Page 19 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded (Rogue Bonds #2)

Zeke

I woke the following morning with a throbbing pain in my leg. It wasn’t the first time the injury had played up, and it wouldn’t be the last. I rolled over, cursing under my breath and dreading the dragging stumble to the bathroom that I was going to have to do to get some painkillers. The pain flared up as I turned, causing me to yelp.

A moment later, Dax was in my doorway, bleary-eyed and sleep-rumpled, but as eager as ever to assist. “Are you all right, sir?”

And that’s when I realised; Holy shit, I didn’t actually have to get up. And even better, Dax would be thoroughly happy to be given something to do. “Can you get me some painkillers?” I asked, feeling profoundly grateful, perhaps for the first time since he’d arrived, that Dax was there. “My leg’s killing me.”

“Yes, sir.” He darted off, returning a minute later with two pills and a glass of water. “Is this because of the physiotherapy session yesterday?” he asked, concerned, as I swallowed the pills.

I shook my head. “Nope. Not directly, at least. It just flares up now and then for no apparent reason.” Be that as it may, I was still disappointed. The physiotherapy was supposed to make this better, not worse.

Dax lingered by my bedside, then tentatively offered, “May I suggest a treatment that might soothe the pain?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, go for it.”

But instead of telling me what he was planning, Dax rushed off. I heard him rummaging about in the kitchen, then he came back several minutes later with four heat packs and a bathroom towel. He summarily stripped the sheets off my lower half, tucking them sideways so they were out of the way, and covered my leg with the towel, then set the heat pads over the top. “Holy fuck,” I muttered, as I felt the heat seep through the towel. “That’s hot.”

“If it starts burning, I can remove them,” Dax said. “But if this is going to work, they need to be very hot.”

“Doctor Green said I should put cold packs on it if it flares up, not heat,” I said – not by way of complaint, but curious about what he thought this would achieve.

Dax nodded. “I might be wrong. And I apologise if I am. But your injury was caused by a type of venom, correct?” I nodded. “There are bugs on Eumad that cause painful stings. The standard treatment was always to apply heat, as hot as the patient could stand. The heat helped to break down the poison. I thought it might be worth seeing if it helps you in the same way.”

I shrugged. Neither the painkillers nor the cold packs had ever seemed to help much, so I wasn’t going to object to trying something new. The real problem was that no one really knew what the venom was. Aside from me, and one other soldier a few months earlier, no one had ever encountered it before.

“Are you hungry?” Dax asked next. “It’s early, but I could make some breakfast if you like.”

I craned my neck to check the clock. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet. “Nah, I’m good. Let’s see if this gets me on my feet again, then we can sort out food after that.”

Dax went back to his bedroom to put on a pair of sweatpants – he’d only been wearing boxer shorts when he’d come in – and then came back to perch on the edge of the bed.

“Thank you for yesterday,” I said, after a while. “For getting us home safely. I know I wasn’t much help.” I’d zoned out twice, staring blankly into the distance, and I’d had to find a quiet corner to sit down for a while when we’d had to change trains. Dax had bought me a bottle of orange juice out of a vending machine, citing concerns about low blood sugar, and made sure that no one bothered me until I’d been steady enough to keep going.

He smiled in the dim light. “It’s always a pleasure to be of service, sir.”

I shifted my hand over a few inches so that it was resting over his hand. Aiden had said that any physical contact was good, and since the opportunity was here, it seemed negligent not to take advantage of it.

The minutes ticked by as I waited, trying to think about something other than the throbbing in my leg. There was nothing particularly appealing at the moment – I still had to find a hobby; I had a psychologist appointment this afternoon that I was most definitely not looking forward to; I was going to have to get a handle on my mental state before I tried to go anywhere on the train again. A few minutes later, I hazily realised I was drifting off to sleep again… and the odd realisation brought me suddenly awake. If I was sleeping then… I tentatively flexed my ankle, then my knee. “Wow,” I said, peering down at my leg. “That feels a whole lot better.” The pain had faded to a dull ache – not a complete cure, but vastly better than it had been ten minutes ago.

Still waiting patiently on the edge of the bed, Dax smiled. “I could massage it, if you think that would help?”

“Yeah, that’d be great,” I said, happy for him to try anything he thought might be useful. He peeled the heat packs and towel off my leg and settled in, cross legged, to begin massaging just above my knee. The sting had originally gone in at mid-thigh, and while I occasionally felt twinges of pain down in my calf muscle, the majority of the pain was from mid-thigh to my knee.

