Page 41 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded

He wanted me to have sex with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Zeke

Completely unexpectedly, the question of consent was answering itself. Dax had a raging erection, and as he perched on the edge of my bed, he was leaning towards me, every muscle poised to spring into action. He might not be able to verbalise what he wanted, but his body language was all but screaming at me. And he was very good at communicating with his body language. I’d learned that on the very first day, when he’d silently scolded me for making him fetch the bottle of alcohol, back on the ship. I’d seen it over and over again, his growing dejection as I ignored and dismissed him, and then his open joy when I started to let him do things around the house. He’d been a calm, soothing presence when I’d had a panic attack. He’d been timid when I’d first asked him to sit on the sofa and watch a show with me. He’d been devastated when he’d presented himself to me to be punished for his unintentional disobedience. His thoughts and emotions were written in neon signs across his features, and he seemed completely guileless, holding nothing back.

If he didn’t want sex, or he didn’t like something in particular that I was doing, it would be just as obvious – so long as I took the time to pay attention.

Slowly, I slid the sheet away from my groin again, then very deliberately lay back on the bed. Then, deciding I didn’t have quite the right vantage point for this, I grabbed the second pillow and shoved it under my head, so that I was propped up a bit more, able to watch him without straining my neck the whole time. “Maybe you could… have another go at that massage,” I said, forcing the words out before I could think better of it.

He looked up at me, and the question in his mind was written on his face, clear as day. Did I realise what I was asking him for? he wanted to know. Was this an invitation for intimacy, or a simple attempt to ease the pain in my leg? I didn’t know how to answer the question, feeling as tongue-tied as he seemed to be, so I smiled, knowing it came out rather bashfully, and nodded.

He swallowed, tried and failed to suppress a grin, and then reached for my leg again. I tried to relax, like I had last time, but my heart was pounding in my chest, and in two minutes flat, I had myself so worked up with anxiety and apprehension that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t getting hard today.

That was not good enough. I didnotlike setting Dax up to fail. I had no expectation at all of climaxing today, but I’d already proven that I was capable of getting hard – to a certain extent, at least – and if Dax could see a small degree of progress, then he had something to look forward to for next time.

I knew instinctively that ‘trying harder’ was only going to lead to more failure. This had worked the first time around because I’d been relaxed enough to let it happen, and so, ironically, the path of success lay down the road of surrender. I sighed, relaxed my shoulders, and let my thoughts begin to wander, even as my eyes mapped the path of Dax’s fingers on my leg. I thought backto the last man I’d slept with before… well, just before. I kept my mind firmly away from any of the things that were going to drive this particular experiment off a cliff. Alex had been tall, blond and muscular, and as cliched as it sounded, he’d been a plumber who had come to fix my toilet one afternoon. We’d stripped each other naked and then-

Oh, fuck, no. I flinched involuntarily, jerking away from the memory at the same time as I jerked away from Dax’s touch. Alex had been inside me, and after having literal fucking tentacles poking around at my insides, I now recoiled from even the thought of another personinside my body.

“I’m sorry,” Dax apologised immediately, snatching his hands away and staring contritely at the covers.

“No, no, it’s okay. I’m sorry,” I said, sounding more breathless than I would have liked. Or rather, because none of my lack of breath was from arousal. “Please, keep going. I just… I startled myself,” I tried to explain, not sure whether he would understand. He was far too quick to blame himself for things that were my fault, and keeping ahead of his internal narrative on the subject was going to be tricky.

Hesitant and unconvinced, he reached out again, resuming the massage. But my muscles were all locked up now, and persuading them to relax was near impossible. But there was a way around this, I realised, as I replayed my sex life on fast forward through my head. Before Alex, there had been Samuel, and I’d been topping him, that time. The monsters had done nothing unpleasant to my dick – hadn’t even touched it, for that matter – and the memory of hot, slick flesh around my shaft was still as appealing now as it had been then. I glanced down, seeing the dejected expression on Dax’s face, even as he kept up with the massage, and I debated whether or not I should ask him for something far more advanced than the meagre hand job I’d originally been expecting.

