Two partners at an intelligence agency go undercover as dominant and submissive.
Lucas is normally a thief-for-hire at an intelligence agency, and Smith is usually his handler – not to mention his sexy age-gap lover who teases him about following in his footsteps and becoming an assassin. In order to get themselves in at a swanky members-only kink club, the two of them go undercover, and Lucas gets to see a new side of the man he thought he already knew pretty well.
Part 1 of a few, this is 12k! Rated E although there’s not much explicit sex in this one – cis M/cis M, with Lucas Heathcock and Vittorio Smith from Like A Thief and an Assassin. Lots of bondage, some hypnosis and suggestibility, some discussions of kink and sadomasochism throughout.
“Undercover?” Lucas repeats, not trying at all to hide the fucking delight on his face. He hasn’t had much interesting work so far this year, especially since he sprained his ankle in January and had to spend like a month or two on ice as it healed up.
Doctor Mallory is standing up and leaning back on her desk, her hands folded in front of her. Lucas doesn’t normally talk much with her, ‘cause most of the time when he has to talk with management it’s because he’s been misbehaving, and she loses patience with her when he makes his Bond cracks, but like… Come on.
Her name is M!
She dresses really well. Lucas always likes to see her walk through the corridor – she doesn’t normally wear heels, just ‘cause, you know, in their line of work, it’s best if you can run, but her shoes are always pretty fucking nice and expensive, and she always wears these killer Versace suits and shit like that.
He doesn’t know about this one – it is Versace, he’s pretty sure, but it’s beige and double-breasted, and to be honest, it’s giving more Lawrence of Arabia than James Bond. It looks good on her, because everything looks good on her, but as a suit it’s not actually that nice.
“You can say no, Heathcock,” Smith says. Where Lucas is on his feet, Smith is sitting back in one of the red leather tub chairs in Mallory’s office, one ankle loosely crossed over the other, his hands resting on the arms of each chair.
It’s a Thursday, so he’s in the charcoal grey suit with the pin-striped vest, and because they’re in the depths of fucking winter, he’s wearing a thick black turtleneck underneath it instead of a shirt and tie.
“I don’t want to say no, I want to go undercover,” Lucas says immediately, and Smith exhales, leaning back in the chair with one of his long-fingered hands now coming to rest on his knees, and Mallory looks at him seriously. “You guys never let me do spy shit!”
“The fact that you think of it as spy shit is one reason why,” says Mallory scathingly, and then, glancing at Smith, slowly exhales. “You wouldn’t be taking on a different identity, Heathcock. We’re considering you for this role because of your existing relationship with Smith.”
“’Cause he’s my handler, or because we’re, uh… you know. Gay age-gap forbidden lovers?”
“Good Lord,” Smith mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose, and Lucas grins at him, then looks back to Mallory, who does seem a little bit less pissed, although only mildly. Smith’s voice is long-suffering and dry as he says, “The latter, Heathcock.”
It’s not like they keep it secret.
Except for the obvious, Lucas Heathcock is not a super secretive guy, likes to be obvious and open about most of his cards rather than keeping them close to the vest – everybody knows, for example, that he sprained his ankle because he got too excited running away from Smith at home and twisted it falling on the stairs. They were naked, but it’s not like they were even having sex, just… you know, playing around.
“You want me to do spy shit with you at a sex club? And you think I’d say no?”
“It isn’t just a sex club,” Mallory says. “It is a BDSM club, but more than that, it’s a very exclusive, members-only club. You won’t be going there directly, though, that’s what we’re telling you – you’d move into this apartment in Chicago, you’d take on some work, and you’d manufacture a meeting with Smith, in his role. You’d start off meeting one another in the local D/s spaces before he’d graduate to keeping you as his regular submissive, bringing you into the Pavillion.”
“And you can’t be a brat, Heathcock,” Smith says. “That’s what we’re trying to impress upon you: we won’t just be having sex or performing our usual intimacy. We’ll be before an audience, a rapt and incisively critical audience, and you will be judged on your behaviour as a submissive – and I on my capacity to dominate you.”
“That’s hot,” Lucas says, and then watches Smith’s expression flatten, watches his thin lips thin even more. “I’m taking it seriously, I promise! I’m into this! I mean, I’m not into BDSM stuff, normally, but I like that you’re old and mean, and I don’t mind you being scary and in charge.”
And it’s true, too – he and Smith have been hooking up for a little over fourteen months now, and their sex doesn’t normally have any roleplay stuff or any sadomasochistic stuff, but they’re pretty acrobatic together, they go for a long time, they play with toys, sometimes, normally just vibrating cock rings and sometimes a butt plug.
A BDSM club is… different, sure.
But he likes flirting with Smith at work and at home, likes how he smirks and gets all pleased when Lucas calls him “sir” or “Mr Smith” instead of Vittorio.
“This sort of intimacy before an audience is not for the faint of heart,” Smith says quietly. He hasn’t taken his eyes off Lucas for a moment, keeps on staring at him, studying him. “It will be punishing, and not merely because I might be whipping you, flogging you, laying blows on the backs of your thighs or your backside, dripping wax on you. Ordinarily, this sort of roleplay dynamic is more reciprocal, is led by the submissive more than his dominant – in this particular environs, as much as I will discuss everything with you first, as much as I will do my best to prepare you, you will be viewed more as an extension of my wants and desires, and more than that, a living representation of my ability to train and hone you precisely to my specifications.”
“That’s what you do with me now,” Lucas says. “You know, here at work.”
“It is not,” Smith says, but he’s trying not to laugh – Mallory scowls.
“He doesn’t drip candles on you at work, Heathcock.”
“Only ‘cause he’s so strict about the no-smoking regulations,” Lucas says, and Mallory slowly shakes her head. “C’mon, Doctor Mallory, he wouldn’t have suggested me if he thought I couldn’t handle it.”
“If the two of you weren’t already intimate, Heathcock, you would never have even made the shortlist as a candidate,” Mallory says, and Lucas leans back on his heels and looks to Smith, who is not studying his nails or otherwise avoiding Lucas’ gaze like somebody else would if they felt called out, but instead looks right back at him.
“They’d normally get you to take somebody else,” Lucas says slowly, “like one of the real spies, but you don’t want to cheat on me?”
“I have a standing membership in several of this club’s sister organisations,” Smith says quietly. “I am generally retired from my previous occupation as murderer-for-hire, but I retain a reputation amongst my cohorts. Most of the members of the Pavillion went to the same private school I went to as a child, attended the same university, or equivalent American institutions. It is a somewhat… hegemonic membership.”
“Rich and posh and white?”
“The white is the sticking point,” Smith says.
“What, they won’t let me in?”
“They will,” Smith says, “what we’re working up to is having you join me as my guest, as my submissive. The membership isn’t wholly white, or even wholly light-skinned, but it is dominated by white faces, and even were we not entering such an exclusive space, our partnership in public will be racialised.”
“I know what racism feels like,” Lucas says, looking from Mallory back to Smith.
“Racial fetishism in any kink space can be… particular,” Smith murmurs, with a slight wince. “What I said to you a moment ago, you will find the white faces more often in the dominant roles, and the others… dominated. And as I said, this dominant and submissive dynamic in this environs is meant to be an extension of my power of personality, a show not merely of ego or manipulation, but pure, human power.
“I don’t want to perform this sort of intimacy with a stranger, but I’m also aware of how going undercover like this could strain our relationship. Before you opt in as eagerly as I knew you would want to, I want you to consider the likely reality that this won’t exclusively be fun.”
“Exclusively,” Lucas says. “So you think it’ll be at least a bit fun.”
