Nathan watched Harold come in to his office, every inch the dutiful employee to the casual eye, and shut the door as he’d been ordered. And then he locked it, which Nathan hadn’t said to do, but then, he didn’t need to.
Still, Harold kept his face in the careful neutrality of an employee called to the boss’s office. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Ingram? Performance review?”
Nathan was tempted to run with it for a second, play along with the other man’s perverse sense of humor. But he’d called his partner in precisely because he was tired of being the boss— he needed a very specific sort of break— and being the ‘boss’ a bit longer wasn’t something he felt like doing.
Even if Harry was damned dirty when he was playing obedient little employee.
He pushed his chair back from the desk. Harold watched him, pale eyes noticing everything the way they always did. Harold would take the gesture for all it was, an unspoken statement that Nathan didn’t want to be Mr. Ingram right now.
Their private language was extensive, many-layered, fifteen years in the shaping. Like an encrypted frequency, Nathan thought. Invisible to anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for.
Harold leaned back against the shut-and-locked door, and the casual eye, if there had been any, would have thought his face expressionless. Nathan saw better— the tiny curl at the corner of Harry’s thin lips. The fractional lift of one brow above the wire-rimmed glasses, saying wordlessly, One of those days, hm, Nathan?
“I need to get the hell out of this damned office,” Nathan said in answer, stretching his long frame back in the executive chair. “Stuck inside four walls on a day like this, Christ.”
“Four walls encompassing about nine thousand square feet,” Harold answered with that barely-a-smile becoming more pronounced. “I’m sure any of your cubicle-dwelling employees would be happy to trade.”
Nathan acknowledged the point with a little snort, a rueful smile. His hands hung off the edges of the chair’s leather-upholstered armrests, dangling from the pivot points of his wrists, loose in space, touching nothing. He breathed in and out, watching Harold. Waiting.
Harold pushed off from the door with his shoulders and walked across the carpet, the thick white carpet that swallowed the sounds of the soles of his business loafers. Harold wasn’t looking at him; his measuring eyes behind his glasses were fixed instead on the vast floor-to-ceiling windows that comprised the wall behind Nathan.
"I sometimes wish I hadn’t suggested reflective glass," Harold murmured as he crossed to stand before one of the panes to study Manhattan, laid out below them like a child’s playset. Other buildings rose from among the toy streets and toy cars, and climbed high with them, became IFT’s peers in a fashion, but the tower that Nathan Ingram had built was the tallest in the immediate vicinity, and they were at the top of it.
"Why’s that?" Nathan asked, watching Harold from the corner of his eye, but not turning his chair to face him. He’d given up that little bit of autonomy when he’d pushed the chair back from the desk.
Right now, this was Harold’s office. He just worked here.
"Because I’d find it fun to tell you that Olivia has hired a private eye with a 500mm lens to try to watch you from the Wells Fargo rooftop. For maximum effect, I’d tell you while you were sucking my cock."
Fuck. Nathan gritted his teeth and pushed his head back into the chair’s leather, breathing through his nose. His hands hanging from the chair’s armrests clenched into fists.
"Then I guess it’s good you suggested reflective windows," he said on an exhale. "This the sort of mood you’re in today, Harry?"
Harold’s smile was audible, if not visible. It didn’t sound like a terribly nice smile. “I’ve been coding mailing-list databases all morning. It’s been very boring. You know how I get when I get… bored.”
Yes. Yes he did. Nathan took some deep breaths and forced his hands to relax, to hang loose again, and forced thoughts of his wife out of his mind. “You’re the one who thought it was a great idea to pose as a code monkey.”
Harold was silent, which meant he’d scored a point in the Game. There wasn’t any sound when Harold moved closer (shoes sinking into the wool/silk blended carpet, soundless), but he could see him, in the reflection of his powered-down monitor, so he didn’t jump when Harold’s hand crept around the black executive leather and touched his shoulder.
His heart sped up, though.
"Take off your belt, Nathan," Harold murmured above him, and Nathan swallowed and nodded and moved to obey. Maybe scoring a point hadn’t been a great idea right now.
"Jacket, too," Harold’s voice said above him, dry as a stock report, "and also? Get out of my chair."
Nathan heard his own breath stutter in his throat as he stood. He undid his belt’s buckle. Leather hissed through his trouser’s belt loops as he pulled it free. Harold took it from him, one hand reaching around into his space then retreating again, somewhere behind the chair.
His jacket. He shouldered out of it; Harold took it too and a second later he heard it drop to the floor, a rustle of exquisite tailoring, a careless dismissal.