He moved gradually upwards, his fingers firm but gentle, as he coaxed the tension out of each muscle in turn. I lay back and simply enjoyed it, then I had to groan as his fingers dug into a particularly stubborn knot on the back of my leg that had been tense for what felt like the entire last year. “Fuck, you’re good at that,” I muttered, my eyes closed, my body feeling warm, despite the lack of covering.

“Thank you, sir,” Dax said simply. “I enjoyed learning this. I believed at the time that it was a skill that could be very useful.” He continued his work, while I savoured the warm, tingling sensation his hands were creating. I hadn’t felt this relaxed in a long time, and the feeling of another person’s hands on my body was creating an odd, flipping sensation in my stomach.

Long minutes later, Dax paused and made a questioning noise, quickly aborted. His hands started moving again… but then stilled, one hand just below my hip, the other one resting on my inner thigh, just shy of my…

Oh. My eyes flew open and I looked down, and suddenly, that warm, tingling sensation made sense. I was hard.

Well, not fully hard. Not hard enough to really do anything fun with it. But harder than I’d been at any point in the last year.

Dax was staring at my groin. He glanced up and saw me watching him, and then darted backwards, snatching his hands off my leg. All of his earlier confidence vanished in an instant, and he was left looking guilty and nervous, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

It was then that I realised we’d never resolved the issue from yesterday about his wet dream. With my panic attack, I’d forgotten all about it after we’d got home. I’d gone straight to bed for a nap, wanting to just hide from the rest of the world for a while, and then I’d spent the rest of the afternoon with my head down, working on the puzzle on the dining table.

Given the deer-in-headlights look on his face now, I knew I was going to have to address the issue. Dax, being the diligent dimari that he was, was never going to just brush his own perceived disobedience under the rug.

But fuck, I still hadn’t really figured out what I was going to say. I sat up, tugging the sheets over my lap. “I wasn’t expecting that to happen,” I blurted out dumbly… and then I watched as Dax’s face changed from startled to disappointed. He looked like he was about to say something… but then abruptly closed his mouth.

“Yes, sir,” he replied woodenly. Fuck. I’d upset him already, and I’d barely said anything. I frantically thought back to the instructions Aiden had sent me, still struggling to get my head around the idea that he somehow expected me to just jump into bed and use my dimari like he was a really fancy sex toy. The whole concept was thoroughly confronting…

But at the same time, the discomfort I felt about it suddenly made something else clearer. I was no longer quaking with embarrassment about telling Dax that my body didn’t work. He’d watched me fall apart yesterday, in a relatively public place, and without the slightest hesitation, he’d protected me from onlookers and then helped to calm me down, all without batting an eyelid. The absolute lack of judgement then was making me feel a lot more relaxed now.

“Do you understand that my body doesn’t always work very well?” I blurted out, as an easy starting point. Dax nodded, his eyes downcast, his hands clenching around the sheets. “I think the venom in my leg damaged some of the nerves in my groin. So I find it very difficult to get an erection.”

Like a lightbulb switching on in his mind, his expression suddenly changed to one of understanding and curiosity. “Oh. Yes, that would make sense.”

I recalled what Aiden had said about dimari wanting to believe the best about their masters, and I paused to consider exactly what to say next. “I realise I haven’t asked you to join me in bed before. Because I just haven’t been able to get my body to work. So I’m aware that you must have been…” Frustrated? Disappointed? Horny? Based on the information Aiden had given me, I didn’t think any of those descriptions were something Dax would relate to. They were all too self-serving. “I’m not surprised you climaxed in your sleep,” I said instead. “Your body would have certain needs, even if your intentions were to be obedient. So I’m not angry about that at all. I don’t believe you would ever willingly disobey me.” I didn’t bother going down the route of explaining that it hadn’t been disobedient in the first place. Dax had certain standards he had been trained to adhere to, and Aiden had been very clear about which parts of that training could be broken, and which couldn’t. A dimari’s perceptions of sex were one of the latter.

“I’ve been waiting for my body to work before I tried to have sex with you,” I said, the lie slipping easily from my lips. “But maybe what I should have been doing was getting you to help me get my body to work. You certainly seem to have a knack for it today.” I glanced pointedly at my groin, still covered by the sheet, and then I watched as a slow, shy smile crept onto Dax’s face. “But what you’re going to have to understand is that I have nerve damage. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep an erection. I don’t know if I’ll be able to climax. And if my body doesn’t work, that is not your fault . Do you understand that?” Consent was still a bridge I was going to have to cross, but at least if I could stop him from blaming himself if this didn’t work, it was a step in the right direction.

