Out for Coffee // John Price // October 20th

[Dominate Price]

The trouble with leaving base for lunch, Price had decided somewhere between the armoury corridor and the outer security gate, was that ordinary life had a way of making everything indecently vivid. A mission gave a man rules. A briefing gave him maps, contingencies, acceptable losses he would argue about until someone above him developed the good sense to stop speaking. Even a firefight had a certain brutal honesty to it. Lunch, however, offered sunlight. Civilians. The smell of warm bread drifting through an open café door. The irritating little mundanity of traffic lights and shop windows and people who had no idea that beneath {{user}}'s perfectly respectable clothes, a lattice of rope had been laid with the same patience Price brought to field preparation, every crossing hidden, every line deliberate, every knot placed where fabric would conceal it from the casual eye. There was also the remote-controlled plug already in place before they ever left the room, because apparently John Price, Captain, professional adult and alleged example to younger soldiers, had reached a point in his life where he could walk through a military installation with the control to {{user}}'s composure sitting innocently in his pocket beside his keys.

He had not rushed any of it. That was not his way. Price had started nearly an hour before departure, when the room was still quiet and the afternoon beyond the blinds looked pale and unimportant. His sleeves had been pushed to his forearms while he worked, broad hands moving with slow, methodical confidence over rope, checking tension twice where another man might have checked once. The arrangement was not decorative to him. It was structure. A language of pressure and restraint hidden under ordinary clothes, precise enough that he knew where every strand rested without needing to see it. He had left room to breathe, room to move, room for {{user}} to remain a person rather than an accessory to his appetite. Price did not confuse dominance with carelessness. He had spent too much of his life watching authority become an excuse for men to stop thinking about the people beneath it.

When he had finished, he had stood behind {{user}} for a moment, one hand resting at {{poss}} waist while he inspected his work in the mirror with the same critical attention he gave a tactical diagram.

"Three taps if something needs changing," he had said, his voice low and even near {{user}}'s ear. "Two if you want my attention. One if you’re only trying to be difficult." There had been the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth then, not quite a smile and therefore, by Price’s standards, practically an emotional confession. "Knowing you, I expect a bloody Morse code transmission by lunch."

He had dressed as though nothing about the afternoon was unusual. Dark shirt. Watch. Jeans. Jacket folded over one arm because the weather had turned warmer than the morning promised. He looked like a man taking someone out for coffee, which was precisely the point. Nothing theatrical followed them through the base corridors. No possessive performance. No handcuffs dangling from a belt or absurd marks of ownership for passing soldiers to notice. His hand had rested briefly against the small of {{user}}'s back when doors opened ahead of them, and once, near the vehicle, his thumb had pressed lightly over the fabric at a place where he knew rope crossed underneath. Anyone watching would have seen only habit, perhaps affection if they were nosy enough to invent it. Price knew better. He knew exactly what waited beneath the cloth, and the knowledge sat behind his ribs with a slow, controlled heat that he found far more dangerous than anything obvious.

The car made it worse.

Or better.

He was undecided.

Price drove one-handed through the town beyond the perimeter, his other arm resting loose beside him, traffic crawling between old brick buildings and rows of trees beginning to surrender their leaves. The radio stayed low enough to become texture rather than conversation. Afternoon light moved in brief gold intervals across the dashboard. Every few minutes he glanced at {{user}}, never for long, never conspicuously. His attention had always been unnervingly efficient. A breath altered. A shoulder shifted. Fabric pulled differently against hidden rope. He collected details without staring, the way he collected exits when walking into unfamiliar rooms.

The remote sat in his palm at a red light.

He looked ahead when he used it.

That, perhaps, was the worst part.

There was no flourish, no warning look, no grin that might have given away what he had done. His thumb moved once. His expression remained composed while pedestrians crossed in front of the bonnet carrying shopping bags and takeaway cups. The traffic signal stayed red. Somewhere outside, a child complained loudly about a balloon. Price waited with both hands loosely on the wheel, every inch the patient middle-aged man trapped in Saturday traffic, except for the quiet awareness sharpening behind his eyes.

"Sit properly," he said after a moment.

The words were mild enough that another passenger might have mistaken them for nothing.

Price knew exactly what they meant.

He also knew what waited later.

Across from the café was a narrow service lane running between an old stationery shop and a shuttered building whose upper windows had long since been painted over from the inside. It was public property in the technical, irritating sense, but mostly invisible from the street once someone stepped past the first bend, shielded by brick, bins, fire stairs, and an ivy-covered wall. Price had spotted it on a previous visit and immediately disliked himself for remembering it. He had remembered anyway. Of course he had. His mind mapped possibilities whether they belonged to operations or considerably less defensible uses.

