Archive of Our Own

The first time Daniel goes to a fetish club he’s freshly twenty years old, out on the hunt for interview subjects. Feinstein and the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco are on the crackdown again, chipping away at the seedier parts of the city. New ordinances seem to come out every week, bent on sending the pornography shops downtown packing and forcing the more raunchy clubs further underground. It’ll be good material, he thinks. Get the point of view not of the business owners, with all their worries about finances and store front rental costs, but the actual everyday people affected.

He’s just out to get some sound bites for the radio, keep his boss off his ass. He’s been on Daniel about finding something titillating to air to get their listener numbers up, no more ‘conspiracy weirdos’ or ‘tired old hippies’. So fine. If he wants titillating, Daniel can give him titillating.

It’s a nondescript sort of place. Bar in the front, with its smoke stained wood paneled walls, vinyl covered booths like anywhere else. The real action happens in the back room. Or at least that’s what he’s been told. But that’s not why he’s here.

He hangs out by the bar, mostly. Picks at a bowl of cashews and chats to a few people who approach him, curious about what he’s got in the briefcase. They all seem a little let down that it’s only an audio recorder, but any disappointment is offset when Daniel admits he’s not actually part of the scene. That he doesn’t entirely know what’s going on.

A virgin, they joke. Daniel sips at his beer and laughs with them, tries to get the interview process back on track.

But it’s hard to focus when he can feel the eyes of every person in the room glancing over to size him up. Trying to determine what he is and what he’s not. If he’s the type of guy who likes to get bent over and beaten or deal out the punishments. Or maybe a pervert who just wants to watch.

Daniel doesn’t know.

Well. It’s not entirely true. He’s got a stack of Bizarre Life magazines under the mattress at home, dog eared from being flipped through one too many times. He hadn’t bought them for the articles but he’s read them anyway; picked up a basic grasp of the terminology, a general idea of the kinds of things people get up to. And he’s got some ideas about things to get up to that are all of his own.

But that’s not the point. He’s just there to get their opinions on the new ordinances, how it’s affected the community. Because there is an immense sense of community here. He can feel it in how everyone knows everyone else’s name, and if they don’t they at least have the reassurance that they’re all here for the same thing, seeking out the same good time. A real camaraderie that always seems to spring up amongst misfits and outsiders, a sense of home. And Daniel wonders what that’s like. He’s not sure he’s ever felt that before.

Not sure he’s part of any community at all, really. Daniel’s three whiskeys in when he admits that to a tall woman in a leather skirt. He’s always been an outsider even among outsiders.

So it’s not really a surprise, he guesses, that he ends up with his shirt off and his wrists tied, lashed to a post in the corner of the back room. The sting of the leather tails on the flogger on his back is dulled by the alcohol he’s had to drink.

But being sober probably wouldn’t make the experience any better, Daniel decides as he’s walking home, t-shirt scraping against the raw marks on his shoulders. It’s just- too much like play pretend. No real threat in it, not when he’s got a safe-word he’s expected to use when he can’t take any more. He’s all too aware of the fact that nobody in the room could possibly hit him hard enough to really do any damage, and that they’d never intend to go that far anyways.

Fantasy can never compare to reality. That’s why the magazines and the movies sell. Why guys line up down the block to put a nickel in the machine and watch five minutes of a porno and then go home to get off alone. People can’t provide what the human mind can conjure all by itself.

Daniel labels the tapes with a marker. Time, date, location. Interview subject’s name and interview topic. He’ll listen to them in the morning and see if he can chop them together to form a coherent storyline for the radio. Right now he’s too tired. The threat of a hangover is already pounding at his temples, and he’s sore in all the wrong places.

He throws the tapes into a bin on his desk, along with the business card a guy had pressed into his hand on his way out. Come back any time, he’d said.

Sure.

Daniel flops onto the bed and the box spring squeaks with his weight. He feels around under the mattress and tugs a wrinkled magazine out.

—

By the time he’s living with Armand in a fourth floor walk up in dilapidated New York, Daniel has pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. Just another experience filed away in his drawer of memories, one that’s overflowing by now. He’s been so many places, done so many things that they’re not even registering anymore. He can barely remember where they went last night, for christ’s sake.

That’s probably why he can’t remember the way home now.

They’ve managed to wander, video camera and audio recorder in hand, from the Village up toward Central Park and then snake their way back down.

I want to be like you, Daniel. I wish to interview people about their lives, Armand had said as he shook Daniel awake hours ago.

And so they had. First a gay couple who’ve just moved to town, and then a businessman out carousing. Armand had sat in fascination, asking question after question about the stock market, how one acquires such a thing, whether a ‘stock’ is a physical or imaginary item or both, like the concept of money. By the time he’d finished up Daniel’s arm had been about to give out from the weight of the camera. He’d grit his teeth and bore it when Armand promised just one more, and accosted a woman walking toward the park.

Armand hasn’t got an angle he’s working, no topic in mind. He just starts every grilling session with ‘what do you do’ and then he’s off from there, asking them anything and everything about their family, their homes, their plans for the night, until the subject is exhausted or the tape’s run out. Upon which Daniel is forced to root around in his camera bag for another, change the cassette, hurry, our subject is waiting.

They wind up out of tape entirely somewhere near midtown. And thank god for that. If they’d had any more Armand would probably have him out walking over the bridge into fucking Brooklyn. Night one of this new fixation and it’s already getting old.

Daniel’s being a little dramatic about it, probably. Too much of a crab. He blames it on the lifestyle catching up to him- having his days and nights flipped has destroyed his sleep, and nutrition is a joke when you’re awake and half the city is closed. Napping on and off all day and eating fries every night would push anyone to the end of their rope.

Or at least that’s how he rationalizes it. Easier to blame hunger than to dig into how playing lapdog like this gets on his nerves, sometimes. Like he’s just Armand’s personal assistant. Background character that’s dull in the face of all these shining strangers on the streets. Standing there, watching him interact with these people- he gets bored.

And maybe Armand’s getting bored with him too. Vicious little voice in the back of his head. Daniel tells himself that’s hunger talking, exhaustion. Time for bed and the blood and hopefully in that order.

“Come on, let’s get home,” Daniel says as he heaves the camera into its bag. “You do know where home is, don’t you?”

He means it mostly as a joke. They keep moving from place to place, so fast now Daniel can’t keep up with the addresses. He had to rent a PO box for his publisher to keep sending him checks. Every time he’s finally got the location memorized, or at least the location of a landmark nearby, they’re packed up again. Always on the go.

But thank god for Armand, because Armand has always known. Armand is like a homing pigeon. Armand-

Armand isn’t saying anything back. Daniel’s stomach drops.

“You know where home is, right?” he repeats.

Armand stares at him. Eyes black in the darkness between the street lights, blank. Empty. And they’re always a little bit like that- he only lights up at the strangest times. When they’re watching the most god awful movies Daniel’s ever seen, or when some object catches his fascination.

Daniel thinks he can control it. That he uses some secret power of his to deadpan him, just to drive him up the wall. This isn’t one of those times. More like the awkward, empty stare of a guilty child who can’t be brought to say ‘no’, and Daniel feels like his own father as he stares back and waits for him to crack.

Armand frowns. “It was near a subway station.”

“A subway station? Are you fucking for real?” Daniel asks. “This city is covered with subway stations-“

“It was this way. I’m certain. Come.”

He takes off without another word. Daniel has to jog to keep up, cussing him in his wake.

They walk a handful of blocks east, then head south. Armand turns left, then right, two blocks and then left again, and christ, this city is on a grid system, where the hell is he going? It would be so much easier to get a cab. Except to do that they’d have to know where they’re going.

And isn’t this just the theme of Daniel’s life anyways? Not knowing where he’s going. His mother had harassed him about that one morning over the phone, except then he’d been twenty, hungover and half-asleep, and it’d been in a more metaphorical sense. Now he’s pushing twenty-eight and he’s got a blister on the back of his heel from hunting for an apartment building he can’t remember the number of.

Or- not a building. A brownstone, converted into apartments. The last place had been in one of those big complexes with fifteen floors. This place was little, he thinks. Like a house. Or was that the apartment before it?

The camera bag is dragging on his shoulder. The strap is starting to dig into his neck, and he’s just sweaty enough for it to really rub him raw. Daniel pauses in the middle of the sidewalk to swap the side it’s on. Struggles not to get tangled in the strap, and he’s just got it settled when he sees a head of auburn hair turning the corner and leaving him behind.

“Hey-“

Daniel hurries to follow Armand, sweat dripping from the back of his neck and leaving his shirt damp between his shoulder blades. Turns a dark corner and finds himself near blinded on 42nd Street.

The deuce is a riot of neon lights, still packed even at three in the morning. The peep shows and porno theaters never rest. He’d taken advantage of those, once, when he was running from Armand. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of a scene of some guy beating off and woken up to a dead boy sitting beside him, staring at him so cold and unnervingly he’d shouted and scared the other guys in the theater, and gotten both of them kicked out.

Daniel loses track of Armand dipping in and out of the crowd, but only for a second. Just enough time to catch up with him at the corner and hook a finger in his belt loop to keep him from jaywalking and disappearing across the street.

“Jesus, slow down, would you? If I lose track of the house and you I’m gonna end up sleeping on the damn street,” Daniel says. He jerks at Armand’s belt loop, trying to get his attention. “Hey. Earth to Armand, hello?”

He’s got a flier in his hand, too busy staring at it to pay attention. Some place called the Vault. The ad says it’s relocated, and there’s probably an address on it but it’s covered by Armand’s thumb. In the neon light his bone white skin glows; first warm gold, and then, when the lights change, shocking red.

“What is an S&M club?” Armand asks.

Daniel rolls his eyes. “A place you’re not going tonight. Or ever. At least not with me.”

The look Armand gives him is so expressionless as to read exasperated. Sometimes Daniel can’t tell when he’s having him on with his questions. Whether Armand actually knows the answer is just trying to annoy him, or if he genuinely doesn’t understand.

“I’ve never said we’d go tonight,” Armand says. “It’s too near morning. I asked what it is.”

Daniel fishes in his pocket for his cigarettes. Takes one out of the crumpled pack and lights it as he chases Armand across the street.

“It’s like- a place where people go to dress up and spank each other in public, or tie each other up or whatever they’re into,” Daniel says. He winces as his sneaker slips up and rubs at the raw spot on his heel. It hurts bad enough he thinks about slipping his foot half out and walking home like that, back half of the shoe flopping like a sandal. “I don’t really know how to explain it.”

“Why can they not do that at home?” Armand asks.

“I dunno. Some people are just exhibitionists. Why’d you have me fuck people while you sat in a chair and watched?”

No answer for that. Typical. Armand’s never been anything less than cagey about the inner workings of his mind, and Daniel- he accepts it, mostly. Just makes him harder and harder to trust. Makes Daniel wonder if he’s somehow not worth letting in.

Whatever. Maybe if he lets it go Armand will drop it.

“So you’ve been to one of these clubs, then,” Armand says as he glances to check for traffic before stepping out and crossing the road.

Or not.

“Yeah. A few times. It wasn’t for me.”

“Why?”

“Because it just wasn’t. I didn’t feel like I belonged there.”

“Why not?”

Why not. Daniel ashes his cigarette as he walks. He glances at a patch of grass in a narrow park wedged between two buildings and lets his brain indulge in the dramatic little fantasy of curling up right there. At least sleeping would get Armand off his case.

He’s always a pest but not usually like this. Just asking why, why, why like a little kid. If Daniel were feeling generous he’d assume there’s something behind that. Something Armand is trying to hide via focusing on Daniel’s responses, picking them apart in this circular sort of way like a slender undead Socrates.

But generosity is running on short supply when the blister on his heel’s got him about to lose it. When it’s hard, talking around something he himself doesn’t like to think about. A thing he doesn’t fully understand, and it nags at him sometimes, this feeling that he’s missing out on something that might not even exist the way it does in his head. That he can’t have any of the things he wants. Doesn’t deserve them.

The lights of 42nd street thin out like the stars the further west they go. Daniel’s stomach growls as they pass a closed deli. The camera bag swings as he jogs a little to catch up with Armand at the corner, the strap see-sawing back and forth and cutting a line into the side of his throat.

