Chapter 12: The Edgy Variable
The word hung in the air between them, a fragile, spoken thing. This. Simon’s thumb was still on that devastating spot on Jason’s inner thigh, a point of contact that felt less like touch and more like a completed circuit.
Jason looked from Simon’s eyes to his own body, strapped and waiting. The machine’s idle hum was a taunt. The brushes and wands were dormant, but their potential was a physical pressure against his skin—the whisper-soft bristles beside his cock, the silicone bulbs resting cold against his nipples.
“So use it,” Jason said, his voice rough. “The right tool.”
Simon’s breath hitched. He looked at his own hand, then at Jason’s face, the trust there so absolute it was terrifying. He slowly, deliberately, moved his thumb away from Jason’s thigh. He didn’t go far. He traced a line up the tense plane of Jason’s stomach, over his ribs, and let his fingertips come to rest, spider-light, on the sides of Jason’s neck. A tender, almost clinical hold.
Then his other hand moved.
It didn’t go to the console. It slid down Jason’s trembling flank, past his hip, and found him. Simon’s fingers wrapped around Jason’s erection, which was trapped between the motionless, ticklish brushes. The touch was firm, knowing, a direct contrast to the machine’s promised teasing.
Jason jerked as if electrocuted, a sharp gasp tearing from his throat. It wasn’t laughter. It was pure, stunned sensation. “Simon—”
“Shhh,” Simon murmured, his fingers on Jason’s neck applying the faintest pressure. His other hand began to move, a slow, devastatingly precise rhythm. He watched Jason’s face, every flicker of pleasure, every strained breath. He was mapping a different kind of vulnerability now, charting the rise of tension with an intimacy no machine could replicate.
Jason’s head fell back against the headrest, his eyes squeezing shut. His hips bucked minutely, seeking more friction, but Simon’s grip controlled the pace. It was relentless, a slow burn that coiled tighter and tighter in his gut. The humming machine, the cold wands, the soft brushes—all of it faded into a distant backdrop. The only realities were Simon’s hand on him, Simon’s breath on his cheek, and the terrifying, wonderful ascent.
“I’m… I’m gonna…” Jason choked out, his body bowing, every muscle straining towards that peak.
Simon stopped.
He removed his hand completely, leaving Jason achingly empty, poised on a cliff’s edge with nothing but air beneath him. A ragged, frustrated cry escaped Jason’s lips. He opened his eyes, glazed and desperate.
Before he could protest, Simon was on him. He cradled Jason’s face and kissed him, hard and hungry. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, a distraction, a transfer of focus. Jason fought it for a second, a muffled groan of frustration against Simon’s mouth, before he surrendered, kissing back with a frantic, starving need. The denied orgasm pulsed through him, a phantom wave, but Simon’s tongue, his teeth on Jason’s lower lip, the scent of his skin—they were a new, all-consuming fire.
They broke apart, gasping for air, foreheads pressed together.
“You’re a bastard,” Jason panted, a hysterical laugh bubbling under the words.
Simon didn’t answer. He just smiled, a dark, beautiful thing. Then his hands, which had been so tender on Jason’s face, drifted down. His fingertips found the hollows of Jason’s armpits again.
The touch was feather-light, exploratory. Jason jerked, a giggle-snort bursting out. The sensitivity was magnified a thousandfold by the sexual frustration humming through his veins. It was too much. It was everything.
Simon dug in, just a little, scribbling his fingers in that devastating hollow.
Jason shrieked with laughter, his body convulsing against the straps. The sensation was electric, absurd, overwhelming. He thrashed, his earlier arousal tangled up with the helpless ticklish agony, creating a feedback loop of sensation that short-circuited coherent thought. Simon kept at it, his touch merciless and exact, until Jason was sobbing with laughter, tears streaming down his temples.
Then, as suddenly as he started, Simon stopped. He leaned in and captured Jason’s mouth again, swallowing the hiccuping, residual giggles, kissing him until the ticklish aftershocks faded and were replaced by a fresh, rising heat. Jason melted into it, his body confusing one intensity for another.
Simon’s hand drifted back down. He took Jason in hand again, his grip slick now with sweat. He built him back up, slower this time, his eyes locked on Jason’s, watching the pleasure build and crest behind his eyes. Just before the point of no return, just as Jason’s moans became pleas, Simon stopped again.
He diverted the crisis with his mouth, kissing Jason until they were both dizzy, until the urgent need subsided into a throbbing, manageable ache.
