Chapter Text
“Oh, now, that’s an exquisite sight,” Dankovsky said, and Stakh’s skin flushed under the harness he’d cinched just as tight as it would fit.
Maybe that wasn’t the point, wasn’t how he’d been meant to do it. But the supple slither of leather through the buckles, the way it braced and contained and bit at and supported him, had goaded him on once he’d started. The way it had pushed his pectorals up and together...
Dankovsky stepped in with a confidence that seemed to add half a metre to his height, smoothing a hand across Stakh’s chest until the harness stopped him. He wriggled his fingers as if he meant to fit them under it, but Stakh’s skin bulged on either side of the strap for how tight he had fastened it. There wasn’t any room for fingers between it and him.
“You certainly don’t do anything by half-measures,” Dankovsky observed. “Driven and meticulous – it’s no wonder Isidor prized you among his students.”
He drew his fingers back over the skin Stakh had shaved so meticulously before binding it under the harness. Goosebumps sprang up in their wake; the words he’d planned to say, any hurt he could have felt at the mention of his dead master, dissolved in a shiver as he shut his eyes.
“Anything worth doing is worth giving your all,” he said, trying to recite it like a textbook fact even as Dankovsky’s fingers glided and ghosted across his bare skin. “He taught me that.”
“And it’s clear you took it absolutely to heart.” Dankovsky spread his hand over the skin and shield of bone that stopped him from caressing the organ in question. Stakh had to look down at that – at the strange sight of no dark skim of hair on his chest, and Dankovsky’s fingers splayed as if to claim it.
To claim him. His heart ran wild, even more so than it had when he’d set the razor against his skin. Cleaning away the lather he’d spread there and the dark, curling hair, cleaning himself like leather or a body being prepared for surgery. Like tightening the harness, it had been hypnotic once he’d started.
His pecs bulged, far more blatant in their constriction than the rest of his flesh. Almost like a woman’s cleavage, the nipples standing hard and greedy under Dankovsky’s touch. Stakh scraped his tongue across the dry roof of his mouth, trying to find and loosen something he could say.
“I- are you sure that you want to-”
But Dankovsky was always so damn sure. He leaned in, letting his hand slide over rather than stick against the strap this time, spreading it across Stakh’s back in a different kind of claim as he brushed his lips across the razor-bared skin.
Blood slammed into Stakh’s groin, hard enough, in just a few heartbeats, to hurt. Even in his apartment, with every curtain pulled, the feeling leapt back up from blood to his skin that they could be seen at any moment. It always did – the frantic feeling that this couldn’t happen without someone knowing somehow.
That he couldn’t be so lucky. Dankovsky dragged his lips over one of those stiff nipples, the slightest late-night scratch of his stubble, and Stakh’s hands leapt forward without his say-so, clamping around the other man’s waist just for some kind of control. Some say-so in how quickly the blood evacuated his brain.
Dankovsky leaned back just far enough to look up at him. Close enough for Stakh to see every fleck of tiger’s-eye brilliance in his brown eyes.
“Was I wrong in assuming that you invited me here so your efforts could be properly appreciated?” he asked.
As if it had been all Stakh’s idea. As if Dankovsky hadn’t been the one to give him the harness, which held his breath just as tightly as he’d been able to tug it. Not, with that smirk on his lips and semi-precious glint in his eyes, as if he would be upset if Stakh did want to slow down or stop.
Just as if he knew already that Stakh wanted no such thing. He had prepared himself that carefully because he’d wanted to see that pride in Dankovsky’s eyes. He’d been breathless shaving himself, half-hard pulling on the harness, arranging himself like a gourmet dish because Dankovsky always looked at him like something mouthwatering.
“No, you weren’t,” he said. “Just...”
The brilliant pride in Dankovsky’s eyes danced and prowled. “Just?”
Just another moment. Just a chance to catch his breath, gather his courage before he said what the blood still humming thinly in his head and roaring below wanted most.
“Do you want to check the straps first?” he asked. “Make sure I’ve got them tight enough?”
