Often.

“You make me feel so alive that it drives me to kill. Not out of wrath but out of envy for others taking the precious and vital breath meant only for us,” he whispered, his stubble grazing mine. I gasped as his lips claimed mine. “So you see, you should fuck me so I don’t go out and make a mess.”

Trove said things like that.   

“There’s a problem with that,” I countered.

And meant it.

“What problem?” His words frowned more than his face. His body, tense - anticipating rejection. It was cruel, perhaps, to toy with him this way but I couldn't help it. It was my joy to provoke the man who’d abducted me seven years ago. It was our way at this point. Threats and teasing. Counterweights and Counterpoints. The dance of being caught and kept in those delicate crosshairs -- crossroads between Stockholm and Lima.

And did it. 

“You're wearing too many clothes,” I answered, armed with a smirk.

His body softened again against mine, relief flooding his breath. It smelled sweet. He always smelled sweet, like dying flowers, cloying and sickly. Sticky like syrup that attracted life, a rare decadence. That was my Trove. And I was his Treasure. The rest of the world was a trash heap he felt duty bound to clean up. For me. I felt duty bound to keep him always, always coming back to me. Only me. It was our way. 

Often.

___

My silk robe was on the floor seconds later, his boots, threadbare jeans and wool tunic. His body, hard and long under me as I bowed my head between his legs, worshipfully attending to him. His legs spread wide, presenting his hole for me to lick and kiss. His hissing spikes of sound hinged to his breathing as the warmth of my mouth sucked his taint and the pucker of his hole, til he pushed me away.

Sometimes I wasn’t enough.

Sometimes he needed to go out. 

Sometimes. 

Often. He’d only be able to be with me after he hunted. 

And I had to be okay with that. 

I couldn’t let him see how it bruised my own masculinity that my mouth, my hands, my ass weren’t enough for him. 

I sat back on my knees, wiping my mouth and chin, then resting my hands on my thighs. He sat up, swinging his long legs over the bed, his head in his hands with a heavy sigh. 

“I can go make the tea.” I started to move off the bed but he grabbed my wrist.   

“C’mere.”

Anxiously, I moved to stand in front of him between his slightly parted legs. It put his head close enough to my naked groin that it took all of my focus to not appear too eager, even as he stared at it.    

“I thought you  --”

“Shut the hell up, Tetsuo. Just… let me...”  He looked up. “Can you just let me? I want to try. For you. I… want to try.”

I nodded. It felt like the air went still, everything paused. His hands ran up my thighs and I clenched my teeth as his hands got closer and closer to the scars. I fought not to flinch when he grabbed me roughly and started to stroke. I felt my mind get gauzy. I needed to lay down. I needed to open my legs. I needed -- 

My reverie ended as he pushed me away. “It’s no good!” he growled. He got up quickly, grabbing his clothes, stopping only once to glance back at me. “Have the tea ready. Should be only a few hours this time.” 

I watched him disappear into the night. 

The night that often met his needs better than my most earnest tries.. 

I also knew that this recurring disconnection between us killed him. That almost made me wonder, did that make me the same as him? 

Gathering my silk robe from the floor, I went about my house duties, gathering the items for the tea. He said only a few hours but I knew that sometimes --

Often 

He would lose track of time and be out longer. I had no way of knowing, no way of anticipating with the kind of accuracy I’m accustomed to. It was this small thing, this one freedom in which my painstaking gaze was unwelcome. He needed this for him. But he also needed it for me. 

Often and Always. 

I had fallen asleep waiting for him, woken only by the sounds of scuffling and the voice of a stray, stolen in the night.  I got up from bed immediately, pulled a robe over my naked body. 

There they were in the front room. The stray went quiet as I entered.

Trove’s eyes were bright, nearly glowing, high from the hunt - manic. 

“I got a good one this time,” he whispered, the pride weighing his volume down. 

I just nodded, unimpressed.

“I wasn’t gone that long, was I?”

“Tea’s cold.” I broke eye contact to throw a dismissive glance at the new arrival. “Where’d you find this one?”

“The Burnished Heel.”

“The cop bar? Are you out of your mind?”

“He has the fullest lips I have ever seen and the darkest eyes. I got him for you. Don’t you like him? Look at how well he kneels. We can enjoy him. Together. Maybe? Just try? Try him with me?”

“How could I say no to such eagerness?”

He smiled that Trove signature grin. It unwound the bindings of me and made me feel vulnerable, exposed, but only a little. I glanced at the prize again. “Do we have enough rope for him, or is that the last of it?”

“I got more!” Trove said eagerly, pointing to a shopping bag dropped haphazardly by the door. Moving closer to me, he pressed a kiss on my lips. I broke the kiss by stepping back and averting my eyes, licking the taste of him from my lower lip. 

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Tea first.”

