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Sep. 9th, 2005 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taharielThis story was written for Susan as payment for letting me come over to her house and practice playing FFXI online ^-^ Basically it's Phantom of the Opera OC slash smut. It follows a scene in the novel by Susan Kay where Erik is turned down by a slavegirl who was ordered to be his wife, but won't even go near him. This was what happened :) If you're offended by homosexual relationships or smut, don't read it. I refuse to pretend that I don't write things like this now and again. I don't see why I should, not with you lot as friends anyway! Bear in mind that I haven't read the novel myself, so any mistakes are my own.
Title: Substitution
Rating: NC-17 (yes, an American rating, but what the hell)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera
The bar was wreathed in smoke of exotic blues and greys, the fine tendrils wrapping themselves around the ornate fixtures and ruffling the tasselled hangings on the walls. Spaced around the floor were large, thickly padded cushions covered in silk on which lounged the wealthy and famous of the city, laying on their sides with the pipes of the hookah between their fleshy lips, eyes rolled back into their heads and lids heavy with pleasure. This was one of the higher-end bars for such things, one in which you had no fear of being robbed while under the influence of the smoke.
Erik lay back on the fine blue silk and watched the ceiling through the drug, the sway of the silk hangings from the breeze that came in around the curtain in the doorway, listening vaguely to the sounds around him with a bitter mixture of anger and despair roiling in his gut. He had hoped that the hookah would soothe his stomach, but no such luck. It seemed that such strong emotion was beyond its power.
It was humiliating – to have a slave, who otherwise faced death, refuse her freedom and take her fate rather than spend one night with him. And this was before she had even seen what lay behind his mask. Erik had always known he was ugly, had always known that people cringed away from his face as though it were a disease and not an accident of birth – but to have it thrown in his face like that by one such as her! It was unbearable.
So here he lay, he thought with a sarcastic edge to his mental voice, and his lips twisted into a parody of a smile. Impotent to change things but not impotent enough not to miss what he could have had if only he had brought himself to discard his morals. He would not force her to him if she would not come to him. Which left him – what?
Alone. Still alone. And if he had been truly alone, rather than in a public place, he would have come to his feet and smashed things, broken them into shards and smaller shards and smaller shards yet until they and everything else was dust beneath his feet.
“Laith! I have not seen your face in a very long time, my Bedouin friend! Are you still being rubbed for luck by every caravan you come across?”
“Rafi, you know full well that I am a singer now,” a young voice replied, and Erik’s eyes moved almost despite themselves towards the comfortable sitting place the owner kept for himself and that voice. “I have not been with the tribes for very much longer than it has been since you last saw me.” The voice mellowed its way through the words, soothing and heartbreaking at the same time until the musician in Erik couldn’t help but sit up. He blinked his drug-heavied eyes to look at the man who sat opposite the owner of the bar, propping himself up on his cushion and trying to appear as though he simply wished to change positions.
Laith was smiling, eyes creased closed with pleasure in a heart-shaped face wreathed in a pale halo of blond curls. He was a slender, pale young man, his clothes well made in brilliant colours of some fabric that was nearly sheer, but somehow he was Arabian despite his colouring. There was an accent to his voice and a tilt to the eyes that said he could not be anything else.
Rafi smiled too. “A Bedouin who cannot travel, yet has not killed himself for the wanderlust? Is it a wonder then that they think you are good luck?”
The young man laughed, and Erik was wonderstruck. This was a voice. “Who do you sing for?”
Laith jumped and stared wide-eyed over at Erik, who stood and made his way slowly over to where they sat. “I asked, who do you sing for?”
“Rafi, who is this?” Laith asked as the man came towards them, a small frown line between his brows, and it was only when Erik was closer and Rafi was describing him to Laith that the Frenchman saw the young man’s eyes.
He was blind. Rather than the green or blue he had expected from the pale hair and skin they were misty white in the boy’s face, seeing nothing and nobody. A Bedouin who cannot travel.
“I sing for the Shah, sir.” The voice reminded him that he had asked a question, forgotten in his surprise. “Do you sing? You have a wonderful voice. It sounds so nice.” The young man smiled, white teeth shining in the lamplight.
“I do.” Rafi caught Erik’s look and nodded, rising to go and check on his other clients in a rustle of fabrics. Erik caught Laith tilting his head to listen to his friend go and looked again at the younger man, reabsorbing him in light of his blindness. Yes, there was his staff – leant against the wall behind him within arm’s reach. “Though that is but one of many things I do.”
