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johannestevans · 2 months ago

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A Clean Pig

Erotic short. DI Phil Hutchinson tries to get in close with the son of a criminal.

Detective Inspector Phil Hutchinson, following up a last-ditch lead on an anonymous and impossible-to-locate narcotics distributor, attempts to get close enough to surveil her son, a young man called Adrian Gillespie, who uses a wheelchair. He gets closer than he intended, and is rewarded — and punished — as per.

13.6k, rated E, cis M/trans M. Written for a commission. Both parties are adults (49 & 27) and fully consenting throughout. Contains degradation and humiliation, age gap, dom/sub dynamics with the younger trans man dominating, mild cock & ball torture, sadomasochism, dirty talk, obedience & discipline, self-bukkake, mild drunkenness.

CWs for mild homophobia and transphobia, mild ableism, referenced drug use, self-esteem & identity issues. Adrian is an ambulatory wheelchair user and also uses a cane and other mobility & assistive devices — note references throughout to his own disability, bodily scarring, and chronic pain, from Phil’s limited POV only.

Set in London in the 2020s. Set in my Magic Beholden universe, readable completely standalone. Phil Hutchinson is non-magical, but it is implied in several places that Adrian and his family are magical themselves.

Also on Medium / / Also on Patreon / / Also on Ao3.

“The two of us have some time to kill, it seems, whilst my housekeeper gets her pacemaker double-checked. How would you like us to spend that time together, Detective Inspector Hutchinson?”

Phil swallows, his mouth feeling dry, and he stares into Gillespie’s eyes, feeling rooted to the spot, feeling paralysed in some way.

“I’m not gay,” is what he says, which is fucking embarrassing, because he could have said fucking anything, or at least thought about what he was going to say.

“That’s alright,” Gillespie says softly. “Nor am I.”

He leans forward again and Phil automatically closes his eyes, realises he’s bracing himself for what Gillespie is going to taste like, for the taste of whatever allergen-free lip gloss he wears, for whatever he’s been drinking, bubble tea or coffee or whatever else—

---

It’s not that Phil has an issue with queers – he doesn’t.

There’s queers on the force these days, not so much of the lisping, mincing sort he remembers on TV growing up, except maybe behind the desks in the office typing up notes and keeping track of memos and appointments in between looking at drag videos on their phones, but real men who happen to take it up the arse, or give it – not counting the lesbians, who have been halfway openly in the force since they let women join up.

He doesn’t see the point in all this LGBTQRSTUVW shit, doesn’t see what the fuck “inclusion” has to do with anything – it’s all very well hiring a copper who takes it up the bum or wears a dress on his nights off, but it seems the next step is hiring ones with one leg or are blind or whatever fucking else, and he does think a line has to be drawn somewhere – but he doesn’t actually have a problem with queers. He’s put his cock in the mouth of pretty boys happily enough, as much as he has a pretty girl. He wouldn’t consider himself bisexual – he doesn’t really put up with this guff about identity, in general – but he can appreciate a good-looking man.

No, he wouldn’t want to sit next to a very obvious out gay on the bus, if he ever took the bus, and he doesn’t like touching the ones he’s cuffing, but it’s not because they’re queer, he doesn’t especially like cuffing any man – or woman, for that manner. Criminals are criminals: they’re generally filthy, or sick, or ODed, or something fucking like it. No matter how big a woman’s tits are or how pretty she might usually be, she’s usually less so in the course of an arrest, covered in spit or shit or vomit, sweating her clothes off, shaking, sobbing; the same might be said of a particularly handsome man. Even the finest arse in the world is less appealing when it stinks of piss and cannabis smoke.

He's been through a few of that sort, of recent – they shut down a brothel operating on the westside, all London girls done up with cheap make-up like they were putting it on with fucking cement trowels, what tits they had pushed to the ceiling out of their blouses, in ripped tights and short skirts. Cheap girls – properly cheap girls, stupid and cheap as chips, riddled with any and all diseases, most of them bruised like apples from one man or another, one pimp or another.

Brothels, Phil doesn’t like, and whores he likes even less – it’s difficult to feel sympathy for the stupid bints when they just make the same stupid fucking decisions that bring them back to the same fucking place again and again. There’s always a tragic hooker on TV – these girls are too thick to really be worth extending sympathy toward, although there was at least one enterprising member of the bunch.

Cheryl has zipped off now with her cash in the bag, but apparently she was not selling what the other girls was selling, or at the very least, was offering a host of other goods in conjunction with the old reliable, and it’s because of her Phil has a headache from six overlapping clouds of cheap perfume interviewing these idiots about who she was, what she looked like, where she was from.

Cheap whores in a house, unfortunately, are much like cats locked up together – no matter all the videos you see of them acting sweet together online, when the cameras are off they’re clawing each other’s eyes out and swiping off each other’s plates. Most of today he’s learned very little about Cheryl, and far too much about how Tamzin stole Chelsea’s boyfriend and her car and her fucking Nintendo DSi, whatever the fuck that is.

“I hope you didn’t want to go home,” says Baz as Phil leans back in his seat, making the cheap plastic creak under his weight, and Phil gives him a foul look.

“Oh, fuck off,” he groans. “I’ve wasted enough of my fucking time today—”

“You’ll like this one,” Baz says, almost sing-song. “No perfume in sight – our boy’s allergic.”

“Allergic?”

“Adrian Gillespie,” says Baz, holding up one of the little sheets they write tips on, and Phil blinks at him, but holds out his hand for the sheet and scans it, holding it by the mark from the paperclip. Okay, allergic makes sense there – that boy is allergic to damn near fucking everything.

It’s just an extra detail from someone else the lads brought in earlier – part of the reason they were chasing up Cheryl Casey (or Canton, or Cheese, or Elias) is because some of the harder stuff she was peddling had come from a rather familiar batch of coke, and Cheryl would potentially be a lead to her boss, who they’d taken to calling Frances Pinard, after the winery that her operation seemed to do a lot of its imports through.

They didn’t know much about her, except that at one time – some twenty-something years ago – her name had been Catherine Priscilla Alnwick, and that at that back then she had given birth to Adrian Gillespie. They were fairly certain she was still in contact with him even though he’d been raised by his father, although beyond that, it was anybody’s fucking guess.

The lad went abroad regularly, but swapped around between planes and friends’ boats and the ferry and the train depending on what he felt like, and his flat had proved somewhat difficult to do any fucking reconnaissance on, owing to the fact that he was some sort of tech fanatic and had cyber security out the fucking wazoo, not to mention tinting and mood lighting on all his windows, and soundproofing, and whatever the fuck else.

They were fairly certain he wasn’t involved in his mother’s drug trade – for fuck’s sake, the little prick was in a wheelchair – but he was still a valuable connection, and according to a GP nurse Jez and Presley had been interviewing earlier because her boss was embezzling, he had a physio appointment tonight, eight o’clock. She’d mentioned it in the interview because Gillespie’s appointments were always at odd times in odd places, but had explained to the cops that she was reasonably certain that had nothing to do with her boss robbing money off of private patients. None of Gillespie’s cheques ever went anywhere funny and none of his accounts were on the locked server – he was just a bit paranoid on top of being eccentric, so they just set up the appointments wherever he pleased.

“Well, at least all that coke Jez snorts hasn’t completely burnt a hole in his brain,” says Phil as he slides his jacket on. “If he remembered Gillespie’s name.”

“I think it was Presley that remembered it,” Bav says. “Or at least, it was Presley that wrote it down – I don’t remember what his handwriting was like before the coke, but I certainly can’t fucking read Jez’ writing now.”

“I’ll nip over and see what’s what,” Phil says. “But if I don’t find anything good, I’m fucking going home, Sarge.”

“Go with God, mate,” Bav says with more of a wave than a salute, and Phil huffs out an amused sound under his breath as he shoves his keys and his wallet into his pockets.

See, Bav’s a queer, according to talk around the place, and Phil has nothing against him – nothing against, as it happens, Adrian Gillespie, who wears pastel blues and pinks and lavenders, and dyes his hair the same colours, and has fucking stickers on his wheelchair and wears a sunflower lanyard, and whatever the fuck else. He doesn’t know if Gillespie fucks, and if he fucks, if they’re hes, shes, theys, its, or something new they’ve not started putting in the hate crime slideshows yet, but if not a homo in action, he’s certainly a homo in spirit.

No, it’s not queers he has an issue with, or slags wanting to charge admission, or even drugs. Phil can laugh with queers and slags, so long as they’re recently washed and not too drunk, and fuck it, he likes drugs himself.

