Sullivan’s voice had lost that diamond edge. It was soft and easy as cotton balls now, and it was too late. It made Tobias sick, because he hadn’t earned it. Sullivan had been mad, he’d had good reason to be mad, and Tobias hadn’t paid for it yet. His heart rate kept climbing. His pulse had gone loose and thin in his chest. He became aware that Sullivan was prodding him gently to the sofa.
“I think I might be sick.” Which wasn’t exactly true—or at least not physically. But he felt that same terrible, shaky feeling that came with being sick, that sensation of being utterly out of control and unable to stop a process that was already well underway.
Sullivan crouched in front of him and stroked a thumb along the side of his face. Tobias slapped his hand away without thinking.
Sullivan sat back, his face going blank. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Tobias snapped, because that careful expression made him want to kick something. Tobias was the one who was a mess, the one who couldn’t decide if he was furious or a horrible person, the one who kept saying and doing things that were wrecking everything, and now Sullivan was just taking it, just letting Tobias be a dick.
That pissed him off maybe more than anything else. “Don’t do that. Don’t be soft like that.”
Sullivan’s eyes narrowed. “You want some time alone? Want me out of your hair?”
Tobias lunged forward, his hand flashing out to catch Sullivan’s sleeve. “Don’t, don’t—I, no—that’s not—”
“Okay, okay, easy, I’m not going anywhere if you don’t tell me to.”
Again with that soft voice. What was Tobias supposed to do with that? He still wasn’t thinking, clearly, because now he was reaching out and shoving Sullivan.
Not hard, barely enough to rock him. He wasn’t trying to hurt Sullivan. He wasn’t trying to do anything except get Sullivan to stop taking it, to stop letting Tobias treat him like this, to stop Tobias cold.
Please, God, let Sullivan be able to stop this.
* * *
Yeah, Sullivan had seen this coming from a mile away.
Tobias was a hot mess right now, and everything in his life was falling apart, and he needed an outlet. Everyone did, from time to time. Some people worked out, some people drank, some people played golf. Tobias had admitted to stress baking, but Sullivan suspected that soft little hobby wasn’t going to cut it here.
No, what Tobias needed was a complete disengagement. An escape into a calmer headspace. No decisions, no responsibilities, no ambiguities. Just an expectation of obedience and a clear system of punishment or reward depending on whether that expectation was met. Sullivan would’ve expected Tobias to prefer a reward-based system until roughly thirty seconds ago, because liking pain wasn’t the same thing as wanting to be taken down hard, but that shove, combined with the don’t leave, was a pretty blatant signal.
Sullivan had never met a sub who’d fought back like this when they didn’t want it. They safe-worded or they left. The broken ones, the ones who’d been abused, they just buckled. The only ones who fought, who said don’t leave but picked a fight, they wanted to be reassured that the world had rules and that there was safety within them. The only way to trust those rules was to be made to conform to them. They wanted the punishment because it meant order existed.
In the past, a nasty takedown wouldn’t have fazed Sullivan. He had to be in the mood, but he didn’t mind a sub who needed something a little more violent to go under. He didn’t have a weak stomach for that sort of thing generally, but he’d only ever gone there with subs he knew well, subs who weren’t in the middle of a major personal crisis. And it’d been well before Nick.
He’d had a little more confidence about his ability to handle the cruelty back then.
Every line of Tobias’s body was confrontational. His hands were in fists at his sides.
“Do you have the first clue what you’re asking me for?” Sullivan asked.
Tobias shoved him again, harder than before, but still nothing to write home about. He meant to provoke, not harm, and the urge to push back, to push harder, flooded through Sullivan’s whole body. He exhaled slowly.
He was already getting hard.
“You don’t know how ugly this sort of thing can get,” Sullivan warned him. “If there’s a kind of scene that’s more prone to going wrong, it’s one like this. The fun scenes where you push and we both think it’s a little funny that you’re being naughty, that’s one thing. I don’t know how I feel about this, to be honest—”
Tobias shoved him a third time, hard enough that he had to take a step to keep his balance, and Sullivan knocked his hands away, grabbing him by the jaw and shoving him back. Then he kept shoving, even as Tobias stumbled, all the way until Tobias hit the wall with enough force to lose his breath.
“You do that again, and you aren’t going to like what happens next,” Sullivan said, and had the pleasure of watching Tobias’s eyes go hazy. “I’m not saying I won’t fuck you up, because I will, if that’s what you want, I’ll tear you into tiny pieces, but not until we talk about this, so slow your roll and keep your hands at your sides until I tell you that you can move.”
He could see it in Tobias’s expression, that he was tempted to rebel further, so he tightened his grip on Tobias’s jaw so hard that Tobias winced.
“We are talking about this,” Sullivan said. “That is nonnegotiable. You will say either don’t you dare or you can try.”
Tobias mouthed the words, learning them, brow furrowing.
“I’m going to restrain you however I want. You’ll be exposed and humiliated and available to be used however I want.”
Understanding snapped into place in those big blue eyes,