The handsome, pretty face crinkled into another smile. “You are the Westerner, then? I have heard much of you, but I have not come to see your performances, as I would miss out on much of it. My master the Shah speaks very highly of you. You live in the palace, yes?”
Erik felt the scowl return to his face beneath his expressionless mask. “I would rather live in the kennels with the dogs than there.”
Laith blinked, surprised, looking a little worried at the vehemence in his tone. “Why?”
“Why do you not travel with the Bedouin?” Erik asked instead of answering, already damning himself for having commented at all. Why tell this stranger about things he had no business knowing?
This time the smile on the pale face was wry. “Because I am blind, or that is what they say. I cannot drive a camel or pitch a tent. But it is because I prefer the intimate company of men, that is why I do not travel with the people of my father and my mother and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father.” He bowed over his lap, the movement graceful and smooth. “Hence I am a singer for my lord the Shah, and I do not visit the tents of my relations when they are in the city, and they do not come to my tent save to remind me of my perversion in curses.”
I prefer the intimate company of men. Erik had heard of such a thing before but never truly believed that a man could truly feel that way. “Why?” he asked before he could stop himself, thinking again of his humiliation earlier that evening.
Laith’s smile was better humoured than his last. “It is the way I was born. Or did you mean to ask me what I like about men?”
“If you sing for the Shah, what are you doing in a hookah bar?”
They talked for a while longer, their combined voices a strange counterpoint to the moans and whispers of the other clients, strangely mellifluous together. Eventually, when both of them had inhaled the smoke from around and were more relaxed than they had been, Laith said in a neutral voice, “If you hate the palace so much, I can offer you space for the night. I assume nothing – most men, Allah knows, are not of my persuasion! – but I would offer you the hospitality of my tent. I am from a hospitable people.”
It was easier to accept this offer than it would have been earlier, lulled by the smoke and the company into a better mood than he had been in for a long time. Erik followed Laith back towards the palace grounds, through a different gate than he usually used and into a small area he had not visited before, where a tent was set up, large and almost permanent looking.
“The Shah allows me this space within his guarded compound to follow the ways of my people, and yet not to have my belongings stolen,” Laith explained before they went in, then shrugged aside the tent flap and went inside. “You are welcome in my home.”
Erik looked around with the eyes of an aesthete. The place was a mishmash of colour, reds next to blues and greens, many different shades all jumbled up together without care for appearance, though for a blind man that would make sense. The second thing he noticed was that all of it felt beautiful to the touch of skin, to run your hand along. Silks and furs and fine linens, smooth woods and metals with embossed designs.
Laith had crouched beside a small pit in the centre and was feeling around for a pair of flints just a little beyond his reach. He found them and struck them together to make a spark which lit the wood piled there to make a neat little fire, carefully surrounded by empty space to prevent accidents. “Sit yourself wherever you like,” he said with a small smile, as he found a blackened pot filled with water and hung it above the flames.
Erik moved over to the thick layer of furs and cushions on one side, realising this was the bed but not knowing what else to do. He was out of his element here. Laith moved around as though he knew where everything was, which he probably did.
Eventually the young man came to a stop before him, and knelt down to be at the same level, his blind eyes nonetheless looking up at Erik where he sat on his bed. “I realise you may think this is impertinent, but may I feel your face? I would very much like to have a picture of who I am talking to.”
Erik jerked away from him, his mood broken. “No!”
Laith bit his lower lip, red blood surging to the surface under it to make it flush. “You should know that appearances don’t scare me. It doesn’t much matter to me whether someone is beautiful or ugly. All faces are faces, to me. I will not scream, and I will not run away.” His voice was nearly hypnotic, smooth as the silk he had hung his tent with.
So Erik sat still and let the long-fingered hands lift his mask away – what was one more witness to his ugliness, when he had used to remove it for show? – and then cool fingers ran themselves slowly over his face, pausing momentarily where his nose should have been, pressing slightly against his skin. A frown of concentration passed over the young man’s face as he traced the twisted lips, the lines of his eyelids. The hands came to rest on his shoulders, feeling the breadth of them, the deoth of his chest, and then before Erik knew what he was doing Laith had leant forward to press his lips very carefully against his own.
“There is very little here to fear,” Laith said gently when he pulled away, the whiteness of his eyes making them look soft. Then he leant forward again, more slowly, as though afraid he would be pushed away, and kissed Erik again.
