Heh, it's Esquire-inspired too. The two things dovetailed unnervingly well.
It's a mix of both motives for Stephen, I think. Tracey definitely knows about the sex; what she knows or thinks of the details, I'm not sure. Probably has a dark streak of her own -- she's definitely going to seduce poor Lorraine one of these days.
All the emphasis here is on character traits we usually gloss over or compensate for. Stephen really can't be trusted not to be having unsafe sex elsewhere; Jon is willing to indulge Stephen's masochistic streak, but as an extension of his disdain for Stephen's views, not as a way of taking care of Stephen's needs; Stephen's acting on his attraction toward authority figures who will hurt him, and Jon has no interest in challenging him to change. It doesn't really fit with all the Jon-being-tender-toward-Stephen scenes we get in canon, but maybe in this universe something different happened early on in their acquaintanceship that put it on a completely altered path.
I think needy!bottom!"Stephen" works because he buys into the seme/uke stuff, and the symbolism of it feeds right into his kinks. Here, he's getting used and controlled more than enough to negate any sense of power he might have gotten from topping, so it still works out in the end.
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It's a mix of both motives for Stephen, I think. Tracey definitely knows about the sex; what she knows or thinks of the details, I'm not sure. Probably has a dark streak of her own -- she's definitely going to seduce poor Lorraine one of these days.
All the emphasis here is on character traits we usually gloss over or compensate for. Stephen really can't be trusted not to be having unsafe sex elsewhere; Jon is willing to indulge Stephen's masochistic streak, but as an extension of his disdain for Stephen's views, not as a way of taking care of Stephen's needs; Stephen's acting on his attraction toward authority figures who will hurt him, and Jon has no interest in challenging him to change. It doesn't really fit with all the Jon-being-tender-toward-Stephen scenes we get in canon, but maybe in this universe something different happened early on in their acquaintanceship that put it on a completely altered path.
I think needy!bottom!"Stephen" works because he buys into the seme/uke stuff, and the symbolism of it feeds right into his kinks. Here, he's getting used and controlled more than enough to negate any sense of power he might have gotten from topping, so it still works out in the end.