Harold would never do that with his own clothes. Nathan took a few deep breaths, staring at the far wall, the locked door. The chair creaked slightly as Harold pulled it out and sank down into black executive leather. Nathan waited.
And waited. He was sure Harold was looking at him but Harold wasn’t saying anything, and standing meant he no longer could see him in the monitor, and Harold had pulled the chair back far enough that even the corner of his vision gave him nothing but endless white carpet. He could see his wall clock, though. Big gorgeous wall clock, Art Deco design, silver hands in an octagon of inlaid wood. In the waiting quiet he could hear it ticking.
Three minutes passed, by the clock, and Harold still hadn’t said anything, done anything, hadn’t touched him. Nathan shifted his weight from foot to foot. His palms itched; he rubbed them against his thighs.
"Harold—"
The belt (his own belt) cracked against his ass like a gunshot. The carpet swallowed up the echoes and his helpless, breathless cry.
"Shiiit—" he wheezed on the next inhale, and grabbed for the edge of the big desk.
Oh yeah. He knew what Harold got like when he got bored.
Nathan licked his lips, taking deep breaths and staring at his desk’s polished surface in the places where it was clear of paper. His ass stung. Harold hadn’t held back with that strike, even the fabric of his trousers and boxers hadn’t done much to lessen the blow. He wanted to rub at his ass, but he tightened his grip on the desk’s edge and waited.
"Spread your feet apart," Harold said behind him, his voice soft, deliberate, hanging onto his vowels. Nathan swallowed thickly and obeyed, soles of own shoes sliding on the plush carpeting. Nathan didn’t fuck around with halfway, with half-assed; he might have some other day but not when Harold was in this kind of mood. He moved his feet until he could feel the fabric of his tailored trousers taut, straining along his ass and thighs, and then pushed them an inch further past that.
Harold’s silence behind him was assessing, critical, for several seconds. “Trying to avoid unnecessary punishment, I see.”
"Yes, sir," Nathan answered, letting his head hang down beneath his shoulders.
"Hmnh," said Harold. "Well. We’ll see how that works out for you."
Nathan dragged in deep draughts of air, fingers curled around the desk’s edge. After a second Harold’s hand found his ass, fingers dragging over herringbone wool trousers to trace the line he’d left on the skin beneath, to dig in against every inch of the blow’s stripe, not gently. Nathan hissed and tightened his fingers on the desk and jerked away from the rough touch before he could stop himself.
"Oh, that won’t do," Harold scolded mildly, and Nathan closed his eyes.
"Sorry," he rasped, and Harold’s fingers gripped his asscheek through his trousers hard enough that he could feel each trimmed nail digging into his sore flesh and Nathan cursed and hit the desk hard with his open hand, hard enough to numb it, and Harold’s nails bit deeper.
“Harry— fuck— ow—”
"Do you want me to stop?"
"I want you to stop doing that, Jesus, that hurts—”
"You’re the one who called me in here," Harold said, in his facts voice, in his answering your earnest emotional position in this argument with logic instead voice.
But he let go. Nathan caught his breath. His hair was dropping into his eyes; he tossed it back with a jerk of his head and stared at the door. The chair creaked and then Harold’s shoes appeared on the desk next to him, Harold leaning back and resting his feet on Nathan’s desk. Harold’s hand settled on his ass, warm through the fabric— or maybe that was just due to the heat from the sting— and rubbed there now, no grip just a slow kneading through his trousers.
"Tell me why you called me to your office, Nathan," Harold murmured, and Nathan closed his eyes.
"Because I’m having a crappy day."
"Oh? What happened?"
"Christ. Like you don’t know every minute of my schedule," Nathan snorted. Harold had his secretary’s phone tapped and access to any of the three-hundred and forty-two computers of their main office building whenever he wanted it; Harold often knew of Nathan’s meetings before Nathan did.
It was the wrong thing to say, though. Harold’s hand stilled a moment, then disappeared. Nathan wiggled back for the touch on instinct but it was gone.
"Spread your hands flat on the desk," Harold instructed him. "And bend forward. I’ll tell you why you called me to your office, but since I have to do that for you— since you’re being difficult— it will, unfortunately, hurt."
Shit. Nathan did so, eyes squeezed shut, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth as he braced for the belt. His cheeks were getting hot. This was an embarrassing position, trousers tight on his exposed ass and with nothing to even grip.
"You had a meeting with the stockholders at ten in the morning," Harold’s voice said softly. The chair creaked; the feet disappeared from his desk. "They weren’t very happy. You smiled and smiled and made promises and discussed projected growth for the next quarter and made a room of unhappy people happy and made it look easy but you were secretly fantasizing about pushing them out the windows. Weren’t you?"