“Of course.”

I felt his eyes caress my spine like the tease of a very sharp blade as I walked away to heat the water for the tea.

I could hear Trove getting our new arrival set up in the room beside the bedroom, tying him to the metal chair. There was a kind of electricity in the air. I felt it magnify when I carried the tray into the tea room and found him already there, waiting, identical silk robe and bare feet.  I set the tray down. He looked up. 

It was in moments like this that I allowed myself to marvel at his beauty, to simply admire his details. The square jaw, sometimes clean of stubble but never clean of shadow. Lashes, sparse and small, often making his eyes look bald when they were too open, trusting, like when he looked at me. 

But I knew how hard those eyes could get, how that hardness made his eyes small like the nose of a bullet, staring someone down. Marking them. But not now. Not here. Here, he was vulnerable and trusting. Funny how that trust formed, given the genesis of our relationship. I could hardly remember my life before him and I told myself it was what I wanted.  

Often.

Pouring the water, whisking the matcha, offering him the cup watching him drink. I felt still as a bird on a branch. Everything around me trembled, the wind of my breath making a drafty mansion of my heart. My ribs, waiting to be broken and bruised for him. I clenched my hands on my thighs; I knew he’d heard the skip in my breath in the otherwise companionable silence. 

He left the tea room first and I followed suit, taking the tray to the kitchen to clean up. I paused and rubbed between my fingers, trying to find a calm that only came to me when his arms embraced me from behind.  

“Come to bed”

“But the dishes…”

“Tetsuo...”

I turned in his arms. “Why not just right here?” I teased, glancing around the space. “There are so many tools here. The knives, the heat of the stove, the hose on the sink…”

“But I caught someone for you. I can fuck you at knife point later.” Trove tugged me out of the kitchen. 

____

The side room held the hooded stray, already tied to the metal chair that was facing the bedroom so he was able to listen. 

Trove striped my robe away, exposing my nakedness to his groping gaze. I stood there, proudly, and let him look. My chin was high til he took his robe off and then any pride I felt quickly transmuted to unabashed lust. I didn't hide it this time. I didn’t want to tease, I wanted to surrender. Even if he wouldn’t give me more scars, I wanted him. I wanted him inside me however he wanted to be. 

“First, he just listens to us,” Trove whispered, a large hand pulling me close to him til my head was against his chest, his pulse drumming into my ear. His chest hair tickled my earlobe. I wanted to squirm but didn’t until his finger was suddenly rubbing along the crack of my ass.  

“Ah!” I bucked against him, feeling his length hardening and grazing mine, frotting close…   

“That’s right, Treasure. Let him hear you.”

That finger went in deeper and I cried out again. His probing found that spot that made me want to kneel and present my hole for deeper probing. As if reading my mind he threw me on the bed like a rag doll.  I followed his gaze to the hooded figure. He could have been sleeping, but there was a slight jittering to his leg that said he was awake.  

Trove’s weight made the bed groan before I did. I felt him part my ass, almost reverently, before his lips were there, devouring the rim of me. 

“Pucker it open,” he commanded. “Wider than that!”

“I am as wide as I can get. You want it wider, you’ll have to make it wider!” It was out of my mouth before I could hold it back. He spit in the small chasm of my asshole once, twice. Fingers; one, two, three, then cock.

Toes curling, I squeaked something incoherent in Japanese, anything resembling English had fled from my grasp and he was thrusting more and more of it out of my mind by the second. 

The bed was groaning along with my squeaking, my whimpering. Over and over and over and over. My dick was pressed against the mattress - bone hard and throbbing. My balls hurt; they’d been full for days. I didn’t know how long I could hold back.

Heavier and harder thrusts - the speed in time with the way the captive’s leg kept bouncing. 

Squeaking

Bouncing. 

Whimpering.

Thrusting. 

Suddenly edging.

My whimpers melted into a kind of adulating garble of sound that stole my vision as my eyes shut tight. My dick spat my ejaculate, dripping and soaking into the bed like tears; until I seized with dry, overstimulated pain. 

The scream ripped out of me as Trove yanked my hair. “Look at him, he’s pissing himself. Look at him. Look!”

One, two, three thrusts more before he pulled out and rolled onto his back.

My cum against his leg made him laugh. “You came hard.”

I moaned, unmoving, just letting the mattress hold me the way Trove wouldn’t. 

Inhaling, he rolled closer. I smelled of fear. I often did, especially after sex. I never knew what kind of violent thing he needed for aftercare or how long it would take me to heal. My ass was starting to hurt now, but my mind would soon be swimming in endorphins. 

“You like your present, right?”

“Yes. Thank you, Takeshi.”

“You remember the day you gave me that name?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me the story.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you not remember it?”

