I stripped out of my trousers, reached down and stroked myself hard without really deciding to, just my hand moving on instinct while my brain was occupied with what was in front of me.

  Caleo on his hands and knees with his back arched low, his gymnast's body a clean unbroken line from his shoulders down to his hips, every muscle present and defined under smooth tan skin. His hairless asshole presenting itself with the rexed openness, soft, avaible and waiting. Framed by the curve of his ass on either side. His balls hung low in the warm air of the bedroom, heavy and smooth, and behind them his long cock hung soft and full, swaying slightly with his breathing.

  I stood there for a moment and just looked.

  Beautiful, I thought, and the word arrived without any of the internal friction I might have expected from a version of myself that existed two weeks ago. Just a pin fact about what I was looking at, received and filed without ceremony. I had apparently become a person for whom this was a thought I could have simply and without making a thing of it, which was either the ring's doing or mine or some combination of the two and I had stopped trying to apportion bme.

  I poured Morning Dew onto my fingers and moved in behind him and began working it into his hole in slow careful circles, coating the muscle gently, feeling it soften further under my touch, the warmth of the Dew spreading immediately on contact. Caleo let out a small sound, low and involuntary, his back dipping slightly lower.

  I moved my hand down.

  I cupped his balls gently, feeling their weight in my palm, rolling them slowly, and heard his breath change. Then I reached further and wrapped my hand around his cock and gave it a slow deliberate stroke, feeling him begin to harden against my fingers, his hips shifting with the attention.

  "I've never done this before," I said. "This potion, like this, I mean."

  "Comforting," he said, with the ghost of his usual tone underneath the arousal.

  "I'm going to uncork the Morning Dew vial and introduce it directly," I said, keeping my voice in the technical register, the pharmaceutical framing doing useful work for my own composure. "Then I'll introduce the second ingredient in the correct quantity directly after. The combining happens internally at your body temperature." I paused. "Are you ready?"

  Caleo reached back and wrapped his own hand around his cock in one long slow pull, his fingers working the length of himself with practiced ease, and then released it and went back to all fours. A gesture of acknowledgment, or preparation, or both.

  "Ready," he said.

  I uncorked the Morning Dew vial and pressed the lip of it gently against his hole. His asshole opened around it with the easy trained softness I still wasn't entirely used to, the muscle simply accepting the intrusion without negotiation. I tipped the vial and let the contents flow in slowly. The warm gold of it disappeared inside him, the faint luminescence visible for a moment at the point of entry before his body took it.

  Some escaped.

  A thin thread of Morning Dew ran down from his hole along his taint, warm and luminescent, catching the light as it tracked slowly downward. I watched it for a moment with the detached attention of someone monitoring a pharmaceutical process.

  I leaned in and licked it off.

  My tongue traced the path of it from his taint upward, following the warmth of the Dew, and I tasted him and the Morning Dew together. The combination was something my brain didn't have a clean category for. I kept going until I reached his hole and ran my tongue around it in a slow circle, tasting the residue there, the warmth of the Dew mixing with the specific warmth of him.

  Never thought I'd be licking a boy's asshole, I thought, with genuine mild surprise at myself. It was less a moral observation than a biographical one — a simple noting of the distance between the Jack Hartley of Ohio and the Jack Hartley currently on his knees behind a beautiful boy in a fantasy city.

  I did it again. Slower this time, more deliberate, my tongue pressing against the soft trained muscle and feeling it respond, opening slightly under the attention, Caleo's breath coming out in a long unsteady exhale above me.

  He moaned. Low and genuine, the sound of someone not performing anything.

  I pulled back and looked at what I'd done, his hole slick and warm. Slightly open, glistening with Morning Dew, his balls drawn up slightly tighter than they'd been a moment ago, his cock fully hard now and hanging heavy beneath him.

  I sat back on my heels and took my own cock in hand, stroking slowly, feeling the ring begin its familiar warmth, the charge building with each pass. The Vitalist's Draught required two parts cum to one part Morning Dew, combined at body temperature, absorbed from the preparation site. The Morning Dew was already inside him, warm and waiting.

  Time for the second ingredient.

  I lined the wide fred head of my cock against his hole and felt the Morning Dew residue warm and slick against my tip and looked at the line of his back and his low arched hips and his balls hanging heavy between his thighs.

  "Caleo," I said.

  "Jack," he said back, and there was something in his voice that was half his usual tone and half something quieter and more real.

  "This is going to help him," I said. "I don't know everything yet. But this part I'm confident about."

  A pause. His hands pressed ft against the sheets.

  "I know," he said simply.

  I pushed forward slowly and felt his body open around me and the ring lit up immediately and the morning got comprehensively underway.