It didn’t feel as though he could have yanked them any further through the buckles. But Dankovsky’s smirk spread into broad, feline self-assurance, sly understanding, as he slid his hand back around to the straps.
“As far as I can see, you’re very well-fastened,” he said. “But you’re right that a hands-on inspection wouldn’t go amiss. Is it comfortable?”
That didn’t feel like the right word. If he’d had to say yes or no, then no, a harness so close to cutting into the skin couldn’t be comfortable. But it held him the way he hadn’t realized he was waiting for something to, commanding his posture and breath. It showed him off in ways he couldn’t hunch out of, and forced a grunt of surprise from him as Dankovsky managed to tug the straps a little tighter after all.
“That was a question requiring an answer,” Dankovsky prompted him. “I would hate for us both to be too distracted to notice it cutting off blood flow.”
“It’s- ngh- it’s fine,” Stakh said. “It’s good. I like how it...”
But the words that had already dissolved inside him evaporated away completely as Dankovsky took a firm grip on his chest, pushing his pecs up and together just as high as the harness could keep them. Settling them roughly there and nodding to himself as if at a job well-done.
“It’s an excellent look for you,” he said. “Are you having any trouble breathing?”
Not because of the harness. That checked his breath, yes, kept it shallow, but Dankovsky’s thumbs circling his nipples were what left him dizzy.
“I’m fine,” Stakh said again. “Though...maybe a closer inspection...”
Dankovsky was already close enough for his breath to raise more goosebumps on Stakh’s skin. Close enough for Stakh to feel how the flutter of it changed through that renewed smirk, a second before it closed in to a murmur against his sternum.
“Oh, I think that could be arranged.”
He’d practically begged for it, but still, a sound of small shock slipped through Stakh’s lips as Dankovsky’s tongue delved into the narrow gap between his pecs. Pressed that close together, it would have been easy to think of them as something more like tits, stripped soft and vulnerable and streaked glossy with saliva wherever that tongue roved. Dankovsky darted and teased with it, taking it back to tweak tiny pink marks into the skin with his teeth, whispering the positive findings of his inspection to the goosebumps they raised.
The harness held Stakh at attention, wouldn’t let him melt, but it felt like the only thing that did. The rest of him, muscle and bone, wanted nothing more than to pour out of it, pool under Dankovsky’s attention. His breath came in gasps that Dankovsky seemed to suck from his skin, savouring them along with the first trickle of sweat that licked its way down his sternum.
Stakh tried to hold his own attention on the straight line of his back, the silence he swallowed carefully down with each breath. On letting Dankovsky savour him, steering his thoughts away from the equal, urgent beat in his chest and groin. He’d never been so hard without having his cock touched before, and Dankovsky-
Dankovsky was leaning back again, looking up with the same hungry liquid glimmer on his lips and in his eyes. A flush rode high on his cheeks, like the warm colour of sunset cast by those shining, tiger-brown eyes.
“It occurs to me that there is one way in which you seem very reluctant to give your all,” he observed.
Stakh’s stomach twisted tight with reflexive shame and newer anticipation. He’d done something wrong, ruined the moment somehow, but Dankovsky had ways of setting him straight that usually mended the moment even better than before.
“What way is that?” he asked.
“For all the many pleasures you give, you stubbornly refuse to give yourself to the pleasure that someone else can give you,” Dankovsky said. “You offer the barest minimum of your enjoyment in exchange for theirs. Are you not enjoying yourself?”
“I...” Stakh’s thoughts, already at a dizzy disadvantage, followed Dankovsky’s words in circles. “Of course I am. But I don’t get what you mean by...”
Pleasure was something he had learned he could give, in much greater amounts than he would ever have believed before. He was giving it now, letting Dankovsky take it from him, and, yes, enjoying it almost too much to stand. So what did...?
