In the Absence of Monsters

by Jp Barnaby

  “Welcome back, can I help with anything?” the boy called from the porch, and Jayden waved him over.

  “Can you get Ethan’s luggage and take it up to his room?” Jayden asked him, and he hurried to help.

  “Connor, this is our very good friend Ethan,” Lexi told him with a soft secret smile. “Ethan, this is Connor, our tenant and new friend.” I could see that she was trying not to describe their relationship exactly because of the listening driver, but she didn’t want Connor to think that she considered him just a boarder. I found that to be oddly compelling.

  I greeted Connor shyly as he extended his hand to me and wished for the quiet solitude of my new, albeit temporary, home.

  My routine at Lexi and Jayden’s house was the same as it had been at mine. I spent the first several weeks alone in the room they were having me use. At first, I had tried playing the music at its highest volume, but I found that after a while it wasn’t as satisfying. I don’t know what had changed, but the need to be screaming had subsided. Instead, I switched to meditation, trying to focus my mind. Sitting on the floor trying to find my chakra didn’t really help either. It could also have been the authors of the books Stephen had forced upon me. As a licensed psychologist and tenured professor at my alma matter, I considered him a relative expert on the subject. Unfortunately, my psychological problems weren’t exactly textbook in nature.

  Unfortunately, I found myself distracted, unable to concentrate on my breathing because my mind kept going back to the sounds coming from the room below. Connor seemed to be getting a real workout, as I could hear the sounds of the paddle and his cries clearly through the inadequate soundproofing. It didn’t take long for me to remember that Jayden had asked Connor to ready the room above the playroom. I’m sure that he never imagined I would be able to hear every whimper from their beautiful responsive submissive.

  I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Connor since I came to stay with Jayden and Lexi, but he seemed like a nice enough guy. He was tall, taller than me, maybe six foot three with a swimmer’s build and brown curly hair. His brown eyes and good-natured expression made me feel at ease with him. It was strange because I didn’t feel at ease with many people.

  I noticed, as his cries came through the floor again, that they had apparently missed an area of the ceiling around the light fixture. The sounds tormented me, reminding me of my time with Jayden in my own playroom.

  Even though he looked as though he were going to faint as he stood naked in my playroom for the very first time, he was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined him to be. Everything from the sculptured lines of his chest to the soft curve of his buttocks drew me to him in a way I did not fully understand. I had never been attracted to a man before – ever. I didn’t want to be attracted to one, but every time I looked at him something inside me felt… I couldn’t describe it…connected? In place? Like plugging in a lamp with the power switched on. There was electricity, there was light. I had to discover what it meant.

  I had told him that we were there to assess his potential as a sub, but we were really there to assuage my curiosity about the attraction I felt for him. As I stood behind Jayden and watched him achieve a full erection merely by my proximity, I thought maybe I had a similar effect on him. I explained the basics of BDSM to him and gave him a safe word for the assessment. If he couldn’t make it through without using it, there was no point to continue.

  I paddled him soundly for coming into my playroom, and maybe a little for my attraction to him as well. He bore it surprisingly well, starting to confirm my suspicions that he was a natural submissive. Of course he was, because he was surely sent to torment me. I looked down at him when I’d finished and found that he was just as hard as I was. Paddling him, watching his skin redden, seeing his struggle, it made me fucking hard. It made me want to just drive into him right there on the leather ottoman he was thrown over. I wanted to feel his tight virgin ass around my cock. I knew he wasn’t ready for that just yet, so I pulled him up before I was overcome by the temptation.

  Instead, I dropped the panel on my pants and pushed my dick into his hot little mouth. He panicked a little at first, but I backed off and let him do things his own way. I didn’t want to frighten him too much in our very first encounter, or maybe I did because if he used the safe word and left, I wouldn’t have to deal with it again. I felt a twinge in the pit of my stomach at the thought of him leaving. I told him to look up at me. I wanted to see his face. God, it made me so excited to watch him suck me, hotter than anyone else, even Lexi.

