“Well done, son,” Dad said.
Did he know how false it all was? Did he know certain professors didn't even read the papers if the work was penned by a Kensington? He went to the same school. He almost had to know, but maybe he'd forgotten.
“Thanks.” My voice sounded hollow in my own ears, but no one was listening to my voice. My parents were shiny with their own happiness, so happiness was all they heard.
“Have you thought about where you're going to law school?”
“I want to think about it some more. Take the summer off. It's a big decision.”
“Of course, son.”
My graduation gift was BMW M3 sedan. I liked it, of course I liked it, but it seemed a little... I dunno... mature for a 21-year-old. I wish he'd asked me before he had my old Nissan towed away.
“Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. I'm speechless.” But I wasn't. I was talking faster and faster as I walked around to play-kick the tires. The car was my pay-off for being who my father expected me to be.
“That new car smell,” Dad said. “There's nothing like it.”
“Sure,” I said. “It's a great smell. I think I'm going to go out for a drive.”
“All right, son. We all know it's a big day to celebrate, but don't drink and drive. You can always call me if you need to.”
“Yeah, yeah. I have a Twitter feed too.” Everybody knew the state police did a big drunk driving campaign on graduation day. Drunk driving wasn't going to be my problem anyway.
Not knowing where to go was my problem. Not knowing what to think or what to feel was my problem.
I was tired of working through things on my own. This test was too fucking hard for me. Maybe Brayden was right, probably he was right, but I wasn't handling it as well as I thought I would. A visit to filthy town's whipping bench was a cakewalk by comparison.
All that psychology shit. You can't see it, but it's real. Maybe it's the realest thing there is.
Don't ask me what made me head out to Brayden's skeevy gym in a brand spanking new BMW. The minute I'd pulled up into the parking lot, I knew I'd made a mistake. I was instantly surrounded by eight guys built like eight tanks. A good ole redneck motorcycle club to judge from their leathers and the eight Harleys I saw parked across the lot.
I couldn't drive over these guys, but I wasn't getting out of the fucking car either. Keeping my gaze fixed meaningfully on the biggest guy in the crew, I tapped on the phone in my pocket. Brayden strolled out of the gym, spotted the shiny new sedan, and burst out laughing. The biggest biker said something, and Brayden said something, and then all eight of the crew members went back to their regularly scheduled steroid dealing.
Brayden knocked on the window glass. I hit a button, and the window came down.
“Nice wheels,” he said.
“Yeah. Thanks. Your friends didn't seem to appreciate my sense of style.” I leaned my head out the window, stuck my left arm with my elbow out too, but for some reason I didn't open the car door. Don't ask me why.
I told myself it was because of the bikers, but it wasn't. Brayden would keep away the bikers with a look.
“Maybe lemon yellow wasn't the color choice,” he said.
“Dad was trying. He probably thought it was a decorator color. Because, you know, the gay.”
Brayden laughed.
“Why weren't you at graduation?”
“None of my students were graduating this time.”
There was a silence. I thought he might have come to see me, but fuck it. Suddenly, I was blind with rage. All the things we'd done meant more to me than they did to him. They just did, and it wasn't fucking fair, that he could put me through all these feelings and not feel it himself.
Yeah, I could see it clearly now. I was just a part-time toy, and I'd become a nuisance. I was feeling pretty fucking stupid for even driving all the way out here.
“Yeah. Well. OK.” I turned the key in the ignition. “I guess I'm... um... I guess I came by to tell you I can't do this.”
“The hell, Nicky?”
“I, um, um...”
“What do you mean, you can't do this? You think this is a game?”
“I think maybe... um, you don't trust me... and I just realized... you weren't there and I didn't know where to go to talk to you and...”
“Of course you knew. You're right here. You knew all the time. You could have come anytime, but you didn't. You had your exams, your graduation rituals. And that's fine. You needed that. You're a 21-year-old a few hours out of college. It's OK to take some time to be a kid.” He touched my chin in that way he had, but I yanked my chin away.
I didn't want to be touched. I didn't want to feel any more confusing feelings. I just didn't.
“I, I, I don't know if I want to keep on...”
“Where is this coming from, Nicky?”
He knew where this was coming from. He'd mindfucked me a mindfuck too far. He had to know that. The more baffled he played it, the more it made me crazy.