“Heathcock,” Smith murmurs in a softly chiding voice, but he’s trying very hard not to smile, and then he looks to Mallory, and Lucas looks between the two of them, at the way they’re communicating something silently, something complicated and subtle that he couldn’t hope to fucking do himself.
“We will ease you into this, Heathcock,” Mallory says finally, breaking her gaze and her silent staring match with Smith. “The move to Chicago, we’ll get you settled, have you doing some small local jobs, with a civilian cover. You’re going to struggle with it, I think, the lack of regular stimulation, being away from this facility, and this job.”
“O, ye of little faith,” Lucas says.
* * *
Lucas is bored out of his fucking mind.
On Mallory’s recommendation, they’d offered him fucking ADHD meds, as if that would somehow domesticate him, and he’d outright refused those. The place is a loft in the South Loop, and it’s a nice building, has its own gym and laundry facilities and a roof garden, but it’s all boring fucking people who work office jobs and have 2.5 dogs and a kid or whatever.
He thinks they were maybe trying to be helpful, putting him in in the corner of the South Loop that’s closest to Chinatown, but it’s not like he’s like, properly Chinese.
His mom had immigrated from Guangdong, and his dad had grown up in San Francisco, but neither of their families wanted anything to do with them, or anything to do with Lucas, when he was born, let alone when they both ODed together. Some of his foster families used to try to push it on him, but that was just because nobody wanted the onus of actually trying to fucking adopt him, ‘cause he was a liability, and he was crazy, and he was just annoying, and all that stuff.
He can read a little Mandarin and speak enough to get by, to be polite when some auntie obviously expects him not to reply in English, but out of six foster families he lived with, two were Chinese, three were white, and one was mixed, Blasian dad, Chinese mom.
The last ones were the best – James and Eleanor, who he called by their first names because by the time they’d been saddled with him, he was sixteen – and they’d been really hurt, he thinks, when he’d said no to them adopting him for real, making him an official part of the family.
He calls them sometimes. Sent birthday cards. They like the occasional reminder he isn’t dead yet.
But even they hadn’t been successful at getting him in touch with his heritage, although at least they’d respected it the most when he’d resisted it. He’s not ashamed of being Chinese-American, not even ashamed of his parents, really – sure, they were junkies, but they were junkies for the reason most people are junkies, that the world fucking sucks and they were poor.
He’s not stupid. He knows he’d be a fucking junkie, probably, if he hadn’t found another way to feel like he’s getting high, if he hadn’t found another way to get his thrills. And people don’t expect it of somebody that looks like him, Chinese and chubby and energetic and gay – they don’t even expect all those things to go together, let alone for him to be so comfortable with being all those things.
To be honest, stealing things has always been where he’s felt most at home. He likes antiques, likes fashion, likes art, likes jewellery, and he likes to read and he likes to watch TV.
One of the boffins, Julio, who worked in neuropsychiatry before he got hired by the Company, had suggested idly one day that it makes sense that Lucas likes to be a thief, because it means he gets to enjoy all the stuff and all the places that would automatically try to exclude him because of who he is – he gets to enjoy James Bond and loads of vintage spy stuff even though it’s fucking racist because he’s got a thief’s mindset, because it feels rebellious, like he’s stealing stuff from an empire.
Lucas thinks that’s kind of stretching it.
Like, sure, he gets it, whatever, it’s easy for somebody like him to feel rejected by society and by authority or whatever, but he started stealing stuff before people started rejecting him. He just likes how it makes him feel. He likes nice stuff, he likes different stuff, interesting stuff – he likes the thrill, he likes being a fucking criminal, he likes not getting caught, but he also straight-up likes the athleticism of it, likes scaling buildings and likes abseiling down them, likes sliding himself through the big vents that will fit him and circumventing the majority that won’t, likes picking locks and picking pockets.
The fact that people don’t expect a master thief to look like him is kind of on them, not him – it’s not like they put a big emphasis on visible representation in his line of work.
Mostly he feels kind of out-of-place as he walks around – the office buildings and fancy apartment buildings are too much, all suits and office people who wear matchy-matchy gym gear that costs more than some cars; Chinatown is a little better, maybe, but he stands out as a tourist.
He does do the tourist stuff. Checks out the Museum of Asian Art, takes the water taxi a few times, checks out the planetarium.
The jobs the Company hook him up with locally are pretty much the kind of thefts he’d have done as a little fucking kid, basic swipes and grabs, easy little break-ins where the security is fucking negligible, easy as anything to circumvent and slide past.
The fake civilian job is in a gay bar, and that’s fine. Not bartending, thank God, just cleaning, mostly, and washing up glasses, washing up the plates from the fancy little desserts they get ordered in from the hotel next door. It’s fucking boring, and they all think he’s crazy, ‘cause he’s just not good at talking with normal people – he isn’t good at flirting, and the first time he infodumps about Ian Fleming’s career, it’s like he can fucking see a little Sims 2 negative interaction icon appearing above their heads.
The gay bar does a BDSM meet-up in the function room two Thursday nights a month, though, and he checks it out, and it’s… It’s interesting. Different. He actually knows some of the shibari stuff already, because knots and ropes that’ll support a human body – or, you know, something heavier – are actually pretty useful in his line of work, but he’s never gotten into them in the bedroom.
Before Smith, most of the time he fucked guys here and there, casual and fast and anonymous, so that they didn’t get freaked out by how much he is, by how fast-paced his head goes and how much he is to deal with. He’s always liked older guys, liked how they can handle him, how they don’t get overwhelmed.
He dated a teacher for a year or two when he was thirty-something, and he was fun, hot, kinda stern, taught poetry. Smith is better, though, really gets him, and it’s like he doesn’t think Lucas is any kind of burden at all. He thinks he’s kind of a chore, sometimes, at work, but that’s because he finds it so easy to run fucking circles around him – and enjoys it when Lucas manages to catch him out or catch him off guard.
One of the girls at the BDSM meet mentions the club he’s supposed to meet Smith at, and so on his day off, a Saturday afternoon, he heads along. He wears a silk shirt and tight pants and Cuban heels that add two inches to his height, and he looks good, he knows he fucking looks good.
This place is—
Not so much like the meet at Queen of Diamonds.
It’s not just gay people, for one. There’s straight people, a lot of fucking straight people, and there’s a dress code, such a stern dress code that he actually thinks that they’re gonna make him put a tie on, although they don’t. There’s men in suits and women in fancy dresses, there’s people in leather, latex, lingerie with lace, but there’s no pup hoods here, and the whole vibe is…
Kinda ick, actually.
It’s not like it feels like a cash grab or something, but there’s something shallow to the vibe compared to the one at Diamonds. Even though it’s more exclusive and less casual, it feels less comfortable, less welcoming – less, he doesn’t know, communal.
Maybe it’s just because he’s a dyed-in-the-wool criminal and a pretty obvious homo and everybody around him clocks that whether they know that’s what it is that’s off about him or not, but it doesn’t feel as personal as that. People barely fucking look at him, talk to him, and he watches the demo of how to work on a pole, and it’s literally all girls doing it, no men – just men watching, and that’s…
That’s just weird.
Not even any of the crossdressing guys seem interested in trying, and he’s pretty sure they do call themselves, or think of themselves, as crossdressers instead of t-girls – the lack of an actual transgender presence here is kind of palpable, actually, and feels as weird as the rest of it.
The crowd is mostly white, and most of the people he sees that aren’t are mixed – two really light-skinned Black dudes are standing and talking together; a gaggle of younger women, he thinks they’re Korean, are guarding their drinks pretty carefully, which isn’t a bad fucking instinct, given how some of the dudes in their suits keep looking their way like they’re trying to think about how to split one off from the herd.
