Chapter 3: The Bathroom Collar
The silence in the bedroom was thick, broken only by the slowing rhythm of their breath. Jung’s arm was a lead weight across Min’s waist, the heat of his body a furnace against Min’s back. Min lay perfectly still, trapped not by force but by a paralysis of the mind. The warmth trickling between his thighs was a vulgar reality, a stark contrast to the pristine silk beneath them.
He didn’t know how much time passed. A minute. An hour. Then, without a word, Jung shifted. The arm lifted, and the sudden absence of its pressure made Min feel untethered, dangerously adrift. Jung swung his legs off the bed, his back a landscape of muscle and old scars. He stood, utterly comfortable in his nakedness, and turned.
“Up,” he said, his voice rough from disuse.
Min moved, his body protesting with every sore muscle. He sat up, the silk sticking unpleasantly to his stomach. He kept his eyes down, fixed on the intricate pattern of the rug beside the bed.
A hand appeared under his chin, tilting his face up. Jung studied him, his dark eyes missing nothing: the tear tracks, the bruised-looking lids, the utter bewilderment. He made a low sound in his throat, not quite pity, something more like assessment.
Then he bent and hooked an arm behind Min’s knees, the other behind his back, and lifted him as easily as if he were a child.
Min gasped, his arms instinctively flying up to loop around Jung’s neck. He was carried, naked and filthy, across the vast bedroom toward a sleek black door. Jung shouldered it open, and a wave of humid, bergamot-scented air washed over them.
The bathroom was a cavern of shadows and muted gold light. Black marble veined with silver covered every surface, swallowing sound. In the center, sunken into the floor, was a tub as wide as a small pool, its water steaming, lit from beneath with a soft, amber glow. Mist curled toward the vaulted ceiling.
Jung walked down the three shallow steps into the water, still holding Min, and lowered them both into the liquid heat. It was scalding, almost unbearably so, but Jung’s grip was immovable. He settled on a submerged bench, Min cradled sideways on his lap, the water rising to their chests.
For a long moment, they just sat. The heat seeped into Min’s bones, beginning to unravel the cold knot of tension coiled in his spine. Jung reached for a bottle, poured a stream of viscous, pearl-colored liquid into his palm, and began to wash Min’s back.
His hands were efficient, thorough. He washed Min’s shoulders, his arms, his neck. It was clinical, a caretaker’s duty. Min felt himself drifting in the haze of heat and exhaustion, his head lolling against Jung’s shoulder.
Then the hands moved. Jung urged Min forward slightly, spreading his own legs to make space. One hand slid down Min’s spine, over the curve of his ass. Min stiffened.
“Relax.” The command was uttered against his ear. “Need to clean you.”
The soapy hand slipped between his cheeks. Min jerked, a short, sharp inhale catching in his throat. Jung’s other arm banded across his chest, holding him steady.
“Be still.” The fingers circled his sensitive entrance, already stretched and sore from earlier. They pressed, not invading, just spreading slick, floral-scented soap. Then one fingertip breached him, slowly, a slippery, intrusive probe. Min whimpered, his nails digging into Jung’s forearm under the water.
“Shhh. Just cleaning out my mess.” The finger worked in deeper, curling, a deliberate mimicry of sex that made shame burn hotter than the water. It was methodical, impersonal. Jung fucked him open with that single finger, ensuring the soap reached inside, before withdrawing. A rush of water followed the movement, an intimate, violating rinse. He repeated the process, spreading Min open with two fingers this time, the stretch a dull, familiar ache. Min buried his face against Jung’s neck, trembling, as he was scrubbed out from the inside.
When it was done, Jung lifted him, water cascading from their bodies, and stepped out of the tub. He set Min on his feet on a plush black mat and wrapped him in a towel so large and soft it seemed to swallow him whole. Jung dried him with the same thoroughness, patting between his toes, rubbing the towel over his cropped hair. Min stood, pliant and shivering, a doll in the hands of its master.
Jung tossed the damp towel aside. From a small black lacquer box on the vanity, he drew out a length of leather. It was slender, supple, the color of midnight. A simple buckle on one end, a plain, polished D-ring on the other.
Min’s breath hitched. He took an involuntary step back, his heel hitting the cool marble tub.
Jung’s gaze pinned him. “Come here.”
