Author's Note: This chapter contains extremely graphic sexual content, including some D/s elements. There is also mention of past self-injury, and a huge amount of religiously-based self-loathing and internalized homophobia that may be triggering to some readers.
Reckless Chapter Twenty: Bonus Scene
Ben McCutcheon
He is so beautiful that you hate yourself for looking at him. You know you’re weak for looking, you know you should ignore him, but you can’t, not when those honey-colored eyes are burning into yours, not when he’s standing so close to you, scorching your skin with those long, slim fingers. Sometimes, in your more cynical moments, you think that he’s been put here solely to test you. Maybe they all have been—Garen and his beautiful green eyes, Travis and his adorable freckles, James… James, who looks so much like Ethan, so much like the one who had you first.
Ethan, Garen, Travis, James. Four of them. When you were little, you had thought there would be one. You had assumed that you would grow up, fall in love, get married, and have that one person for your whole life. And then you weren’t so little anymore, and you realized that you wouldn’t ever be getting married, and that was supposed to change everything. When you told your parents what you were, you promised them you’d still be good. You’d be chaste, you’d be virtuous. You’d be a virgin. Always.
And now you’re not. You’re the type of person who has to stare up at James through the cloud of smoke from his cigarette and say, “You don’t have chlamydia, right? Because if you do, you really should have let me take ten seconds to go grab a condom before we fucked.”
“I’m clean, I told you. And if we’d stopped for ten seconds, we would have realized what a mistake it was,” he says, and you nod like you agree, even though you aren’t certain that you do. Of course fucking James was a mistake, but you knew the truth of that as it was happening. You don’t think that stopping for ten seconds would have made you change your mind.
“Am I really the only one who didn’t know about Alex having feelings for me?” you ask.
James grabs your ankle and lifts your foot so that he can stub out his cigarette on the sole of your shoe. “Yes.”
“And it’s been that way for a long time?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you hate me?”
He grins and ducks his head, almost like he’s surprised that you’d ask. “I hate you for many reasons. But yes, I suppose that’s one of them.”
You shake his hand off of your ankle and hop down from the trunk of the Ferrari. Standing next to him for too long will inevitably lead to an irritating moment where he steps close and smirks pointedly down at you, as though you could ever forget the near foot of height difference, and you’re not in the mood for that brand of humiliation. You pull the coat more securely around yourself and begin to pace in a wide, clockwise circle around the entire car. After a moment, James begins tracing the trail your footsteps have left in the snow in his own counter-clockwise circle. You pass each other at the driver’s side door, and again at the passenger’s side.
It continues for nearly a full minute in silence before he clears his throat and says, “You really had no idea?”
“What, that Alex wanted to… date me, or whatever?” you say. You catch sight of him nodding near the trunk. “No. I had no idea, at all. It’s—we were never supposed to be like that. We’ve kissed a few times, sure, but we were joking around. It was a dumb fucking thing we used to do in high school, and plenty of people hook up with their friends in high school. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not supposed to be the start of something more.”
“Perhaps you should have mentioned that to Alexander,” James suggests.
“Perhaps you should have told me that I was potentially breaking my best friend’s heart before I had vicious, scarring floor-sex with you,” you mutter, shoving your hands into the pockets of the coat. There’s a set of keys in each pocket, which is a little peculiar, but the symmetry of it is nice.
He quirks an eyebrow. “I think scarring might be a bit of an overstatement. Certainly wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I’m very secure in the knowledge that you can’t possibly have been scarred by it.”
“I meant literally,” you say, tracing your fingertips through the snow dusting the hood of the car. “Physically.”
He staggers to a stop near the passenger-side door, but you keep walking, eyes on the ground. When you make your way back around to his side of the car and step into reach, he snags you by the lapel of the borrowed coat and says, “I don’t understand.”
“Let go of me,” you say, not lifting your eyes. He doesn’t release you. You sigh. “My back. You left—when you scratched me, when I asked you to scratch me, you broke the skin. Left five marks from my shoulderblade to the small of my back. It’s been weeks, and they still haven’t gone away. I don’t know if they ever will.”
“Show me,” he says. Your eyes dart from the ground to his face, but you’re not sure if you’re staring at him because his voice sounds uneven, overly eager, or because you want to shoot him a disgusted glare. He repeats the two words, and this time, his words are an order, smooth and unavoidable, the same as the way he’d said shut up and sit down in the diner.
You don’t know what it is about that tone that makes you want to do what he says, but there’s a pinch in your stomach, like you’ll be sick if you dare to ignore him. You meet his gaze unblinkingly, but your hands still tremble as you reach up to slip the coat from your shoulders. He accepts it from you and digs into the pocket to retrieve a set of keys—Garen’s keys? He unlocks the car door, opens it, and flings the coat across to the driver’s seat, all without even glancing down at his hands. You only look away as you turn your back to him, reaching for the hem of your hoodie to pull it up.
James freezes you with a hand to your wrist. “No. Off.”
“It’s thirty degrees out,” you say, a token protest.
“Off,” he repeats.
Your cold fingers twitch to the zipper, lowering it carefully and stripping off the article of clothing. You don’t turn to face him as you toss it into the car to join his coat. You’re not supposed to look at him right now. Even if you were given an hour to collect your thoughts, you couldn’t find the explanation for how you know that, but it’s the only thing you’re certain of right now.
When you hesitate to take off your henley—it’s snowing, and goosebumps are already rising on your skin, and you’re in the middle of a very public place, and your friends are right inside the diner, Alex is right inside the diner—James says, very carefully, “I don’t want to have to ask you again.”
He won’t have to. You won’t make him do it. You don’t understand how you can feel like you’re the one drawing the lines when he’s the one giving you orders in that voice. With one deep breath to steel yourself, you yank the shirt up and off. You’re standing half-naked in the middle of a parking lot; there’s snow dusting your shoulders, but behind you, there is a sharp inhale that makes your skin feel so, so hot.
“Oh, Christ. Look at you,” he breathes, and you have to squeeze your eyes shut, because that reaction is more than you had dared hope for.
It has become one of your secret rituals—every morning, when you lock yourself in the bathroom and turn on the shower and strip off your clothes, you have to pause in front of the mirror and crane your neck to stare over your shoulder at those five lines down your back. Those five awful, beautiful lines. You stare at them, sometimes for so long that the water is running cold by the time you even step into the spray. You stare, the same way you used to stare when you’d make new cuts with your razor, and you’d been the one to do it, but you were still always surprised to see them somehow. You stare, and you remember the way James had clawed into you and bitten you and pinned you to him with long, graceful arms as you had gone off. You hate him more than you hate almost anyone else you’ve ever met, but looking at those scratches every morning makes you feel raw and real and… sexy. You never feel sexy, not like you know your friends must. Garen wakes up smirking like the world is lucky to have him, and Alex and Travis aren’t idiots, they realize how attractive they both are. But that isn’t what it’s like for you. You know that you are silly and small and so dangerously fucking ordinary that sometimes you worry you might disappear altogether. But when you see these marks on your back, you remember the aggressively beautiful man who gave them to you and how he’d fallen apart beneath you, saying your name. And then you think you finally understand what sexy feels like.
If James knew any of this, he would laugh until he choked. It’s a legitimate question, but you still feel compelled to adopt your most patronizing tone as you say, “Gosh, Jamie, you can’t stop staring. Do you like them?”
“I wish you were fucking covered in them,” he says immediately.
You’re grateful that your back is still turned to him so that he can’t see how that makes you close your eyes, lick your lips. All he can see is that you stretch your arms out a little, like you’re surprised to see the scars that stretch from shoulder to wrist, and say, “How about that? Looks like I already am.”
“I wasn’t talking about scars that you made. I meant—” He breaks off, impatient and frustrated, and then you feel the brush of his icy skin against your back. You shiver, first from the cold, and then from the way he fits the tip of each of his fingers against the top of one of the marks, aligning his fingers the same way he did when he made them. He traces them, up and down, over and over, not digging his nails in to bring the pain back… just present enough to make you wish he’d make it hurt again.
“I look at these scratches on you, and it feels like I own you,” he murmurs. “It feels like I marked you and claimed you and made you mine.”
That is the most fucked up thing anyone has ever said while looking at your partially-nude body, including the time Ethan Hall said I always knew you were a fucking homo right before he came in your mouth for the first time.
You don’t know what it says about you that you can’t remember ever being this hard in your life.
“I’m not your anything,” you snap, fumbling to get your shirt back on. It makes almost no difference, because James won’t drop his hand from your back, so the hem of the henley is still rucked up over his elbow, and his fingers are still rubbing tiny circles against the tops of the scratches. You try to shrug away, but the next thing you’re aware of is being pushed up against the side of the Ferrari, the door cold against your front and his body warm behind you.
“I’ve thought about it, you know,” he says quietly. When you don’t protest, he leans down and speaks right against the shell of your ear. “Not just an offhand, abstract sort of remembrance, either. When I’m in bed with Rach and she pulls my hair too hard. Or when I find some pretty, dark-haired boy to kiss in a shadowy corner of a bar, and he wants me to suck a mark into the side of his neck.” He breaks off into a soft laugh, then steps closer, closer, closer, until you can feel the bulge in the front of his pants pressing against the small of your back; you don’t even try to pretend you’re not moving up onto your toes and bracing your hands against the window of the Ferrari so that you can rock back against him, his hard-on now grinding against the curve of your ass.