"Yes," Nathan admitted to his chest, his chin sunk down to his shirtfront. He had a moment’s warning— the rustle of Harold’s shirt— before the belt sang through the air and smacked down hard across both cheeks.
He jumped. Ah fuck. "Jesus," he gasped, and his fingers scrabbled uselessly for purchase on the glass of the desk’s surface.
"Lunch was with the head of our international sales department. Production’s lagging in Europe. He wanted to know what he could offer our major clients there as apology for the delay and you spent the whole hour having to argue profit margins with someone who really ought to know this already. You considered firing him but, sadly, you don’t have a qualified replacement. You added that to your list of things to do, and sent me a text message about inventing a time machine so that you would have enough hours in the day. Poor, poor Mr. Ingram, CEO."
"If you’d get on that time machine, it really would help," Nathan smart-assed, and his reward was the belt hitting three times, once on his thighs below where his boxers ended— barely above the backs of his knees really— and there was much less fat to cushion the blow.
He let out a wordless cry; his knees buckled and then barked against the desk’s drawers as they popped forward. He splayed his fingers wider, shoulders bunched beneath his dress shirt.
"Your afternoon was spent talking alternately with lawyers regarding our pending patent violation suits and with calls to and from Olivia’s personal assistant as you tried to sort out who Will is going to be staying with this weekend, during which you had to remind yourself multiple times that just because Olivia has given this woman orders to make your life as difficult as possible doesn’t mean you should be anything but charming with her since the phone conversations are inevitably going to be featured in court someday. The plans regarding the weekend were changed three times. You are sure they will change again between now and Friday.
"You really need to know whether or not you are free to play golf with the director of our major distribution partner before Saturday comes, but you can’t commit to anything until Olivia makes up her mind, and you can’t tell either her or her assistant of your dilemma because this too is likely to come up in court as an argument that you’re more interested in your work than in making time for your son."
Nathan stared at the glass of the desk. The stripes on the backs of his legs, hidden from eyes and air by his trousers, throbbed as if they had a life of their own, a pulse, an angry existence. The pain was hot and itching and intense and made it hard to think about other things— about anything but the desire to clutch and rub at his hurting skin.
"Acknowledge it when I tell you something," Harold’s level voice ordered, and Nathan flinched for a blow of the belt… that didn’t come.
"Yes— yes. Sorry. Yes, all of that. All of that happened."
His hair was falling into his eyes again. He tried to jerk it away; it settled back where it had been. Nathan flexed his hands against the desk, fingers splaying flat and pushing against the glass-covered wood, debating whether or not it was worth it to risk lifting his hands. He was still tensed for a strike, his shoulders bunched under his dress shirt and his thighs flexing in his too-tight trousers.
Waiting. Waiting. What the hell was Harry playing at? Nathan took deep breaths, trying to relax, knowing that if he said anything aloud trying to urge him on that his answer would be the belt.
"You’re tired of responsibility," Harold’s voice said, dry as filing, dry as mailing lists. "You called me up to your office because you want it off your shoulders for a little bit. You want someone else to be in charge, you want some consequences that you can’t do anything about and that you don’t have to fix, you want to stop thinking.”
"Yes," Nathan whispered, barely audible.
The belt hit. “F-fuck—!” Nathan cried out, his whole body jerking. His hands slid and skitted over the glass, hitting the mug that held his pens, sending it toppling over and scattering writing implements over the desk.
"Do you know why I just hit you, Nathan?" Harold asked, voice soft and treacherous.
"Jesus— fuck— no,” he growled, his chest heaving.
"Because I’m not your goddamn on-call pressure valve, Nathan,” Harold answered.
The protest he might have made was cut off by the belt. Nathan’s words turned into gasps and then hollers as Harold striped his ass through his trousers, hitting him on skin already struck, too fast to catch his breath, too many for him to keep a concrete count. Some distant part of his brain remembered that along with reflective glass on the windows, Harold had also been the one to suggest the soundproofing for his entire office.
Real bastard for foresight, Harold was.
By the time Harold let up, Nathan had one forearm flat on the desk and his forehead pressed into it. Another hand around the desk’s side edge, gripping hard.
He could hear his own breathing, ragged, loud— fogging the glass. Counterpointed by Harold’s, softer, shallow, thready; somewhere behind him.
"We do this on my terms, not yours," Harold said.
"Yes," Nathan agreed in a raw whisper. His legs were trembling.
"Good. Take off your trousers."
