Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (17 page)

"If you tipped raw sewage over it."

He has a drink, watching the kid calmly, then puts his bottle down next to his empty plate and says, "Come here."

"I'm sorry," the kid says immediately, going completely still again.

"Don't-"

"I'm not going to smack you. Come here."

Valentine still looks dubious, but he does as he's told. When he's round the other side of the table Lindsay draws him even closer and sits him down on his knee, sideways. "Why are you such a baby?" he asks, awkwardly reaching around Valentine's body to pull the plate nearer and start cutting the vegetables up into small bites.

"Why do you let me?"

"Why do you let
me
?"

"I'll let you do
anything
, you know that."

Lindsay huffs a little laugh and scoops up some of the mangled broccoli the kid was playing with earlier. "Come on. There's, what, eleven bites here?

Have six, you can leave the rest. Anything?"

"Yeah. Except make me eat broccoli and cauliflower. It's nearly as bad as
cabbage
."

"Will you let me... come in your hair?"

Valentine looks at him, wide-eyed for a second, then he laughs. "Okay.

You already did, though."

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"That was an accident, you moved. Eat this, come on."

He takes the mouthful reluctantly, and chews with his face all screwed up. "Ohgod. Oh Jesus, Lindsay, it's so horrible, don't make me have no more, this is
foul
."

"It's not my fault you grew up on jelly cola bottles and flying saucers.

Here, another one."

He's behaving, just about, but he seems determined to make the process as slow and difficult as possible, kicking his heels against the chair legs and pulling faces and making gagging noises like he's about to throw up all over the table. Lindsay carries on the game, trying to take Valentine's mind off the food.

"Would you let me... use things on you?"

He pauses mid-chew, then starts up again and swallows before he answers. "Things?"

"Like. I don't know. Toys."

"I'm guessing you ain't talking about Lego."

"You know what I mean."

"Vibrators and stuff."

"Maybe. Yeah."

"If you want." He takes another lump of cauliflower without faking a retch this time and chews with his eyes fixed on Lindsay's face, although Lindsay's looking down at the kid's red jeans now, smoothing a crease in the denim out with his finger and letting it pop back up, repeating it and repeating it, getting closer to his zip every time.

"Would you let me... piss on you?" he says, and Valentine bursts out laughing with his hand over his mouth so he doesn't spit food everywhere.

"That what you want?"

"Not really. Just wondering where you draw the line. Look, last bit of broccoli now, come on."

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"Uugh," Valentine says after he's swallowed, dragging the noise out into a long, miserable whine. "You're killing me."

"Grow up. Come on, just these two little bits more. Look how much you're leaving. My dad would've saved it for my breakfast and made me eat it then if I left this much."

"
My
dad wouldn't give a shit."

"I'm not your dad." It's almost physical, the way Valentine steels himself for the forkful of cauliflower. Lindsay can almost
see
him psyching himself up for it before he takes it and swallows quickly so it doesn't have to stay in his mouth long enough to taste too much. "Good boy. Last one."

Valentine reaches for his beer and drinks half in one go, burping delicately against the back of his hand after. "Ask me another one," he says. It's obvious he's trying to put it off, or make Lindsay forget.

"Alright. Would you let me... blindfold you so you can't see what I'm about to do?"

"What? Fuck. Yes. Christ.
Yes
."

"Oh?" He tries to hide how amused he is, but can't. "You like that idea?"

Valentine replies by twisting round and kissing him instead of words, slow and hard and deep, all tongue and spit and quiet noises that might be
yes
and might be
oh fuck yes NOW
. He tastes like dinner and beer, which seems vaguely disgusting even though Lindsay tastes the same. Still, he kisses back for at least half a minute before he gently pulls away. "Last bite, now. It's going cold, it'll be worse when it's cold."

"Oh fuck," Valentine says. He sounds upset, like somebody's died. "I thought you'd forgot."

"I
knew
that's what you were trying to do. Nice try."

"What if you smack me instead? I'll pull my pants down right now and bend over your knee and you can smack me til your arm falls off.
That's
how much I hate cauliflower."