He accepts that as the signal to continue with all the things you are incapable of making yourself request. The hand on your back glides down and over your side, around the front of you to scrape his nails—finally—against the trail of hair that starts just below your navel and disappears into the waistband of your jeans. You jolt at the sensation, but not nearly as much as you jolt when his other hand settles over your crotch, rubbing you through denim. And he’s still talking. “Lord. I’ve even thought about it when I was alone once or twice. Fingered myself and thought about that idiotic look on your face when you did it to me, like you were shocked at your own daring. Fucked my own hand and wish--thought about fucking you. Wondered what it might be like to get inside this ass.”
You aren’t surprised when he moves his hand away from your crotch to wedge it between your bodies, but you’re expecting him to grope you a bit through your jeans—instead, he shoves his hand right down the back of your pants, gives your ass a rough squeeze, then rubs the tip of one dry finger across your hole.
You hiss something that might be, “Fuck.”
He whispers something that might be, “Want to.”
You give your head a wild shake and say, “Can’t. No, we—dude, get off me.” He lets you drag his hand out of your jeans and shove him off so that you can move a few steps from the car. “Do you not remember why Garen left us out here? You’re supposed to be telling me how to deal with the fact that my best friend—who is right there, in that diner—is in love with me. And if he wasn’t in love with me, he’d probably be in love with you, though it beats the fuck out of me why, because you are straight-up awful.”
“I’m good in the ways that count. You remember that,” James says, pushing the passenger door further open so that he take a seat inside the car, letting his long legs dangle out the side. “And it’s not like you can stop having a life—more specifically, a sex life, just because it might hurt the feelings of somebody who’s in love with you. Lord, if I stopped sleeping with people every time I had somebody fall in love with me, I’d never get to have sex. There’s always somebody who’s fixated on me.”
“Must be your modesty and strong moral code that attracts them all,” you mutter.
“Maybe. You tell me, McCutcheon. What is it that makes me so attractive?” he practically purrs. You roll your eyes at him, but he is undeterred. He catches you by the belt buckle and tows you close enough that he can throw an arm around your waist and drag you onto his lap. He’s hard under you, and you make a half-hearted attempt to squirm away from him, but the movement just makes him sigh. “I know you want to have sex with me again.”
“The fact that you’re a fucking sex addict is not—” Your sentence breaks off when he skims a hand up your thigh, scraping the tips of his fingers against denim. When his palm reaches your crotch, you know your protests have been shot to hell. He can feel how hard you already are; he makes a pleased noise against the nape of your neck and reaches for your belt buckle again. You let your head loll back against his shoulder and mutter, “This is fucked, dude. This is—Alex is right inside that diner, and he’s waiting for us to go back inside. He’s in love with me, and—”
“Are you in love with him, too?” James asks. You hesitate, then shake your head. He finally gets your belt open, then moves on, popping open the button and sliding down the zipper. “So, what exactly do you think you’re going to do to make anyone feel better about this situation? There’s nothing I can tell you right now that will make you feel better about your best friend wanting to be with you. And there’s nothing you can say to Alex that will make him feel like less of a damn fool than he does. Stop trying to fix things. You do that all the time, you try to make everything better, and it doesn’t work. God, McCutcheon. Don’t you ever get tired of being such an obnoxiously perfect person all the time?”
Yes. Yes, always, he has no idea. You swallow hard and lift your hips a little, pressing harder against his hand as you slip your own between your ass and his lap to touch him through his wool trousers. “Don’t you ever get tired of being such a shitty one?”
“No,” he says simply. He kisses the back of your neck--kisses it, like he’s your boyfriend, like it’s acceptable for him to act on sweet little impulses like that—and says, “I can make it worth your while, if you let me. If you ask me to.”
“I know,” you say, and shit, that’s not what you meant to say at all. You mean to withdraw your hand, to stop writhing in his lap, to stand up and walk back inside and talk to Alex like an adult. But then James’ hand is slipping beneath the waistband of your boxers and wrapping around your length, and it’s so difficult to remember why this is wrong.
No one has touched you since last month, when you fucked him on your living room floor. No one has held your hand. No one has hugged you. No one has kissed you. No one has fucked you. You think maybe a girl in your philosophy class tapped your shoulder once last week when she was handing you a worksheet, and you feel like Garen might have poked you in the ribs a few times to annoy you during your Black Friday shopping, but there hasn’t been any skin-on-skin. And even if there had been, you don’t think that it would compare to the feeling of James’ long fingers curling around your cock now.
You don’t care anymore. You can’t care anymore, because if you let yourself remember all the reasons why this is a bad idea, you might go insane. So instead, you reach back with your other hand to work open the buttons of his fly as you say, “Close the door, we’re not doing this in the fucking snow. And don’t—god, don’t for a fucking second think that this means I don’t hate you, because I—”
“Is it wrong of me to think that makes it so much hotter?” he interrupts, swinging his legs into the car and dragging you in with him so that he can shut the door. You’re not surprised that someone like James—someone who has money and looks and charm that most people only dream of having—would be more turned on by someone who won’t fall in love with him than the hundreds of people who already have. People who have love and touch in spades are always the quickest to stop caring about it.
The Ferrari is warmer than standing outside, but just barely. You still shiver when he releases your cock long enough to hook his thumbs over the waistband of your jeans and pull them, along with your boxers, down to your knees, but not nearly as much as he squirms when the pair of you have to lift up and writhe around to get his pants down as well.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this seat’s fuckin’ freezing,” he practically yelps.
You dig an elbow into his ribs. “Stop whining. Or, would you rather keep your clothes on? Because I don’t have to touch you, you know—”
“You do if you expect to get fucked,” he says. You are so glad that you’re sitting on his lap, both of you facing the windshield, because you think you’d have to be ashamed if he could see the way your lips part and your tongue darts out to wet them as he says those words.
His erection—which is, really, large to an almost upsetting degree—is digging into the small of your back, but you arch your spine so that there’s room for you to stroke him. He mutters something you don’t hear, and you’re not sure that you want him to repeat it, but you don’t have to ask him to; he flings an arm out and pops open the glove compartment, rifling through the registration papers and crushed, empty cigarettes packs, until he finds a tube of lube. Two tubes, actually. And a small bottle. Because of course Garen keeps three different containers of lubricant in his glove compartment. You are unable to stop yourself from huffing out a laugh at that, but James doesn’t laugh with you. He’s too busy shoving you down by your shoulders so that the back of your head knocks against his collarbone, too busy yanking your legs as far apart as your jeans will allow so that he can slop some lube across his fingers and drop them down between your legs.
“If you’re expecting me to be careful with you, or some other such bullshit, now would be the time to say something,” he says, pausing with the tips of his fingers at your opening.
You’re so thrown by his words that you instinctively turn to stare at him, even though the movement puts your face much too close to his. He’s giving you the same sneering look he always does, and you don’t know what possesses you to do it, but you use your nose to nudge his head to the side so that you can sink your teeth into the smooth skin of his neck. He twitches closer to you, but you release him before he has a chance to even enjoy it.
“I don’t want you to be careful with me, or gentle, or—don’t be so fucking stupid, alright? You know that’s not what I want, and it’s not what you want either, so don’t even think about it.”
“Thank god,” he mutters, and then he’s sinking two of those unbelievably long fingers into you at once. You sink your teeth into your lower lip in an attempt to bite back a cry, but James catches you by the jaw and snaps, “No. I want to hear you.”
“Fuck off,” you hiss. “You already know I don’t make much noise, so don’t expect—”
“You will for me,” he says. He works his fingers harder into you, twisting them to brush against your prostate, and when you groan, he laughs—it’s a mean little sound. “That’s right. Open up those dick-suckin’ lips of yours and let me hear you.”
You don’t groan again, but you also don’t try to hold in the heavy stutter of your breath as he fucks you with his fingers. You can tell that he likes that—he’s grinding his hips upward, fucking the curve of your fist, and twisting your head up and closer so that he can mouth over the space below your ear.
“Have you been with anyone else since the last time?” he asks. “The morning after the club, in your apartment. On the floor.”
You know when and where the last time was, but you wonder when it became “your apartment,” not “Alex’s apartment.” You shoot him your most disgruntled look and say, “Are you seriously asking me if I’ve been faithful to you since our one-night stand?”
“Doesn’t seem like it was a one-night stand, does it?” he murmurs, pressing into you with a third finger.
You let your head roll back. “It can be a one-night stand even if it happens again, as long as it’s meaningless. As long as you don’t do it like a couple. You just—there are rules.” He echoes the last word in a questioning whisper, so you swallow hard and continue, “Don’t lend the other person clothing. Don’t have breakfast together. Don’t—”
“Gave you my coat tonight. You’ve made me pancakes,” he says, nipping your jawline hard enough to send beautiful sparks of pain down your neck.
“I made you pancakes two months ago, not after we slept togeth—”
“Those are the wrong rules anyway,” he says. He pauses to grip one of your knees and yank your legs as far apart as your jeans, still tangled around your calves, will allow. “The real rules of a one-night stand? No contact information. No repeats. No kink you’ll have to tell your friends about. No barebacking. Which, again, brings me to my question—have you been with anyone else since last time? Because I haven’t been with anybody but Rach, and everything she and I have done together has been protected, and sweet Lord, I wanna fuck you bare. Please tell me I can.”
