A Crack in Our Defenses
I knew his smell in an instant.
Brasidas smelled of dust, iron, and a sharp, male sweat born of pure, relentless exertion. He left the smell on my skin, in my hair, a scent I could not scrub away.
When I slipped into the storeroom, Theron was there, a silhouette of strength and warmth. As I moved into his arms, the familiar scent of him—olive oil and sun-warmed skin that smelled like HIM—should have been a comfort. Instead, it was suddenly a confusion to my mind, a distorted message to my arousal.
His hands, gentle and seeking, found my back. But the muscles there were not his to know anymore. They were a coloured map of the day’s lessons, bruised and knotted at the hands of Brasidas from the press of his shield and the outline of his knuckles. When Theron’s palms pressed against them, pain flashed, bright and sharp and I flinched.
He froze. “Lysander?”
“It’s nothing,” I whispered, lying through my teeth as the pain slowly subsided. “Just… sore.”
But it was everything. My body was no longer my own. I was being beaten down by my erastes in training, and then again in submission to him as my duty. Theron’s loving touch now felt, terrifyingly, like a betrayal. My body was responding to Theron’s touch as a disloyalty to Brasidas, even though my mind was trying to tell me the opposite. This was now a different war I was fighting.
Brasidas was becoming increasingly needy. He was looking at me now not just as his soldier to mold, but a thing to use for his pleasure as was his right. He penetrated me often, swiftly at times, without warning, as if the need overtook him. His cock a weapon he now seemed to wield into me to break me even further.
The more he beat me in the training grounds, the more he seemed to need to enter me. The more he entered me, the more he broke me.
Deep down I knew Brasidas was winning the war. He knew it as well.
Theron seemed to understand though without me having to express it. He was careful now, his hands lightly caressing as they explored me. He undressed me with a slow reverence that I felt I did not deserve. Each new bruise, each red mark his fingers didn’t make, was a mark on me from another man’s claim. In the dim light, I saw his jaw tighten as he traced a dark, hand-shaped blotch on my bicep.
“He…” In that one word, Theron’s voice was thick.
“He is building a Spartan,” I finished for him, the words hollow. This was the law: turning your eromenos into the most prized soldier; to make Sparta proud; to make him proud.
Theron then kissed me, but it was now different. His mouth was soft, seeking permission as if he was afraid to push too far. My body took time in responding to him. But when it did, I became a desperate, hungry animal, clawing its way to the surface to find Theron there instead of Brasidas.
But it was a fractured response, a war constantly going on in my entire soul. As his lips moved to my neck, I was there with Theron, in the dark, in the feeling… and then I was also on the training ground, the flash of a grunted command in my ear, or the rough beard on my cheek as the pain of Brasidas entering me radiated through me.
Your body betrays your mind’s hesitation. So I was learning in my new war.
The two realities overlapped in my brain, making it hard to discern between a violation or love. When Theron’s body settled over mine, a wave of shame washed over me it stole my breath. This body he was worshiping, this skin he was mapping with his lips, had been gripped, shoved, and conditioned by Brasidas only hours before. I felt like I was being torn in two, and Theron was here to witness my unavoidable turmoil.
“Look at me,” Theron whispered as he always did, his voice now frayed with a pain that mirrored my own.
I forced my eyes open. His gaze was not clouded with passion alone, but with a devastating understanding. He saw it. He saw the war being fought inside my skin.
“This is you,” he whispered, his forehead resting against mine as he moved inside me. He stilled me, forcing my body to relax by just his eyes and his touch, his rhythm now a desperate but forceful deliberate reclaiming. “This, right here.” His hand gripped my pectoral muscle, his fingers outlining my heart. “This is mine. Remember? He cannot touch this.”
He was carving himself back inside me. He was rewriting his touch over my flesh, erasing the trace of the other. He was trying to ease all my pain from the battlefield and soothe my agony from my duty to another. Every caress of his hand was a removal of Brasidas’ violence. Every gentle thrust was a denial of Brasidas’s brutality. Every soft gasp from both of us was a rebellion against Sparta.
“He can enter you, but he will never own you.” He stroked my face as he spoke, giving me more of himself even deeper, pushing himself so far inside me I began to shake at just the feeling. I grasped his hand on my face and held on, nodding to him as a tear escaped my eye. It was like he was knocking on my very soul, bringing me to a state of pleasure only he could produce.
I saw the wave wash over Theron. I knew he was on the verge of explosion as his eyes locked with mine.
“I love you completely Lysander.” He panted out as the waves overtook him. His face tightened, his grip around me increased, and he held me in his powerful grasp that I gasped breathlessly as he filled me with that love.
When he exploded, I trembled, not with my own release, but with the aftershock of the internal battle of having him inside me. He held me, his hand splayed possessively over my heart, digging himself deeper into me, driving himself into that spot within me, that I felt my own surge swell within without touching myself.
I gasped out loud, feeling my seed erupting from my cock as Theron held my shuddering body, my own face a mask of surprise and submission as he continued to throb against my inner walls. My body gave in, spasming within his grip, his leg around me to hold me, his strong arms at full force to hold me still as his breath felt hot against my neck.
“Yes.” Was all he said in my ear, bringing my body back to earth and the heat of his presence settled me. His erection slipped from me, but we remained entangled for as long as we could, before the secrecy of our meeting threatened our minds.