It’s been a while since he’s been on a pole, so he approaches, and waits his turn in line, and smiles as the women trying it look at him inquisitively, or amusedly. It’s a joke to them, he guesses, a fat Chinese guy who wants to work the pole – they maybe think it’s a humiliation thing, ‘cause for the guys in this place, it’s all about that, about humiliating themselves, degrading themselves.
“Are you sure you’re, um, okay to try? It’s a lot of muscle engagement,” says the woman running it. She’s aiming at Lucas and also a woman behind him who’s with two slimmer women, and he can see that they’re friendly, but she’s shyer than they are, less confident. She looks very aware of her size in this environment, is in a pretty cute floral sundress, but is hunching herself down a little so that she doesn’t look as tall next to her skinny friends.
The lady demonstrating, and now gatekeeping, the pole is not helping that confidence, and Lucas doesn’t like the way that she looks at her, the up and down look she gives her and Lucas both.
He wonders if she’s ever actually stripped or danced for money. She’s maybe his age, but she looks well-off. Her hair looks like she spends a lot of money on it, and like she uses a lot of skin products, and she’s had work done around her eyes and her mouth. She’s white and slim but not skinny, and there’s a lot of light muscle on her body, but he gets the impression that she takes a lot of supplements and does crazy diets, that she’s always obsessing over looking trim but not looking muscular.
The dress she has on is Chanel – it’s actually pretty cute, black bouclé, and it looks pretty drab compared to a lot of the dresses around the place tonight, but it’s probably pretty easy to dance in…
Still.
Seems a fucking shame to wear fucking gym shorts under it like that.
“I think I’m okay,” Lucas says, grips the pole, and swings himself into action – first he just plays with it, curls one leg around the pole and follows the momentum, pretends like he’s never done this before and is just shakily attempting the extended leg, but he loses patience with pretending pretty much immediately.
He does an aerial shoulder mount, and he listens to the girls ooh and aah and laugh in surprise, and he walks on air before planking on his side, then slides down.
“Don’t let the skinny girls let you down,” he says to the fat girl with her friends. “Stuff like pole is sexier when we’ve got curves, you know? Stamina, too.”
He’s said too much and overstepped the mark, because she laughs but kind of steps behind her friends while averting her eyes, and they both give him weird looks, and Lucas wonders if he’s coming off as flirting, somehow, ‘cause he doesn’t know if there’s a gaydar common to these people, and if it’s even got Asian guys installed.
When he turns away from the pole demo, it’s to see Vittorio Smith watching them, watching him, and it’s like he’s seeing the old man for the first ever fucking time. A thrill goes through his body, and for a second it’s like inhabiting this skin he’s in, this version of himself who’s just checking out something new and exciting, with immediacy and freshness.
Smith is just a sexy older stranger who’s looking at him, and Lucas is looking back, and it’s the first time in this dingy little place that he’s felt actually fucking connected to the person looking at him. They’re on a level, the two of them, in this moment, and it’s a relief as much as anything else.
Smith is in a very expensive suit, one Lucas has never seen before – it’s very dark black with shiny purple thread sewn into some of the stitching and the lining, so that as he stands there in the darkened room, Lucas can see the threads shimmer a little.
He looks good.
“You’ve done that before, I take it,” he says in his rumbling voice, only just loud enough for Lucas to hear him over the music, and Lucas is so excited to see him and to not be on his own anymore and for the fact that it’s Smith that he almost ruins everything and just straight away starts to babble about when he was learning pole in his twenties, how much fun it was, how he even stripped a little, in Vegas, but he wasn’t too popular.
“First time,” Lucas says instead, pretending he’s cool, even though he is so not cool, and he knows it. Not at all innocently, he adds, “Do you believe me?”
“I do not,” says Smith, smirking.
He’s cool. Lucas knew it the first time he met the old fucker, and he knows it now, knows it seeing how fucking at-ease and relaxed he is even in the middle of a place like this, even in this fancy suit with a purple necktie, and a silver pin through it. Lucas leans forward to peer at the tie pin, which looks like real silver to him – no gemstones, just a little inlay of a woman in relief.
“What’s that about, anyway?” Lucas asks, looking from Smith’s breast up to his eyes again. “Isn’t this meant to be like, BDSM stuff, whips and chains and ropes? The fuck does pole dancing have to do with bondage and discipline and submission and sadism and masochism and… I’m missing one.”
“Domination,” Smith provides helpfully. “Bodily control – and such… grace. You can see, I’m sure, what appeal that may provide to an interested party.”
“Is that what you are?” Lucas asks. “An interested party?”
“And if I am? Are you going to give me a private performance, young man?”
“Young man? That’s like, that’s so condescending,” Lucas says. “It’s dark in here, and my dermatologist might be like, crazy rich. Maybe we’re the same age.”
Smith laughs. “What a charming world you imagine,” he says, and he holds up his finger and curls it invitingly, the motion careful and controlled, and Lucas eagerly comes up to where Smith is leaning his forearms on the grab bars separating the two sections of the bar, and loosely grips at the metal. “I’ve not seen you at one of these events before. A foray into a new hobby, is it?”
“I kinda just wanted to get laid,” says Lucas, and Smith laughs again, and it’s so familiar, and at the same time, it feels new, different. Feels more like Smith at the beginning, when he was Lucas’ handler and not a friend, or a lover – Smith superior and kind of smug, and more distant.
Still. They’re on the same wavelength, at least, he knows that. It’s not like a lot of the other people in this place.
He wonders if it would feel that way if they really were strangers to one another – Vittorio Smith is a fish out of water in this place, more so than Lucas himself. He’s nearly seventy years old, although he looks crazy good for it and is still crazy fit, but he’s privately educated and fancy and British and comes from money and boarding schools and creepy English political manouvering, and Lucas is pretty sure nobody else in this grotty Chicago kink meet-up fit that bill.
There’s other seventy-year-olds, sure, other white guys, other English guys, maybe even other private school guys who graduated from Cambridge, but no one else here is all those things together, and no one here is all those things and also radically, deliciously insane, like Smith is.
“There are easier places to indulge a young man’s desire for a casual encounter, even apps for the purpose,” Smith says, quieter now that they’re so much closer together. At work, he always wears a sort of odour neutraliser, but he’s wearing a cologne now, faintly smoky and woody, and Lucas has to resist the urge to bury his face against the man’s chest and take in a big whiff of it. “Something particular about this place must have drawn your interest.”
“Pretty glad I came, yeah,” Lucas says, keeping his grip on the bar between Smith’s hands and leaning back on his heels, looking up at him, smiling. “What are you, then?”
“What am I?” Smith asks, arching an eyebrow.
Lucas wishes he could do that, raise just one eyebrow. Smith can raise either eyebrow, and he can wiggle his ears, too, can roll his tongue backwards. He’s double-jointed, and while he isn’t as flexible as Lucas is, with a mix of that and being a fucking crazy ex-assassin, he can dislocate pretty much any of his joints on command.
He’s offered to teach Lucas the bone dislocation thing, which unsurprisingly, he’s always said no to, and selfishly, he’s never offered to even tutor him on how to raise his eyebrows independently.
“You know,” Lucas says, gesturing around. “Are you looking to tie people up, or be tied up? You look like you could be one of those big finance guys who wants a woman bigger than him to rail his ass after making him take his heart meds.”
“My heart is quite healthy, thank you,” Smith says, narrowing his eyes slightly. His lips have taken on a slightly sneering smile, superior in a way that isn’t normally actually aimed at Lucas, and for some reason, it makes him squirm a little. “I’m afraid my preferences lie in the opposite direction.”
