Part the Third

At rehearsal the following day, Thom's concentration was shot to pieces. Everywhere he looked, Colin seemed to be in his line of sight: when he lifted an arm to adjust his guitar strap, Thom remembered how his small fingers had looked with Thom's belt wrapped around them; when he was biting his lip as he focused on keeping time with Phil, Thom remembered how his face had looked, rapt with concentration, as he had watched Thom touching himself; when he knelt down to talk to Jonny, sitting on the floor doing complex things with pedals, Thom remembered two dark heads bent together, lost in a conversation that Thom was no part of, and his fingers slipped off the strings with a discordant squeak that made the pair of them look up with identical, accusing glares on their faces. But while Jonny seemed innocent, oblivious to the cause of Thom's distraction, Thom knew better than to think it was the same case with Colin; when he dropped his gaze to find his place again, he could feel those hot eyes boring through his skull, and he shuddered and kept his head down until his blush went away.

He was barely able to hold a note for the rest of the session, let alone play at the same time, and before lunch both Ed and Phil had lost their patience and given up, leaving early. Thom was mostly relieved, although embarrassed at his complete inability to keep control of himself, and Jonny's confused glances between him and Colin weren't helping as they packed away the remainder of the equipment; Thom insisted that they couldn't do anything without a drummer. While Jonny was out the front of the studio, loading an amp into the back of Colin's car – Thom could see him through the window – he grabbed Colin's arm and pulled him aside.

“We need to sort this out,” he hissed desperately.

Colin prised his arm out of Thom's grasp, and Thom tried to ignore the way his skin prickled at the touch of his friend's fingers on his hand. “We? I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. I don't seem to be having any problems.” He snapped shut the clasps on his guitar case and hoisted it from the floor. “Unless you're starting to rethink our agreement?”

Thom spluttered. “Agreement?” He wasn't even aware that they'd had an agreement – it wasn't as though Colin had ever handed him a contract to sign, or anything like that. But then, it was Colin who'd invited him to the Club; it was Colin who had done everything for him; Colin who'd shown him the things he hadn't known about himself. Perhaps they did have an agreement – an unspoken one, but there was a level of mutual understanding (not understanding, that wasn't the right word, he didn't think he understood a thing about Colin) that didn't need to be articulated.

Colin sighed. “I didn't expect that I would have to explain it to you, Thom. I'd credited you with the intelligence to work it out for yourself.” He lowered his voice, speaking rapidly. “You made a choice, when you stayed to watch me with Florian, didn't you? A choice between what you felt was right, was decent, and what deep down you knew you desired; and by making that choice, you involved yourself in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Think of it in legal terms, if you will... the party of the first part – that's you – agrees to render up his soul now and forever more, to the party of the second part – that's me – in return for whatever cheap thrill might be necessary to assure your compliance. It was an idea I had after a conversation with our friend, or rather our associate, Mr Francis-Taylor – he's a lawyer, did you know? Quite fascinating – and I enter into it with every boy I engage at the Club. Even if they don't fully understand it, none of them objects to it... would you like to be an exception? I told you that I would never force anyone.”

Thom shook his head dumbly, feeling that he'd been outmanoeuvred. To have it explained in such a cold, clinical way... it was so undeniably Colin, the cool logic, the rational thought behind such a thoroughly irrational secret lifestyle.

Colin smiled fondly at him, and patted his shoulder on the way to the door. “I knew you'd learn fast,” he said cryptically. “Tomorrow night, then.”

Thom watched his retreating back as he left the studio. His heart was racing, his palms sweaty, and he wasn't quite sure why; he felt as though he had just signed a contract with the Devil. Moving to the window and hoping he was sufficiently concealed, he watched through the partly open blinds as Colin approached his brother at the car, putting his bass in beside the amp and slamming the door shut. Jonny was saying something to him – Thom strained to hear it, but couldn't make out the words through the double glazing – and after a few moments Colin nodded, pulling him into a close embrace, and kissed the younger man's forehead affectionately.

Thom's mouth went dry as every last drop of blood in his body seemed to race straight into his cock.

He gripped the windowsill tightly with trembling fingers, squinting through the blinds as the brothers drew apart. It wasn't something unusual to see between them, really; Colin touched and held everyone so easily, it came so naturally to him, and he'd always reserved a special tenderness for his younger sibling. Thom had never thought anything of it, until now, his nerves scraped raw over the past few days as one by one the lights had been shut off and darkened the interior of the man he thought he'd known. He was about to dismiss it as coincidence, just Colin's habitual concern for Jonny – Jonny had been unusually reticent of late, even for someone as naturally shy as him, and Thom had found himself wondering whether something was wrong without quite knowing how to broach the subject – when Colin lifted his head and his eyes fixed directly on Thom.