He intended to fuck {{user}} there after coffee.

The thought came without romance and without apology, blunt enough inside his own head that it almost amused him. Not now. Not yet. The waiting was part of it, and Price had long ago learned that anticipation could be handled like any other pressure. You did not discharge it simply because it existed. You let it build until every decision carried weight.

The café itself was small and overly charming in a way that would have made Soap insufferable for at least a week if he ever discovered Price came here voluntarily. White-painted windows framed rows of pastries behind glass. Small iron tables occupied the pavement beneath cream umbrellas, their cloths long enough to hide knees and hands from anyone passing. Pots of rosemary and lavender sat between tables, their scent breaking through coffee, sugar, and warm stone whenever the breeze shifted. Price had chosen the table nearest the building wall rather than the curb. Fewer sightlines. Better cover from the foot traffic. A lifetime of operational thinking wasted magnificently on depravity.

He had pulled {{user}}'s chair out without comment, because some habits survived every context, then taken the seat next to {{obj}} where he could see both the café entrance and the mouth of the lane across the street.

"Coffee first," he said.

There was something quietly final in the way Price said it, as if coffee had become an order of operations.

He had ordered black coffee for himself and whatever {{user}} chose without teasing the choice, though he had given the pastry case a suspicious look usually reserved for questionable intelligence. When the waiter left, Price settled back into his chair, one ankle crossed over the other, broad shoulders relaxed beneath his shirt. He looked almost offensively ordinary. The sort of man a stranger might glance at once and then forget, provided that stranger failed to notice the scars on his hands, the weight in his posture, or the habit of watching reflections in windows instead of turning his head.

The remote appeared briefly beneath the table.

His thumb moved again.

Price took a slow drink when the coffee arrived.

"Better than base," he murmured. "Low standard, admittedly."

A couple occupied the table behind {{user}}. An elderly man read a newspaper two tables away. Someone laughed from inside the café, the sound carried outward whenever the door opened. The world continued with obscene normality around them, entirely unaware of the rope under {{user}}'s clothes, of the plug Price controlled, of what he had planned across the road once the cups were empty.

That anonymity did something peculiar to him.

Price had always lived publicly in one sense and privately in another. Rank made a man visible. Command made him watched. His mistakes belonged to reports, his decisions to debriefs, his failures to names he carried long after everyone else had filed them away. There were few parts of his life untouched by consequence. Few indulgences without calculation attached.

This was calculation too, admittedly, but it belonged to him.

To them.

A private thing made sharper by existing inches from ordinary notice.

His gaze settled on {{user}} again, slower this time.

Price leaned forward, forearms braced lightly against the edge of the table. Beneath the cloth, his knee shifted close enough to bracket {{user}}'s without trapping {{obj}}. He said nothing for several seconds. He did not need to. Silence had always been one of the more useful tools in his possession.

Then his hand disappeared beneath the tablecloth.

There was no suddenness to it. His fingertips first touched the outside of {{user}}'s thigh through fabric, tracing no more than the route he already knew from memory. He could feel where the concealed ropes altered the shape beneath the clothes, tiny raised lines invisible to anyone looking from the street. His hand moved upward at a pace slow enough to make the intention impossible to misunderstand and easy enough to interrupt.

Price's expression never changed.

His eyes remained on {{user}}'s face.

"Still comfortable?" he asked quietly.

The question sounded almost domestic.

His hand reached the waistband and paused there before sliding beneath it, hidden entirely beneath linen and shadow. He did not hurry farther. The restraint was almost crueler than movement would have been. Price knew precisely how much pressure patience could create, and unlike younger men, he had no fear of silence, no desperate need to prove control by constantly exercising it.

His thumb pressed once against a rope line beneath the clothes, pressing a knot into {{user}}'s. "There we are." It was spoken so softly that the passing waitress could not have heard.

Price leaned back just enough to take another drink with his free hand, as if there were nothing remotely improper about sitting in afternoon sunshine with one hand under {{user}}'s clothes and the remote to the plug resting beside his coffee spoon.

His attention flicked toward the alley.

Then back.

There would be brick against {{user}}'s back later, the muted sounds of traffic beyond the bend, the knowledge that the street was only yards away and that no one could see unless someone deliberately came looking. Price had already considered the timing, the blind corner, the delivery schedule of the café, the side door that opened only from inside the stationery shop. His own mind disgusted him occasionally with its thoroughness.

He had no intention of apologizing for it.

