Death's Ink Black Shadow (11 page)

Usually they agreed to take turns, or one would be content to take the other inside with no reciprocation. This was not one of those nights. Both had territory to regain, status to recapture, punishments to inflict…

Ben suddenly turned and flipped Nikolas off, pinning him to the bed. He was heavier and stronger than Nikolas. Nikolas would never admit to this latter claim, but he didn’t contest it either, Ben noted, usually finding subtle ways to avoid putting it to the test.

But Ben was stuck now. If he jerked his hand away to unzip and free his cock, Nikolas would be loose, and that wouldn’t do at all. Ben grinned and without giving any warning in his look, rolled Nikolas over onto his belly, pulling his arms to the back. He lay heavy over the prone form, holding both wrists securely with two hands until he’d manoeuvred them and could hold them with one—just. Ben used his knee in the small of Nikolas’s back to imprison him more securely.

One hand now free, Ben’s cock was out within seconds. The relief was overwhelming, and he rested his forehead for a moment on Nikolas’s jean-clad backside. Nikolas took advantage of the weakness and lurched free, spinning around and taking Ben down onto his back.

Ben would have fought back, but his cock was now in Nikolas’s hand and with a mischievous smile of triumph, Nikolas took it deep into his mouth and almost to the back of his throat. Ben closed his eyes to the glory of Nik’s lips upon him, knowing he was being tricked, hearing Nikolas undo his belt and lower his zip, knowing what was coming, but not caring that much anymore.

He helped Nikolas disrobe them both fully, and then they were one body again, not two, and it didn’t matter who was in whom or where the pleasure came from, for it just went on and on in a twisting and writhing sharing of sensations.

Nikolas worked on him for many minutes with his mouth. He kept Ben on just the edge of coming without allowing relief. Which was hard for Ben, because Nikolas had inserted a finger into him and was employing it deeply, scratching and pressing it around sensitive walls, easing it in and out repeatedly, making Ben groan with thwarted need. Very slowly, Nikolas eased his mouth from Ben’s cock and trailed his tongue lower. He’d never done this before. Ben occasionally did it to him, but Nikolas said it was only because even in bed Ben liked to eat. Nikolas didn’t like things in his mouth, and so even a blowjob was rare for him.

Now, he held Ben’s thighs wide and lay studying his desire until Ben groaned again, this time with frustration. Nikolas chuckled and gave him an experimental lick. Ben arched off the bed and shouted something incoherent. It was all the encouragement Nikolas apparently needed. He pressed his mouth to Ben and pushed his tongue deep, then bit and Ben cried out. The pain gave way to waves of pleasure when Nikolas licked back up to Ben’s cock and played with the leaking tip once more, teasing it.

When Ben was flat to the bed again, panting, his heart beating rapidly, Nikolas descended onto his hole once more and the bite was harder and lasted longer, so Ben was tingling, wincing, when the teeth let go, and then bathed in delight once more as his cock was returned to and treated to a deep-throat plunge.

That time, he snagged Nikolas’s hair. “Please.” He gave it a tug, desperate now to be entered fully.

Nikolas slipped away from the grasp and returned to his fun below.

He dragged it out for a very long time, but eventually he seemed unable to deny himself any longer. He knelt and pulled Ben higher onto his lap, forcing his strong thighs back. With a sigh of possession, he buried himself in Ben, deep, right up to the hilt, and Ben suffered no pain from the intrusion. He’d been more than ready to take Nikolas’s cock, and there was nothing but a throb of anticipation at what was to come.

Slowly at first, Nikolas began to move inside him. Long strokes, driven deep, gave way to short stabs at Ben’s ring, a pull out and re-entry, and the entire time Nikolas mixed it up and kept Ben dangling, waiting, begging. It was the entreating that did it for both of them. Ben rarely demeaned himself by pleading for anything, but he did this once and on top of the shocks and the pain they’d given each other, it seemed to swell Nikolas more, perhaps made him realise how powerful he was, how much Ben needed him—if he’d needed this confirmation of something he should have known so well already.

Ben wasn’t faking it either. He found himself saying incredible things, which he’d never thought to hear himself utter—how he wanted Nik’s spill deep inside him, how only Nikolas could fill him and give him a sense of himself. But it was this last confession that undid him. As the words eased out on the exquisite delight of Nikolas once more pulling out and then opening him up and entering again, Ben’s throat seized up, a deep sob emerged, and before he could stop himself, he flung his arms across his face for privacy, and the pleasure was buried under a desolate confusion at who he was.