It took him the second try to straighten back up. His hands slid on the glass, in the condensation from his breath, the first drops of sweat.
He wanted very much to turn around, to see Harold’s face; he knew better. He undid his trousers, slid them down his legs until they hit his shoes— half-hesitated for instructions.
"I said off," Harold murmured, and lightly brushed the leather— smooth, cool— against the backs of his thighs where it had left his skin hot and tight and sore.
Nathan wordlessly crouched down to untie his shoes. It hurt. Across his legs, across his buttocks. He took deep breaths, through his nose, and took off his four-hundred-dollar shoes, first the left, then the right. He set them beneath his desk, out of the way, and then stood back up and stepped out of his trousers.
Harold hadn’t said anything about his shirt, or tie. Nathan studied the ceiling of his office, breathing in deeply, filling his lungs then letting it out. There was something about being half-naked in his office that was extremely different from being naked in a bedroom, in a closet, in any small private space. The office was vast and the bank of windows behind him made him feel indescribably exposed, reflective glass or not. He was facing the door, the door that was currently the only thing separating him from the hall, the receptionist’s desk, the view of numerous of his upper management employees, from the vice president and the head of accounting and the conference room.
Unbidden, Nathan’s mind flashed to conjuring the tabloid headlines should any of them somehow be able to see this— see him standing here at his desk, half-naked, dick out, ass bent for another man to whip.
STOCK TANKS IN WAKE OF GAY SEX SCANDAL.
FORTUNE 500 CEO CAUGHT WITH PANTS DOWN.
BLUE CHIPS, RED BOTTOMS… That one probably wouldn’t get run in America though. Nathan wasn’t sure if he was amusing himself or horrifying himself with these possibilities.
“You’re asking yourself if you’re quite sure I locked the door, aren’t you, Nathan?”
“…Christ,” Nathan muttered, fingers grabbing at the desk’s edge reflexively. “I wasn’t, now I am. Goddamnit, Harry— no, I know you did.”
“You’re so very certain?”
“Hell yes, I am. I know you. You wouldn’t risk it.”
“Mmm, perhaps not.” Harold sounded amused. “Turn around, Nathan.”
He did so, another shuddering breath as he turned, hands twisting to keep hold of the desk. Careful steps, and now he had to have his back to the door— it damn well better had be locked. At least he’d be able to see Harold now—
“—Christ,” he said again, reflexively. Harold was lounging in his chair, one foot up on the opposite knee, posed like some modern-day goddamn Caesar. The belt dangling from one hand, and his other loosely curled around his hard-on, because apparently at some point he’d gotten his trousers open without Nathan hearing. Harold just watching him, from great heights.
Harold gave him a deliberate once-over, from his mussed hair to reddened face to his shirtfront and then down to where his cock was jutting up between the halves of his shirt, parting them.
He’d been half-hard ever since he’d paged Harold’s desk phone. It had only gotten worse.
Nathan put his weight on his hands on the desk’s edge, careful not to actually lean back with his ass. He licked his lips and found the patented Ingram grin, flashed it at the other man.
“Enjoying the view, Harry?”
Behind the wire-rimmed glasses, his partner’s pale eyes took their time traveling back up to his face. “If you’re getting the urge to start being a mouthy son of a bitch, I’m sure I can find something to keep that mouth of yours busy, Nathan.”
“I’m sure you can too,” Nathan said with a leer, letting his own gaze linger on Harold’s groin, where the other man’s pale fingers were still idly pulling on his prick.
The flick of the belt caught him entirely by surprise, stung sideways against his hip and curled around to find his now-bare ass in the process. Nathan yelped, and jumped, and shot Harold a reproachful glare that withered into nothing at the look on Harold’s face.
“You’re still hazy on the concept of my terms, aren’t you, Nathan? Give me your tie.”
He swallowed thickly and moved to obey. It seemed to take a long time to slide the silk off from around his neck, to hand it over. Harold tugged it free from his fingers, then wheeled the chair closer. And started to loop the tie around Nathan’s cock.
“…what… what are you doing?”
“I’d think that would be obvious.” Harold’s fingers, deft, precise, careful— knotted the silk around him, navy blue against his flushed skin, a snug loop around the base of his dick. Nathan found the air in the room was suddenly in scarce supply. He stared down, then jumped despite himself when Harold’s knuckles brushed his balls.
“Shit, Harry…”
“And you’re still talking. I don’t think so. Open your mouth.”
He stood there, clutching the edge of the desk behind him, his face red and his ass striped and his own expensive tie dangling from his erection, while Harold undid his own tie in a swift one-two of his hands.
