Chapter 7: Alistair
The last of the takeaway containers sat between them on the low table, greasy and emptied. The room was warm, steeped in the earthy smells of cumin and lamb, underpinned by the familiar scent of aged leather from the furniture. John leaned against the sofa, sated and loose-limbed. Silas sat beside him, not touching, his gaze fixed on the middle distance, tracing ghosts in the patterns of the worn rug.
“Alistair,” Silas began, the name leaving his lips like a stone dropped into still water. “He wasn’t a monster. Not in the grand, cartoonish sense. That would be easier to explain.” He paused, collecting the memory. “He was a man of absolutely no special features. Average height. Mousy brown hair that thinned. A face you’d forget in a crowd. I think that was the root of it. The sheer, unremarkable nothingness of him. It made him cold. Calculating. He used charm like a scalpel—precise, sterile, and only when necessary to make an incision.”
John stayed quiet, watching the play of shadow and lamplight on Silas’s profile.
“It was 1974. I was seventeen. Silas Smith. A skinny, obvious queer boy with bitten nails and a Midlands accent that stuck out in London like a sore thumb. My father had put me on a train with a suitcase and twenty pounds. ‘Sort yourself out,’ he’d said. The sign in the window of ‘Alistair Blackwood & Son, Bespoke Tailors’ was literally my last hope. I had no prospects. Nowhere to go. The ‘& Son’ was a fiction, a tradition. I didn’t know that then.”
He took a slow breath, his precise movements stilled. “He took me in. Gave me a cot in the back room. Fed me. In return, he... reshaped me. His philosophy was simple. Base desires—hunger, lust, pride, even the desire for comfort—were distractions. They clouded focus. The only path to true mastery, to loyalty, to worth, was through absolute discipline. And the ultimate discipline was submission. The annihilation of the self in service.”
Silas’s voice remained steady, a clinical recitation. “The training was relentless. Eighteen-hour days. Mastering the pick stitch, the blanket stitch, the buttonhole. If my fingers shook from exhaustion, he’d make me start again. If I grimaced, he’d strike the back of my head, not hard enough to damage, just enough to jolt. ‘Your face is a tool, Smith. It displays courtesy, confidence, or blank receptivity. It does not display you.’ He was exorcising me. Erasing Silas Smith.”
John felt a cold knot forming in his gut.
“The clients… that was part of the curriculum. ‘They come for a fantasy, Smith. Your body is part of the cloth now. It must drape to their need.’ The first time… I was eighteen. A barrister with thick, clammy hands. Alistair stood behind the changing room curtain, listening. When the man pushed me to my knees, I hesitated. Alistair’s voice slithered through the velvet. ‘Serve.’ It wasn’t an order. It was a verdict on my worth. I served. Afterward, Alistair made me unpick and re-stitch an entire jacket sleeve for my hesitation. The punishment wasn’t for the act, but for the reluctance. The job and the giving were to be seamless. He called it ‘integration.’”
A long silence stretched. The fridge kicked in with a low hum.
“He adopted me legally when I was twenty-one. Smith was shed. I became Blackwood. It was the final piece of erasure. The business, the client list, the legacy… it required a son. I was the appliance that fit the socket.” Silas finally turned his head, his black eyes meeting John’s. There was no self-pity there, just a vast, weathered truth. “He died in this flat, in his sleep. I found him. I buried him. I took the keys. And I promised myself the ‘& Son’ would remain, but the meaning would change. The discipline would stay. The precision. But the submission… that would become a choice. A shared hunger, not a commanded fast.”
The quiet that followed was immense, saturated with the echo of a young man’s erased life. John saw it now—the source of Silas’s patience, his terrifying focus, his ability to compartmentalize. It was a survival mechanism honed in a crucible of calculated cruelty.
Without a word, John shifted. He closed the space between them, his big, muscular arms encircling Silas, pulling the older man’s back against his broad chest. He held him tightly, not a gentle embrace, but a firm, anchoring press, his face buried in the silver hair. Silas went rigid for a second, a lifetime of conditioning resisting the unscripted warmth, then he melted, a full-body sigh shuddering through him.
“I’m so sorry that happened,” John whispered, his voice thick. “I’m so fucking sorry, Silas.” He felt a hot, unexpected anger rise in his throat. “It makes me so angry. I wish that bastard was still alive so I could find him and… just fucking punch him right in his forgettable face. For you.”
Silas trembled in his arms. A sound escaped him, a wet, choked gasp that wasn’t a sob but something more profound. He turned within the circle of John’s arms, facing him. His eyes were glistening, but dry. He looked utterly astonished.