Your throat tightens. So does your grip on him. No one has ever, ever done that to you. That sort of intimacy was something you had planned to save for someone special, for the one. Not for some beautiful jackass you shouldn’t even let touch you. And you don’t know what it means that you never did this with Travis or Garen, and James won’t do this with his girlfriend, but you’ll do it with each other. You think that should mean something, even though you know it doesn’t. But when you hesitate, or when he senses your hesitation, he scrapes his short nails over your thigh and says, “You’ll love it. I swear, McCutcheon, it’s so hot. Raw. Dirty, filthy. Flawed and flawless. It’s too much, and it’ll make everything else feel like not enough.” He bites down hard on the stretch of muscle where your throat meets your shoulder. You grind back onto his fingers and cry out, too loud. He quiets you, kisses your neck--no, too much, too sweet, why is he doing that?—and then brushes his lips across the shell of your ear to whisper, “I want to fucking ruin you for everyone else you’re ever with.”
“Okay,” you choke out, even though that’s not what you mean at all. “Do it, now, please.” But he doesn’t. You’re nodding, you’re grabbing at his wrist, you’re raising your hips so that he can shift beneath you and line the head of his cock up with your hole, but he’s not pushing in. He’s not fucking you, even though he must know how much you want it, how much you need it. You try to sink down onto him, to make that connection he hasn’t made, but he grips your waist and holds you up, hovering just above him. “What the fuck, James?”
“Say it again,” he says.
“Now,” you snap, and he huffs out a laugh against your shoulder and shakes his head. You know exactly which word you’re meant to repeat; you know you’re meant to say please. The idea of it sends a spike of red-hot embarrassment through you, followed by an incredible deepening of your arousal. That’s so wrong. You shouldn’t be so turned on by the threat of him making you beg to be fucked and used. You should be humiliated, but you’re not—or, you are, but it’s a good humiliation, a slow burn under your skin. It’s sick. You’re sick, you’re dirty, you’re perverted, and you don’t know how to be anything else. You close your eyes and whisper, “Please.”
His fingers dig deeper into your skin, and his voice sounds almost like a growl when he says, “Louder. Say it loudly and repeatedly, until I’m satisfied, and then maybe I’ll satisfy you—”
“Please,” you say hoarsely. He isn’t fucking you, and he isn’t hurting you, and you need both. You knot your fingers in your own hair and pull until your scalp is tingling, but it’s not enough. You catch a handful of James’ dark, silken hair and force his mouth back to your shoulder so that he’ll bite you again. He obliges, and you can feel your eyes rolling shut as you say again, “Please. Please, please fuck me, you said you wanted to ruin me, and I want you to, please, need it, please, please—”
And then he’s yanking you down by your hips, filling you so suddenly and deeply that you fear you’re going to split in two. There’s no pause for you to adjust—just him working you onto his cock, fucking up into you, and it hurts so right. It isn’t painful in the way the first time with Ethan had been painful, with barely any lube and both of you too uncomfortable with the idea of fingering for there to be any prep beforehand. And it isn’t that playful sort of painful, the way it had been with Garen, because yes, G had always been willing to scratch you, pull your hair, fuck you fast and deep, tie you up that one time, but there were things you would never have asked him for. Things he would never have been able to do for you, not without driving himself a little bit mad. You think James might already be a little bit mad; it would certainly be a valid explanation for why, when you drag his hands from your hips to your throat because you want him to choke you but don’t know how you could possibly verbalize something that perverse, he chuckles and says, “Oh, no. Got a much better idea than that, sweetheart.”
Instinctively, you cringe at the term of endearment. You know he doesn’t mean it, and that isn’t the problem, except that it is. You know there have been dozens of men and women before you who have all been James Goldwyn’s sweetheart for an hour or so, and after that, they’ve been pushed away, thrown out. This is not what your body was meant to be used for. You’re supposed to treat yourself with the dignity and respect that God intended, but you’ve read your Bible over and over, and not even the most brutal scenes in the Old Testament will tell you that you’re anything other than a pervert and a sodomite and a freak for wanting the things that you want. You’re awful, and you’re sorry, and you know you need to be punished for wanting these things, but it doesn’t feel like a punishment when James strips off his necktie, folds it over itself, and draws the silk taut across your throat. It feels like a reward.
“Put your hands on my wrists,” he orders, and you obey without hesitation. “If it’s too much, squeeze down, and I’ll ease up. Don’t want you passing out on me before I’ve had my way with you.”
That shouldn’t turn you on as much as it does, the idea of him completely cutting off your air supply, of him making you dizzy, making you faint. It’s harder to maintain a proper rhythm now that both of you are focused on the fabric at your throat. You end up kicking off one of your shoes and briefly releasing his wrists—that earns you a growl of protest and a quick jerk of the necktie against your windpipe, which earns James a choked groan and a buck of your hips—so that you can reach down and free one of your legs completely from the jeans. You can spread your legs more now, brace your weight properly, ride him hard even though every upstroke has your head hitting the roof of the car.
You’re not sure if it’s that repeated thunk of your skull against the Ferrari, or the fact that James’ grip on the tie keeps tightening and tightening, but after a few more minutes, you’re starting to get too dizzy to keep the rise and fall of your hips steady. You don’t want to tell him to stop; you don’t want him to sneer at you and tell you you’re weak for not being able to handle more. You want him to see how much and how hard you can take it. A twisted, humiliating part of you wants him to leave a necklace of bruises around your throat, wants him to kiss the marks and tell you how well you’re doing. Just like in the diner, when he told you to shut up and sit down, and you obeyed, and he whispered good boy, and it made your heart pound and your cheeks flush, and you don’t know why.
Another minute, and your vision is starting to gray out at the edges. You can’t take it anymore. You dig your fingertips into the delicate bones of James’ wrists, and, fortunately and unfortunately, he immediately releases you. He soothes your throat with one cool palm, and once he’s satisfied that you’re alright—or, at the very least, that you’re conscious—he winds the necktie around your wrists, binding them together with a series of intricate knots made by deft fingers. When you shoot him a bewildered glance over your shoulder, he smirks back and says, “Ten years of horseback-riding, six summers of sailing, eight semesters of stringing lacrosse nets, and two unreasonably long military leadership education workshops on rope skills during my freshman and sophomore years. I’m good with knots.” Only once the tie is secure enough that you couldn’t wriggle out of it even if you wanted to (and you don’t) does he bother to blink at you and say, “This is okay, right?”
You know that it’s probably good that he’s checking on you, but it doesn’t feel good. It feels too concerned, too friendly. You dig your elbows into his ribs and snap, “If I wasn’t okay with it, you would’ve been able to tell. Mainly because I’d have pulled away and punched you in the mouth. Now shut up and fuck me, slut.”
You feel guilty for calling him that—you feel guilty for everything these days—but it wipes the smile off his face, replaces it with a snarl. He forces you back up off his dick and begins to manhandle you around, bending your limbs in ways they’re not supposed to move and shoving at you enough to make your joints pop, until finally, you’re back on his lap, back on his cock, facing him with your knees planted on the seat on either side of his hips.
“It’s really goddamn rich of you to call me that, you know,” he pants, grabbing a fistful of your hair and dragging you in until your forehead knocks against his and the tip of his perfectly straight nose is brushing your cheek. “You’re as bad as I am. At least I know what I am. At least I admit that I’ll fuck anyone I feel like fucking. But you pretend to be so pure, you’re so saint-like, until your best friend in the whole world tells you that he’s desperately in love with you, and then your immediate reaction to that situation is to get another man’s cock in you.”
You don’t know if you get off on the horrible things he says or not, but you know you’re barely listening to them. You pull back just enough to raise your hands through the space between you, dropping them behind his head so that your arms are wound around his neck and bound at the top of his spine. He drags you right back in by the hair, and you can feel his breath on your face, sure that he can feel yours, especially once he starts to jerk you off. And then you are both making soft noises right there in each others’ space, practically into each others’ mouths. You might be kissing, if not for that half-inch of space, and you wonder what he would do if you leaned in just a little more and closed that gap.
His phone rings.
Any normal human being would ignore it, but James is not normal. He spares a glance to the caller ID and answers the call, pins the phone between his shoulder and his ear—you have to shift your forearm further out on his shoulder, mostly out of the way—and then his hands are right back in your hair and on your cock, and you are certain that James is not normal.
“What do you want, Anderson?” he snaps into the receiver. At least it’s Garen, not his girlfriend. You make a grab for the cell phone anyway, but your hands are still tied together, so you don’t make much progress. He shoots you a warning glance and says into the phone, “He’s not.”
You don’t know what the question was, but you’d bet anything that it was about you. Your knees are slipping against the leather of the seat, and you readjust, trying to see if you can hear any of what Garen is saying. All you can make out is the indistinct rumble of that smirky, smoke-wrecked growl he calls a voice.
