by Allan, S. H.
Anna’s website is http://annabutlerfiction.com. You can also find her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/anna.butler.9822. E-mail her at [email protected].
The Responsible One
Eva Clancy
Tom
“WHY don’t you go without me?” Tom said. “Or you could call Andy and see if he wants to go?” He kept his tone light and his attention fixed on the coffee machine, but he could sense the waves of resentment coming off Owen as he ate his frosted cereal at the kitchen table. Frosted cereal. Ugh. Just thinking about that much sugar made Tom’s teeth ache.
There was a brief silence. Then, “I wanted to go with you,” Owen said. His voice was tense with anger. “You promised last weekend we’d spend some time together.”
“I know, babe, and I’m sorry. If I could avoid going to work today—”
Owen clattered his spoon down on the table. “Please don’t pretend there’s nothing you can do. We both know that nobody else goes into your office at the weekends—you spend long enough moaning about it.”
Tom sighed. Okay, maybe he had an overly developed sense of responsibility, but he couldn’t let everything slide just because that was what everyone else was doing.
“I spent ages planning a route and getting the bikes ready,” Owen continued. “You watched me do it, Tom! You knew this was important to me, but you still let me down at the last minute. Again.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said again, but this time he didn’t try to suppress the resentment in his tone. Was it really too much to expect Owen to be in his corner over this? He wearily ran a hand over the back of his neck, wincing at the tension he carried there.
“You’re always sorry,” Owen muttered.
They lapsed into a strained silence, broken only by the drip, drip, drip of the coffee machine. It was an ancient thing, and it produced a lethal caffeine-heavy brew that Tom loved and Owen couldn’t stomach.
When the machine eventually stopped, Tom reached for a mug, pausing when he caught sight of the time. Shit, was it almost ten already? This morning’s argument had set him back more than hour. He’d hoped to be at the office by now.
Well, he could always have breakfast at his desk. It was probably better than being glared at by Owen across the kitchen table, wasn’t it?
Decision made, he began raking through the kitchen cupboards for something to put his coffee in, finally unearthing a big vacuum mug Owen had bought him a couple of Christmases ago. The reindeer on the front was a bit unseasonal for April, but it would keep the coffee hot, and it held almost a pint, which should help him stay awake after his crappy night’s sleep. He gave the mug a quick rinse under the tap, then filled it almost to the top with coffee, adding a cursory dash of milk before screwing the lid on. Another rake around in the larder scored him a couple of cereal bars.
“You’re not even having breakfast before you go?” Owen’s voice, tinged with disbelief, caused a stab of guilt.
Tom glanced at his lover, taking in the rigidity of his shoulders and the tight line of his mouth. Owen looked as though he was trying to suppress his anger, as though he was only just keeping it in check, and Tom’s resentment flared again.
“I thought I might as well have breakfast in the office,” he said. “It’s not as if we’d be eating together—you’ve already had yours. Such as it is.”
“Oh, sorry, should I have offered to cook you some bacon and eggs before you head off to work again?” This in a sarcastic voice.
Clearly, Owen was spoiling for a fight, but he wasn’t going to get one. Even if Tom hadn’t had far too many other things to do, he didn’t have the energy for another argument. “I need to get going,” he said instead. He paused before adding more gently, “I really do wish you’d go cycling without me.”
“Well, like I said, the purpose of going was to spend some time with you, so I don’t really see the point. Besides, someone needs to clean this place up, and it might as well be me—it usually is.”
“Please don’t do cleaning. We can do that tomorrow. Together.”
Owen gave a bark of disbelieving laughter. “Oh right, so the one day a week we have together we’re going to spend cleaning? No thanks, I’ll do it today, and maybe we can salvage something out of this weekend tomorrow. Assuming you don’t have to work again.” He turned on his heel and stalked out of the kitchen, throwing over his shoulder, “You have a great Saturday at work. I’ll be sure to have your dinner on the table when you get back like a good little wife.”
Tom sighed, grabbed his reindeer mug, and made for the door.