Daniel draws hard on his cigarette. Adjusts the camera strap for the millionth time and hisses at the way it scrapes his neck. It’s going to leave a mark. He’ll probably have a blister there too, when all this is over. Maybe it’ll even scar and he’ll be stuck with that until he’s dead. Eternal monument to Armand’s inability to keep track of an address. That’ll be something to put in his obituary.

“You’re uncomfortable with this topic,” Armand says. “You hardly ever avoid answering me in this way.”

Daniel barks out a laugh.

“Yeah well- we don’t really talk about this stuff. Not just you and me but-“ He gestures vaguely. “It’s in the movies and in magazines, but that doesn’t really teach you how to articulate these things. Anyways, can’t you just pull all this shit out of my brain without even asking me? Why do you have to grill me about stuff I don’t even want to talk about when the answers are all right there?””

“It’s not the same as hearing it from you. Memories are scenes without emotion, like looking at moving photographs. I can get a feel for the shape of the event but not the way it was processed in your mind, how it exists to you as a person,” Armand says, as though it’s that simple. “Does that make sense?”

Does that make sense. Does any of this make sense, that he’s standing on a corner arguing with someone five hundred years old. That Daniel forgets, sometimes, that Armand has these powers but he can’t comprehend how it feels to be him, how they all work.

Armand tilts his head and his curls fall over his shoulder, warm glow of the street lamps threading his auburn hair with gold. Daniel’s caught off guard by the sight of them. It takes a second for his brain to catch up and tell his shoulders to shrug.

“Kind of, I guess,” Daniel says, even though he’s not certain he understands it at all. He’s pretty sure there’s a second reason, and it’s that Armand likes to see the way he squirms when he’s cornered by his questioning. He hasn’t even said anything revealing but his face is prickling, flushed. “I mean it really doesn’t but I’ll take you at your word.”

“So then tell me, why could you not enjoy your experiences?”

“Because- I don’t know. It wasn’t exciting. It was all just playing pretend, you know? Oh, you’ve been bad, oh, are you gonna hurt me? It didn’t feel real.“ Daniel tosses his cigarette butt on the ground. “And then you get all these people watching and asking if you’re a masochist, or if you’re dominant, and- I can’t tell if it was the people or the environment but I couldn’t get out of my head. It wasn’t some transcendent experience. It actually kind of sucked.”

Masochist. Dominant. Even just using the terminology is mortifying, in its own way. Not something that belongs in Daniel’s mouth.

Armand could probably pull it off, though, and that- it’s annoying, somehow, the way he pulls on a mask and can insert himself into any social scenario seamlessly. He’d look good in that sort of club. No faux seriousness from him. No games. He’d be-

Streetlight casts dark shadows in the hollows beneath Armand’s eyes as he stares at him. Daniel cuts his thoughts off.

“You’d like to go, Daniel. I think you’d like to go with me,” Armand says.

“Fuck off,” Daniel mutters. He’s red up to his hairline as he roots in his pocket for his pack of Camels, where they ought to be wedged between his wallet and his keys. Pats his other pocket as adrenaline rushes through his veins. “Hey, do you have the keys?”

Armand stops at the edge of the sidewalk, just about to step off it and back into the street. “I thought you had them.”

Daniel heaves the camera bag off his shoulder, puts it on the ground as gently as he can manage. Drags his hands over his face and tries to physically hold back the noise building up in the back of his throat.

His back is one giant seized up muscle. His t-shirt is soaked with sweat and he feels disgusting from it. They’ve walked at least a hundred blocks tonight without even ten minutes on a bench, or a break for food, and this whole conversation-

Forget immortality. He’s going to die right here of aneurysm.

“Daniel-“

“Look, why don’t we just get a hotel?” Daniel interjects. “If you want to keep interrogating me you’ve got to get me somewhere with a bed and air conditioner, otherwise I’m laying down in an alley.”

“Daniel-“

“Don’t ‘Daniel’ me. Surely to god you have the money to get a room,” Daniel continues as he drags his fingers through his damp hair, shoves it back from his face. “Or you can kill someone, steal another credit card, I don’t care. You’ve had me haul this camera all over, and now you’ve run me up and down the streets lost- I’m not like you, you know? You’ve gotta be a little more fucking considerate sometimes instead of assuming I can just go and go and go.”

Armand blinks at him, slow, like a cat, and god, maybe Daniel’s really done it now. Maybe Armand really will leave him on the street to sleep after that one.

He doesn’t mean to lose his temper, he really doesn’t. It’s only that things have been like this for months, all this going and going, and sometimes Armand really tries his patience. There’s a delirious part of him that thinks maybe Armand likes it when he snaps and- christ, it’s all so messed up.

Armand’s all blank eyes, blank expression. No reaction at all that Daniel can see, and his heart climbs into his throat when Armand takes a step closer to him, standing so near that he has to tilt his chin up to look Daniel in the eyes.

Pale lips part, flash of fang under the glow of the street light. At the edge of his vision Daniel can see Armand’s hand creeping upward and this is it, he thinks. This is how it ends, with him having a bitch fit and getting killed on a street corner. What a way to go.

“Daniel?”

So quiet. He says Daniel’s name too much sometimes, and it makes him think of a cult leader he’d interviewed once. Same low, hypnotic repetition. Disarming in a way that alerts something primal in the back of his brain.

He doesn’t know if his name was spoken or if that was entirely in his head, but it doesn’t matter. Makes his heart beat faster, so hard his rib cage hurts. Armand’s mouth is close enough to kiss. His nails are sharp enough when he doesn’t file them that they could slice open his throat.

“Next time you ought to say please when you ask,” Armand murmurs.

He walks across the empty street toward the neon glow of the open sign on a hotel, and Daniel wants to follow but he’s rooted to his spot on the sidewalk. His blood pounds in his ears, can feel the artery in his throat twitching with it.

Can feel it pounding somewhere else too, below the waistband of his jeans. Daniel digs the heels of his palms into his eyes and rubs until he sees stars.

He’s so, so fucked.

—

It’s not the nicest hotel in the city, but it’s got a working shower and a/c and that’s all Daniel cares about. In the morning he’ll have to put on his gritty clothes and wander around in hopes of finding their place- he thinks he can pick it out in the day time, there was a window with weird green curtains in it- but for now he’s okay with crawling in between the sheets naked and passing out.

The tv hums with static when Armand turns it on. He flips through the channels until he finds a late night program still playing, a rebroadcast of Tom Petty performing with his band. Daniel watches the picture flicker from the corner of a half-closed eye. Lets his head be lifted from the pillow and onto a curiously solid, denim-clad lap.

His fingers are so cold on Daniel’s scalp. His nails drag over the back of his skull, down behind his ear where his hair is starting to grow too long. He’ll get it cut soon, he swears. Just has to be awake long enough when it’s light enough to find a barber shop.

Daniel tips his chin down toward his neck in silent demand for more. He closes his eyes and lets the tinny sound from the television speakers wash over him, drown out the way his calves are throbbing. Parts of his body he didn’t even know could hurt are aching. But this is-

It’s not worth it, exactly. If asked to do the whole night over knowing this was at the end Daniel would still balk. But it’s something. Acknowledgment that he’d had a rough time but he’d put up with it all for Armand. That he’s worth taking care of.

“Daniel.”

Whatever could he want now, right when he’s on the edge of sleep. Daniel struggles with himself to focus, to blink heavy eyelids open and glance up at Armand.

“Huh?”

“In my time-“

“Here we go, story time with grandpa,” Daniel huffs out.

Armand pinches his ear, holds tight until the pain is bright enough to get a hiss out of Daniel, makes him raise his head. He grunts and swats at Armand’s hand until he lets go.

“In my time,” Armand repeats, “the only delineation there existed between sexual acts was those you did with God’s approval, which were intended for procreation, and all others which were sin and considered to be sodomy. Criminal acts, but ones performed all the same in the privacy of the home, or at the homes of courtesans who specialized in such obscure behaviors.”

His voice is quiet, slow like honey. He has such strange accents on certain sounds. Sharp on the consonants, rounded on the vowels. More like a singer than someone speaking. Like how his professor in the greek classics class he dropped out of described the way the Illiad would have been speak-sung.

“Which is to say, there was no labeling as there seems to be now. One did not identify with certain roles, or certain acts. Pleasure was pleasure, and all pleasure was an offense to God. And when all pleasure is an offense one quickly learns that there’s little point in shame, for if you felt shame over every pleasure then you’d spend all of your time worried about sin.”

“You know, for someone who says an awful lot of words about the past you always somehow manage to tell me almost nothing about yourself,” Daniel says into Armand’s thigh. “What are you trying to say?”

“That I find your outward distaste towards such topics strange. You have no concern for God and yet you feel shame, but only when asked about your preferences. Preferences which you attempt to avoid or obscure, claiming you don’t know what they are despite having a narrow taste in pornography, one that often runs toward the sadomasochistic-“

“Jesus, Armand-”

“So one would think that all of that, combined with having a lover who doesn’t have any cares for modern moralizing, would result in an interest in going to this place. But you claim to have none. For one who wishes to have every sort of mortal experience you make little effort to seek them out, but also reject what should be an opportunity. Not an irritation.”

God. He’s so hard to parse when he gets like this. All big words, rambling sentences put together so as to sound like one great stream of consciousness. Like reading Dickens, or the dialogs of Plato.

And Daniel’s worn out. His brain feels like soup, sloshing around in his head. Can’t make sense of it at all.

“That’s a lot of assumptions to make based on me not wanting to go to that club with you,” he says, unable to come up with anything more intelligent.

Armand twirls a lock of his hair around his finger, quiet for a moment. And then-

“But do you not wish to go?” Armand asks. His voice is so soft. “Or is it only that there’s something you’re afraid of that’s holding you back?”

Daniel’s eyelids are heavy. The music from the television doesn’t even sound like it has words anymore, it’s all one big wash of sound.

He buries his nose in the crevice where Armand’s thighs meet. Seeks out the cool meat of his stomach to rest his cheek against and feels his dead little body breathing in, out. Slow, easy rhythm and he can’t remember the question he’d been asked.

“I don’t know,” Daniel mumbles. “Touch the back of my neck s’more. That was nice.”

Cold fingers trace over the bumps of his spine, down to the place where his neck meets his shoulders and then back up again. Daniel inhales the scent of fabric softener on Armand’s jeans, some brand they’ve never bought. It’s the last thought he has before the sounds of the television disappear.

—

Truth is, he’d gone back to the club more than just a few times. Even gone home with a couple people and tried things out in what little privacy the paper thin walls of their apartments had afforded.

Each time had been different, distinct in its own way. There had been the domineering types who never praised him for anything, for whom it seemed the entire point of the game was to set the bar higher and higher until he could never reach it, so that they got the pleasure of doling out punishment. And then the ones that praised too much, who’d reward any half effort with effusive ‘good boy’s and give him anything he liked. Experiences which, surprisingly, set Daniel off kilter more than the endless punishment kind of nights ever did, almost as if there was safety in knowing the game was rigged against him.

And Armand knows all of that, probably. Or some of it. There’s a more than non-zero chance that he’s been rooting around in Daniel’s memories, no matter what he says about them being less interesting than hearing it straight from his mouth. Daniel doesn’t quite trust him.

Maybe the problem was that he never really got to know any of these people. That he’d treated them like interview subjects, shrugged his clothes back on and hurried out the door before the sweat had even dried on his forehead. Better to keep himself closed off, compartmentalized. Better not to get attached if there wasn’t any spark to begin with. To avoid setting himself up for failure.

Or maybe Daniel had just been right the first time. That nothing they could offer could compare to what he was hoping for. No person could ever get him out of his own head.

Armand, though-

Strange, thinking about a sex life with a being who can’t really have sex in the traditional sense. Whose parts don’t work like his, who survives on an experience that supposedly makes orgasm seem mundane in comparison. Who likes to watch Daniel in bed and, with time, has come to crawl in between Daniel’s sheets himself, regardless of all of that.

Outside of the brief period of voyeurism (and what the fuck that was all about, Daniel still doesn’t know, because Armand has never explained anything to him even once) they’re not unlike any other couple, really. They do all of the usual things in all of the ways Armand’s body can withstand, and that was enough for a while. But then, naturally, Armand had become curious. Swept up in the same fascination that he had with films, or collecting wet specimens, except this time it was pornography, toys found in seedy shops along 42nd.