“Turn around.”
Okay. Okay. Yes. He made a mental note, sent it to the mental receptionist since this couldn’t go to the real one: Don’t let Harold get bored again.
He stared at the far wall once more, the locked door, while Harold slipped his own tie into his mouth and knotted it behind his head. The silk was thick against his tongue.
“There. That’s better. I’d tell you to try not to drool on it overmuch, but I think that’s going to be a lost cause. So we’ll add on the cost of my tie to what I’ll be taking out of your ass, shall we? Move to the end of your desk and bend over, Nathan.”
It smelled of Harold; his prick-driven imagination told him it tasted of Harold too although really it just tasted of fabric. Nathan ran his tongue against the rasp of the silk. He closed his eyes. He breathed. He moved to the end of the desk.
“Legs apart, thank you.”
Harold’s cologne, that was what he was picking up, he thought. Or aftershave or whatever it was. Cedary kind of smell. Nathan breathed shallowly, and spread his feet.
“Wider, Nathan…” Harold’s voice was edged as fine as any paper-cut. Nathan sucked air down through his nose. He slid his feet further apart on the carpet. No more strain of fabric across his thighs or buttocks, but every move reminded him of the marks on his legs and ass.
Harold moved. He caught it from his peripheral vision, and the creak of the chair, and then the chair was empty and Harold was behind him again, an invisible rustle of cloth, a jingle that was the belt’s buckle.
Nathan tongued Italian silk, unable to ask questions and knowing that was exactly why Harold had gagged him anyway.
The answer was clear enough in coming, anyway. Leather. Looped around his ankle, pinning his left foot in close to the leg of the desk. His belt tying him there. Shit. Christ. Goddammit, Harold, he would have said, but he couldn’t so he just closed his eyes. The clock was ticking on the wall; the AC was running its soft subliminal hum, blowing cool air on to his reddened ass, and his heart was beating in jagged thuds of nerves and lust, dub-thub, dub-thub.
Harold’s fingers were not especially warm when they nudged his right ankle further, further. For a few seconds he considered resisting. He could, he thought distantly. Harold couldn’t force him. Harold couldn’t do anything to him. His hands were free, for Christ’s sake, he could just reach up and yank the necktie jammed into his mouth free and say, right, enough bullshit, and grab Harold and haul him into a kiss that would wind up with both of them in a tangle of limbs on the carpet but with Nathan on top. Harold couldn’t stop him, and Harold sure as hell couldn’t make him go along with this. On his best day, and Nathan’s worst day, Nathan could still have taken him with one hand behind his back. Gag or no fucking gag.
Harold’s cool fingers tapped at his ankle, impatiently.
Nathan shuddered, and pushed his foot next to the other leg of the desk.
The leather looped around quick and sure and that had to be Harold’s own belt, his own was busy with his left foot. Nathan stood there with his chest heaving, holding the edge of the desk, staring at nothing, spread half-eagled with his dick tied up like a conference call.
He heard Harold stand up. Then the hand was on his back between his shoulder blades, the layer of his shirt shielding him from the air-conditioned chill of his partner’s touch.
“I told you to bend over.”
Yeah. Harold had. Nathan stared at the wall. This was not the wall with the clock and the door, nor the wall of windows. There was a painting on this wall. Some goddamned modern art thing, mostly swathes of maroon paint. Olivia had picked it out, paid seven thousand dollars for the thing. It’ll look good in your office, Nathan.
He stared at it, mouth and tongue and teeth working against the necktie, until he felt Harold’s fingers slither down his spine and keep going until they reached to bottom hem of his shirttail and lift it.
“I see we’ve finally left behind that pleasant fiction that you’re going to try and avoid unnecessary punishment. Alright, Nathan, we’ll do it the hard way,” Harold murmured, and he brought his hand down on Nathan’s bared ass, on top of the lines the belt had left earlier, and Nathan jerked and cursed into the gag.
“I’m not in any hurry.”
Nathan counted at first. Harold spanked with the precision of a surgeon. No big whalloping smacks of the hand, no brute force. Just studying the marks he’d already left, then snapping his palm at them. Like bites rather than blows. Fast but rhythmless, unpredictable, sometimes the flick of his manicured nails against chastised skin as he pulled his hand away and then sting, sting, sting again, again.
He stopped counting somewhere after fifteen. He was sucking down desperate air through his nose, and the tie in his mouth was soaked with his saliva. The belts at his ankles kept him from shifting his feet and he could feel the muscles on the insides of his thighs starting to object; they didn’t get much of a workout these days and this was a goddamned uncomfortable position.