Owen
IT WASN’T the Saturday Owen had been hoping for. He’d been so looking forward to taking the bikes out again—it’d been months since they’d been cycling.
Now that Tom was gone, Owen felt like shit. He was still pissed off, still furiously angry. He knew Tom wasn’t having an easy time at work, but this seemed to be turning into the new normal for them—and it felt like Tom didn’t even get why Owen was so angry about being let down again.
Tom acted like Owen was being a brat over not getting his own way, but the truth was Owen just fucking missed Tom. And frankly it didn’t feel like the sentiment was returned. Right now it felt like he was a duty to Tom, an afterthought. Another job on Tom’s long list of jobs to be done: spend time with Owen.
The stress Tom was under wasn’t just preventing them spending time together. Owen only had to look at the state of the house to see that. It really was a horrible mess. The laundry basket was overflowing—no clean socks for either of them—and the kitchen was a pigsty. The bathroom needed a good scrub too. Without a doubt, it would take most of the day to sort out.
Ah well, he might as well get to it.
Donning a pair of sweat pants and a ratty T-shirt, Owen got busy, going at the place like Snow White on steroids.
By midafternoon, the house was transformed. The bathroom and kitchen shone, the carpets were vacuumed, and the laundry was well on its way to being up to date. He’d even finished his most hated job of the day: ironing. He normally didn’t bother ironing his stuff, and Tom tended to do his own, but in a fit of generosity—or maybe, more honestly, martyrdom—Owen had decided to tackle Tom’s work shirts. Now, as he added the last shirt to the neatly folded pile and unplugged the iron, a sense of satisfaction washed over him. Once he’d put this stuff away, he was done. A cold beer while he watched this afternoon’s England game on TV would be ample reward for his efforts.
The cleaning spree didn’t exactly match a twenty-five-mile bike ride in the activity stakes, but it seemed to have helped to work off some of his temper. For the first time, the thought of his argument with Tom that morning didn’t make him want to grab something and throw it at the wall.
Instead, he felt the familiar pall of worry settling on him. Tom was working far too hard. Coming to bed late every night and getting up early every morning too. The occasional attacks of insomnia he suffered when he was stressed were becoming noticeably more frequent. It wasn’t healthy, and they both knew it, but so far neither of them had mentioned that fact. Not explicitly. Maybe it was because they’d both thought it was just a temporary blip to start with. Till the days had turned into weeks, then the weeks into months.
They were going to have to have a proper talk about it, Owen decided. Things had to change, and not so they could go on bike rides together. Bitching wasn’t the way to go about it, though.
Tonight he’d show Tom how much he appreciated him with a good meal, and when they were nice and relaxed, Owen would explain that the reason for his bad temper this morning was that he was worried about Tom. That he missed him.
He’d make steak and peppercorn sauce—Tom’s favorite—and pop to the independent wine shop down the road to get a nice bottle of red. And after they’d had their chat—and maybe some sex—they could watch a flick. They’d agreed at New Year that Owen would watch Tom’s top ten film noir flicks in exchange for Tom watching Owen’s top ten horrors. Tom had
dutifully sat through most of Owen’s list already, but Owen had only watched one of Tom’s.
Owen frowned at that thought. They’d laughed about it just the other night when Tom had suggested putting on The Big Sleep. Owen had whinged, the way he always did when he didn’t get his way, and Tom had laughed and given way. When Owen thought about it, Tom always gave in over stuff like that.
Well, not tonight. Tonight, they’d watch Tom’s choices. All nine of them back to back, if Tom wanted.
With that decided, Owen lifted the pile of ironing and headed for the bedroom. Tom’s shirts, still warm, gave off the satisfying fragrance of clean laundry as he climbed the stairs. He inhaled the scent, smiling, a smile that widened when he saw how good the bedroom looked. For the first time in ages, the floor was clear of Tom’s discarded socks and boxers, and the ancient carpet was as spruce as it could be after a good vacuuming. The bedding was clean, the windows shone, and the furniture was dust free. It was a very different room from the one he’d woken up in this morning.