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His grip on the fork feels kind of sweaty now. It's tempting. "My rules, not yours. Maybe you should have both for being a cheeky little shit."

"Oh, come
on
, that ain't fair!"

"The longer you stall, the more revolting it's going to be. Cold, soggy cauliflower..."

Valentine snaps his last bite off the fork like a piranha and makes a huge dramatic show of how awful it is and how he's so hard done to, pulling faces and whining and covering his mouth with his hand like he's going to throw the whole plate back up again. "Happy now?" he says when he's swallowed, making a point of sounding weak and pathetic like some poor malnourished Victorian orphan.

"I don't think I can take another dinnertime like this."

"So start doing
proper
food, then."

"What, pre-packaged microwave meals with all the nutritional content of polystyrene? I don't think so. You're just going to have to get used to it. Or leave. I'm sure you could survive off Pringles alone for at
least
a week, in your own place."

"Stop it. I ain't going nowhere."

"Me and cauliflower, we're a team. You take us both or not at all."

"You bastard."

"Sometimes."

The kid's not really angry, or at least not so angry he doesn't want a cuddle. He rests his head on Lindsay's shoulder, breathing hotly against his neck, where his shirt collar's open. The tie he'd been wearing when he came home from his meeting is still where he left it, a little heap of patterned blue silk on the countertop, just within arm's reach.

Valentine goes very still again. "What are you doing?"

"You said yes."

"Yeah. Yeah, I did. Oh fuck."

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He finishes knotting it. It's not really wide enough to make a good blindfold, but it'll do for now. From Valentine's reaction, it's the
idea
of it more than the practicality. Lindsay can see his eyes are closed under it anyway, and his chest's going like crazy as he breathes.

"Stand up. Don't let go of my hand. I'm taking you upstairs. Okay?"

"Yeah," he says, then he laughs, a bit wild and breathless.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just thinking. Better way of getting rid of the taste than teethbrushing, this is."

Lindsay just yanks on his hand to hurry him along, and thinks about which tie to use for a gag.

"
Don't
open your eyes," he says, when he's led the kid to the middle of the bedroom and unwound the tie so he can find something better. The room's a right state, it has been ever since Valentine moved in properly. Lindsay's always been fussy about everything being tidy and all in its place, shirts hung up neatly and grouped by colour, but now it looks like a bomb's gone off in there.

Valentine's useless at putting stuff away, he's got nailpaint bottles and jewellery scattered all over the dresser and odd shoes waiting in the middle of the floor to trip Lindsay up on his way to the toilet in the night, clothes heaped on the floor and scarves draped around the bedposts. Lindsay takes one of these, a long stretch of scarlet silk the kid sometimes wears instead of a belt, and ties it over his eyes. "Too tight?"

"It's fine."

"Can you see?" He flicks his fingers in front of Valentine's face to see if he flinches, and he doesn't.

"No."

"Good."

"What are you gonna do?"

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"Oh, I don't know," he says, faking nonchalance as he lifts the hem of Valentine's t-shirt up over his arms and head, careful not to dislodge the blindfold, and starts working on his zip. "I'm probably going to fuck you, eventually. Thought I'd sort of make it up as I go along until then. Objections?"

"No, none." He's biting his lip, hard. Lindsay holds his hand to steady him while he steps out of his jeans and pants, then guides him onto the bed.

"Stay still," Lindsay says. "Don't move. Do
not
move."

"Or what?"

"Or I'll put my gun in your mouth." He presses two fingertips against the kid's lips until he lets them inside and starts sucking on them, wet and eager.

"And I'll blow a hole right through the back of your head. Blow your brain cell all over the pillows."

Valentine's laughing. "Brain
cell
?"

"Yeah."

"You're mean to me." He's still got Lindsay's fingers in his mouth, so his words are muffled.

"No I'm not," he murmurs, as he slips his fingers free and circles them gently over the kid's nipple. "I'm good to you."

"That, too."

"Don't move."