Nikolas faltered. Ben felt him withdraw, but then he took him in another way. Nikolas’s arms came around him, dragging him into a tight spoon, just holding him as the humiliating sobs wracked his body. He didn’t even know what he was crying for. Once he’d started, he was distraught for that—for the fact that he was so unlike himself, so unmanned by everything in his life that he didn’t know who he had become any more.

It was only when he heard an agonised whisper, “Please don’t, Ben, you’re killing me,” that he turned, forcing himself to calmness, to find Nikolas’s stressed and worn face creased with anguish.

Ben hiccupped a chuckle. Nikolas caught the incredulity and disdain for their weakness and snorted a little too, and then they couldn’t stop.

As Ben had noted only recently, Nikolas rarely gave way to this emotion. When he did he was usually laughing at Ben, not with him, so this was something new yet again. Ben reckoned it was a great deal better than crying together, which they’d been embarrassingly on the verge of, so he kissed Nikolas through their amusement and told him he was a pillock, a wassock and a wanker, which only made Nikolas laugh more with incomprehension and return the favour in Danish, proving to Ben yet again that there were many dubious terms of affection in that language he did not yet understand.

Unbelievable to Ben, they had now been in bed for a few hours and neither had come yet. He slid onto Nikolas, lying heavy on his lean belly, feeling the occasional rumble of laughter still. He stared down into Nikolas’s eyes and brushed his fringe away, noting again the grey that had started to speckle the blond. He brushed his finger once more over the bruising marring the unbearably beautiful features. How had he thought he hated this man? He’d always believed that nothing Nikolas ever did to him would stop him from loving him or drive him away—that Nikolas could murder him and his ghost would come back beseeching Nikolas to kill him again. He knew now this wasn’t true. He’d always thought in violent terms—Nikolas maiming him, executing him. He’d never been a person who thought about love or matters of the heart. He hadn’t had much of a heart until he’d fallen in love with Nikolas Mikkelsen. That catchall forgiveness, Ben realised now, didn’t extend to Nikolas cheating on him.

It was a simple discovery but a profound one at the same time. If Ben had ever thought about Nikolas with someone else, it had been in hypothetical terms. It wasn’t theoretical now. He’d suffered an instant, debilitating, almost lethal pain thinking Nikolas was sharing his body with another man. Not love—Ben hadn’t for one moment thought Nikolas was having a loving relationship with Jackson Keane. He’d known it was just sex. But that had almost destroyed him. Why? Even though Tim occasionally professed annoyance that Squeezy was happy with their open relationship, they both saw and fucked other people. Although, when Ben thought about it, Squeezy’s intervention in the bedroom in Devon had seemed to be as much about Tim as it had been about him, despite the fact that Squeezy had apparently been put on Ben-guard duty by Nikolas…

But imagining Nikolas…his mouth for example. Ben put his finger to the beautifully shaped lips, dragging the lower one down a little and experiencing a surge of possessiveness about Nikolas’s body that was greater than the one he felt for his own. Which didn’t make a lick of sense as far as he could tell. “What were you thinking when you undressed Jackson?”

Once more, Nikolas attempted one of his Ben-outmanoeuvring expressions but then clearly read the disbelieving,
“Seriously?”
in the look Ben gave him back, so he admitted, “You probably don’t want to know.”

Ben raised his brows, but before he could challenge this irritating assertion, Nikolas added hastily, “In that it’s embarrassing. For me. I was thinking I pay him too much. He was wearing more expensive shorts than I do. Stop laughing at me. They retail at over a hundred pounds each…
stop it
!”

Ben leant in and kissed him for such a good answer. “I’ll buy some for you.”

Nikolas held him off a little. “You? Buy something for me?”

Ben frowned. “I—” He didn’t. He rarely got Nikolas anything. What did you get someone who had more money than God and who bought for himself whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it? And who was so picky that if something wasn’t entirely how he liked it, he returned it…

Nikolas rolled them suddenly so they were lying side by side once more. He propped his head up on his hand and said deceptively casually, “There is something you could buy for me, if you were in an expansive mood. I have been thinking about it over the last few days.”