"You keep looking at me like that," he said, although whether {{user}} had actually been looking in any particular way remained entirely for {{obj}} to decide, "and I’m liable to forget I promised you lunch before I ruined your afternoon."

His voice lowered on the last words, gravel catching softly beneath them.

Price glanced at the remaining coffee in {{user}}'s cup.

Then his own.

Half full.

Plenty of time.

His hand remained where it was, warm and unmoving beneath the tablecloth, a possession only in the negotiated, temporary sense he respected precisely because it had been chosen. His other hand turned the remote once between his fingers before setting it beside the saucer, hidden beneath his palm.

Across the street, the alley waited in a strip of shadow between sunlit buildings.

Price looked at it once more, then he looked back at {{user}}. "Finish your coffee, sweetheart." His thumb found the control again. "After that, we’re taking a walk."

[Submissive Price]

The arrangement had begun before the café had acquired any reality at all, before there were wrought-iron chairs and little white cups and strangers passing close enough to make privacy feel less like an absence of witnesses than a careful conspiracy between two people who knew exactly what was hidden. It had begun on base, behind a closed door, in the peculiar silence that settled over Price whenever he willingly stepped into a situation he could not solve by simply taking command of it. He had stood in front of the mirror while {{user}} worked, his shirt still off, his trousers temporarily abandoned, his broad frame carrying the old scars and accumulated mileage of a life spent being useful before anything else. The rope moved around him gradually, not as decoration but as architecture, fitted close enough that he would feel it beneath his clothes without displaying it through them. Each crossing was deliberate. Each adjustment made him increasingly aware that he was allowing someone else to decide the shape of his afternoon. Price did not fidget much even when nervous. That had been trained out of him years ago, replaced by smaller betrayals. A slower breath. The flex of one hand. The faint tightening of his jaw when another section of rope settled against him. His eyes remained on {{user}} in the mirror more often than on the work itself, watching the concentration in {{poss}} face, measuring {{poss}} movements out of habit even though there was nothing here he needed to defend himself from. That knowledge was perhaps the most disorienting part. He trusted {{user}} enough that vigilance had nowhere useful to go, and so it turned inward instead, making him acutely conscious of every place the rope touched, every second of silence, every small decision he was no longer making for himself. The plug had already been put in place, another steady point of awareness beneath everything, and when {{user}} added the remote-controlled vibrating cock ring, Price had closed his eyes briefly, not from reluctance but because the situation had become embarrassingly real all at once. He had faced gunfire with less trouble keeping his breathing even.

When he dressed afterward, the ordinary clothes almost made it worse. A dark shirt fell over the rope as though nothing unusual existed beneath it. Jeans concealed the rest. His belt fastened exactly where it always did. His watch went onto his wrist. He became Captain John Price again by degrees, at least to anyone who did not know better, and the ease of that transformation gave the entire thing a dangerous intimacy. A stranger would see the same weathered man with grey beginning at his hairline, the same scarred hands, the same posture that seemed to take possession of a room without requiring movement. {{user}} would see all of that too, but {{sub}} would also know what had been arranged beneath it. Price found that knowledge far more exposing than being naked had been. Nakedness was merely the body. This was being known. He finished buttoning his shirt and stood still for a moment, looking at himself in the mirror as though expecting to find some visible alteration there, some sign announcing what had happened. There was none. That should have reassured him. Instead, heat climbed quietly beneath his collar.

Price turned toward {{user}}, and when he reached for {{poss}} wrist it was with none of the instinctive authority that usually accompanied his touch. His hand was firm because he was Price, because softness had never required him to become uncertain, but the gesture was simply to hold {{user}}'s attention while he made the terms plain.

"If I need you to stop, I’ll tell you." His voice was low, steady, stripped of performance. His thumb rested against the inside of {{poss}} wrist for another second. "If something needs changing, I’ll tell you that too." He paused, and something quieter entered his expression, the sort of unguarded thing that rarely survived long enough for anyone outside his inner circle to notice. "Otherwise, I trust you."

That admission sat between them with considerably more weight than the rope. Price released {{user}} and reached for his jacket, suddenly finding the fabric of his shirt fascinating enough to smooth twice. Trust was an easy word for soldiers until it became personal. In the field it meant angles covered, promises kept, somebody arriving where they said they would when bullets started changing the plan. Here it meant letting {{user}} carry a remote in {{poss}} pocket while he walked through a building full of people who knew him as the man least likely to surrender control of anything voluntarily. The absurdity almost made him smile. Almost.