“No one,” Silas breathed, the words fragile, “has ever said anything like that to me. No one has ever been angry for me. They’ve been angry at me, disgusted by me, or simply… indifferent. You care. You want to protect me.” He cupped John’s jaw, his thumb stroking the stubble. “But you don’t want to smother this. You don’t want to change what I am. You see the shape the damage took, and you… you don’t look away. You kiss it.”
“That’s because I love you,” John said. The words came out quietly, easily, as if he was simply noting the time. They hung in the air, simple and monumental.
Silas stared at him. The silence stretched, breathless. Then, a slow, trembling smile broke across his thin lips, transforming his whole face. “Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, John.” He leaned forward, until their foreheads touched. “I love you, too.”
They stayed like that, breathing the same air, the words settling into their bones. After a moment, John spoke again, his voice raspy. “It’s been what, a few weeks? It’s insane. It’s the most intense thing I’ve ever lived.”
“It is,” Silas agreed.
“But I’ve never… I’ve never felt so comfortable. So seen. You don’t just put up with my shit, you… get it. You work with it. You don’t want me to be less hairy, or more ambitious, or… quieter. You just want me.”
“And you,” Silas said, “see the craft, not just the perversion. You see the man, not just the mystery. You accept the history without needing to chain yourself to it.”
John leaned in and found Silas’s mouth. This kiss was different from all the others. It was not hungry, not devouring, not experimental. It was a slow, deep, claiming confirmation. A silent yes to everything just spoken. John’s tongue swept into Silas’s mouth, tasting the ghost of shared spices and a future. Silas’s hands came up to tangle in John’s messy hair, pulling him closer, a soft moan vibrating between them.
The kiss deepened, turning hotter. The emotional tide began to channel into physical need, an urgent, grounding force. John’s hands slid down Silas’s back, grasping the firm curve of his ass through his trousers, squeezing hard. Silas ground his hips forward, the evidence of his arousal pressing against John’s thigh.
“I need you,” John growled against his mouth. “Need to be inside you. Right now.”
“Yes,” was all Silas said, a fervent exhale.
They stumbled up from the floor, a tangled, kissing mass of limbs, and made their way to the bedroom. The few items of clothing they had on were shed in a frenzied moment, a shared, clumsy desperation. Soon they were naked, tumbling onto the sheets that still smelled of their earlier, chemical-scented union.
John covered Silas’s body with his own, the weight a crushing comfort. He kissed him savagely, biting his lower lip, sucking his tongue. His hands were everywhere—kneading Silas’s arse, pinching his nipples, rough and demanding. This wasn’t about service or worship. This was possession, communion, a physical manifesto of his love and his fury on Silas’s behalf.
“Oil,” John panted.
Silas reached blindly to the nightstand, handing John the familiar crystal bottle. John slicked his fingers, his eyes locked on Silas’s. He pushed Silas’s legs up and back, spreading him open. He didn’t tease. He pushed two oil-slick fingers into him all at once, a brutal, stretching invasion.
Silas cried out, arching off the bed. “God, yes… more.”
John scissored his fingers, working him open with rough, efficient strokes. He leaned down, taking Silas’s cock into his mouth, swallowing him deep, his throat working around him. The dual sensation—the devastating stretch inside, the wet, sucking heat on his cock—unraveled Silas completely. He babbled, a stream of filth and pleading. “Fuck me, John, please, I need your cock, I need you to fuck me like you mean it, like you own it, please.”
John released his cock with a pop. He coated himself liberally, the oil cool on his heated skin. He positioned himself, the broad, leaking head of his cock nudging against Silas’s well-stretched entrance. He held himself there, his muscles trembling with restraint.
“Look at me,” John commanded, echoing Silas’s own past instruction.
Silas’s black eyes, blown wide with need, found his.
“I love you,” John gritted out, and slammed home in one devastating thrust.
The air left Silas’s lungs in a punched-out groan. John buried himself to the hilt, their bodies crashing together. He didn’t wait. He set a punishing, violent rhythm, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in with a force that shook the bed frame. Each thrust was a word: Mine. Seen. Loved. Protected.
“Fuck! Yes! Harder!” Silas roared, his hands scrabbling at John’s broad back, leaving red trails. He wrapped his legs high around John’s waist, taking every savage inch, meeting each plunge with a downward snap of his hips. The sounds were raw, animalistic—the wet slap of skin, the creak of the bed, their guttural, overlapping cries.