Then his fingers skittered over Jason’s ribs, dancing a vicious, tickling tattoo that made Jason scream-laugh until he was hoarse.
It became a brutal, exquisite pattern. A climb with hands. A precipitous stop. A salvage with lips and tongue. A crash down into helpless, ticklish hysterics. Each cycle was a negotiation of trust, a surrender of control. Each stop was a small death. Each kiss was a resurrection. Each tickling attack was a playful, torturous purgatory.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, timeless. An hour dissolved. Jason lost all sense of where he ended and the sensation began. He was a instrument being played with devastating expertise, strung tight between pleasure and pain, frustration and release.
Then Simon changed the algorithm.
He didn’t retreat to the console or drop to his knees. He simply leaned over the chair, his body half covering Jason’s. He kissed him, deep and slow, a mimicry of tenderness. At the same time, his hands crept up. His fingers slid into Jason’s armpits, not with a scribbling attack, but with a slow, wriggling penetration.
Jason’s laughter was immediate, but it was trapped. Simon swallowed it. He kissed Jason harder, his tongue delving as his fingers wriggled, and the laughter vibrated between them, a captive, sweet sound. Jason shook, his mirth bursting against Simon’s lips in stifled bursts, tears leaking from his clenched eyes. Simon drank it in, the taste of salt and joy, the physical vibration of Jason’s happiness against his mouth.
He broke the kiss, trailing his lips down Jason’s jaw to his throat. His fingers left Jason’s armpits and spider-walked down his sensitized sides, a fluttering, insidious touch.
Jason gasped for air, his laughter turning to ragged pants. “Oh my god, don’t—”
Simon sealed their mouths together again, kissing him as his fingertips danced over the lowest, most ticklish ribs. The laughter came again, helpless and bright, and Simon took it, consumed it, his own body thrumming with a power more profound than anything his machines could generate.
He was no longer conducting an experiment. He was having a conversation in a language of nerve endings and breath, a dialogue where every stifled giggle was a confession and every hungry kiss was an answer. The machine around them was just furniture now, a relic of a simpler, less terrifying intimacy. The real device was the space between their bodies, charged and singing, and Simon had finally, after all his careful planning, learned how to play it by ear.
His next move was a quiet decision, not a grand design. He kept his lips pressed to the hollow of Jason’s throat, tasting salt, as his wandering hands stilled. One palm flattened over Jason’s racing heart. The other slid, with deliberate slowness, back down his quivering stomach.
This time, Simon’s fingers didn’t wrap around him. They bypassed entirely, tracing lower to the intense, hidden sensitivity of his perineum, then skating back up the inner seam of his thigh with a gossamer touch. Jason yelped, a sound that was pure startled reaction, his hips lifting off the chair.
“Right here,” Simon whispered against his skin, his fingers settling in the crease where thigh met torso, applying a gentle, persistent scribble. It wasn’t rough. It was insidious, a focused, fluttering agitation directly beside his straining erection.
“No, no, no, that’s not fair,” Jason chanted, laughter and desperation warring in his throat. He was painfully hard, every nerve screaming, and the tickling wasn’t a distraction—it was a co-conspirator, amplifying the need into something unbearable.
“It’s perfectly fair,” Simon murmured, adjusting the angle of his fingers minutely, finding a spot that made Jason jolt as if shocked. “You chose the tools. I’m just applying them.”
He kept at it, an unrelenting, pinpoint torment adjacent to the epicenter of Jason’s arousal. The sensation built, a weird, intolerable pressure that wasn’t quite either thing but somehow both, coiling tighter and tighter in Jason’s gut. His laughter grew frantic, punctuated by choked-off moans. His body didn’t know how to react, caught in a feedback loop of conflicting signals.
“Simon, I can’t—what is—oh god—” The words shattered into a helpless, continuous stream of giggles and gasps. His back arched, his hands fisted in the restraints.
Simon watched his face, saw the precise moment confusion crystalized into inevitable release. Jason’s eyes flew wide, his mouth forming a silent ‘O’. A final, breathless laugh hiccupped out of him, and then he was coming, untouched, his body convulsing under the sheer, overwhelming overload of sensation. Wave after wave crashed through him, drawn out by the unceasing, tickling flutter of Simon’s fingers.
He collapsed, utterly spent, a boneless heap of shuddering flesh. The silence was profound, broken only by his ragged, sucking breaths.
For a long moment, Simon just watched him, mesmerized by the aftermath. Then he moved with a soft, practical efficiency. He gently released the leather straps, his hands soothing on Jason’s wrists and ankles. He fetched a bottle of water from a small fridge humming in the corner, unscrewed it, and held it to Jason’s lips.