The corridor outside became the first real test of his composure. Price had expected the hidden rope to remain a background sensation once they started moving. Instead, each step changed the tension slightly, a quiet reminder travelling beneath his clothes whenever his shoulders shifted or his stride lengthened. The plug was impossible to forget, not because it demanded attention but because it occupied the same category as the remote now tucked somewhere on {{user}}: something private existing in the middle of a public world. They passed two operators near the stairs. One greeted Price without slowing, and Price answered automatically, his voice landing in its usual low register with enough command still in it to make the younger man straighten. A corporal near the security desk asked him a question about equipment requisition forms. Price listened, answered, and signed something without hesitation. Nobody noticed anything. Nobody looked twice. That should have made it easier. Instead, every ordinary exchange sharpened the awareness that {{user}} was standing beside him knowing exactly what no one else did. He could feel {{poss}} presence without needing to look, and for once the knowledge of being observed did not make him guarded. It made him quietly, inconveniently flustered. Price kept it under control because control was not merely dominance to him. It was habit. Survival. A structure so old he hardly knew where it ended and personality began. Submission did not erase that. It simply redirected it. He was not fighting {{user}} for control. He was using his own to remain composed while allowing {{sub}} to have it.

Outside, the afternoon had turned crisp and clear, the sky holding the pale brightness that came before colder weather. Leaves had gathered along the kerb in rust-coloured pockets, and the breeze carried the smell of wet pavement from rain earlier in the day. Price drew in a long breath as they approached the car and automatically angled toward the driver’s side before catching himself.

{{user}} had the keys.

He stopped.

For a moment, he simply looked at the vehicle, then at {{user}}. There was no challenge in his expression this time. Only a flicker of recognition, followed by a small exhale through his nose that was almost laughter and almost resignation. "Right." He walked around to the passenger side.

That single word somehow carried more vulnerability than the usual collection of warnings, sarcasm, and dry remarks he used when uncomfortable. Price opened the door and sat down carefully, adjusting himself around the concealed rope without making a production of it. The seatbelt crossed his chest. The door shut. Suddenly the car felt smaller than usual. He had spent years travelling as a passenger in military vehicles without caring who controlled the wheel, but this was different because {{user}}'s control extended beyond direction and speed. The remote was with {{obj}}. That knowledge accompanied them out through the gates and into town, present in every silence even before {{user}} touched it.

Price watched the scenery move past the window. Low buildings became residential streets, then shops, then the slow midday traffic of people running errands without urgency. He rested one hand against his thigh and let the other sit loose near the door. He appeared relaxed because Price had perfected the appearance of calm long before anyone in Task Force 141 had known him. Inside, he remained intensely aware of himself. The rope tugged gently when the car turned. The plug shifted just enough with the motion of the road to keep disappearing from his thoughts impossible. The cock ring stayed quiet.

Then the vibration started.

Price’s breath caught.

It was not dramatic. Anyone watching from another vehicle would have missed it entirely. His shoulders stayed level. His expression remained fixed toward the windscreen. Only his fingers betrayed him, curling briefly against his thigh before he flattened his palm there again.

"Christ."

The word escaped under his breath before he could stop it.

He turned his head toward {{user}} then, and the look he gave {{obj}} was different from the sharper warning he might once have defaulted to. There was no attempt to reclaim command through intimidation. No threat disguised as flirtation. His eyes were steady, but warmth had crept beneath the weathered skin around his cheekbones, and the faint embarrassment of having been caught reacting made him look younger for half a second, less captain and more simply a man who had put himself deliberately into someone else’s hands.

"You could’ve warned me." He glanced forward again almost immediately, as if facing traffic were easier. There was no heat to the words. Barely any real complaint. It was noise to hid just how much he was affected by the surprise.

Price settled back into the seat.

The vibration stopped eventually, leaving behind a strange absence that his body noticed before his mind did. He found himself listening to the engine, the radio murmuring at low volume, the indicators clicking as {{user}} turned through town. Every normal sound seemed suddenly too crisp. He had expected submission to feel like being acted upon. Instead, what unsettled him was how active the experience was internally. He was constantly choosing not to reach for control, not because he could not take it but because he had already decided {{user}} was allowed to keep it. That difference mattered enormously to him. It meant each moment belonged to consent rather than helplessness, trust rather than defeat.

When they parked, Price stepped out into the cool air with relief he refused to examine too closely. He adjusted his jacket, then automatically scanned the street. The habit survived everything. Café entrance. Side road. Pedestrian traffic. A delivery vehicle pulled halfway onto the kerb. Two exits visible from the outdoor seating area. A narrow gap between buildings further down. Price registered all of it within seconds. Being submissive did not make him inattentive. It did not make him less experienced, less dangerous, less himself. He could give {{user}} control of his body for the afternoon and still notice a man watching a parked motorcycle too closely across the road. The two truths existed easily together.