And it’s fun. Horrible, sometimes, going into these places, and standing around for ages while Armand examines every item in every aisle, even gets out the long pole with the hook on the end meant for staff to take items down from the very top of the wall and retrieves things himself. But Daniel withstands it, because at the end (and sometimes, if he’s lucky, at the beginning and the middle too) there’s the blood.

Like a hit of the purest LSD. Like falling into a warm bath. Who cares about whether your boyfriend can cum when you could lick a trail of blood off the pale, cold expanse of skin that runs from his pubic bone up to his navel instead?

Daniel’s always been an outsider among outsiders. Maybe it was inevitable for him to get addicted to something a human can never provide. A special experience only Armand can give.

And for someone who claims to be so curious, so new to these things, sometimes Armand seems so certain about everything he does to Daniel in bed. Too certain, detached almost, like he’s looking for something more but can’t put his finger on what. Or like maybe he’s focused on building toward something. Boiling Daniel slow, like a frog.

He’s just so damned hard to read. A vault of secrets, trapped forever in the form of a seventeen year old boy. But then Daniel figures he’s got secrets too. Things even he doesn’t understand about himself yet.

What these desires are. Why he has them, but doesn’t enjoy them when they’re given to him. Why he’s never brought them up to Armand. What he, the guy who’s been everywhere, has seen almost everything by now, really has to fear.

He sits up in bed in the middle of the afternoon and thinks about it. Too tired to sleep, somehow, a paradoxical sort of insomnia that comes from mixing up his days and nights. Humans were never meant to live like moles the way he does, only ever seeing the world in the dark. Daniel digs his heels of his palms into his eyes and tries to work it all out, and he can’t come up with any answers. No good ones at least. Like without Armand he can’t understand himself.

But he’s got to. He’s got the odd sense that he’s on a staircase, one where with each step he takes the one behind him disappears, forcing him forever downwards. No way back up, the only way out is through, and it’s terrifying, being on that sort of precipice. The edge of the cliff of life itself.

Daniel’s dirty clothes lay in a heap on the floor. If he puts them on he can go out and figure out where the hell they’re living. He’s got a couple bucks in his wallet he can grab a late lunch with too. All of this other stuff can wait.

For just how long though- that’s the question.

—

“This would go a lot better if you had an angle,” Daniel says as he clicks a roll of film into the video camera.

He still doesn’t know where their apartment is, but that doesn’t matter now. Armand has signed a lease on a new one, ordered them entirely new things. Eventually a bill for the rent will hit their account and he’ll untangle this whole mess, but until then he’s unburdened of all his worldly belongings and finds himself drowning in a sea of cardboard instead.

Boxes from furniture and clothing orders and empty cigarette cartons. They didn’t have a garbage can for the first four nights thanks to Armand’s fixation on interviews outweighing the need to stop at a home goods store, and so in the corner is a pile of empty beer cans. Half eaten take out boxes are strewn everywhere because Daniel can’t be bothered to climb over all this junk and put them in the trash.

“An angle?” Armand asks.

He’s sitting on the floor across from Daniel, because their couch is due to arrive at eight am tomorrow. And damned if Daniel isn’t getting to bed at a reasonable time tonight to be up for that. Two interviews, maybe three, and that’s it, he’s cutting him off no matter how hard he bats his copper lashes at him.

Daniel hauls himself to his feet. He steps carefully around an empty box, over another that contains their as of yet unused cutlery, and makes his way into the kitchen in search of a glass and the whiskey bottle he knows he brought back with him last night. He thinks he left it somewhere behind the cleaning supplies on the counter.

God. The place is a fucking wreck. All the clutter is about to give him a panic attack, and more shit is coming in the morning. Thinking about it makes his stomach hurt.

His fingers tremble as he pours himself a glass. More like four fingers than the traditional two, but what does he care? He’ll walk it off while they’re out.

“Yeah. Like a question you ask everyone so that you get different takes on it from different people,” he explains once he’s made his way back into the living room. “It’s more interesting than just asking random stuff. Makes more of a story.”

Armand frowns. He sits back like a normal boy, hands behind him on the floor to prop him up as he thinks, and Daniel is struck by how innocent he looks like this. With his hair cut into a shag and a t-shirt meant for Daniel on he could be any college kid out on the streets, just looking for a night out at a bar that won’t card him over his baby face.

But under all that Armand’s got a bit of a sordid past, Daniel figures that much. Not just the stuff at the theater but when he was alive. He died at seventeen probably having done more interesting shit than Daniel has gotten up to despite having ten years on him and that makes him feel- weird. Naive.

Daniel perches on the edge of the coffee table. He swirls his whiskey in the glasses and wishes he had some ice. Surely there’s ice cube trays around here somewhere in this mess. He just can’t be bothered to look.

There’s a box of tapes on the floor near his foot though. Interviews from the past couple nights, because even if they’ve lost track of their old place and all the other tapes in it, Armand just can’t quit. They’re all neatly labeled. Names, dates, location it was filmed. As if they’ll be used for something.

Probably they won’t. Not even a public access channel would want these endless, droning interviews that go everywhere and nowhere. Daniel can’t imagine editing it all together even though he used to like to do that sort of thing. Figure out how people’s stories fit in a bigger framework. Chop bits and pieces together to play on the radio to a silent, unseen audience.

Sometimes he’d get feedback. A voice mail from someone who really enjoyed the subject of the night, or a stranger inviting him to talk to them. He’d liked hearing from them.

Now he doesn’t hear from anyone, really. Just Armand. His world is such a narrow place.

“So what are you gonna ask people about?” Daniel asks.

“Their early sexual fantasies,” Armand says, like it’s nothing at all.

He half-chokes on his drink. A drop of whiskey makes it up the back of his throat and into his sinus cavity, where it stings so bad his eyes water.

“You can’t ask people that,” Daniel says.

“Why not?”

“It’s intrusive. They’ll think you’re some weirdo looking for material to go home and beat off to.”

“Then tell me one of yours and I won’t ask anyone else.”

Armand’s fangs are just visible when he smiles. Two white pinpricks behind pale lips, so delicate that most people would miss them if they weren’t sure what they were looking for. He never smiles wide enough to make them really obvious but Daniel notices them every time, and it’s infuriating, how attractive it is. How Armand just toes the line between smug and innocent whenever he lets a grin creep onto his face.

“You’re really obnoxious, you know that?” Daniel says.

Armand’s smile stretches wider. “You say that yet you’re thinking you’d like to kiss me now.”

“Yeah. Well.” Daniel’s face burns, right up to the tips of his ears. “Since you’ve pointed it out I don’t want to anymore.”

“Now who between us is the childish one?”

“You. You’re seventeen, technically.”

“Only technically. And in spite of being seventeen I’m more able to discuss my desires than you-“

“Yeah but are you? Really? You can’t even explain why you want to go do this stuff outside of ‘because’. I think you just keep questioning me so that it looks like you can talk about it. I think you’re just as afraid of the things you want as anyone else.”

The sight of Armand’s expression crumbling is a punch to the gut. A flash of something- hurt? Vulnerability?- and then the placid mask is back up, no more smile, nothing. Blank, neutral face and Daniel almost regrets what he said.

Almost.

“I’ve been thinking about your other question,” Daniel says. Changes the subject, because if deflection is good enough for Armand then it’s good enough for him. “The one from the other night at the motel.”

“About what it is that you’re afraid of?” Armand asks.

“Yeah. That one.”

What makes him afraid. The normal things, honestly. Sickness. Sudden death. Waking up without the radio already blasting and the scent of burning eggs filling up the house.

“What do you think happens when we die?” Daniel asks. “Just play along with me. Worst case scenario.”

Armand tilts his head. His curls fall against his cheek, close enough to his eye that if he were mortal it would be irritating, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Daniel’s fingers itch to brush them away anyways.

“Nothing. That we experience all of this and then are returned to mere darkness that never ends. Or worse, that our souls exist in some sort of ether, not on the mortal plane but not in heaven or hell either. Eternity spent floating in the same place spirits exist, unable to return to the world,” Armand says. “All of the build up, all of the adhering to what makes a being good and then-“

“Disappointment,” Daniel finishes for him. “Exactly. The fear that what you have pictured in your head will always be better than what you actually get to experience.”

“And you think I would disappoint you, were we to go to that place.”

“I-“ Daniel hesitates.

He’s thought about it, he can’t lie about that. Imagined what it might be like if they did go, but he can’t picture anything except the way Armand is on every night out. Blinded by his own desires, flighty. Too easily interested in the people around them and not enough in tune with Daniel as he wilts into his seat at a boxing match, exhausted and dying to go somewhere with less shouting, less blood in view that’s not Armand’s.

Just another night that ends in -y. Boring, tiring. Lonely in spite of not being alone at all and nothing like what he has in his head.

“I don’t know. I don’t know you,” Daniel says. “I mean I know you in the sense of the things we’ve done together, and from the stuff Louis told me. I know about you and that kid at the theater, the one that called you master. But even that- none of it makes sense. I don’t understand how you got to that point.”

Armand’s expression goes tight at the mention of the theater, the corners of his mouth harden- in agitation or sadness, it’s impossible to tell. It only lasts for a second. Blink, and Daniel might have missed it.

He sits up, criss crosses his legs and places his folded hands in his lap. He looks up at Daniel through his lashes.

“The way anyone does. Through a formative experience with one you trust above all else,” Armand says. Always cryptic, always continuing too fast for Daniel to question him. The whiplash of his questioning drives Daniel insane. “Are you certain that the problem is fear of your own disappointment? Or is that you’re too consumed by the idea of you being the disappointing thing that you can’t stand to even try?”

The question hits him like a slap in the face. Even after taking another drink of his whiskey Daniel’s mouth is dry.

Fair is fair, maybe. One pointed question for another and now both of them are cross with themselves.

Armand puts the audio recording devices in the bag with the camera, tucking each piece neatly into its respective slot. Little elastic bands and recesses in the bag, created just for each item that goes along with it. Everything perfectly in its place.

He heaves the strap over his shoulder and then grabs the keys from the bowl of junk on the coffee table. Spins them around his finger like a real human.

“I’ve decided to change my angle, I think,” Armand says, and immediately Daniel pushes off the edge of the coffee table to stand. “I’d like to ask people what they believe happens after death. Perhaps an outside perspective will do us both good.”

Yeah. Perhaps it will.

—

They interview three people. Armand keeps each one to a tight thirty minutes, asking the final question exactly five minutes before they run out of tape, and then wraps up the session with a level of professionalism Daniel didn’t know he was capable of. Quick stop at a diner on the way back so that Daniel can pound a bowl of chili and some fries and then they’re done for the night. All of it is finished up neatly by one am.

And Daniel wonders if he saw that in his head. That he was already irritable about the idea of wandering all night, that three interviews was his limit. Why Armand decided to respect that now, all of the sudden, when he’s pushed for ‘just one more’ every single night before this-

It’s unfair that he can know these things but choose whether or not to disclose it. That he could be listening to Daniel’s thoughts right now as they climb the steps of the fire escape up to the roof, but Daniel would never be able to tell.

Disappointment. Letting people down.

Daniel’s got a whole catalog of those moments in his mind. The sound of his mom’s voice on the phone when he told her he was going to San Francisco and not coming back. The look on his professor’s face when he told him he’d be dropping out, even though he was getting an A in the class. You’ve got a bright mind, the man had said to him. The world could use bright minds like yours.

Sure.

A mind that always circles back to unsavory topics, as his grandmother had called them. One that would rather interview junkies and outcasts than spend another moment in the company of another politician or a business exec. Daniel’s never gotten a grade lower than a B. He’s never had the motivation to do anything with that and so he’s ended up like he is now. A wanderer. An outcast among outcasts. Twenty eight years old with nothing to show for it but a wallet full of cash a dead teenager stole for him, an apartment filled with boxes of shit he didn’t pick out. Thoughts that are always turning towards death, and the precious rush of the blood in his mouth, and Armand’s cold hands on his skin.

Perhaps life is doomed to be disappointing when you don’t feel like you were meant to be alive in the first place.

Daniel sits down in the gravel with his back against the low concrete wall that runs the perimeter of the roof. His hair blows into his eyes as he fusses with the switch on his lighter, cups a hand around his cigarette to protect the flame until it catches.

Smoke burns his mouth. Clears his head, insomuch as it’s ever clear. He closes his eyes, lets the back of his skull thud against the wall, and lets the breeze wash over him; cold, where his sweat damp t-shirt is stuck to his chest.