There was a flash in the Frenchman’s mind of the slave girl from earlier, comparing the two, before his mind made its decision and he kissed the young man back awkwardly, letting the slick tongue enter his mouth when it pressed against his lips, those slim arms thrown around his neck and his hands finding themselves a resting place on slender hips. It was the hardness pressing against his hips that made him nearly pause, but someone was here and willing for no other reason than liking him to be close to him, to kiss him, and the fact that Laith was male he brushed aside with the ease of many years of ignoring things.
“Is this alright?” the blond asked between kisses, climbing into Erik’s lap like a cat and pushing up against him close, closer. “Please say it’s alright…”
“It’s fine,” Erik said in a voice that was harsher than usual, then gasping despite himself when Laith rocked their hardnesses together through the cloth of their clothing, the young man tossing his pale head backwards with a moan and eyes tight shut in pleasure. “Are we going to do this with our clothes on?”
The Arab laughed, not mockingly but merrily, and shrugged his shoulders out of the top waistcoat-like silk thing he was wearing, his fingers dancing down the lacings of the shirt he wore under that until it was open to show the pale skin of his chest. “Only if you don’t mind getting them dirty!” He kissed Erik again even as he wriggled out of his shirt entirely, still rocking gently against him and sending shivers down the older man’s spine.
He had never done this before with anyone. Yet his pride would not let him say so to Laith, who was busy with sweet kisses and the buttons of Erik’s clothing. Instead his thin hands clenched tightly on the younger man’s hips, pulling them harder against his own and feeling his breath coming fast and irregular. Laith had to be some sort of unearthly creature, perhaps a cat made human. Hand pushed Erik’s shirt from his broad shoulders and fiddled getting them over his wrists, then tossed it aside as though it wasn’t an expensive piece of clothing but simply something to be disposed of as quickly as possible. Nobody had ever treated him that way, acted towards him the way that this young man did.
Laith stood up suddenly, moving a couple of steps away, and Erik stiffened, sure that he had changed his mind and would ask him to leave. But instead the Bedouin pushed his trousers from his hips, stepping out of them unselfconsciously, and took Erik’s hand to pull him to his feet as well, feeling for the fastenings of his trousers with the awkwardness of someone who had never encountered them before and had no sight to guide him. In the end Erik, feeling embarrassed but still hot with need, took them off instead and let Laith push him back to sit down on the edge of the bed.
But this time the young man instead knelt once more in front of him to kiss him, hands wandering his deformed face as though it didn’t matter, his lips then moving to the place in his neck where his pulse was beating quickly just under the thin skin. Laith’s tongue wandered the ridge of Erik’s collarbone in a wet trail, dipping into the hollow at the base of his throat before wandering ever downward and taking in one of the Frenchman’s nipples. He licked and bit at it with a greedy mouth, smiling when it hardened to a solid nub between his lips and Erik’s hands tangled themselves in his hair, then doing the same to the other one. Then, slowly, he worked his way down further still, past the dark line of hair that started just beneath Erik’s navel and finally to his already weeping penis, then leant delicately forward to Erik’s disbelief and took the head of his cock into his mouth.
The hot, wet muscle of his tongue slid into the slit at the top of Erik’s cock and made him shiver, then, with a smile from Laith, he moved his lips to take in the whole foreskin with an audible pop, the tongue sliding underneath to tease the almost exposed nerves beneath it.
Erik felt his hips thrust against Laith almost against his will as waves of pleasure rolled up his spine, his mouth falling open but no sound coming out. Firm hands pressed him down to the bed as the younger man continued, Erik’s eyes alternately closed with the rising pleasure of it or watching himself slide in and out of Laith’s beautiful mouth – because handsome was no word for this man. Oh –
He came in a flash of nothingness, a moment where he sat suspended in eternity, even as Laith took him and took him through the aftershock with gentle suction, swallowing down his seed as though it were nothing.
Eventually the young man let him slip out of the hot wet warmth of his mouth and smiled, seeming barely aware that he himself was still hard, the thick line of his own cock pressed up against his belly. Wordless and unsure how to react to – well, this act of kindness – Erik pulled him up and kissed him again, the only thing he could think of to do. Laith relaxed into it with a soft moan and let Erik take control of his body, trusting him if his body language was to be believed.
“What do I do?” the Frenchman whispered eventually, when Laith was rubbing idly against his hip, eyelids heavy and carnal.