Harold showed no signs of stopping. He took his time. He switched it up. A rough grasp of Nathan’s throbbing ass, nails in, hard and sharp enough to prick tears to his eyes— then stinging, painful slaps to the backs of his thighs on the weals there, making his knees buckle into the desk. Again.
“Jesus— alright, Jesus, stop,” Nathan moaned eventually, except it was all lost into the damp silk. He groaned his frustration, let his head hang down between his shoulders and shifted his grip on the desk’s edge.
“Sorry, Nathan, I didn’t hear that,” Harold said, and slapped him hard enough on the ass that his bobbing, helpless cock hit the desk with the motion, a flare of a different stripe of pain, and Nathan swore, muffled and incoherent.
On the plus side, Harold’s fingers were warming up.
Beneath his shirt, Nathan’s shoulders worked and bunched like a racehorse’s, like one of those stallions back on his daddy’s ranch, years and years ago. Each time Harold’s hand hit his skin a helpless shudder jolted up his spine. He told himself his ass was getting numb; it wasn’t, Harry moved around too much, Harry didn’t let any area get numb. Harry knew him way the fuck too well.
His fingers were knuckled white on the sides of the desk and his ass and thighs were on fire. He made wordless, raw noises into the tie— but he didn’t bend down.
Like those damned stallions, refusing to break despite his daddy’s hands’ best efforts…
Harold stopped. Eventually. Nathan’s mind was foggy and his senses consumed with the living throb that was the skin of his ass right now; it took him indeterminable seconds to realize the rain of blows had stopped.
In the silence his own ragged breathing whined in the back of his throat, whistled through his nose. Harold’s was a softer counterpoint somewhere behind him.
Harold’s fingers touched his cheek and he jumped, having braced for another strike to his ass. Harold’s fingers weren’t having any of that, though. Harold’s fingers ran along his jaw, his cheekbone, up into his hair to rake it back from his eyes, down to his lips to thumb moisture from his upper lip, sweat probably, or his own spit, he didn’t know.
“Trying to tire out my hand, Nathan?” Harry asked, voice treacherously soft. Nathan answered with an ambiguous mumble into the silk of Harold’s tie.
Harold’s other hand was back on his shoulders, between them, rubbing as if to calm him. Nathan closed his eyes. His legs hurt— trembled— and his knees stung where they’d banged into the wood of his desk several times now, pains entirely separate from that consuming burn on his ass and thighs. His cock was begging for touch and freedom from Harold’s improvised cock ring.
Harold fingered the fabric in Nathan’s mouth with a soft tcch for how wet Nathan’s drool had left it. One deft finger pushed at his lips until he parted them, and then it was in his mouth, hot and probing, running against his tongue and the silk tie.
“Suck, Nathan,” Harold whispered, but his mouth was already trying to do that. Hell with needing an order.
It wasn’t easy with the gag in his mouth— it was sloppy, and he felt his own saliva leaking out the corner of his mouth, wetting his lips, his chin. Extraneous sensation. He just sucked. Nothing else mattered but trying to distract Harry with his mouth, pretending this was the other man’s cock and hollowing his cheeks around it and doing his best goddamned impression of a small-town whore.
He got his reward: the sharp intake of Harold’s breath— a wordless noise from the other man— the twitch of Harold’s fingers on his spine. Nathan smiled as best his mouth allowed.
“I suggest you get it wetter,” Harold said, and he lost the smile in a reflexive, helpless groan.
When Harold pulled his finger free a minute later it was wet, alright. Wet as he could make it with his tongue and his sloppy gagged mouth.
One of Harold’s hands spread his striped cheeks and Nathan sucked down desperate gasps of air— stole a few seconds to lift his sweaty hands from the desk and wipe them on his shirtfront.
“Put them back,” Harold’s voice snapped, brittle as the glass of the desktop, and Nathan froze and twitched and pressed his hands back down, thick fingers spread.
Harold’s finger pressed wet and spit-slick and hot at his clenching asshole. The tie swallowed his heartfelt Fuuuck like it had everything else.
“Bend over, Nathan,” Harold said, so soft, so soft, and started to slide that finger into him.
His knees buckled. He told himself he hadn’t given them permission. His knees buckled and he sagged forward, down onto the desk, bending and bending and doing what Harold said and Harold pushed his finger the rest of the way in, one motion that absolutely destroyed his ability to breathe, took the air from his lungs, made his teeth grind into silk and then Harold started hunting for his prostate and yeah, yeah, fuck, Harry knew him. Harry knew him too well.