John fucked him with a focused, passionate violence. It was an exorcism of a different kind—driving out the ghost of Alistair’ cold, transactional touch with this feverish, claiming heat. He leaned down, capturing Silas’s mouth in a messy, biting kiss, swallowing his moans.
“You’re mine,” John grunted against his lips, pistoning into him. “You’re beautiful. You’re loved.”
Silas was sobbing now, tears cutting through the sweat on his temples, not from pain but from an overwhelming catharsis. “Yours! God, John, I’m gonna come, I’m gonna—”
John’s pace became frantic, ragged. He reached between them, his big hand fisting Silas’s slick cock, jerking him in time with his brutal thrusts. “Come for me. Come with me inside you.”
The command shattered Silas. With a strangled shout, he came, thick, hot pulses of cum striping his own stomach and chest, his channel clamping down on John’s driving cock in frantic, rhythmic pulses. The intense, viselike grip dragged John over the edge.
“Silas!” he roared, his body locking as he slammed in one last, deep time. He throbbed inside him, pumping his own release in hot, endless spurts, filling him, marking him from the inside out. The pulses seemed to go on forever, a physical echo of his confession.
He collapsed, his full weight pressing Silas into the mattress, their sweat-slick skin sealing together. They gasped for air, hearts hammering against each other’s ribs. Slowly, John softened, slipped out. He rolled to the side, gathering Silas against him, tucking the older man’s head under his chin.
They lay in the wreckage of the sheets, sticky and spent. The silence now was profound, peaceful. John pressed a kiss to Silas’s damp hair.
“Silas Blackwood,” he murmured.
“John,” Silas whispered back, his voice scratchy and replete. He traced a finger over the hairs on John’s chest. “My love.”
Outside, a light rain began to patter against the window, sealing them into their dim, warm world. The shop below was silent. The past, for now, was just a story that had been told. The present was the steady beat of two hearts, finally in sync.
. The rain whispered against the glass, a private sound for their private world. John’s fingers drew slow circles on the damp skin of Silas’s shoulder.
“The sign,” John said into the dimness. “Outside. ‘Blackwood & Son’. Was there ever anyone in the picture to fill that role? Before?”
Silas was quiet for a moment, his breath warm on John’s chest. “Three,” he admitted, the word soft. “Young men. I had hopes. They had… curiosity.” He shifted. “It was always too much for them. The work downstairs was one thing—the clandestine measuring, the charged fittings. The reality upstairs, the peculiarity of my needs, the history in the walls… they found it distasteful. Weird. They left.”
John’s hand stilled. “I’m grateful for that. Otherwise, I’d never have had a chance.”
“A strange calculus, isn’t it?” Silas murmured. “Their rejection paved the way for you. The wrong key for the wrong lock.”
John propped himself up on an elbow, looking down at Silas’s face, half-shadowed in the gloom. “Are you asking me something? With that ‘& Son’ talk?”
“I might be.” Silas’s black eyes held his. “Am I hearing you correctly? Might there be an interest?”
A laugh, low and surprised, rumbled in John’s chest. “I thought I’d be too old for an apprenticeship. For a ‘son’.”
“Nonsense. You’re only in your late twenties, surely.”
“Thirty-two,” John said, the chuckle softening into a smile.
“Historically,” Silas said, his thumb stroking John’s lip, “the age gap has been wider. It means nothing. Interest matters. Willingness to learn the skills matters. Feeling the shop in your bones matters. Do you?”
John didn’t hesitate. “I do. I feel it. This place… it’s in me now.” He sighed, a contented sound. “On that note, I need to get my image together tomorrow. Something that better fits the shop. Can you help? You know someone?”
“I’ll take you to my barber,” Silas said immediately. “But John… don’t lose too much of yourself to it. I like you just as you are. The hair, the stubble… it’s you.”
“In that case,” John said, rolling onto his back and stretching, the muscles in his arms and chest pulling taut, “I need to find time to work out. Properly. Balance out all the gentle work downstairs with my hands. If you want to keep this physique, I can’t just be hunched over buttonholes all day.”
Silas traced a line down John’s sternum, over the gentle swell of his stomach. “I know a gym. More of a boxing club, really. Old-fashioned. Smells of sweat and liniment. I go sometimes, to stretch. To keep some shape.” He paused, a faint smile playing on his lips. “And yes, to look at the hot young men sweating.”
John raised an eyebrow, a sly grin spreading. “You ever hook up with any of them?”
“One or two,” Silas admitted, his gaze frank. “It was transactional. Very much me giving them what they wanted. A release. Nothing for me. Not like this.” His hand settled possessively on John’s hip. “Not like with you.”
