Everything But

I tried to look like I was deep into studying the order forms on the desk in front of me as workers around me prepared to leave for the day. I had tried to establish over previous weeks that I was so assiduous involved in my work that it was natural for me to be the last to leave. I was keyed up inside but trying not to show it. One after the other the oil lamps on the desk were turned down and off until there were only two focuses of light in the large, dusty wood-paneled room--mine and that of the boss, Edmund Barrington, in his office beyond the end of the room, separated from the workers’ floor by a wide window of glass.

Increasingly, as the other workers left, I glanced up at him, finding that he simultaneously was looking out into the larger room--at me. The fewer there were of other workers still at their desks, the bolder he was in seeking me out with his eyes. It was like we were on some sort of wavelength of our own--connected by a special mutual interest. The thought of that made me shudder--the thought of sharing his interests--his fetishes--which increasingly I did, much to my mystification and at least partially to my concern. What we had wasn’t new to me; that it stopped short of the completion I was accustomed to was both exhilarating and frustrating.

As his glances at me became prolonged, I felt the heat building in me. I blushed and lowered my eyes under his gaze, which both I and he knew to be a signal of submission. I let one of my hands fall into my lap, where my fingers traced the engorging line of my shaft through the material of my trousers. I felt a spot of precum work its way through to the surface of the trouser material, quick, but frequent, release being an attribute of mine that I had seen as a fault, but that Barrington did not.

If anyone had said six months ago that I would perform the servicing Barrington demanded of me for any man, I would have said they were crazy. But I did it now willingly and, increasingly, wantonly and not only because he was the boss--the owner of the factory making gymnasium equipment for men’s health clubs, all the rage now in the final years of the nineteenth century. I did it also because I was drawn to him, mesmerized by what one man could do to another in the worship of the male tool--the male sword, the phallus, the penis, the shaft, the dick, the cock. No matter the word for it, it had become a fetish for me, as it already was for Edmund Barrington.

I reached for and ran my fingers up the base of the marble obelisk on my desk, a replica of the Washington Monument. Barrington had given it to me. The workers around me assumed it was just a souvenir from a trip to the nation’s capital. Edmund Barrington and I knew better, of course. We knew what it was in homage to.

I had once thought that orgasm reigned in the act of sex. To Barrington, though, it was phallus worship. And he had one worthy of worship.

I found Barrington was not looking away anymore. His gaze was steady on me, watching me finger the marble obelisk he’d given me. I reached over and turned my oil lamp down, watching the flame die, feeling the flame within me flare. With a sigh of anticipation, I rose from my desk and walked across the room, listening to the hollow sound in the large, high-ceilinged room, of my boots on the wooden floor, as I approached and then entered Barrington’s office. There were no words between us at that point. There didn’t need to be words. The weeks of resistance and then reluctance on my part were over now. They had been over for two weeks now. I would do anything he wanted of me, and it wasn’t just because he was the boss, the company owner, the man who paid me a good salary.

He also was a handsome, charismatic man. He epitomized his product--the robust health and muscular form promised to a successful Boston businessman, into his forties and fifties, if he spent an hour or more each day in a men’s health club exercising his body. Part of Barrington’s success as a supplier of gymnasium equipment and goods was that he insisted that all of his employees be representative of what more than an hour a day of vigorous exercise in a gymnasium could do to achieve and maintain the physical form of a Greek-statue.

I came up very close to where he was sitting, rolled out from behind his desk. I was within easy reach of him, as I knew he wanted me to be. Looking down on the blotter on his desk, I could see what he would want from me tonight. There, on a handkerchief sat a jar of the perfumed jell he preferred to use and, laid out neatly in rows, the graduated-size steel sounding rods.

