JUSTIN’S POV

Brian lies back on the bed after asking you to get his cigarettes, his pale aqua towel still wrapped around his hips. You light it, take a drag, and then walk over and hand it to him. You sit beside him and put your hand on his chest to see if he’s still shaking. He turns and reassures you, “I’m okay. It’s okay.”

“You were trembling. You sort of scared me.”

He blows smoke out of his nose and repeats himself, “I’m okay.”

“I think you’re working too hard; you’re exhausted,” you offer. “You had three presentations in two days plus…what we’re doing. Maybe it’s too much. I don’t want you to go to work tomorrow.”

“Don’t ‘mother’ me.”

“Don’t get mad at me for caring about you, okay?”

“I’m not mad at you at all. I’m just---,” and he stops talking and lets his words just evaporate.

“Just what?” you press.

“I think…,” Brian starts out slowly, “That I’m a little overwhelmed.”

“Right. That’s what I said. Maybe you have too much on your plate right now.”

He shakes his head at you, “No, that’s not what I mean.”

BRIAN’S POV

You have no idea how to explain this to him, to his scrubbed clean, naked body all warm from the shower sitting next to you as you lie on these sheets and try to think. You try to start, “I…don’t think I was ever…actually prepared for this….”

Justin knows you so well now that he recalibrates his approach immediately, his hand rests on your shoulder, “I don’t think either of us were. It’s okay. We don’t have to be perfect, flawless people just because we’re both perfect, flawless people.”

You roll your eyes and slap his stomach. “There’s an…insecurity….,” you say and you just let the word hang out there all by itself because you hate the taste of bile you get in your mouth anytime you say it.

Justin speaks, “I thought—at first—that you were shaking because something was wrong, something physical, like you didn’t feel well, but you feel okay?”

“Well, I feel fine except…that I don’t feel fine.”

He nods and scoots a little closer to you so his knees are touching you. You rest your arm in his lap, and he borrows your cigarette for a few seconds. Then he coughs a little because he’s laughing; when he recovers, he says, “I thought that maybe you took too much Viagra or something.”

You give him the crossest look you can muster. “Thanks. Thanks a lot for that.”

He returns your cigarette to your fingers and smiles, “Oh, come on. You think I mind that you take it? I love it. My ass adores it.”

“That’s one, Justin.”

“It should probably be five,” he quips, “But consider the subject dropped. You were saying that you don’t feel ‘fine.’”

You slide your hand in the opening of your towel, close your eyes and just stroke yourself. Sometimes a relaxing rub focuses the mind. After a minute or so, Justin offers to take over; his words quiet and sincere, “I’d be happy to do that for you.” You end up doing it together, you tempering his enthusiasm and getting the speed very slow but constant. He tugs at your towel until it falls away on either side of your hips. “You’re so beautiful,” he sighs, “Sometimes I still can’t believe that I get to have you every night.”

“Like the feeling isn’t mutual,” you say.

“I’m not fishing for a compliment; I’m trying to give you one--one that you deserve.”

Your eyelids flutter, “Yeah, thanks,” but you mean it.

“So what is overwhelming you?” Justin asks, his hand still wrapped around your cock.

……

“I guess I feel like this has become about way more than spanking you.”

“Yeah.”

……

“Is that what you wanted?” you ask.

Justin smiles, takes your cigarette, stubs it out and then stretches out beside you, resuming his fondling, “I didn’t plan on wanting anything else, but I’m happy with where we are…if you are.”

“I’m happy; I guess I get a little freaked out sometimes…. I thought this whole exercise would be about technique and new toys and—“

Justin interrupts you, “And state-of-the-art dungeons and diamond-studded slave collars?”

“Right.”

“And it’s so not,” he agrees.

“You always say that I’m painfully honest, right?”

“Yes.”

“So in the spirit of complete honesty, I never expected this experience to bring up….all these…weird…things.”

Justin stops stroking you and lays his head on your chest and says, “People call this ‘play,’ and I hate that word because this doesn’t feel like playing at all.”

“These things…they freak me out.”

“Like in the shower?”

“Yeah,” you sigh.

