Behind the Scene by Emory Vargas Page B

cooker, it makes everything easy." He watches Ethan get stuck in his shirt for a moment, perplexed, before he realizes Ethan's making a soft, grunting noise.
    "Ow," Ethan says. "Help me?"
    Robert helps him out of the shirt carefully, gentle with the marks on his back. "Sore?" he asks, dropping the shirt over the towel rack.
    "Yeah. I stiffen up pretty quick. I think it's worse when it's cold outside."
    "I can tell. Your shoulders are tense," Robert says, getting Ethan's belt for him. He sinks to the floor and opens Ethan's fly easily. Pulling Ethan's jeans and briefs down his thighs, he tries to keep his breathing calm--but he feels like he's opening a Christmas present. Ethan's cock is long and ruddy and close enough to make Robert's mouth water.
    "Shoes," Ethan says, a laugh puffing out with his breath as he grabs onto Robert's shoulders and toes his sneakers off before they get tangled up in his jeans.
    When Ethan is fully undressed, Robert slings an arm around his lower back and helps him step into the tub. The steam has already whited out his mirrors, and it feels private and crowded and good in his bathroom, with Ethan filling his tub with wiry legs and long arms and big hands. Robert smells the fresh, bright scent of Ethan's deodorant on the steam.
    "Aren't you going to get in? There's room," Ethan says, reclining with his head against the smooth ledge and his knees sticking out of the water. The water flattens the hair on his legs, makes it look darker and silky.
    "Just relax," Robert says, folding his legs to sit on the bath mat beside the tub.

    • • •

    Ethan falls asleep in the tub.
    Careful not to wake him, Robert places a folded washcloth behind Ethan's head and reads a few articles about inventive vegetarian appetizers in one of the wrinkled copies of Gourmet on the floor.
    Every few sentences, he realizes he isn't paying attention to the words at all. He's just glancing up at Ethan, admiring the way his face softens with sleep, how his lips part and his forehead smooths out.
    It's nothing like the tension he saw in Ethan all afternoon, the way Ethan clenched his jaw as if fighting his descent, the way his nostrils flared with tight, pained breaths until his Mistress set an uneven rhythm he couldn't breathe through and startled a cry out of him. Robert can still hear that cry, the sharpness of it, the way it clipped off as if Ethan had tried--and failed--to swallow it back. He recalls the exact moment Ethan's body changed as if gravity stopped affecting him, allowing him to float, serene with pain.
    After fifteen minutes, Robert reaches over and brushes his thumb through Ethan's damp hair. "I hate to wake you, but I don't think too much soaking is good for those welts. Also, you might drown."
    Ethan wakes with a low groan. He sinks under the water and comes back up quickly, blinking and mumbling incoherently, something about being embarrassed and how he doesn't normally nap in bath tubs. He shakes his hair out like a wet dog and looks around blearily, until Robert hands him a folded up towel.
    "Sorry about that," Ethan says, his lashes clumped together with water. Even sheepish and soaked, he's pretty.
    "I think you needed it."
    "Were you there the whole time today?" Ethan asks, standing and toweling himself off from the knees up.
    "Only the flogging. It was... you were really beautiful."
    Ethan's nose wrinkles. "She knows I don't like an audience."
    "Oh. I'm--we shouldn't talk about it, then. Right? I'm sorry," Robert says.
    "No, no." Ethan steps out of the tub and crouches to dry his feet. "She's good to me. The things I don't want... I. I probably really want them. You know how it is."
    Robert nods, pulling a thankfully-fresh robe off the hook on the wall and handing it to Ethan--and thinking that no, he doesn't know how it is. He's been pushed down deep and twisted up, and he's lost hours, intoxicated and flying in his subspace, but he's never shattered the way he's seen Ethan shatter. Robert