Edited on 1/26/2015. I've reworked chapters 1 & 2 and rewritten chapter 3 as two chapters. The fifth and final chapter is on it's way.
"Do you want to come try something new tonight?" Natasha asked me after the others had left the training room.
"Something new?" I inquired, wiping away the grit from the split seams of the latest bag.
"Well, new to you."
"There's more?" I asked incredulously, realizing too late how ridiculous I sounded.
She smiled warmly, and I felt like even more of a dope. "There's always more. This one is...just a kink. Took him a while to share it, even with me."
That surprised me; Clint shared almost everything with everybody. How the man could be so good at his job, so silent and patient and yet still rival Tony in his level of over-sharing was always impressive.
Although, now that I thought about it, the man could keep a secret. Even with all the loaded glances, surreptitious caresses and almost-innuendos, he'd never breathed a word or betrayed a hint of the arrangement between the three of us. But I always assumed it was simply the result of a death-threat from Natasha.
She had approached me today in the gym with the same polite seduction she adopted those long months ago. That day, she found me looking out over the skyline in this city that was decidedly not the one I grew up in. She sidled close to me and, tracing idle patterns on my skin with her deft touch, invited me to "visit" her and Clint sometime. Her implication was clear, even to me; I didn't realize how much modern social mores had already infiltrated my consciousness. So much so that her proposal didn't even shock or confuse me.
Or maybe Natasha is just that good; that a few words in that smoky voice of hers could draw me away from what I had considered pretty established parameters and into this arrangement with hardly a backward glance.
Either way, I couldn't get it out of my head. The provocative words kept me up at night and followed me around in my waking hours. I found myself watching her, watching him, and wondering. One afternoon, Clint caught me studying him from behind the book I was hardly even pretending to read, and gifted me with an assessing glance and a sly smirk before returning his attention to his coffee. Natasha brushed against him when she entered the kitchen and took the cup he offered her. She pretended to not even see me as she stirred a generous helping of sugar, slid her spoon in her mouth to taste the sweetness, kissed him extravagantly and sauntered out.
I knocked on their door that night.
So now, several months and lots of nights since, when she said those words with that same dark promise, I knew how to interpret her meaning.
And I understood the intensity in Clint's eyes as he disappeared through the gym's exit. It occurred to me that his haste was to give Natasha time to put this new proposition on the table. I was intrigued; of course I was.
"What's the game?" I asked.
"Clint gets really turned on when you punch or press his stomach."
I blinked. I thought of some of the perverse paraphelias I'd seen on the internet. Once JARVIS set me up with a way to privately Google, I'd done a fair amount of research —I thought of if as porn with a purpose. This one was new, and much more appealing than, say, feet or just general pain, and less daunting than some of the more extreme "erotic" tortures I'd stumbled upon.
"That's it?"
"Yes," she confirmed.
I'd noticed the extra attention he paid to my abs and to Natasha's, how she sometimes positioned herself to exert pressure in one way or another on her partner's midsection while we reconfigured ourselves in bed or on the floor. In fact, the strange position she arranged him in last time made a lot more sense; she placed him in such a way that each time I pushed into him, I ground his belly into the back of the chair.
I hadn't understood dominance and submission when we first began; and I still wasn't an adept. Even though we usually played as equals, under Natasha's competent tutelage, I'd found pleasure in bending the cocky, self-assured archer to my will and to watching her do things to him I hadn't even known were possible. I guess I was submitting to them too, after a fashion, but I've always been comfortable taking orders from able leadership so that didn't seem too strange. And I cherished the few times she had submitted to me, even if I didn't demand much from her.
We'd never set out to hurt one another before, but finding pleasure in pain sure seemed like that was the plan tonight. I found my senses humming at the prospect.
"Show me," I said.