Owen laid the ironing on the bed and opened up the doors of the big double wardrobe. He put his own stuff away first—there wasn’t much. As an IT guy in a big company with no customer-facing responsibilities, he could pretty much dress as he liked for work. Jeans and T-shirts were his uniform, so his side of the wardrobe was pretty low on dress shirts. His one and only suit, purchased for his sister’s wedding last year, sat neglected at the back of the rail, going swiftly out of date.
Tom’s side, by contrast, was bursting with suits. As a criminal lawyer, he lived in them. Owen frowned as he considered just how full the space was. The newly ironed shirts were going to get crushed all over again if he tried to shove them into the tightly packed space.
Hadn’t Tom been talking about having a clear-out just the other day? There were clothes in there he hadn’t worn for years, he’d said. Well, maybe Owen could help out. Even if he just made a pile of possible things to chuck out that Tom could look at when he got home, it’d be a start.
Owen began to shuffle through the hangers, quickly identifying a dozen garments Tom hadn’t worn in ages and tossing them onto the bed. He’d fill a charity bag in no time at this rate.
The last third of the rail was taken up with suit bags. For all his untidiness, Tom generally did take care of his suits. There was probably at least one among all these Tom would never wear again. Owen thought of a suit with wide pinstripes he’d always hated. Now would be a good time to persuade Tom it had to go.
Owen lifted out the suit bags and laid them on the bed. Methodically, he began unzipping them, peering inside to ascertain the contents of each one.
The first four were fine. No sign of the offensive pinstripe yet. Maybe Tom had already ditched it? The fifth suit bag, though, felt oddly heavy when Owen moved it. He frowned, wondering at the unexpectedness of the weight.
He unzipped the bag and peeled the sides open. The first thing he noticed was a lump inside the jacket. He frowned, wondering what it could be, and unbuttoned the jacket to investigate further.
Hidden inside was a dark-blue plastic bag, the handles hooked over the top of the hanger.
Owen gently unhooked the bag. His stomach clenched as he shook the contents out onto the bed, wondering what was inside. When he saw what tumbled out, he let out a choked laugh. Strange that was his first instinct. His second was to feel weirdly empty.
He organized the items—the three magazines and two DVDs—in a tidy line. A bit tired and dated, they nevertheless declared the same interest. Dominance. Submission.
Slowly, Owen picked up the first magazine. The cover bore the date October 1999, and the pages were well thumbed and crumpled. It had been bought years and years before Owen had even met Tom. If Tom had bought this in 1999, he’d have been twenty at the time.
Owen had been ten.
He flicked through the magazine, glancing at the pictures: a man suspended in bondage, impaled by a dildo, clamps on his fleshy nipples; a leather daddy with his boy over his lap, the man’s arse reddened from being spanked; a slender submissive sucking his tattooed master’s cock, the master’s hand fisted in his hair.
One or two of the pictures were unexpectedly tame. Owen couldn’t look away from one picture Tom seemed to have marked with a turned-down corner. A stocky blond submissive sat, leashed and naked, at his dark-haired master’s feet. He leaned his fair head against his master’s leather-clad leg as his master stroked his fingers through the sub’s hair. The sub looked blissed out, the master lazily satisfied.
The sub looked quite a bit like Owen.
He flicked through the other magazines and looked at the DVDs. They were all from around the same time and all D/s in nature. The pictures didn’t disgust him—far from it, his cock was rock hard from looking at them. And there was nothing particularly violent or worrying in the material. So far as kinky stuff went, it struck Owen as fairly mild.
So why were they hidden away like this, in a suit bag in the wardrobe? Why had Tom never mentioned he was interested in this kind of thing? It wasn’t as though Owen was the repressed type. They’d watched plenty of porn together. Had Tom thought he’d be disgusted by this?
Or perhaps Tom had just forgotten about them? Owen glanced in the suit bag again. He recognized the navy suit inside—it was one of Tom’s favorites. He’d worn it just the other day.