I could see also, there being space--space enough for me to kneel in front of him--between the desk and where he had rolled his chair back, that he’d already unbuttoned himself and had his shaft out. It was unusually long, if not appreciably thick, and projected straight upward from the dark, curly pubic hair of his groin. He was in full erection. The freed phallus was an incongruous, but arousing sight, as otherwise he was fully dressed in a well-tailored gray-and-black-striped suit, complete with waistcoat and cravat. I knew I shortly would be naked and that both of us would be energized by the sensation of my naked body on his fully clothed one.

Wrapping one arm around the small of my back, he drew me close to him and laid his cheek on my belly. Instinctively one of his thumbs went to the wet spot on my crotch and rubbed the bulb of my cock through the material. Expressing pleasure at finding me already wet for him, he moved his mouth down to grasp my cock head through the material and suck at the wetness. He pulled the hem of my shirt out of my trousers and kissed where the crease of my lower belly descended into my groin on my right side. This allowed me to look down the line of my body to savor the view of him undoing my belt, unbuttoning my fly, flaring the front panels of my trousers, and to watch as my own cock, also erect, was freed and flung forward, straight out from my groin. I groaned and pushed my fingers through the luxuriant black hair on his head, reaching in and clutching his scalp, as I gasped at the feel of his fingers playing down the length of my shaft and pulling the foreskin back off my glans. His fingers glided along the sides of the phallus, worshipping it, as I knew was his fetish. I whimpered as he teased my urethra slit with the tip of one of his fingers.

Leaving that, he whispered, “I want you naked. I want to make you naked.”

Obediently, I pulled my suspenders off my shoulders, letting them fall to my sides, and he pushed my trousers and underwear down off my hips. I stepped out of them, leaving me in my leather boots and knee-high socks, held up with garters. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off my back as he turned his face to my belly and licked and nipped the tender skin at my navel. His fingers were playing along the surfaces of my cock, making me rock hard. His mouth went lower and he was licking and closing his teeth on the sides of my cock and throbbing and causing me to moan and warn him in a quiet voice that I wasn’t far from coming.

He seemed to enjoy this--he always wanted me to come before him, and multiple times--and increased his teasing of my shaft rather than leaving off. I knew that I could come when I had to--that he enjoyed making me come in this way, that my quick and frequent releases weren’t a disadvantage with him. While he continued to teeth the side of my cock, his hand cupped the tip of the shaft and his fingers continued to press on the edge of the foreskin, pushing it to below the rim of the bulb. The fingers tightened and flexed in rhythm, and, with a groan, I shot my first load into his cupped hand. With a laugh, he raised the hand, and I licked my cum off the palm and then took each finger, in succession, in my mouth, sucking on it.

“Now me. On your knees,” he said in a low, hoarse voice, and I sank between his thighs on my knees and took the side of his cock in my mouth and teethed it, as he had done with mine. I also pushed the foreskin of the shaft back as he had done. But I’d taken a gob of the jell up with my fingers as I had come down on my knees and I slathered that on his glans and worked the lubricated bulb with my fingers as he lay back in his chair and moaned. I could feel his thighs trembling. He was holding my head between his hands, his fingers running into my blond curls, rhythmically pressing and releasing pressure on my skull in the pleasure I was giving his shaft.

“Now. The rods,” he whispered. Reaching behind me I took up the thinnest of the steel rods and slathered it in the jell. Then, my head resting on his thigh with the long shaft in front of my face and two fingers of my left hand imprisoning the root of his shaft between them, I held the penis steady and perfectly upright and positioned the tip of the rod at his urethra entrance. I slowly started to insert it into the channel of his phallus. He gasped and sighed and groaned as I buried the rod and twirled it slightly.

When I’d inserted the third, slightly longer and thicker rod, he bade me stop and extract it. Precum came out with it. “I want to rise higher before I release,” he muttered. “Dock them.”

I placed the rod with the others on the desk blotter and stood and came down into his lap, facing him, my thighs resting on his. Our cocks lay against each other’s, mine on top of his. Briefly, Barrington held the cocks together in a bundle and stroked them together lightly. He was still erect and throbbing. I was becoming erect again.