“What do you like, when you’re alone?” Laith asked in a soft voice, smiling into the side of Erik’s neck when he understood and wrapped his hand around the younger man’s cock, stroking it and then adjusting his grip to press more firmly. The hard fleshiness of it was not all that different from his own, and yet at the same time it was entirely different. He pressed hard against the place just below Laith’s foreskin and the younger man writhed in his lap, panting harder now and thrusting into his fist faster than he had before. “Aah…” It came out as a clear note, perfectly pitched, ringing in the tones of Laith’s beautiful tenor. Then hot fluid was rushing out over his fingers and the younger man collapsed into a supine pile on top of Erik, draped across him hot and sweaty and perfect.
The misty eyes seemed to meet his own when Laith managed to raise his head, and then the soft voice said, “If you want to enter me, now would be the best time.”
Erik stiffened, surprised. “What?”
“Oh. Well, you don’t have to, it was just an offer,” Laith said quite genially, standing up from Erik’s lap and moving to lie on his front on his bed, still floppy and relaxed from climax.
“No, I didn’t - ” Erik stopped, fought with his pride, but his curiosity – and his filling cock – won out, and he said instead, “I don’t know how.”
Laith’s expression changed to a radiant smile. “I can show you. There’s a small pot on the side, over there – could you get it and bring it over here?”
Erik did as suggested and gave it to the younger man, who opened it to show him a slippery substance of some sort inside. “If you’ve never done this before, then it would be better if we were lying on our sides with you behind me.” He took Erik’s hand and pulled him down onto the bed, rolling so he faced away from his bedmate. “You coat your fingers with that, then you need to put one inside of me until I’m comfortable, then another, and stretch me so I can take you. Now’s the best time because I’m all relaxed still.” Laith moved the top one of his legs upwards so that the cheeks of his rear were spread, and then Erik could see where he was supposed to enter.
Feeling strange, Erik did as directed, and wondered who was supposed to be the dominant partner here. He might be taking the man’s role, but it seemed to be Laith who was calling the shots. His finger covered with the slimy stuff, he touched it to the pink bud of Laith’s anus, then, apprehensively, slipped it inside of him. It was warm in there, and tight, and he hadn’t been expecting it at all. The young man let out a small sigh and nodded, so he pushed another of his fingers in beside the first one, and spread them. Slowly, the muscles relaxed, and Erik began to see how he was going to fit inside of Laith.
“You will enjoy this?” he asked, as he spread more of the stuff onto his cock and came up behind Laith, already hard and feeling his muscles quiver with wanting it.
The young man nodded, smiling and stretching a little, feline-like. “As long as you are careful, and wait until I say before you thrust too hard.”
The head of Erik’s cock popped past the tight ring of muscle and he groaned hard, wanting to thrust hard into Laith already but waiting and pushing in slowly, feeling the tight muscles squeeze around him while the young man moaned low and steady. This was nothing like being in Laith’s mouth – this was so much beyond that. Erik gripped tightly to Laith’s hips and pushed until he was all in the way inside, then Laith nodded once more and Erik let go of the control he was keeping of himself.
He pulled himself several inches out of the tight passage then thrust himself hard back in, the friction burning up his spine as he kept moving, pushing hard into Laith until the young man was wailing, though whether in pain or pleasure he couldn’t tell. Erik was too far gone to care. His teeth fastened themselves into the pale shoulder before him and he tasted a little blood even as Laith moaned loudly and reached for the hand on his hip to move it to his own cock, which was once more hard even after Erik had touched him to completion earlier. Getting the idea, he pulled his hand up it in time with his own thrusts, and Laith was rocking forward into his hand and back onto his cock with eyes clenched tight shut and breathing hard, Erik’s teeth still clenched in his shoulder.
The Frenchman pushed harder upwards and Laith almost screamed when the angle changed, quivering, so Erik did it again, pleased that he could affect him like this and wanting now to dominate, to control his reactions, to be the master here. Now that he knew what to do, he could be in control here. Laith was whispering nonsense in a rasping voice, words Erik couldn’t make out, arching and moaning and making Erik smile even as he shoved hard into him, the walls of Laith’s anus contracting around him. He groaned, and then his second climax washed over him, thrusting into Laith as his hot seed spurted into him, hot and wet and utterly satisfying. He finished Laith off in another rush of wetness over his hand and then lay there, tired, still inside of the younger man and his hands clenched tightly into Laith’s flesh.
In the morning, Erik awoke and found his face buried in blond hair. It took a moment to remember where he was, but then he pulled away slowly to see the young man’s face, relaxed in sleep, hands open on the sheets beside him where he had lain spooned together with Erik through the night.
Quietly, so as not to wake him, Erik got up and found his mask, putting that back on first before looking for his clothes. He wiped himself clean with a rag left by the washbowl someone had left full of water outside and dressed, tying the laces of his shoes before looking back once again at the bed where the man who had taken his virginity was sleeping, not that Laith would ever know it.