“Small sips,” he said, his voice low.
Jason drank, water spilling down his chin. He coughed, managed a weak grin. “You… you literally tickled the come out of me. That’s a thing.”
“It appears to be,” Simon said, a quiet awe in his own tone. He let Jason breathe, mopping his brow with a clean towel, saying nothing for a solid ten minutes. The only sound was Jason’s breathing gradually slowing, deepening.
Then Simon reached for the wireless control tablet on the console. He detached it, his fingers moving swiftly over the interface. He programmed a new sequence with meticulous care: all actuators active, initiating at baseline one, with an automatic incremental increase of one level every six hundred seconds. He set the duration for indefinite.
He walked back to the chair, his shadow falling over Jason’s prone form. Without a word, he straddled Jason’s hips, his own weight settling not on the sensitive flesh but on the sturdy frame of the chair itself. He placed the control tablet on the headrest cushion, within easy reach, and reattached the restraints.
Jason watched him through half-lidded, satiated eyes, a question in their haze. Simon didn’t answer. He simply lowered himself, shifting back to sit directly on Jason’s stomach, a warm, solid pressure. Jason grunted, but didn’t protest.
Simon’s thumb tapped the screen.
A new, collective hum vibrated through the chair. It was soft, a distant beehive murmur. The two soft roller brushes pinning Jason’s hips and cock began a lazy, slow rotation. The tiny silicone wands nestled against his nipples came alive with a barely-there, tingling vibration. The bristles lining his inner thighs started their gentle, swirling sweep.
It was nothing. It was everything. After the violent peak, it was a tidal return of sensation, gentle but inescapable, a low-grade reclaiming of his nerves. A shiver wracked Jason’s frame, but it was a shiver of oversensitivity, not panic.
Simon leaned forward, bracing his hands on the chair beside Jason’s head. He bent down and kissed him, deep and slow, a languid exploration. Jason melted into it, a soft hum in his throat that matched the machine’s.
As they kissed, Simon’s right hand drifted. His fingers, warm and familiar, slid up Jason’s arm, dipped lightly, and wiggled into the damp hollow of his left armpit.
Jason jerked, a muffled squeak of laughter escaping into Simon’s mouth. He was too wrung-out for hysterics, but the sensation was bright and sharp, a sparkling counterpoint to the deep, throbbing exhaustion and the machine’s persistent, growing hum. Simon swallowed the sound, his kiss unbreaking, his fingers maintaining their gentle, wriggling occupation.
The machine whirred on, imperceptibly gaining strength, a clockwork promise set in motion. Simon was still playing by ear, but he had also composed the next movement, and now he was there to feel every note resonate through the instrument of Jason’s body, to taste the vibrations of his breath, to witness the slow, delicious climb all over again.
The kiss broke, leaving Jason gasping. Simon’s fingers remained in his armpit, a gentle, wriggling presence that was more intimate than torturous now.
“You set a timer,” Jason rasped, his voice wrecked.
“An increment,” Simon corrected softly, his thumb stroking the skin just above the trapped fingers. He nodded toward the tablet on the headrest. “Baseline. It increases every ten minutes. Indefinitely.”
Jason processed that. The machine’s hum was a tangible layer on his skin, the brushes a persistent, soft coaxing. The wands on his nipples sent tiny shocks straight to his groin, which was already stirring again, trapped and teased by the rolling pressure. It was a slow, inescapable reclamation of his nerves.
“You’re insane,” Jason breathed, but a smile tugged his raw lips.
“You’re participating,” Simon replied, his blue eyes sharp. He finally removed his hand from Jason’s armpit, only to drag both palms slowly down his damp sides, fingertips tracing each rib. Jason shivered, the touch a brand. Simon’s weight on his stomach was a comforting anchor in the rising sea of sensation.
Then Simon reached behind himself, fumbling for a moment in the equipment tray. His hand returned with two small, sleek objects Jason hadn’t noticed before: adjustable silicone clamps, connected by a fine chain. They weren’t punitive. They were precise.
Jason’s breath hitched. “What are those for?”
“A focal point,” Simon said, echoing Jason’s own earlier words. He brushed his thumbs over Jason’s already-pebbled, oversensitive nipples, making him jerk. “The vibration is diffuse. This is specific.”
He opened the first clamp. The silicone was cool. He placed it carefully, allowing the gentle pressure to build before clicking it shut at its lightest setting. The sensation was immediate and profound—a constant, pointed awareness that drowned out the wand’s buzz. Jason gasped, his back arching minutely.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, that’s… yeah.”