“You like boys?”
Smith laughs. “I do… And I prefer to dominate than to submit.”
“Cool,” says Lucas.
“Cool,” Smith repeats softly. “And you?”
“Just checking things out,” Lucas says. “Thinking about it. Like— About… about that I want.”
“And have you come to any conclusions?”
“You look pretty hot,” Lucas says. “I could see wanting somebody like you.”
“Very flattering,” Smith says. “Although it might occur to you that I am looking for a partner of comparable experience – a fellow veteran, so to speak. You are, it would seem, as yet untried and untested. Perhaps I’m not in the mood to train up a companion from scratch.”
“Please, control freak like you, with that posture from the stick up your ass?” Lucas replies. “You definitely like the idea of starting with a beginner. You summoned me right over here, with your finger thing – I bet you trawl these places just for somebody like me. Are you bummed I’m not also a virgin?”
Smith’s eyes are very dark in the dark room, only a tiny little glint of light in them, and Lucas stops being able to breathe as he reaches over and adjusts Lucas’ collar, smoothing out the fabric after fixing the shape of the lapel so it lays flat.
He likes to do that with Lucas, likes to fix little things – his hair, his lapel, his tie, when he has to wear them. Lucas wonders if that’s what this is going to be about, as they get into it, Smith fixing him, adjusting him to standard, and the idea makes his mouth go a little bit dry and his head feel warm and full.
“You strike me as quite incorrigible,” Smith says. “Is it discipline you’re in desire of, or merely an outside force against which to resist?”
“I don’t think I’d resist you much – wouldn’t want to hurt you. Your heart is good – what about your bones?”
“Quite healthy, I assure you.”
“Nice hard bones, good, cool, good. No accidental hurting the older guy.”
“Older guy,” Smith repeats, scoffing. “And to be hurt? Is that what you want?”
“Maybe. If it’s hot.”
“And what else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it only sex that motivates you?” Smith asks, tilting his head to the side and examining Lucas very keenly, and Lucas kind of doesn’t get the question, furrows his brow and shifts back and forth again on his toes, gripping at the bar, letting his body move one way and then the next.
“This is like… this is kinky shit,” he says. “Isn’t sex the point?”
“Sex, yes,” Smith says with a delicate half shrug of one shoulder, sort of dismissive, as if sex is just pedestrian compared to what he’s used to dealing with. “But there’s more than that, isn’t there? A hunger for something more deeply satisfying?”
“Like a really big—”
Smith leans forward, gripping Lucas by the shirt front and pulling him close, and abruptly they’re nose-to-nose over the divider, Lucas forced up on his tiptoes to be in line with Smith’s nose. Their lips are almost touching, and Lucas almost can’t breathe, and he glances at Smith’s hand.
He loves these fucking moments. Kind of lives for them, when he and Smith argue with each other, or just talk really fast – after so many months working together, and then so many months fucking each other, living together, shopping together, talking, they have a rhythm in common, and they get each other, understand each other.
People at work think it’s like a fun party trick, that Smith can predict what Lucas is thinking about and what he’s gonna do and even sometimes the time he’s gonna get on a challenge or the method he’s gonna take to approaching a job. They find it a bit spooky when they realise it’s mutual, that it’s not just Smith’s experience and the weird expertise he has about loads of stuff at his age – that Lucas knows what Smith will do when something goes wrong and he needs to fix it, that Lucas can sometimes predict to the syllable what Smith is gonna say in response to somebody’s fuck-up or to the news or anything else.
Smith and he dance together, at Company parties and also go to clubs sometimes, and people at work are surprised that Lucas can keep up with Smith, and normal people out in the wild are surprised that either of them can do anything, the old white dude and the not-quite-middle-aged-yet-fucking-thank-you Chinese guy, that they can tango, and cha-cha, and salsa, and that they do it fucking well, and look fucking good.
Conversations like these are like the dancing, in a lot of ways. It’s the same shared rhythm, the same push-and-pull and back-and-forth, and it’s exhilarating and fun even before Smith gets in his face like this.
Lucas feels like his head is spinning, and he’s so grateful not to feel bored anymore, but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna just give Smith an easy ride.
“Why doesn’t your tiepin match your cufflinks?” he asks, raising his eyebrows (both of them, sadly), and Smith’s eyes flicker, and his body slowly shifts. The guys at work that don’t know Smith too well, they think he’s cold-blooded, think of him as kind of reptilian – not in a gross antisemitic conspiracy way, but like, in a deep-seated scary predator way.
They see Smith and they sense how fucking dangerous he is, how controlled and careful and fucking predatory he is and can be, how he could kill basically anybody in the Company as easy as fucking breathing, and they think of him as like an animal that’s just made to that purpose, or like he’s some kind of fucking machine.
He’s not a machine, though. He’s not cold-blooded. He’s not naturally any of this at all – he’s honed his body for this purpose, trained it, shaped it, every part of his fucking body, his mind, his brain, and that’s as crazy hot as it is deranged. It’s what makes him a good handler and a good trainer, that he’s sectioned every part of his body and brain and personality into bite-sized chunks to train up to max level, and he’s willing to share it out.
“It does match the cufflinks,” Smith murmurs against his mouth. “The vases are Vestan; the relief is Vesta herself.”
“Antique? What is that, 19th century? Sterling silver?”
Smith’s eyes widen the slightest bit, and then he grips the bar and with cat-like grace slides his leg over, spinning on the meat of his thigh, and then he’s in between Lucas and the divider and he is so fucking warm, even before his mouth slides up the side of Lucas’ neck, teeth dragging over the skin before they nip at his earlobe.
“Wow,” Lucas mumbles. “If that’s what I get for recognising a bit of jewellery, what will you give me if I get the right answers on University Challenge?”
“Oh, young man,” Smith murmurs, manhandling Lucas around and pinning him back against the divider, pinning him in. It’s easier for him than it would be for most men so narrow and muscular as he is – Lucas has a soft and beautiful body with muscle underneath, but Smith is wirier, harder. “Don’t tell me you’re imagining Paxman in my place.”
“D’you go to school with him?” Lucas asks, faux-sympathetic. “Old rivalry, is it?”
“Jeremy Paxman is from Leeds,” Smith says, pronouncing the word as if it’s one of the circles of Hell, and not somewhere he’d be caught dead. “He is a fellow Cambridge alumnus, although a few years my senior. He was well-removed by the time I attended.”
“So he couldn’t get his Leeds cooties all over you.”
“Cooties,” Smith repeats, amused. “I didn’t know Americans actually employed that word with any level of seriousness.”
“I’m so serious,” Lucas says.
“Is that why your hand is in my pocket?”
“Just feeling around.”
“And what are you finding?”
“No wallet.”
“Oh, dear. Do you charge for your services?”
“Depends what you’re ordering.”
“I might have a great many orders.”
“Maybe you should have brought your wallet, then.”
“Oh, it’s there. Try another pocket, maybe.”
Lucas doesn’t, slides his hand under Smith’s open jacket as if he’s gonna go for the pocket and instead just slides his palm under the material of his waistcoat, feeling the lean muscle of his body through his shirt, and Smith laughs.
“Incorrigible is right,” he says, but lets Lucas molest him a little, even lays his hand over Lucas’, through the layers. “You are a very naughty boy, aren’t you?”
“What do I get if I say yes? Do you have any Werthers Originals in these pockets?”
“You’re quite preoccupied with my age, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know much else about you yet. I’m sure I can find other stuff to get preoccupied with. How about—”
Smith grips his hand before it can touch his cock through his suit pants, even though Lucas knows it’s a little hard, not even from feeling it, not even from touching it, but just from Smith’s face and the shine of his eyes and the shape of his smile and knowing him, wanting him, missing him.
