Page 30 of Discordant Cultivation

“Go upstairs,” Vale said. “Clean up. Rest.”

Kieran set the guitar down and stood on legs that felt like water. His jeans were still open, his waistband loose around his hips, but he couldn’t make himself care enough to fix it. He moved toward the stairs, each step requiring conscious effort to execute.

“Kieran.”

He stopped but couldn’t make himself turn around.

“What we discovered today—” Vale’s voice cracked slightly and he cleared his throat. “We’ll continue this. Tomorrow. We’ll build on it.”

Tomorrow. There’s going to be a tomorrow of this.

Kieran climbed the stairs without responding, one hand on the wall to keep himself upright. Each step took him further from the basement, but not away from what happened there.

He made it to his bedroom, closed the door with a soft click that felt too final, and sank onto the bed. His jeans were still open. His body still hummed with the unwanted sensation. His mind still screamed with violation.

Vale looked like he lost control.

Or maybe he never had control in the first place.

9

Your love's a poison apple wrapped in ribbons red as blood...

Vale

Vale’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Three hours past midnight and he sat in his study with his palms pressed flat against the desk—trying to stop the tremor, trying to forget the velvet heat of Kieran’s body responding in his grip. The way those fingers kept moving on the guitar strings even while his cock hardened under Vale’s palm. The sound Vale himself had made—guttural, starving, nothing like the controlled precision he’d maintained for thirty-seven years.

Necessary artistic intervention.

The rationalization formed even as his body ached with a want that still felt foreign to him. Physical contacthadproduced unprecedented emotional vulnerability. Kieran’s playing during those final minuteshadtranscended anything Vale had heard before—raw confession bleeding through every note, barriers shattered, truth spilling out like an open wound.

It didn’t matter that Vale’s own arousal had been immediate. Devastating. That Kieran’s stuttered pleas made Vale harder than he’d ever been in his life. That he’d nearly abandonedthe lesson entirely just to chase that exquisite friction to its inevitable conclusion.

It was about the music. About cultivation. About pruning away the last defenses between Kieran’s technique and his soul.

But the lie caught in his throat like thorns.

He wanted Kieran. Not as a student or an instrument or a rose to be shaped through careful violence. He wanted him the way drowning men wanted air. He wanted Kieran’s surrender and his resistance. His pleasure and his tears. His willing compliance and everything that broken, beautiful boy would try desperately to withhold.

He wanted to devour him. Worship him. Remake him from the inside out until Kieran couldn’t tell where Vale’s desire ended and his own began.

The realization should have brought shame.

Instead, Vale’s jaw ached from clenching, his body rigid with the effort of not returning to the bedroom right now and finishing what he’d started. Instead, he felt something close to ecstasy—the terrible clarity of a man finally admitting what he’d been circling for months.

If desire produced such devastatingly authentic results, then perhaps desire was simply another pedagogical tool. Intimate intervention to enhance emotional accessibility. A teaching method, as valid as pain or praise.

He could frame it that way. He could call it artistic development, all part of the necessary boundary dissolution for the sake of Kieran’s craft.

The lie tasted bitter, but Vale swallowed it anyway.

It would get easier with repetition.

10

I've got stained glass windows made of broken dreams...