It’s fucking crime that he has a problem with – the people it hurts, the messes it causes, the messes he has to fucking clean up, and worse than that, fill out paperwork for afterwards.

Adrian Gillespie, pretty homo in a chair he may be, is at least not much of a mess in himself – the value in this young man is in his connections, and subtly trying to feel them out without setting off his paranoia or perhaps tipping off his mother has been a fucking challenge so far. He has a driver who takes him places, a man in his forties they’ve not been able to find a legal name for who goes by Laborious King, who comes from up north near Scarborough way, and an assistant called Hanzalah from fucking Bangladesh, who they’ve not been able to find much by way of background on either.

Laborious is in his forties, and Hanzalah is about the same, Phil would guess – they’ve only been able to find what must be his dad’s records, who entered the UK in 1972 and by now should be nearly fucking ninety, though they’ve seen no particular sign of him.

Frustratingly, both King and Hanzalah live in the same fancy house that Gillespie does – same as his gardener and housekeeper, a lesbian couple. It’d be a Hell of a time sink for someone who’s not actually suspected of any criminal activity themselves, trying to get somebody undercover into Gillespie’s household, but it’s not been an option from the beginning, because his four people have worked for him and his father since the place was built when Gillespie was a young lad, and they’ve not had any staff changeover since, except for Gillespie’s father’s assistant going with him when he moved back up north once Gillespie was old enough to look after himself.

Gillespie lives in a wheelchair-accessible manse in Chislehurst with a nice, fancy vegetable garden, and most of his friends come to visit him there rather than his going out to meet them. He goes out to pride events here and there or occasional drag shows and the like, but he doesn’t go to any regular events that would make him easy to track and surveil, although at least with his having a driver and a car, a tail doesn’t generally have to worry about losing him on the Tube.

Hanzalah and King go to the same mosque and go to a few regular events in the city, mostly Muslim charity things and occasional social nights; the Quayles go to a regular fresh grocer’s market and Andreca, the housekeeper, goes to an AA meeting most Tuesdays, but none of them ever discuss their work, let alone any specifics of who they work for and what he gets up to when he’s out of sight and out of earshot of any interested parties.

This address is for a fancy little dancing studio two streets removed from Piccadilly Circus, and when Phil drives past he doesn’t see Gillespie’s red V-Class on the street, but that’s no surprise, with parking in London the way it fucking is, King could have put the car fucking anywhere.

King and Hanzalah are visible in a coffee shop on the corner overlooking the studio, looking for all the world like two men having a regular old chat, a set of coffee cups between them, but they’re still looking into the streets, both of them, Hanzalah looking down one street and King keeping an eye on the other side.

The studio’s hours online are listed as closed from noon on Thursdays, but Phil gets into the building from the fire exit shared with the bookshop downstairs, and he’s quiet and careful about ascending the stairs up to the studio. It’s a big, fancy space, all wide fucking windows as if anyone would to enjoy the fucking view from here.

He steps down the corridor and goes past two empty studios with the lights off, including the biggest ballet one that overlooks the street – Gillespie and his physio are in one of the smaller classrooms, and Gillespie’s wheelchair is just outside of the room beside the door, him and his physio in the middle of the place under the bright lights.

Gillespie is taking a break, his surprisingly toned forearms braced on a central bar and his head forward – sweat glistens on his body, and his blond and lavender hair, pushed back from his face with a pink headband, looks slightly damp as well. He’s in black leggings and a soft cream jersey shirt that hugs tight to his chest, fuck, but he’s not as skinny as Phil expected. He’s been deceptively muscular under that tie-dye denim jacket and those ripped pink-dyed jeans.

It’s automatic, the glance down to his crotch – people do it even with dogs, he hears, glance at their dicks – and he’s surprised at how little of a bulge he sees, wonders if this kid fucking tucks for his dance classes.

As he watches, Gillespie stands up straight again, keeping his hands on the bar in front of him, and then he straightens his back and brings up one of his knees, extending it outward in a dancer’s kick before bringing it down again.

He’s surprised. He’d thought he was fucking wheelchair-bound, that he was a paraplegic, didn’t realise he could actually stand and walk, let alone dance like this. Sure, his legs are unsteady in places, and now and then his physio puts out an arm for him to steady himself on the bigger dancer’s weight, but he has genuine, real strength here, or at least, he used to, and genuine skill.

Phil looks to Gillespie’s chair, which has a pastel blue gym bag resting open on the seat, a towel and jacket slung over the back handles, and he leans forward and slips his hand into the pocket, feeling for Gillespie’s phone and pointedly not picking it out. What with this kid’s sense of security, he knows it’ll probably be primed to take a picture of anyone who tries to unlock it that isn’t Gillespie himself, so he reaches for Gillespie’s wallet instead – or, more accurately, his fucking purse, which is the same lavender as his hair, and he takes a quick few pictures of each card inside. His debit cards, his fucking Clubcard, a few cards for different coffee shops, a gay bookshop in Soho, a few sex clubs—

“You ever miss bacon, Laborious?” asks a voice behind him, and Phil whips around, straightening up to stare at both men. Neither King nor Hanzalah are particularly tall, both a little shorter than Phil himself, but they’re both decently beefy, and they fill the corridor, standing shoulder to shoulder like they are.

“You know, Hanz, I don’t,” says King. “Even the stink of pork, I’ve come to really dislike. Makes me sick.”

“Me too, actually,” says Hanzalah. “Let’s air this corridor out, why don’t we?”

Phil stiffens, tossing Gillespie’s wallet aside and stiffening, standing up straight.

The door opens sharply, and the physio, tall, aggressively handsome cunt that he is, looks furious, but Gillespie lays a hand on his muscular chest before he can say a thing.

“This is a private session, sir,” he says softly, his accent faintly Scottish, most of the Edinburgh poshness worn down by all the years he’s spent in London. “And this studio is technically supposed to be closed.”

“Sorry for not knocking to let you know I was here, Mr Gillespie,” Phil says. “I’m Detective Inspector Phil Hutchinson, I just wanted a word with you. Wanted to let you finish your physio session before I interrupted.”

“How’d you get in?” demands the physio. “What, you get in the backway?”

“Don’t be so judgemental, Charlie,” says Gillespie, not breaking eye contact with Phil. He must be wearing contacts – Phil never realised before, his but eyes are the same fucking lavender his hair is dyed, a wholly unnatural colour, but very pretty. “Who amongst us doesn’t enjoy going in through the back, from time to time?”

“You want us to take him out, Adrian?” Hanzalah asks, and Gillespie looks Phil up and down.

“Look,” Phil says, but Gillespie talks over him.

“Please, Hanz, if you would. Wrap him up to go for me, would you?”

Wrap him up?

The fuck does—

There’s a sudden explosion of rainbows before his eyes, brighter in colour than the pastel colours Gillespie’s denim jacket is tie-dyed, and then there’s a wave of blackness over it, and he’s slipping, or falling, or—

Something.

* * *

When Phil wakes up, it’s in a dangerously plush, comfortable armchair. His arms have been harnessed behind his back with surprisingly comfortable rope, and most of his clothes have been stripped off him – he’s only in his boxers and vest, and when he looks to the side he sees that his trousers and shirt are folded neatly on top of one another, his boots beneath the chair they’re folded on, his coat hung over the back of it.

Adrian Gillespie is sitting back in one of those fucking roller chairs that videogame people use, although it doesn’t have the stink of weed and bollocksweat and spilt cider Phil is used to them coming with – this one is cream and pink with a cat’s face and ears detailed into the top part of the seat, and Gillespie is sitting back in it with one leg crossed over the other, buffing his nails.

“What exactly is wrong with you?” Phil asks, his voice slightly hoarse, and Gillespie’s perfectly threaded blond eyebrows raise in concern.

“Oh, Detective Inspector, you sound positively parched,” he says, and uncrossing his legs he rolls his chair across the room, picking up a metal cup with a straw and rolling it over to him. He doesn’t wear any kind of perfume, but he must have showered in the time Phil’s been out of it, because he doesn’t smell of sweat – only smells faintly of vanilla and something floral, whatever his shampoo must be scented with.

Phil doesn��t see any reason not to, and his throat is fucking sore, so he wraps his lips around the straw (Jesus…) and takes a sip. The water is ice-cold but sparkling, and he grunts in distaste and surprise, but swallows, and doesn’t cough.