It was one finger but it felt worse, sore as his ass was. Harold was in him up to his knuckles, other fingers and thumb brushing the burning lines on his ass and making him jerk in helpless spasms that pushed his trapped, swollen, flushed, hurting cock into the desk’s hard wood. Nathan whimpered.
Harold had said he wasn’t in any hurry. He proved it.
He fucked him with that one finger, found his prostate and started assaulting it. A couple of thrusts in, and Harry had apparently thought of something new to try while coding databases: each rub against his buried gland was followed a second later by his other hand hitting one of the sore spots, pain chasing pleasure like thunder following lightning.
“You’re so stubborn sometimes,” Harold’s voice said from a million miles away as he pressed and pressed and spanked and spanked, until Nathan’s vision was a reeling dizzy thing and his cheek was sliding in his own sweat on the glass. There were noises, garbled sounds that rose and fell in muffled cries: Nathan reckoned that was his voice, his curses and pleas permeating the tie just like his spit.
He was rocking his hips. He couldn’t have stopped himself. It hurt, his dick hitting the wood, and he still couldn’t stop himself. Every grind of that finger inside him, artful twist to hit him just right, in and out and then the thunderclap of blazing fire, and his body bucked and he was going to have bruises on his goddamned dick, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. Harry was trying to kill him.
No, he realized. That wasn’t it at all. No, Harry was trying to ensure that he couldn’t go anywhere the fuck near his own wife for weeks— not until the stripes on his ass faded, not until there was no sign of what he’d done, what he’d let be done to him.
Trust Harry to fuck him over like this. Trust Harry to stick him into the untenable position, between a rock and a hard place, between the pain on his ass and the pain of humping the desk, between his wife and his vows and Harold himself.
Harold pressed a second finger into him without much in the way of prep and shorted out his vision for several breaths’ worth of air. “You’re still thinking,” Harold told him, from somewhere above him, behind him. “You should stop that.”
His shoulders shook with his helpless attempts to get more air. The gag felt impossibly big in his mouth, just like Harold’s fingers in his chastised ass. When Harold’s fingers moved to the knot of the tie and started sliding it free he didn’t understand at first, didn’t register, started to try and twist his head away but Harold grabbed a handful of his ass with the hand not knuckle-deep inside him and he howled but held still.
The tie came off. Nathan gasped and sputtered against the glass of his desk. “Goddammit, Harry—”
“Put your hands at the small of your back.”
“Fuck you,” he wheezed, lips numb and swollen, and Harold jammed his fingers against his prostate so hard that he thought he was going to black out.
“Sometimes,” Harold said above him, when he could hear again, conversational except for that betraying rasp in his tone, “I think you are difficult with me because I’m the only person you can be difficult with. The only person you don’t have to smile for. The only person you don’t have to manage.
“Put your hands behind your back, Nathan, or I’m going to start looking in your desk for a ruler.”
He panted for breath for several seconds. Then he let go of the desk and put his hands up behind himself.
The ruined tie looped around his wrists. That other hand never left his ass so he knew Harold wasn’t actually dealing with the knots, just slipping the circle of silk around one wrist then the other with some twists in it to make it taut. He imagined he could probably even get free of it, if he wanted.
They both knew he wouldn’t.
He could breathe more easily now, at least. There was that. He let his chest heave against the glass while Harold fiddled with the tie, with trussing his wrists to Harold’s satisfaction: a few seconds of reprieve at least.
It didn’t last long. Harold patted at his loosely-bound wrists once then followed it up with another thrust of his fingers that left Nathan slamming his cheek against the glasstop because there was nothing else for him to do, nothing he could clutch at, no way he could dig the desk’s unyielding edge into his palms.
He hadn’t anticipated how just the shift of his hands to the small of his back made such a difference. He hadn’t been using them anyway but now he couldn’t, and it changed his balance, changed his posture, left him a whole new stripe of vulnerable and right where the man who knew him so very well wanted him.
“Harold— Harry, J-Jesus, please,” he panted with his breath fogging the glass as Harold finger-fucked him, how many times was that now, how many deliberate, rough presses and scissors inside him? His legs were getting to be twin sources of misery, screaming muscles and chastised skin, and his dick was like a curse between his legs, heavy and aching and bitten by the silk.
“What do you want?”
“You kn-know what I want, goddammit—”
Another slap, full palm against his ass. His ass had to be bruising now, had to be, beyond red into purple by the feel of it.
“Ask like that and you won’t get it.”
He banged his jaw against the desk hard enough that he’d probably have a bruise from that too, frustrated beyond words, out of his mind with the jagged lightning bolts of red pain and white pleasure. How the fuck did Harry do it, stay so goddamned calm, Christ wasn’t he hard too?
