The Circus - Chapter 1 -Fan request (Patreon)

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.

🎁 This story is a fan request from one of my subscribers of the Lavish Obsessed Tier. If you want a personalized story from me subscribe to that tier.❤️‍🔥

Chapter 1

The tent always smelled like three things at once: wet rope, fried sugar, and animal.

Not the cute kind. Big-cat animal. Piss and straw and the sour heat that lived under the cages even after the show was struck. Lions on one side of the run. Tigers on the other. It got in your hair. It got in the sequins. By the time I came off the silks my mouth tasted like metal and dust and the cheap lipstick I put on because the lights ate color. You could shower in the trailer and still find the smell in the crease of your elbow at breakfast. That was the show. That was the job.

I was twenty. Benito. Latino, a face that photographed prettier than it should have. I danced on fabrics hung from the peak of the big top — wraps, drops, the hold that made the cheap seats gasp. Makeup. Gloss. A little glitter at the corners. Two tamers watched from the wing every night I went up. Eden and Viko. Twenty-six. Not brothers. Not a matching set. Just two men who slept next to teeth and looked at me like the silks were a stall they hadn’t used yet.

Eden was the lion man. The one I wanted. Redhead. Beard. White skin that went pink under the lights. Almost nothing on his chest or stomach — smooth, slick when he sweated, the only hair a dark-ginger line under his navel that the water always found. Whip coiled in his fist after the bow like he’d forgotten he was holding it.

Viko ran the tigers. Darker. Hair on his chest and belly like the job had grown it there. Beard too, black, thicker. Louder with the crowd. Eden was louder with the cats. I liked the quiet one. I liked that he looked at the silks like they were a problem he could put his hands on. I liked the way he drank water after the bow and didn’t wipe what ran down that bare stomach.

The Saturday show ran hot. Full house. A kid dropped a soda in the third row and nobody cared. The band missed a cue and covered it with a roll. I went up on the blue silk first, then the red, then the drop from the high wrap. The crowd made that sound circus tents make when a body falls and then doesn’t. Applause hit the canvas and came back at me. I held the pose three extra counts because the cheap seats liked extra counts. My shoulders burned. The harness cut the same red lines it always cut. When I came down my legs were shaking and I was smiling with my mouth only.

Backstage was a hallway of trunks and light cables and men peeling shirts off like the air had insulted them. A clown went by with one shoe. I hate clowns and I work in a circus. Ridiculous, right? Somebody yelled for tape. The lions were already back in the run, coughing that thick cough they did when the heat sat on them. Farther down, a tiger dragged a chain. Straw. Meat. Iron.

Eden was against the prop wall with a bottle of water. Shirt gone. White skin glistening. Freckles wet on his shoulders. The beard dark with sweat. Bare chest shining. The cheap cologne he put on before cage work had not survived the first bow. What was left was him and the run.

“You almost missed the catch,” he said.

“I didn’t.”

“Almost.” He drank. Water ran down the smooth stomach and into the little line of hair under his navel. He didn’t wipe it. His eyes went over my face — the glitter, the smear of lipstick, the sweat at my hairline — and then down the harness like he was counting straps. “You look at me when you’re up there.”

“I look at the mark.”

“You look at me.” He capped the bottle. Nodded at the empty costume stall at the end of the hall, the one with the sequin jackets nobody had worn since the last owner sold the show. “Two minutes. Then Viko comes looking for his gloves.”

I went because I had been going in my head for months. Because I liked feeling like a slut in the hands of men who did real work. Because hanging off a rope in makeup is a pretty job and I wanted a dirty one under it.

The stall was a closet with a bulb and a trunk of dead glitter. Dust. Mothball. A jacket with a missing sequin hanging off a nail. Eden shut the half-door with his boot. Up close he was a lot of man. Shoulders. Heat. Beard. The smell of lion still on his palms. He didn’t kiss me. He pulled my face into that bare, wet chest and said, quiet,

“Lick it.”

I did.

Salt. Heat. Smooth skin under my tongue, then the beard when I went too high. I dragged my mouth over the muscle and he made a sound in his throat that wasn’t for the crowd. I found a nipple, sucked it because it was there and because he hissed when I did. Sweat ran into my mouth. I followed it down the middle of him, over the slick stomach, tongue in that thin ginger line, and he held the back of my head the way he held a stick on a cat that was thinking about standing up.

“That’s it. Get it off me. I stink.”

“I like it.”

“I know you like it. That’s why you’re in here instead of wiping down the silks.” His other hand opened my harness buckle like he’d been looking at the clasp from the wing. The straps loosened. Cool air on skin that had been packed in sequin and sweat for forty minutes. “Mouth. Fast. We don’t have a scene.”