“If you would clarify the question for me,” Gillespie says, almost sweetly, batting his eyelashes, which are a bit darker than the blond of his eyebrows, making them look longer than they otherwise would. He has a button nose and very pink lips that must be glossed, and he’s painted on fake freckles on each of his cheeks, three on each side in a perfect little triangle. He hasn’t shaved today – there’s a bit of dark blond peach fuzz under his neck and around his throat.

“I assumed you were a paraplegic,” says Phil.

“Oh, did you?” Gillespie asks, tilting his head. “Easy enough mistake. I have a heart condition, you do know that?”

“Yeah. It’s why you moved down to London in the first place, innit, to be closer to the hospital?”

“That’s right,” Gillespie says – Phil knows there’s no point lying about it, no point trying to fucking hide it, and in any case, the boy is smiling now like the intel that’s been gathered on him is somehow complimentary toward him, his head tilted slightly to the side as though he’s a princess in a movie receiving a very nice compliment. “I had to have several surgeries when I was younger, to repair some congenital issues, but I still have a syndrome that causes recurring tachycardia.”

Phil blinks. “PoTS?”

“No, actually, SVT, but my episodes are worsened by fatigue, and given that I have chronic insomnia, asthma, and a compromised immune system that makes me rather prone to one infection or another, I’m almost always fatigued.”

“And that’s why you have the chair? Keep you from falling if you have an episode?”

Gillespie’s elbow is rested on the arm of his chair, his chin on his palm, and he has one foot on the ground and the other curled beneath him now, spinning idly back and forth, back and forth. “No,” he murmurs. “Or, yes, but not only that. I’m prone to subluxations and dislocations, very prone, and I have to be very careful about how and where I move – at a certain point, Detective Inspector, it’s safer to just use the wheelchair than to try to go without.”

“Subluxation,” Phil repeats, trying to keep the conversation going even as he scans the room – the curtains are closed, but they’re not very thick, and the light they’re letting in is too yellow and too dim to be sunlight, must be from a streetlamp, or maybe one of the lamps on Gillespie’s garden property. Would he do that? Just have his lads chuck Phil in the trunk of the Mercedes-Benz and bring him all the way back home? “What is that, like, half a dislocation?”

This is an office, he thinks, or a library, or a lounge, whatever the fuck some young lad like Gillespie would call it – there are plush blue sofas along with the armchair Phil’s in, and pink hearts on the wallpaper and a furry rug on the ground that’s black and white like a cow, covering the dark wood flooring, and dominating a whole corner of the room is Gillespie’s absurd computer display with eight monitors and multiple towers, big fancy speakers and rainbow lights and little fucking figurines of anime girls (or boys? Who can tell?) and Pokémon and whatever else.

“Partial dislocation, yes,” Gillespie says. “Do you mind if I ask you a question, Detective Inspector?”

“Shoot,” says Phil, trying to keep his voice even, friendly, almost. He expects, “Why were you following me?” or “Why were you going through my wallet?” or “Don’t you know who my mother is?” or something like that.

Gillespie asks, “Would you mind if I slapped you?”

Phil stares at him, and wonders for a second if he’s misheard, because Gillespie’s big lavender eyes look innocent as anything, his lips pressed primly together, his seat still swinging gently from one side to the other.

“Slapped me?” Phil repeats.

“You look like you’d enjoy it so terribly much,” Gillespie says, and then drops his voice, drops his eyes at the same time so he’s looking up at Phil through his eyelashes, surprisingly coquettish for a man. “And I’d enjoy you enjoying it myself.”

“The fuck do you—”

The pain is sudden and sharp and burning, wet heat across his cheek as Phil’s head snaps to the side – for a fucking twink who picks his colours off the Lovehearts packaging and has a tattoo of Bagpuss on his ankle, he can really put some power behind a slap, and Phil is surprised by the guttural noise that comes out of his throat. Heat sinks down through his body, and it’s not the cold blood that comes with panic or the adrenaline rush that comes with the urgency of needing to get out of a situation like this – this, this is arousal.

Okay.

Fuck.

“Did you like that, Detective Inspector Hutchinson?” Gillespie asks softly.

“That why you brought me here? To slap me around?”

“No, no,” Gillespie says, abruptly stopping his swinging movements from side to side and looking at Phil straight on, his expression abruptly flat and serious. “I wanted to ask you about the Greenman Group.”

Phil stops breathing.

“Mm, yes,” Gillespie says sympathetically. “I thought it might be a touchy subject.”

“I don’t know what you—”

“Let’s not insult one another, Detective Inspector,” Gillespie says, beginning to swing from side to side again, leaning his cheek into his hand. He hasn’t got the headband he’d on in the dance studio now, and the shift in position causes a few top strands of dye-tipped hair to fall to the side, hanging over the side of his temple, the lavender hair in line with his lavender eyes. There’s something hypnotising about it, about how carefully cultivated his colour palette is, the pinks and lavenders and blues, the powder pastels. Like a sort of camouflage for… something. But what? “Let’s jump from the denial stage and get onto your justification.”

“I don’t need any justification,” Phil says immediately, trying to convince his lungs they don’t need to speed up like that, and hoping his heartbeat will get the fucking hint and all. “It’s just a private pension fund, it’s not illegal. Loads of people with public pensions pay into private pensions as well.”

“Mmm, that’s true,” says Gillespie. “It’s more about who else is paying into your private pension, isn’t it? I’m informed that a Mr Chapman, whose son was brought in on some rather nasty possession charges, paid in,” he makes a show of glancing down at his phone, then drops his jaw, “Goodness, twenty-three thousand pounds into this shared scheme? That’s rather a lot of money, Detective Inspector. Not exactly pocket change.”

“I don’t know anything about who invests in the scheme, I just—”

“You must know something about it, Detective Inspector – you dropped the charges against his son just after the transfer went through.”

“We didn’t have sufficient evidence to convict, happens all the time, it—”

“Detective Inspector,” Gillespie says, pouting out his pretty lips, and Phil stares back at him, feeling the prickle of sweat on the back of his neck, on his cheeks, on his neck.

“You’re not going to ask why I was in that studio, looking in on your physio appointment?”

“A man can have a crush, dear, even a police inspector. Who am I to judge?”

Phil huffs out an amused noise, though he’s sweating too much and it doesn’t come out as haughty as he’d like, and he thinks about the fact that if Gillespie were to slap him again it would be a little more damp with sweat this time, even though his stubble would provide enough friction to make the blow land loud in the room.

“I don’t need to ask why you were looking in on me in the studio,” Gillespie says mildly. “I’m a very private man, Detective Inspector, and I am informed I am not easy to spy on. You’ve some interest in my business, I presume as an extension of someone else’s business – my father’s? My mother’s?”

Phil doesn’t say anything, looking straight at him, and Gillespie shakes his head and clucks his tongue in a disapproving manner.

“I hardly fault you for wanting an edge in, Detective Inspector, but you won’t get that edge with me, and if I find you following me about again, I think you’ll find that Greenman business will be making some rather powerful headlines. The satisfaction you might get in chasing down your target on this case won’t make up for your coworkers’ disappointment – if not reprisal – for fucking them and you out of this rather deep retirement pot, and all the bribes that have gone therein. I might even out you as a nasty little addict on top, just as a little cherry on the pie. Capisci?”

He says it like an Italian would say it, with the -i sound on the end instead of with an -iche ending like the Yanks in movies, and Phil wonders if he speaks Italian, if there’s Italian in him, but unfortunately what he’s thinking about is the threat inherent in the words, and more than that, he’s thinking about the way Gillespie’s posh Scottish accent clips around the words nasty little addict, how filthy those words make him feel, and how they go straight to his fucking cock in the same way the slap had.

“Would you like me to slap you again, Detective Inspector Hutchinson?” asks Gillespie.

Phil doesn’t actually nod. His head shifts forward by maybe an inch or half an inch, and it’s just because he’s breathing in, not because he’s fucking saying yes, not because he’s asking for it.

Gillespie uses the other hand this time and slaps the other side, and Phil heaves in a sharp gasp of breath, fills his lungs and tastes the sweet heat as it burns across his cheek and across his face, the steaming warmth of it and more than that, the ever-so-slight numbness that follows the blow, the ringing in his ears. His cock aches as it strains to actually harden under his trousers, below and under the buckle of his belt, and Gillespie laughs softly, then pushes back on the floor and picks up a landline phone from his desk, beside his myriad of screens.