“I talked him out of those,” James finally says, and then, a beat later, he repeats the sentence. Garen’s response continues, pauses, then continues in a yell. You roll your eyes toward the roof of the car—they’re unnaturally codependent, this isn’t even the first time you’ve had to wait out a Garen-James phone call while one of them was inside of you—but then James adjusts the angle of his thrusts, and your eyes are rolling for a completely different reason.
He’s saying something to Garen, and you don’t like to interrupt people who are engaging in conversation, but you can feel yourself getting too close, and you’ll be damned if you let Garen hear you coming on the other end of a phone call. You grind out the words, “End the call, or I’ll break your phone.”
You would, too. It isn’t as if he couldn’t afford another one to replace it. He could afford a dozen to replace it, if he wanted to, and he probably wouldn’t bat an eye as he signed the credit card receipt for them, either.
“Is there a reason you called, G?” he snarls into the phone. “Don’t get me wrong, hearing your voice is a lot sexier than hearing this little bitch barking orders at me--harder, faster, scratch me, choke me.” You might be embarrassed, if Garen didn’t already know that you were sick enough to want those things. “Only, it’s a little difficult to jack him off, and pull his hair, and hold a cell phone all at once.”
His solution to that problem, even as he voices it, is to stop stroking your cock so that he can take the phone in hand. He doesn’t stop pulling your hair—he pulls a little harder, truth be told—but you need to get a hand back on you. You shake your head viciously from side to side, wanting to show your displeasure without risking Garen hearing you say, don’t stop touching me.
James cocks an eyebrow at you, and how anyone can look so smug even while he’s panting, moving, fucking you, is completely beyond your comprehension. He mouths, close? You don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it’s true, but you hold onto the hope that maybe he’s decent enough to touch you again if you admit that. You give a very stiff nod, and he shoots you a wide, open-mouthed smile, then says to Garen, business-like in his succinctness, “I’m aware. I’m hanging up now. We’ll be done soon.”
And then he’s finally lowering the phone, ending the call, practically flinging his iPhone across the car. It hits the driver’s-side door and clatters to the floor somewhere, maybe cracking, you’ve got no idea. James lunges forward and catches your bottom lip between his teeth, biting down so hard you fear (and hope) he might draw blood. He releases it to whisper, “You gonna come for me?” when you start to shudder, then bites back into it when you nod and jerk closer and spill mostly onto your own shirt, but somewhat onto his, too. You’ll apologize for that, maybe, later, but right now, you’re just coming so hard you feel like you’re about to start sobbing. You need friction, oh god, you need him to touch your cock, or you need to be able to touch yourself, to wring the last of your orgasm out, but you can’t. All you can do is tremble, untouched. He hasn’t stopped biting you, or gripping your hips with bruising strength, or fucking you, though his rhythm is sloppier now. You know you’re still grinding down onto him and clenching around him, but you don’t realize how much it’s affecting him until he slides his hands from your hips up your spine to grab at your shoulders and yank you down against him, stilling you as he comes inside you with a groan that’s nearly inhuman. You can feel it. You’d expected that, within reason, but it isn’t until you’re full of the dirty heat of it that you really understand what he meant about it being too much. You wish your hands weren’t tied, but you don’t know what you’d be doing differently if you were freed. You don’t know anything right now.
He’s not so much biting your lip anymore—it’s more as if he’s sucking on it, his teeth still clamped down on it but his tongue soothing over the pinched skin. It makes you want to scream, and not in a good way. You’re a heartbeat from shoving him back or pulling away, but then his hand comes up to cradle the back of your neck, and he’s tilting your head down, and his upper lip is slotted between yours, and he’s kissing you. He’s holding you to him, and he’s giving up the biting in favor of slipping his tongue between your lips, and he’s kissing you, like you’re lovers, instead of two men who can’t stand each other.
It only lasts a few seconds before you launch yourself off his lap and into the driver’s seat, even though your sudden emptiness is downright painful. The two of you stare at each other for a moment, and you can’t help but let your eyes travel his body—his pants are pulled halfway down his thighs, his cock is still half-hard, shiny and slick with cum and lube. There are cumstains on his Oxford. His artful haircut is mussed, and his beautiful face is flushed. There’s a smear of eyeliner on his cheek, but you don’t know how it got there. He’s staring at your body, licking his lips, and you’re only bare from the hips down, but you’ve never felt more naked in your life.
You shove your free foot back into the leg of your jeans, yank them and your boxers back up. It’s a struggle, because your hands are still bound by the necktie, and you’re just so… ashamed. Your best friend is in love with you, and here you are, filled with his ex-boyfriend’s spunk, in your friend’s car, tied up like an animal. You don’t know how you became this person. You swear, you used to be good. Or, you think you were good. Maybe. You’ve spent your entire life trying so hard to make your family proud of you, and you’ve tried so hard to do the things you’re supposed to do, to live your life the way you know He wants you to, but lately, it’s like every single thing you do is more fucked up than the thing before. You’re still trembling, and you wish it would just fucking stop. You wish you had more control over yourself.
James’ expression is wary as he tucks himself back into his pants, zips up, and reaches for your wrists. “Here. Let me take care of you.”
It’s not what he means. You know that all he wants to do is get his hideous necktie back, but his words are all wrong. So unbelievably, painfully wrong. You shake your head and jerk your hands out of reach. “I can do it.”
“McCutcheon,” he sighs.
“I can do it,” you snap. He turns to glare out the passenger window as you yank at the ends of the tie with your teeth. You pretend you don’t notice that the silk smells like his cologne. You wonder how much he spent on the tie you’re getting your spit all over. A hundred dollars? Two hundred? More? He doesn’t even care that you’re chomping down on it as if you’re a puppy with a chew toy. He just waits in silence until you finally manage to open the worst of the knots, and then it’s fine. You free yourself without much trouble, fling the tie onto his lap, and tumble out the driver’s side of the car, wriggling back into your hoodie as you go.
You’re grateful that you chose to back into the next space over, because it means that you only have to take two steps to get behind the wheel of your own car. You climb inside, slam the door, and grip the steering wheel. You will not let yourself make this worse by enjoying the afterglow. You don’t deserve that—not when you’ve just done something you swore you’d never do again. Not when you’ve betrayed your best friend, the man who apparently loves you. Not when you’ve fallen to temptation yet again, in the same perverted way you’ve been doing since you were sixteen. It’s not okay. You know that being with another man is not okay, but sometimes, you wonder if it could be, if you were in love, if it were special. Maybe it’s okay for Garen and Travis to be together. Hell, maybe it was even okay for you and Travis to be together.
But not you and James. Never you and James. Every step of the way, he asked you what you wanted, and every time, you gave the wrong answer. You wanted him to choke you, to fuck you, to come inside your body, to… kiss you. You wanted that, too, even if you hate yourself for wanting it, for wanting him. He is a test that your body is determined to make you fail.
There is a faint tap-tap-tap on your window. You allow your eyes to dart to the side. James is standing there, face blank, hand gesturing for you to roll down the window. When you don’t move, he raises the other hand; he’s holding your shoe. You’d forgotten to put it back on after dressing yourself. You laugh, but your bones have all gone away, and you can’t make yourself turn on the car and roll the window down.
So, he does it for you. He opens your door, leans in to turn the keys, then presses the button to lower the window. You make no move to accept the shoe, so he hooks his hands around your calves and turns your body ninety degrees so that your legs are dangling in front of him. He kneels on the ground in front of you, seemingly unconcerned with the fact that there is snow melting into the expensive wool of his trousers. He slips your foot back into the shoe like he’s the charming prince and you’re Cinderella, but if your life is a fairy tale, it’s the Grimm version. This isn’t Cinderella, with singing mice and happy endings; it’s Aschenputtel, and you’re one of the evil stepsisters, cutting off your toes to fit into gold slippers and waiting for doves to peck out your eyes. You would deserve it, too. You have bled for far lesser offenses than this.
James ties your laces in a neat bow, stands, and shoves himself back between your legs. You glare at the buttons of his peacoat and try not to think about the fact that he has only buttoned it up to hide the smears of cum on his shirt. He doesn’t speak, and you don’t want him to, but you don’t want him to stand there any longer, either, so you eventually consent to meet his eyes.
“I don’t like you,” he says. “I think you’re a melodramatic, pretentious, boring midget with a martyr complex the size of Texas, and when you speak, I think about sticking thumbtacks in my ears, because I am nearly certain that it would be more enjoyable than listening to you correct yet another one of Alexander’s grammatically incorrect sentences.”
You don’t say anything, because you know you deserve his verbal abuse. You might deserve physical abuse, too, but it would probably just get you off, and it’s that sort of sickness that has gotten you into this mess in the first place. You lick your lips and watch as his eyes flicker down to follow the movement.
He swallows, continues, “That being said… I don’t have anything to gain by lying to you again. So, I’ll just come out with it: I was never supposed to enjoy having sex with you, but I do. It’s wild and frantic and wrong in the sort of way that ends up accidentally feeling pretty right. I’m not going to ask you if you want to do this again, and I don’t expect you to ask me that, either. All I am going to say is that I know you have my number. And if you ever happen to be in New York, I wouldn’t be opposed to you using it.”
