Answer: Prologue

The moment he let out a hoarse cry, his vision blurred.

He blinked, and the ruffle of his lashes shook loose a droplet that painted a cool stripe down the curve of his flushed cheek. Although Hatano recognized these were tears, the arms to wipe them away were both wrapped around the broad, rocking back of the man above him. Even had they been free, with the firm, muscular hips driving rhythmically between his splayed legs and stoking the fever coursing through his body, a few tears were the least of his worries.

“Oh, oh—ah!” His voice rose in fitful bursts, pitched high and honey-sweet as if to entice his partner in sensual invitation. It was not the voice of a man in his thirties, and the sound of it crumpled him in crushing shame. But he had recently learned that any attempt to suffer in silence would only intensify the torture, and so he let his tearful cries spill unchecked.

“Loosen up, a little more… can you?” Mashiba breathed into his ear. “You’re too tight.”

His tone was deep and low, and yet glazed with a certain salacious promise. He was five years Hatano’s junior but his cool composure showed nothing of it, and despite the untimely prickle of frustration, Hatano could not deny that Mashiba’s voice mesmerized him.

He fought to relax as he had been told but his legs remained stiff and trembling, and even the slightest easing of tension only gave Mashiba leeway to slip further inside him, triggering another reflexive squeeze.

“Having trouble?”

It was not only Mashiba’s voice but his physique and facial features too that suggested he was the older one; but between them, it was Mashiba who looked his age. Hatano’s face retained still some vestiges of boyishness, and his body was too slender for a man of his years.

Being pinned like this beneath him only accentuated the wild masculinity of Mashiba’s chiseled features, and even now Hatano wavered on the verge of submission, and had to steel himself.

“Just, shut… up!”

Mashiba gazed down at him, observing his callow reactions and twisting his full lips as if to suppress a smile, and Hatano cursed him inwardly. His claim that Hatano was ‘tight’ was likely a laugh at his expense, as well. The inner walls of his body, now molded around Mashiba’s erection, were so slick with lubricant, the unrelenting foreplay, and Mashiba’s own fluids that every inch of progress left his ears burning at the lewd sounds.

“No, d-don’t, stop…”

Mashiba’s teeth worried the fevered, sensitive lobe of his ear, and a flush of pleasure loosened his muscles, leaving him soft and slack. Immediately Mashiba surged forward, his hot, rigid length churning eagerly through the gummy mess between his legs, and Hatano all but screamed.

“Like hell it’s… ‘too tight’… oh, yes—!”

Mashiba made love like a bully, hounding him with cruel persistence, and Hatano thrashed in desperate, gasping delight. His body had learned to delight in it.

His racing heartbeat pounded in his ears, all of his senses quivering in aching desire. Not an inch of him was dry, tears and drool dripping from his chin, streaks of sweat and precome across his abdomen, until even the narrow ribbon of space that parted him from Mashiba seemed to grow heavy with damp. A startlingly gentle tongue coiled around his nipples, flattening against the hardened nubs and soothing their painful tingling. Suddenly his head was spinning, and he felt a sickening lurch in his gut as if he were in free fall. Blind with anxiety he flailed for Mashiba’s brawny shoulders, pulling himself up to cling to them, and he whimpered when the movement impaled him further on Mashiba’s penis.

The high bridge of Mashiba’s nose slid against his cheek. Mashiba nestled tenderly against him, bringing their lips together, and the mere flutter of his long eyelashes on Hatano’s skin had him moaning again. Mashiba’s tongue twined with his and in a daze he traced its movements with his own, drawing threads of saliva between their mouths. By the time he recovered his senses it was to his lips smeared against Mashiba’s and the loud wet twisting of their tongues, and the graphic sensuality of their kiss left him drugged again. His own trembling flesh betrayed him, swallowing the man inch by inch as if to savor the taste, and he could only listen in mortification to the slurping sounds of it greedily chasing its pleasure.

His body lay open at his lover’s mercy and Mashiba took him ravenously, violating him with both his tongue and his sex.

“It really is tight. I think you’re eating me alive.” Mashiba’s teasing tone failed to mask that he sounded rather on edge himself. But Hatano had been driven far past that edge already, and he was deaf to the kernel of bitterness in Mashiba’s voice.