It’s an old-fashioned rotary telephone in robin’s egg blue, the intercom it’s connected to hidden artfully hidden in a compartment at the back of the desk – Phil can just see the red light flashing as he dials an internal line. Makes sense, from a security standpoint, using an internal line in the house instead of texting, no matter how good the encryption is… or maybe the kid’s fingers just get sore. He’s certainly got a bunch of different keyboards, a bunch of them hanging from the wall in the way a lot of people might hang a collection of guitars, and they have different shapes to them, only two or three of them the rectangular shape of the QWERTY keyboard Phil’s used to in the office, the rest in weird shapes or with balls or handholds or whatever else.

“Hi, Andreca, are Hanz and Laborious still in bed? No, that’s fine, let them get the sleep they need, they’ll be up for suhoor any minute now, or at least, Laborious will be. Hanz might well go without again and starve, you know how he is about his sleep. Just tell them our guest can be returned to the pigpen whenever they’re up and ready.” He swings idly from side to side, the wire of the phone curled around two of his fingers as he cradles the receiver against his elbow, his lips loosely pressed together. “Mmm hmm. She’s otherwise alright, though, no fever, no nausea? No, I think it’s better to be safe than sorry – do you want to wake them up? Please, Andy, I could handle him even if my arms were tied behind my back. Have them drive you over, drop off Ysbal and you as well, if you want to… Well, what do I need you for? I’m a grown man, don’t you know?” He huffs out a soft laugh, and looks over at Phil. “Once they’re back, they can put him back in the boot and cart him home.”

“I was in the boot?” Phil asks, and Gillespie pouts at him and releases a sharp, disapproving click of sound, waggling a finger at him to be quiet.

“Thank you, dear, just let me know once you’re off and have them let me know once they’re back.”

He drops the receiver back into the cradle, and he turns to Phil again, resting his hands between his knees.

Phil arches his eyebrows in expectation, feeling calmer right about now and looking calmer too, he’s pretty sure, leaning back in his seat. “Mrs Quayle’s chest is acting up again?”

“It really does wound you, doesn’t it?” Gillespie asks pleasantly as he rolls forward again. “You’ve done such a lot of careful research, and yet here you are, in the middle of my home, with no opportunity to dig your little snout about in the dirt, sniff about for evidence.”

“Never known a guy to hide so much about his fucking life without having a reason to hide,” Phil says, and Gillespie laughs faintly, tapping his thumb against his lower lip.

“That any creeping, cocaine-snorting piglet might wish to rifle through my records and my things is reason enough to prioritise my privacy, dear,” Gillespie retorts, and Phil feels his lip curl slightly, but doesn’t immediately make a reply. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Detective Inspector?”

“Excuse me?”

“You have little to no oversight in your profession, Detective Inspector. In my line of work, every single thing I do is to be combed over, scrutinised, rewritten, recoded, re-encrypted, shared, and modified. Much of what I do ends up publicly accessible to some degree or other – and rightly so. The same can’t be said for your actions in the course of a day or night. If you suspected criminal activity within these walls, you might obtain a warrant – you do not, in fact, and you have not. What you crave to do is within the bounds of the law, I suppose, to creep about me and my staff and see who we talk to and what we talk about, but it’s hardly required by law that I should make my private life accessible to you.”

Phil breathes in as Gillespie’s chair rolls closer, and he smells the sweetness of his shampoo, stares into Gillespie’s eyes as he leans over Phil’s body in the armchair, rests his hands not on Phil’s knees or his thighs but on the arms of the chair. Phil tries to lean forward and grunts when he finds that the harness tying his arms together is somehow clipped to something behind the chair, keeping him pinned in place and stopping him from leaning forward to meet Gillespie’s forward motion.

“The two of us have some time to kill, it seems, whilst my housekeeper gets her pacemaker double-checked. How would you like us to spend that time together, Detective Inspector Hutchinson?”

Phil swallows, his mouth feeling dry, and he stares into Gillespie’s eyes, feeling rooted to the spot, feeling paralysed in some way.

“I’m not gay,” is what he says, which is fucking embarrassing, because he could have said fucking anything, or at least thought about what he was going to say.

“That’s alright,” Gillespie says softly. “Nor am I.”

It doesn’t come.

What he experiences instead is overwhelming blackness, the same as he did before he woke up here in Gillespie’s house, and he wakes up again in his own fucking bed, a glass of water on the night stand, his phone on charge beside him.

“Fuck’s sake,” he groans, and nearly smashes his beeping alarm clock into pieces.

* * *

Phil means to leave it be.

Honestly, Gillespie is just one fucking thread leading back to his mother, and even having been in the kid’s house, “met” his staff, seen his PC set-up… There hadn’t been a single picture of his mother or any other family member, and when he’d mentioned it to Phil, he’d asked like he didn’t know – like he didn’t even care – if it was his father or his mother Phil might be chasing up.

It's easy to say, “Chasing it up was a bust,” to Baz. “Watched him do stretches in this fucking ballet room, get back in his chair, then his guys drove him straight back home. No records on site, either, not for him, and his physio guy barely seemed to know anything about him.”

Baz shrugs his shoulders. “We knew it was a long shot,” he says mildly. “C’est la vie, Philly.”

And Gillespie goes back to being almost nothing, barely even a person of interest – someone people note down when his name crops up or when he wheels into one event or other, but that’s pretty much it. It’s not like he’s a criminal himself, not like he’s dangerous.

Not that they know, anyway.

Phil tries to put it from his mind, tries to commit himself to that. Liking to play with a lad’s cock from time to time, wet his prick in an asshole instead of a cunt, that’s one thing, but this lad, that’s… Something else. He’s something else.

Phil thinks about it, thinks about sitting back in that fucking chair and feeling the burning heat of Gillespie’s palm having smacked across the side of his face, thinks about how it had felt when he’d called Phil a nasty little addict, the burn under his skin, the prickling want in his veins and his twitching, aching cock. It’s best to put all of that shit out of his fucking mind, same as he pushes the unpleasant shit out, the dirt and the filth and the stench of the day.

He goes out for pints here and there, watches some shitty thrillers at home, goes out for Baz’s birthday and snorts a few lines in the bathroom in between throwing axes at light-up targets, laughs when his boyfriend does a lap dance for him but is too drunk off shots to stay upright. Phil carries Ricky to their Uber when Baz is struggling to stay upright himself, and laughs as he pours both of them in.

He's drunk, he’s high, he’s buzzing. His thumb shakes as he taps on his phone, and he ends up in his photo gallery instead of his Uber app, a few pages up – and he sees it, the picture of the inside of Gillespie’s wallet, the one he genuinely had forgotten about, not the same as his trying to forget Gillespie.

Phil reads through the cards – different sex clubs and shops, most of which he recognises. Two are members-only, ones he only knows of from higher-profile hookers getting brought in, but one is open to anybody who pays in on a Friday night, and hey, fuck it.

Tonight is Friday.

He gets the Uber there instead.

It’s twenty quid in – fucking bullshit – and Phil walks in with his hands in his pockets, looks with disinterest at the different booths of people selling shit – harnesses and leather panties and chainmail bras, dildos and buttplugs, earrings and necklaces that say shit like DADDY’S GIRL and SPANK ME HARDER and FUCK THE TORIES, which seems a little irrelevant unless they mean literally fucking them, but what the fuck does Phil know about it?

They’re doing a demonstration up on the stage, a guy up on stage bent over and groaning as wax drips over his bare-cheeked ass, down his thighs, the backs of his knees.

Phil is almost surprised they let him in, given how drunk he is, how unstable he is on his feet, but he tries to hide it as best he can as he moves through the crowds of kinksters and perverts buying their wares, moves past an array of spanking paddles and whips and crops and into the other room. They do this for birthdays and shit normally, but when they’re doing their kink nights they put out gym mats on the floor and put out some dividers.

Phil glances at the sign that reminds people not to film or get their phones out, that food and drink aren’t allowed in the drinks area, to be careful of one’s shoes on the mats.

“Detective Inspector Hutchinson,” says a voice to his right, and immediately Phil turns to look down at Gillespie, who is sitting back in his wheelchair, a fleece blanket decorated with old-fashioned Victorian sweets over his lap, a very fluffy pink jumper worn over the top of his white collared shirt. Phil is momentarily distracted by the jumper’s angora wool, thinking of how soft and silky it would feel under his fingers, and his mind quickly hops to the thought of Gillespie’s pinned back hair, which might be even softer, even silkier. His hands twitch at his sides. “Whatever are you doing here, you naughty, naughty boy?”

