“Fuck me, sir.”
He knew how hard it was for me to ask. To beg.
“Please.”
We reached the end of the sidewalk. Even if the rest of the game hadn't really been played out in darkness, I knew it was dark here. The familiar vanilla scent of Ponderosa pine bark tickled my nostrils. He pushed me up against something, and I sat hard.
A swing? I hadn't seen a swing. Maybe he'd arranged to have it placed here just for tonight. It was a sturdy swing to judge from the plump cushions which supported not just my ass but also my back.
There was the creak of a pulley, and the swing began to move—not outward, like a regular swing, but upward. Ah. It was suspended from chains, and now I was being lifted. With my hands in cuffs, I felt a little nervous about falling out, but the back was high enough to ensure I wouldn't. After a minute or two, the creaking stopped, and I was just hanging there in space.
He spread my bare thighs apart and stood right up close to me, and I could feel he'd raised the seat high enough to put my cock at the level of his face.
I hadn't expected this. Not this.
“You're mine, and I want to know everything about you. The feel of you. The taste of you.”
“But, sir. I'm afraid I'll come too fast. You've been stimulating me all night. Teasing me. You know.”
“I am giving you a direct order. I am telling you to come hard whenever you feel it most.”
“Yes, sir!” I certainly hadn't expected that, but fuck knows I was ready.
Maybe I should have expected it. Not all men had that passion for giving little kisses that Master had. He had a hunger for tasting and licking, and I should have put it together that he'd like to suck. That wasn't in my preconceived notions of what doms did with their subs, but maybe I needed to change some of my preconceived notions. Why shouldn't a true dom do whatever he fucking wanted to do?
His mouth so hot on my flesh. His throat so easy and open. The pull of the long muscles in his cheeks.
I curled my toes hard against the soles of my feet, a technique which sometimes starts a cramp in my calf. Not that I wanted a Charley horse, exactly, but anything to slow me down...
Didn't work. Not this time. I was being turned inside-out from the passion of the moment, but there was never any pain and never any cramping. Just the tension, the winding-up, and then the explosion. His forehead felt hot and damp against my pelvis as his throat bobbed to swallow all my juices.
My toes uncurled. Even the place where my back trapped my cuffed hands felt as if it was glowing rather than burning.
He must be hard again. I put my foot out cautiously, not wanting to kick him by accident, but needing to feel around for his bulge.
Oh, yes.
“Fuck me, sir.” I moaned the words without any pretense of dignity. “I feel so empty. I need you to fill me up.”
I brought up the other foot and began to rub that marvelous bulge with both feet. His shaft moved restlessly in his jeans.
“You're starting to convince me.” My master's voice was so calm, so controlled.
I remembered that small shriek in the saloon, and I knew I could shake that calm. “Please, sir. I'll make it so good for you, sir. Any way you want it, sir.” My toes had somehow become prehensile and figured out a way to squeeze all over his denim-covered shaft.
A creak and a jerk. The pulley was lowering me again. My feet slipped from his crotch to the ground, and I stood up when I could.
“Turn,” he said, and I did.
A touch, and a click, and a tug. I shook out my wrists when he pulled the cuffs away.
“I wonder if I should remove the hood.” How could his voice still be that calm?
I honestly didn't know what would be dirtier—if he fucked me blind or if he did it when I could see everything he was doing to me. “That's your decision, sir. Whatever pleases you the most, sir.”
“Good answer. Sometimes you surprise me, Nicky.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He meant he'd expected me to be more of a spoiled-rotten rich kid. I wouldn't have thanked him every time he'd come out with that kind of statement, but it felt right tonight. I wasn't just surprising him. I was surprising myself.
There wasn't any “eight minutes into the ice bath” moment. In all that time of being hooded and blind at a party full of people, or all that time of being outdoors swinging on some big-ass tree, I don't think I'd lost my faith in my master for even a moment. I don't remember any panic, any fear.
Don't get me wrong. I was far beyond my comfort zone. Blowing a guy on a public dance floor while other guys were doing the orgy thing all around me? That wasn't something I ever thought I would be able to do. Much less be able to enjoy doing.
My trust in Brayden Brent was that strong.
“I think I want to see your eyes.”
His fingers worked the straps and buckles. His hands tugged and lifted. I blinked and looked around a quiet clearing on the outskirts of filthy town.
Turned out there was indeed a moon—the full moon overhead, which put the time around midnight. There was a blanket, a pillow, a picnic basket, a silver bucket of champagne.
Who had put that there and when? I hadn't heard them. It made me shiver, to think someone might have seen my master sucking me off in the swing, although somebody could have set up the blanket hours before.
A smile fluttered across his lips. If I didn't ask, he wouldn't say. He'd let me wonder.
I didn't ask. It was sexy to wonder.
I didn't want to know who might have seen me. Whoever they were, they didn't matter. Master was the only thing that mattered tonight.
“Get on your back,” he said. “Curl your knees to your ears.”
“Ooh, I like it when you talk dirty, sir.”
“I'm not sure I requested a running commentary.”