“So,” John said, rolling back toward him, his voice a low tease. “No competition for my affections, then?”
Silas let out a loud, unexpected guffaw, a rich, unfettered sound that seemed to startle even him. “You are a man made of dreams for someone like me, Jonathan. No one will ever compare.”
“Jonathan, is it?”
“If you don’t mind,” Silas said, a rare flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “I rather like the more formal name. It suits the new life. The ‘& Son’.”
John thought about it, the weight of the new name settling over him like a well-cut shirt. “Jonathan,” he repeated, testing it. He smiled. “Yeah. I actually love it. Feels like a renaming. A fresh start in the same skin.”
They fell into an easy sleep tangled together, the rain a gentle lullaby. Dawn filtered grey and soft through the window, revealing them still entwined. The naked heat of their bodies under the sheets had stirred a familiar, urgent pressure.
John awoke to the solid, demanding ache of his own erection pressed against Silas’s thigh. Silas was already awake, watching him, his own hard length a firm line against John’s hip. A silent, hungry understanding passed between them. No words were needed.
John pushed Silas onto his back, his mouth descending on Silas’s with a warm, sleepy passion. He kissed him deeply, tasting sleep, while his hand slid between them, fingers wrapping around Silas’s hard cock. He pumped him slowly, his grip firm, his thumb swiping over the slick head.
“Want you in my mouth,” John murmured against his lips. “Need to taste you.”
He slid down the bed, his broad shoulders pushing Silas’s thighs apart. The morning light caught the silver in Silas’s pubic hair, the deep pink of his erect cock. John didn’t play. He licked a thick, wet stripe from base to tip, then took the head into his mouth, sucking hard.
“Christ, Jonathan,” Silas gasped, his hands flying to John’s messy hair.
John worked him with a focused, filthy dedication. He used his tongue broadly against the sensitive frenulum, then hollowed his cheeks, sucking harder, taking him deeper with each bob of his head. Drool slicked his lips and dripped onto Silas’s balls. The noises were obscenely wet, vulgar in the quiet morning. John pulled off with a pop, breathing heavily.
“Your turn,” he growled, his own cock throbbing. “Suck me. Make me fucking scream.”
They pivoted on the bed in a clumsy, eager scramble, a mutual, wordless agreement. Silas positioned himself between John’s spread legs, his thin lips parting. He didn’t just take John in; he devoured him, swallowing his impressive girth in one relentless, deep-throated plunge. John cried out, a ragged shout that echoed off the bedroom walls. Silas set a brutal pace, his head bobbing furiously, his throat stretching and relaxing with a practiced, greedy rhythm.
John fisted the sheets, his hips involuntarily bucking up into that divine, wet heat. “Oh, fuck, Silas! Right there! Suck it, you fucking cocksucker, suck my dick!”
Silas moaned around him, the vibration traveling straight to John’s core. He worked John with a desperate intensity, one hand cupping and rolling his heavy balls, the other reaching between John’s legs to press a dry finger against his hole. The dual assault was devastating. John’s climax built, a tsunami gathering force in his groin.
“I’m gonna come!” he warned, his voice stripped raw.
Silas redoubled his efforts, his throat a slippery, milking vise. He took him all, until his nose was buried in John’s pubic hair, and held him there.
With a final, shattered shout, John came. His release pulsed in hot, bitter jets down Silas’s willing throat. Silas swallowed convulsively, greedily, not spilling a drop, his own neglected cock twitching and leaking against the sheet beneath him. He drank John down until he was soft, then lapped gently at the oversensitive head, making John whimper.
Spent, John pulled him up, their bodies colliding. He kissed Silas deeply, tasting himself on the older man’s tongue. He reached between them, his hand slick with spit, and wrapped his fingers around Silas’s dripping cock.
“My turn,” John whispered, and began to stroke him, a fast, tight, punishing rhythm. He bit Silas’s neck, sucked on his earlobe. “Come for me. Paint your stomach. Let me see it.”
It took only a few relentless, perfect pulls. Silas arched, a silent scream contorting his features, and erupted. Thick, white ropes of cum streaked across his abdomen, over John’s working fist. John stroked him through it, milking him until he was spent and shuddering.
They collapsed, spent and sticky, the morning sun now bright on the cum drying on Silas’s skin. John nuzzled into his neck.
“Jonathan,” Silas breathed, the name a benediction.
“Silas,” John replied, smiling into his skin.
The shop, the day, the future—all of it could wait a little longer.