“Lean back. I’ll do it,” he muttered, and I arched my torso back to the desk and supported myself on my elbows on the desktop. I watched down the line of my naked body to his clothed one as he put the tips of the two cocks together, pulled his foreskin over the bulb of my cock and began to stroke them together. We were both panting hard, but I was breathing more heavily than he was and moaning more deeply. That was exactly how Barrington wanted it. He had magnificent control. I, the neophyte, did not. He wanted me to cum again--he enjoyed it when I came multiple times before he did. He stroked more vigorously, my cock head rubbing against his, both confined in the foreskin of his cock and the pressure of his stroking hand.

With a cry, I came again, my cum burbling out of the docked cock heads. He laughed, and I came off the desk with my elbows and pressed my chest into his, flinging my arms around his neck. Our mouths met and we kissed hungrily. I could feel that he was rigid, tense, and ready to blow. Knowing what he wanted, I pressed my feet into the floor on either side of the chair and lifted my pelvis enough for him to slide his cock under my cock and balls to where it was rubbing along my perineum. He placed the palm of a hand in my sternum, coaxing me to lean back, supported by his other arm around the small of my back. His lips went to my nipples, where he licked and nipped, as he slid his cock back and forth across my perineum, under my cock and balls. The pumping increased as did the heavy panting of both of his and his little cries of pleasure.

He ejaculated between my thighs, just as he loved to do. He hadn’t entered my anal channel. He probably never would. He enjoyed everything but anal penetration. Increasingly, I had adjusted to this, lost in the inventiveness of this muscular man taking me to the heights and beyond in multiple ejaculations short of the ultimate, fully possessing act of one man with another.

As I was dressing, he said, “I want you to be available to my needs on Saturday night.”

“Of course,” I answered, surprised that he had shown any hint of asking rather than flatly telling me I would be his to demand on Saturday night. I was available to him whenever he wanted to use me.

“We are producing enough that I want to expand beyond Boston. I have an important buyer coming in from New York who I will be entertaining that night--who I want you to entertain as well.”

Ah, I thought.

“We are somewhat like minded--members of a club of sorts. He is interested in ‘everything but,’ as I am, but perhaps is a little more forceful, rougher than I am. I want you to make him pleased. Will you--?”

“Whatever pleases you,” I said. I admit to having been somewhat apprehensive, though. He had never indicated that I would have a choice before--or that I might want to say no to something, to anything short of full possession of my body. I couldn’t know what being more “rough” would entail. Regardless, I couldn’t really say no.

* * * *

The dining room at Young’s Hotel was so impressive and so far above my station in life, that, in order not to appear to be a country bumpkin with my gawking at the honeycombed, low-slung coffered glass ceiling, or the burgundy-painted wainscoting with the gold wall covering above, and the back-lit stained-glass semicircles of the stained glass above the windows, I sank into my chair and remained subdued.

My shyness and reticence continued when Mr. Barrington gestured and said, “That’s him,” when a tall, beefy, florid-faced man with a riot of gray-streaked red hair and mutton chop whiskers appeared at the maître d’ station across the dining room, next to a huge fireplace. The man must have been six and a half feet tall and over two-hundred and fifty pounds, although the poundage was well-distributed on his large frame other than the distinctive paunch of a belly. He was dressed elegantly in an expensively tailored gray and black pin-stripe suit.

Barrington rose from the table, gave me a look that had me on my feet as well, and caught the attention of the imposing figure of a man from across the dining room. The man’s eyes shifted from Barrington to me, and he produced a smile with his thick, red lips. I caught a slight look of lust in his hooded eyes before he recovered, directed his full attention to Barrington, and put on the mask of the successful businessman meeting for a business dinner.

We remained standing as he approached us. Both Barrington and he extended hands and shook and blustered about the hotel setting and that it was raining out on the street and that the man had had a devil of a time finding a carriage to bring him back to the hotel from another business meeting like they were long-time acquaintances, although my understanding was that they had no more than a passing acquaintance. That, of course, proved to be a false impression.

