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“This is weird,” Will complains. He’s not making eye contact, and his glasses, the only thing he’s still wearing, are sliding down his nose. He pauses to push them back up but continues to stare blankly to his left.
“You’re not overly concerned with the norms of social behavior,” Hannibal replies, picking up his glass of wine. He inhales deeply with his nose inside the rim before taking a delicate sip.
“You’re right. It’s not the norms of social behavior that concern me right now. It’s the fact that my bare ass is making contact with your dining table.”
“I wouldn’t think that’s your concern.”
“Not my concern?”
“You aren’t the one who’s going to be cleaning this table later, so no.”
“That’s n–” Will starts, but Hannibal cuts him off, removing his napkin from his lap and pushing back his chair.
“I’ll get you a cushion to sit on. If you’re more comfortable, you may find it easier to relax.”
Will opens his mouth to speak, but no retort is forthcoming. He’s speechless. He’s also naked and sitting Indian-style in the middle of Hannibal’s dining table, a centerpiece of skin and muscle and a traitorously half-hard cock.
Moments later, Hannibal returns with a sofa cushion, and he gestures sharply for Will to lean forward. He manages to tuck the cushion under Will’s ass without touching him at all; then he steps back to admire his handiwork.
“Better,” he says. “Yes?”
Will shrugs. He watches as Hannibal resettles himself before his meal: medallions of some kind of pork, it looks like, drizzled with a sweet and tangy mustard sauce, elegant spears of white asparagus, and a salad of greens, pomegranate, and fennel, dressed simply with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice. Hannibal gathers a bite of salad on his fork and chews slowly, savoring it with eyes closed. He drinks from his wine again and begins to slice a dainty bite of pork medallion with a toothy, ebony-handled steak knife. He starts to speak without looking up, ignoring Will’s eyes on his work.
“Proceed when you’re ready.” He looks up and catches Will’s gaze. “Unless you’re waiting for something else?”
“An explanation?”
Hannibal’s hands stop their work. He settles his knife on the edge of his plate, and one of its teeth catches the light of the setting sun and reflects a blurry bright spot onto Will’s cheek like a ghost of a teardrop.
“You’re stalling.”
“Yes, good job. I don’t have a strong desire to jerk myself off while you watch and eat your dinner. Very well spotted.”
“It wouldn’t be a useful exercise if it wasn’t a challenge.”
“A challenge? What’s the purpose of challenging my sexual boundaries?”
Hannibal bites the tip off of a spear of asparagus, chews, and swallows while his eyes slide down from Will’s face to his indecisive cock. “I don’t intend to challenge your sexual boundaries. Not everything is about sex, difficult though that may be for you to understand.”
“Sorry, no. Just– You’re not going to convince me that exhibitionist masturbation is not a challenge to my sexual boundaries.”
“I find it curious that you failed to protest this exercise until we reached this point. You were quite quick to disrobe and…get into position. Surely that indicates the challenge to your sexual boundaries is minimal.”
Will scoffs and rolls his eyes.
“In any case, there is a way you can prove me wrong.” Hannibal lifts his wine glass and breathes—twice, this time—then closes his eyes and takes a long drink while Will speaks.
“And what is that?”
“Just do it. Now. Touch yourself until you come all over this table.” Hannibal indicates the space of table in front of his plate with a flat hand and then licks his lips in a fashion that strikes Will as strangely not sexual at all.
“Wh–”
“Now,” Hannibal repeats.
Will’s right hand moves to his groin. For a few moments, he looks down to watch his fingers encircling his cock, stroking lightly at first to tease himself, then tighter but slower. It’s too strange to keep looking; male genitals really aren’t very pretty, speaking in terms of pure aesthetics, and watching the process of engorgement feels like it might be as futile as watching a pot set to boil. Even thinking the word ‘engorgement’ threatens to put him off.
Will intends to stare off to his left again, but when he raises his eyes, Hannibal ducks his head slightly to catch them. It feels like a trap.
“Don’t look away,” he demands in a tone so quiet and soft that it could be a suggestion, but Will knows it’s not.
Hannibal continues to eat, slicing off morsels of pork and guiding asparagus into his mouth slowly, his mouth forming a perfect (and frustratingly suggestive) ‘O’. Will’s eyes never leave Hannibal’s face, although the man himself looks away when he needs to.