He steps back and allows you to swing your legs back under the steering wheel. He shuts the car door, flicks something through the open window at you, and strides off towards the diner. You stare down at your lap, where the crumpled silk tie has fallen. You fold it with trembling fingers, wondering if you should leave it in his car for him. By the time you have prepared yourself to get out of your car, you can already see the rest of the group returning from the diner, Garen bolting ahead of the rest of them. Before he can get to you, you stuff the tie into the side pocket of the driver’s side door and dig your cell phone out of your pocket to delete James’ number from your address book.
Because you are a bad person, and you don’t deserve to have anything that feels as good as he does.
Ethan, Garen, Travis, James. Four of them. When you were little, you had thought there would be one. You had assumed that you would grow up, fall in love, get married, and have that one person for your whole life. And then you weren’t so little anymore, and you realized that you wouldn’t ever be getting married, and that was supposed to change everything. When you told your parents what you were, you promised them you’d still be good. You’d be chaste, you’d be virtuous. You’d be a virgin. Always.
And now you’re not. You’re the type of person who has to stare up at James through the cloud of smoke from his cigarette and say, “You don’t have chlamydia, right? Because if you do, you really should have let me take ten seconds to go grab a condom before we fucked.”
“I’m clean, I told you. And if we’d stopped for ten seconds, we would have realized what a mistake it was,” he says, and you nod like you agree, even though you aren’t certain that you do. Of course fucking James was a mistake, but you knew the truth of that as it was happening. You don’t think that stopping for ten seconds would have made you change your mind.
“Am I really the only one who didn’t know about Alex having feelings for me?” you ask.
James grabs your ankle and lifts your foot so that he can stub out his cigarette on the sole of your shoe. “Yes.”
“And it’s been that way for a long time?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you hate me?”
He grins and ducks his head, almost like he’s surprised that you’d ask. “I hate you for many reasons. But yes, I suppose that’s one of them.”
You shake his hand off of your ankle and hop down from the trunk of the Ferrari. Standing next to him for too long will inevitably lead to an irritating moment where he steps close and smirks pointedly down at you, as though you could ever forget the near foot of height difference, and you’re not in the mood for that brand of humiliation. You pull the coat more securely around yourself and begin to pace in a wide, clockwise circle around the entire car. After a moment, James begins tracing the trail your footsteps have left in the snow in his own counter-clockwise circle. You pass each other at the driver’s side door, and again at the passenger’s side.
It continues for nearly a full minute in silence before he clears his throat and says, “You really had no idea?”
“What, that Alex wanted to… date me, or whatever?” you say. You catch sight of him nodding near the trunk. “No. I had no idea, at all. It’s—we were never supposed to be like that. We’ve kissed a few times, sure, but we were joking around. It was a dumb fucking thing we used to do in high school, and plenty of people hook up with their friends in high school. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not supposed to be the start of something more.”
“Perhaps you should have mentioned that to Alexander,” James suggests.
“Perhaps you should have told me that I was potentially breaking my best friend’s heart before I had vicious, scarring floor-sex with you,” you mutter, shoving your hands into the pockets of the coat. There’s a set of keys in each pocket, which is a little peculiar, but the symmetry of it is nice.
He quirks an eyebrow. “I think scarring might be a bit of an overstatement. Certainly wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I’m very secure in the knowledge that you can’t possibly have been scarred by it.”
“I meant literally,” you say, tracing your fingertips through the snow dusting the hood of the car. “Physically.”
He staggers to a stop near the passenger-side door, but you keep walking, eyes on the ground. When you make your way back around to his side of the car and step into reach, he snags you by the lapel of the borrowed coat and says, “I don’t understand.”
“Let go of me,” you say, not lifting your eyes. He doesn’t release you. You sigh. “My back. You left—when you scratched me, when I asked you to scratch me, you broke the skin. Left five marks from my shoulderblade to the small of my back. It’s been weeks, and they still haven’t gone away. I don’t know if they ever will.”
“Show me,” he says. Your eyes dart from the ground to his face, but you’re not sure if you’re staring at him because his voice sounds uneven, overly eager, or because you want to shoot him a disgusted glare. He repeats the two words, and this time, his words are an order, smooth and unavoidable, the same as the way he’d said shut up and sit down in the diner.
You don’t know what it is about that tone that makes you want to do what he says, but there’s a pinch in your stomach, like you’ll be sick if you dare to ignore him. You meet his gaze unblinkingly, but your hands still tremble as you reach up to slip the coat from your shoulders. He accepts it from you and digs into the pocket to retrieve a set of keys—Garen’s keys? He unlocks the car door, opens it, and flings the coat across to the driver’s seat, all without even glancing down at his hands. You only look away as you turn your back to him, reaching for the hem of your hoodie to pull it up.
James freezes you with a hand to your wrist. “No. Off.”
“It’s thirty degrees out,” you say, a token protest.
“Off,” he repeats.
Your cold fingers twitch to the zipper, lowering it carefully and stripping off the article of clothing. You don’t turn to face him as you toss it into the car to join his coat. You’re not supposed to look at him right now. Even if you were given an hour to collect your thoughts, you couldn’t find the explanation for how you know that, but it’s the only thing you’re certain of right now.
When you hesitate to take off your henley—it’s snowing, and goosebumps are already rising on your skin, and you’re in the middle of a very public place, and your friends are right inside the diner, Alex is right inside the diner—James says, very carefully, “I don’t want to have to ask you again.”
He won’t have to. You won’t make him do it. You don’t understand how you can feel like you’re the one drawing the lines when he’s the one giving you orders in that voice. With one deep breath to steel yourself, you yank the shirt up and off. You’re standing half-naked in the middle of a parking lot; there’s snow dusting your shoulders, but behind you, there is a sharp inhale that makes your skin feel so, so hot.
“Oh, Christ. Look at you,” he breathes, and you have to squeeze your eyes shut, because that reaction is more than you had dared hope for.
It has become one of your secret rituals—every morning, when you lock yourself in the bathroom and turn on the shower and strip off your clothes, you have to pause in front of the mirror and crane your neck to stare over your shoulder at those five lines down your back. Those five awful, beautiful lines. You stare at them, sometimes for so long that the water is running cold by the time you even step into the spray. You stare, the same way you used to stare when you’d make new cuts with your razor, and you’d been the one to do it, but you were still always surprised to see them somehow. You stare, and you remember the way James had clawed into you and bitten you and pinned you to him with long, graceful arms as you had gone off. You hate him more than you hate almost anyone else you’ve ever met, but looking at those scratches every morning makes you feel raw and real and… sexy. You never feel sexy, not like you know your friends must. Garen wakes up smirking like the world is lucky to have him, and Alex and Travis aren’t idiots, they realize how attractive they both are. But that isn’t what it’s like for you. You know that you are silly and small and so dangerously fucking ordinary that sometimes you worry you might disappear altogether. But when you see these marks on your back, you remember the aggressively beautiful man who gave them to you and how he’d fallen apart beneath you, saying your name. And then you think you finally understand what sexy feels like.
If James knew any of this, he would laugh until he choked. It’s a legitimate question, but you still feel compelled to adopt your most patronizing tone as you say, “Gosh, Jamie, you can’t stop staring. Do you like them?”
“I wish you were fucking covered in them,” he says immediately.
You’re grateful that your back is still turned to him so that he can’t see how that makes you close your eyes, lick your lips. All he can see is that you stretch your arms out a little, like you’re surprised to see the scars that stretch from shoulder to wrist, and say, “How about that? Looks like I already am.”
“I wasn’t talking about scars that you made. I meant—” He breaks off, impatient and frustrated, and then you feel the brush of his icy skin against your back. You shiver, first from the cold, and then from the way he fits the tip of each of his fingers against the top of one of the marks, aligning his fingers the same way he did when he made them. He traces them, up and down, over and over, not digging his nails in to bring the pain back… just present enough to make you wish he’d make it hurt again.
“I look at these scratches on you, and it feels like I own you,” he murmurs. “It feels like I marked you and claimed you and made you mine.”
That is the most fucked up thing anyone has ever said while looking at your partially-nude body, including the time Ethan Hall said I always knew you were a fucking homo right before he came in your mouth for the first time.
You don’t know what it says about you that you can’t remember ever being this hard in your life.
“I’m not your anything,” you snap, fumbling to get your shirt back on. It makes almost no difference, because James won’t drop his hand from your back, so the hem of the henley is still rucked up over his elbow, and his fingers are still rubbing tiny circles against the tops of the scratches. You try to shrug away, but the next thing you’re aware of is being pushed up against the side of the Ferrari, the door cold against your front and his body warm behind you.
“I’ve thought about it, you know,” he says quietly. When you don’t protest, he leans down and speaks right against the shell of your ear. “Not just an offhand, abstract sort of remembrance, either. When I’m in bed with Rach and she pulls my hair too hard. Or when I find some pretty, dark-haired boy to kiss in a shadowy corner of a bar, and he wants me to suck a mark into the side of his neck.” He breaks off into a soft laugh, then steps closer, closer, closer, until you can feel the bulge in the front of his pants pressing against the small of your back; you don’t even try to pretend you’re not moving up onto your toes and bracing your hands against the window of the Ferrari so that you can rock back against him, his hard-on now grinding against the curve of your ass.
