Chapter 11: The Bargain
The silence after the storm was absolute. It was a thick, living thing, heavier than the velvet duvet currently tangled around Robert’s legs. The blindfold was gone, discarded on the black marble floor like a shed skin. He stared at the ceiling, his chest rising and falling in ragged, unsteady rhythms, the phantom sensation of silk restraints still singing on his wrists and ankles.
Beside him, the bed dipped under an impossible weight.Lucifer hadn’t spoken. He simply propped himself up on one elbow, his amber eyes scanning Robert’s face with an intensity that felt more invasive than anything that had come before. The air still vibrated with the echoes of Robert’s own voice, raw from screaming confessions he didn’t know he possessed.
I need to be controlled.To surrender.I need to feel owned. I need you to hurt me.
Each admission had been a key turning in a lock, and Lucifer had opened him, brutally, beautifully.Now, in the stark silence, Robert felt flayed. Not just physically, with the map of bite marks and reddened skin Lucifer had left on his thighs and chest, but psychically. The curated persona, the witty armor, the ‘Robert Downey Jr.’ of it all, was in a heap on the floor next to the blindfold.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Lucifer rumbled.His voice was low, scraped raw from use.
“My head’s a fucking circus,” Robert whispered back, his own voice a stranger’s. “Lots of clowns.No elephants, though. Disappointing.”
A ghost of a smile touched Lucifer’s lips. He reached out, and Robert flinched, a tiny, instinctive recoil. Lucifer’s hand paused, then continued, his fingertips tracing the line of Robert’s jaw with a gentleness that bordered on absurd after the earlier violence. The contrast was dizzying.“You okay?” The question was so ordinary it snapped something inside Robert.
A choked laugh escaped him.“Define okay. I just came harder than I have in two decades because you spanked me and called me a greedy fucking slut while I was tied to your bed.” He looked over, meeting those unsettling eyes.“So, yeah. Peachy.”
Lucifer’s thumb stroked his cheekbone.“You needed it.”
“I know.” The admission was quiet, final. He did know.That was the terrifying part. The need hadn’t been extinguished; it had been fed, and now it slept inside him, sated but deeply rooted. He turned onto his side, facing the giant.“Your turn.”
Lucifer’s brow furrowed. “My turn?”
“To say what you need.” Robert’s gaze didn’t waver. “It’s only fair.You peeled me open. Let me see a crack in the monolith.”
For a long moment, Lucifer said nothing. The neon glow from the window bleached the planes of his face, making him look carved from obsidian. His silence wasn’t refusal; it was a deep, careful excavation.When he finally spoke, the words were simple, devastating.
“I need not to be a novelty.”
The air left Robert’s lungs. He saw it then, the subtle tightening around Lucifer’s eyes, the wariness that lived behind the dominance. He was a seven-foot-tall spectacle.A myth people wanted to conquer, to brag about. Robert, with his world of red carpets and facades, understood the currency of being used.
He pushed himself up.He moved slowly, giving Lucifer every chance to pull away, and straddled his waist. The man beneath him was monumental, all hard muscle and restrained power, but Robert placed his palms on the vast expanse of Lucifer’s chest.He felt the strong, steady beat of his heart.
“You think that’s what this is?” Robert asked, his voice soft.
“It’s a possibility.”
“Fuck your possibility.” Robert leaned down, stopping when their lips were a breath apart.“I didn’t come back for a story. I came back because I couldn’t fucking breathe after I left. Because your hands on me felt like the only real thing in a planet made of plastic.”
He saw the exact moment Lucifer believed him. A subtle release in his shoulders, a dark fire igniting in his gaze. One massive hand came up to cradle the back of Robert’s head, fingers threading through his sweat-damp hair.
“Then show me,” Lucifer said, and it was a command, a plea, a vulnerability all at once.
Robert didn’t need a second invitation. He kissed him, and this kiss was nothing like the bruising clash at the door. It was deep, searching, a slow tangling of tongues that tasted of salt and spent passion. He could feel Lucifer’s cock, already hardening again against his thigh, a thick, insistent pressure.
Breaking the kiss, Robert slid down the bed, his mouth trailing a wet path down Lucifer’s sternum, over the hard ridges of his abdomen. He paused at the thatch of dark hair, breathing in the musky, intimate scent of him. He took Lucifer’s cock in his hand, already fully erect, a heavy, veined weight that made his own mouth water.