  What the fuck did it mean?

  Damn, just thinking about being in Jayden’s mouth was beginning to make me hard. The sounds from downstairs had lessened, like they had moved on to something else but I couldn’t make out what. I slid my sleep pants down to my knees and began to stroke my aching erection. Lying back on the bed, I let my other hand drift up to pinch and pull each of my nipples, rolling one, and then the other between my thumb and forefinger, remembering how it felt to have his lips there, his teeth. My back arched slightly in response to the jolt of need that burst through my stomach, running down deep into my groin. I turned my hand so that my thumb was at the base of my cock rather than at the head, getting an entirely different sensation. It felt like it was someone else’s hand, or maybe his hand. My mind wandered back to that first time again.

  Bound on the table with his legs in the air, he had to feel incredibly exposed, exactly how he made me feel just with his presence. As I looked into his face, I saw a tear fall down his cheek. That single drop provoked something in me, and I grabbed the warming lotion from a nearby table and began to stroke him. Of course, I knew that the more aroused he was, the easier the penetration would be for him, I just didn’t want to dwell on how I knew that. Instead, I focused on his pleasure. Pumping with two hands, like I enjoyed, I hid a smirk when he tried to buck his hips up into my hand. I knew that he was ready, so I slid one hand down and started to prepare him for me. I heard his small whimper as I opened him up and slid inside of him. Fuck, he felt so good. Because it would be painful for him at first, I watched his face, prepared to stop if he needed to. He closed his eyes and locked his jaw, but I kept pushing forward until I was completely sheathed by him.

  The memory of that feeling, that perfect feeling of being inside of him caused a low moan to escape me. I reached down with my other hand and fondled my balls before moving it back nearly to my anus. My eyes closed and I concentrated on the feeling of my own hands, the memory of him bound and spread as I took him, the look on his face as he climaxed. My hips moved slightly against the motion of my hands. Once the image of him dropping from the table onto his knees with his face pressed against my thigh came unbidden into my mind—his willing act of submission—I pulled down lightly on my balls and climaxed hard over my stomach. I tried to keep my cries quiet, but the release overwhelmed me, not just the physical release, but emotional and mental releases as well. Wiping my semen from my abdomen with my discarded t-shirt, I pulled my sleep pants back around my waist. As my eyes closed, I sank into the bed and felt that I could sleep.

  I slept better than I had in weeks.

  When I awoke hours later, I rolled over to see Jayden in a nearby chair watching me. I smiled at him and his face brightened. Then I remembered why I was here and sank back onto the pillow. Getting up out of the chair, he walked to the vacant side of the bed. Discarding his shoes, he climbed into the bed next to me, kissing me lightly on the forehead before propping his head on his hand and looking at me.

  “This is about more than just not having a sub, Ethan,” he said and I nodded. I could have called any number of acquaintances and hooked up with another sub, but I hadn’t wanted to. Lexi and Jayden had changed me. Just having a sub wasn’t enough anymore, I needed something more. I had relied on the BDSM relationships for so long because it was something I enjoyed, but there had to be more to it than I was getting out of it. I thought about telling Jayden, but I felt that it was a journey I need
ed to make by myself. Maybe getting these feelings, these memories out, getting them into a form where I could study them would help.

  “Is there a bookstore around here?” I asked him thoughtfully. He cocked his head and looked at me with a puzzled expression, but nodded. “Good. I think I need a journal. I think that writing will help to purge some of these feelings into a form that I can analyze.”

  Leaning forward, he caressed my cheek lightly before replying, “I think that is an excellent idea,” and then pressed his lips to mine in a gentle kiss. That simple contact flared through me and I kissed him back enthusiastically, hungrily. I all but bruised his lips with the veracity of it, and he moaned quietly into my mouth. It made me feel so good to have him against me like this. We broke apart a minute later, both of us panting slightly and he chuckled.

