back, his cock pressing insistently against me.

I felt a slick finger trace my hole and then push inside me.

“Do it,” I said. I wasn’t sure who I was talking to.

Jack positioned his cock and pressed inside me slowly, giving me time to feel every inch of it, and then he was fully seated and the warmth of him radiated through me in waves. Not sharp, not violent, just heat spreading outward from somewhere deep, the way warmth blooms through your chest from a good drink on a cold night. I rocked between them: Pip’s mouth below, Jack filling me from behind. I stopped thinking about anything at all.

Jack leaned close to my ear.

“The boy is yours,” he said. “The realms of Faunara are yours. You have been making them for eternity. You just need to remember who you are. The Heart Flame flows through us all. It is in our seed.” He moved slowly, deliberately, hitting something inside me that made my vision blur. “As the spirit of the forest I give you mine first. Then you will give yours to the boy. His virgin seed will keep the portal open.” A pause. “Command him.”

I reached down and pulled Pip back by the hair. His eyes were glazed, his mouth slack, a thread of spit and my own fluid connecting his mouth to my cock.

“Turn around,” I said. The confidence in my voice surprised me. “Present yourself.”

He moved immediately, turning and bracing himself against the desk. I traced the head of my cock around his hole: slick, pink, pulsing with wanting. I felt it pulse back at me, hungry. Each slow circle left a smear of moisture and drew a soft sound from him. I pressed at it gently. He pushed back hard in response.

I took in the sight of my own cock, thicker and harder than it had ever been stretching his hole, his small, muscular ass cheeks parted and twitching. Jack chose that moment to slam into me.

The force drove me deep into Pip in one stroke. He cried out, not in pain, and pushed back further, greedy. I grabbed his hips and found my rhythm, and the three of us locked into something that felt less like sex and more like a mechanism, perfectly calibrated, each thrust answering the last.

Pip’s moans shortened. His breathing changed. I reached around and took his cock in my hand, already wet at the tip, slick and eager, and worked him in time with my thrusts. With each stroke I could feel myself leaving more of me inside him, a slow accumulating warmth building between us. Jack changed his rhythm: shorter, faster, precise, hammering directly at something inside me that sent sparks up my spine with every stroke until I was nothing but the need.

Then Jack’s hands gripped my waist and he drove himself as deep as he could go, and stilled, and I felt it. Not a violent sensation but a warmth, blooming from somewhere inside me that I hadn’t known existed, spreading slowly outward through my gut and my chest and down my thighs. Hot and certain and deep. He grunted softly against my neck and went quiet, and the warmth kept spreading, kept blooming. I understood without being told that this was what it meant: the Heart Flame passing between bodies.

And then I saw it all.

All of it at once. The realms, every one of them. Pool boys in the suburbs with their patient rich daddies. Lodge men in Stag Valley hunting the beautiful forest boys on the full moon. A devil presiding over an entire village built for his pleasure. A secret society meeting in rooms so exclusive they existed outside normal space. Men and pleasure and hunger and tenderness and power, all of it spinning outward from some central fire I understood, suddenly and completely, to be mine.

I had made these places. I had been making them, somewhere behind my ordinary life, for as long as I could remember. They had been waiting for me to arrive.

The realms unfolded and I lost my name entirely and drove myself into Pip with everything I had. I could feel every pulse of him around me, tight and hot and getting wetter with every stroke, his body drawing more from me than I thought I had left. I wanked his cock until his breathing broke entirely and he went rigid and I pushed deep one final time and let go.

The warmth bloomed again, different this time. Pouring out of me in waves, filling him, spreading between us like the light had spread through the shop. He shuddered and shot five heavy strings of cum across the wooden laptop, and for a moment I felt his pleasure as if it were my own.

For a moment we were one body. One fire.

Then Pip’s shaking legs and the weight of him on my arm pulled me back into the room, and I was just a man again. Just an old bear with unsteady knees. The stone chamber was still around us and the stars were still turning.

We found the sofa. Jack was already on it.

Pip curled into my side immediately, easy as breathing. Jack sat back with the satisfied look of a man who has done exactly what he came to do.

“You understand now?” Pip asked.

“I do,” I said. “All of it. Though I’m not sure I could explain it.”

“You don’t need to explain it,” Jack said. “Just tell the stories. The more people who find the Heart Flame, the stronger our realms become.” I noticed, idly, that I could see the pattern of the sofa cushion through his torso. He noticed me noticing and smiled. “I must go. The boy is yours. He will guide you.” He stood, inclined his head. “I’ll see you again when the narrative requires it.”

And then he was gone.

I looked at Pip.

“The boy is yours,” I repeated.

“I have always been yours,” he said simply. “You just needed to claim me. The shop will vanish soon. You need to take me home or I’ll vanish with it.”

I found a shirt from the clothing rack that more or less fit me. Pip dressed. I tucked the wooden laptop under my arm and we walked out of the alley and into the afternoon sun.

He was definitely going to get the neighbors talking. I didn’t give a single fuck.

I had found myself again. And a boy to take care of, and who would take care of me, was exactly what the new me required.

On the drive home he sucked my cock clean while I navigated the dirt tracks, which I maintain was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When we got back I had intended to rest, but his ass was right there, his perfect round cheeks tempting me as he climbed the stairs to the bedroom. He had been so good, and he deserved a proper reward. I ate him out until he came untouched, then we slept for twelve straight hours.

Our dreams were full of the realms and everything we were about to do in them.

Welcome to Faunara.

I’ll be here every time you arrive. Drink in hand. Watching. Proud.

Now, where shall we begin?