He shoved his shorts down just far enough. He was already hard. Thick. Flushed dark at the head against all that pale skin. He put it on my tongue like he was clocking a cue. I opened. He used me. Not a date. A gap between the bow and the lockup. He fucked my face in short punches, one hand in my dark hair, the other braced on the trunk, breathing through his nose like he was still in the ring. The bulb swung. Sequins stuck to my knees. I gagged and he didn’t apologize. He said stay and I stayed and the taste of him mixed with the sweat I’d just cleaned off his chest.

“Look at you,” he muttered. “Pretty thing from the peak. Glitter on your face and a cock in your throat. That’s the show they don’t sell tickets for. They should. It would be a success.”

I hummed around him because I wanted him to feel it. He cursed and pulled out and turned me toward the trunk. Dance belt yanked aside. Spit. Two fingers. Not enough and enough. I was already open from wanting it since the first week I saw him put his arm past a lion’s face and not flinch.

He shoved in and my forehead hit the trunk.

“Fuck. Tight.” His mouth was at my ear. Cage voice. Smooth wet chest on my back. Beard scraping my shoulder. “You think about this on the silks. Don’t lie.”

“I think about it.”

“Yeah you do. Every drop. Every hold. You’re up there in makeup thinking about a tamer fucking you in a closet.” He started moving. Fast. The stall was too small for anything pretty. His hips slapped my ass and the trunk knocked the wall and somebody in the hall laughed at a joke that wasn’t us. He clapped a hand over my mouth.

“Quiet. You moan like you do when you’re stretching and Viko hears you.”

I moaned into his palm anyway. I wanted to feel like what I was in that stall — a boy in lipstick getting used by a man who put his body next to teeth for money. Eden’s sweat dropped off his jaw onto my shoulder. He licked it off me like a joke and then he was just fucking, short and mean, the way a quicky is supposed to be when the next act is already in eyeliner.

“I’m gonna dump it. You take it.”

“Give it to me. Breed me.”

He slammed in and came with his teeth in my shoulder, a growl he should have saved for the cats. Hot. A lot. He held me there while he pulsed and the bulb hummed and the tent canvas popped in the wind outside. I felt every jerk of him. I pushed back to keep it.

He pulled out. I felt it run down my thigh. He slapped my ass once, not tender.

“Wipe your mouth.”

He didn’t pull the shorts up. He lifted both arms and hooked his hands behind his head like he was still in the ring cooling down. The pits were soaked. Sharp. Almost no hair there either — just wet skin and the smell of the run mixed with what he’d just done to me. Sweat ran down the bare chest.

“You’re not done,” he said. “I told you to get it off me. That was before. This is after. Different sweat.”

I put my mouth in the left pit because that’s the one he shoved at my face. Salt. Heat. Smooth, slick, a little razor burn. He held my head there until I was licking, not kissing, dragging across the wet skin while that hairless chest rose against my cheek. He switched me to the other side with a fist in my hair. The smell sent me stupid.

“All of it. Chest. Belly. I came in you and I’m still dripping on myself. You wanted a real man. Clean the man.”

I did. I licked the shine off the pecs, the sweat under them, the smear on that flat stomach from his own cock. He tasted like the stall and the cage and the two minutes he’d promised. When I came back up for air he wiped my mouth with his thumb and put the thumb on my tongue.

“Better,” he said. “Now you look like you work here.”

That was when the half-door opened.

Viko had the other face of the job. Dark hair. Dark beard. Shirt slung over one shoulder. Tiger gloves in one hand because he never put the gloves down like a person. Hair on his chest already wet. A thicker trail down the stomach. A scratch on his forearm from a paw that had gotten curious in the bow. He looked at Eden’s cock, wet, at my ruined belt, at the sequins on my knees, at the smear of glitter on Eden’s bare chest.

“You started without me.”

“Two minutes,” Eden said. Not sorry. Breathing hard. “He’s still open.”

Viko stepped in and shut the door with his boot. The stall got smaller. Redhead and dark. Smooth and hairy. Lion and tiger. Same heat. Same work smell, different animal under it. Viko thumbed my chin up and looked at the glitter at the corner of my eye like it offended him and interested him in the same second.

“You lick him clean?”

“He told me to.”

“He would.” Viko glanced at Eden. “You always did like the pretty ones from the air. Tell him to lick me too, or do I have to ask nice.”

He didn’t ask nice.

He shoved his shorts down. Thick, darker than Eden’s, the head already wet. He dragged it across my mouth and I tasted him before I had a sentence. Eden leaned on the trunk and watched, still half-hard, wiping that smooth chest with his own palm like he was bored and he wasn’t.