He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. Min took a faltering step forward, then another, until he was standing naked and dripping before the taller man. Jung bent, going down on one knee. The sight was so disproportionally submissive it stunned Min into stillness.
Jung lifted the collar. He brought it around Min’s throat. The leather was cool and strangely soft against his skin. Jung fed the end through the buckle, pulling it snug, not tight enough to choke, but with no possibility of slipping over his jaw. The buckle fastened with a definitive, soft click.
The weight of it was negligible. The meaning was colossal.
Jung remained on his knee, his hands settling on Min’s narrow hips. He looked up, his eyes dark and burning. “This marks you. Out there,” he gave a slight nod toward the window, the city beyond, “you are mine. In here,” his thumbs stroked the crests of Min’s hip bones, “you are mine. You breathe because I allow it.”
He stood then, his motion fluid, crowding Min backward until the edge of the cold marble vanity dug into the small of his back. Jung turned him, a firm hand between his shoulder blades, bending him over the counter. Min’s palms slapped against the smooth, fogged surface. He stared, uncomprehending, at his own blurred reflection in the mirror.
Behind him, he heard the tear of another foil packet, the slick sound of Jung stroking himself. The broad, blunt head of Jung’s cock prodded at him, still loose and wet from the bath.
“Look,” Jung commanded, his voice a gravelly threat. “Look at yourself.”
Min forced his eyes open. In the misted glass, he saw a ghost: pale skin, wide black eyes, damp hair sticking to a forehead. And around its throat, a band of black.
Jung pushed inside with one brutal, bottoming thrust.
Min cried out, his reflection’s mouth a perfect ‘O’ of shock. The marble was cold beneath his belly, his forearms. The man behind him was incendiary heat. Jung set a punishing pace immediately, no warm-up, no tenderness. Each drive punched the air from Min’s lungs, making the reflection in the mirror jolt and shudder.
“See that?” Jung growled, his hands gripping Min’s hips hard enough to bruise. His balls slapped wetly against Min’s skin with every thrust. “See what you are? That’s my good boy. That’s my pretty, collared cunt.”
The obscenity, paired with the relentless pounding, unspooled something in Min. His own cock, trapped beneath him, was hard and leaking onto the black marble. Pleasure, sharp and shameful, was building its pyre on the foundation of his ache.
Jung leaned over him, his chest plastered to Min’s back, his mouth at his ear. His gaze in the mirror was predatory, locked on Min’s glassy eyes. “Every time you look in a mirror. Every time you feel this leather.” He snapped his hips, a brutal, deep angle that made Min scream. “You’ll remember. This throat?” He bit the juncture of Min’s shoulder, not hard, a possessive claim. “Mine. This ass?” Another driving thrust. “Mine. That cock twitching like a beggar’s? Mine. Every fucking breath, Min. Mine.”
He was pounding into him now, a frenzied, possessive rhythm. The vanity rattled. The mirror fogged with their exerted breath. Min’s reflection was a mess of parted lips, fluttering eyelids, a sheen of sweat on its brow. The collar was the only thing in sharp focus.
“I’m gonna come inside you again,” Jung snarled, his control visibly splintering. “Gonna fill this sweet hole up until it leaks. You want that?”
Min, shattered, watching his own degradation, nodded frantically. “Yes,” he sobbed. “Yes, please.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir!”
The acknowledgement triggered Jung’s release. With a final, ground-out groan, he buried himself to the root and held, his body rigid. Min felt the hot, intimate pulse deep within him, a flooding claim that had his own orgasm ripping through him untouched, stripes of white painting the marble beneath his trembling body.
They stayed there, locked together, panting. Jung’s weight was heavy, his breath hot on Min’s neck. Slowly, he pulled out. A trickle of his release followed, tracing a path down Min’s inner thigh.
Jung straightened. He looked at Min’s ravaged reflection, then at the real thing, slumped over the counter. He reached out and with a corner of a towel, wiped Min’s cheek, smearing away tears and sweat with an odd, rough gentleness.
He didn’t speak. He simply lifted Min into his arms again. The collar sat against Min’s throat, a new and permanent truth. Carried back to the bed, Min closed his eyes. The echoes of the words bored into his soul.
Every time you look in a mirror.
He knew, with a chilling certainty, that he would never see himself the same way again.