He accepts that as the signal to continue with all the things you are incapable of making yourself request. The hand on your back glides down and over your side, around the front of you to scrape his nails—finally—against the trail of hair that starts just below your navel and disappears into the waistband of your jeans. You jolt at the sensation, but not nearly as much as you jolt when his other hand settles over your crotch, rubbing you through denim. And he’s still talking. “Lord. I’ve even thought about it when I was alone once or twice. Fingered myself and thought about that idiotic look on your face when you did it to me, like you were shocked at your own daring. Fucked my own hand and wish--thought about fucking you. Wondered what it might be like to get inside this ass.”
You aren’t surprised when he moves his hand away from your crotch to wedge it between your bodies, but you’re expecting him to grope you a bit through your jeans—instead, he shoves his hand right down the back of your pants, gives your ass a rough squeeze, then rubs the tip of one dry finger across your hole.
You hiss something that might be, “Fuck.”
He whispers something that might be, “Want to.”
You give your head a wild shake and say, “Can’t. No, we—dude, get off me.” He lets you drag his hand out of your jeans and shove him off so that you can move a few steps from the car. “Do you not remember why Garen left us out here? You’re supposed to be telling me how to deal with the fact that my best friend—who is right there, in that diner—is in love with me. And if he wasn’t in love with me, he’d probably be in love with you, though it beats the fuck out of me why, because you are straight-up awful.”
“I’m good in the ways that count. You remember that,” James says, pushing the passenger door further open so that he take a seat inside the car, letting his long legs dangle out the side. “And it’s not like you can stop having a life—more specifically, a sex life, just because it might hurt the feelings of somebody who’s in love with you. Lord, if I stopped sleeping with people every time I had somebody fall in love with me, I’d never get to have sex. There’s always somebody who’s fixated on me.”
“Must be your modesty and strong moral code that attracts them all,” you mutter.
“Maybe. You tell me, McCutcheon. What is it that makes me so attractive?” he practically purrs. You roll your eyes at him, but he is undeterred. He catches you by the belt buckle and tows you close enough that he can throw an arm around your waist and drag you onto his lap. He’s hard under you, and you make a half-hearted attempt to squirm away from him, but the movement just makes him sigh. “I know you want to have sex with me again.”
“The fact that you’re a fucking sex addict is not—” Your sentence breaks off when he skims a hand up your thigh, scraping the tips of his fingers against denim. When his palm reaches your crotch, you know your protests have been shot to hell. He can feel how hard you already are; he makes a pleased noise against the nape of your neck and reaches for your belt buckle again. You let your head loll back against his shoulder and mutter, “This is fucked, dude. This is—Alex is right inside that diner, and he’s waiting for us to go back inside. He’s in love with me, and—”
“Are you in love with him, too?” James asks. You hesitate, then shake your head. He finally gets your belt open, then moves on, popping open the button and sliding down the zipper. “So, what exactly do you think you’re going to do to make anyone feel better about this situation? There’s nothing I can tell you right now that will make you feel better about your best friend wanting to be with you. And there’s nothing you can say to Alex that will make him feel like less of a damn fool than he does. Stop trying to fix things. You do that all the time, you try to make everything better, and it doesn’t work. God, McCutcheon. Don’t you ever get tired of being such an obnoxiously perfect person all the time?”
Yes. Yes, always, he has no idea. You swallow hard and lift your hips a little, pressing harder against his hand as you slip your own between your ass and his lap to touch him through his wool trousers. “Don’t you ever get tired of being such a shitty one?”
“No,” he says simply. He kisses the back of your neck--kisses it, like he’s your boyfriend, like it’s acceptable for him to act on sweet little impulses like that—and says, “I can make it worth your while, if you let me. If you ask me to.”
“I know,” you say, and shit, that’s not what you meant to say at all. You mean to withdraw your hand, to stop writhing in his lap, to stand up and walk back inside and talk to Alex like an adult. But then James’ hand is slipping beneath the waistband of your boxers and wrapping around your length, and it’s so difficult to remember why this is wrong.
No one has touched you since last month, when you fucked him on your living room floor. No one has held your hand. No one has hugged you. No one has kissed you. No one has fucked you. You think maybe a girl in your philosophy class tapped your shoulder once last week when she was handing you a worksheet, and you feel like Garen might have poked you in the ribs a few times to annoy you during your Black Friday shopping, but there hasn’t been any skin-on-skin. And even if there had been, you don’t think that it would compare to the feeling of James’ long fingers curling around your cock now.
You don’t care anymore. You can’t care anymore, because if you let yourself remember all the reasons why this is a bad idea, you might go insane. So instead, you reach back with your other hand to work open the buttons of his fly as you say, “Close the door, we’re not doing this in the fucking snow. And don’t—god, don’t for a fucking second think that this means I don’t hate you, because I—”
“Is it wrong of me to think that makes it so much hotter?” he interrupts, swinging his legs into the car and dragging you in with him so that he can shut the door. You’re not surprised that someone like James—someone who has money and looks and charm that most people only dream of having—would be more turned on by someone who won’t fall in love with him than the hundreds of people who already have. People who have love and touch in spades are always the quickest to stop caring about it.
The Ferrari is warmer than standing outside, but just barely. You still shiver when he releases your cock long enough to hook his thumbs over the waistband of your jeans and pull them, along with your boxers, down to your knees, but not nearly as much as he squirms when the pair of you have to lift up and writhe around to get his pants down as well.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this seat’s fuckin’ freezing,” he practically yelps.
You dig an elbow into his ribs. “Stop whining. Or, would you rather keep your clothes on? Because I don’t have to touch you, you know—”
“You do if you expect to get fucked,” he says. You are so glad that you’re sitting on his lap, both of you facing the windshield, because you think you’d have to be ashamed if he could see the way your lips part and your tongue darts out to wet them as he says those words.
His erection—which is, really, large to an almost upsetting degree—is digging into the small of your back, but you arch your spine so that there’s room for you to stroke him. He mutters something you don’t hear, and you’re not sure that you want him to repeat it, but you don’t have to ask him to; he flings an arm out and pops open the glove compartment, rifling through the registration papers and crushed, empty cigarettes packs, until he finds a tube of lube. Two tubes, actually. And a small bottle. Because of course Garen keeps three different containers of lubricant in his glove compartment. You are unable to stop yourself from huffing out a laugh at that, but James doesn’t laugh with you. He’s too busy shoving you down by your shoulders so that the back of your head knocks against his collarbone, too busy yanking your legs as far apart as your jeans will allow so that he can slop some lube across his fingers and drop them down between your legs.
“If you’re expecting me to be careful with you, or some other such bullshit, now would be the time to say something,” he says, pausing with the tips of his fingers at your opening.
You’re so thrown by his words that you instinctively turn to stare at him, even though the movement puts your face much too close to his. He’s giving you the same sneering look he always does, and you don’t know what possesses you to do it, but you use your nose to nudge his head to the side so that you can sink your teeth into the smooth skin of his neck. He twitches closer to you, but you release him before he has a chance to even enjoy it.
“I don’t want you to be careful with me, or gentle, or—don’t be so fucking stupid, alright? You know that’s not what I want, and it’s not what you want either, so don’t even think about it.”
“Thank god,” he mutters, and then he’s sinking two of those unbelievably long fingers into you at once. You sink your teeth into your lower lip in an attempt to bite back a cry, but James catches you by the jaw and snaps, “No. I want to hear you.”
“Fuck off,” you hiss. “You already know I don’t make much noise, so don’t expect—”
“You will for me,” he says. He works his fingers harder into you, twisting them to brush against your prostate, and when you groan, he laughs—it’s a mean little sound. “That’s right. Open up those dick-suckin’ lips of yours and let me hear you.”
You don’t groan again, but you also don’t try to hold in the heavy stutter of your breath as he fucks you with his fingers. You can tell that he likes that—he’s grinding his hips upward, fucking the curve of your fist, and twisting your head up and closer so that he can mouth over the space below your ear.
“Have you been with anyone else since the last time?” he asks. “The morning after the club, in your apartment. On the floor.”
You know when and where the last time was, but you wonder when it became “your apartment,” not “Alex’s apartment.” You shoot him your most disgruntled look and say, “Are you seriously asking me if I’ve been faithful to you since our one-night stand?”
“Doesn’t seem like it was a one-night stand, does it?” he murmurs, pressing into you with a third finger.
You let your head roll back. “It can be a one-night stand even if it happens again, as long as it’s meaningless. As long as you don’t do it like a couple. You just—there are rules.” He echoes the last word in a questioning whisper, so you swallow hard and continue, “Don’t lend the other person clothing. Don’t have breakfast together. Don’t—”
“Gave you my coat tonight. You’ve made me pancakes,” he says, nipping your jawline hard enough to send beautiful sparks of pain down your neck.
“I made you pancakes two months ago, not after we slept togeth—”
“Those are the wrong rules anyway,” he says. He pauses to grip one of your knees and yank your legs as far apart as your jeans, still tangled around your calves, will allow. “The real rules of a one-night stand? No contact information. No repeats. No kink you’ll have to tell your friends about. No barebacking. Which, again, brings me to my question—have you been with anyone else since last time? Because I haven’t been with anybody but Rach, and everything she and I have done together has been protected, and sweet Lord, I wanna fuck you bare. Please tell me I can.”
