Mastered

By

Bryl R. Tyne

Mastered

I can’t go through with it…I dare not risk…

Chin slamming against my exposed chest, I sucked air through gritted teeth awaiting his next attack. What in hell was I thinking…I agreed to Sean marking me the night before the crescent moon waxes, but— “Christ! Please…”

“Please what? Please take time not to smudge, Sean…Or please, I’m backing out, our bonds aren’t as strong as first imagined?” Smells of singed hair and flesh lingered as he lifted the heat from my lower back. “Calm down, Richard. It’s three initials from an iron no bigger in diameter than my index finger.”

“You…don’t…understand…” My jagged breaths manifested into hoarse rasping, and I wrenched in vain at my shackled limbs as salt from my sweat-soaked hair burrowed into my eyeball’s protective layers of moisture burning sensitive tissue in its wake. God, help me…

Firm palms cupped my face and Sean snapped my head upward, directing my blurred gaze to his. “Stay with me, Richard. Damn it!” He smacked my left cheek. “Look at me…Focus, on my eyes.”

Although my body raged war on my mind, I obeyed. I found his eyes and focused yet under constraint. Cold, it was cold. Exhausted, my head fell back. Sean righted my vision once more and I realized the cold’s source. A damp washrag soothed my stinging eyes.

“Listen to me, Richard. Okay?”

I managed a weakened nod.

“Good,” he said, and embraced my spread eagle chained form. The flesh of his naked torso searing as it contacted mine sent me hyperventilating. “Not yet, Richard, calm down. Breathe deeper…slower.”

Inhaling as Sean instructed worked to steady my breathing, but tamed little else. This night of all nights, the most recklessly unplanned of my mortal life to date, I’d agreed in haste, ignored warnings. I knew the signs, but with sensibility forgotten under pleasant duress, under Sean’s glistening thighs and the curve of his perfect buttocks, I’d foolishly compromised my life and his.

Like now, my desire to touch, to taste, to allow him to surround me with his flesh waxed as the moon surely would the forthcoming evening. I tasted his lips and he offered me his tongue. “God damn it!” I growled, breaking free his temptation. “You don’t understand what’s about to happen. I need to get away from here, as far away from you as possible…now.”

His strong hands mapped the ridge of my shoulders then traced the curve of my spine as he kissed my chest, the cleft of my throat, and along my neck to the tender skin below my right ear. “No, Richard,” he whispered. “It is you who doesn’t understand. It is All Hallows Eve, is it not?”

“No! Sean don’t!” I was loosed, and I was deadly. I snarled a semi-audible sentence. “I love you, Sean…I’m sorry…”

“Don’t be. I’m not.”

I lunged for him.

“Stop!” He commanded.

In disbelief…I obeyed.

“You wear my mark, Richard. You will not harm your master.”

I smiled. I was free.