“Ah ah ah,” Smith scolds him faintly. “What’s the phrase? Aren’t you going to buy me dinner first?”
“Is that why you’re hiding your wallet?”
Smith laughs, openly and freely and all scary straight teeth, and then he has Lucas bent over with his hands twisted behind his back, his breast against the divider bar, and Lucas shivers. Smith doesn’t pin him much, outside of sparring in the exercise room. They wrestle and they chase each other, but he doesn’t normally put Lucas in a hold like this that he can’t actually get out of, and when he realises that he’s firmly held, that he has no way of getting out without Smith letting him go, his blood feels all hot and gooey and sticky, and that’s to say nothing of what his dick is doing.
“You don’t seem displeased to be in this position. Are you very used to it?”
“Honest, officer, I’ve never been arrested in my life,” Lucas says.
He can’t see Smith’s face like this, but he can see other people in the place looking over at them – people look interested, or amused, and some of them look a little grossed out, maybe ‘cause Smith is so old or maybe ‘cause Lucas is fat or maybe because they’re both men, or maybe because Smith hasn’t even done anything to him but Lucas looks so horny, and they think it’s some kind of stolen valour against the real, hardened kink people.
He doesn’t need to see Smith to enjoy the syrupy drip of the older man’s answering laugh behind his head, and the way it feels like it’s sliding down his spine and right into his fucking pants.
“I need a volunteer,” Smith says. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Nah,” Lucas says. “I can volunteer.”
Smith leads him to another room, nudging him up to a smaller stage, and there are already a bunch of seats laid out in rows. Some have people sitting in them and hanging out already, and Lucas hadn’t even fucking realised this room was here, but they’re obviously walking in prepared for an event.
Smith frogmarches him whilst keeping Lucas’ hands pinned behind his back, up the little steps and onto the stage itself.
A sign reads SUSPENSION BONDAGE DEMONSTRATION, by Doctor Vittorio Smith.
“You’re a doctor?” Lucas asks.
“I’ll give you a treat if you can guess what of,” Smith says.
“Science,” Lucas says, because he does know, and he guesses that’s what Smith is hinting at, challenging him like this as he pushes Lucas into place. Was he fucking waiting for Lucas to show up, had this event set up?
“Go on.”
“Genetics?”
“No.”
“Biology?”
“Closer.”
“Pathology?”
“Ding ding ding,” Smith murmurs. “We have a winner.”
Releasing Lucas’ hands, he turns him around and pushes him back into a waiting chair, then crouches to unzip his boots.
“Aw, I’ll be short!” Lucas complains, which makes Smith huff amusedly, and makes a few people in the waiting audience laugh. None of them were close enough to hear them talking about Smith’s degree, he doesn’t think, but now they’re talking normally, the sound carries, and it is a performance of a kind.
At the back, filtering in, he sees the fat girl following after her skinny friends, and he vaguely notices a few other people he’s noticed around the club, different ages, different genders.
Smith was right, it is weird, different, being in front of an actual audience like this and being watched and studied and focused on – not people at a club where they’re dancing together and there’s other dancers to watch, or at work where there’s context, where people know Lucas and they know Smith, thief and assassin, insane weirdo and patient handler, kooky enthusiast and dusty old British dude.
“You don’t need shoes where I’ll be putting you,” Smith says, neatly setting Lucas’ boots aside, and then he unbuckles Lucas’ belt and rolls that up too. “No jewellery?”
“No,” Lucas says, and then, even though Smith is crouching on the floor and he’s looking down at him, even though Smith doesn’t say anything to prompt it, even though he doesn’t even prompt Lucas with his expression the way he sometimes does, he adds, “sir.”
Smith’s face changes the slightest bit, maybe darkens, but not out of sadness. He tilts his head a little forward so he’s looking up at Lucas through his dark eyelashes, and he’s smirking, and it’s a very dangerous, very sexy look.
“No corsetry under this shirt, no binder, girdle, compression or support garment?”
As he asks the question, he slides his hands up Lucas’ thighs, then up the sides of his belly, like he’s feeling for his answer.
“No,” Lucas says again, hearing his voice come out a bit breathily. “Sir.”
“Are you wearing underwear?”
“Yeah, ‘course.”
“Good boy,” Smith says. “I’ll take these trousers off you, then, if you don’t mind.”
“Are you gonna give them back?”
More laughter from around the room – it’s filling up a bit, more asses on seats, but Lucas can’t really concentrate on any individual people anymore, can’t bring himself to look away from Smith long enough to check out individual faces.
“If you continue to be so well-behaved, I’ll certainly consider it,” Smith says magnanimously, and as his clever fingers undo Lucas’ thigh, he lifts his ass and lets him pull his pants down his legs and off. “No circulatory problems, nothing wrong with your heart, lungs, blood pressure?”
“No, sir.”
“Splendid. Up you get, young man, give our audience a twirl.”
Lucas feels his cheeks heat up a bit as he follows the motion of Smith’s demonstrative finger and turns on the spot. His hands twitch at his sides, but his shirt is long enough to hide the bulge of his half-ready boner.
Smith is folding Lucas’ pants in that stupid, sexy way of his, aggressively flicking them out and briskly folding them into perfect sections.
“Oh, and—” he turns to look at Lucas. “Your name, dear?”
It’s so theatrical.
Smith doesn’t go in for “dear” and “love” and “darling” and stuff like that, and although he occasionally calls Lucas “babe”, it’s always dry and funny and sarcastic, because Lucas calls him babe sometimes.
Breaking out a term of affection now whilst folding Lucas’ pants, it’s really British and silly and gay, like they’re in an Oscar Wilde play or a fucking Monty Python sketch, and people are laughing at that, too.
“Uh, Lucas, sir,” he says.
“Then I must be Doctor Smith,” Smith says to their audience with a smile and a slight incline of his head. “Now, Lucas, you are a mouthy one – you don’t mind my saying that.”
“No, sir,” Lucas agrees, half through a laugh. “You’re not wrong.”
“I so rarely am. Come here, Lucas.”
Lucas steps closer in his socks, automatically obeying the order, and then grunts in surprise as the ball gag is inserted deftly into his mouth. His eyes are wide as Smith casually straps it behind his head, sliding a finger under the strap to test the buckle isn’t too tight.
“Good man,” Smith says, patting the side of his face roughly enough that his cheek stings and his body tingles, although it’s kind of hot, actually, in a weird sticky way that makes his organs wiggle around inside him. “If you need me to stop, you’ll snap your fingers twice. Show me that you know how.”
Lucas snaps his fingers.
“Good,” Smith says, smiling. It’s a very threatening smile, full of foreboding – Lucas used to get it when he was about to be pushed through a really gruelling session in the lab or the training field, and most of the time now he sees Smith aim it at new recruits, or somebody that another handler has basically asked Smith to make regret ever being fucking born.
Lucas has a moment to sit with that sadistic smile and all it portends before the blindfold is passing over his eyes.
He hadn’t expected it, and it makes a noise fall out of his mouth and hit the gag, which is firmly nestled between his teeth like a horse’s bit, although he can still close his mouth most of the way, and he isn’t drooling around the ball like he knows you do with the bigger ones.
Smith says, warmly, soothingly, like he is calming an animal, “Hush now, be a good man, that’s it…”
The headphones slide into his ears and then something is put over them and over his head, holding them in place and cancelling out any background noise. It’s just instrumentals, and he vaguely recognises them as from a Bond soundtrack, although in the moment he can’t think which one.
Fuck.