“A telescope system would fit nicely here,” Armand says. Daniel hears the crunch of gravel when he comes close, feels the bump of his limbs as he settles into the empty space between Daniel’s knees. “If we purchased one large enough we could see the stars despite the city lights.”

“Mm.”

His little body is so solid against Daniel’s chest. Like he’s all bone, no meat at all, even though Daniel is all too aware of the way his thighs curve when he takes off his jeans, the once soft protrusion of his belly where Daniel likes to rest his head. Armand curls up to him like he’s not gritty and disgusting from hauling a camera around the city in the summer. He drops his head onto his shoulder, forehead pressed against his sticky neck.

“If this is something you want so bad, why don’t you just make me do it like you do everything else?” Daniel says. “Why all this beating around the bush?”

“Do I ever make you do anything, Daniel? Really?” Armand says the words right into his throat. “You say no but go along with me anyhow. You enjoy being buffeted about.”

“It’s not-“ Daniel pauses, chews on his frustration. “Don’t make this about me. That’s not what I’m asking.”

“But it’s what I’m asking you now.”

Daniel flicks ash from his cigarette onto the gravel. Thinks about what he’s about to say because there’s no way to be honest without being a little cruel. Though maybe Armand expects it of him by now.

Hateful thought, that he’s become the kind of person you know will snap, the way his father always was. That his defenses are up so high he can’t find a nice way to phrase anything anymore.

“I’d enjoy it more if I trusted you better, I think. I just don’t know how to do that.”

Armand doesn’t respond. And that’s so typical of him. It’d be irritating if Daniel wasn’t already worn down, heat exhausted. Belly too full to be comfortable, because he’s not used to getting an entire meal on their nights out. He’d tell him off if he had it in him. He’d-

The bite takes him by surprise. They’ve done it a thousand times by now but his body never gets used to it. The white hot puncture of fangs through his flesh awakens an urge in him to push Armand’s head away. Try to flee because this thing can kill you, his limbic system shouts.

Daniel’s fingers curl into the denim jacket stretched across Armand’s back. He clutches at it until the piercing pain is over and his blood starts to flow. And the visions-

Beautiful room. Walls painted in a riot of color, harlequin pattern in red and blue and black and cream, and the ceiling carved and gilded wood. And the bed. An imposing, dark stained four poster that seems to take up the better part of the room even in a space cavernous as this, all covered in red silk velvet and embroidered with gold. Even the canopy is a work of art with its red and gold fringe, and curtains that hang all the way to the floor.

Those curtains will close soon. Shut the two of them in so they’re in their own little world of velvet and blood and gold. As if his world has not narrowed to that one being already.

“Master-“

He’s done a terrible thing. Skipping lessons had been sin enough, but to go to a tavern and put himself in danger by falling into the water like that, causing another boy to risk his life to save him. And seeing that boy get whipped for it in his stead- never has he felt so low.

“You’ll never do that again, will you?” a voice asks.

“Never.”

“And you know that I do these things not to cause you suffering, but because I want you to be better? I know that you can be. You have it in you to be exactly as I see you.”

Does he know this? Does he really understand it? Or is he nodding his head just because he wants it back, the stitch in his heart that drives him to do all manner of things, to writhe and beg and plead, to endure the rod and those cold, disregarding glances. To tolerate being taken from home and then brought back educated, changed, yet still as desperate for-

Doesn’t matter. His honesty and understanding isn’t something for him to judge himself. That is his master’s purview and in that judgment he must trust.

Cold arms, terrifyingly strong arms gather him up. Toss him onto the bed like a poppet, face down in the pillows. The gold embroidery scratches at his face.

“Count the strokes for me.”

He will do better. He will be better. And pleasure will follow after this pain as it always does. The sweetness of being returned to good graces can only come from a moment of loss, of suffering. Like sinning and then repenting to god. There is always a reward for goodness.

The blow that comes down on his backside blinds him. He struggles to find a number to say. He knows four languages by now but all of them are failing him, and if he fails again-

Daniel’s dizzy with blood loss when he opens his eyes. All the lights of the city blur and wink at him as he waits for the tingling in his face to subside, for sensation to come back to his lips. He’s so cold all of the sudden. Even Armand’s body is warm in comparison to his numb hands.

“See?” Armand asks.

See. See what? Daniel feels the way he always does when a plane lands, and he’s somehow managed to sleep the entire flight. Dried out. Disoriented. Unsure how to tell up from down.

“No, not really,” he admits.

“That there must be a certain balance of trust and fear. That you’re seeking a person who can find that balance for you, not a specific act, or a particular role.”

Armand’s tucked up against him with his arm curled around his waist. His head is at just the right height for Daniel to rest his cheek against the top of it. He tosses aside his cigarette, useless now, just one long stem of ash, and sticks his hand up the back of Armand’s shirt to try and steal his own warmth back from him.

He’s so hot with his blood. The silver of hip Daniel can see between his shirt and his jeans has gone pink and alive with it.

“And you can be that person?” Daniel asks.

“Perhaps. If you let me. But trust isn’t created. It’s simply a decision you make.”

Armand noses at the place where two wounds would be, had he not licked them shut. He digs his thumbnail into his own palm and offers Daniel his bloody hand.

And I seek a person as well, one who can fully give in to me, who’s no longer for sharing. Little voice, right inside his head like there’s a microphone wired into his brain. I like keeping you as a pet, Daniel, the way witches keep cats. I’d sit you at my feet like an animal.

Daniel swallows down the blood. Hot and thick and it burns all the way down until he’s on fire inside. He swears he can see the individual stones that make up the concrete wall, could probably count the number of gravel pieces on the roof in an instant if someone asked. And Armand’s body- suddenly he doesn’t feel like marble, but like he has pores on his skin, a mound where a beauty mark had once been on the small of his back.

He traces over it again and again. Rubs at the tiny bump like he’s stoned and thinks of that boy behind the gilded bars in the theater raising his glass, toasting to his master. What about him had been different? Same games, but Armand had discarded him in the end when something better came along. Had he been enough? Or had his death marked him out as a failure of some type?

He forgets, sometimes, that Armand could do that to him. Drink him empty and leave him dead in a motel room, on the roadside. No one would ever know what happened to him. They’d all think he had a heart attack, some strange foreign disease. No one would have any idea of the rapture he felt just before his heart gave out.

Armand’s ribs are slotted up against his crotch and he’s hard, suddenly, beneath his jeans. Too aware of how every breath Armand takes causes his side to press down into his cock.

He hasn’t been seeking a person at all. He’s been seeking this.

“Well?” Armand asks.

Daniel swallows hard. “I guess you’d have to take me somewhere else to find out. The apartment is a dump right now. We can’t do much of anything here.”

Armand’s arm squeezes at his waist, hugs him tight as though he’s been given a gift, and Daniel feels constricted with fear. Excitement. They’re one and the same, maybe. Both leave his heart slamming against the inside of his chest.

Gravel crunches as Armand scoots up, sits up a little straighter so he can kiss at the hollow just beneath his ear. Rolling on the blood like this, Daniel can feel every crinkle in his lips. The wet press of his tongue on his skin is like an electric shock that goes straight to his groin.

“But there is something we can do right here, isn’t there? A problem of yours I can fix?” Armand asks.

His breath is warm on Daniel’s ear, ticklish. His hand is soft and malleable when he grasps him through his jeans.

Daniel nods, short, staccato, and realizes this isn’t a favor so much as a reward. A prize for being good enough to agree to this outing Armand wants and- shit. He’s in so far over his head he’s drowning already but it’s too late. Armand’s unzipping his jeans and he’s the most turned on he’s ever been in his life. There’s nothing to do now but swim.

—

The flier is crumpled up from having been stuffed into Armand’s pocket. Fold lines criss-cross the image on it, some vague black and white photo of a person’s back, imposed between the forks of an oversized V. They’re wearing some kind of studded leather harness from what Daniel can make out, and he reads the tag line again and again.

Come take a walk on the wild side at our new location!

Corny. But it stirs something in him regardless, a twist of anxiety in his gut.

It’s a terrible idea, probably. He can’t imagine what Armand would do with him there- he seems absolutely thrilled by anything and so the possibilities are endless. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The not knowing?

Daniel sets the flier down in the wreckage on the nightstand. Overfilled ash tray and empty soda cans and his watch, his wallet, spare pair of glasses. So much shit you can’t set one thing down without knocking another over. He manages to send his cigarettes crashing to the floor but he’s too lazy to lean over the bed and see where they went. He flops back into the pillow and throws his arm across his face to block out the light streaming through the crack in the curtains.

Armand could bend him over a bench and spank him. Could write all of his sins on his chest in marker and parade him around the room- Rude. Demanding. Repressed. Blindfold him and let him struggle to figure out who or what is touching him. Sneak little drinks off him while no one is the wiser, just make it look like he’s leaving hickies on his neck. There’s no telling what he would or wouldn’t do.

All he has to do is let go and trust him. Stop worrying about disappointment and try.

He lays there and thinks about the memory Armand had given him. Velvet bed covers beneath his face, ass bare for the rod. Complete and total resignation to his fear of the thing putting him through this torment. Something old and deadly. Something that wants him to be better.

Daniel has so many questions about it. Where it happened, who the other person was. If it was all even real, or just some horny story to prove a point.

I like keeping you as a pet. I’d sit you at my feet like an animal.

Heat floods the cradle of his hips. He slips his hand down beneath the blanket.

Flash of memory of Venice in the dark, waves slapping gently on the walls of the canals. He’d gone there to try and understand this thing following him and ended up with more questions than answers. Decided to drown his frustrations in alcohol and met a woman at the bar. Blur of steps in the old palazzo that formed the hotel, old fashioned key slipping into the lock with a thud.

It’d been a warm, sticky night and he’d left the windows thrown open to keep the room from getting stifling. Daniel conjures up the image of the sheer curtains rustling in the breeze. The woman’s hands pulling hard enough at his hair to bring tears to his eyes as she rode him. And that’d been good, almost enough to get him out of his head, but not quite. Hadn’t stopped him from looking out the window.

Daniel palms at himself, knuckles dragging against the underside of the bed sheet. Thinks about the sight of Armand in the window across the canal, the way the light leaking from the windows of the hotel had reflected off his skin, illuminated him like the white marble of the bridge of sighs. Freakish, how still he was.

Fear had gripped Daniel’s throat tight. He’d come on the spot.

He tries to imagine Armand staring at him that way again. How threatening he used to be. Run, he’d said, and Daniel had immediately taken off, no protest, no questions asked.

He spills hot and messy into his palm. Gropes around for tissues on the nightstand but doesn’t come up with anything but the flier.

Come take a walk on the wild side at our new location!

A terrible idea, Daniel thinks. But he’s never really had any other kind.

__

The Vault, as it turns out, is notorious enough to be lined up down the block. Three hour wait to get in, with the high possibility of being turned away at the door by the bouncer if you’re not a regular already, or if your look just isn’t good enough. The kind of place Daniel would have no hopes of getting into if he were a normal person, with a normal partner.

Unlucky for him, he’s neither of those things. Which is why he finds himself standing just inside the club doors with leather pants riding up his ass.

Daniel feels ridiculous dressed like this. Combat boots on his feet, no shirt. Just fine lambskin leather clinging to his thighs and calves. Wide, heavy collar that feels like a hand around his neck. All Armand’s choice, of course. He’d never have picked out any of this himself and it makes him want to walk out of his skin, the way he’s on display already.

The other night Armand had set up the video camera by himself. Positioned it on the peninsula counter that divides their kitchen from the living room and set Daniel on the couch to be interviewed. Tell me about an early sexual fantasy of yours, he’d asked.

Strange, being on the other side of things. Being questioned and knowing it’s going to be committed to a physical format, captured on a tape forever until Armand decides to destroy it or time degrades the film within the cassette. Daniel had squirmed under the eye of the camera lens.

I found a magazine out in the woods when I was young, up in some abandoned treehouse, Daniel had said. It had a story in it told in pictures, about a guy who’s taken away by another man on the premise of going on vacation, but it turns out to be something else.

The pictures had been the usual thing. The subject bound and spanked, used as a footstool at a party with wealthy strangers, made to do menial tasks like carry trays of drinks and then whipped for spilling a drop. And the captions- trite stuff, calling the guy a good boy or bad depending on the image. What’d gotten him had been the total relief from responsibility. How in those circumstances the man became not quite human, not quite an object. Subjected to an endless array of different torments. Humiliated.