Slowly, his mouth curved into the most frightening smile Thom had ever seen on a living face.

---

Thom was a shredded bundle of nerves by the time the next evening rolled around. He changed into and out of several shirts, spending longer looking at his reflection in the wardrobe mirror than he thought he'd done in the entire time he'd lived in that house. It took him twenty minutes to knot his tie. He'd barely stepped through the door of the Club when he spotted Wesley lounging like a particularly attractive part of the furniture at a table by himself, sunk into an overstuffed leather armchair with one leg hooked over the other and a half-empty bottle of vodka hanging from one limp hand. He looked positively miserable. Thom noticed that he was wearing an expensive pair of riding boots, but chose not to mention it as Wesley saw him and waved him over.

“Colin told me to send you through to the Green Room as soon as you arrived,” he said. His voice, previously silky-smooth, was roughened and slurred by the alcohol; he had a shaving cut on his chin, and a livid purple-red love bite nestled just below his sculpted jaw. His knuckles were bruised; he saw Thom staring, and shook his sleeve down to hide them. “Go on. He didn't seem in the mood for waiting.”

He didn't have time for wondering about Wesley's dishevelled appearance. He hardly knew the man, although Wesley seemed to know enough about him; perhaps Wesley was like Florian or David, and enjoyed being treated badly, even though from talking to him he had seemed to be cut from similar cloth to Colin – supremely calculating, cool and in control. He tried to imagine Wesley bending over Colin's lap to be spanked, and couldn't conjure the appropriate image in his head; slender bodies and doe eyes and dark hair kept invading his thoughts.

The Green Room was in complete darkness as he slipped inside and locked the door, unsure of whether he should turn on the light or not – of whether Colin would want him to do so. Abstractly he wondered just when he'd started thinking in Colin's voice. Eventually curiosity got the better of him – he could see a little of the room from the sodium glow filtering through the closed curtains, but it wasn't enough – and he edged along the wall with one hand outstretched, seeking the switch. Finally his fingers slid over it, and he screamed when a warm hand came down over his own and the light flicked on.

Colin was smiling, but Thom could see immediately that the expression was strained. He actually looked a little unwell; there were dark circles under each of those sparkling, liquid eyes, and his cheeks had a pinched appearance, as though the skin was stretched too tightly over the bones. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket or tie, and Thom looked around for them, finding them not draped neatly over the chair in the corner or folded at the end of the bed, but dropped on the floor as though they had been shed in haste. And the bed was already occupied, a long, slim, white body stretched out face-down on top of the quilt, head pillowed on arms and back to them. Thom thought for one bizarre second that Colin had presented him with a girl; there was a distinctly feminine flare to the hips and unusually shapely legs, the slim waist and the glossiness of dark brown hair, but as the figure shifted and rolled over to face them he could tell he had been mistaken.

“Cozzie,” the boy on the bed asked, his lower lip pushing out into a pout, “who's that?”

Colin moved over to the bed and stroked the boy's fringe back from his face, kissing his forehead – Thom's mind flashed back to the scene outside the studio the day before, and his stomach clenched – before winding his fingers into the shiny hair and clutching and wrenching, pulling the boy's head back to bare his throat. “No concern of yours,” he murmured, his voice low and treacle-thick, trailing the fingers of his other hand up the boy's pale arching neck to the heavy lips and then slipping two of them inside. Thom watched, fascinated, the boy's cheeks hollowing out as he sucked – he was already growing hard, what was wrong with him? - and the way the boy's eyes closed as he did so, long lashes dusting his cheeks. “Just keep that pretty mouth for what it's made for,” Colin told him tenderly, withdrawing the fingers and kissing the boy again, gently, on the tip of his nose, before pushing him back down onto the bed. “Thom, this is Nat. A little present for you... I don't think I've been very fair, have I?”

Thom didn't know what to say. He stayed where he was, as though in a trance, until Colin beckoned him to join them; his head was spinning, and all of a sudden every inch of his skin seemed hypersensitive, little shocks of electricity sending shivers up his spine as he crawled over the covers to Colin and Nat and tucked his legs beneath him. Nat was gazing up at him with eyes like molten chocolate, hands resting one above the other across his flat stomach. There was something in his expression that reminded Thom of David, and he felt inexplicably angry with the boy he'd never met before, spread out so temptingly like this: it awoke a small and vicious part of himself that had been deeply buried, and he let out a shaky breath.

“He's your present, Thom,” Colin said silkily. “What would you like him to do?”