He left before Laith woke up, to face up to the rest of his life in Persia without the baggage of a blind Bedouin singer with a beautiful voice to keep him back.
Title: Substitution
Rating: NC-17 (yes, an American rating, but what the hell)
Fandom: Phantom of the Opera
The bar was wreathed in smoke of exotic blues and greys, the fine tendrils wrapping themselves around the ornate fixtures and ruffling the tasselled hangings on the walls. Spaced around the floor were large, thickly padded cushions covered in silk on which lounged the wealthy and famous of the city, laying on their sides with the pipes of the hookah between their fleshy lips, eyes rolled back into their heads and lids heavy with pleasure. This was one of the higher-end bars for such things, one in which you had no fear of being robbed while under the influence of the smoke.
Erik lay back on the fine blue silk and watched the ceiling through the drug, the sway of the silk hangings from the breeze that came in around the curtain in the doorway, listening vaguely to the sounds around him with a bitter mixture of anger and despair roiling in his gut. He had hoped that the hookah would soothe his stomach, but no such luck. It seemed that such strong emotion was beyond its power.
It was humiliating – to have a slave, who otherwise faced death, refuse her freedom and take her fate rather than spend one night with him. And this was before she had even seen what lay behind his mask. Erik had always known he was ugly, had always known that people cringed away from his face as though it were a disease and not an accident of birth – but to have it thrown in his face like that by one such as her! It was unbearable.
So here he lay, he thought with a sarcastic edge to his mental voice, and his lips twisted into a parody of a smile. Impotent to change things but not impotent enough not to miss what he could have had if only he had brought himself to discard his morals. He would not force her to him if she would not come to him. Which left him – what?
Alone. Still alone. And if he had been truly alone, rather than in a public place, he would have come to his feet and smashed things, broken them into shards and smaller shards and smaller shards yet until they and everything else was dust beneath his feet.
“Laith! I have not seen your face in a very long time, my Bedouin friend! Are you still being rubbed for luck by every caravan you come across?”
“Rafi, you know full well that I am a singer now,” a young voice replied, and Erik’s eyes moved almost despite themselves towards the comfortable sitting place the owner kept for himself and that voice. “I have not been with the tribes for very much longer than it has been since you last saw me.” The voice mellowed its way through the words, soothing and heartbreaking at the same time until the musician in Erik couldn’t help but sit up. He blinked his drug-heavied eyes to look at the man who sat opposite the owner of the bar, propping himself up on his cushion and trying to appear as though he simply wished to change positions.
Laith was smiling, eyes creased closed with pleasure in a heart-shaped face wreathed in a pale halo of blond curls. He was a slender, pale young man, his clothes well made in brilliant colours of some fabric that was nearly sheer, but somehow he was Arabian despite his colouring. There was an accent to his voice and a tilt to the eyes that said he could not be anything else.
Rafi smiled too. “A Bedouin who cannot travel, yet has not killed himself for the wanderlust? Is it a wonder then that they think you are good luck?”
The young man laughed, and Erik was wonderstruck. This was a voice. “Who do you sing for?”
Laith jumped and stared wide-eyed over at Erik, who stood and made his way slowly over to where they sat. “I asked, who do you sing for?”
“Rafi, who is this?” Laith asked as the man came towards them, a small frown line between his brows, and it was only when Erik was closer and Rafi was describing him to Laith that the Frenchman saw the young man’s eyes.
He was blind. Rather than the green or blue he had expected from the pale hair and skin they were misty white in the boy’s face, seeing nothing and nobody. A Bedouin who cannot travel.
“I sing for the Shah, sir.” The voice reminded him that he had asked a question, forgotten in his surprise. “Do you sing? You have a wonderful voice. It sounds so nice.” The young man smiled, white teeth shining in the lamplight.
“I do.” Rafi caught Erik’s look and nodded, rising to go and check on his other clients in a rustle of fabrics. Erik caught Laith tilting his head to listen to his friend go and looked again at the younger man, reabsorbing him in light of his blindness. Yes, there was his staff – leant against the wall behind him within arm’s reach. “Though that is but one of many things I do.”
The handsome, pretty face crinkled into another smile. “You are the Westerner, then? I have heard much of you, but I have not come to see your performances, as I would miss out on much of it. My master the Shah speaks very highly of you. You live in the palace, yes?”
Erik felt the scowl return to his face beneath his expressionless mask. “I would rather live in the kennels with the dogs than there.”
