Page 36 of Connor and the Dragons

Connor went still. “No wings. Big teeth. Did any of them have tiny little arms?”

“Several. How did you know that?”

“Holy shit,” Sky breathed, forgetting his stranger voice entirely. “Dinosaurs?”

“I do not know that word, but I did not care for them.”

“We’re not going that way,” Connor said, and steered us back toward the canal.

“Well,” Sky said, in a voice for everyone nearby, “you simply must eat before you see the Old Bridge. There’s a house on the square that does the crab rolls.”

The eating house had tables in the open air, and I felt a lurch of joy when I saw the cushions. Kneeling cushions, stacked in a basket by the door, as ordinary as napkins. Connor took one down without asking anyone’s permission, dropped it on the right side of his chair, pointed, and I knelt on it in the middle of a public square in the sunlight while the waiter took orders over my head.

What followed was the best meal of my centuries.

Connor fed me from his fingers. He did it without ceremony, mid-conversation, breaking off pieces of crab roll and bringing them down to my mouth while he argued with Sky about the correct way to eat a crab roll, as though feeding me were a thing his hand had always done. I took each bite gently. Once I caught his fingers and licked them clean, and he glanced down at me then, just briefly. He wiped the corner of my mouth with his thumb and let me suck on it for a long moment.

On his other side, Kessrin sat straight-backed and shining, and Connor’s free hand lived on him the whole meal, resting on his knee, tracing his jaw, once sliding into the open front of the cloak flat over his heart, and Kessrin held his poise like a professional and leaned into every touch by one telling degree. He watched the finger-licking too.

Connor’s hand settled in my hair while the table talked over me, and I leaned into it, resting my cheek on his thigh the way I saw another like me doing four tables away, and closed my eyes, imagining what it would be like if this wasn’t just a show we were putting on.

After the meal my mind was fuzzy and warm. There was something about a shop Sky just had to show us, and we followed him and Moerrven three streets up from the square, to a place with a discreet sign and an interior that stopped me in the doorway.

I had thought Sky’s wall of implements was abundance. This was a whole establishment of the craft, wall after wall of it, harness and collar and cuff, coils of rope in every weight, paddles arranged neatly by length, and all of it made carefully, by hands that respected the work, for the purpose of sexual pleasure.

Sky towed Moerrven off toward a display of floggers, and I watched the enormous troll pick one up and test the fall of the tails across his own palm, and Sky said something up at him that made his ears go blue, then took the flogger from Moerrven and tested it against the big troll’s thigh.

“We’re here for him,” Connor told the shopkeeper, and took the leash ring and drew me forward. “We’ve discovered that he must be caged in public, or his erection becomes quite… obscene. Do you have options for that?”

The shopkeeper measured me with tailor’s hands and no comment beyond “warm one, isn’t he,” and laid out choices on a velvet cloth, and I stood and was discussed. Connor lifted each piece, tested the weight, asked about hinges and heat and long wear. He did not ask me which I liked. He asked Kessrin.

“The black one,” Kessrin said, with enormous composure, from inside his hood. “The strapwork is more precise. It will hold him better. I think it could be very useful.”

“The black one it is, then,” Connor agreed. “May we put it on him?”

The shopkeeper led us into a back fitting room, and I looked around, raising my eyebrows.

“No,” Connor said. “I’m not going to fuck you in here with my brother and his husband right out there.”

“I could stay very quiet,” I said.

Kessrin snorted. He was carefully opening the box and pulling out the cock cage, a wicked smile spreading slowly across his lips as he turned it over in his fingers. I shivered, eyes widening, as I imagined his slim, elegant hands fastening those buckles tightly around me, forcing me to stay controlled until one of them allowed me to come.

“Do you believe in destiny?” I asked.

Connor laughed, eyes sparkling. “You think your destiny is to be a caged slut with two masters?”

“Gods, how did you know? You are quite perceptive. Perhaps you are a wizard after all.”

“I think he was teasing you.” Kessrin waited for a nod from Connor before stepping forward and carefully undoing the buckles of my loincloth. His hands were far too skilled and efficient. He glanced up at me as he worked. “Why do you look disappointed?”

“I was hoping you’d grope me just a little. You know, remind me of who owns me.”

“Do you just say every single thing that comes into your head?” he asked.

I thought about that. “Pretty much. When you’re forced to go without speaking for ages, you make a point of getting everything out, just in case it happens again.”

Connor stepped in close, brushing his lips against my jawline, then nipping at my earlobe. “We won’t let that happen.”