In the short span of six months his rectum had become more insatiable than any woman, and it spasmed in an intricate pattern of convulsions as he felt his peak approaching. Hatano begged with every rock of his hips and sobbed with every tense of his muscles, his straining erection grinding into the ridges of Mashiba’s taut abdomen.

“Feel good?”

The simple, obscene question had Hatano nodding his head over and over like a child. Decency and shame reproached him, but he would debase himself a hundred times over if it meant this hunger would be satisfied.

“Yes—yes, it does… more,” he pleaded, his voice fading to the faintest whisper, and Mashiba slowly rolled his hips in reply. Mashiba’s movements were subtle but precise, and a staggering burst of pleasure arced through him, ripping out a lovely, shattered cry. His doe eyes were glazed and gleaming with a sheen of tears, their usual wholesome purity seduced away and replaced with wanton lust. He had only half his wits about him, and at times like this it was beyond even Hatano to get a hold of himself.

“Oh, oh… Ma, shiba—!” He panted out sobbing cries between his breaths, and he bucked in blatant demand against Mashiba, willing him to do something, anything. “Oh—oh, no!”

The piston of heat that had been rutting inside him began a lazy retreat, squelching crudely as it dragged free, and when he scrambled to keep him inside Mashiba’s firm grip locked him in place. Cold air chilled the space Mashiba had abandoned, bringing Hatano fleetingly to his senses, and he could have wept at the wretched way his body mourned the loss, pelvic muscles clenching around emptiness.

“W-Why did you pull ou—mm!”

His struggling arms were captured, and his lips sealed. Mashiba’s thick tongue licked into Hatano’s mouth like a living thing, and his lips and teeth nibbled at him when he outstretched his tongue as he had been taught to do. But Mashiba neglected to touch him any lower, and nothing would distract him from that twinge of agonizing need. He cringed as his entrance twitched in minute contractions, miserably awaiting the other man’s return.

Something thin and rigid stretched the ring of pliant muscle and plunged inside, and Hatano recognized distantly that Mashiba had inserted a finger. Frankly anything would have done, anything tangible and hard; if it would only touch him where he ached, then at that moment he might have accepted even the most repulsive of objects. Mashiba’s practiced hands were more than welcome, and Hatano swooned as those long, elegant fingers traced a sinuous path inside him.

“I’ve got you this loosened up, and you’re still squeezing my fingers. You want it that bad, huh?” Mashiba jeered, aiming for the instant Hatano went stiff in offense to bundle his fingers together and begin thrusting them violently in and out.

“You’d take anything, wouldn’t you?” he said, speaking over Hatano’s hysterical keening. “Right here, as long as it can do this to you,” and Mashiba twisted his fingers roughly while Hatano could only shake his head, choking on the force of his own screams. “How about a toy next time? A vibrating one, come on.”

“No, no—ah!”

He barely registered the sting of Mashiba’s sneering dirty talk before it was drowned in a jolt of arousal. As Mashiba had once rather nastily described him, it appeared that Hatano really did have a ‘talent’ for this sort of sex. He was loath to admit it, but as his limbs writhed meaningless patterns into the sheets, he was forced to concede it might be true.

“No—no, never, I won’t…”

“Are you kidding? Look how wet you are.” Mashiba’s grip closed firmly around Hatano’s erection, wringing another dribble of precome from the tip, and Hatano grimaced in humiliation.

“No, no more—I can’t…” He shook his head with a fearful look, and a dangerous shadow passed over Mashiba’s expression.

Oh, no…

Hatano jumped in alarm when Mashiba’s eyes narrowed, broadcasting his displeasure, but his bid to escape came a second too late.

“Stop, no!”

Mashiba ducked his rugged, handsome face into Hatano’s lap and, fingers still probing behind, he literally sank his teeth into Hatano’s trembling penis.

“Hurts—it hurts!” Hatano cowered in pain and fear as Mashiba nipped him lengthwise between his teeth, until a soft tongue began to stroke circles over the abused area. “No, no—oh… oh, so hot…”

Mashiba’s tongue swabbed back and forth, and Hatano soon found his erection more than fully recovered, swollen an angry red and made a toy inside of Mashiba’s mouth. His body was a limp ragdoll sprawled on the bed, the only movement the lewd snaking of his hips. He barely understood what was happening to him; wet, cosseting warmth enveloped his sex, and Mashiba’s beautiful fingers were massaging him deep, deep inside. His lips could only spill sweet, gasping cries, one after another.

