Page 86 of Oleander

“I like being choked on someone’s dick like that,” he told me. “The bigger the better, really. I like it to feel as if I’m going to die.”

I let out a strangled groan and felt something pulse out of the head of it.

Caspien was alternating between looking at my dick and my face, conductor-like concentration in his eyes. He stroked his own without urgency.

“Would you like to do that to me, Jude? Shove that…” He indicated it. “…so far down my throat I can’t breathe? Choke me with it?”

“Caspien,” I warned.

He smirked. “Tell me what you’d like to do to me.”

“I...” I wasn’t even touching it, and it was pulsing, a stream of liquid leaking out of the tip. “I’d like...to kiss you again.”

He blinked a few times. Surprised.

“Well, do it then,” he said.

I leapt across the couch and pressed him into it with my body. His bare dick chafed against mine as I shoved my tongue down his throat. I moaned, deep and satisfied, as I tasted him.

There are things I’ve tasted since – the burrata from that café by the Tiber in Rome, the croissant from that café in St Mark’s Square, the hot chocolate from Angelina’s on the Rue de Rivoli – that I’d describe as little pieces of heaven on earth. But his mouth, laced as it was with grape and watermelon, altered my brain chemistry in a way that I’ve never been able to undo.

He let out a little huff of breath at first, but then he was kissing me back. Our first kiss had been a strange thing, our second a rushed desperate chaos of lips, but this, I decided, would besomething else. I kissed him slowly, deeply, I tilted my head and sucked and bit at his lips in gentle motions. I drew my tongue over his and curled it around it. Caspien sank into the couch deliciously submissive, his body softening and hardening at the same time. When I felt him grab my dick I thought my body might erupt in flames.

He stroked my dick with his long, elegant fingers, his touch a searing brand. His mouth, a warm, wet paradise I never wanted to leave. I lasted less than ten seconds before I gasped, bit down on his lip, and poured great floods of white over his hand.

After, I sat up and muttered an apology, but he just wrapped his hand, still covered in me, around himself and stroked.

His eyes never left mine as he did it, and I watched, bewitched, my brain popping and fizzing like champagne as he made himself come. His own orgasm was gentle and restrained, and it slipped out of him in a series of small gasps. He scooped up his own mess – mixed now with mine – and sucked them into his mouth to lick them dry. Then he leaned across to kiss me, pushing our come into my mouth with his tongue.

My head spun as my dick twitched back to life.

I kissed him back eagerly, not at all minding the thick sour taste of us inside his mouth.

I was already desperate to do it again.

Twenty-four

Imoved through those spring days in a trance. My sleeping hours were filled with dreams of us together, warm young bodies tangled, scents and smells, and nightly expulsions that would wake me before the sun was up, wanting him.

The music room, the Arboretum, the boat that bobbed in the lake outside my window, on the deep grass inside the wood that ran on the furthest side of the grounds. In all of these places, he’d kiss me and touch me, opening himself up to me like the petals of a flower. I dreamt of him, of us, everywhere.

The awake hours were worse.

Because in these, I was fully conscious and able to direct my thoughts where I wanted them, and I wanted them on him. Back then, he was the beating heart inside my chest, the hopes and dreams I harboured in my soul. I existed only because he perceived me. He lived inside me then, in a different way to how he does now – like some exotic disease I was infected with in my youth and of which there is no cure.

And I wanted to live inside him too, crawl under his skin and settle there.

In the shower the morning after the night before, I’d closed my eyes and run my hands over myself, imagining they were his. I’d ejaculated against the tiles before wiping it clean with myhand. Then, as I stared at it, curious, I brought my hand to my mouth and tasted it.

I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t forget the memory of him having sucked the mess into his mouth like it was some delicious treat.

I cycled up to the mansion before lunch that Sunday and found him in the stables with Falstaff. He was brushing the horse’s coat in long, slow strokes while feeding him chunks of bright red apple with the other. I watched him for a bit from the door without announcing my presence.

He hadn’t invited me, and part of me feared his reaction to my being there. Maybe he wouldn’t want to see me. (I lived in constant fear that one day, he would decide he was done with me and shift his attention elsewhere.) He wore his usual riding outfit: tight beige trousers, black knee-high riding boots, and a fitted navy polo. His hair was still wet from the shower, slicked behind his ears.

When he moved around the horse, he caught sight of me standing by the open stable door. He said nothing, but neither did he look unhappy to see me.

“Did he miss you?” I asked him.