I left him reluctantly, to try to calm my confused body that night before the next day’s training was to begin once again.
It was the hour before dawn when my erastes began his daily ritual. Brasidas’s training was no longer about strength; it was about ownership. This was his ritual of dominance, and tonight, that ritual took him to my bed within his house as if he knew there was something deeper within me he needed to break.
He did not speak. Words were unnecessary. His strength as he flipped me over from my usual position onto my back the only necessary communication that this was to be different. The air was cold, the rough wool of the blanket abrasive against my back. But I did the same thing I always did. I closed my eyes and went to the fortress inside my mind. I built the walls high, stone by stone, with the memory of Theron’s voice. He cannot touch this. He cannot touch this. He cannot touch this.
Brasidas was a creature of habit at times, of brutal, predictable rhythm. When he would bring me to his room, it was the same. He showed me how hard I made him. He pushed me forward into position, bent me over onto my hands, exposing me to his gaze. He would enter without mercy. He gripped my shoulders or waist tight and drilled me like an animal.
But tonight, in my own room, he pushed me onto the bed, onto my back and I knew this was going to be a battle I needed to prepare for. Brasidas’ breath was on my face, lifting my naked body upwards for him to claim. His hands, which usually gripped my hips with impersonal force, slid higher though, up my body, in a light caress over my chest as he inserted his own sword deep into my guts. I closed my eyes and silently took him, the girth, the length, willing it to finish quickly. But his calloused palms scraped across the skin just below my neck, over my shoulders to a spot still tender from a fall days before that Theron had tried to eradicate only hours before.
And I flinched.
It was a tiny, involuntary spasm. A slight crack in my control so minute I barely felt it myself.
But he felt it. He went perfectly still over me as my eyes flew open. Even his cock inside me remained motionless. The entire world narrowed to the point of his touch on my shoulder.
His breath, which had been a steady, laboring rhythm, stopped. In the utter silence, I felt his focus sharpen from this brutish act to a predatory gaze. His hand did not move. It remained there, a heavy, hot weight on my flesh, as if listening to the secret my skin had just betrayed, or the heavy beating of my heart as if it too could give away a clue. His eyes raked across my body as if searching for more signs.
My heart was a frantic bird beating itself to death against my ribs. Stupid. So stupid.
He knew this body better than I did at this point. He knew every strain, every new ache, every old scar. In the times he had claimed me, he knew exactly what I could endure. He knew exactly how much pressure that spot could take.
And he knew I had not flinched from true pain.
I had endured broken fingers without a sound. I had taken his large phallus without a sound in even the roughest of ways, in the most surprising attacks, as deep as he could insert himself. I had borne punishment without a tear. That war I was winning.
This was not a flinch from pain. It was a flinch of sensitivity I could not hide. A memory of a different kind of touch. A gentleness that had made that patch of skin remember it was capable of feeling something other than brutality.
His eyes snapped back to mine and his head lowered. His mouth was near my face, his lips just apart from mine, his voice a low, venomous whisper that froze the blood in my veins.
“You have been touched here,” he breathed. It wasn’t a question. It was a coroner’s report. “And not by a sparring partner.”
He remained inside me, impaling me with an extension of his massive body, holding me in place, his mind now working with a cold, terrifying clarity. He was no longer just claiming his due as his cock began to throb inside me; he was conducting an investigation on occupied territory.
“You give me your body,” he murmured, the words dripping with a new, sickening understanding. “But instead I get this… shell? You have been giving your skin to someone else.” He seemed to become a man obsessed, grabbing my neck with such fury and force that I clenched my jaw tight and squeezed my eyes in fear as he began to thrust in me furiously, his face still close, his beard now scratching my cheeks as my body was used under him.
I was incapable of sound, my body being ravaged so roughly, his power overtaking us both. He claimed me. There is no other word for it, like a demon. Full on, vengeful, with a rage that echoed in his own sounds. Growls and grunts filled the room as he unleashed a drilling that both claimed and possessed my shell of a body.
I swallowed down my tears, held back my cries of pain, and gripped the edges of his bed and waited. This was my duty. This is what I should expect. This is what I deserve. And when he erupted, he came with such a slam, such a fury, that the sound of his roar echoed in my ears for several seconds.
Until the only sound thumping in my head was the beating of my terrified heart.
He finally pulled away, the sudden absence of pounding and of his weight a different kind of violation. I remained stock still, on my back, my legs now relaxed around him, as if any movement might further enrage him. He moved around me and stood by the bed, looking down at me in the grey light. I turned my head from his contracting abdominal muscles up past his enormous, heaving chest to meet his gaze. He was glaring at me, not with rage now, but with a chilling, absolute certainty.
“You have not been broken,” he said, his voice flat. “You have been hollowed out to this shell that you have provided to me. While HE…your Theron… he is the one who is living deep inside you.”
He turned and walked out, still hard and naked, leaving the door open to the cold dawn.
I let out all my breath and relaxed into my bed, exposed and trembling, the scent of him everywhere in my brain, the truth of his words floating in the air above me like a guilty mist. He had not discovered a secret. He had discovered the secrets within me in one slight flinch. He now knew that I had betrayed his ownership. And I knew, with a certainty that turned my stomach to ice, that the war had just entered a new, more dangerous phase. He would no longer try to break my body.
He would now hunt for the man I was hiding within it.
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