In another club, a real night club, not a fetish night, there’d be pounding music playing and drowning out some of his speech, or at least, the particulars of his tone, but that’s not the case here. The music is background noise, only just enough to overwhelm the drone of other people’s chatter, barring the occasional laughs or louder sounds like moans or cries of pain – Phil hears every single semitone of Gillespie’s words, reads them on his lips at the same time he hears them, hears how he draws out the vowel sounds in the last words, hears the emphasis he puts on the Ts and the B.

“You’re a cop?” asks one of the two women beside him – both of them are supernaturally tall, one with her hair worn in a long braid down her back and wearing an incredibly ugly fucking jumper that has some kind of anime nun knitted into the front of it; the one speaking is more muscular, wearing a tank top that shows off the tone of her shoulders and upper arms, a few chains worn around her neck. Her hair is thick and curly, bounces whenever she moves her head, and her fingers keep twitching with want toward the vape pen sticking out of her front jeans pocket.

“That a problem?” Phil asks, and the girls look at each other and laugh.

“Cringe,” says the girl in the nun jumper.

“Why are you even here?” asks the first one. “Couldn’t find enough victims to rape at work?”

“The fuck is that supposed to—”

“Now now, Detective Inspector,” says Gillespie sharply, and he extends one leg outward, pushing him with his thighs back from the girls when Phil’d barely even stepped forward. “Let’s behave, why don’t we?”

Phil has to focus to keep his feet, and he feels the alcohol swirling inside his skull as he stares down at Gillespie, breathing in through his nose.

“In fact,” Gillespie says slowly, keeping his eyes on Phil’s face, “I am feeling the chill a bit, I probably do want to get home. Sorry to love you and leave you, Star, Aspen.”

“No worries,” says the curly-haired girl. “You taking him with you?”

“Certainly, I am,” Gillespie says. “Detective Inspector, push my chair for me. We’re going out through the side way, down the ramp.”

“’Kay,” Phil mutters, because he’s embarrassed and his hackles are up, but there’s no way he can start a fucking fight with two big women in the middle of a space like this, people tying each other up, spanking each other. Even if it wasn’t in the papers, the lads at the office would take the ever-loving piss out of him – and besides, he’s not supposed to be here.

He hisses when he initially puts his hands on what he expects to be the handles of Gillespie’s chair and instead touches fucking spikes, and Gillespie pulls a lever on the side of the chair and makes the spikes retract, folding down so that Phil has space to put his hands on the handles. They’re not that sharp, haven’t even broken skin, but he still mutters, “Fucking boobytraps,” under his breath as he pushes Gillespie’s chair for him through the crowd, down the narrow corridor and out through the open fire door, where the security on duty says a cheerful, “Good to see you, Adrian, safe home!” and doesn’t acknowledge Phil at all.

King pulls up, and it’s only Hanzalah that gets out of the front seat, glowering at Phil as he pulls himself to his full height, which isn’t very tall at all.

“It’s alright, Hanz, I’m bringing him home.”

“Takeaway bacon stinks out the car,” Hanzalah mutters as he hands Gillespie a cane and opens the door, and Gillespie laughs quietly.

“Open the windows, then,” he advises, and supports himself with the cane to climb into the backseat, sliding across to the one on the far side, and Hanzalah passes him his bag and his blanket before folding up his chair to put into the generous boot space – no wonder they stuck Phil in there so easily, if that’s really what they did. “Come on, Detective Inspector, in you get.”

He shouldn’t, obviously.

He does.

The backseats are laid out like a posh taxi cab, two facing forward and two facing back, each with a small table between them, and Phil sees the extendable ramp on one side and the way that one of the seats has more wear on the underside – that’s the one that they slide out when they don’t fold the wheelchair down, when Gillespie just rolls in and puts on the brakes.

Phil sits across from Gillespie, facing the back, and he watches Hanzalah close the boot and then walk back around, sliding into the front seat beside King before – with what seems to Phil to be a lot of fucking emphasis – closing the glass frame that separates the two front seats from the back. Unlike in a taxi cab, this separator doesn’t have a little hatch to put money through or talk to the driver – as soon as it closes shut, Phil can’t hear anything from the front seats, even though he can see King laughing and smacking his hand against the steering wheel as Hanzalah snaps something at him and makes a dismissive wave of one hand.

“Seems like your bodyguard doesn’t approve,” says Phil, watching Gillespie spread his blanket out across his lap, and Gillespie smiles thinly at him.

“No,” he agrees. “But I believe I gave you very specific instructions, Detective Inspector. I don’t exactly approve of your disobedience either.”

Phil feels a bead of sweat run down the back of his neck even as the rest of him feels suddenly drenched in hot, steaming water. King has pulled out, and Phil closes his eyes at the wave of mild motion sickness that overtakes him, abruptly regretting sitting backwards in the car.

“Water, Detective Inspector,” Gillespie says sharply, and Phil opens his eyes as the bottle presses at his hands, so he opens it and takes a few swigs, swallowing hard and hearing the gulp in his ears.

“Your friends didn’t like cops,” he says.

“No one likes cops, dear,” Gillespie says. “I doubt even your own mother likes you.”

Phil releases a low, gruff laugh, because yeah, the lad has fucking got him there. “She didn’t like me even before I was police,” he mutters, and takes another swallow from the water, glancing at the label and then looking down to the cupholders, almost surprised Gillespie’s given him still water this time instead of sparkling. “What do you fucking think, I walk the streets all day bashing in civilian brains and kicking puppies? That what you kids think police do? This isn’t fucking Yankland, it’s not like I’m shooting bullets.”

“Sorry, Detective Inspector, I’m hardly a staunch abolitionist, but it’s not the guns that trouble us so much as the leverage of power against the powerless.”

“The fuck would you know about powerless, a kid like you with more money than God?”

“Philip, I’m in a wheelchair,” Gillespie says, sounding so genuinely wounded that for a second Phil stumbles over his own breaths, over his own fucking thoughts, partly because Gillespie’s outplayed him so well and so fucking deftly, and partly because Gillespie just called him Philip instead of Detective Inspector.

“You can fucking walk,” mutters Phil.

“Sometimes,” Gillespie allows, tilting his head slightly to one side and looking out of the window as they move slowly out of the city. “What sort of consequence were you hoping for, Detective Inspector, looking for me in public like that? Do you want to lose that little retirement fund?”

Phil doesn’t say anything right away, doesn’t know how to say out loud that he had been thinking as little as possible about the potential consequences, same as he’d been thinking as little as possible about Gillespie himself until he’d taken the plunge and let himself fucking go for it.

“Have you been into a club like that before, Detective Inspector?”

“Of course.”

“Ever partaken?”

“I seem like the type?” Phil asks, the question sort of fucking genuine, because of all the sex in his life, he’s never been slapped like Gillespie slapped him two weeks ago – he’s fucked women, mostly, fucked a few young men here and there, tends to prefer lads on the slimmer side, generally less muscular than Gillespie is, even as unreliable as that muscle may be.

“Oh, yes,” says Gillespie.

“Wha—”

“Ah ah,” Gillespie says. “No talking now – be quiet, drink your water. Sober up.”

Phil clenches his teeth together, but despite the fact that his head is spinning as the car drives on, he drinks the water, and he doesn’t talk. They sit in the quiet for the whole drive back to Gillespie’s, and Phil can almost feel the alcohol evaporating out of his veins the longer he sits in place.

* * *

When they get back to Gillespie’s, Hanzalah watches Phil like a fucking hawk as they get out in the garage, Phil obediently pushing Gillespie up the ramp and through the corridors as he’s directed, until they end up not in Gillespie’s colourfully lit office as they were before, but in a bedroom.

The bedroom is not decorated in pastels, but in deep and luscious reds – there’s red silk with gold brocade on the bed, a golden tone to the carpet, and the papered half of the walls are decorated in a gold brocade pattern that glitters, the lower half sided in dark wood board made to match the legs of the bed, the wooden ottoman at the foot of it, the wood of the wardrobe, drawers, cabinets, bookshelves. These bookshelves host a variety of books, a mix of what look like computer textbooks and leather-bound antique books of fiction, and there are no photographs in here, either. On one wall, over the desk – this is a small thing like you might expect in a Victorian schoolhouse, has a sloped top with storage underneath, and no computer – is a painted portrait, but it’s not Gillespie’s dad, and he doesn’t think it’s his mother either.

As Gillespie wheels in and parks his chair beside the bench at the foot of the bed, barely even standing before he sits again – and with a wince that Phil can see, his teeth clenching and his eyes narrowing for a second – Phil steps forward to look at it.