His panting silence as he tried to order himself met with another assault: Harold’s fingers picked up the pace, firmer and faster and now the blows of his palm came with the thrusts, not after them, and Nathan howled wordlessly with his spine bunching and arching and his socked toes digging into the carpet in a hopeless bid for traction.
He lost track of any sense of time. Words? Hell with those. He was somewhere where all that existed was the driving fuck of Harold’s fingers into him, hitting nerves that were way way too stimulated, over-stimulated, verging on pain even inside him but his body still translated it as fire lancing to his cock, up his spine, flooding his vision. He fucked helpless against the air, hitting the desk too despite his best attempts otherwise, despite the awkward, uncomfortable curve of his legs and ass out to give himself distance, and Harold didn’t— fucking— stop, Harold kept it up, kept hitting his ass like he had something to prove, like Nathan were a system to be cracked, not with the finesse he usually associated with his friend, but with a Brute-Force Attack, like Harold was just going to overload him until he crumbled.
And he was crumbling.
“Harrrry--” he gasped. Harry, stop, Harry, please, Harry I need—
Words. Couldn’t manage them. Only the noises he was making, torn from his throat, his whimpers sharpening into now-breathless pants on each emphatic thrust. He couldn’t holler anymore. Didn’t have the air for it.
Hands. Hand fumbling at his balls, the sensation barely registered, like one more raindrop in a storm, and then past them to his desperate cock which made him jerk, and whine like a dog. Something tugged. The silk slid free. He moaned his relief against glass slick with his own spit.
“Tell me what you need,” Harold whispered, and the fingers slid from him. He lay there gasping, boneless, a puppet with its strings cut in the sudden absence of sensation, like a diver’s ringing silence. Everything hurt.
“Need t’come,” he mumbled through his half-numb lips.
Harold’s fingers were almost unbearable when they wrapped around his cock. Hot. Tolerable only because they were gentle now, so gentle, sending more triggers along his nerves and making him keen in the back of his throat.
“What else?” Harold asked in that soft, soft voice, other hand on the small of his back, under the shirt, under his tied hands. Petting his sweaty skin soothingly.
Nathan felt his heart banging against his ribs, his breath tangling in his lungs. He closed his eyes.
“Need you.”
Harold sighed behind him, a little noise almost lost in the hum of the air conditioning. The hand on his spine slid and patted at his hip. “Yes.”
Hands moved again. Nathan lay there between seconds, between the tick of the wall clock, staring blankly at the wall with the door as Harold fumbled with whatever he was doing. His own need was a tidal wave, hanging, suspended, but he couldn’t even coax another single rock from his hips to make it crash down. He was waiting for Harry.
Hand around him, slick now. He moaned. Harold pulled at his cock with sure, deft, knowing strokes— knowing just how, just where to touch him, knowing all his buttons, all his commands and backdoors and workarounds. Coaxing him to come like it was a confession, like it was a secret, I’m right here, tell me. Give it to me, it’s okay.
Nathan trembled head to toe, his thighs taking the worst of it, shaking violently with the strain.
Harold pushed into him from behind, slick as his fingers, careful and slow. Brushed the spot inside him that his fingers had been tormenting and that was all it took, Nathan’s muscles managed to scrape together one last spastic jerk and his world went white.
Sense tumbled back in to the knowledge Harold was fucking him, still milking his cock with the one hand but moving in him deep and slow, still couldn’t understand how Harry could do slow after that, but in him, yes, still stealing his breath, still making him whimper with every deliberate thrust.
“I had your… secretary… tell Mr. Dawkins… you wouldn’t be free for golf… Saturday..” Harold panted, closer to his ear than he’d expected, and he registered the other man’s body heat, the curve of him bent over his own spine but not touching, not quite touching.
The words spiraled around in his head, in the mush of his brain. Who the hell was Dawkins? Not someone he cared about right now. “Yeah?” he managed, trying to convince his spent and throbbing body to rock back, to meet Harold’s. No dice. All he could do was lie there and take it.
“Yes,” Harold whispered, and kissed at the back of his neck in between those slow, aching thrusts. “And told… Olivia’s— nnn— assistant that you were— going to be out of town…”
“Am I?” he whispered dully.
“Yes.”
“Okay, Harry,” Nathan whispered, and let his eyes drift shut again. His world was very simple right now, his world was the bittersweet motion of Harold’s body atop and in his own and the light kisses to his neck. And he wasn’t thinking anymore, about anything at all.
It was Harold’s show. He just worked here.