“Ah, ah, no, I can’t—”

Hatano’s hesitance never lasted any longer than his sobriety, and once the night progressed, Hatano was the one losing himself headlong to passion. Modesty and propriety fell away from him like sloughed skin, and he abandoned himself to sensation without even realizing the loss. The intensity of his sensuality, far from being off-putting, was an uncalculated coquetry that called to men like a siren song.

At last Mashiba raised his head to whisper, “No? What do you want then?”

He captured Hatano’s offered tongue with his teeth, and Hatano shamelessly clung to Mashiba’s shoulders and begged him, “Just—just put it in, please, just, put it in…”

Mashiba had been the one to drag these abominable true colors of his out into the open, and yet there were times when Hatano’s bald debauchery seemed to unnerve him. Then, without fail, dismay would give way to a flicker of irritation, and to mask his confusion his long fingertips would tease with especial wickedness. Tonight was no exception; Mashiba’s lovemaking was insistent and vicious. He pressed erotic supplications over and over again from his partner’s lips, until finally he took up Hatano’s weight again, and maneuvered his slim, shaking legs around his own waist.

“No, no—!”

But Mashiba entered him only shallowly and would not move, and he met Hatano’s resentful glare with a thin smile. “What?”

Hatano was all too familiar with that pitiless expression. He sucked in a breath and lifted his hips, wrapped one hand around Mashiba’s jutting erection, and with desire and terror warring inside him he moved to guide it into his body. But his arms could only reach so far in this awkward position, doubled over in a crunch with Mashiba’s weight bearing down on him, and his limbs began to convulse from the strain. Mashiba watched his laboring with a cold, almost perfunctory stare, but he did not appear to be enjoying the sight at all.

“That’s enough.”

Mashiba’s palm wiped the tracks of sweat and tears from Hatano’s cheek with unexpected gentleness. Hatano shied in surprise, and Mashiba held him steady as he lowered himself down, sliding smoothly inside until their hips were flush. Hatano nearly forgot how to breathe. One thrust had filled him with its long, thick heft all at once, and the throbbing pulse of Mashiba’s blood was electrifying. He felt himself hurtling to climax when Mashiba’s fingers clenched the base of his erection, instantly damming the rush.

“Nngh… ah, ah, ah!”

Twice Mashiba pulled slowly out of him and eased in again, then began to snap his hips in a rapid jackhammer that jostled Hatano into the mattress. The pitch of his moans rocketed higher, scalding him in embarrassment.

“What do you want me to do?” Mashiba asked, loosening his tormenting grip to avoid dousing the flames of Hatano’s desire, and Hatano wailed, slurring, “Thr-Thrust, deeper, thrust—!”

Mashiba hardly had to bother coercing him anymore; he’d learned to recite these appalling phrases all on his own. Once he had discovered that swallowing his humiliation and voicing these sordid words would heighten his pleasure, they practically spoke themselves.

“With this?” Mashiba taunted callously, and his strokes pushed deeper inside in demonstration. Hatano let out a scream that was somewhere in the middle of ecstasy and plaintive despair, and he hooked his nails into the back of the man swaying above him.

“Oh, yes, there, there—!”

Nothing in the world mattered to him right then but chasing the high of sex.

Stupid, pointless, he spat soberly at himself, but every night that he spread his legs Mashiba pushed him further, breaking in Hatano’s body to his design.

The muscles gone soft and liquid for Mashiba’s trespass barely seemed to belong to him anymore. His flesh devoured the man with fierce appetite, little more than a vessel to be filled by the pumping of that slick, hot length. He felt a spike of dread as if he were teetering on the brink of an abyss, and he clawed at Mashiba’s sweaty, bronzed skin in his panic to hold onto him. He knew that it was Mashiba dangling him over the edge, but the threat of that bottomless drop terrified him, and Mashiba’s broad chest was all he had to cling to.

“I, I’m coming, gonna—”

“Tighten up!”

Powerful arms wrapped around his waist, hands stroked the sweaty dip of his back, and just as something like relief unfolded within him, his creaking body seized in orgasm.

He heard Mashiba choke out a groan, and warmth began to pool steadily inside him. He ground his hips back against Mashiba as the man’s release spurted into his narrow channel, and spent himself between their heaving bodies.