There’d been this repeated caption about the man having the sense that all that was happening to him might go on forever. Complete and utter loss of control.

Daniel’s mind had latched onto that bit of prose and never quite let it go. Had never stopped wondering what it might be like to consent to a situation that left him truly afraid. To be horrified by his own arousal in a moment of real, unending distress.

Daniel leans against the door frame. Cold metal sends goosebumps racing down his arms but he doesn’t pull away. It’s too warm in here for that. Not even midnight and it’s already packed. Heat of bodies from window to blacked out basement window, and it’s soothing in a way. Womb-like, as though the outside world doesn’t really exist. Just this stifling world of flesh.

A big man in a leather vest shoulders past them. Bumps into Daniel in the process and leaves a damp streak on his bicep with his sweat.

“So are we just gonna stand here or what?” Daniel asks as he rubs at his arm.

Armand toys with the crop dangling from his wrist. Taps it against his leg as he scans the room, one two, one two, in the same rhythm as Daniel’s pounding heart.

What would distress you, Daniel? Armand had asked from the other side of the camera, face placid as though he were asking about the weather forecast. Pain? A certain implement, perhaps?

Daniel had shaken his head. He didn’t know the answer. But maybe not knowing, maybe that was it- uncertainty. He was alright with anything Armand could come up with so long as it seemed like it could do the job.

Famous last words. Usually he’d laugh when Armand used modern phrases like that, the kind that always sound wrong in his mouth. But his grin had been so frightening. Those who are willing to try anything are more likely to find out the hard way that there’s something they truly, truly cannot stand.

Daniel’s itching for a smoke but there’s no room in the pockets on these pants to hold anything like that, so he’s got nothing to do with his hands. Keep them behind his back, probably. The one guy he’d tried this with had demanded that. Or-

God. He’s barely in the doors and he’s already wondering how to do things right.

But it’s hard to help when Armand hasn’t told him much of anything. He’d laid out the clothes, bickered with Daniel a bit about putting them on. This is what you desired, Daniel, a loss of control. It’s natural to begin with what you wear, he’d said, and fixed him with that relentless stare until he’d taken off his boxers and changed. Gathered up his own accessories and that’d been it.

No rules. No hints. Just Armand in his little vest and matching trousers, lump in his pocket from some object he’d refused to let Daniel see. And Daniel can’t stop wondering what it is. Why he’d let him see the crop but hidden this little thing.

Could be something awful. A plug to go into the bathroom and put in. An instrument of pain Daniel hasn’t heard about. Surely they had stuff back in the renaissance that nobody still uses today. Some lost torture tool that belongs in a museum.

He chews at his lip as he rolls ideas over his mind. Nearly jumps out his skin when Armand turns to him.

“Perhaps it’s only your cigarettes,” Armand says, and Daniel rolls his eyes. Fat chance of that. “Would you like to see what it is?”

He’s all auburn curls, frothy lace collar that looks almost yellowed against the bone white skin of his neck. He’d look innocent if Daniel didn’t know better. He’s probably been combing through his mind at the sex shops and cataloging his reactions to objects for weeks just waiting for a night like this.

Before Daniel can say anything snappy he reaches into his pocket. Pulls out a coil of black leather, gold clip on the end that matches the d-ring on the collar, and that-

Daniel had assumed that was just for dress up. Part of the game, something to wear to fit in with the rest of the crowd like the pants. Or the gloves on Armand’s hands. He hadn’t expected for the collar to be used in any real way. For Armand to mean the whole thing about treating him like a pet in such a literal sense.

“I wouldn’t wish to lose you in the crowd,” Armand says. His gloved thumb presses down the latch on the clip dangling from the end of the leash, and Daniel’s stomach drops to his feet. “Lean down.”

The collar lays heavy on his throat, bearing down against his adam’s apple, and the dramatic voice in his head worries it’s going to make him gag, the way it feels like it’s choking him. It’s all so horribly real all of the sudden.

He’d agreed to come here. Had fantasized about what it’d mean to submit, be a human pet.

He’s really in it now.

The air feels thick as glue when Daniel goes to bend, like he’s moving through something sticky that takes all of his effort to cut through. Humiliating, having to stoop for the guy that’s about to put him through something terrible. He’s got a good six inches on Armand. Daniel’s used to looking down and seeing the top of his head, and something about Armand’s size- by all rights he should be the weaker one, the less dangerous of the two of them. Daniel leans down and he’s all too aware of how untrue that is.

Gloved fingers slide up the leash, grasping it tight just beneath the clip. Armand tugs his head down until they’re eye to eye and his blood pounds in his ear. Daniel can’t tell if the bass from the music or his own heart is causing his ribs to rattle around in his chest.

“I hardly expected you to be so well behaved so soon,” Armand says.

His lips are moving, cast an eerie color by the blue neon lights at the bar. Like the mouth of a hypothermia victim. And Daniel’s not entirely sure he hears the sound of his voice over the music. Whether it’s spoken into his head or just into his face, so close he can feel the cool huff of Armand’s breath on his skin.

He swallows thickly. Struggles with how constricting the collar is, like hands around his throat.

“Yeah. Well. It’d be embarrassing to throw a fit right at the door and not even make it in, wouldn’t it?” Daniel mutters. His mouth is so dry already. He can hardly wrestle the words past his lips. “Maybe I’m just saving up a shitty attitude for later.”

“Maybe you are.” Armand’s smile is brief. Menacing, with the glint of his fangs at the corners of his mouth. Daniel can’t stop himself from fixating on his mouth, always searching for the quick flash of them. “Come.”

Impossible not to follow the yank at his throat. Armand’s hands are so slender that sometimes Daniel forgets how strong he really is, but now he can’t stop noticing these things about him. Little details that have him off kilter, unable to focus. That give him intrusive thoughts like how it wouldn’t take any effort at all for him to squeeze too tight during sex and crush his throat. That Armand could probably kill him with a single blow, and that-

Daniel takes a step forward. He stumbles over his own feet and this time he’s the one bumping into a stranger.

He collides with the guy hard enough to make his drink slosh over the rim of its glass. The man who turns around is tall, muscled enough to really be intimidating. His beard is greying in a couple patches around his chin. An old hat. A regular, probably, and shit, what a great way to make first impressions at this place. Daniel’s about to turn and say sorry but the guy’s expression gets his words stuck in his throat.

He’s looking at Daniel like a piece of meat. Something tender, needing breaking in, and this is the kind of place where it wouldn’t be out of the question for him to offer to Armand to give it a go.

Would Armand say yes? They haven’t negotiated anything like that. Haven’t negotiated anything, really, and the longer they take to make their way across the room the more Daniel realizes everyone they pass is giving him the same sort of hungry, appraising glances. Big, stumbling fawn of a man attached to the leash of a pale boy, paraded around the room.

It’s too warm in the club. Too crowded, and Daniel is dizzy with the awareness at how naked he is in spite of his clothes. He thinks this is how livestock must feel when they’re shown at auction. One last proud walk before the kill.

Focus.

His own thought, or something Armand spoke into his head? Doesn’t matter, really. He’s gotta get out of his head or he’s going to lose it before this has really begun.

Daniel lets his vision tunnel out until all he sees is auburn curls, tight vest that nips in at the waist with its little gold buckle and straps at the small of Armand’s back. The leash is short enough he has to hold it trailing over his shoulder to give Daniel enough lead to stand up straight. Any closer and he’d have to hunch. Or crawl on his knees.

Awful thought. He can’t bear to picture it, dragging himself like a postulant between the furniture that dots the edge of the room. Tables with guests and their drinks, sofas, the tall wooden cross a weeping and moaning woman is strapped to, getting lashed. That could be him. Might be before the end of the night, Daniel doesn’t know. The idea of it makes his blood run cold. His pants feel too tight in all the wrong places.

Big blue armchair in the back corner of the club, with a woman seated on it, chatting to a friend. She gets up in a jerking, mechanical way, almost like the thought to do so hadn’t been her own. Armand takes her place on the chair. He nods at the floor.

I’d sit you at my feet like an animal. The words pingpong back and forth in Daniel’s memory.

Daniel tries to swallow but there’s nothing there. His brain has forgotten how to use words, how to make his body move. All the signals to get on the floor are firing but his knees refuse to bend.

“Do I have to spell out what I want from you?” Armand asks, and shit, he’s never been sharp like this before. “You’ve never ignored a demand before, you didn’t strike me as the type of buffoon to begin now. Hesitation is an infraction, you know.”

“An infraction? You never said there were rules,” Daniel says.

“You never asked if there were,” Armand says. Hits him with that same pain in the ass grin and gives the leash a little tug. “Sit.”

His stomach does one of those flops, the kind it does when he’s about to be sick. He wishes he had something to hold onto. Anything he could do with his hands. Standing here at the end of the leash is about the same as he imagines floating in space would be. The kind of useless, weightless experience that leaves someone totally impotent.

Daniel clasps his hands behind his back. He picks at a loose piece of skin at the edge of his thumbnail and tries to ignore the way Armand being seated has shorted the leash just enough that he’s stuck leaning slightly forward, just off balance enough he’s anxious he could fall.

The clasp jingles on the O-ring attached to the collar when Armand tugs at it again. He gives Daniel a look and he doesn’t have to say a word, because the question is written on his expression; eyebrow raised as if to ask if he really has to force him down.

Daniel can’t stand him. Yet as he fumbles his way to his knees he can’t stop looking at Armand in the kind of desperate way a starving man looks into the window of a restaurant, staring at all the things he wants but can’t have. He’s got the loving brown eyes of a doll, the soft curls to match tumbling down onto his shoulders. Disturbingly pale skin above the lace collar on his throat, in the sliver of space between the cuffs of his sleeves and his gloves. When Armand crosses his ankle over to rest on his knee his pants ride up and expose the little leather garters holding up his socks.

Daniel’s got the bewildering urge to kiss that bit of skin, right beside the tiny strap that attaches to the sock. Could rub his cheek against it like a cat.

Perhaps later, as a reward.

His face burns at the sound of Armand’s voice echoing in his skull. Beneath his knees the concrete floor is miserably hard, enough that he’ll probably have bruises later just from kneeling there. Not as satisfying as a bruise inflicted by Armand but. Trophy enough. A reminder of whatever he’s about to suffer.

Armand cups his cheek in his gloved hand, drags his chin up until he has no choice but to look at his face.

“What am I to do with you, Daniel?” he asks, voice low, words slow and deliberate.

The gloves are scented with frankincense. Myrrh. Nothing really sticks to Armand, not even cologne, and so sometimes he scents his clothes with it instead. He runs his palm over Daniel’s face. Maps out his features with his fingers, bridge of his nose, hollows beneath his eyes, jut of his cheekbone. Touches so soft and careful that Daniel shivers with it, leans in instinctively to the kidskin covering his hand and seeks the chill of his flesh radiating through the leather. Armand’s palm covers his nose and the scent of it envelops him entirely. Feels like he’s back in church.

People at the edges of the room are looking at them. Whispering. Half of Daniel wonders what they’re saying. The other half can’t bear to know. Praise, desire, distaste- the idea of any of it puts him on edge. He’s too aware that in these places he doesn’t really belong.

Armand’s hand slips down to his jaw, thumb and forefinger digging into the tender flesh of his cheeks. He squeezes just hard enough Daniel’s mouth falls open. Forces him to sit there for a moment, gaping like a fish.

“Armand-“

It comes out all stupid and slurred from how his face is being squished. Armand blinks down at him. Infuriating, how he stares. Daniel can’t tell what he’s looking for, why he’s doing this, except to get him wound up and embarrassed.

“I said, what am I to do with you?” Armand repeats.

Same question. Daniel’s so tired of questions, interrogations that leave him exhausted, rhetorical shit he can’t answer and that Armand doesn’t explain. It’s all meant to obfuscate. It all sets him up to fail.

“Thought that was up to you to plan and not me,” Daniel snaps back.

No reaction. Just a long, cold look, right into Daniel’s eyes as though Armand could see straight into his soul. Sometimes Daniel wonders which one is the mask. The animated looks Armand gives at parties when he’s entertaining a crowd, the laughter when he breaks down into hysterics over a film. Or this. The empty kind of expression that makes Daniel’s blood run cold.