Laith blinked, surprised, looking a little worried at the vehemence in his tone. “Why?”
“Why do you not travel with the Bedouin?” Erik asked instead of answering, already damning himself for having commented at all. Why tell this stranger about things he had no business knowing?
This time the smile on the pale face was wry. “Because I am blind, or that is what they say. I cannot drive a camel or pitch a tent. But it is because I prefer the intimate company of men, that is why I do not travel with the people of my father and my mother and my father’s father and my father’s father’s father.” He bowed over his lap, the movement graceful and smooth. “Hence I am a singer for my lord the Shah, and I do not visit the tents of my relations when they are in the city, and they do not come to my tent save to remind me of my perversion in curses.”
I prefer the intimate company of men. Erik had heard of such a thing before but never truly believed that a man could truly feel that way. “Why?” he asked before he could stop himself, thinking again of his humiliation earlier that evening.
Laith’s smile was better humoured than his last. “It is the way I was born. Or did you mean to ask me what I like about men?”
“If you sing for the Shah, what are you doing in a hookah bar?”
They talked for a while longer, their combined voices a strange counterpoint to the moans and whispers of the other clients, strangely mellifluous together. Eventually, when both of them had inhaled the smoke from around and were more relaxed than they had been, Laith said in a neutral voice, “If you hate the palace so much, I can offer you space for the night. I assume nothing – most men, Allah knows, are not of my persuasion! – but I would offer you the hospitality of my tent. I am from a hospitable people.”
It was easier to accept this offer than it would have been earlier, lulled by the smoke and the company into a better mood than he had been in for a long time. Erik followed Laith back towards the palace grounds, through a different gate than he usually used and into a small area he had not visited before, where a tent was set up, large and almost permanent looking.
“The Shah allows me this space within his guarded compound to follow the ways of my people, and yet not to have my belongings stolen,” Laith explained before they went in, then shrugged aside the tent flap and went inside. “You are welcome in my home.”
Erik looked around with the eyes of an aesthete. The place was a mishmash of colour, reds next to blues and greens, many different shades all jumbled up together without care for appearance, though for a blind man that would make sense. The second thing he noticed was that all of it felt beautiful to the touch of skin, to run your hand along. Silks and furs and fine linens, smooth woods and metals with embossed designs.
Laith had crouched beside a small pit in the centre and was feeling around for a pair of flints just a little beyond his reach. He found them and struck them together to make a spark which lit the wood piled there to make a neat little fire, carefully surrounded by empty space to prevent accidents. “Sit yourself wherever you like,” he said with a small smile, as he found a blackened pot filled with water and hung it above the flames.
Erik moved over to the thick layer of furs and cushions on one side, realising this was the bed but not knowing what else to do. He was out of his element here. Laith moved around as though he knew where everything was, which he probably did.
Eventually the young man came to a stop before him, and knelt down to be at the same level, his blind eyes nonetheless looking up at Erik where he sat on his bed. “I realise you may think this is impertinent, but may I feel your face? I would very much like to have a picture of who I am talking to.”
Erik jerked away from him, his mood broken. “No!”
Laith bit his lower lip, red blood surging to the surface under it to make it flush. “You should know that appearances don’t scare me. It doesn’t much matter to me whether someone is beautiful or ugly. All faces are faces, to me. I will not scream, and I will not run away.” His voice was nearly hypnotic, smooth as the silk he had hung his tent with.
So Erik sat still and let the long-fingered hands lift his mask away – what was one more witness to his ugliness, when he had used to remove it for show? – and then cool fingers ran themselves slowly over his face, pausing momentarily where his nose should have been, pressing slightly against his skin. A frown of concentration passed over the young man’s face as he traced the twisted lips, the lines of his eyelids. The hands came to rest on his shoulders, feeling the breadth of them, the deoth of his chest, and then before Erik knew what he was doing Laith had leant forward to press his lips very carefully against his own.
“There is very little here to fear,” Laith said gently when he pulled away, the whiteness of his eyes making them look soft. Then he leant forward again, more slowly, as though afraid he would be pushed away, and kissed Erik again.
There was a flash in the Frenchman’s mind of the slave girl from earlier, comparing the two, before his mind made its decision and he kissed the young man back awkwardly, letting the slick tongue enter his mouth when it pressed against his lips, those slim arms thrown around his neck and his hands finding themselves a resting place on slender hips. It was the hardness pressing against his hips that made him nearly pause, but someone was here and willing for no other reason than liking him to be close to him, to kiss him, and the fact that Laith was male he brushed aside with the ease of many years of ignoring things.
