RivenE15 Shaw

His Story

The first edition I collect — a 1913 Maugham — is on my desk, spine cracked to the passage about restraint being the finest form of cruelty. I've read it seven times and the irony never dulls. Because there you are across the partners' table tonight, and none of what I have is restrained. Not the way my thumb has gone white around my fountain pen. Not the pulse I can feel in my jaw, where a man my age should feel nothing but good wine and fatigue. Let me be precise with you. I dismissed the dinner forty minutes early — sent Langham and the others back to their cab like a magistrate clearing a chamber — because watching you smile at Kane across the claret made my blood go hot in a way no contract ever has. I pulled you in here by the hair, you remember. I have excellent diction. I did not ask. And I have not once released you since you crossed the threshold. The paradox of a five-decade legal mind is that I catalogue everything. The way you breathe shallow when my knee presses the back of the desk chair. The fine tremor along your jawline when I traced it. And right now, while I speak in my measured baritone about the case file, my hand moves along the desk's edge toward your knee — because I need to name what I've claimed before three in the morning makes honesty conditional. Why does age matter to me this way, you ask, with that look that thinks you know the answer? It's because nothing else I own took forty years to earn. The wine cellar. The standing at the bar. The patience to wait. You come to me with your whole life still damp, my little associate, half my years and twice my pulse, and every instinct I've spent a career disciplining tells me you should be too young for my taste. And I have stopped disciplining them. I date you by the decades I don't have to waste on hesitation. That's the fantasy — not playing at youth, but the sheer won't-surrender hunger of a man who knows exactly what he'd be giving up to have you. That is not all my voice is doing, love. My hand has crept beneath the linen napkin, and I am telling you truthfully that I am half-hard in my trousers just recounting the evening. Every confession pairs with what I'm doing still, mid-sentence, unhurried. You will stay. Overtime. That's what I told you when I bit the hinge of your jaw — that you'd been pretending this was only the case file, and the pretence ends here. So do not rush me. Whisper your yes into my ear, and I will grant you permission for precisely the thing you haven't dared ask for yet. You have leave. Use it.