Quick shove and he’s thrown back, heels of his combat boots digging into his ass. Armand clips the end of the leash to his belt loop. Frees up his hands so that he can tap the crop against his knee in time with the gallop of Daniel’s heart.

“You’re insolent, Daniel. I let you get away with far too much,” Armand murmurs. “You forget yourself around me, I think. Don’t you agree?”

The leather tip of the crop is cool beneath his chin. It’s a springy thing. The body of it bends when Armand applies pressure, uses it to guide him to lift his face and keep Daniel’s eyes on him. Springy means it’ll sting when the blow comes down on him. And stinging-

Daniel can take a blow. He’d been paddled in grade school by a nun, whacked across the knuckles with a thick wooden ruler. Deep pressure, hard hits, those he can grit his teeth and withstand. Stinging, he hates. Stinging’s the kind of pain that makes him cry, and crying in a public place like this- too much. No way he can bear that.

“If I agree with you is that better for me, or worse?” he asks, because he can never fucking help himself.

Armand huffs out a sound, something close to a laugh. “Do you think I’d tolerate dishonesty?”

“I don’t know. You’ve admitted you were something of a liar yourself when you were in charge of that theater. Back when you met Louis.”

Daniel doesn’t mean to say it. The words just tumble out of his mouth because they haven’t set up any protocol. No rules about whether he should answer simply, yes sir, no sir. If he’s even permitted to speak. Armand’s got him dangling here with no real sense of right and wrong and he feels like a child at confession all over again. One wrong step and maybe god will never forgive you, except his teacher never told him where the line actually is.

Armand drags the crop down his throat, over the sparse blond hair on his chest. Finds Daniel’s nipple and nudges at it, catches it on the edge of the little leather loop and leaves him biting back a whine.

“You speak to me as if I’m one of your peers. As if I’m beneath you, sometimes, when you condescend to me like I’m a child,” Armand says. “You’ve gone complacent in our time together, I realize that now. Intimacy has made you reckless.”

Daniel’s wound tight. He’s the kind of anxious that makes his face numb, because Armand’s not wrong. He has forgotten what this thing is at its core. A beautiful young man dressed in leather and lace that has Daniel painfully hard at his feet. An ancient, powerful thing that doesn’t belong here. Something that shouldn’t be alive.

Still. In all his jerk off fantasies he’d never pictured him like this. Hadn’t thought Armand would say it out loud. There’s so many sides of him Daniel doesn’t know about. Thoughts he’s had, feelings that Daniel will never understand.

Hard to tell if this is real. Whether it’s how Armand actually feels or if he’s just making shit up to get Daniel nervous. He’d brought the idea up- the way the man in the magazine had been told off, as if the physical stuff wasn’t enough. It’s his own fault either way. The cold rush of adrenaline every time Armand opens his mouth is just the result of Daniel digging his own grave.

Armand flicks the crop against his nipple. Little painless thud but it still makes him jump. Reminds Daniel that wherever he decides to strike him it’s going to hurt, and he’s going to hit for sure. It’s just a matter of time. Placement. The crop teases over his abs and Daniel’s mind whirs with options- backs of his thighs, bottoms of his feet, across his ass. Each one worse than the last. Armand prods him with it right in the groin and Daniel thinks he might be sick.

You’ve forgotten, Daniel, that I could kill you at any time I want. Your existence is at my discretion.

Words, right in his head again, like a cold slap in the face. Daniel’s so hard beneath the leather pants he could die. Thinks he just might when the tip of the crop rubs there, teases right at the head of him just along the inside of his leg. Heat rises in him like sparks beneath his skin.

He can’t decide if he should arch up into it or squirm away. Daniel starts to lift his hips but aborts the motion halfway when he notices people at the edge of his vision, just beyond Armand’s face. Strangers, looking at him. An entire cluster at the corner of the room stopped to stare.

And probably Armand is going to get him off in here at some point, with all of these people around to see. He’s never done that before. Those times he’d gone to the club in San Francisco had ended in him half hard, going home alone to conjure up a fantasy and finish himself off. No one had ever forced the issue, but Armand- it’s almost certain he will. Makes Daniel want to crawl under the chair and hide.

He tucks his chin down toward his chest so that his hair falls in a curtain over his eyes. It’s just long enough now to get in the way, obscure his vision and hide him from the rest of the room. He moves away from the touch of the crop. Curls in on himself like a child.

“Daniel.”

Armand shifts on the chair. Uncrosses his legs. Whatever he’s about to say, it’s going to be awful. Daniel knows that. His shoulders are tensed up around his ears as if he could physically brace himself against it. His mind’s working a hundred miles an hour to try and predict it, make himself a plan for how to handle whatever he’s about to do. Just the groan of the springs in the chair as he leans forward has Daniel’s heart pounding.

And he could call it now. Say he’s had enough and walk right out the front door. Armand would probably let him go.

Are you so certain about that? I think you don’t want me to allow you to go anywhere. I think you want to be forced to stay right where you are.

Chills down Daniels’ spine, so much that he almost misses the toe of a freshly shined oxford slipping into the space between his knees. The tip of the crop hovers just beneath his face.

Armand stretches out the moment. Waits until Daniel’s just about to say something smart, let his anxiety take over and make him snap again. He’s got his lips parted to speak when Armand lets the blow fall.

“Kiss it. And then lean forward on my leg and clutch it as if it were a whipping post.” The crop slides from his chin to press against the jut of his lower lip. “We’ll see if we can’t sort out that insolent nature of yours.”

Two simple directions. Daniel can’t decide which he hates most.

Through the damp fringe of his hair (and shit, when did he break a sweat?) Daniel can see nothing but Armand’s mouth. Full lips, cupid’s bow like a doll. The last thing hundreds, maybe thousands of people have felt before their death was the softness of that mouth locked against their neck, and here Daniel is kissing it before he goes to sleep. Trusting it won’t do the same to him. The thought makes the hair on his arms stand on end.

“Daniel.”

No need to make threats now. Just the sound of his name is enough to jolt him into action, get him to kiss the rod that’s about to be the source of all his misery. It’s warm now, heated from resting against his skin. The leather smells of incense from the way Armand’s gloved hands have been toying with it all night. Daniel brushes his lips against it. Licks the taste of frankincense from his mouth and tries to unstick his knee from the floor.

His joints have frozen up from kneeling in one place. Or at least that’s what he tells himself. If Daniel acknowledges how difficult it is to crawl to Armand he’ll lose his nerve, do something stupid like beg not to be made to do this. The number of infractions he’s committed- he has no idea. He can’t bear to add to them.

Daniel keeps his eyes on the laces of Armand’s shoe. Shuffles forward, left knee first, then the right. Tries to swallow and force his stomach to stop turning over but it’s no use. In getting closer to Armand’s knee he’s only made a bigger obstacle for himself to overcome.

He’s right there. So close he the fine wool of Armand’s trousers brushes against his chest. All he’s got to do is wrap his arms around his calf.

Insane, how every time he think’s he’s through the hard part Armand manages to escalate. First the leash, then being paraded around. Now this. It’s just the way Armand makes it all his choice. Daniel has to keep choosing to make himself miserable.

Big lump in his throat. He chokes it down. Glances up into Armand’s eyes for just a second, like a lost child, and then squeezes them shut to close the few inches of distance between them.

Armand’s kneecap fits perfectly against his face, right in the hollow beneath his cheek bone. His leg is so slender. His shin is short enough Daniel has to hunch like a cat when he wraps his arms around it. Clings like a boy stuck out on a tree limb, afraid he’s going to fall.

Gloved fingers plunge into his hair to massage at his scalp. The backs of Daniel’s eyes burn.

“I’d ask that you count the strokes as I once did, but you’re pathetic at arithmetic. My fault, really,” Armand murmurs.

His gentle fingers in Daniel’s hair do nothing to lessen the threat of the crop on his back, tracing around the knobs of his spine. Daniel’s world has narrowed to nothing but that little loop of leather. His entire body’s going to wind up sore from being tensed up, waiting for the blow.

“I’ve spoiled you, giving you hundred dollar bills to pay for the things you need. I bet you don’t even bother to count the amount of money you have before you go to the store. The price of your precious cigarettes means nothing to you now, doesn’t it?” Armand asks. “Perhaps I should take that from you. Make you scrounge and count the pennies you have so that you remember your own humanity.”

Condescending thing to say. Cruel in its accuracy, just like everything else that’s come out of Armand’s mouth tonight, and it’s so fucking confusing how it gets Daniel hot. How being talked to like he’s useless circles back around from being infuriating to turning him on.

“Or perhaps I should make you count. We could start over whenever you make a mistake.” Armand taps the crop against his back idly, the same way he’d tapped it against his own leg just minutes ago. “Lucky for you my arm never tires. I imagine we’d be here all night.”

The crop drags from his hairline down to the waist of the leather pants, and then- Daniel can’t track it. It’s gone.

His cheek muscles ache from screwing his eyes shut. His fingers, too, where they’re clamped around the back of Armand’s calf. His flesh isn’t malleable enough to dig into, more like grabbing at stone, but Daniel can’t bring himself to loosen up and let go.

Stop hunching, Daniel. I’d rather not break your back with this blow.

“Easy for you to fucking say, you’re not the one down here waiting to be hit,” Daniel says from between gritted teeth.

Armand tsks at him. The sound is enraging. “Oh, Daniel. Just when I thought you were beginning to learn.”

The blow lands in a perfect arc from his right shoulder to his lower left rib. Burns a stripe across his flesh that makes him yelp like a hit dog.

Armand’s precision is terrifying. Unnatural, how he can measure out the strokes in perfect criss-cross over his back until the skin from his shoulders to the bottom of his ribcage is all lit up. More like a surgical procedure than a beating. Every strike of the crop knocks the wind out of him, makes Daniel feel as if he’s being flayed.

He’s earned the pain, probably. The way tears prick at the backs of his eyes when Armand lays down another stripe on his back, sears a hot red line into his skin. Armand cracks across his shoulder blade and his world goes white at the sting of it. Daniel can’t stop the wretched little sounds that keep escaping his mouth.

Another stroke, another choked back whimper. He cannot, will not cry.

“Really, your mouth is the least of your problems,” Armand says. “Should I list the rest? How you hardly ever express gratitude when I bring you gifts? I feed you, Daniel. I shelter you in fine homes. I take you to places most people could never dream of going. I fuck you when you haven’t bathed.”

Daniel’s got a smart remark about each point. A line about how he didn’t ask for any of those things, how he’d be able to shower if he wasn’t so goddamn tired. How this is all ironic coming from Armand, who hasn’t known the price of any fucking thing in the past five hundred years. If Armand wants to see insolent, he can show him insolent, if only he’d stop hitting him every time he opens his mouth.

He can’t get any words out. Armand strikes him twice in the same place in quick succession and Daniel yelps into his knee.

His face is just as hot as his back. Daniel’s burning from the inside out and he hates it. Hates the sting of the crop, the way Armand’s trousers have gone damp from him trying to muffle his cries every time he’s struck. Hates Armand for making him jump when the crop lands so that his hips rush forward and he ends up rubbing his cock against his ankle.

He’s so fucking miserable. His hips jut up with the next blow, send sparks up his spine, and he can’t believe he spent his whole life without the pleasure of suffering this way.

You’re greedy, Daniel. You’re the most demanding being I’ve ever met. What am I going to do about that?

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know,” Daniel gasps. “Please.”

Armand gathers him up by a fistful of his hair. Jerks Daniel’s head up, off his knee, and forces him to look at him.

It’s hard, when he’s this messed up. When every muscle in his body is exhausted from being tensed for the blows and his vision is blurred with tears. Armand’s face looks like one of those old black and white movie stars filmed with a greased up lens. Soft around the edges, beatific as the angels in prayer books.

“Please what?” Armand asks.

Daniel blinks and he’s got this feeling like he’s moving through quicksand. Everything is too heavy. Uncomfortable. He can’t focus with how his back itches from the sting of the welts rising on his skin.

Fingers twist in his hair, send pain radiating across his scalp. Then just as suddenly as he’d hurt him Armand lets go, massages at his skull. Soothes the pain and leaves Daniel’s tongue feeling thick and stupid in his mouth.

Please what? Please let him go? Please get him off?

Daniel doesn’t know. He can’t think of anything except the way Armand’s calf is cool beneath his palms where he’s still clinging to it. How there’s so many dark, blurred faces behind Armand’s head. People. Watching them. Watching him.