“This is a young associate of mine, Horace, Neal Drummond. If you choose to order equipment from us for your men’s gymnasiums in New York, you will be working with Neal--if, of course, it pleases you to work with him. This is Horace Crowley, Neal. He owns four men’s health establishments in New York.”

Of course I’d already learned who Horace Crowley was and what he owned in New York City--and how much he was worth. I knew that he was fifty-one years old too, but he appeared to be a far more robust man in the flesh--and quite a lot of flesh there was, although, barring his generous paunch, it seemed more muscle than fat.

“Mr. Crowley was once a champion boxer,” Barrington said in way of an explanation of how he’d risen to own gyms.

Crowley turned to look at me for the first time since he’d approached the table, and even now he seemed almost to be looking past me. I didn’t see the spark of interest in his eyes that I’d seen when he’d first entered the dining room. “And do you partake of the gym as well, Master Drummond? Are you a boxer as well?”

“Neal was a gymnast,” Barrington said, “weren’t you, Neal? He competed collegiately in the high bar and the rings. I only employ former athletes. I want them to be thoroughly knowledgeable of the equipment me provide.”

“Do you?” Crowley said, nearly sniffing in the air. “That seems a good idea. Shall we order?” He sat down at the table, giving me no further notice and turned his attention to the menu. I felt a sense of dismissal. If Barrington had brought me along to impress the man--or, more, to arouse him and excite him at the prospect that I would service him--the effort seemed to have fallen flat. He seemed more interested in the menu than anything else, and he ordered enough food for the three of us and tucked into it with relish and a bit of crudeness, talking equipment and prices with Barrington with food coming out of his mouth and dribbling down into the edges of his mutton chops.

Given the wine list, he ordered beer. He gave me the impression of a crude glutton, which made me shudder at the thought of how he would be as a sex partner. I almost didn’t regret that I didn’t seem to appeal to his arousal.

I had also felt the dismissal in his use of “Master” rather than “Mr.” when he addressed me. I was just another low-ranked, wet-behind-the-ears employee to him. He had no interest in me other than a name and an address to send his order vouchers too--if he decided to buy our equipment or to permit me to be his contact with the company. This brought me to the worry of whether his business was so important to Barrington that my boss would cultivate and train another young man in my stead to serve both him and Crowley. My task, of course, was to swallow my disgust and make sure that didn’t happen.

I was wrong in that assessment, though. Crowley was interested in me, I just didn’t rank as high in his priorities as food or business. By the coffee service he had been satiated in terms of his higher priorities, and he, at last, turned his attention to me, as if he only now was aware I was in the room, and I saw that hooded-eye look of lust return to his eye.

“You are a fine figure of a young man, Neal,” he said, his voice both heavy with sensuality and hard, commanding, in full control. “A gymnast, you say. A gymnast relies on flexibility. Have you retained that from your college days, Neal? Will you bend for me and not break? Will you pleasure me in taking you to the edge of being broken?”

His hand had come over to my knee under the deep-flowing table cloth and I winced at the strength of his grip. I didn’t quite know how to answer that and was still searching for words, when Barrington answered for me.

“He will give you whatever pleasure you seek, Horace. He has become my favorite.”

“Your favorite?” Crowley asked in a voice of disbelief. “You prefer him over Johnny Boy? I haven’t seen Neal here on club nights. You say he is good at the ‘everything but’?”

“Very good, Horace. It’s the aura of innocence he brings to the servicing that sets him ahead of Johnny Boy--plus his body is delicious. Johnny Boy has become jaded. And Neal here is more athletic. You will find he will bend for you very nicely. But if you wish to break him--”

“And the lash? Will he take the whip?”

“He has not had the lash. You will be the first.”