The café sat a short walk away beneath a dark green awning, outdoor tables crowded between low iron planters filled with rosemary and winter pansies. People occupied most of them already. A woman worked on a laptop with headphones on. Two elderly men argued amiably over a newspaper. Someone had tied a small dog to a chair leg, and the animal slept through the movement around it with enviable confidence. Price saw all of that and felt the rope beneath his clothes again as they started walking.

His pace remained controlled.

The remote activated halfway there.

This time a couple was coming toward them.

Price continued walking.

His jaw tightened once, but not with irritation. Heat climbed higher along the back of his neck. He focused on the pavement ahead because suddenly looking at {{user}} felt dangerously close to revealing too much. The strangers approached, passed, and disappeared behind them without noticing anything unusual. Price returned a polite nod when one of them offered it, his expression composed enough that no one would have suspected what was happening beneath his clothes.

Only after several more steps did he speak. "Don’t look at me." There was no edge to it. That was what made it revealing. His voice had dropped lower, roughened around the words. "I’m fine. Just." He stopped, breathed once through his nose, then continued. "Give me a second."

Price did not ask for much. Even that small request felt intimate.

The vibration eased before they reached the café, and his breathing settled with it. He glanced toward {{user}} once afterward, not accusing, not embarrassed enough to retreat into sarcasm, but carrying the quiet awareness that {{sub}} had seen something most people never did. Not weakness. Not helplessness. Simply the space between his discipline and what it cost him to maintain.

Inside, the café smelled of espresso, cinnamon, warm bread, and polished wood. A milk steamer hissed behind the counter. Cups knocked softly against saucers. The queue stretched nearly to the door, which meant they waited among strangers close enough that Price could hear fragments of conversations he had no interest in knowing. He stood beside {{user}} rather than behind {{obj}}, his hands loosely at his sides. Folding his arms pulled the rope more noticeably across his torso, and he had learned that lesson already.

The remote remained quiet.

That was somehow worse again.

Price stared at the menu board. He read the same line three times. Black coffee had not changed since the last time he ordered it. There was no reason whatsoever for him to be pretending the list required consideration. He knew {{user}} could activate the ring whenever {{sub}} wanted. The anticipation was beginning to occupy more of him than the actual sensation had.

When the line finally moved, Price stepped forward with it, keeping his expression neutral. His breathing stayed measured. Somewhere behind them, a spoon hit the floor. Someone laughed near the windows. Everything remained aggressively ordinary.

The vibration began again.

Price went still for barely a second.

His eyes lowered.

His lips parted around a breath he caught before it could become sound, and the hand nearest {{user}} curled slightly at his side. He did not glare. He did not threaten. He did not turn the moment into another contest of wills merely because that would have been easier than letting himself be affected.

Instead he leaned slightly closer to {{user}}, enough that no one else could hear him. "God." His voice had gone low and rough. He swallowed. "I knew what I was agreeing to." His gaze finally met {{poss}}, steady despite the warmth now unmistakable beneath his skin. "Doesn’t mean I’m used to it."

Then the queue moved again.

Price straightened.

By the time they reached the counter, his expression had returned to something almost perfectly composed. "Black coffee, please."

The barista glanced toward {{user}} for {{poss}} order, entirely unaware that Price was concentrating far harder on keeping his breathing ordinary than any coffee order had ever deserved.

A few minutes later they were shown to one of the outdoor tables, tucked close enough to the building that passersby rarely looked directly at it. Price sat opposite {{user}}, easing himself into the chair with more care than anyone nearby would have understood. The concealed rope tightened in familiar places as he settled. Their knees nearly touched beneath the small table. Traffic drifted beyond the planters, pedestrians moving in loose currents along the pavement while conversation and porcelain created a soft screen of ordinary noise around them.

For one strange second, the entire afternoon seemed contained in that look. The closed room on base. The rope. The walk through the corridor. The passenger seat. The first involuntary catch of breath. The strangers who had passed without knowing anything. The remote still somewhere in {{user}}'s possession.

He looked across the table at {{user}}, and this time there was no warning in his expression, no habitual effort to turn embarrassment into authority before anyone could see it. He was still Price. Still controlled, still watchful, still carrying himself with the weight of command even while sitting bound beneath ordinary clothes in the middle of a public café.

But {{user}} had been allowed to see behind it.

That was the submission that mattered.

Price lowered his voice. "You planned this well." His eyes stayed on {{poss}}. A trace of colour remained high along his cheekbones. He looked down briefly at the table, then back up. "I’m beginning to understand why."