Right. Because they’re not home, and how in the hell did he forget that?

A flush creeps its way up his chest, into his cheeks. Daniel’s red up to the tips of his ears. He’s got the impulse to hide but god, it’s too late. They’ve already seen so much of him. Going to see more if Armand has anything to say about it, because it doesn’t much matter what he wants now, does it.

Armand twists his leg back and forth until Daniel has no choice but to loosen his grip on him. He presses the sole of his shoe between his legs and grinds it down against his cock.

“Fuck-“

Not wearing underwear, that’d been Armand’s choice too. Wear the clothes exactly as I’ve laid them out, he’d said, and Daniel had found it silly at the time. Assumed Armand had just wanted to keep the lines of his underwear from showing through the pants but now he gets it.

The leather’s thin, practically adhered to his skin by now with his sweat, and it’s as if there’s almost nothing between him and the sole of Armand’s shoe. Rubber soles, and he’d thought that’s strange too since Armand tends to prefer the expensive leather kind, but it makes sense when Daniel realizes he can feel every ridge and bump of the pattern molded into them. Little zigzags meant to help grip the floor but all they’re gripping now is the head of his cock through his pants.

Heat curls at the base of his spine, the warmth of blood rushing into the cradle of his hips. Daniel bites down on his lower lip and chews at it to suppress his whine. He’s never made so many pitiful noises in his life as he’s made tonight.

“Nothing to say now, Daniel?” Armand asks. “Disappointing. But that’s hardly a surprise, isn’t it? You always turn into something of an animal when you’re aroused. You don’t think of anything but your cock. Difficult to believe I asked for a teacher in this world and this is what I get.”

There’s no rhythm to the way Armand works his foot against him, and so Daniel can’t rut up and seek anything but what he’s given. He’s pinned there. Helpless.

And the people-

Fucking for an audience of one, that’d been one thing. Armand curled up in a chair in the corner of a dimly lit room, still as a statue. He’d been easy enough to ignore the first time, once Daniel got into the swing of things. Eventually gotten used to the way Armand stared, the little interjections of his voice in his head. Almost had become fun, at times.

But only almost. Only because he knew Armand, and in knowing Armand he had some power over their third; the two of them sharing a secret the stranger would never be in on. This is different. Suffocating.

Strangers passing by with their drinks on their way across the room, pausing to take a glance. Parking themselves only a few feet from the chair, chatting with their friends as though they’re at some stage show from Armand’s time, and Daniel is the background entertainment for their conversation. An oval-faced woman and her partner clad in all black position themselves by the arm of the chair and stare so overtly Daniel’s stomach is in knots.

Humiliating enough, being on his knees on the ground, his back a whip-marked mess. If all he had to do was sit there like an object he could probably handle it. Find some way to shut them out.

But Armand’s foot keeps rubbing against his cock. Incremental motions, just enough to tease, and it’s driving Daniel slowly out of his mind. He can’t keep still for the life of him, and squirming around like this- they have to know what’s going on. There’s nothing subtle about the way he’s down here practically panting. Too worked up to breathe through his nose so all he can do is sip sharp little inhales through his mouth.

“Armand-“

No answer. Ignored, because Armand’s too busy turning to the woman at his side, striking up a conversation Daniel can’t bear to listen in on. Talking about him probably. How he’s got a sharp tongue but he’d folded the second Armand put him to the whip.

Or maybe not. Armand’s got the ability to discuss anything and everything in the most inappropriate of places. He could be asking the woman where she bought her heels, or quizzing her about philosophy, and that’s worse, somehow. That Armand could switch topics like he’s not even there.

He’s such a bastard sometimes. A real son of a bitch, and the loss of his attention cuts like a knife. It’s as if the free fall Daniel was in has come to a crashing halt against the ground, left him there awash in uncertainty. He’s too turned on to sit still and wait this conversation out. Too tied up in knots about what this woman could have to say that’s more interesting than what they’re doing to really enjoy Armand grinding his heel in minute circles between his legs.

And Daniel wonders if this is how their thirds felt. Just some play thing. Worthless toy to be used up for someone else’s middling entertainment. An animal that demands attention while its owner is trying to watch a television show.

The woman keeps stealing glances at Daniel from the corner of her eye, but Armand hasn’t looked at him once, and Daniel can’t decide which is more terrible. Which one makes his eyes prickle, ears burn with blood rushing to the surface of his skin. Armand laughs at something she says and it’s devastating, how lovely he looks with his head tipped back with mirth. No one ever gets to see Armand laugh that way but him.

Armand’s foot slips down into the space between Daniel’s legs, sneaks up under him so he’s practically sitting on it, riding the toe of his shoe. The bone of his ankle presses into his cock where it lays in a thick line along the inside of his thigh.

Do you think you’re so exceptional, Daniel, that I should have no one but you? Are you so certain you’re such a nonpareil of a companion? She’s an educated woman. A member of the New York symphony. I could clip your leash to this chair and leave you here while I speak with her in private. Certainly it’d be easier to focus without you rutting on my leg.

“No, don’t,” Daniel says through gritted teeth.

Don’t? Are you even embarrassed to be pleasured in front of others, or just embarrassed that it’s happening while my attention is on something else? You’ve always been the jealous type. You always want that which others have but you don’t.

Daniel tucks his face against the inside of Armand’s thigh. The carved detailing on the chair digs into his arms where he’s still clinging to Armand’s calf, as though that’ll keep him afloat somehow. He’s never, ever needed him in this way. He can’t stand going through it in this place where just anyone can see him struggling to keep from falling apart.

He sneaks a peek at Armand’s face and catches sight of the woman leaning against the chair. Squeezes his eyes shut again and ruts his hips faster. Like that’ll get him attention somehow.

But Armand’s ankle is such a narrow target for working himself against. Daniel has to keep adjusting his angle, little awkward thrusts that ensure his cock grazes his leg and sends heat flooding into his hips. And he’s so aware of the toe of Armand’s shoe against his ass. How Armand lifts his foot and causes him to pitch forward, lose his rhythm, and start the whole cycle over again.

Or perhaps instead of simply leaving you to wait I could gather you into my arms and drink the life right out of you. They wouldn’t even see you die, what with the way you wrap yourself around me eager for the bite.

Armand continues, right into his brain. Almost loud enough to drown out the low, feminine laugh from somewhere above his head, and it takes a moment for Daniel to process what he’s said. For his brain to catch up and his stomach to drop right into the floor with it.

You know, I don’t believe anyone would notice what I’ve done. I could leave you curled up in this chair and they’d all think you passed out drunk.

A shudder runs through Daniel at the thought. Blip in his mind, like the film at a theater stuttering. The image of his corpse explodes in his thoughts. Armand’s cheeks flushed pink with his blood while he lays lifeless in his arms, and god, it’s so real. Terrifying, that it’s actually possible, that Armand really could kill him at any moment and he’d never expect it.

Terrifying, how he wants it.

Beneath the leather pants his cock leaks a wet trail. Leaves the lambskin slick with it, clinging to him every time he rubs up against Armand’s leg.

Daniel’s hot all over. The hair at the nape of his neck has started to curl with his sweat. All around his hips the waistband of the pants is starting to chafe, another pain to join the ache in his knees, the burn of the muscles in his abdomen. He’s never worked so hard to get off in his life. He wants to beg but he doesn’t even know what to ask for at this point. He’s too overstimulated to think of anything.

“Is it so terrible, Daniel? Should I take pity on you?” Armand asks.

Mortifying rush of relief at the sound of his voice directed at him. Gloved fingers squeeze the back of his neck and Daniel thinks he could cry. He would, maybe, if he knew what ‘pity’ meant.

Could be anything. Armand gathering him into his lap and putting a hand down his pants. Another lash of the whip on his back. Leaving the club entirely. His corpse in the chair.

Daniel runs down the list of options. Even the delicious ones are frightening. He can’t quite trust Armand not to make even a handjob into something horrible and so there’s really no choice at all, really. Only one thing he can say.

“Yes. Please, yes,” Daniel huffs into the inseam on his trousers.

He expects Armand to draw it out. Ask him some irritating questions about whether he thinks he’s earned it, make him jump through hoops, and god, Daniel would hate it but he’d do it. He’d lay on his belly and rub against the floor if he had to just to get relief.

Instead it comes in the form of long fingers massaging at his scalp, loosening the tension in his shoulders, his jaw. Armand gets him malleable enough to turn his face so that his cheek rests against the inside of his knee. Soothes Daniel until his eyelids unscrew themselves and he blinks up at the blurry sight of Armand’s stomach covered by the vest, and-

“Oh, fuck,” Daniel gasps.

There’s something inside him. Except nothing can be inside him, the logical part of his brain knows that for a fact. Some trick of the mind. The projection of the memory of what it’s like to have a toy worked in deep, Armand twisting it at the base to make it nudge at all the secret, sensitive places deep in him. But instead of Armand’s hand it’s the toe of his shoe controlling the rhythm of this pleasure. Or not really, it’s Armand’s mind-

Too confusing. Too much to take in and Daniel stops trying to figure out how he does it because suddenly his brain can’t put together words anymore. His world is narrowed to the leg between his thighs, the imaginary thing fucking him. Armand’s hand petting his cheek as though he's a cat, luxuriating in having his chin scratched, and hell, he doesn’t mind being treated like an animal if it’s like this.

“Do you wish to know something, Daniel?” Armand asks.

Yes. Sure. Tell him anything. Anything, so long as the words are just for him.

Daniel nods because he can’t get his lips to move and say the words. But Armand probably hears them anyway. He’s always in his head and thank god for that.

“That woman would have never gone away with me. It was you she was negotiating for,” Armand says. “Not a single person in this room would turn down the opportunity to play with you. What a shame for them.”

Yeah. A real shame. Daniel can’t withstand a whipping, can’t take having Armand ignore him for even a moment to speak to someone else. He balks at the idea of being leashed. He can’t even sit still and let Armand do as he pleases to tease him- he has to chase his own end regardless of what’s going on. Having him would be such a disappointment for them.

“You have a low opinion of yourself, Daniel. What am I going to do about that?”

What’s he going to do? What does it even matter when he’s wound up like this.

He must look pathetic, desperate as he stares up at Armand. Mouth hanging open as he gasps, sweaty chest leaving damp marks all over his trousers. The zipper on his pants has probably rubbed a run into his silk socks, but can’t stop himself. Friction on the outside, pressure within, Armand’s gloved fingers stroking his cheek. It’s all too much. Overwhelming and he’s starting to lose it for real.

Armand presses his foot up tight against him. Lowers it back down and Daniel chases it as though he’s chasing his phantom cock. It’s as though he’s being stretched out, breached for real when rolls his hips down for it. The flood of endorphins that comes with being fucked hits him just the same, mixes with the rush of adrenaline from the whipping and leaves him floating.

It’s a high not unlike being on the blood, except the blood brings everything into sharp relief. Daniel doesn’t care about the other people in the room, the way his muscles are screaming for release. Everything’s gone blurry the way it does when one’s about to lose consciousness. He can’t see anything but Armand’s face, gentle and soulful as a saint.

Good. You’re so very good for me.

Armand’s thumb smears away some wetness at the corner of his eye. Good. He’s doing good. Everything is alright.

Daniel twists his hips in minute circles, does whatever he can to keep contact with Armand’s ankle, maintain the friction that’s got him all coiled up inside. Hard work, terrible work, but the phantom pressure in him rubs at all the right places. He’s so close the back of his throat is prickling with want. He’d spill right now if Armand would just say go.

And that- if he had any sense he’d remember that wasn’t a rule. In their little video negotiations he’d never mentioned wanting to be given permission for anything but now that he’s in it, christ, he wants. He’s dying for Armand to make the decision for him, take the last shred of responsibility out of his hands.

“Soon, Daniel,” Armand murmurs. “Do you know why it’s a shame that they all want you?”

Know. Daniel doesn’t know up from down. He’s so mixed up he can hardly remember his own name.

Somehow he manages to shake his head. Armand’s kneecap grinds against his cheekbone with the motion and Daniel wonders if the strange hardness of his bones means it’ll leave a red mark, or even a bruise. All this time and he still doesn’t fully understand what Armand’s body can and can’t do.