In an old-fashioned bed, one with four posts and red silk canopies, lies a man with dark blond hair and a golden crown on his head, various blankets of different colours and patterns layered over his body. He looks perfectly at peace, and kneeling beside the bed, clasping one of his relaxed hands in both of his own, kneels what Phil initially thinks is a woman in green robes, her long, black hair covering most of her back, her head bowed towards the sleeping man’s hand – it’s here that Phil sees the kneeling man’s beard and his angular features, the expression of quiet grief on his face.

Hanzalah moves through the room with quiet ease, flicking on the light over the bed and turning on the light in the bathroom before going about with other tasks – setting two fresh towels over what Phil guesses is a warming rail, turning on an electric blanket, removing a can of peach-flavoured pop from a mini-fridge and also a jug of water with lemon. He seems disdainful about pulling out two glasses to go with the latter.

“You want me to run you a bath?” he asks – he doesn’t so much as glance at Phil, directing the question wholly to Gillespie, who has removed his fluffy jumper and the shirt underneath, and is buttoning up a silky pyjama shirt over his muscular chest. Said chest, Phil realises, is a mess of fucking scars – horizontal ones under his pecs that form a cross with the central scar down the centre of his sternum, more across his belly. They’re all old scars, for the most part, but many of them are raised and thick in places, keloid scarring – Phil guesses that’s to do with one of his myriad health conditions.

“No, thank you, not tonight,” Gillespie says quietly. “Could someone make up the guest bedroom for DI Hutchinson, please? And something cold to eat – would crackers and cheese be alright?”

“Can do,” Hanzalah says. “Those grapes want eating as well, I’ll bring those in. You.” He whirls on Phil so fast Phil thinks Hanzalah is gonna fucking hit him, then demands, “Any allergies?”

“What?” Phil asks, and then says, “Uh, shellfish. That’s all.”

“Right,” says Hanzalah, then, “Take those fucking boots off.”

He disappears out into the corridor, and Phil sinks into the stool in front of Gillespie’s desk and unlaces his boots, which are fucking clean, thanks, regardless of the foul look Hanzalah had shot them.

When he looks up again, Gillespie has changed fully into a set of pink satin pyjamas with black edging, and Phil can’t help but stare at the way the fabric clings to his thighs and his arse even as he limps across the room, depending heavily on a cane, to pick up his can, and then sigh.

“Open this, please,” he says, holding it out to Phil, and Phil almost thinks he’s taking the piss as he takes the can to flick open the tab, but then he sees how bad Gillespie’s hand is shaking.

“You want me to pour it?”

“Oh, yes, that would be splendid.”

Phil’s hands aren’t the steadiest themselves, right about now, but he mostly doesn’t spill the pink soda as he pours it into a glass, only halfway full to make it harder to spill, and Gillespie hobbles back to his bench again and sits, taking a sip and exhaling in obvious relief.

“Pain bad today?” Phil asks.

“Very,” Gillespie murmurs, reaching up and pinching between his eyebrows, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Always so many smells in that place, the HEPA filters do help and there’s good ventilation, but even if I wear a mask, the different scents do my fucking head in.”

Hanzalah comes in at the same time as one of the Mrs Quayles, Ysbal, and set out a folding table across from Gillespie’s bench. Phil expects it to be all fancy, the way you might see it done on Downton, but they haven’t chopped the cheeses up all fancy or anything – the grapes are in a bowl, the different crackers are still in their wrappers, and the cheeses have dedicated knives in each of their labelled Tupperware containers.

As Ysbal puts the jug of water and their glasses on the cup, she gives Phil a circumspective look. “L, XL,” she muses aloud, and fuck, but her accent is strong, a lot stronger than Gillespie’s is. “What are you around the waist, a 36? 30 for the inseam?”

“Uh, yeah,” says Phil, and Ysbal Quayle disappears into the corridor as Hanzalah gets behind Phil and physically wrestles his coat off him before sweeping away with that, Phil’s shoes, and Gillespie’s, too.

Phil slides the stool across from the fold-out table, and Gillespie looks at him amusedly as he puts a slice of brie shakingly over a cracker.

“You’re not lactose intolerant?” Phil asks.

“I take a supplement to help me digest it,” Gillespie says. “Eat. You’ll feel the worse tomorrow if you don’t.”

Phil is initially surprised when he picks up the knife for the cheddar and feels how fucking heavy it is with a thick weighted handle, but then he sees Gillespie slicing through the brie and how much the weight helps even out the trembling of his hands. He wonders how many things in this house are made for that, things he’d notice and things he wouldn’t, things that he’s paid for just to even out the pain or the symptoms or whatever the fuck else.

After he’s eaten two crackers, one with a slice of brie and the other with a slice of spiced Caerphilly, Gillespie flicks open a pillbox and shakes out the handful of pills in Friday’s compartment, swallowing six or seven pills in between bites of his supper and sips either of water or his peach pop.

“How old are you, Detective Inspector?” Gillespie asks.

“Forty-nine,” says Phil, because it doesn’t occur to him not to answer.

What the fuck is he doing here?

The drink is starting to ease off, sobriety kicking in, and there’s a sinking feeling deep inside him as he considers what he’s done and where he is – that he’s here in Gillespie’s fucking house, no eyes on him, no one knowing where he is, that just because they have no evidence that Gillespie is a criminal doesn’t mean he isn’t fucking dangerous; that he’s sitting here having let his dick fucking lead him to that club and into Gillespie’s car and now into Gillespie’s house; that he’s sitting here across from a twenty-seven-year-old with pastel-dyed hair and a haughty attitude and it’s making his heart skip fucking beats, even when he knows damn well that twenty-seven-year-old has blackmail material on him and who knows what other fucking intel.

He eats a grape, eats a few more crackers, and when they finish, Hanzalah and Ysbal come in to take the table away and then Hanzalah helps him back into his chair.

Phil gets to his feet as Hanzalah leaves the room, and then says, “Uh, I should go h—”

“Detective Inspector Hutchinson, you aren’t going anywhere,” Gillespie interrupts him, sharp and cool, and Phil presses his lips together.

“I made a mistake,” he mutters, “coming to find you in that club, I was just drunk, I didn’t mean—”

“It wasn’t work: it was personal,” Gillespie interrupts him again. “You hardly want professional consequences for a personal indiscretion, I understand.” His smile is sly and his lavender eyes are cold as he shifts in his wheelchair and nods across the room. “Go ahead of me into the bathroom, please, Detective Inspector.”

Phil’s stomach drops. “Huh?” he hears himself ask.

“Chop chop,” Gillespie says, a note of challenge in his voice. “No need to keep a cripple waiting.”

“You can’t make me,” Phil hears himself say, and Gillespie laughs, an airy sound.

“I suppose I can’t,” he agrees. “Look at me, a trembling bag of bones and muscle in a wheelchair, aching in every limb, pretty to look at, but rather mangled. Physically, it’s not as though I can force you to do anything. Consider how oh-so-satisfying it is for me, then, that you will do as I say of your own accord, twisted little pervert that you are.”

The fuck is he meant to say? That he’s not a pervert, that he’s not twisted? He’s here, isn’t he?

Phil’s mouth is dry but blood is rushing downward as he takes slow, socked steps toward the bathroom, where the light is already on and a little brighter than the dimmer lights in the bedroom. It’s a big fucking room, as big as the bedroom in Phil’s shitty little maisonette in Plumstead, and through one glass door is a contained shower room with benches against two of the walls – or maybe it’s a fucking sauna? – and out here, in the bathroom proper, there’s a large bath with jets inside and one of those walk-in doors, a large stained glass window that’s decorated with a scaly white dragon against a golden background, with thick leathery wings and claws, done in a medieval style. The rest of the bathroom isn’t so aggressive about its colour scheme as the rest of the house that Phil’s seen, is just done in beiges and dark woods, the tiled floor black and white.

There are two sinks, a smaller one right beside the door on a regular height mini counter, and then a larger sink with more counter space at wheelchair height, various hair products and soaps and make-up products in pull-out organisers on wheels, all at easy height to reach from Gillespie’s chair.

Gillespie pushes the door closed, and Phil is painfully aware of the quiet of the room they’re in and the echo of the ceiling, the tiled floor and walls. He can hear himself breathing, can hear Gillespie breathing.

“Unbuckle your belt,” Gillespie orders.

Phil’s hands go slowly to his belt, a little clumsy still, and he faces away from Gillespie as he slides the tongue of the belt out of its loops and then the buckle, then slides the whole thing free.