If he didn’t want this, I reminded myself, he would let me know. And right now, he was looking unhappy not because he had to try and get me off, but because he thought he was failing at it.

“Dax, maybe you could…”

He stopping what he was doing instantly, his gaze rivetted to my face as he waited for my next instruction. But I saw an immediate problem with my next request. “Wait, hang on a second,” I muttered, then swiftly grabbed the waistband of my boxers and stripped them down my legs. I had to wriggle a bit to get them off my feet, but then I lay back… and had to grin at the awestruck look on Dax’s face. My genitals were nothing particularly impressive to look at, but this was the first time Dax had seen me naked. And apparently, I was making quite the impression.

“Could you use your mouth on me?”

He looked like I’d just told him he’d won the lottery. “Yes, sir!” he chirped, hastily rearranging himself on the bed to be able to bring his face to my groin. He took my flaccid length into his mouth, not at all deterred by my current lack of response.

I moaned at the warmth of him, and then my breath caught in my throat, and I muttered a startled, “Oh, god,” as I found out exactly how talented a dimari was. Aiden had said they were trained to do this, and bloody hell, I really needed to have a look through that blasted operations manual. Holy fuck, he was good at this.

Sure enough, my dick began to thicken, far quicker than I would have expected. It wasn’t just the feel of warm lips and slick tongue against me that was getting me going. It was the look of sublime satisfaction on Dax’s face, the contented little moans he was making, and as I watched, he sneaked his hand down, pressing his open palm against his own erection.

And that’s when it occurred to me that I’d missed one of the major considerations in doing this. “Wait, wait… Dax, hang on a sec,” I interrupted him. He stopped immediately, pulling back with a look of apprehension. It was disappointing to see him expecting criticism so readily, and that just reinforced the idea of how badly I’d let him down so far. It would take time to build trust with him in the long term, with a steady diet of praise and reward, until we finally reached a point where he could relax in the knowledge that I was pleased with him as a general rule, and minor requests for him to adjust his actions were nothing to be feared.

For right now, though, I decided to just leap right in. “I want you to stroke yourself while you do this,” I told him. Heeding Aiden’s advice, I managed to stop myself from asking if hewantedto stroke himself, and simply made it an order instead. “And you’re allowed to come whenever you’re ready. You don’t have to wait for me.” Aiden’s notes had been very insistent about remembering to tell a dimari he was allowed to come. If I didn’t, then he would simply continue to hold himself in an aroused state indefinitely, without ever gaining any relief.

“Yes, sir,” Dax said. His hand was shaking a fraction as he reached for me again, but then he thought better of it and darted off the bed. He stripped off his sweatpants and boxers with quick, efficient movements, then scrambled back over to my side.

And holy fuck, he was hard. His cock curved upwards, a darker blue than the rest of his body, and the head was almost purple. He was leaking fluid from the tip, and he reached down to smear it around, giving himself some lubrication.

Shit, that was something I’d forgotten. There had been a whole pile of other instructions with Aiden’s notes, but the thought of lube reminded me of one part in particular. “Dax, I just want to mention that if I ask you to do anything during sexthat hurts, I want you to tell me straight away. My intention here is not to hurt you physically at all, so if I’m doing that accidentally, I need you to tell me.”

“Yes, sir,” Dax said, nodding eagerly. Then without any further preamble, he leaned down and took me into his mouth again.

In this position, hunched over and kneeling beside me, I couldn’t see his cock, just the movement of his arm… and a rogue part of my brain decided that was unacceptable. “Dax?”

He paused again, this time looking more eager about receiving my next instruction, rather than apprehensive about an imminent scolding. “Yes, sir?”

“Could you move around to the side a bit? I want to be able to see you stroking yourself.”