Ben mirrored Nikolas, supporting himself on one hand, his other playing with Nikolas’s nipple idly until Nikolas snagged his fingers. “I was thinking you could buy me a ring.”

Ben raised his eyes. He was fairly certain he’d heard that wrong. Surely Nikolas only meant a cock—“Not
that
kind of ring, Ben. A—” Nikolas tapped the ring finger on his left hand with his thumb “—kind of ring.”

Ben opened his mouth but discovered yet again the annoying inability to actually speak. Nikolas smiled. “I didn’t do what I did lightly. I needed for you to distance yourself from me, and it was the only thing I could think of. If you remember, you proved yourself more than willing and able to defeat me in every other way.” If his gaze travelled to the bed rail to which he’d been handcuffed for over two weeks while Ben had broken his spirit and his defences, then it was a very small flick of movement. “But I miscalculated badly—not just the effect it would have on you either. I have committed more betrayal in my life than you can imagine. I’ve betrayed everyone I have ever met except you and then I did. So after you left—”

“After I hit you.”

“Yes, after you hit me, I was—it is hard to explain in English. I wish you spoke Russian.”

“Say it in Danish.”

“Ack. I have never told you this, but my Danish is not all that good. I know a child’s language. I cannot express these things of our hearts with that vocabulary. I need to use Russian. But what I mean to say is that I was entirely lost. I
didn’t
want you to believe what was happening at the same time as believe it and go. I wanted you to see it for the fiction it was. And that led me on to thinking that I want the truth between us to be more visible. I want to do something I never thought I would. Because it is an anathema to me—to be so visible and marked and…owned.” He risked a glance to Ben’s face. “I want to be marked and owned by
you
. So, buy me a ring, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen, and if you do, I will wear it.” He frowned then added, “But maybe I should help you choose…Now you are laughing at me again. It is really annoying—” Ben silenced him with a kiss.

He was so entirely overwhelmed by what Nikolas had just admitted and offered to do that all he could do was kiss him. Words were utterly impossible. Nikolas still didn’t even hold hands in public. Now, he’d said he was willing to wear a ring that marked him as owned—that branded him as belonging.

Ben had never once in their relationship even considered such a gesture, but now that Nikolas had volunteered to do it, he saw it had been the token he’d wanted most. Nikolas was clever like that. Nothing could have made Ben’s spirits recover so quickly. He’d gone from despair to elation in a few hours. Nikolas clearly preferred Ben euphoric too, and they both swiftly revived to the hard kissing and Ben grinding his cock into Nikolas’s.

Nikolas swiftly pushed Ben onto his back and rose above him, considering him as he inserted a finger. Ben groaned. Without speaking, he knew they both needed this rough and emotionless now, to regain some sense of themselves as men, escaping the sentiment they’d spilled and shared for a while in the purely physical. Nik didn’t waste too much time just using his finger and soon replaced it with a hardness that took Ben where he needed to go. They kept their eyes open, fastened on each other, and if the emotional bond they’d just strengthened made the fucking better, neither acknowledged it. Ben just enjoyed it hovering there in each clench of his balls, each glorious wave of pleasure as Nikolas hit the spot inside him that made him pant and clench his jaw on the intensity of the feeling. This was about being male and revelling in body and strength and muscle.

When Ben was at the peak, just before the fall, he suddenly rolled Nikolas onto his back and straddled him, the delay at the crest postponing release just as he’d wanted. He rode Nikolas now, forcing the erection inside him to do its job and find the sweet spot for him. He hung his head. Nikolas’s fingers snagged into his hair and forced him on deeper. Nikolas lifted his hips, thrusting into Ben’s grinding. Sweat poured off Ben now, dripping down onto Nikolas beneath, making him slippery, heat rising inexorably where their flesh touched.

Nikolas suddenly swore and pushed Ben off, flipping him onto his belly again, dragging him up onto his hands and knees, spreading him wide and surging back into him, and that was all it took. Ben shouted out that he was coming and then he was filled, flooded with warmth as his own dick jettisoned into the sheets, great shots of cum propelled on shudders of ecstasy.

Nikolas groaned as he wrung himself dry inside Ben. Ben collapsed. Nikolas went with him, and they lay soaked and drained, still joined upon the damp sheets.