“Do you want to tell me what they are?” he asks.

“Not really. I feel nauseous just having this conversation.”

He laughs, “Me, too. Do they make you regret that we started this?”

You shake your head, “No, not at all. It’s just that…they kind of flip everything on its head, you know?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“They make me doubt myself, and I never doubt myself, especially when I’m in bed with you.”

Justin lifts his head up and gives you a tiny but sweet ‘you poor thing’ smile, “Okay, that’s ridiculous. I was serious when I said that I can’t believe I get to have you every night. That’s what started all of this—you making me so fucking crazy.”

“Then we’re both fucking crazy. I think we’re addicted to this,” you admit.

“Yeah but the only bad side effects are me not being able to sit comfortably and both of us being exhausted.”

“No, the side effect is that you’re in my fucking brain,” you knock on your skull for emphasis, “All fucking day every day.”

“And I wasn’t before?” he asks.

“You were, but not like this. Before I would think about a restaurant I wanted to take you to or whether I could convince you to paint at the loft during the week so I could fuck you at lunch or how much it would cost to hire you to come blow me at work every day.”

“You wouldn’t have to pay me to do that.”

“You’d make me buy your gas and you know it.”

He laughs, “Yeah, you’re right. The blow jobs are free, but I want mileage reimbursement.”

“You’re the richest tightwad I know, Sunshine.”

He sighs, “Just send a limousine every day. Problem solved.” You both laugh and he continues, “So, that’s what you thought about before; what do you think about now? How is it different?”

You roll onto your side so you can face him, your fingers draped around his arm, “If I talk about this, I want you to talk about it, too. I don’t want to walk this plank by myself.”

“That’s fair,” he says, “I’m okay with that.” You start to say something and he interjects, “But wait, I want to make something clear. You are never out on the plank by yourself. The way you feel about me, the way you take care of me when I’m flying through subspace, I want to do the same for you wherever you go. If you feel alone, then I’m not doing a very good job.”

“No, no, that’s not true at all. I’ve never felt like I needed something from you that I wasn’t getting, Justin.”

“Okay.”

“I’m more talking about the sense of responsibility I feel for this whole experience. I want to be exactly what you want me to be and then just a little bit better than that.”

“You feel competitive about this? It sounds like that to me.”

You take a deep breath in and then exhale trying to let your thoughts crystallize in your mind. “I don’t want to let you down.” He immediately shakes his head, but you keep going, “It doesn’t matter what you say or how much you reassure me, it’s how I feel about this…about pleasing you. I take it really seriously…maybe too seriously, but it’s how I feel. Don’t dismiss it. Because here’s the thing, from the moment I met you, I could always tell when you were happy in my bed and when you weren’t. I could read you and your hungry, tight little ass like a book. But the further we go down this path, the worse my vision gets. And when I see clouds instead of sunshine, well, apparently…I get really nervous.”

Justin is quiet for about thirty agonizing seconds and then he scoots in to be closer to you, resting his head on your arm, his arm snug around your torso. Finally he speaks, “Brian, you never ever seem nervous to me, and I’m not nervous with you—not in any systemic way. I mean, I get the good kind of nervous when we do this. I like my nervousness, I guess.”

You run your fingers through his still damp hair, “I like your version of it, too, much better than mine. We’re different people; we feel things in different ways.”

“One of the reasons I love you so much is because you can still do that to me.”

“I know, and it’s a testament to your tenacious blond perseverance that this has happened. No one else…no one else in the entire world…could’ve done this to me. No one.”

“People were too busy being intimidated by you or jealous of you to see what I saw. You were a coin, a very gigantic and heavy coin, just dying to be flipped.” You smile at his characterization; his fingertips dance on your collar bone, “And I knew that if I could flip you once, every other flip would get progressively easier.”

“Yes, and somehow you rigged the game so heads or tails, you win.”

He grins; he likes that idea a lot, so much that he pulls your head down so he can kiss you. The whole maneuver gives you goose bumps, and somehow, you end up back on top of him feeling his legs spread and then coil around you.

In that moment you know for certain that there is only one slave in this relationship.

And it’s not him.