When Hannibal’s teeth scrape against his fork, Will shudders, and his cock inexplicably twitches and hardens further. When Hannibal does it again, Will winces (and increases the tempo of his strokes on his cock). When Hannibal scrapes his teeth on metal a third time, Will digs the nails of his free hand into his thigh to avoid shutting his eyes against the grating sound.
“Ah,” Hannibal muses. “You don’t like that sound.” His chair makes an echoing screech as he pushes it back and rises. “Perhaps some music?”
Hannibal moves out of Will’s line of sight then, and that’s somehow a million times worse. The movement behind him makes Will’s spine stiffen.
“What would you prefer?” Hannibal asks. “My collection is extensive.”
“What would I prefer to listen to while you watch me masturbate?”
“You seem particularly fixated,” Hannibal’s voice is coming from closer now, from nearly right behind Will it seems like, but Will refuses to turn around to see if he’s right, “on the particulars of this task.”
Will doesn’t answer; he slips his thumb over the head of his cock and redistributes slippery pre-come by rubbing tiny teasing circles. He fancies he hears Hannibal’s breathing hitch.
“If you don’t choose something, I will.” Hannibal’s voice is farther away again and facing the other direction.
“The Moonlight Sonata. Clair de Lune.”
It’s a few moments before Hannibal responds, and before he does, there’s rustling and papery sliding sounds, the pop of speakers coming on, and the static tickle of a needle touching down on vinyl. “Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” he says.
The opening strains of the music are devastatingly familiar: Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Hannibal seats himself back at the table and spreads his napkin over his lap with an especially extravagant flourish; the linen actually snaps from the whipping motion.
Will’s hand is motionless, although still loosely holding his cock.
“Proceed, please.” Hannibal gestures with his knife to Will’s hand and cock.
“This is vulgar,” Will complains as he resumes stroking himself.
“In more than one way, yes.”
“This music is for children.”
Hannibal chews slowly and thoughtfully on a piece of pork. “Does that bother you?”
“It’s inappropriate.”
“As is the rest of this situation.” Hannibal rests his silverware at precise angles on the edge of his plate and steeples his hands in front of his face, leaning forward. “We’ve already established that this engagement runs contrary to the norms of social behavior. Don’t get tiresome about it.”
Hannibal picks up his knife and fork again, holding both with perfect poise: tines of his fork pointed down, index finger resting atop the blade of the knife, to better guide its keen teeth. He looks down at his half-finished meal, then back up, seeming to reconsider, and that slight hesitation tugs at Will’s guts. He’s not sure what might happen if Hannibal changes his mind about finishing his dinner, and just the fact of that insecurity causes a river of trepidation to wash through his veins.
“Tedious,” Hannibal mutters, and he pierces the last remaining spear of asparagus on his plate and draws it to his mouth.
Something about that muttering prickles at Will’s sense of…something. Perhaps it’s his pride. He doesn’t want to be a cause of tedium, not to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, possessor of the only brain (aside from the many brains of psychopathic serial killers) that he’s enjoyed sparring with.
So Will readjusts, spreading his legs a bit wider and reaching down with his free hand to cup his balls in his palm. He doesn’t dare close his eyes, but his eyelids droop to half-mast of their own accord, not because it feels that good, but because Hannibal almost, but not quite, fails to conceal his pleased surprise at Will’s addition to his performance: his hands don’t pause, feeding the asparagus into his mouth, inch by inch, but his nostrils flare briefly, and his shoulders tense.
Will increases the tempo his strokes, and he keeps his eyes on Hannibal, as instructed, but he wasn’t instructed where he had to focus, and he lets his gaze drop to Hannibal’s mouth, puckered around asparagus. Two can play at this game. Why should Hannibal be the only voyeur in the room?
Hannibal finishes his dinner, laying his silverware neatly in the center of the plate and pushing it forward, only inches from Will’s folded legs. He pushes his chair back a scant inch and reaches for his wine glass, telegraphing his intention to continue watching.
“Do you know why I don’t think this exercise has anything to do with challenging your sexual boundaries?” Hannibal asks, and he lifts his glass for a drink of wine, as if the answer doesn’t matter, as if it’s more-or-less a rhetorical question.
“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“Indeed.” Hannibal sets his glass down and twists the stem between his thumb and two fingers. “You don’t have any sexual boundaries. Sex—or, to be more precise, the pursuit of sexual relations with another—is not one of your primary drives. I don’t think it’s even in the the top five.”
“You’re accusing me of being repressed. That’s just stupid. Cliché. Freudian psychobabble.”