I firmed my lips in silence as I assumed the position in question. My ass was slightly raised off the blanket, and I could feel the soft bloom of my hungry pucker. There were sexy supplies in the picnic basket, which somehow didn't surprise me. Not just lube and rubbers, but a selection of toys too.
He stroked me with one lubed finger, then two, then withdrew his hand to replace it with a flexible dildo that measured maybe three inches or so. It wasn't close to being as wide or as long as a real man, and he'd obviously chosen it to prolong the tease.
“Please.” In my entire life, I'd never said “please” as many times as I did in one night with my master.
He had a way of spinning it around that was positively evil.
“You're going to break my mind. Oh, fuck, please.”
The toy popped out, and then he gave me a flutter of tongue against my taint. Then it was the fingers again, three of them this time.
My cock shouldn't be this stiff again so soon after he'd sucked me off. My balls shouldn't be this blue.
“This is ridiculous, sir. I can't, I can't...”
“You can.” The fingers retreated, and finally, finally, his jeans were coming off and the rubber was going on.
Was he moving so slowly to drive me crazy? Time kept slowing down more and more until it seemed like we would never quite reach the moment when he stroked inside.
And then he did. Oh, fuck. Then he did.
My legs twisted to wrap themselves tightly around his back. My cock lifted and twisted between our churning bellies. His cock found my gland on the very first stroke.
Chapter Fourteen
What is trust? Is it a form of voluntary insanity? Is it a choice we make to turn off the head and open the heart? That sounded so New Agey. Chuck Palahniuk would not be impressed.
Did I know Brayden Brent well enough to trust him with a key element of my future? If I was making a mistake, it could be life-changing, and not in a good way. We'd been dating for only a couple of weeks. If it felt like more, it was because of the intensity of the relationship, not because of the passage of time.
In some ways, I knew him as intimately as you co
uld ever know another man. I knew the places to rub and suck to make him come. I knew the taste of his skin salts, the taste of his spunk. I knew he was aroused by images of control and domination and that he'd let himself become part of some bigger community dedicated to men with the same urges.
I knew the caress of his fingers smoothing cream over the back he'd just whipped.
I knew the possessive pride in those eagle eyes when he claimed me in front of a room of naked, sweaty men.
I knew what it was like to count a day lost if the night wasn't spent with Brayden. That fast, we were a couple, and I honestly believed it was deeper than the usual sex thing. Together, we went places the average couple would never go in a thousand years.
Had we moved too fast? Had I trusted him too much? He'd said it himself that a dom/sub relationship created an extraordinary bond, but the word “transference” hadn't prepared me for this level of intensity. Even in sleep, I was focused on him. Even in dreams, I saw those golden eyes.
Yeah, it was insanity. And yet I did trust him. Without question. Beyond thought. His idea sounded crazy to me, but if he said it would work, I believed him. Brayden might string me up on a tree for his own entertainment, but he wouldn't leave me hanging to twist in the wind.
“You'll want to see this for yourself what happens,” he said. “You'll be rethinking some of what you thought you knew about college life.”
So. With a shrug of the shoulders, I pulled up a copy of the original document of my senior thesis and ran it through the grammar check again. Got the same results I did the first time. As far as grammar and spelling went, I was A-plus. As far as baffling them with bullshit, well, I was an A there too. There wasn't really any reason this paper should have ended up bloody and ripped in pieces to rain down on Dr. Morrison's desk.
He'd been fucking with me for reasons of his own. Brayden wasn't wrong about that.
I had to believe Brayden was right about everything.
So I did it, just what he suggested. I gave the document a different title and saved it under a different name in a different place. Printed it out all nice and neat and crisp. Used a different brand of paperclip, one of those colorful ones. Red was the color I picked.
Now or never. Now.
It was too late to write another paper anyway.
I walked over to Dr. Morrison's office and knocked on the frame of the open door. Tough life these professors have at elite colleges. I could see him sitting there with his feet up hoping nobody would wander by.
“Hello,” I said. “I don't mean to disturb your nap.”
He sat up fast. “Good afternoon, Nic. I didn't expect to see you until...” He made a point of checking his watch. “Six-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”
The paper was due at six. He meant he thought I'd be late and full of excuses.
“It's done, sir. I figured there was no time like the present to go ahead and turn it in.”
“Excellent.” He took the paper from my hand, glanced down, and nodded. “Good. Good. I'm glad you took this seriously.” The paperclip looked very red against the white paper. Could he read the first page at a glance? I could, so there was no reason to think he couldn't.
And still he continued to nod and smile. Not much of a smile but it was there.
I smiled a not-much smile too. “I appreciate the opportunity you gave me.”
And then somehow we were shaking hands. Did he honestly not see that it was the exact same fucking paper he'd ripped into shreds two weeks before? Maybe he was past that age where you can read a page at a glance. Was that a skill people lost?
This game he was playing... Did he know I was playing him back?
“I look forward to seeing you at graduation.” His voice seemed free of irony.
I kept studying his face and kept thinking about what Brayden wanted me to think about. I didn't know if I felt enlightened or what I felt. “Thank you, sir. I enjoyed working with you, sir. I really learned a lot.”
Did I put too much emphasis on the phrase “a lot?”