Lucas is standing there with his hands by his sides, sightless, gagged, ears plugged, and he feels rooted to the spot. He’s very aware of Smith beside him, Smith’s hand casually on his shoulder and then on his lower back as the other gestures around – as he talks.
Talks to the audience, Lucas guesses, addressing them, while he’s made sure that Lucas can’t join in, can’t be an active part or partner in the performance, but more than that, can’t even react to anything Smith says or anything anybody else says back, he’s just there, an object, kind of, a doll, a demonstrative human crash dummy.
Goldfinger starts to play, and it’s a banger, and it’s fucking distracting, especially with all his other senses dampened, even as Smith tugs him closer and starts fucking tying him up.
He’s in such a strange mood, fells almost like he’s been drugged and wonders if maybe the ball gang resting on his tongue was dosed with ket or something similar. Everything feels dreamy and slow, and every touch of Smith’s fingers, his hands, on Lucas’ body feels at the same time urgent and like it’s happening in slow motion.
Smith ties his arms behind his back, wrist to elbow, and passes the rope around and around his body. It’s nice rope – it’s very soft, not like the stuff Lucas climbs with. This has a lot more give, slides against his skin with no bite or dig, and is finely woven.
He tries to concentrate and track exactly what Smith is doing, to visualise what pattern he’s making on Lucas’ body, but it’s hard because he’s so fast and Lucas struggles to think about the rope when his whole being wants to concentrate on the ghosting feel of Smith’s hands, sliding down his flank or his thigh, checking the rope’s give, making his knots.
It’s glancing, the touches of Smith’s hands, just touches against his flesh in the process of passing the rope through – not the flat of his palm or the press of his fingertips, but the sides of his hands, his knuckles, and then a calming squeeze of Lucas’ shoulder before he abruptly feels himself lifted clean off the ground by a focal point between his shoulders.
The harness digs in around his breast, under his tits, and under his belly, around his thighs, and it actually feels really good – he feels basically completely supported, and Smith has balanced out the harness so well that there’s no digging or catching anywhere on his body, and it feels fucking good. He’s aware he’s making noises, quite moans around the gag, as he swings a little in place, his feet kicking a little bit.
He’s gently lowered and the ropes are loosened and undone, and then Smith is pushing his arms forward, tying Lucas’ wrists together. Ropes again, oddly hypnotising, almost like snakes or tentacles or something else coiling around him kind of of their own accord, with minds of their own.
He’s falling… deeper.
If before was like a ketamine dose, now he’s bound for a k-hole, everything dizzy and slow and dreamy and warm. It’s instantaneous when Smith hoists him off the floor this time, and the moment his feet leave the floor lasts for fucking hours, his head tipping backward, his back cradled by a hammock of ropes.
Suspended on his back rather than up straight, his body swings a bit more, and Smith puts out a hand to steady him on the side of his belly, palm flat and warm, not gripping, just resting there as a counterweight.
This time as he lowers Lucas down, one hand is on his shoulder and the other under his thigh, supporting him as he’s brought down. Lucas knows Smith can carry him pretty easily – despite Smith being taller and looking very thin, he’s deceptively heavy, and the two of them probably weigh about the same.
Still, though, this feels extra intimate.
Like Smith is pulling him down from the sky.
The music takes him away, ebbs and flows, and he melts into it, more ties – he’s hoisted up again, this time by his ankles, and Smith catches his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t knock his head against the floor as he’s flipped over and suspended by his ankles like a caught tuna.
Dangling upside down, his shirt rides up and blood rushes to his head and he just starts laughing. It’s hard, around the gag, but he laughs anyway, is still laughing when Smith scoops him up bridal style and the hook around his ankle is lowered, and he peters off, slowly, as Smith sits down with Lucas in his lap.
Lucas blinks up at him, grateful for the room’s low lighting, as Smith gently removes the blindfold and the headphones and then the gag.
His fingers press and squeeze at Lucas’ slightly sore jaw, massaging away the ache and wiping the spit with a hankie, and then he starts undoing the ropes.
The room is empty now, all the chairs left behind, and Lucas lays his head on Smith’s shoulder and melts into him. He’s glad it’s over, the tying and dangling, but he liked it a lot, he thinks.
“That laughter was unexpected,” Smith says. “Did it feel ticklish, absurd?”
“It just felt really good,” Lucas mumbles, slurring a bit.
“Good,” Smith says. “Good. Are you working tonight?”
“No.”
“I’m taking you home, then.”
“How’d you know I was gonna be here?”
“I didn’t. This is a monthly event, but I was pencilled in a little while ago – if I hadn’t found you, I would have selected another volunteer.”
“Fuck that guy,” Lucas says reflexively. His legs feel like jelly when he tries to stand up, and he laughs again as Smith catches him.
“Did you drug me?”
“No,” Smith says, and Lucas wraps his arms around his neck and half-hides his face as Smith carries him outside, his pants and boots in the tote bag with Smith’s rope, slung through the crook of Smith’s elbow. People fucking rush in front of him to open doors so he doesn’t have to use Lucas’ body to open them, and Lucas hears a few people speaking admiringly about him as they go by – hears someone comment how surprisingly fit Smith is for a man his age, hears a woman sigh and say she wished most guys that good at this stuff were actually interested in women. “I didn’t need to drug you. Did you enjoy that?”
“Yeah. Fuck, it’s getting dark.”
“It’s nearly five o’clock.”
“Fuck off.”
It’s cold outside, especially half-naked, but Smith’s car is already heated and he has the seat warmers on as well, and once he has Lucas settled in the front seat, Smith unfolds a soft blanket over his lap.
When Smith crosses around the car and takes the driver’s seat, putting it in drive, Lucas says, “That was crazy. I didn’t know you were gonna… I thought you were gonna hit me.”
“Pain is predictable,” Smith says with one of his superior little smirks, the way he sometimes does when he’s giving Lucas information or teaching him something from an angle he doesn’t expect. “Sensory deprivation, not to mention manipulation, less so. I didn’t anticipate you enjoying it quite so much, though, I must say.”
“You wanted me to freak out?”
“Not wanted, no, but when you were upside-down, I anticipated that far more than you giggling about your ball gag like a loon. No, truth be told, I thought deprivation would tighten your awareness, not lower it. You melted into my arms like so much warm butter.”
Lucas doesn’t know what to make of his tone and his head lolls on the headrest as he looks his way. Smith’s expression is extra unreadable.
“Did I blow it?” Lucas asks. “Like, ruin the cover?”
“You haven’t ruined a thing,” says Smith, his eyes on the road. “Your performance was exquisite. It was a privilege indeed to handle you – the audience was very impressed.”
“Oh,” Lucas says. “And that’s… bad?”
“It isn’t bad.”
“Tell that to your face. You’re doing your neutral in meetings face. The no, I don’t want to talk about the news, I need time to calm down face. The I’m not looking at that cat video, Lucas, it’s the same as all the others you’ve ever shown me face.”
Smith smiles. It’s a very small, faint smile, but it’s a real one. Lucas waits, as patiently as he knows how – which is actually pretty easy at the moment, what with how fucking chilled out he feels – until he says extremely quietly, “I almost regret not pushing this sort of play sooner.”
“Better late than never,” says Lucas.
“Quite so.”
“Have you thought up loads of fucked-up kinky stuff you always wanted to do to me, and you’re able to do all of it now, and you don’t even have to worry about if I’ll like it ‘cause of the undercover? And you feel guilty, maybe, ‘cause it’s all really sadistic, and you’re horny about getting to hurt me?”
Smith inhales.
