TAGS bc I forgot to put them in the title: [no sex] [mdom/fsub] [light bondage] [exploration]

The thing is, Seth never really liked sex.

That wasn’t to say he hated it. He knew how to make himself feel good and how to make his partners feel good. He didn’t know if it was trauma, because everyone who grew up in the Ring came out a little fucked up, or if that was just how is brain was wired.

His cousin and best friend had sex as a vice. Seth rarely saw his real smile anymore, but the one he got with the girls at the clubs was the closest he had seen to the real one.

His brother drowned in obsession for one person, always, always hungry for his one and only. Seth would feel obligated to stop his brother. Honestly, from the extent of it, he felt the moral thing to do would be to put him down. He would have. But his brother’s lover was just as insane as his brother was. Two black holes, circling each other and feeding off of and swallowing each other till the end of time.

So he left it alone.

He fucked some girls and some boys, and then just stopped. He had sought it out for curiosity and not for want.

And then it all changed when it came to Mary.

He had noticed things in high school. Mary was strong. Mary was brilliant. If anyone could get out of the slums of the Ring, it was gonna be Mary. He had seen people look at her, all lust, but for different reasons. Half for her body, half for the intelligence behind silver eyes.

Mary walked with purpose. She was shorter then a lot of them, but she held her spine straight and she could make them all feel small.

Seth had once told her “good job” with a smile he had known was unhinged. They had just came out of a fight, and Mary was the one who negotiated terms of complete surrender. She had stared at a man twice her size and age with tats and scars all over his body and told him in no uncertain terms that he was well and truly fucked over.

So yeah. Seth had smiled at her, blood in his teeth, and told her “good job.”

And he watched her hands spasm on her phone and drop it as her face went red, then pale.

He had noted it, then shrugged it off. Everyone raised in the Ring was a little fucked up. He had probably pushed a button.

(He might not have been as book smart as her, but he always noticed, always knew when something up with a person. He could never forget that moment, that knowledge of something more).

A couple years later, it was Mary, one of maybe a dozen who graduated their shitty little high school, and the only one with a half-ride to the university in the Center City. Seth had dropped out years ago, trying to take care of his family.

He had patted her head, because it had been him, his cousin, and her, forever. She was the youngest by a year and two months and she was the best, strolling into the playground with a demand of friendship all those years ago.

Mary was a good girl. She could play the bad part, the cold hearted bitch, but she was a good girl. So he had taken off her dumb graduation cap, patted her on the head, and told her that. “Good girl.” He wanted to make sure she knew that, before she left them forever, because that was the smart thing to do. And he had watched her eyes go cloudy, her legs shaky, before she blinked and gave him a smile he had never seen before. Half shy and half wicked.

And that.

That made something warm bloom. Not in the way he got with his friends or brother. It choked him up, made him burn like with them. But this was lazy and pleasant and—

—and then she was gone.

But she didn’t stay gone like she should have. She came back.

And she gave that smile sometimes from across dance floors and bars and every time, the warmth got stronger and darker and more potent and he wondered why he wanted to make her burn like he did when it was only half good and half awful.

On one of her visits, the heat over came him and he called her pet because he had seen that in one of the kink clubs and saw how the girl there melted and Mary fucking stumbled.

And the fire was sated for a second before it bloomed stronger than ever.

And he wound up continuing to nurse that fire, until one day the two of them were on the couch as all of their friends snored in chairs or on the floor, not quite friends but not quite anything else. And then he had her skinny wrists in one of his hands over their heads and he asked her questions that built up over the years.

“Do you like being called good? Pet? Why? Do you like how I have you pinned? Do you like it when I’m bloody and dangerous? Tell me everything you feel right now?”

And he listened to her answers, yes, she didn’t know, yes, yes, the hot puffs of air against her neck were sending chills rolling down her spine, and she like this but if they didn’t stop she was going to scream because she… she liked this far too much.

Seth didn’t like sex.

But he loved how her eyes would glaze over when he talked to her with a low voice, when he praised her, when he straddled her on his bed and pinned her hands over her head. She liked to wiggle and grind against him in a weak attempt of escape, and he liked the flush on her cheeks more then the stimulation against his cock.

One night he decided to kiss her. He meant it as brief, sweet affection, but then it felt like cocaine straight to his veins and he couldn’t stop. When he came up for air, he was burning from the inside out. When he looked down, her lips were swollen and glossy. And those eyes, all pupil and hazy and feverish.

Yeah.

He had been burning with fever for years, and she was a drug that made it better and worse.

He needed her to want to burn with him.

And if kisses on her lips and other places made her burn like he did?

He’d tear her down and build her up again.