Your throat tightens. So does your grip on him. No one has ever, ever done that to you. That sort of intimacy was something you had planned to save for someone special, for the one. Not for some beautiful jackass you shouldn’t even let touch you. And you don’t know what it means that you never did this with Travis or Garen, and James won’t do this with his girlfriend, but you’ll do it with each other. You think that should mean something, even though you know it doesn’t. But when you hesitate, or when he senses your hesitation, he scrapes his short nails over your thigh and says, “You’ll love it. I swear, McCutcheon, it’s so hot. Raw. Dirty, filthy. Flawed and flawless. It’s too much, and it’ll make everything else feel like not enough.” He bites down hard on the stretch of muscle where your throat meets your shoulder. You grind back onto his fingers and cry out, too loud. He quiets you, kisses your neck--no, too much, too sweet, why is he doing that?—and then brushes his lips across the shell of your ear to whisper, “I want to fucking ruin you for everyone else you’re ever with.”
“Okay,” you choke out, even though that’s not what you mean at all. “Do it, now, please.” But he doesn’t. You’re nodding, you’re grabbing at his wrist, you’re raising your hips so that he can shift beneath you and line the head of his cock up with your hole, but he’s not pushing in. He’s not fucking you, even though he must know how much you want it, how much you need it. You try to sink down onto him, to make that connection he hasn’t made, but he grips your waist and holds you up, hovering just above him. “What the fuck, James?”
“Say it again,” he says.
“Now,” you snap, and he huffs out a laugh against your shoulder and shakes his head. You know exactly which word you’re meant to repeat; you know you’re meant to say please. The idea of it sends a spike of red-hot embarrassment through you, followed by an incredible deepening of your arousal. That’s so wrong. You shouldn’t be so turned on by the threat of him making you beg to be fucked and used. You should be humiliated, but you’re not—or, you are, but it’s a good humiliation, a slow burn under your skin. It’s sick. You’re sick, you’re dirty, you’re perverted, and you don’t know how to be anything else. You close your eyes and whisper, “Please.”
His fingers dig deeper into your skin, and his voice sounds almost like a growl when he says, “Louder. Say it loudly and repeatedly, until I’m satisfied, and then maybe I’ll satisfy you—”
“Please,” you say hoarsely. He isn’t fucking you, and he isn’t hurting you, and you need both. You knot your fingers in your own hair and pull until your scalp is tingling, but it’s not enough. You catch a handful of James’ dark, silken hair and force his mouth back to your shoulder so that he’ll bite you again. He obliges, and you can feel your eyes rolling shut as you say again, “Please. Please, please fuck me, you said you wanted to ruin me, and I want you to, please, need it, please, please—”
And then he’s yanking you down by your hips, filling you so suddenly and deeply that you fear you’re going to split in two. There’s no pause for you to adjust—just him working you onto his cock, fucking up into you, and it hurts so right. It isn’t painful in the way the first time with Ethan had been painful, with barely any lube and both of you too uncomfortable with the idea of fingering for there to be any prep beforehand. And it isn’t that playful sort of painful, the way it had been with Garen, because yes, G had always been willing to scratch you, pull your hair, fuck you fast and deep, tie you up that one time, but there were things you would never have asked him for. Things he would never have been able to do for you, not without driving himself a little bit mad. You think James might already be a little bit mad; it would certainly be a valid explanation for why, when you drag his hands from your hips to your throat because you want him to choke you but don’t know how you could possibly verbalize something that perverse, he chuckles and says, “Oh, no. Got a much better idea than that, sweetheart.”
Instinctively, you cringe at the term of endearment. You know he doesn’t mean it, and that isn’t the problem, except that it is. You know there have been dozens of men and women before you who have all been James Goldwyn’s sweetheart for an hour or so, and after that, they’ve been pushed away, thrown out. This is not what your body was meant to be used for. You’re supposed to treat yourself with the dignity and respect that God intended, but you’ve read your Bible over and over, and not even the most brutal scenes in the Old Testament will tell you that you’re anything other than a pervert and a sodomite and a freak for wanting the things that you want. You’re awful, and you’re sorry, and you know you need to be punished for wanting these things, but it doesn’t feel like a punishment when James strips off his necktie, folds it over itself, and draws the silk taut across your throat. It feels like a reward.
“Put your hands on my wrists,” he orders, and you obey without hesitation. “If it’s too much, squeeze down, and I’ll ease up. Don’t want you passing out on me before I’ve had my way with you.”
That shouldn’t turn you on as much as it does, the idea of him completely cutting off your air supply, of him making you dizzy, making you faint. It’s harder to maintain a proper rhythm now that both of you are focused on the fabric at your throat. You end up kicking off one of your shoes and briefly releasing his wrists—that earns you a growl of protest and a quick jerk of the necktie against your windpipe, which earns James a choked groan and a buck of your hips—so that you can reach down and free one of your legs completely from the jeans. You can spread your legs more now, brace your weight properly, ride him hard even though every upstroke has your head hitting the roof of the car.
You’re not sure if it’s that repeated thunk of your skull against the Ferrari, or the fact that James’ grip on the tie keeps tightening and tightening, but after a few more minutes, you’re starting to get too dizzy to keep the rise and fall of your hips steady. You don’t want to tell him to stop; you don’t want him to sneer at you and tell you you’re weak for not being able to handle more. You want him to see how much and how hard you can take it. A twisted, humiliating part of you wants him to leave a necklace of bruises around your throat, wants him to kiss the marks and tell you how well you’re doing. Just like in the diner, when he told you to shut up and sit down, and you obeyed, and he whispered good boy, and it made your heart pound and your cheeks flush, and you don’t know why.
Another minute, and your vision is starting to gray out at the edges. You can’t take it anymore. You dig your fingertips into the delicate bones of James’ wrists, and, fortunately and unfortunately, he immediately releases you. He soothes your throat with one cool palm, and once he’s satisfied that you’re alright—or, at the very least, that you’re conscious—he winds the necktie around your wrists, binding them together with a series of intricate knots made by deft fingers. When you shoot him a bewildered glance over your shoulder, he smirks back and says, “Ten years of horseback-riding, six summers of sailing, eight semesters of stringing lacrosse nets, and two unreasonably long military leadership education workshops on rope skills during my freshman and sophomore years. I’m good with knots.” Only once the tie is secure enough that you couldn’t wriggle out of it even if you wanted to (and you don’t) does he bother to blink at you and say, “This is okay, right?”
You know that it’s probably good that he’s checking on you, but it doesn’t feel good. It feels too concerned, too friendly. You dig your elbows into his ribs and snap, “If I wasn’t okay with it, you would’ve been able to tell. Mainly because I’d have pulled away and punched you in the mouth. Now shut up and fuck me, slut.”
You feel guilty for calling him that—you feel guilty for everything these days—but it wipes the smile off his face, replaces it with a snarl. He forces you back up off his dick and begins to manhandle you around, bending your limbs in ways they’re not supposed to move and shoving at you enough to make your joints pop, until finally, you’re back on his lap, back on his cock, facing him with your knees planted on the seat on either side of his hips.
“It’s really goddamn rich of you to call me that, you know,” he pants, grabbing a fistful of your hair and dragging you in until your forehead knocks against his and the tip of his perfectly straight nose is brushing your cheek. “You’re as bad as I am. At least I know what I am. At least I admit that I’ll fuck anyone I feel like fucking. But you pretend to be so pure, you’re so saint-like, until your best friend in the whole world tells you that he’s desperately in love with you, and then your immediate reaction to that situation is to get another man’s cock in you.”
You don’t know if you get off on the horrible things he says or not, but you know you’re barely listening to them. You pull back just enough to raise your hands through the space between you, dropping them behind his head so that your arms are wound around his neck and bound at the top of his spine. He drags you right back in by the hair, and you can feel his breath on your face, sure that he can feel yours, especially once he starts to jerk you off. And then you are both making soft noises right there in each others’ space, practically into each others’ mouths. You might be kissing, if not for that half-inch of space, and you wonder what he would do if you leaned in just a little more and closed that gap.
His phone rings.
Any normal human being would ignore it, but James is not normal. He spares a glance to the caller ID and answers the call, pins the phone between his shoulder and his ear—you have to shift your forearm further out on his shoulder, mostly out of the way—and then his hands are right back in your hair and on your cock, and you are certain that James is not normal.
“What do you want, Anderson?” he snaps into the receiver. At least it’s Garen, not his girlfriend. You make a grab for the cell phone anyway, but your hands are still tied together, so you don’t make much progress. He shoots you a warning glance and says into the phone, “He’s not.”
You don’t know what the question was, but you’d bet anything that it was about you. Your knees are slipping against the leather of the seat, and you readjust, trying to see if you can hear any of what Garen is saying. All you can make out is the indistinct rumble of that smirky, smoke-wrecked growl he calls a voice.
“I talked him out of those,” James finally says, and then, a beat later, he repeats the sentence. Garen’s response continues, pauses, then continues in a yell. You roll your eyes toward the roof of the car—they’re unnaturally codependent, this isn’t even the first time you’ve had to wait out a Garen-James phone call while one of them was inside of you—but then James adjusts the angle of his thrusts, and your eyes are rolling for a completely different reason.
He’s saying something to Garen, and you don’t like to interrupt people who are engaging in conversation, but you can feel yourself getting too close, and you’ll be damned if you let Garen hear you coming on the other end of a phone call. You grind out the words, “End the call, or I’ll break your phone.”