"I'm not gonna." He does, though, just a little bit, just turning his head to follow the sound of Lindsay's movements as he gets back off the bed, and he sounds confused and panicky. "Lindsay?"

"I'm just taking my clothes off. Lie still for me."

"Tell me what you're doing."

"I just said, I'm-"

"Taking your clothes off, yeah, I know.
Tell
me. Don't be stingy, I want 141

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details."

"How many details can you want to hear about me taking off my jumper?" The collar of it rasps past his ears and knocks his glasses crooked. He turns the inside-out top back the way it's supposed to be, and finds the silky little label at the neck, pushing his glasses straight so he can read it. "It's black. A hundred percent cotton/coton/algodon. Machine wash warm with like colours-"

"You fucking tease." He's laughing a bit, but still behaving himself and not moving. Lindsay puts his folded jumper neatly on the chair, and his folded jeans neatly on top of it, and his folded glasses neatly on the dresser. He's being slow and fastidious on purpose, and making more noise than he needs to because he likes the way Valentine turns his head to listen better every time he hears something. "Lindsay?" he says eventually, when Lindsay's run out of things to remove and just stands like a statue for a couple of minutes, watching him.

"Shush. I'm still here." He sits back on the bed, and Valentine breathes out a shaky sigh when he feels the lurch of the mattress. He turns his face to Lindsay and smiles, just waiting for the promised improvisation.

Somehow, tenderness comes much more easily to Lindsay now the kid can't see him. He tastes all the familiar places, and some that are new – the soft skin between his sharp ribs, every finger in turn, the surprise dusting of dark little freckles near his hipbone like spilled cinnamon, the arch of his foot, the stupid tattoo on the inside of his forearm, a song lyric informing the world of Valentine's belief that "Til there was rock you only had God", the hollow behind his knee and the crease where his buttocks meet his thighs, the puckered scar below his shoulderblade where he said his dad stubbed out a cigarette after catching him smoking for the first time when he was thirteen, his crooked broken nose, and then his mouth. Valentine kisses back, desperate and shaking. He's clinging to Lindsay like he's afraid of him moving away again, fingers tangled almost painfully in his hair and the other hand fumbling blindly down his body to curl around his cock.

"Don't," Lindsay says. He holds the kid's arm and kisses his fingers again, the blue veins on his wrist and the map of lines on his palm. "Just let

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me..." He trails off before he can finish the thought –
let me love you
– because he doesn't want to come on that strong, and it sounds like a crappy line in a crappy love song anyway.

"Let you what?"

"Just let me."

"Alright."

"Thank you."

"Ohgod," Valentine whimpers, when Lindsay starts kissing his neck again, and the patch of skin behind his ear, and the bit that comes between his eyebrow and eyelashes, through the silk. He pauses when he gets back to Valentine's mouth, close enough that the kid's able to feel the breath from Lindsay's words touching his lips like ghost kisses.

"Everything okay, little man?"

"Don't stop. Your whiskers are all scratchy. Don't stop, though."

"You want me to go and have a shave?"

"Please don't stop."

"I'll go and shave." He stands up off the bed and Valentine swears, anguished and almost tearful.

"Don't stop."

"Two minutes."

"Lindsay."

"Don't move." The kid makes as if to push the blindfold up off his eyes, and Lindsay's back on him in a second, straddling his thighs and slamming the kid's hands down on the pillows either side of his head, pinning him there and leaning down to whisper in his ear, "Do I have to tie you to the posts?"

"If you want."

"I don't want."

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"What
do
you want?"

He's still whispering. He imagines he can feel the kid's blood thundering through the pulse points in his wrists like the rapids in a rocky bit of river. "Oh, not much. Just complete obedience, all the time. Think you can do that for me?"

Valentine goes very still, except the beating pulses and his breathing.

"I'll be good."

"Promise me."

There's a darkening flush in his cheeks. He's speaking so softly now Lindsay can hardly hear him. "I promise I'll be very, very good for you."

"I'm going to get up now. You're not even going to twitch a finger, are you?"