“But he will take it?” Crowley asked insistently. He was looking at me, but again it was Barrington who answered.

“Yes, he will take it.” I lowered my face in submission.

I shuddered at the thought of that. Barrington had told me that that would be involved with this prospective client, and I reiterated that Barrington was the boss and I’d do as he bid. But I shuddered at the thought. And I could feel in the tremble of the grip on my knee that Crowley was shuddering too. The obvious difference was that I trembled from anticipation and fear and this florid mountain of a man trembled from the anticipation of personal pleasure.

“Are we finished here?” Crowley’s question came out almost in a growl. It didn’t seem like he was finished here, his hand was higher on my inner thigh, a thumb rubbing against the bulb of my cock through the material of my trousers. He was making me wet, and I knew my trousers would be spotted. I glanced around at the other tables, but no one seemed to notice that he had his hand under the table and his arm unnaturally extended. Anyone observing us could follow the line of his extended arm to where my lap, hidden under the table cloth, was.

“I would like to get to the dessert you promised me,” he said. “I wish to use this young man now.”

Barrington must have seen the resulting expression of slight consternation on my face, as he was staring at me, willing me to do something. This suddenly was moving very fast. Crowley’s fingering of my cock through my trousers was near to making me come. I didn’t know what Barrington wanted me to do, but my body involuntarily answered the call. With a shudder, my legs went to putty and parted and Crowley’s hand cupped my basket briefly, no doubt taking that as surrender. I came in my trousers, wetting them. And, smiling, Crowley removed his hand.

I lowered my face again in a submissive gesture and when I looked up, I saw that he’d taken his hand away and had his thumb in his mouth--the thumb that had brought the cum out of my cock and soaked a spot in my trousers. He smiled licentiously at me. I returned a somewhat weaker smile and lowered my eyes again.

“If you don’t want another cup of coffee, we can be finished here,” Barrington said. “If you have the time and inclination, we can show you our line of equipment--at one of our showrooms--a very private showroom.”

“Take me there,” Crowley answered in a low, hoarse voice.

“I have a carriage waiting for us outside.”

In the carriage, Barrington sat next to us in the darkness of the rear compartment, holding my trousers and underdrawers in his hand, as I sat in Crowley’s lap, facing forward, his cock out of his trousers, Crowley was otherwise fully dressed, and stroking up and down the small of my back, while he cupped my chin in one hand, pulling my face around for an exploration of my mouth cavity by his tongue, while he stroked off my shaft with the other hand. I could tell from the feel of his cock that he was massive, both in length and girth.

I came for him again, splashing my cum onto the back of the partition between our compartment and the driver, which seemed to please Crowley greatly. Barrington had told me early in our practice of “everything but” that the controller enjoyed it more if the submissive ejaculated frequently while the controller held himself in check for a final flourish. In this regard, Barrington said Crowley was like him.

“He comes nicely,” Crowley said as he pushed me off his lap, tucked his own cock away, and buttoned his fly.

“And frequently,” Barrington responded, “as I told you he would.”

* * * *

“Bravo, such grace,” Barrington called out.

“Beautiful,” Crowley chimed in. “His body is superb. Such flexibility. I can’t wait to use him.”

I had demonstrated a routine on the high bar to begin with and now had done some flips on the rings. I was a bit rusty, but as I was doing the exercises naked and the two men were swigging bourbon, that didn’t seem to matter much to them. They both were fairly salivating at what this was building up to.

Crowley stood and came to me as I hung from the rings. He was nearly as naked as I was. He was wearing some sort of black leather chaps that left his low-hanging cock and balls exposed and a black leather hood, with eyeholes, that came down just as far as his nose in front. He cut an imposing figure. Heavy he was, with a beer belly on him, he was imposingly muscular too. His pecs were hard and he was covered with curly red hair--a thick thatch across his chest that descended into a riot of curly hair at his groin from which a mammoth, thick cock rose in an angry-looking upcurved erection. His back, thighs, and forearms were similarly covered in hair. His complexion was ruddy, his legs muscular, his biceps bulging. The whole package came together to resonate “master.”