“You wanna know what I need right now?” Robert murmured, looking up the long line of Lucifer’s body.“I need to taste you. I need to hear you lose that famous control.”
Without waiting for an answer, he took the head into his mouth, swirling his tongue around the broad tip, lapping up the bead of pre-come that had already gathered. Lucifer hissed, a sharp intake of breath, and his hips bucked up involuntarily.
“Easy, big guy,” Robert said, pulling off for a second with a filthy, wet sound. “My turn to drive.”
He engulfed him again, taking him deeper, using his hand to work the base. He focused on the sensations—the salty-skin taste, the hot, smooth texture, the way Lucifer’s stomach muscles clenched under his other hand. He sucked, hard, using every trick he knew, his world narrowing to the weight on his tongue and the stifled groans above him.Lucifer’s hands fisted in the sheets. “Fuck, Robert…” The use of his name, stripped of any pretense, sent a jolt straight to Robert’s groin.
He redoubled his efforts, bobbing his head faster, taking him deeper until his throat relaxed and he could take him all. He swallowed around the intrusion, and Lucifer cursed, a raw, guttural sound that was pure music.
“I’m gonna come,” Lucifer growled, a warning.
Robert just hummed in approval, his own cock aching and neglected.The vibration tipped Lucifer over the edge. With a roar that seemed to shake the very foundations of the room, Lucifer erupted into Robert’s mouth. Robert swallowed, again and again, taking every hot, bitter pulse, his own need cresting in a wave of desperate empathy.
When he finally pulled off, breathing heavily, Lucifer was spent beneath him, his chest heaving.For a moment, he looked young, unguarded, utterly wrecked.
Robert crawled back up his body, his own erection dragging against Lucifer’s thigh. He kissed him, letting Lucifer taste himself. Lucifer’s arms wrapped around him, rolling them over in one fluid motion so Robert was pinned beneath that incredible weight.
“My turn again,” Lucifer breathed against his mouth, and there was a dark, playful promise in it.
He manhandled Robert onto his stomach.Robert went willingly, burying his face in the pillow that smelled of Lucifer. He felt hands on his hips, lifting his ass into the air. There was no prep this time, just the slick head of Lucifer’s cock, still wet from Robert’s mouth, pressing against his hole.
“You’re still open for me,” Lucifer murmured, a note of possession in his voice.“Always,” Robert gasped, pushing back against him.
Lucifer sheathed himself in one long, relentless stroke.Robert cried out, the stretch a perfect, burning fullness. Lucifer didn’t move, just held himself there, buried to the hilt, letting Robert feel all of him.
“You feel that?” Lucifer whispered, bending over him, his mouth against Robert’s ear.“That’s not just me inside you. That’s you letting me in.”
Then he began to move. This wasn’t the punishing pace from the bar, or the measured, rewarded strokes from the blindfold.This was deep, rolling, possessive. Each thrust pushed Robert higher up the bed, each withdrawal left him hollow. Lucifer’s hands gripped his hips hard enough to bruise, anchoring him, claiming him with every drive forward.
The room filled with the sound of skin slapping skin, of labored breathing, of Robert’s broken, repeated litany of “yes” and “please” and “Lucifer.” He was hurtling toward the edge, his own cock swinging, heavy and leaking beneath him.
Lucifer shifted his angle, and on the next thrust, he brushed Robert’s prostate dead-on.White heat exploded behind Robert’s eyes. He came violently, his body seizing, his release splattering the dark sheets beneath him untouched. The spasms of his climax clamped around Lucifer, pulling a final, ragged groan from the man above him as he emptied himself deep inside Robert once more.
They collapsed together, a tangle of exhausted limbs. Lucifer softened inside him but didn’t pull out, his arms a vise around Robert’s chest.The humming silence returned, but it was different now.Softer. Threaded with the syncopated rhythm of their breathing.
Robert knew, with a clarity that was both chilling and calming, that there would be no easy exit from this, no casual walk back into the neon-lit night. The lines were crossed.The masks were off. He was lying in the aftermath with a man who was both a stranger and the most familiar person he’d ever known.
As sleep began to pull at him, heavy and irresistible, he felt Lucifer’s lips brush the nape of his neck.“Stay,” was all he said.
And Robert, for the first time in a very long time, had no intention of doing anything else.