His face doesn’t blush or anything, ‘cause he can probably control individual blood vessels like those insane Buddhist monks that can look like they’re dead and slow their heartbeats down to nothing, and he has micro versions of microexpressions ‘cause of his whole thing, but still, Lucas knows him, gets him. He sees it, sees the confirmation in Smith’s face.
“Fuck, that’s so hot,” Lucas says, and Smith laughs and sort of grimaces because he thinks Lucas is a menace and he’s not wrong, but he does look a tiny bit relieved, Lucas thinks. “Is this blanket important? Can I jack off?”
“Can you?”
“Fuck you, old man, may I jack off? You said I could have a treat!”
“I did say that, Lucas, but then you said, “Fuck you, old man,” didn’t you? Hands where I can see them.”
Lucas groans and puts one hand on top of the blanket in his lap and his other hand in Smith’s lap, settling on his inner thigh, and Smith takes one hand off the wheel to smack him really loudly on the back of his hand.
“Where I can see them and to yourself,” he adds crisply, but he’s still smiling, and Lucas shifts back in the chair and presses the heels of his hands into his knees to avoid sliding them under the blanket or even over the blanket and against his cock, which has remembered that it’s in this thing to win it again and that there’s better stuff in the world than being sensorily deprived and dangled upside down in front of a room of strangers.
“Come on,” Lucas said. “I fucking signed up for this, Vichi, and I was super excited, I’m not gonna be judgemental about anything. I’m super horny about it – as you can see.”
“I cannot see, in fact, I have my eyes on the road,” Smith retorts. There’s still something kind of weird in his face, and Lucas is frustrated that he can’t dig into it, that he doesn’t know enough about where it comes from to pull on the threads and get a better look at it, to address it, to respond to it.
It’s what a life like Smith’s does to you, really – all that boarding school private school stuff, sent away from his family before he was old enough to wear long trousers (literally an insane thing to track, what the fuck, how did English people kill half the world and enslave a bunch of other people whilst freaking out about if their kids were too young to be allowed not to wear shorts?), and put through elocution classes and grammar classes and Latin and politics stuff as well as all the normal school subjects, with schoolmasters and matrons and other boys like him.
After finishing university, his family had actually thought he was slumming it being interested in studying tissue samples and stuff in a lab – his dad was a member of the House of Lords, which he’s explained to Lucas a few times and which seems both crazier and stupider every fucking time, and was a judge, and his mum was also a solicitor. They’d been disappointed he was so interested in the sciences instead of law, but then had gotten frustrated with the lack of like, social manoeuvring or whatever that he was meant to be doing.
Lucas doesn’t get it, personally. Smith fucking lights up when he talks about how you isolate chemical evidence in a blood or tissue samples, and Lucas doesn’t think there’s a single appliance in the world he loves more than a fucking centrifuge. He doesn’t really talk about it much at work unless he’s physically with some of the boffins in the lab, talking about tracking poisons or certain chemical structures, but sitting with Lucas at home or wherever he’ll sometimes talk about blood, or about histopathology or pharmacology or like, the Bradford arsenic poisonings, and his body goes loose and happy and he smiles really easily and his eyes crinkle at their edges.
Smith talks about pathology – and to be honest, about a lot of grisly chemistry in general – the way that you expect a lot of guys his age to talk about their grandchildren or their little dog or their rose garden, and it’s really fucking cute. Lucas can imagine him at twenty years old, or thirty, or forty, and showing all the same joy and enthusiasm. He can’t imagine looking at that joy and complaining he went into it instead of soliciting.
“Soliciting is not the same as pursuing a career in law,” Smith always dryly says when he calls it that, although Lucas knows he finds it fucking funny. “That would have been a different career path altogether, and my parents wouldn’t have liked it any better.”
He’s kind of dozing, he realises, or has been dozing – he only realises they’ve come to a stop because Smith is opening the door and reaching in and undoing his seatbelt for him, and then lifting Lucas up again, wrapped in the blanket.
“I’m not dying,” he complains, as if he doesn’t fucking love this, as if as he says it he isn’t throwing his arms around Smith’s neck and kissing under his ear and squeezing in close to him. “You don’t have to carry me.”
“There are a great many things I don’t have to do to you that I have on my to-do list,” Smith replies mildly, and sighs in pleasure as Lucas sucks on his earlobe, digging his teeth in just a little bit.
He not just drops the ear but nearly falls out of Smith’s fucking arms as a snotty voice to the left of them asks, “Dinner for two, sir?”
“If you would, Carter, that would be much appreciated. We’ll dine at six.”
“Very good, sir,” says Carter, a fat little white dude also with an English accent who’s maybe about Lucas’ age, toddling off and away from them as Smith glides through his apartment and lays Lucas down on his bed.
“You have a fucking butler!?” Lucas demands.
“He’s more of a valet,” Smith says. “What would you have me do, young man, cook my own meals, iron my own trousers?”
“You’re insane,” Lucas hisses, and Smith laughs as he nudges the door closed, then falls on top of him
They fuck the way they usually do, without any extra BDSM stuff, kissing, frotting, fucking face-to-face. Vittorio Smith, at his own admission, is actually more of a side than a top, and Lucas has always considered himself more of a bottom up to now, not because he’s really that obsessed with getting penetrated rather than doing the penetrating, but because he’s more of what Smith would call a “passive” partner.
It’s not like Lucas is lazy – he not just enjoys exercise but enjoys a lot of exercise that strikes most people as pretty much deranged if they even realise it exists – but he likes when he’s bottoming for the guy topping him to want to shove him around and position him how he wants and to roughly fuck him; when he’s topping, he likes to sit back and invite the other guy to use him, to ride him, or to position themselves in a way where the other guy is doing more of the work than he is.
“Near all your waking hours, you’re tracing one precious object or other, positioning yourself best to steal it – you study it, its defences, and mount an attack upon them. I rather love that sexually, you expect your partners to come to you, to mount their seductions to act upon you.”
They’ve talked a lot about it, about sex and desire, and that’s really why this shit feels so crazy to Lucas now, he thinks, the idea that there’s this bit of Smith’s personality, of his sexuality, that he’s been holding back – not keeping secret, exactly, but obfuscating, and keeping in shadow.
He’s talked about studying sexuality through medicine, kind of treats it as neutrally as he does the rest of his study of the body – pain and pleasure are tools like any other, he says, used to reward or to punish, used to seduce or deter, to deepen one relationship or other. Not as a pathologist, but later on, once he was actually assassinating people – “neutralising targets” – or gathering important information and doing spy shit occasionally, he’s talked about doing honeypot stuff.
The first time he’d mentioned it, sort of offhand, it had been while they were eating breakfast together at a nice brunch place, and going from talking about the chemical process that goes on while somebody poaches an egg to talking about being a social chameleon and moulding yourself into the ideal figure to offer the greatest potential pleasure to a target, to present yourself as a bottom or a top, a passive or active partner, like… That should be illegal.
Because Lucas had gone from enjoying his eggs to sort of staring at Smith over the table with egg yolk dripping off his fork and from his lip and with his dick hard enough that he was suddenly glad the place they were at had stupid fucking tablecloths, and Smith had said, “We’re enjoying a meal, Lucas, and if you attempt to invite me into a bathroom or a coat closet to attend your needs, I will not be pleased,” and he’d said it while smirking his stupid sexy smirk, and Lucas had hissed, “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” and Smith had said, “An elegant first attempt at seduction. Nonetheless, eat your eggs.”