“My enjoyment isn’t just in the sight and taste of you,” Dankovsky told him. “Do you think I would be this meticulous myself if I didn’t want to undo you?” His voice, breathless with how much of it he’d left on Stakh’s skin, fell to a low, electric hum. “If you want to think of it this way, then give me your composure. Give me this insistence you have on holding back. Give it all to me – and then you’ll have given me everything I want.”
That brilliant, unbearable heat twisted in Stakh’s gut again. As if Dankovsky had caught hold of and tugged something tethered too firmly to just come loose, but something that wanted to, and just the tugging was heaven.
“I don’t-” It would have sounded stupid to say he didn’t know how. How could he not know how to not do something? Just stop trying to stand so stiffly, to stay silent, and let Dankovsky get the reaction he was apparently after. But in practice, his body snapped taut again the moment Dankovsky’s breath stroked his skin.
“You don’t what?” Dankovsky murmured. “Want this?”
Of course he did. Of course he did, and Dankovsky knew it. That was the lure he used to tug Stakh’s words out, so meticulous, so unlike so many people who’d been happy to ignore Stakh’s silence in the past when he hadn’t known what to say. Dankovsky forced him to find himself, to find the answer to do you want this, and after years of being expected to keep the answer to himself, he didn’t know how to-
“I don’t know if I can just-”
-just let something go straight from his nerves to his mouth. From the tight suck of Dankovsky’s lips around his nipple to a shuddering little moan. Letting it happen felt like even more effort than stopping it, but Dankovsky’s smile against his skin was worth the effort.
“Good.” The word seemed to vibrate straight to Stakh’s centre, a touch of heat threatening to melt what he’d kept so rigid there. Candlelight kissing a wax pillar, smoothing away one of its stubborn edges. “That’s good. Focus on my mouth, not yours. Whatever sounds your mouth makes are mine anyways.”
Sucked from his skin, swirled by Dankovsky’s tongue. Stakh clamped down by reflex on a groan, then guiltily let its dregs sieve through his teeth.
Focus. It didn’t feel like letting go. It felt like clinging to something else, the feather-light, promising skim of Dankovsky’s teeth down his sternum, the soothing flick of Dankovsky’s tongue where a shifting strap had left his reddened, sensitive skin exposed...
The messages traced by Dankovsky’s lips and the praise he whispered aloud. When Dankovsky closed his teeth almost tight enough to break skin, over the thickest bite he could take of Stakh’s pectoral, a loud, messy gasp bolted down Stakh’s throat before he could stop it. The pain kneaded his muscle, just on the perfect edge of unbearable, leaving even more sensitive crescents of flesh for the tongue to dab and tend to when the teeth moved on.
A familiar warning lit, late, in Stakh’s mind. He was about to come, too close, already, to take it back. He could clench his teeth, make it almost nothing, the way he usually did, but would that be stealing it from Dankovsky? Insulting him, even, by pretending he’d done almost nothing?
The question distracted him from Dankovsky’s mouth, but from his own as well. When teeth did take his attention again, when that hot twist in his gut wrenched gloriously tight, he was too late to try to stop the loud, clumsy sound that tumbled out of his mouth. The harness bit into the soft hollows of his shoulders as he bent as close to double as he could, clinging to Dankovsky’s waist, letting that feeling wring itself out through him and leave his breath noisy, his legs trembling as limp as dishrags.
Only the leather had stayed stiff and resolute. It had stopped him a few inches from burying his face in Dankovsky’s neck, but Dankovsky’s hand on the back of his bare head pulled him the rest of the way.
“Good,” he repeated, in a whisper and a thrum through the veins of his throat. A warm, melting word against Stakh’s cheek. “That was very good.”
Was it? It had felt as clumsy as it had sounded. All he had done was let himself slip and make a mess in his trousers, but Dankovsky’s smile felt real against his ear, and there was no disappointment in how Dankovsky’s other hand closed around his ass.
“Maybe we can find you some matching pants next time,” Dankovsky said, low as a threat and warm as a fond hope. “Or a more...comprehensive harness. I feel like we’ve only just started to explore all the excellent potential combinations of you and leather.”