  “Get dressed and we can head over there. I think I’d like to look around too,” he said with a smile as he got off the bed.

  As I stood in the shower a few minutes later, my mind raced with the things that I wanted to put to paper. It wasn’t going to just be a catalog of things that had happened to me, but rather anything that came to mind. More than once I’d thought about writing a book based on my experiences, wanting to maybe help others with their coping. However, I needed to help me first, because I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone how to cope with trauma if I was unable to do so myself. It had taken Lexi and Jayden coming into my life, and then leaving, to make me realize that I hadn’t been coping, only merely masking my real feelings with a different kind of control. I had to learn to start dealing with my emotions, face them head on, or I was never going to make it.

  When I walked into the kitchen, I found a very different atmosphere than what I was used to. Lexi and Jayden were sitting at the table laughing at some joke that Connor had told them. When they noticed me watching, Lexi got up from the table and walked over to me. Her small arms wrapped as she kissed me lightly, though it was nothing like the kiss that Jayden and I had just shared upstairs. When our lips parted, I kissed her on the forehead.

  “I missed you, Ethan,” she murmured, unsuccessfully trying to hide the swipe of her hand across her eyes and continued. “Not just a journal, but you’ll need a good pen too; one that feels comfortable and flows well can make all the difference. Jayden, you should take him over to that place on Michigan. I’m sure they’d have what he needs.”

  With that, she ushered us out the door, and on the first step of my own journey to self-discovery.

  Journal Entry: The Beginning

  I have a feeling, deep down, that this will help me. The way that I have been living my life since my abduction has not allowed me to deal with my trauma, it has only masked it. Only the patient care and determination shown by Lexi and Jayden have made any kind of impact. They have cracked the mask that I wear day in and day out, and they have discovered the terrified shell of a child underneath. However, Lexi and Jayden cannot heal me. Only I will be able to enact the cathartic purge of the darkness in order to dispel my demons. I neither look forward to, nor can I shy away from, the conclusions that I will draw about myself from this exercise. Whomever I have grown into, I must accept him and allow him to finally emerge from where I have hidden him. I’m just not entirely sure where to begin.

  There are days when I am just tired of living and I think that I can finally admit that to myself. I have tired of the lack of hope that I will ever be a whole man, and most of all I have tired of being trapped by the bastard that destroyed my life. I remember very clearly the first time I actively thought of killing myself. Of course when I was young, and he would come into my room at night, I would wish for death – just to escape the pain and the feeling of his hot breath on the back of my neck. It wasn’t until I was older, and could fully appreciate the consequences, that I contemplated the method by which I would take my life. That first time, I was fourteen years old, and I wanted that year to be my last. In school I was an outcast, I never felt safe enough to confide in anyone or to make friends. I couldn’t take the chance that any of the kids at school would find out what I was. It horrified me that they would find out what my afterschool activities consisted of. There was one girl, however, who tried to befriend me. One day she cornered me in the music room after class and tried to kiss me. As she pushed me against the wall, and used my lack of resistance to shove her face against mine, I panicked. It felt forced, and brutal and wrong. My stomach turned at the thought of what she wanted to do, and it threw into sharp relief the fact that I would never be able to have a normal relationship with a girl. I was truly a freak of nature; I couldn’t even kiss a girl that wanted to kiss me. The only resolution I could come to was that I couldn’t live like this. It had to stop.

  He kept a gun in a lockbox under his bed; I knew where the key was. One night while he was at work, I took it out of the box and held it to my head. The safety was off, and my finger was on the trigger when he came home early. When he saw me, he started to cry, telling me that he loved me, and that I was all he had in the world. He begged me to put the gun down. Why I didn’t just turn it on him I will never understand. It was probably the same reason why I never ran away. He had told me that my parents had moved away, leaving me here with him. I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Deep down, I knew I didn’t want to die. I just couldn’t think of any other way out. It was another two years before I finally found it. I thought about death hundreds of times in those two years, but never got up the courage to try again. Like the child that I was, I held out the hope that I would find my escape, an escape to someone that would help me. When I did, it started a whole different kind of nightmare.