He thrusts against his leg faster. Gets in closer, if he even can, until Armand’s shin is mashed against his sternum, and what a mess of sensation it is. Pain above the waist from his itching, miserable welts, stretched tighter and tighter over his back as he clutches at Armand’s leg. Inhuman pleasure below where Armand keeps rocking that nonexistent phallus into him, and he must really look like an animal now with how he’s rutting into it. Real dog in heat humping away at his master’s leg.

Daniel doesn’t care. Doesn’t even mind the way the collar jerks at his neck when Armand pulls on the leash to get his attention.

No other people now, none that he’s able to see. Armand’s leaning forward slightly, elbows resting on his thighs so that his face takes up Daniel’s entire field of vision. He’s got the kind of presence that seems to affect the very air around him, a certain heaviness that Daniel can feel even when he closes his eyes. He has to squeeze them shut for a moment. The brilliance of Armand’s eyes bearing down into his, it’s liable to burn him alive.

Smell of incense fills his nose as a gloved thumb swipes back and forth across his cheek, and he thinks that this is what being in the presence of god must be like. Having all of one’s senses occupied by something bigger than him. Armand’s not even speaking but Daniel can’t hear the music in the club because his ears are too busy straining to catch whatever he might say next. Praise or damnation, doesn’t matter, so long as the words are for him and only him.

He’s jealous like a child. Greedy. Demanding, and how can he help but want this thing that’s got him broken down like this?

“Please, god, please,” Daniel gasps.

He sounds wounded. He’s so close it’s bordering on painful, overstimulating, and fuck, he’s not even sure if he wants it anymore, or if he just wants the relief of collapsing against Armand’s leg when he’s done.

Another jerk on the leash. Slow grind of Armand’s foot against his ass, that false pressure inside him, and Daniel openly sobs.

“Do you know why it’s a shame, Daniel?” Armand repeats.

Something’s changed in his expression. Same blank, inscrutable look but his eyes- so vivid and alive. As if that’s what’s been buried behind all of the masks he wears and this is his true self. Like it took getting Daniel dangling on the tip of his shoe to get him having the time of his life, and the fact that Daniel is the one who got him there-

It’s too much to take in. Can’t make sense of it and so he shakes his head no and hopes that’s good enough because he can’t get words out now. Just broken, wet noises that punctuate every thrust of his hips against that narrow ankle.

Armand drags the moment out until Daniel can’t take it. Lets him get right up to the edge and then-

Because it’s just as I told you. Your life, the manner of your death- all of it is mine. You belong to no one but me.

Daniel’s blood runs cold. A violent shudder wracks him as his cock pulses against his thigh and he comes in a wet, sticky mess right there on the floor of the club.

And people are watching, probably, as he fucks the jut of Armand’s ankle once, twice again. He doesn’t give a shit. Let them look. They can all be jealous of the terrible, delicious things this creature does to him. See what a sodden mess Armand has made him.

Daniel shakes through it. Still trembling even when his body is spent and he has nothing more to give, but it’s not so bad yet. He’s too flooded with endorphins to feel all the aches and pains that’ll catch up with him later, when the sun comes up and he’s lying in bed. No need to think of that now, though.

He uses the fabric at the inside of Armand’s knee as a handkerchief, nuzzling at it, cat-like, as he dries the corners of his eyes, wipes his nose. He’s sticky all over. A real nasty mess but Armand sits there and lets him cling. Keeps stroking his head while he comes down.

“Just give me a minute,” Daniel says. His voice is slurred to the point the words are just noises.

But Armand understands.

“Take all the time you wish.”

—

Everything that comes after that- it’s all bits and pieces in Daniel’s head. Collar taken off, sweatshirt pulled over his head. Cab ride him where he sits there with his forehead against the window and listens to the rain dumping down from the pale grey sky. Three flights of stairs and a maze of cardboard boxes that Daniel almost trips over.

Shower. Television on. Bed.

Daniel’s never been tired in this sort of way before. Not the sore footed, irritating exhaustion of wandering around all night but something bone deep. The release he’s heard people get after a good massage but that he’s never felt himself. Always been too hard to get out of his own head.

Armand’s fingers are cold on the back of his neck without the barrier of the gloves between them. He touches Daniel in an absent sort of way as he stands there in one of Daniel’s t-shirts, an old pair of blue jeans. Pets him as if now that they’re home he doesn’t know what to do.

Daniel doesn’t really know what to do either, if he’s being honest. How to end a night like this. It’d been play acting to an extent, but where that ends and the real stuff begins- he doesn’t have a clue.

They should talk about it, probably. A normal couple would.

The thin blue veins of Armand’s wrist are just barely visible in the light coming from the tv. Daniel makes as if to grasp his arm but Armand pulls away.

“Your blood-“ Daniel begins.

Armand shakes his head. “Not tonight, lover. I have to go.”

The sliver of sky in the gap between the curtains has gone lavender just above the horizon. Daniel buries his face in his pillow. Wonders what it would be like to have a cold body beside him in the morning in his bed.

He’ll probably never know.

The bedsprings groan. Beside his hip the mattress dips with Armand’s weight, and if Daniel’s limbs didn’t feel like lead he’d curl around him, wrap an arm around his waist and hide his face against his thigh again. But he’s too wrung out to move and besides, Armand’s nails are skating over the nape of his neck, sending electric shocks radiating across his scalp. Daniel tips his chin down and lets out a quiet sound.

No idea how long they stay like that. If Daniel drifts off for a bit or just floats there beneath Armand’s touch. Everything feels fragmented. Surreal. When Armand finally speaks it sounds as if it’s coming from somewhere in his memories, and not from above him where it belongs.

“Do you intend to be insolent with me again?”

“No. Never.”

“Liar,” Armand says. “But that’s not so unusual.”

Daniel opens his mouth to ask him what that means. If it’s something that’s been said to him and by who, why. By the time he lifts his head Armand’s nothing but a dark shape moving to turn the knob on the front door.

“Armand?” he asks, voice thick with sleep.

“Yes?”

“Was I- tonight was okay, right?”

Low sound of the deadbolt sliding free of the latch. Squeak of the door being opened.

“Of course, Daniel. Didn’t I say that? You did well for me.”

And then he’s gone. Behind him the door clicks shut.

On the floor beside the bed is the pile of Armand’s clothes. Socks, garters, vest. Lace collared shirt. He gropes around until his fingers catch on the lace and he’s able to drag the thing into bed. Not a single damp mark on it, no scent except the same incense smell the gloves had been drenched in. Daniel wads it up and places it on the pillow. Closes his eyes and inhales.

—

“So what’s the angle tonight?” Daniel asks.

He’s sprawled out on the bed on his stomach, head pillowed on his arms as he watches Armand fuss with the video camera. His back is a wreck. When he’d woken up and stumbled into the bathroom he’d twisted around in front of the mirror to take a look at the bright red welts hatch-marked over his spine. Some of them have started to bruise and it makes it hell to lie on his back, or relax into a chair. Even wearing a shirt is driving him nuts. Too aware of the drag of the fabric on his skin.

Armand says nothing and he hopes that’s a good sign. He’s not much in the mood to go out, talk to people. This afternoon when he’d dragged himself out for cigarettes he’d gotten short with the bodega owner and it nags at him, the way he’d snapped.

But then he’s always crabby anymore. Lack of sleep, shitty diet, real pigsty of a house. Add on being sore all over and that’ll do it to anyone, Daniel tells himself, but still. He’ll have to stuff a bill into the tip jar next time he goes down there. Make up for it somehow.

He flexes his shoulders, twists his head from left to right until his neck pops. A hair thin scab on his back catches on his shirt and Daniel grimaces at the way he has to angle his arm to try to itch it.

“Picking at it will only cause it to bleed,” Armand murmurs. “It’ll take longer to heal.”

“Wouldn’t take that long if you’d give me your blood-“

“Later.”

Later. He’s heard that one before.

Daniel tucks his hand beneath his cheek. His eyes track Armand’s movements as he circles the room, camera in hand, as though he’s searching for something. Or maybe he’s staking it out.

Sometime before he woke Armand must have tidied up. The empty boxes on the bedroom floor are gone, his clothes are all put away in dresser drawers or hung up in the narrow closet. It looks almost like a home in here. Livable, so long as he doesn’t go out into the living room and see the mess that’s still lingering, filling it up from windows to kitchen door. But this is nice. Feels like he’s got room to breathe.

Armand stands by the window and toys with the buttons that adjust the focus on the camera. His fingers are long, delicate in a way that reminds Daniel of the statues of saints in his childhood church. Funny how he’d only worn the gloves for one night and now he looks naked without them. Like his bare hands are something Daniel’s not meant to see.

All day memories of it have been creeping up in his mind, like insects coming up from the ground. Armand’s gloved hands on his face, the foot between his thighs. The way that the utter humiliation of it all had become bearable, somehow, the second Armand had whispered the word ‘good’ right into his mind.

He’d been so easy for it. A horrible, squirming mess on the concrete floor. Daniel’s knees are bruised from how he’d risen up and down on them to ride Armand’s leg. The insides of his thighs are chafed angry red from the seams on the leather pants and he wonders where those went. If the collar and leash are still around somewhere.

Daniel’s face burns hot when Armand glances up from the camera to stare at him. Heard his thought, maybe. His pulse pounds in his own ears.

The top of the dresser is pristine for once, empty of all junk save Daniel’s wallet and his keys. Armand pushes them aside and sets the camera down. When he crawls onto the bed the mattress groans.

“Going out for interviews won’t be necessary tonight.”

The way he says these things- like a prince making an official announcement. Like he’s perfectly aware Daniel is his to command. Obnoxious tone of voice. It thrills Daniel down somewhere in his core.

Unnaturally strong hands on his shoulders, manhandling him onto his back. Daniel puts up a cursory protest, wriggles until the fabric at the back of his shirt isn’t stretched so tight as to drive him nuts. Armand straddles his waist and rests all of his dead weight onto him.

Always creepy how heavy he feels, like holding a sculpture in his lap. Even in the glow of the lamp his face is wan, as though he hasn’t fed yet tonight. Like he’s saving all of his thirst for Daniel, and that should be terrifying. Would scare the piss out of a normal guy.

But then, Daniel’s never been normal. He doesn’t belong anywhere but here.

Daniel goes to slip his hands up under Armand’s t-shirt, grab him by the waist, but before he can get there Armand snatches his wrists. He encircles both of them in one narrow hand and pins them down against Daniel’s chest so that he’s forced to feel the drum of his own heart against his hands.

“I’ve decided we ought to work on my film making skills together, you and I,” Armand says. “You’d make a tape with me, wouldn’t you?”

Little flash of fangs behind his lips as he grins, sharp and eerily white. His eyes are lit up that same way they’d been last night, with all the excitement of someone’s who’s been given the keys to something truly dangerous and told to do as they please. It’s beautiful how they glitter in the low light. The weight of the full focus of his gaze is like having a boulder rest on Daniel’s chest.

And this is what he’d wanted, last night. All of Armand’s attention.

Armand leans in and his curls fall over his shoulders to tickle at Daniel’s cheek. Auburn hair falls around them in a curtain and shuts out the rest of the room so that all Daniel can see is his face, almost close enough to kiss. He lifts his head, tries to close the gap, but he can’t get close enough to do anything except feel the cold exhale of Armand’s breath.

“I went shopping, Daniel, before I came to you. I stopped at one of the places on 42nd Street. Would you like to see what I purchased?” he asks.

Flash of images in Daniel’s mind. Neon glow of the open sign above a door plastered in fliers and seedy advertisements. Leather cuffs to match the collar, blindfold. Heavy silver chain that looks more suited to a home improvement shop than this kind of place. A box with a plastic window on it to display the toy within-

Daniel’s mouth is dry. He can’t remember what exactly it was he was so aggravated about all day. He’s too busy with the sinking realization that film making is a secondary desire, just a flimsy excuse for Armand’s actual new fixation. An endless array of new ways to torment him, and Daniel’s the one who’d opened the door to them.

“Do you wish to try them with me, Daniel?” Armand whispers. A thin line of blood glitters between his lips. “Like last night?”

Questions, he never stops with the questions. He’s going to drive Daniel insane.

Daniel surges up to kiss him. Licks the blood from his cold lips and lets it burn him up from within. No pain, no more itching welts. Just the electric sensation of Armand’s mouth on his, his silken hands around his wrists.

Do you trust me, Daniel?

“Yeah,” Daniel says, and this time he thinks he really means it. “I’ll try whatever you want. Go and get it out.”