Still, he’s talked about when he was younger and first getting into intelligence stuff and undercover work, doing seduction stuff, but it’s always been with the active/passive thing, talking about pursuing or letting himself be pursued or engaging in a mutual dance. He’s talked about shit like class or accent, body language, verbal hypnosis stuff, the art of flirtation or coded language, or social mirroring – he’s even talked about erogenous zones or appealing to specific fetish sites or attractions, talked about hair or clothes or nice shoes or sitting or standing in just the right position to emphasise your neck or your waist, or showing off how strong you are.
But the sadomasochism stuff… Nah. Sometimes they wrestle and they play a little bit more roughly, but Lucas isn’t as strong as Smith and even if he was, he’ll never be as crazy honed for violence as he is, and Smith is always super careful not to mark him up too badly or leave him with uncomfortable bruises – sometimes Lucas throws himself at him solidly enough to wind him, or Smith spanks him or gives him a little hickey or something.
They make out, they frot, they grab at each other, laugh into each other’s mouths, get refamiliarized – it feels fucking good, feels like coming home, to slot their bodies together, to feel Smith’s stupid narrow hip bones under his hands and all his muscle and leanness and curly chest hairs, to tumble over and over in bed.
It’s pretty mutual, though – maybe Smith pins him down a little more than usual, rolls them over so he’s more on top, but he doesn’t hurt Lucas, and doesn’t tie him up.
But Lucas is thinking about it, of course he’s fucking thinking about it. He thinks about it as they fuck, and afterwards, when Smith’s butler brings them a meal, while they eat in relative silence because Lucas is unexpectedly hungry – unexpected to him, anyway, Smith doesn’t seem surprised.
“Did you do that fagging stuff at school?” Lucas asks after they shower, while he’s putting on his moisturiser.
“Again, I hazard to remind you that I am not the centuries old that you sometimes imagine me to be,” Smith says dryly, drawing his straight razor over his cheek, shaving himself smooth around the edges of his moustache and his goatee, which he’s trimmed down a little. Lucas kind of loves him using that thing, but not as much as he loves watching him sharpen it on the strop like Sweeney Todd – he shaves Lucas sometimes, but Lucas has never been a really hairy guy. He’s looking at himself in the mirror, focusing on himself, but Lucas knows that with all the mirrors in the bathroom he can probably see Lucas from all angles. “But certainly, in the boarding school environment, one fumbles about with other boys, ostensibly to practice for later on. Some boys take on girlish roles in a way others don’t – I was never that, I must say, other boys were often nervous of my manner, my… intensity, perhaps. I was terribly frank, less adept at disguising, or perhaps cultivating and more strategically employing, my natural coolness.”
“Isn’t fagging like, more punishment? Like taking a guy’s punishment for him?”
“You might be mingling the idea with being a whipping boy in your head,” Smith says. “Fagging often involves – or involved, I should say, it’s a terribly out-of-date practice now – a level of submission to an older boy, helping him with his books and homework, perhaps having him fuck you. There was submission in it, certainly, and he might well beat you just as a schoolmaster would, but you couldn’t submit yourself for a punishment in another’s place – not officially, in any case. What brings this idea to the forefront of your mind?”
“You’ve thought about it,” Lucas says. “Like… like hurting me. And you’ve teased about it and we’ve flirted about it, but you punishing me has always been stuff like, you know, you teasing me or not making me breakfast, or maybe pinching me or something. Never the real punishment stuff, never really hurting me, or getting me to hurt you. But you’ve thought about it. So I’m just trying to get a sense of… of what those thoughts are.”
“I see,” Smith murmurs. “You were asking if I was domineering over a fag or two, not if I was one myself.”
“D’you ever think about caning me?” Lucas asks, rubbing cream into the backs of his knees and leaning back against the bathroom tile. It’s a really nice bathroom – sleek black tile and wood around the sink and the big bath, gold taps and fixtures, but a dark enough gold that it doesn’t look gross or tacky. “Making me count ‘em out?”
Almost infinitesimally, Smith’s posture shifts: the old man stiffens, his shoulders coming back a little, his neck straightening. He’s in some pyjama pants that are slung low on his narrow hips – he hasn’t got much of an ass, really, it’s muscular but not fat, but Lucas likes it, likes the shape of it. He cops a feel often enough, whenever he picks the old man’s pocket, or just to amuse himself.
“You do,” Lucas says. “What turns you on about it? Making me bend over and stuff, all the boarding school ritual of it? Or the— it hurts really bad, right? Caning? Afterwards, not just during, it leaves marks?”
“It’s a rather sharp, cutting pain,” Smith says softly. “You can easily break the skin, if you aren’t careful. A beating delivered with a broad, blunt tool – the palm of one’s hand, a paddle, the cover of a book – spreads the impact of each blow. Leaves less obvious marks, and more diffuse ones.”
“Like when you beat the shit out of somebody with a phonebook?”
“Precisely,” Smith murmurs, lips twitching. “A smaller implement can be a little more precise – a wooden spoon, a crop. A cane, being so thin as an implement, almost feels as if it’s cutting you when first the blow lands – it’s incisive, severe. An accurate marksman can layer blows in such a way as to leave a sharp horizontal line directly across the buttocks or the thigh – white amidst red, often, before the bruising comes in. The thinner the implement, the more painful.”
“And that turns you on,” Lucas presses.
Smith rinses off his razor, and then wipes off his face with a cloth. His posture isn’t that much stiffer than usual, on account of being so controlled all the time, just ‘cause of how he is, but Lucas can still see the difference.
“Lucas,” Smith says.
“Vichi,” Lucas replies, which makes Smith’s lips draw into a softer, warmer smile, ‘cause he really likes it when Lucas calls him that, reminds him of hanging out with his grandparents and all his aunts and uncles in Tuscany when he was a kid, drinking wine and criticising people’s outfits from like age five.
He sighs through his smile.
“You can’t be like, ashamed of it, insecure about it,” Lucas says. “It’s hot, I’ve been telling you it’s hot!”
“Would you describe yourself as a masochist?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas says. “You gonna teach me?”
“It isn’t a skill one learns, it’s a natural inclination.”
“Why don’t you think I could be inclined?”
“You’ve never shown that inclination.”
“Nor have you,” Lucas points out, and Smith arches an eyebrow, but Lucas doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t back down. As he keeps on massaging his moisturiser in, he adds, “Not like this. Being into this stuff, into— maybe not whips and chains, but canes and ropes, absolutely. You wanna hurt me for real, and that’s not gonna scare me off or freak me out.”
“Perhaps it’s not you I’m afraid of,” Smith murmurs, padding forward. “Perhaps it’s the depths of my own depravity that I’m frightened of.”
“Oh,” Lucas says, and squirms a little, rubbing his thighs together, and Smith laughs and cups the side of his cheek, tapping his thumb against the flesh.
“Let us see,” he says, and then with a sudden whistle of sound and not nearly enough movement for Lucas to track, his hand whips faster, sharper, and Lucas’ head is snapped to the side a second before the pain hits him. It blooms hot and bursting over his cheek, the weight of where Smith’s palm has made contact all over the side of his jaw, his cheek, and his eyes water and he kind of groans, and the pain doesn’t turn him on, exactly, or maybe it does, kind of? But what’s really hot is the complete control of Smith’s body, the way he stands there, the way Lucas can see that he’s holding his breath as he looks down at Lucas.
“Again?” Lucas asks, breathless. “Other side?”
“Later,” Smith says softly. “For now, let’s sit and read a while – bask in each other’s company before I drive you home.”
“You missed me,” Lucas says.
“Desperately,” Smith says, so genuinely, and with such a serious look in his eyes and on his face that Lucas’ chest kind of throbs a little, and he feels bad for saying it, a little, and his eyes want to water again all of a sudden, from more than the sting of the slap.
Lucas kisses the tips of Smith’s fingers, and then eases himself to his feet.
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