  I lined the wide fred head of my cock against his hole and felt the Morning Dew warm and slick against my tip.

  "Ready?" I said.

  "I've been ready since you said internal mixing environment," he said, and pushed back against me before I'd finished processing the sentence.

  His hole opened around my fred head with that trained ease and he took the first few inches with a satisfied sound that had nothing tentative in it, his hips rolling back to take more, his hands braced ft on the sheets and working with me rather than waiting for me.

  "I want to note for the record," he said, his voice only slightly affected by the twelve inches of horse cock currently working its way into him, "that this is the most practical pharmaceutical methodology I have ever encountered."

  "I'm gd it meets your professional standards," I said.

  "The peer review is going to be extraordinary," he said. Then I hit a particur angle and the commentary dissolved into something considerably less academic.

  I worked deeper and felt the Morning Dew inside him warm against my tip, the Dew from my cock mixing with what I'd introduced from the vial, the ring lighting up at every point of contact, running it all back through me doubled. I could feel the Cum Crafter intuition at the back of my awareness, that quiet sense of a process working correctly, the ingredients combining at the right temperature, the preparation doing what it was supposed to do.

  I grabbed his hips and set a pace and Caleo responded immediately and completely, his whole body moving with it, sounds filling the room that had nothing shy or tentative anywhere in them. He reached back with one hand and grabbed my thigh pulling me deeper, his cock swinging hard beneath him, Morning Dew dripping from my shaft running down over his balls in warm luminescent threads.

  "Harder," he said, with the direct crity of someone who knew what they wanted and saw no reason to be indirect about it.

  I obliged.

  The ring was drinking charge from the encounter in long steady pulls, the warmth at my base building with each cycle, the bond's contribution sitting rich and distinct alongside my own. I could feel the Draught developing inside him, the Cum Crafter intuition tracking the preparation's progress with quiet certainty — the Morning Dew and the charge cycling through his system, beginning the slow systemic work that a vial sold across a counter could only approximate.

  At maximum potency, the bond notification had said. Administered to bonded partner, maximum potency.

  I thought about Marten. Fifty three years old and in pain and declining. Three years before it became serious. I thought about the locked recipe behind Level 8 and the trajectory the system had been pointing me along since the beginning.

  I drove deep and held there, let the ring release and felt Caleo's whole body respond to the warmth of it spreading through him from the inside, his back arching lower, his cock jumping hard beneath him, a sound leaving him that was less Caleo the cum sommelier and more something entirely unguarded and real.

  "Oh," he said quietly, to the sheets, to himself. "Oh that's — yes. That's it."

  Not about the sex. About the warmth of the Draught moving through him. I could hear the difference.

  He came shortly after, his cock pulsing untouched beneath him, his ass gripping me in long waves, his sounds filling the room with the full uninhibited commitment he brought to everything. I followed him over the edge and directed the ring to release everything, the full preparation delivered internally, the warmth of it spreading through him in a deep comprehensive wave that I could feel even from the outside, a heat moving outward from his core through every part of him.

  He dropped his chest to the mattress and y there breathing.

  I pulled out slowly and sat back on my heels and watched Morning Dew and cum run slowly down the inside of his thigh and felt the Cum Crafter intuition settle into something satisfied and certain at the back of my awareness.

  First preparation successful. Potency optimal.

  Caleo rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling with the expression of someone running an internal inventory. He pressed a hand ft against his stomach.

  "I can feel it working," he said. Not with surprise exactly. More the tone of a theorist watching a hypothesis become a result. "It's warm. Moving outward from — " he pressed his hand lower, " — from here. Spreading." He turned his head to look at me. "Is that normal?"

  "First time for me too," I said. "But yes. I think that's exactly what it's supposed to do."

  He nodded and looked back at the ceiling. The mp all the way down, quiet underneath everything, just Caleo with his hand on his stomach feeling something work through him that he'd spent five years trying to find.

  "Will it help him," he said.

  "Yes," I said. Simply, because I was confident enough to say it that way. "Not everything. Not permanently. Not yet. But yes."

  He was quiet for a moment. Then the small decisive nod of someone receiving information they'd been waiting a long time for and didn't want to make too much of in case it moved.

  "Good," he said.

  We y there for a while. The te morning light coming through the window, the house warm and thoroughly aromatic, the sheets a complete documentation of the st twelve hours. The ring hummed deep and satisfied at my base. The Cum Crafter intuition sat warm at the back of my awareness like a pilot light, steady and certain.

  Then I remembered.

  "The vials," I said.

  Caleo looked at me.