He was an animal in both his looks and how he subsequently used me.

He came to me as I hung off the floor on the rings and encircled my waist in his strong embrace. Kissing my belly and tonguing my navel, he growled, “Hang your legs on my shoulders,” and when I did, he kissed down into my pubes, took my cock in his mouth, and sucked me to an ejaculation. Suspended there in air, I moved my hips, fucking his face. He took my cum in his throat and then sucked hard on my bulb until, moaning deeply at his insistent demand of more from me, I gave him a secondary ejaculation. My balls already were beginning to ache from the draining.

This was more than Barrington had done with me--and this was fine. If this was the extent of it, it would be fine, I thought. But of course he wasn’t done with me. I didn’t kid myself that he would be. He pulled me off the rings and took me over to a piece of equipment I’d never seen before. I’d looked at it when we’d entered the windowless chamber and tried to figure out how it was used in exercise.

It wasn’t used in exercise. It was built for testing sex. It was one of the “everything but” club’s devices that Barrington had brought out for this visit. This was where my flexibility was to come in as well as Crowley’s taking me to the edge of being broken.

The contraption was in somewhat of a saw horse configuration, with the small of my back lying on a thick, wide pad on the top and me bent over either side, my ankles initially lashed to the spread legs of the device on one side and my wrists to the spread legs of the device on the other side. Using this configuration, Crowley worked our penises for a while, as Barrington, dressed, but his cock out and being stroked, sat at the sidelines and watched. Standing over and below me, Crowley frotted our cocks for a while, bundling them and stroking them. Then he docked them for a while, as Barrington had done in his office previously. Crowley made the cock heads kiss and then he folded his foreskin over my bulb and stroked the cocks until I came, my cum burbling out around the edges of his foreskin, my balls tender and aching from the demand to produce ejaculate.

He knelt then and cleaned my glans with his tongue, but from there, he became rougher, sucking on my bulb hard, while he distended and squeezed my balls to hear me scream and enjoy my writhing against my bonds on the horse. He bit the sides of my cock and sucked my ball sack hard, laughing at my unheeded cries for mercy.

“Yes, let me hear your passion--your distress,” he growled.

I didn’t hold back.

“Yes, yes, punish me. Take me hard!” I cried out, knowing that was what Barrington wanted me to say, at least halfway wanting it. Wanting to know how much harder I could get, how much I could give before breaking. The rumbling I could hear from deep in Crowley’s throat told me I was giving him what he wanted from me.

Eventually, he grew tired of this and moved around to my head, stopping at one side of me, forcing his cock into my armpit and stroking it there. Coming around to my head, he slapped me on the face, biceps, and shoulders with his cock and rubbed it on my cheeks, encouraging me to open my mouth to it. Instinctively, and exhausted, I turned my face away, but, with a laugh, he forced my mouth open by sticking the fingers of both hands in it and spreading my mouth.

“Yes, fight me. It will do you no good, but fight me.”

With a groan, I collapsed and made a big O of my mouth. He was right; there was no fighting him. He slid his cock inside deep enough for me to gag and, laughing, he face fucked me for several minutes, as he held my head stationary by cupping my cheeks on either side with his big hands and stroking them with his thumbs. As he face fucked me he whispered in what should have been a soothing tone, but wasn’t, all the things we wanted to do to my body.

He didn’t come, though. For that--his first of two ejaculations, with me coming twice as often--he came around to below me again, released my ankles, hooked my legs on his hips, slid his cock under my balls and stroked between my thighs and under my balls, stroking my cock with his hand, and timing our release so that we came together. Long before we ejaculated, my legs turned to trembling putty, cramping up, the right one supported against his waist under his arm, and the left one just falling away to the floor.