“Is this alright?” the blond asked between kisses, climbing into Erik’s lap like a cat and pushing up against him close, closer. “Please say it’s alright…”
“It’s fine,” Erik said in a voice that was harsher than usual, then gasping despite himself when Laith rocked their hardnesses together through the cloth of their clothing, the young man tossing his pale head backwards with a moan and eyes tight shut in pleasure. “Are we going to do this with our clothes on?”
The Arab laughed, not mockingly but merrily, and shrugged his shoulders out of the top waistcoat-like silk thing he was wearing, his fingers dancing down the lacings of the shirt he wore under that until it was open to show the pale skin of his chest. “Only if you don’t mind getting them dirty!” He kissed Erik again even as he wriggled out of his shirt entirely, still rocking gently against him and sending shivers down the older man’s spine.
He had never done this before with anyone. Yet his pride would not let him say so to Laith, who was busy with sweet kisses and the buttons of Erik’s clothing. Instead his thin hands clenched tightly on the younger man’s hips, pulling them harder against his own and feeling his breath coming fast and irregular. Laith had to be some sort of unearthly creature, perhaps a cat made human. Hand pushed Erik’s shirt from his broad shoulders and fiddled getting them over his wrists, then tossed it aside as though it wasn’t an expensive piece of clothing but simply something to be disposed of as quickly as possible. Nobody had ever treated him that way, acted towards him the way that this young man did.
Laith stood up suddenly, moving a couple of steps away, and Erik stiffened, sure that he had changed his mind and would ask him to leave. But instead the Bedouin pushed his trousers from his hips, stepping out of them unselfconsciously, and took Erik’s hand to pull him to his feet as well, feeling for the fastenings of his trousers with the awkwardness of someone who had never encountered them before and had no sight to guide him. In the end Erik, feeling embarrassed but still hot with need, took them off instead and let Laith push him back to sit down on the edge of the bed.
But this time the young man instead knelt once more in front of him to kiss him, hands wandering his deformed face as though it didn’t matter, his lips then moving to the place in his neck where his pulse was beating quickly just under the thin skin. Laith’s tongue wandered the ridge of Erik’s collarbone in a wet trail, dipping into the hollow at the base of his throat before wandering ever downward and taking in one of the Frenchman’s nipples. He licked and bit at it with a greedy mouth, smiling when it hardened to a solid nub between his lips and Erik’s hands tangled themselves in his hair, then doing the same to the other one. Then, slowly, he worked his way down further still, past the dark line of hair that started just beneath Erik’s navel and finally to his already weeping penis, then leant delicately forward to Erik’s disbelief and took the head of his cock into his mouth.
The hot, wet muscle of his tongue slid into the slit at the top of Erik’s cock and made him shiver, then, with a smile from Laith, he moved his lips to take in the whole foreskin with an audible pop, the tongue sliding underneath to tease the almost exposed nerves beneath it.
Erik felt his hips thrust against Laith almost against his will as waves of pleasure rolled up his spine, his mouth falling open but no sound coming out. Firm hands pressed him down to the bed as the younger man continued, Erik’s eyes alternately closed with the rising pleasure of it or watching himself slide in and out of Laith’s beautiful mouth – because handsome was no word for this man. Oh –
He came in a flash of nothingness, a moment where he sat suspended in eternity, even as Laith took him and took him through the aftershock with gentle suction, swallowing down his seed as though it were nothing.
Eventually the young man let him slip out of the hot wet warmth of his mouth and smiled, seeming barely aware that he himself was still hard, the thick line of his own cock pressed up against his belly. Wordless and unsure how to react to – well, this act of kindness – Erik pulled him up and kissed him again, the only thing he could think of to do. Laith relaxed into it with a soft moan and let Erik take control of his body, trusting him if his body language was to be believed.
“What do I do?” the Frenchman whispered eventually, when Laith was rubbing idly against his hip, eyelids heavy and carnal.
“What do you like, when you’re alone?” Laith asked in a soft voice, smiling into the side of Erik’s neck when he understood and wrapped his hand around the younger man’s cock, stroking it and then adjusting his grip to press more firmly. The hard fleshiness of it was not all that different from his own, and yet at the same time it was entirely different. He pressed hard against the place just below Laith’s foreskin and the younger man writhed in his lap, panting harder now and thrusting into his fist faster than he had before. “Aah…” It came out as a clear note, perfectly pitched, ringing in the tones of Laith’s beautiful tenor. Then hot fluid was rushing out over his fingers and the younger man collapsed into a supine pile on top of Erik, draped across him hot and sweaty and perfect.