  "The preparation needs to be extracted and bottled," I said. "For transport. For your father." I sat up and reached for the three empty vials I'd set on the bedside table before we started, lining them up. "The Draught that's inside you right now — some of it your body will absorb directly, that's part of the process. But there should be enough remaining to bottle. Three vials worth if the yield is what I think it is."

  Caleo looked at the vials. Looked at me. The academic interest fully present alongside everything else.

  "And the extraction method," he said.

  "Straightforward," I said. "You'll need to squat over the bowl."

  He sat up immediately with the decisive energy of someone who had committed to a process and was seeing it through to completion. I got the gss collection bowl from the crafting room and set it on the floor in the middle of the bedroom and Caleo stood over it and looked at me for a moment.

  "How much pressure should I apply," he said.

  "Enough," I said. "Take your time. The yield should come naturally with some assistance."

  He nodded once, the professional nod, and squatted over the bowl.

  What followed had the specific quality of a procedure, deliberate, focused, both of us paying attention to the task with the concentrated interest of people who had decided that this was a completely normal thing to be doing and were correct. Caleo bore down slowly and I watched the Draught begin to emerge from his hole, warm and luminescent, the gold of the Morning Dew threaded through the thicker white of the cum, the two ingredients combined into something that was neither of its components separately but something new, the color deeper than pin Morning Dew, richer, with a luminescence that pulsed very faintly rather than holding steady.

  It ran in a slow thick stream and hit the bowl with a sound that seemed very loud in the quiet bedroom.

  "Keep going," I said.

  He pressed more deliberately and the stream thickened, his hole opening further, and more of the Draught ran out of him and into the bowl in long warm pulses, his body releasing the preparation methodically. The smell hit immediately, the familiar warm sweetness of Morning Dew concentrated and deepened into something richer and more complex, something that the Cum Crafter intuition in the back of my awareness recognized and responded to with immediate approval.

  The bowl collected the output steadily. Caleo breathed through it with the focused calm of someone performing a task that required physical attention, bearing down in careful increments, his thighs holding the squat with the easy strength.

  When the main flow slowed I leaned in.

  His hole was slightly gaping, soft and open, the trained muscle rexed and loose in the aftermath, a thick bead of the combined Draught sitting at the rim of it, luminescent and warm. I scooped it off the edge with two fingers and brought it to my tongue without overthinking it.

  The taste hit immediately.

  Not Morning Dew. Not cum. Something that was both and neither, the sweetness of the Dew and the salt thickness of the cum combined into a third thing that my Cum Crafter intuition received like a tuning fork hitting its correct frequency. Warm and complex and alive with that systemic kick, spreading across my tongue and down my throat in a wave that reached my stomach and kept going, the healing warmth moving outward through me even from a single finger's worth.

  I held it on my tongue for a moment.

  Then I pushed him forward, his ass in the air. I leaned in further and ran my tongue slowly around the rim of his hole, collecting the residue there, tasting the st of the Draught where it clung to the soft open muscle, warm and luminescent and perfect. Caleo made a low sound above me that had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical process.

  I sat back on my heels.

  "Perfect," I said.

  Not a casual assessment. The Cum Crafters intuition confirming it with complete certainty, the quality of the preparation sitting in my awareness like a struck bell holding its note. Whatever was in those three vials was going to do what it was supposed to do.

  I picked up the funnel and began filling the vials carefully, the combined Draught flowing warm and thick and faintly glowing into each one. Three vials filled to the stoppers, the liquid inside them pulsing with that slow faint luminescence, visually distinct from anything the Golden Salve produced. Richer. Deeper. The color of something that had been made rather than simply collected.

  I stoppered the st one and held it up to the light.

  The Cum Crafters intuition hummed with satisfaction.

  Caleo had straightened up and was looking at the three vials in my hand with those blue eyes and an expression that was doing several things at once — the academic satisfaction of a hypothesis confirmed, something more personal underneath it, and the particur quality of attention of someone looking at something that might change his father's life.

  "Three," he said.

  "Three," I confirmed. "One a week to start. I want to see how he responds before adjusting the dosage." I set them carefully on the bedside table. "Bring him here if you can. I'd like to assess him directly."

  Caleo nodded. He was quiet for a moment, looking at the vials.

  "Jack," he said.

  "Yes."

  "Thank you," he said. Simply. No performance in it, no Caleo energy. Just a boy who had spent five years working toward something and was standing in a bedroom looking at three small vials of it.

  I picked up the vials and put them carefully into a cloth wrap and handed them to him.

  "Go get that graduated set," I said.

  The mp came back up. The smile returned, warm and slightly unhinged around the edges.

  "Prepare yourself," he said.

  "I walked into that," I said.

  "Comprehensively," he agreed, and went to get dressed.