“You said ‘repressed,’ not me.” Hannibal’s teeth flash white for a moment and are hidden again when his smirking grin disappears as fast as it arrived.
Will snorts. “Oh, don’t be that boring. For God’s sake, look at what I’m doing!” Will twists his fist around the end his cock, and his hips twitch a little. “Fuck,” he whispers, failing to prevent the word from escaping. He’d almost forgotten what he was doing, what the consequences would be, and God, he’s getting close now.
Hannibal smirks again—closed mouth, this time, just the corners of his lips tightening and his eyebrows climbing briefly. “Not being strongly driven to pursue sexual relations is not the same as repression. Sex drive varies quite a bit across the whole of the human population. Being to one side of the bell curve—even far to one side—is not to be equated with a pathology.” Hannibal’s gaze sinks to Will’s hand on his cock; he stares. “Or I could be wrong. It could be that your sex drive is quite normal, but that you choose not to pursue relations resulting in its satisfaction—satisfaction being a relative term here, of course—because your sexual attraction is directed…atypically.”
“That still sounds like you’re accusing me of being repressed.”
Hannibal shrugs, a distressingly casual move from a man who takes great care in choosing his words. Or, possibly, it could be an indicator that his attention is a bit…divided. Sure enough, his eyes promptly drop back to Will’s leaking cock.
“I still don’t get the bit about my not having any sexual boundaries.”
“Oh, that’s quite simple.” Hannibal stands and takes his plate and newly empty wine glass in hand. He retreats to the open kitchen to place the dishes in the sink and continues in a louder tone from there as he turns the tap to hot and prepares the sink with soapy water. “We’ve discussed before your considerable need for mental fortification. It stands to reason that an area that demands very little of your attention, such as sexual relations with others, would not be worth the energy required to protect it, nor can you afford to spare that energy, when it’s so needed elsewhere.”
Hannibal returns to the dining table; he tucks his chair in and then leans over, placing his palms flat on the table. His eyes are on a level with Will’s now, and he’s just too close for comfort. In more than one way.
“I won’t hide my intentions, Will. I like to be honest, and it’s also futile, given your own proficiency with reading people. I have a strong…” Hannibal licks his lips, and he glances down for a fleeting second, “professional curiosity in your mind. Due to the lack of fortification, your sexuality is merely the easiest way in, and I am—occasionally—quite lazy.”
Hannibal leans forward a fraction more—positively looming now—and deliberately drops his gaze to Will’s groin.
“Come for me, Will.”
Jesus Christ. That almost does it. Will’s cock twitches, and he feels his skin heating across his chest and up his neck. Sweat blooms from his pores. But he’s still not quite there, despite his hand pumping his cock frantically, desperately.
Hannibal looks up again, opens his mouth to speak– What he’s going to say, Will can’t know, but he can guess it’s going to be chastisement of some sort. Demanding, commanding. And that does it: Will comes, spurting onto his own ankles and onto polished wood.
Hannibal fails to hide an eyebrow-arching flash of surprise, and Will feels dizzy—with the aftermath of orgasm, with success, with some kind of pride in a task accomplished. He wipes his fingers on his knee and then leans back, panting, pressing his own palms to the table’s surface.
The table is where Hannibal’s eyes are now, and Will’s mind is overtaken by an image of Hannibal leaning over to clean Will’s come off the polished wood with his tongue, lapping at it like a cat at cream. No. Not like a domestic cat: like a jaguar, lapping water from a waterhole, eyeing a doe frozen in fear just beyond the tree line.
Will jerks in surprise when Hannibal straightens abruptly, drawing his palms off the table. He lifts his left hand to examine it, and oh, that’s a drop of Will’s come, landed square on the neatly manicured nail of Hannibal’s left index finger. Hannibal peers at it, and then he looks at Will. Will’s cock twitches feebly, and he inhales sharply, holding the breath in his lungs, shoulders high and tense, as if he can undo what he’s just given away in his reaction if he lets his breath go slowly and unnoticeably.
Hannibal lifts his finger to his mouth, and his stare is accusing. His tongue darts out to lick off the stray drop, and his gaze is unflinching. He savors the taste of Will in his mouth, and his prescience proves true: Will is bare, open, naked, unable to hide anything in this moment.
Hannibal has now seen it all, and he’s tasted. He’s cracked into Will like a nut and found the sweat meat inside. It can’t be undone, but Will might not care.