The misty eyes seemed to meet his own when Laith managed to raise his head, and then the soft voice said, “If you want to enter me, now would be the best time.”
Erik stiffened, surprised. “What?”
“Oh. Well, you don’t have to, it was just an offer,” Laith said quite genially, standing up from Erik’s lap and moving to lie on his front on his bed, still floppy and relaxed from climax.
“No, I didn’t - ” Erik stopped, fought with his pride, but his curiosity – and his filling cock – won out, and he said instead, “I don’t know how.”
Laith’s expression changed to a radiant smile. “I can show you. There’s a small pot on the side, over there – could you get it and bring it over here?”
Erik did as suggested and gave it to the younger man, who opened it to show him a slippery substance of some sort inside. “If you’ve never done this before, then it would be better if we were lying on our sides with you behind me.” He took Erik’s hand and pulled him down onto the bed, rolling so he faced away from his bedmate. “You coat your fingers with that, then you need to put one inside of me until I’m comfortable, then another, and stretch me so I can take you. Now’s the best time because I’m all relaxed still.” Laith moved the top one of his legs upwards so that the cheeks of his rear were spread, and then Erik could see where he was supposed to enter.
Feeling strange, Erik did as directed, and wondered who was supposed to be the dominant partner here. He might be taking the man’s role, but it seemed to be Laith who was calling the shots. His finger covered with the slimy stuff, he touched it to the pink bud of Laith’s anus, then, apprehensively, slipped it inside of him. It was warm in there, and tight, and he hadn’t been expecting it at all. The young man let out a small sigh and nodded, so he pushed another of his fingers in beside the first one, and spread them. Slowly, the muscles relaxed, and Erik began to see how he was going to fit inside of Laith.
“You will enjoy this?” he asked, as he spread more of the stuff onto his cock and came up behind Laith, already hard and feeling his muscles quiver with wanting it.
The young man nodded, smiling and stretching a little, feline-like. “As long as you are careful, and wait until I say before you thrust too hard.”
The head of Erik’s cock popped past the tight ring of muscle and he groaned hard, wanting to thrust hard into Laith already but waiting and pushing in slowly, feeling the tight muscles squeeze around him while the young man moaned low and steady. This was nothing like being in Laith’s mouth – this was so much beyond that. Erik gripped tightly to Laith’s hips and pushed until he was all in the way inside, then Laith nodded once more and Erik let go of the control he was keeping of himself.
He pulled himself several inches out of the tight passage then thrust himself hard back in, the friction burning up his spine as he kept moving, pushing hard into Laith until the young man was wailing, though whether in pain or pleasure he couldn’t tell. Erik was too far gone to care. His teeth fastened themselves into the pale shoulder before him and he tasted a little blood even as Laith moaned loudly and reached for the hand on his hip to move it to his own cock, which was once more hard even after Erik had touched him to completion earlier. Getting the idea, he pulled his hand up it in time with his own thrusts, and Laith was rocking forward into his hand and back onto his cock with eyes clenched tight shut and breathing hard, Erik’s teeth still clenched in his shoulder.
The Frenchman pushed harder upwards and Laith almost screamed when the angle changed, quivering, so Erik did it again, pleased that he could affect him like this and wanting now to dominate, to control his reactions, to be the master here. Now that he knew what to do, he could be in control here. Laith was whispering nonsense in a rasping voice, words Erik couldn’t make out, arching and moaning and making Erik smile even as he shoved hard into him, the walls of Laith’s anus contracting around him. He groaned, and then his second climax washed over him, thrusting into Laith as his hot seed spurted into him, hot and wet and utterly satisfying. He finished Laith off in another rush of wetness over his hand and then lay there, tired, still inside of the younger man and his hands clenched tightly into Laith’s flesh.
In the morning, Erik awoke and found his face buried in blond hair. It took a moment to remember where he was, but then he pulled away slowly to see the young man’s face, relaxed in sleep, hands open on the sheets beside him where he had lain spooned together with Erik through the night.
Quietly, so as not to wake him, Erik got up and found his mask, putting that back on first before looking for his clothes. He wiped himself clean with a rag left by the washbowl someone had left full of water outside and dressed, tying the laces of his shoes before looking back once again at the bed where the man who had taken his virginity was sleeping, not that Laith would ever know it.
He left before Laith woke up, to face up to the rest of his life in Persia without the baggage of a blind Bedouin singer with a beautiful voice to keep him back.