So that was one theory shot, then—Tom had to know this stuff was in there.
Owen grabbed one of the DVDs, leaving the other things lying on the bed with the garments he’d pulled out of the wardrobe and the pile of freshly ironed shirts. He went downstairs to the living room and stuck the DVD in the machine, his heart thudding as he waited for the movie to load.
The weirdest sense of disbelief suffused him. If there was something he’d never worried about, it was his and Tom’s sex life. They both liked sex, and they had it all kinds of ways. When they did anal, they switched up who topped and who bottomed. They both liked fucking, and they both liked being fucked—and sucked and rimmed and wanked. Everything was good between them, open and easy. He’d always felt lucky, having a boyfriend like Tom, who didn’t seem to have hang-ups or limits. Even now, when Tom was as busy as he was, they always found time for sex. Owen had thought it was a measure of how strong their relationship was. If everything was okay in the bedroom, everything else would be okay.
Wouldn’t it?
Owen made himself comfy on the couch, skipping past the trailers to the main event. His cock quickly grew hard as he watched the opening scene. It was pretty standard stuff. An American flick set on a college campus. Geeky college student meets dominant professor. The actors were buff and toned and actually pretty unconvincing as a geek and an academic respectively, but Owen’s cock didn’t give a shit about plausibility. He was hard within a minute, leaking precum within two.
The professor spanked the student for handing in his assignment late. Then he forced him to his knees and stuffed his cock in the lad’s mouth, fucking it for a long time before coming on his face. He tied the guy up, spanked him again, harder. Rimmed him. Fucked him. Brought in another guy and double-teamed him.
Owen’s cock was as hard as a stone as he watched, but for all the wrong reasons. He didn’t see himself as the student. Or the blond sub in the picture in the magazine, leaning against his master’s leg. He tried to imagine Tom bending him over like the dom professor did to the student. Tom spanking and fucking him. Telling him what to do.
It didn’t… work for him.
Thinking of fucking Tom worked, though. Thinking of Tom choking on his dick, like the student was doing right now, worked.
He liked that so much that it only took a few more strokes of his hand and he was coming, all over his belly.
Regret followed closely on the heels of his orgasm.
He sat through the rest of the film with a limp dick, thinking That’s what Tom wants, and as the credits rolled up the screen, he realized something: Tom wasn’t like him. He wasn’t sati
sfied with their relationship.
If he was, he wouldn’t have this stuff hidden away, would he?
Tom
TOM threw an armful of files onto the passenger seat and wrenched his seat belt on. Jesus. Six o’clock. He’d worked the whole day, a full extra day, and he was still behind.
It wouldn’t be so bad if anyone else had come in, but, as usual, he was the only one who’d turned up, and now he felt as pissed off as it was possible to be. He’d hoped to get away with working three or four hours max, but it hadn’t happened. Too much to do. He turned his head and stared at the buff-colored files. Was he seriously going to look at those tonight? Tomorrow?
Ever since Kate had gone off sick, it had been like this. Latimer & Brown was a small practice, and the four partners had agreed to absorb Kate’s work among them. Except it seemed Tom was the only one actually honoring that agreement.
Simon, the senior partner, was perennially lazy and had been since Tom joined the firm. He viewed himself as semiretired and rarely put in a full week. While Tom found Simon’s idleness irritating, he’d long ago realized Simon would never have offered him a partnership if he hadn’t needed a young deputy to pick up his slack. Tom had known Simon’s work pattern wouldn’t change just because Kate was off, no matter what platitudes he mouthed in partners’ meetings.
Rosie and Paul, though—they had been the big disappointment. The three of them had always got on, all having joined the firm around ten years ago, and all being made up to partner around the same time following a rash of partner retirements. They regularly met for drinks—usually to let off steam about Simon—and had dinner at each other’s houses. But when things had blown up with Kate, neither Paul nor Rosie had done more than the bare minimum to keep things ticking along. Whenever something big needed to be done, it was always Tom stepping in.