“Hang it up,” Gillespie says, and when Phil turns to glance at him he sees the hooks on one wall, over top of two stacked shower chairs with pink plastic seats and pink rubber ends on their legs, and he hangs his belt up. “Shirt now. Fold it neatly and set it on the seat.”

Phil pulls his rugby shirt up and over his head, folds it as neatly as he fucking can – the fuck does neatly even mean for a shitty shirt like this one? – and puts it down. He goes for the vest he’s wearing underneath before Gillespie gives the order, and Gillespie nods his head in approval as Phil lifts it over his head, folds it too, sets it down – reaches for his jeans, and Gillespie says, “Ah ah. Empty your pockets.”

He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and slowly walks over to Gillespie in his chair, puts it down on the counter, the one at Gillespie’s height. Gillespie’s looking up at him from his place in his chair, his pretty hands folded in his lap, one pink satin-clad leg crossed over the other.

From the other pocket he pulls out his housekeys and a few coins, setting them on the counter in a loose pile beside his wallet.

Gillespie reaches forward and pats him down, and Phil abruptly straightens up as Gillespie’s fingers pat down his back pockets and then his front ones. Lips pressed together, he slides two fingers into the coin pocket of his jeans and removes the baggie of coke folded into quarters with about half a gram left inside, and he sets that aside with the coins.

“Anything concealed on your person?” Gillespie asks, looking up at him with his lavender eyes unspeakably cold, and Phil stares down at him, feeling rooted to the spot for reasons he doesn’t think he could explain, if asked, can’t explain to himself in his own fucking head. His cock is aching in his boxers, his skin prickling with heat and want and feverish need. “Anything in your socks, concealed in your waistband?”

“No,” Phil says.

“Good,” Gillespie says. “The rest off. I want you naked.”

“What happens then?” Phil asks.

It’s a stupid fucking question, and Gillespie treats it as one, not giving him an answer. He sits there with his hands folded on one pretty knee, his expression cold and unmoving, lips pressed loosely together, his lavender eyes unblinking.

Phil takes off his jeans and folds them into a square on top of his shirt and vest. He takes off his socks next, his feet bare on the tiled floor, and then slides off his underwear and folds them too, puts them on top of the pile. The floor isn’t as cold under his soles as he expected, and he can feel ghosts of warmth here and there – not a full heated floor, but the pipes definitely run under the tile.

His cock is halfway hard and standing up, and he’s abruptly painfully, scorchingly grateful that the only mirror in this room is the one over the wheelchair-height counter, that it’s off toward the corner, that he doesn’t have to fucking look at himself because the glass walls of the shower room are so well-polished you can look right through them, because what the fuck is he to look at? Five ten, not fat but certainly stocky, sagging at the belly and the bollocks, hair patchy on his thighs and his chest and his back, and when he shags a woman from time to time, it’s normally in the dark and under the covers and he keeps his fucking socks on, not like this, under bathroom lighting with a boy in customised pyjamas (as well as the black edging, they have calligraphic As embroidered on the breast pockets, for fuck’s sake) looking at him.

“Turn around, face away from me,” says Gillespie softly, and yet the two words are achingly loud against the bathroom walls.

Phil does, stares at the chair his clothes are folded on, his belt hanging from the wall.

“Bend over and touch your toes.”

Phil hesitates.

“You heard me,” Gillespie says, and Phil swallows, feeling humiliated, his cock giving an approving, eager lurch like a dog that’s heard the word “dinner”, bobbing between his legs. The rush of pleasure that runs down his spine is fucking awful and also, exquisite. What happens next? he’d asked. What do you fucking think?

Phil slowly bends over and reaches to touch his toes, having to rock a little just to skim the tops of them with his fingertips.

“Do you understand why I’m telling you to do this, Detective Inspector?” Gillespie asks.

“That a rhetorical question?” Phil retorts, his voice slightly strained from the position.

Gillespie laughs quietly, and then orders in a crisp, clear voice, “Now cough.”

Phil is up and whirling around on the lad in less than a fucking heartbeat, his bare feet making almost no noise on the floor as he advances on him, and he shoves down the part of himself that tells him he can’t fucking go up to a boy in a wheelchair like this, no matter that there aren’t any fucking witnesses.

“Is that what this fucking is to you?” he demands, and he winces at the volume of his own voice against the glass and the tile and the too-high ceiling. “A fucking joke, am I a fucking joke?” He’s spitting, can feel the froth of saliva in his mouth, and Gillespie’s expression does not change, stays cold and distant. Phil’s cock is the hardest it’s been and at the same time he’s fucking humiliated, and this isn’t the sexy degradation, not this, this is something else, something else spotlit and vulnerable. “Am I a fucking joke to you, boy?” he demands, and he reaches out and doesn’t even know where he’s going to put his hands, if he’s going to grab his shoulders, his pretty wavy hair, his throat.

Gillespie grabs him first, grabs him by the bollocks, and twists.

Phil’s knees go weak and he yelps, feeling his legs half-collapse underneath him, grabbing at the counter to keep from falling all the way to the floor, because Gillespie isn’t just twisting but squeezing, and for all his shakes, he’s got a Hell of a lot of fucking strength in those pretty fingers.

“Please—!” he wheezes, and he doesn’t know what he’s begging for, exactly, because the searing pain that bursts through his body, behind his fucking eyes, is the most extreme sensation he’s ever fucking experienced, and at the same time, he doesn’t know if he wants for it to stop, if he’d be able to take it stopping. His fingertips are digging into the polished wood countertop and his eyes are watering, and when it stops, it crashes over him like a cold fucking wave, and he heaves a gasp into his aching, empty lungs.

“Let’s be on thee and thou terms, you and I,” says Gillespie, and he’s smiling now, a knife edge of a smile as Phil tries to get his breath back, clutching at his sweat-soaked chest. No other aspect of his expression has changed – his eyes remain cold and hard, his expression severe, but now his thin pink lips are cut into a dangerous smile. “I will call you Philip, and you might call me Adrian. You will do as I tell you, and you will enjoy the fruits of that obedience.”

Phil, breathing heavy and with tears staining his cheeks, stares down at him, at the younger man’s cold eyes and knife-edge smile, and asks in a voice he doesn’t mean to have quaver, but does quaver, “This whole thing a statement on fucking… On police procedure?”

He’s so cool and so distant and so impossibly, impossibly beautiful as he shrugs his shoulders, his waves of hair shifting slightly as he does so. “The difference here is that you’re obeying because you wish to, because it excites you. Your detainees have no such luxury.”

“Some of them do fucking like it,” Phil mutters, “and in any case, that’s not the fucking point, they’re fucking criminals, they—”

“It was an invitation to call me by my forename, Philip, not to decry my commitment to police abolition,” Gillespie – Adrian – says in cool, calculating tones. “Would you like to continue?”

“What next?” Phil asks, feeling the relief of the cool wood under his forearm. “Cavity search?”

“I’m satisfied you aren’t carrying anything illicit,” Adrian says with obvious amusement. “Now shower.”

The shower proceeds in much the same way his stripping had done – “Turn on the water, soak yourself. Water off. Shampoo your hair. Soap your body – torso first. Armpits, arms. Belly, back. Thighs. Your calves, your feet. Shower on, rinse. Conditioner. Cock, behind your bollocks, your hole. Rinse.”

Adrian watches him unblinkingly as he soaps himself with thick, white suds all over, all through the patchy hair on his body and the rest of his balder flesh, and he watches the water rinse it off, too. Phil watches the soap suds swirl in the water under his feet – the tiles in the shower all have a bobbled texture to them, the sort you get in the showers in leisure centres and gyms to avoid having fucking mats, and the water drains into a gutter and then dribbles away.

Phil turns off the water and hangs the shower head on the rung it had been on, the lowest on – Gillespie is about the same height as Phil, when standing, but the rungs for the shower head go much higher that, would allow for someone six and a half feet tall to have the shower head comfortably over their head. Phil wonders who Gillespie has in this room with him, in his bedroom with him – those fucking Amazonians in stupid clothing he saw at the club? Big, muscle men, giant strongmen?

Other pathetic cops like him?

“You are so compellingly pitiable,” says Adrian, leaning his chin on his hand and bouncing one of his feet, and Phil stares at it, the graceful arch of it and his pink-painted toenails, and then he looks back up to Adrian’s face. “Are you pleased to be in this position, Philip, deplorable and disgusting thing that you are? Naked of every thread so that I might scrutinise each and every part of you that pleases me – degrade you too, hm? Tell you what, exactly, that you’re worthless, scum, a filthy pervert, little more than dirt to be trod under my heel?”