“Yes, sir,” he said, which was not at all convincing. I was well aware of a dimari’s ingrained tendency to agree with whatever their master told them.

“What did I just say?” I asked gently. “Explain it back to me in your own words.”

Dax thought about that for a moment, then said, “You have physical injuries that might stop you from enjoying sex.” He hesitated, then continued, when he saw from my expression that I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “I am not to blame if you can’t climax.”

“You needn’t sound so disappointed about it,” I said with a smirk. “I’m sure I can find something else to blame you for, if you’re so determined about it.”

Thankfully, he saw the humour in that, and chuckled. “I want to make you happy,” he admitted quietly, twining his fingers in the sheets again.

There was an easy lie, in response to that, or a much more difficult truth. “There are many things in life that are making it difficult for me to be happy,” I told him, reaching out to take his hands – if only to stop his fidgeting. “And very few of them are your fault. You’re doing a very good job of making some of those things easier.”

He ducked his head a little, and I was surprised to see a faint ripple of green across the scales over his collarbones. I’d noticed flashes of violet there, when he was agitated or upset. So green meant he was pleased?

“What other colours can you turn?” I asked, without really thinking about it. I knew that Kade presented himself as brown when they were out in public, just a shade or two darker than my own skin. But I hadn’t thought to ask Aiden much more about it.

A moment later, my jaw was dropping, as I watched Dax’s scales flash to a brilliant forest-green. Then the colour darkened, through a muddy brown, to a very dark grey – not quite black, but pretty close. Then they lightened again, through violet, then to a deep, ultramarine blue, and finally back to his usual turquoise colour. Every single colour along the way had been utterly beautiful, his scales shimmering and rippling as they changed.

“Does that hurt?” I asked, suddenly concerned that I was asking him to do something terribly difficult.

“Not at all,” he said, seeming almost amused. “It takes a bit of concentration. Some dimari find it quite easy. I was never…” He looked away and I saw that faint trickle of violet again. “It wasn’t something that came naturally to me.”

“That’s okay,” I said easily. “I’m perfectly happy for you to stay your normal colour. But that was beautiful. I’m thoroughly impressed.” Wow, look at me go, I thought, with a sardonic self-deprecation. It turned out that praising Dax wasn’t that hard, after all. Nor was touching him. I was still holding one of his hands, stroking my thumb back and forth over the back of his fingers.

And now, that faint flash of green was back again, this time fluttering over not just his collarbones, but his cheeks as well. He wriggled a little on his knees, where he was still perched on the edge of the bed, and bit his lip, as if anticipating…

I didn’t know what. He was watching me surreptitiously, but when I didn’t do whatever it was he seemed to be waiting for, he sank back down, his shoulders drooping a little in disappointment. What the fuck was he waiting for?

Bloody hell, I should know the answer to this one, I scolded myself. After all the information Aiden had given me, it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out what a dimari wanted – even if said dimari didn’t know himself what he wanted, because if I was to actually ask Dax, he would inevitably tell me he didn’t want anything. Or, more likely, that he wanted to please me.

I glanced over at the discarded heat pads, considering asking him to take them back to the kitchen, and perhaps to make some coffee while he was there. Being given things to do usually made Dax happier. But something about that felt inadequate.

Think, Zeke. Get that fucking brain of yours to do something useful.

Okay, so Dax was looking disappointed. So he’d been anticipating something good, and hadn’t gotten it. What had he been anticipating?

Well, obviously, a reward of some sort. And I suddenly realised that he’d more than earned a hefty reward. Yesterday, he’d got me to and from the physiotherapy session intact and he’d averted a number of crises along the way. This morning, he’d found a magical cure – albeit a temporary one – for my aching leg. And then he’d changed colour in the most beautiful cascade I could imagine, and I’d told him I was thoroughly impressed.

So he wanted…

My brain skidded to a halt at that point, as I happened to glance down and my eyes landed on the thick length of his erection, clearly outlined by the soft fabric of his sweatpants.

He wanted a reward for all his good behaviour.

And the best sort of reward for a dimari – according to Aiden, at least – was sex.

He wanted me to have sex with him.