“Get the sweat first,” Viko said. “I ran three cats. I’m not putting that in your throat dry of the rest of me.”

I put my mouth on his chest. Different from Eden. Hair. Salt. Heat trapped in it. I licked the pec, the nipple through the hair, the pit when he lifted his arm like a dare. He smelled like the tiger run. He smelled like work. I went down the trail and he laughed under his breath and let me do it until his stomach jumped.

“Look at him, E. Pretty little silk boy cleaning a tamer. You’d think he was raised in a cage.”

“He likes men,” Eden said. “That’s all it is.”

“That’s not all it is.” Viko pushed my head down. “Open that mouth, silky boy.”

I opened. He was rougher than Eden. He used my throat like the stall had a clock and the clock was his. When I choked he held me there a beat longer and let me drip on his boot and put me back on it. One hand on the trunk. The other in my hair. I looked up and saw two different men — beard red, beard black — one watching, one using, and I made a sound around him that I didn’t try to make pretty.

“That’s a professional mouth. You hang off a rope all night and then you come down and do this. You want to be a slut for men who smell like the run. Say it.”

I came off him long enough to say it.

“I want to be a slut for men like you.”

“Good. Get back on it.”

I did. Eden’s hand found the back of my neck. Not to stop it. To keep me there. Two tamers. One stall. A lion coughing on one side of the canvas. A tiger dragging chain on the other.

Viko pulled out, spat in his palm, turned me toward the trunk. He shoved in on the mess Eden had left and swore at the ceiling.

“Loose now. You filled him up.”

“He asked for it.”

“He asked for you. He’s getting both.” Viko started fucking, harder than the first one, hairy chest on my back, sweat and tiger-smell so close I could have been standing at the bars. I moaned. I didn’t keep it down. I wanted them to hear what I was. I wanted to be the thing they used when the lights died and the crowd went home smelling like sugar and nobody was clapping for the drop.

“Hear that,” Viko said. “That’s a slut on silks. Louder.”

I got louder. The trunk knocked. Eden put his cock back on my mouth while his friend fucked me and I took it because there was nothing else I wanted to take. The stall was heat and two beards and the wet sound of men who did dangerous work using the dancer who hung from the roof and thought about their hands during the hold.

Viko changed angle and hit something that made my knee slip. He caught my hip and didn’t slow down.

“Don’t fall. You fall on the silks they gasp. You fall in here I just put you back on it.”

Eden’s fingers tightened in my hair.

“He’s close,” Eden said, and I didn’t know if he meant me or Viko. Both, maybe. I was leaking on the dead jacket. I didn’t touch myself. I wanted the using to be the whole thing.

Viko came with a curse and a deep shove, filling what was already full. He stayed in me, breathing like he’d closed a cage, dark beard wet on my shoulder. Eden finished in my throat a minute later, hips tight, a sound he bit off, and I swallowed because the bulb was still on and the hallway still had voices and I wasn’t going to walk out of there looking unfinished.

They pulled out. I stayed on the trunk. Slippery. Makeup smeared. Sequins glued to my knees. The torn feeling of being used right. Between my thighs I could feel both of them leaving. I didn’t close my legs.

Viko picked up the gloves. Pointed them at my chest, not touching.

“You don’t talk about the stall.”

“I won’t.”

“You come off the silks tomorrow and you find us. Not this closet. The trailer behind the runs.” His smile was not Eden’s. Worse. “We got rope. You already know how to hang. Different knot. You come if you still want real men to use you.”

Eden pulled his shirt on over that bare wet chest. Looked at my mouth. Looked at Viko. Looked at the glitter on my cheek.

“He’s shaking.”

“He’s fine,” Viko said. “He’s hard. Look.”

I was. I hated that he pointed. I loved that he pointed. Eden hooked two fingers under my chin and made me look at him instead of the floor.

“You wanted men,” he said. “You got the ones who sleep next to the cages. Don’t get sweet about it in the morning. Don’t come to the wing with that face like we owe you a dinner.”

“I don’t want dinner. I want to be used.”

“I know what you want.” He let go of my chin. “Trailer. After strike. If the door’s locked you knock twice. If we don’t open, you go wash and you keep the silks.”

They left the stall first. The hallway swallowed the red beard and the dark one and the smell of them. I sat on the trunk until my legs worked. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and tasted both of them and the salt I’d been told to clean and the cheap lipstick that hadn’t survived the first minute.

Outside the canvas, a lion made that sound they make when they want out. Farther off, a tiger answered.

I fixed the belt as far as it would fix. I put glitter back at the corner of my eye with a finger that still smelled like their sweat. I walked into the hallway like I had come off a normal drop.

I didn’t wash.

I wanted the run on me until morning.

I wanted the trailer to smell me coming.