It was always this moment that brought him the most pleasure: the moment he took within himself the seed and weight of a man he didn’t love and who didn’t love him, a man he didn’t even know well enough to call a stranger.

There must be something wrong with me, the thought drifted through the fog of his mind.

* * *

“Not going to stay the night?” Hatano made a lethargic inquiry, and Mashiba shot a look of amazement in his direction.

“Sometimes I can’t believe your nerves.”

“Oh? I just thought, since it’s already late.”

The sweat had evaporated from his skin, and Mashiba was once again clad in the suit he had worn to Hatano’s doorstep, hair straightened and profile sharp and collected, not a crease out of place to hint at the sensual fever of minutes ago.

“It was just common sense to ask.”

“‘Common sense.’” Mashiba’s dashing features twisted briefly in sarcasm, and he flung out in a chilly monotone, “How thoughtful of you, even for the man who raped you and forced you into this arrangement.”

Mashiba’s unflinching bluntness no longer came as any surprise, and Hatano puffed at his cigarette with his chin propped lazily in his palm. “If you’re so keenly aware of what you’ve done,” he retorted, matching Mashiba’s flatness, “then why the hell are you still doing it.”

He could pass off the edge that sharpened his hoarse voice as postcoital fatigue, but perhaps he had been a bit too direct. Mashiba took in hand his premium leather briefcase, well-suited to a young, talented businessman like him, and for a split second his face darkened sourly. Hatano’s fleeting glance caught the pained furrow just in time to see it smooth away.

Unlike Mashiba, who had finished his shower and was now smartly dressed, Hatano remained sprawled on his stomach upon the bed, the ripple of his spine jutting from his bare back. He didn’t do so out of spite; the sex had been as rough tonight as always, and he was simply too drained to move. The lukewarm heaviness in the air, herald of the coming summer, made his body and especially his lower joints ache something fierce, and Hatano bowed under the weight of his years.

I never want to move again.

His legs slumped numbly behind him, and between them, that worthless part of his body that Mashiba had seen fit to ravage throbbed in pain—a natural consequence, of course, given the circumstances.

It was far too late to be preening for Mashiba, anyway. What was the point? This elite-looking man standing before him probably knew his body more intimately than he did.

Mashiba’s body temperature was naturally high, so high that his skin was hot to the touch, and yet Hatano shivered with the chill he created only a few feet away from him. He found himself gazing at the young man’s figure, seeing nothing to suggest that Mashiba had just passed those same hours blending his senses and bodily fluids with Hatano’s.

The elegant cut of Mashiba’s suit complemented his tall, muscled frame. Not even an echo of afterglow from their impassioned time together now lingered in the young, hard lines of his face. His features were a shade broader than most, with a wild ferocity to them, but strangely they did not appear coarse or brutish; in fact, they possessed a refined glamour. Maybe it was the somewhat pale color of his irises, but although his creased eyelids framed eyes that were lovely in shape, they did not leave an impression of kindness.

The only emotions that bled into his expression were aloofness and intellectual pride, and Hatano watched them play across his face like a tragedy. Mashiba always looked so bitterly miserable after sex. The more he fought to keep a stony front, the more vividly his stifled irritation and regret sprang to the surface.

You don’t have to waste your time on an old man like me, if it’s going to wear you out like this.…

What a thing to say to one’s sort-of blackmailer!, Hatano thought, but a pang of sympathy wove itself into the complicated knot in his breast. Under the pretense of exhaling a mouthful of smoke, he heaved a sigh.

There was far too much he could not forgive and could not forget for him to accept Mashiba with open arms, but six months was a long time to share one’s bed with somebody, in any case. The act of joining the most private parts of their bodies had begun to create some kind of connection between them, no matter how either of them might strive to keep strings unattached. Both of them were loath to acknowledge it, but it was Hatano who was as honest with his feelings as he was quick to resign himself to them. And as the prickly edges of his demeanor softened, the subsequent hardening of Mashiba’s was, perhaps, a sort of inevitable reaction.

“When’s next time?” he asked in a dry voice. It was all he could bring himself to do.

“I’ll come again Friday,” Mashiba replied in a similar tone, and there was nothing about him that should have wrung his heart like this—if anything his manner was insolent—and yet Hatano was again stung with pity, and he had nothing more to say as he turned his eyes away from Mashiba’s retreating silhouette.