“I think maybe I learned something too. My best students have the ability to make me stop and think about things I thought I already knew.” So, eh, he was pretending he had read something when he skimmed the front page of my paper?
Or what the actual fuck?
“OK, well, um... I have to get to my art history exam.” Matching the titles of Rothko paintings to Rothko canvases in a slideshow was going to seem like a fucking piece of cake compared to this conversation.
“Good luck, son.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He was already filing the paper somewhere before I'd completely backed out of the office. The way he tucked it in like a baby's blanket, I seriously doubted he'd ever take another look at it.
Holy fuck. I could breathe.
Brayden was right.
Morrison didn't read the fucking papers. He said the things he said, did the things he did, handed out the grades he handed out all completely based on some idea he had in his head. You worked your ass off, sweating and thinking, and all the time he'd already decided who you were. All that sweat, all that thinking was a total waste of time.
I was the spoiled rich boy who needed a good kick in the ass but would ultimately come through if you shook him up a little. That was Morrison's narrative about me.
He didn't even know me. He sure the fuck hadn't bothered to read me.
How many other professors were the same way? So many things I'd never understood were suddenly crystal-clear to me. All those idiots with college degrees, all those dumbasses you couldn't figure out how they graduated, now I knew how they got away with it.
Fucking wow.
All this time, I'd had no fucking idea of what I could get away with. All this time, I'd been struggling to figure out how to pick the lock and break out, and all this time the door was already unlocked and wide open and waiting for me to walk through.
I still studied for exams. Habit. Many seniors didn't bother, and now my head exploded because I realized they weren't necessarily wrong. The last few weeks of senior year were meant for party time. Everything had already been decided about who we were and where we were going.
Except I wasn't really in a party mood. My whole worldview had been turned upside-down. Things weren't what I thought they were.
Work hard, get good grades, get into law school... all those hoops. Fake hoops, maybe. Sometimes it wasn't about working hard.
Sometimes, I didn't know what the fuck it was about. Sometimes, maybe nobody did.
A rich kid is supposed to be forever sure of himself. Hell, I was sure of myself. On the outside.
The inside was something else.
This crazy fucked-up situation was messing me up more than I thought it would. My thesis advisor, a guy I'd worked with for years, was a fake. How many others were fakes, and I'd never even guessed?
Was anything real? Was anybody real?
I called Brayden, and it went to voicemail. Stopped by his office on Tuesday afternoon, but a small pink Post-It note on the door said he'd canceled office hours this week. Sent an email, didn't hear back. Left a note with the music department's receptionist and watched her fold it over and stick it in a pigeonhole.
Radio silence.
He told me to do something, and I did it, and then he just dropped me here. What was he playing at? More of his mindfucks, more of his trying to push me beyond myself, but this time he was taking things a little too far.
I needed to talk about this with somebody who'd understand.
I called again. This time he picked up, but he didn't say anything.
“I'm lost,” I said. “I'm wandering in the dark here.”
He still wasn't saying anything.
“I hope that doesn't sound too dramatic. Brayden, I need to see you. Sir. I need to see you, sir.”
Was he there? The seconds ticked off on my phone. The connection was still open.
“You're scaring me, sir.”
“Trus
t me a little longer, Nicky. When you first find your dom, when you first accept that you need a strong alpha, it can be tempting to lean too hard. You're in a situation you can handle by yourself, but you'll never know you can handle it by yourself unless... you handle it by yourself.”
I felt hot all over. Is that what I was doing? Leaning too hard?
Fuck it. I knew there was something to what he said, but my reactive nature wouldn't let me admit it. Anyway, I wasn't a guy who leaned too hard. I wasn't.
Brayden's voice was calm. Almost but not quite hypnotic. “Give yourself time to wander in the dark a little longer. You're strong enough. You need time to work through what you're feeling on your own.”
“But, sir... I need to see you.”
“You don't need to see me. You want to see me. What you need is to learn you're strong enough to handle those feelings of being lost. That's going to take some time. A few more days. Be strong.”
I wouldn't beg. I wouldn't. “Please,” I said.
“Trust me. Trust yourself.”
The seconds stopped ticking over. The connection was closed.
He was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
James tossed me a can of beer, and it sprayed all over the place when I pulled the tab. Morrison had issued my grade—A-minus. What was that picky little minus about? It wasn't about my paper, which he clearly hadn't read. Probably it was Morrison saying he was still his own man who would never, ever dream of passing out easy As to keep the legacies happy.
“So give me the lowdown,” James said. “Tell me all about this so-called Fight Club of Dr. Brent's.”
“Eh, there's no club. There's a couple of semi-pros he trains with. One of them got knocked out by Mayweather once on Pay Per View.”
“Wow.”
“I had to pivot and make my paper about the evolution of urban myths and their relationship to modern-day masculinity.”
“Bro, I'm just glad I'm a quant.” He tapped his beer can against mine. “Cheers.”
Graduation day. Black gowns. Caps tossed in the air. My mom in tears, my dad shaking my hand with a grave expression on his face. I looked at the place where the teachers sat, but Brayden Brent wasn't there. Many adjunct professors didn't bother to attend graduation, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I admit I felt a pang of disappointment.
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