Each last insult shocks him like a bolt, and his cock aches it’s now so hard, his slit winking as his foreskin rolls back a little bit, a little pre shining around the head. Phil grips at the nearest fucking support bar – at least there’s no end to those in this fucking bathroom – and breathes deeply, as if deep breaths are going to make him any less fucking dizzy.

“Do you know wat pleases me, Philip, about what an odious and wretched creature that you are?” Adrian asks, and Phil groans quietly aloud, his chest aching at the way his heart is pounding hard and fast in his chest, and Adrian makes a single motion with his index finger. Phil damn near throws himself to the black and white tile, almost fucking grateful for the stability of his hands and knees – at least he can’t collapse so far to the ground, now he’s not on his feet. He turns his hand over, and instead of making a motion downward, he makes a beckoning motion with his finger instead, and Phil crawls closer. The nobbled texture of the tiles hurts his aching fucking knees. “I doubt you’ve even considered what you might do if I let you touch me. You know, deep down inside that stupid, filthy pig’s head of yours that you don’t deserve to touch me, and your subconscious won’t even let you visualise it.”

The noise Phil lets out is agonising, wheezed and whimpering, and hands and knees or no, his knees go out from under him, and he’s flat on the fucking floor with his dick dragging on the wet, rough tile and it hurts. Adrian Gillespie is the size of a titan when he’s on his belly on the floor like this, looking up at him with his tearing eyes. He’s close to Adrian’s pretty, painted toes like this – fucking prettier than he’d have thought, he must not have been able to do ballet much in his life or his feet would be fucked, from what Phil’s seen on ex-ballet dancers who strip or do trade – and he almost feels dizzy at the view of his creamy white ankles under the silk-satin of his pyjama trousers as he uncrosses his legs.

Phil stares up at him between Adrian’s parted knees, up to his heavily-lidded eyes and smirking lips, haughty and god-like so far above Phil’s shoulders, deified and not easy to think of as in a fucking wheelchair – it’s like he’s in a fucking throne, and Phil is just fucking… What do they call it?

“Supplication,” Adrian supplies, as if reading his fucking mind, and Phil keens breathlessly. “You can think to do that, at least. But what else, Philip? How would you touch me, if I deigned to permit it?”

Phil moans in the helpless, aimless way of a man offered the world without being able to conceive of it – he feels like a pint that’s been overpoured, the tap left on and gushing and creating a waterfall of fucking cider, or beer, or whatever the fuck else, and that’s him. That’s him with want or desire or blood or need or the universe, and all he can do, flat on the tile and looking up at Adrian like a man “supplicating”, all that comes out of him is helpless, hopeless gibbering.

“K—” he tries, starts, but it comes out more as a G because his mouth is full up with fucking saliva and his nose is threatening to run. “K’ss you—”

“Kiss me?” Adrian repeats in sharp, mocking tones, and he laughs and it’s an awful sound that goes right into Phil’s bones and threatens to make its home there, inside his bones, in his heart, in the very core of him, his cock straining against the warm rough tile, and he knows that he’ll never be able to come again in his life without thinking of Adrian Gillespie laughing at him just like this. “Oh, will you kiss me, will you, Philip? Not on the mouth, I suppose?”

“Your… you… feet? N—neck? Cock?”

Adrian laughs at him some more, and Phil, sweating and tearful and wet and aching, looks between Adrian’s lean but muscular thighs, at the pink satin that covers his crotch. He can’t see Adrian’s cock bulging out the silk – is he even fucking hard? Is he even aroused by Phil at all? The thought that he isn’t, that he’s doing this just to laugh at how pathetic he is, shoots through him with the force of a lightning bolt and his whole body shudders hard.

“Please,” he moans. He’d been sobering up, but he feels fucking drunk now, feels drunker than he’s ever been and yet still been fully conscious, without the coke giving him a window through it. His whole skin feels as if it’s being seared from the inside, his pulse something he can feel through his prick, and he crawls forward, desperate, needful, makes to put his mouth against one of Adrian’s ankles and receives a foot on the throat for his troubles.

He doesn’t resist it as Adrian nudges him to collapse on his back on the floor, his hips thrusting uselessly against the air.

“Sit up,” Adrian orders, and as Phil sits up, Adrian rolls forward and grips the back of his neck in a tight, painful grip, and at the same time, leans over Phil’s body. He’s still damp from the shower, damp and shivering not from the cold, his arse against the warm tiled floor – he can feel the satin of Adrian’s pyjama bottoms, feel the cooler material of his pyjama shirt buttons, as the younger man kicks the brake on his chair to keep it in place and leans right over him, feel the beautiful warmth of his body and smell his shampoo – not the same shampoo Phil’s just used, which is odourless, had clear labelling about its lack of allergens. Adrian keeps one hand tightly – painfully, wonderfully painfully – gripping the back of Phil’s neck and steadying himself by it whilst with the other hand he grasps hold of Phil’s cock.

“Tight,” Phil whines.

“Quite,” Adrian agrees, and grips him even tighter – it hurts, it hurts even before Adrian twists his wrist slightly and puts friction on the damp, sensitive flesh around his shaft, and that’s it, that’s everything, his cork is fucking popped.

As his cock pulses and his orgasm hits him like a fucking punch to the jaw, it’s not the only thing that hits him in the jaw – Adrian uses his grip on Phil’s neck to shove his face forward and into the path of his pumping prick so that his own come hits him in the face, spatters over his cheek, the underside of his nose, into his fucking mouth.

Phil feels it quake through his body, doesn’t know when he’s last had an orgasm as intense as this one, as powerful as this one, hitting him so hard he wonders for a second if he’s gonna go fucking blind. He sits there, breathing heavily, tears on his cheeks falling down them and mixing with his own fucking come, and Adrian pats him idly, thoughtlessly, on the head.

“Wash that off and then come brush your teeth,” he orders, pulling up his chair brake and wheeling back. “Spare toothbrushes are in the tall counter.”

Phil takes a minute to get his breath and his brain back before he crawls into the shower to obey.

The evening is a sleepy blur from then.

* * *

When the morning light begins to shine through the curtained windows into Adrian’s bedroom, Phil is scantly awake, his face mashed into the pillow that Ysbal had brought in for him at the same time she’d brought in a pair of black satin pyjamas matched to Adrian’s own, with pink edging and buttons, and nothing embroidered on the breast pocket. They’re in his size, fit him perfectly, and it had been humiliating, last night, distantly humiliating as he put on these fucking women’s pyjamas and felt how soft they were, how cool the fabric was.

He'd not been able to make eye contact with Adrian as he’d put them on, had kept his gaze instead on the portrait of the sleeping king and his boyfriend, servant, whatever, on the wall.

Adrian had followed his gaze and said, “Oh, well, I’m not much of a royalist, but… What am I saying? Do you even know who those men are?”

“Uh, no,” Phil had said.

“King Arthur Pendragon, asleep beneath the mountain.”

Sleepily, his eyes barely opening, Phil looks over at the portrait now, notices for the first time that the fancy four-poster bed with its canopy isn’t in a bedroom or a castle hall but in some kind of fucking cave, a shallow stream running from the background to the foreground barely lit by wax candles that illuminate the scene and melt directly into the outcrops of stone they’re rested on. His boyfriend’s skirts are wet from kneeling in it.

“You know how I am about strays, Mum,” he hears Adrian say, and a part of him wants to wake up, wants to wake up and fucking listen – Mum? Mum!? – but he’s too comfortably settled into his doze.

He's not very hungover at all, in the scheme of things, has slept really fucking well – slept at Adrian Gillespie’s feet, horizontal at the foot of the bed like a dog. Now, Adrian is sitting cross-legged beside him, wrapped in blankets and leaning against pillows, and he’s stroking his fingers absent-mindedly through Phil’s short-cropped hair.

“I think I’ll have him grow it out, he’s got that awful bristly look for now – far too military for my liking. Clean-shaven is fine, but I’ll perhaps try him with a beard.” Adrian grips Phil’s chin, turning Phil’s head toward him and looking at him thoughtfully, analytically, before nudging Phil’s head away again and running his fingernails over his hair and fuck, but it feels nice, feels good. “No, never hurts to have another on the payroll, even if this one doesn’t need paying in the… traditional sense.”

Phil closes his eyes and waits for the shame to hit him, the disgust at the idea of his being corrupted in precisely this way, not paid money but led by his cock and collared and, what, pampered in a rich boy’s fucking bed?

The shame doesn’t come, though.

This moment simply feels too good to let it.

FIN.

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