“I want you to tell me the story. It will help me sleep”

“That orgasm wasn’t enough to make you sleepy?”

“No.”

That hurt to hear. I should have expected it. I wasn’t bleeding enough, of course it wasn’t satisfactory enough for him. I was bobbing in and out of consciousness, needing to relax into sleep, but that cold splash of him admitting that he wasn’t satisfied by me - well it sobered me awake.  

There was the sound of a cough, a reminder that Trove wasn’t the only one listening. I glanced up to the man bound to the chair, a puddle of piss around his feet. I could smell it now. 

I winced when Trove’s hand caressed my cheek to bring my focus back to him. Right, the story.

“It was about seven years ago. I was just another tired and frustrated journalist getting a drink at the Burnished Heel after a long day of interviewing criminals…”

He curled closer to me, eyes rapt and eager for my words. It was endearing - it made me suspicious. It was never as simple as just telling him a bedtime story. His eyes held my entire face in their gaze. I felt small. My words evaporated in the sudden desert of my mouth. He caressed my sweat slick hair away from my face. I flinched again; he smiled.

“l remember the rope around my body, the darkness of the hood, the taste of metal, the pounding of your fists, the slice of your knives -”  I gasped as his hand ran over my lower abdomen and my scarred thighs-  the scars he made.

“Keep going…” he demanded. His fingertips traced as he studied my face. I could see the memories taking the width away from his eyes. The scope of his scrutiny shrinking to a knife point. 

“You liked to tease and threaten to castrate me like it was some forbidden dance. You’d get closer and closer, enjoying my fear. I was smug with the knowledge that if you followed through, it would ruin everything. I’d be worse than useless. So you never took more than teasing stabs at me, let me heal while you fed me cold soup and treated the wounds with crude medical skills.”

“It kept you alive..”

“Yes.” 

“Tell me how I got my name, Tetsuo. Tell me about that night,” his voice was closer and louder than before. I squeaked, his carving glance suddenly nose-close, slowly chopping at me with its caressing stare.   

“It was at the Throuple’s Dungeon. I had been there many nights before and I caught my sights on you. There was something about you, some potential, some beauty. So, I walked up to you, full of charm and friendliness, clapping you on the shoulder. I said to you; ‘Takeshi, 'it's been a long time. How have you been, old friend?’ and the look you gave me, so startled, so lethal and amused…”

Trove was jerking off as I spoke, I caught the way his breathing changed before hips bucked against my thighs. He smeared himself against my scars - marking them.  Remembering what he did to me, that was the point. He got off on the pain it caused me to remember; knowing I would omit details - flinching as I remembered, but never speaking them.

He liked to fap to the flinch in my voice.  

Often.

Lying there, watching Trove regain his breath and roll away from me, sighing like a satisfied beast, I raised my eyes to the bound and silent figure in the side room. I knew my telling the story was also for his benefit. I knew he would be kept here for a while. I also knew that  befriending him was simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing. I couldn’t let Trove see me favoring anyone more than I favored him. I also knew that things would be better with someone else between us.   

I was sick of being alone while Trove hunted. Sick of the feigned civility of Hollywood-inspired tea ceremonies and rituals. I never even learned how to do it the way you’re supposed to, the way it is supposed to be done. I just copied the movies because I could never deign to insult the ancestors of a culture I cannot claim. Too many generations removed from one and never having confirmation of the other, but I needed something. I needed an upper hand, somehow. And Takeshi… Trove…  none of those his real name, just names I gave him to make him feel special. Letting him believe he earned it. He was ignorant of most things because of….

It didn’t matter really.  

I mean it does. 

But it doesn’t.

I just needed someone else to talk to sometimes. Especially once Trove needed to hunt again.  And he always does, almost every night now. For now though, Takeshi was asleep. I’d wait til he hit a REM cycle before I would shower and get something to eat for myself and for this new arrival, this new toy. Trove’s gift to his Treasure.

___

The smell of sizzling bacon woke Trove. I should have just gone with toast and some bitter black tea, but I had to crave protein didn’t I? I barely got two slices for myself. Trove was so hungry, demanding seconds, thirds. I had cooked up the last of the eggs and potatoes along with the bacon before it went bad.   

“What are we going to feed the new arrival then, with you eating everything?”

“Oh, I can grab some food today. Just shower him and clean up that mess he made last night. I want him clean when we play later,” Trove scooped the last forkful of eggs into his mouth. 

He got up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Breakfast was good. I’ll be out for a while, do some glancing about in case this new one breaks too fast. Clean up, you look like shit. Maybe get some sleep. I know you don’t sleep well when I do.”

I kept my eyes averted, biting my cheeks to remain silent. I heard his boots scuff out the room, the door closing. In the silence that followed, a spike of vitriol emotion exploded silently inside me. I picked up the plate and threw it at the wall just...