  I always thought that Charity and Ethan Hughes, Sr. walked on water. They were the best parents I could have asked for, until I actually needed them. When I was finally returned to them, they had no idea how to deal with the disturbed, violent, damaged teenage boy their sweet child had become. The first time my father tried to wake me from one of my frequent nightmares, I accidently broke his nose. I was so lost in what I thought was happening to me, that all I saw was a man that wanted to hurt me. By the time my mother was able to snap me out of it, his face was bloody. When I finally realized where I was, and what I had done, all I could do was sink into a corner of my room, pulling my knees up to my chest, and sob. I was so terrified that they would send me back to him. Though, somewhere inside of me I knew that they loved me and that they would never ever let him have me again. I was so irrational those first few weeks, trying desperately to hold onto my world that was spinning out of control.

  The next day they took me to my first shrink. He put me on a cocktail of meds that made me feel like a zombie, and then threw his racquet into the back of his BMW and drove off to play tennis. He didn’t give a damn about me, but he was a golfing buddy of my father, and wouldn’t let it get around the club that Hughes’s son was a psychotic little freak. I have fleeting images of that time of my life. I remember lying in bed for hours just staring at the ceiling. Because of the meds I couldn’t concentrate on anything, they essentially rendered me catatonic. When I decided that I didn’t want to be numb anymore, I started to hide the pills when my mother would bring them to me. I’d just pretend to be numb and lay in my bed. It was then that I realized that I wasn’t alone. My mother would sit in my room with me while I lay in bed. She would read to me, or play guitar. Sometimes, when she thought I was asleep, she’d cry and beg me to forgive her for letting it happen to me. At other times, she’d ask God to please just let me have peace.

  It was during those times, with my mother, that I blamed myself for the nightmare I had put us all through. If I would have just stayed on the route I was supposed to take, none of it would have happened. My father would be proud of the son he had raised, not disgusted by the freak raised by the pervert. My mother wouldn’t look ten years older than she was. She would smile when she looked at me, rather than looking at me with pity. And me? I would have been captain of the soccer team with a nice girlfriend and lots
of friends, driving around in the convertible that my parents had bought me for my last birthday. I would have been fumbling through groping a girl in the back seat while we kissed. I would not have been the boy who had more experience with blowjobs than any girl on campus. I wouldn’t have been the only virgin at school who required tests for sexually transmitted diseases. I wouldn’t have been the boy who got physically ill when he woke up with morning wood because sex was so horrifying to him.

  Thankfully my mother convinced my father to let me be homeschooled. I had been on the news so often there was little doubt that the kids I went to school with knew all the details of my life. Because I spent all of my time alone, it didn’t take me long to catch up on the work I needed to do to graduate. Graduating from high school seemed like such a normal teenage activity, yet it felt completely foreign to me. At that point, I was just living to turn eighteen so that I could leave Chicago. Every time that my mother had talked me into leaving the house, either for dinner or even to go to a museum, I felt like people were staring at me. She tried to tell me that they weren’t, but I knew that they could see my shame. It might as well have been branded across my forehead. I was the freak from the news. I was damaged. I had to escape, again.

  Would I spend the rest of my life running?

  A few weeks after I was finally able to sleep through the night for the first time, I got notice from the district attorney that my abductor had accepted a plea, there would be no trial. For the first time in my whole fucking life, something had finally gone my way. I knew I couldn’t get up in front of a room full of strangers and explain in detail what he had subjected me to. I couldn’t go into detail about each act he had performed on me, and forced me to perform on him. Especially not with my father’s shame and my mother’s pity staring me in the face. The district attorney explained the terms of the deal to me, and to my parents, assuring us that the man would not see the light of day for a long time. The dark, wicked voice in my head whispered that he hoped the man would become someone’s bitch and be taught a very valuable lesson in repeatedly being violated.