You would, too. It isn’t as if he couldn’t afford another one to replace it. He could afford a dozen to replace it, if he wanted to, and he probably wouldn’t bat an eye as he signed the credit card receipt for them, either.
“Is there a reason you called, G?” he snarls into the phone. “Don’t get me wrong, hearing your voice is a lot sexier than hearing this little bitch barking orders at me--harder, faster, scratch me, choke me.” You might be embarrassed, if Garen didn’t already know that you were sick enough to want those things. “Only, it’s a little difficult to jack him off, and pull his hair, and hold a cell phone all at once.”
His solution to that problem, even as he voices it, is to stop stroking your cock so that he can take the phone in hand. He doesn’t stop pulling your hair—he pulls a little harder, truth be told—but you need to get a hand back on you. You shake your head viciously from side to side, wanting to show your displeasure without risking Garen hearing you say, don’t stop touching me.
James cocks an eyebrow at you, and how anyone can look so smug even while he’s panting, moving, fucking you, is completely beyond your comprehension. He mouths, close? You don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing it’s true, but you hold onto the hope that maybe he’s decent enough to touch you again if you admit that. You give a very stiff nod, and he shoots you a wide, open-mouthed smile, then says to Garen, business-like in his succinctness, “I’m aware. I’m hanging up now. We’ll be done soon.”
And then he’s finally lowering the phone, ending the call, practically flinging his iPhone across the car. It hits the driver’s-side door and clatters to the floor somewhere, maybe cracking, you’ve got no idea. James lunges forward and catches your bottom lip between his teeth, biting down so hard you fear (and hope) he might draw blood. He releases it to whisper, “You gonna come for me?” when you start to shudder, then bites back into it when you nod and jerk closer and spill mostly onto your own shirt, but somewhat onto his, too. You’ll apologize for that, maybe, later, but right now, you’re just coming so hard you feel like you’re about to start sobbing. You need friction, oh god, you need him to touch your cock, or you need to be able to touch yourself, to wring the last of your orgasm out, but you can’t. All you can do is tremble, untouched. He hasn’t stopped biting you, or gripping your hips with bruising strength, or fucking you, though his rhythm is sloppier now. You know you’re still grinding down onto him and clenching around him, but you don’t realize how much it’s affecting him until he slides his hands from your hips up your spine to grab at your shoulders and yank you down against him, stilling you as he comes inside you with a groan that’s nearly inhuman. You can feel it. You’d expected that, within reason, but it isn’t until you’re full of the dirty heat of it that you really understand what he meant about it being too much. You wish your hands weren’t tied, but you don’t know what you’d be doing differently if you were freed. You don’t know anything right now.
He’s not so much biting your lip anymore—it’s more as if he’s sucking on it, his teeth still clamped down on it but his tongue soothing over the pinched skin. It makes you want to scream, and not in a good way. You’re a heartbeat from shoving him back or pulling away, but then his hand comes up to cradle the back of your neck, and he’s tilting your head down, and his upper lip is slotted between yours, and he’s kissing you. He’s holding you to him, and he’s giving up the biting in favor of slipping his tongue between your lips, and he’s kissing you, like you’re lovers, instead of two men who can’t stand each other.
It only lasts a few seconds before you launch yourself off his lap and into the driver’s seat, even though your sudden emptiness is downright painful. The two of you stare at each other for a moment, and you can’t help but let your eyes travel his body—his pants are pulled halfway down his thighs, his cock is still half-hard, shiny and slick with cum and lube. There are cumstains on his Oxford. His artful haircut is mussed, and his beautiful face is flushed. There’s a smear of eyeliner on his cheek, but you don’t know how it got there. He’s staring at your body, licking his lips, and you’re only bare from the hips down, but you’ve never felt more naked in your life.
You shove your free foot back into the leg of your jeans, yank them and your boxers back up. It’s a struggle, because your hands are still bound by the necktie, and you’re just so… ashamed. Your best friend is in love with you, and here you are, filled with his ex-boyfriend’s spunk, in your friend’s car, tied up like an animal. You don’t know how you became this person. You swear, you used to be good. Or, you think you were good. Maybe. You’ve spent your entire life trying so hard to make your family proud of you, and you’ve tried so hard to do the things you’re supposed to do, to live your life the way you know He wants you to, but lately, it’s like every single thing you do is more fucked up than the thing before. You’re still trembling, and you wish it would just fucking stop. You wish you had more control over yourself.
James’ expression is wary as he tucks himself back into his pants, zips up, and reaches for your wrists. “Here. Let me take care of you.”
It’s not what he means. You know that all he wants to do is get his hideous necktie back, but his words are all wrong. So unbelievably, painfully wrong. You shake your head and jerk your hands out of reach. “I can do it.”
“McCutcheon,” he sighs.
“I can do it,” you snap. He turns to glare out the passenger window as you yank at the ends of the tie with your teeth. You pretend you don’t notice that the silk smells like his cologne. You wonder how much he spent on the tie you’re getting your spit all over. A hundred dollars? Two hundred? More? He doesn’t even care that you’re chomping down on it as if you’re a puppy with a chew toy. He just waits in silence until you finally manage to open the worst of the knots, and then it’s fine. You free yourself without much trouble, fling the tie onto his lap, and tumble out the driver’s side of the car, wriggling back into your hoodie as you go.
You’re grateful that you chose to back into the next space over, because it means that you only have to take two steps to get behind the wheel of your own car. You climb inside, slam the door, and grip the steering wheel. You will not let yourself make this worse by enjoying the afterglow. You don’t deserve that—not when you’ve just done something you swore you’d never do again. Not when you’ve betrayed your best friend, the man who apparently loves you. Not when you’ve fallen to temptation yet again, in the same perverted way you’ve been doing since you were sixteen. It’s not okay. You know that being with another man is not okay, but sometimes, you wonder if it could be, if you were in love, if it were special. Maybe it’s okay for Garen and Travis to be together. Hell, maybe it was even okay for you and Travis to be together.
But not you and James. Never you and James. Every step of the way, he asked you what you wanted, and every time, you gave the wrong answer. You wanted him to choke you, to fuck you, to come inside your body, to… kiss you. You wanted that, too, even if you hate yourself for wanting it, for wanting him. He is a test that your body is determined to make you fail.
There is a faint tap-tap-tap on your window. You allow your eyes to dart to the side. James is standing there, face blank, hand gesturing for you to roll down the window. When you don’t move, he raises the other hand; he’s holding your shoe. You’d forgotten to put it back on after dressing yourself. You laugh, but your bones have all gone away, and you can’t make yourself turn on the car and roll the window down.
So, he does it for you. He opens your door, leans in to turn the keys, then presses the button to lower the window. You make no move to accept the shoe, so he hooks his hands around your calves and turns your body ninety degrees so that your legs are dangling in front of him. He kneels on the ground in front of you, seemingly unconcerned with the fact that there is snow melting into the expensive wool of his trousers. He slips your foot back into the shoe like he’s the charming prince and you’re Cinderella, but if your life is a fairy tale, it’s the Grimm version. This isn’t Cinderella, with singing mice and happy endings; it’s Aschenputtel, and you’re one of the evil stepsisters, cutting off your toes to fit into gold slippers and waiting for doves to peck out your eyes. You would deserve it, too. You have bled for far lesser offenses than this.
James ties your laces in a neat bow, stands, and shoves himself back between your legs. You glare at the buttons of his peacoat and try not to think about the fact that he has only buttoned it up to hide the smears of cum on his shirt. He doesn’t speak, and you don’t want him to, but you don’t want him to stand there any longer, either, so you eventually consent to meet his eyes.
“I don’t like you,” he says. “I think you’re a melodramatic, pretentious, boring midget with a martyr complex the size of Texas, and when you speak, I think about sticking thumbtacks in my ears, because I am nearly certain that it would be more enjoyable than listening to you correct yet another one of Alexander’s grammatically incorrect sentences.”
You don’t say anything, because you know you deserve his verbal abuse. You might deserve physical abuse, too, but it would probably just get you off, and it’s that sort of sickness that has gotten you into this mess in the first place. You lick your lips and watch as his eyes flicker down to follow the movement.
He swallows, continues, “That being said… I don’t have anything to gain by lying to you again. So, I’ll just come out with it: I was never supposed to enjoy having sex with you, but I do. It’s wild and frantic and wrong in the sort of way that ends up accidentally feeling pretty right. I’m not going to ask you if you want to do this again, and I don’t expect you to ask me that, either. All I am going to say is that I know you have my number. And if you ever happen to be in New York, I wouldn’t be opposed to you using it.”
He steps back and allows you to swing your legs back under the steering wheel. He shuts the car door, flicks something through the open window at you, and strides off towards the diner. You stare down at your lap, where the crumpled silk tie has fallen. You fold it with trembling fingers, wondering if you should leave it in his car for him. By the time you have prepared yourself to get out of your car, you can already see the rest of the group returning from the diner, Garen bolting ahead of the rest of them. Before he can get to you, you stuff the tie into the side pocket of the driver’s side door and dig your cell phone out of your pocket to delete James’ number from your address book.
Because you are a bad person, and you don’t deserve to have anything that feels as good as he does.