When he’d brought us both to release, he left me there, bent backward and trussed to the apparatus as he went back to Barrington to recharge and to discuss their deal for a gym equipment order.

He wasn’t finished with me, though--not by a long shot. With Barrington’s help, he released me from the apparatus only to hang me from the rings again, this time my hands and wrists bound to the rings so that I couldn’t escape them.

Barrington brought out a multithonged leather hand whip and went back to sitting, watching, licking his lips, and stroking his cock, as Crowley whipped me. He didn’t lash me hard enough make me unconscious, but hard enough for it to sting, raise welts, and bring out a trickle of blood on my back, buttocks, thighs, belly, and chest, as I twisted in the wind and groaned, moaned, and, occasionally cried out.

I also, embarrassingly, got very hard, as did Crowley, and as closely as I could see, Barrington. Crowley stopped from time to time to run his fingers over the welts, bounce my shaft with a flick of the whip handle, frot our cocks together, nibble on my nipples, and kiss my body all over. I was just hanging there, moaning, when he dropped the whip, stood behind me, and started running the underside of his cock up and down between my buttocks cheeks, rubbing again and again across my hole.

For the first time during my association with Barrington and his fetish, I was feeling the sensations of wanting a man inside me. I had no more cum to give, which caused my attention to go to my rippling, clutching channel walls. They wanted to be filled, possessed by a throbbing cock. I was drained but not fulfilled.

I had been fucked anally before. But I hadn’t felt the aching desire for it before during one of these “everything but” sessions. My hole puckered and grabbed at his cock as it rubbed up and down, between my buttocks cheeks, pressed together by his hands gripping them on the side and raising and lowering my pelvis in countermotion to his stroking cock. I felt my channel opening, wanting him, even as thick as he was.

I murmured something.

“What was that?” he asked in a low voice.

“Please, please.”

“Please what?”

“Please. Put it in me. Fuck me.”

He laughed and slapped my buttocks on each side, but I could feel his bulb pause at my hole. My sphincter muscle convulsed, trying to reach out and grab the cock head and pull it inside.

“Please,” I whimpered. He had reached around and fisted my cock and was stroking it.

“Come for me again and we’ll see,” he whispered in my ear.

With effort I gave him a weak ejaculation. I’d already come too much in the evening. My balls ached dreadfully from the milking.

He came then too--but not inside my channel. He slid his cock up my crack and came on the small of my back.

He put his mouth to my ear and whispered a few sentences. I was still moaning, both from the low-level pain I felt from what I’d been put through and from the incompleteness, for me, of the sex. I wanted a cock inside me, churning. I wanted everything. Not everything but.

The two men disappeared. Only Barrington came back.

“Where is he?” I asked, almost whining. I still had hopes he would finish me. I knew Barrington wouldn’t do that for me.

“He’s gone. I put him in the carriage to return to the hotel. It will come back for us and I’ll drive you home. Are the welts too painful? Here I have some salve.”

He released me and sat me down on a bench and gently dressed the welts with the salve. They stopped hurting almost immediately. “You did very well,” Barrington said as he worked. “We have a big contract for equipment and a promise of more orders. He wants you to deliver the equipment to New York when it’s ready. Will you do that? He will, of course, use you again then.”

“Yes, of course,” I murmured. “You’re the boss I’ll do whatever you want” . . . even though, I wanted to add, I want more than this now. I wanted it all.

Barrington was babbling on as I was assessing what Crowley had whispered in my ear before leaving me. “I want more too,” he had whispered. “Come to work for me in New York. I’ll pay you more than Barrington does. I’ll give you a higher position. I’ll take care of you better. And I’ll give you everything. You want me to fuck your ass? Come work for me in New York.”

Could I trust him? Would he give me what I wanted or just continue to take what he wanted and leave me unfulfilled? Could I go beyond “everything but” with Barrington? Crowley was thicker and longer--and his cruelty took me to new heights of arousal. But could I trust him to take care of me? It was something I needed to think about.