Simon attached the second one. The chain between them lay against Jason’s sternum, a cool, slight weight. The dual pressure created a feedback loop, a taut line of sensation that pulled his entire chest into focus. Every subtle movement Simon made on top of him, every increased rotation of the brushes, made the clamps shift just enough to steal his breath.
“Talk to me,” Simon said, his voice low. He wasn’t looking at the biometrics. He was looking at Jason’s face.
“It’s… building,” Jason managed. The machine’s hum seemed to deepen, or maybe his hearing was just tuning to it. The brushes on his inner thighs felt sharper, more insistent. “The thigh ones. They’re… faster.”
Simon didn’t check the tablet. He believed him. He slid his hands under Jason’s back, his fingers finding the notches of his spine. He massaged there, a counterpoint to everything else. “And here?”
“Good. That’s really good.” Jason’s words slurred. His mind was trying to process too many inputs. The sweet, maddening scribble against his perineum. The unyielding, rhythmic pressure framing his cock. The deep, claiming ache in his chest. Simon’s hands on his back, Simon’s weight on his belly, Simon’s eyes seeing every flinch.
Jason’s mind was in orbit. The soft tickling brushes against his hips & cock, and on his inner thighs & perineum. The teasing vibration of the wands on his nipples. Simon’s wandering fingers and claiming mouth. All after cumming to his friend’s fingers barely more than ten minutes ago.
He didn’t know he could feel this good. He didn’t know how long he would be kept like this, but if it was Simon’s doing, he’d stay here forever
A loud, sequential click echoed from the machine’s core. The whirring pitch shifted distinctly.
Level two.
The change wasn’t dramatic. It was a slight intensification of everything. The roller brushes pressed more firmly, the rhythm gaining a determined certainty. The sensation against his thighs and perineum became less a tease and more a direct, rhythmic demand. The clamps on his nipples seemed to tighten, though they hadn’t moved.
A shaky moan leaked from Jason’s throat. His hips twitched, a helpless stutter. “It changed.”
“I know,” Simon said. He leaned down, his lips hovering over Jason’s. “What do you need?”
The question was absurd. He needed everything to stop. He needed it to never stop. He needed Simon to dismantle the machine with a sledgehammer. He needed Simon to decrease the increment timer to five minutes.
“Don’t know,” Jason confessed, his eyes glassy. “Your hands. Just… your hands somewhere.”
Simon smiled. He obeyed. He brought his hands around, palms flat, and pressed them over Jason’s ears.
The world outside muted. The machine’s hum became a distant, rhythmic throb. His own ragged breathing echoed inside his skull. All that existed was the symphony of touch on his body—deepening, escalating, orchestrated but now felt in a terrifying vacuum. He was trapped in the sensorium of his own skin, with Simon as the only tether to the outside world.
Simon’s mouth moved, forming words Jason couldn’t hear. He was speaking into the silence he’d created. Jason could only read his lips, see the intensity in his eyes.
You are so beautiful like this.
Jason trembled. A tear, from overwhelm or emotion or both, tracked from the corner of his eye into his hairline. He was laid bare, utterly, in every possible way.
Simon removed his hands. Sound crashed back in—the machine, his own gasp, the soft rustle of Simon’s clothes.
“You with me?” Simon asked, his voice barely audible over the din.
Jason nodded, frantic. “Yeah. Don’t go.”
“Nowhere else to be.” Simon shifted his weight, his own arousal evident now against Jason’s stomach. He reached for the tablet, his finger hovering. “Next increment is in four minutes. I’m pausing it for ten minutes once level two finishes.”
He tapped the screen. The machine didn’t jump. It began a slow, seamless ramp-up, the whir climbing in pitch and power, the actuators moving with a new, purposeful strength.
“Why?” Jason choked out, his body beginning to strain against the restraints in earnest.
“Because you asked for my hands,” Simon said, his own breathing shortening. He placed his hands back on Jason, not to soothe, but to engage. One hand placed over the sensitive head of Jason’s cock, over the top of the relentless brushes. The other found the chain between the clamps and pulled, just slightly.
The cry that left Jason was raw, stripped of any pretense of laughter. It was pure sensory overload, a white-out of pleasure-pain that shattered the last of his coherence. The machine built its inexorable rhythm, Simon’s hands applied their devastating points of focus, and Jason simply fell apart, hurtling toward a new, unimaginable edge with the terrifying certainty that Simon would decide whether he flew or shattered.