“I think maybe, yeah, it was fun, it was interesting but, um...” Did I really want to say what I started to say? I let my voice trail off.
He touched me again, on the arm this time. It should have been calming, but his words didn't hit me right. “Oh, I get it. You want me to take you over right now. Well, I've got things to do today, Nicky. You have to respect my boundaries too. I'm making the arrangements, and I'll let you know when I'm coming for you. I'll come when it's time, and this isn't the time. This is your graduation. It's your friends and family time. One more night, Nicky. This night is for them, not for me.”
I didn't say anything. It wasn't exactly wrong what he was saying, but...
“Go on, now. Go home. Go to your graduation parties. Get some party, get some rest. You're not going to know exactly when I'm coming for you. It's going to happen, but you're not going to know beforehand exactly when it's going to happen. You have to trust the process. This isn't under your control. Submission isn't about you taking the lead. It's about trusting me to take the lead.”
I nodded with my chin. Rolled up the window.
Then I rolled it back down again.
“Buttercream,” I said. “Buttercream.”
Only then did I drive off.
Brayden stood there flat-footed. Open-mouthed.
He'll call you back. He'll come for you. He will.
Somehow, I was on the other side of town. The side where they didn't shoot out the stoplights or make illegal bets on pick-up games.
Why had I done what I did? What the fuck came over me? Why had I failed this final test, when I could handle the whipping tree? When I could handle being hooded at a leather party?
Every bar was packed with college kids. Former college kids, I corrected myself. The gay dance club never got started this early, but on graduation night it did. I drank, I danced, and somehow a guy in leather chaps was hitting on me.
Was it me? Had I started dancing with him first?
He wasn't what I wanted. What kind of signals was I giving off?
Did I even fucking know who the hell I was anymore?
“Baby.” He touched my hip and spun me around, and I let him. Then he was clasping me from behind, and I wasn't letting him. I was wiggling away in that kind of wiggle you do to avoid rubbing up against the guy's bulge with your ass.
“Hey.” We were face-to-face now, and his hands were gripping hard into my shoulders. The guy's mouth twisted with anger. “Hey. Don't you fucking play me. I know what you like. Don't you fucking blow me off.”
“I don't know you, and you don't know me.” I kept my voice level and my gaze direct. I wouldn't look down, wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
“I know you're a fucking cock-tease.” And then he'd faded back into the crowd.
Fuck. I was just a guy in a bar. Jeans and a button-down shirt. As of today, I was a college graduate with a bright future and a brand new BMW fresh off the lot. It would be enough for anybody else.
Why couldn't it be enou
gh for me?
Some guys from my art history class called to me, and I said something about going to the bar for another round and instead I went out the back and into a different bar and then out the back of that one too. I was walking to be walking. I'd have to go back and pick up the car tomorrow, but it was safe to leave a lemon yellow BMW alone on this side of the railroad tracks.
Why had I tested Brayden like that? Why had I used the safeword?
What the hell was the matter with me?
He'll know. He'll understand. It can't be over. I couldn't have ended it like that. He'll come for me. He will.
But he didn't.
Chapter Sixteen
This town had a secret. A mirror town that most people didn't know about. A town where men lived out their kinkiest fantasies. A town where a man was forced to face the deepest truths about his own desires.
Brayden had pulled the curtains off this town's deepest secret, and I'd been afraid to look out the fucking window.
I'd shut down. Closed the curtains tight.
I'd moved out of the dorm only four weeks ago, and yet I already felt like I didn't belong on this campus. It felt odd to get out of a BMW in the visitor's lot instead of a Nissan in residential parking. As I walked down a familiar path to the Nicholas Pembroke Kensington Building, nothing felt real to me—not the plush green lawn, not the hard blue of the cloudless sky, not the red brick exterior of buildings that wouldn't have looked out of place back east.
A giggling gaggle of students walked toward me. They were wearing badges from an elite prep school, which put their ages at around seventeen or eighteen, and they parted around me to give me space on the path without looking at me, the way a group of students would part for a teacher.
Did I look that much older? Or was it just the attitude I projected?
I knocked on the open frame of a door and walked in. “Roy,” I said.
Royal Anders looked up, an eyebrow lifting at the sound of a name he'd probably only heard from Brayden's lips. Something he saw in my face made him say, “Close the door.”
I did. He gestured at a chair, and I sat. For a minute, we looked at each other.
“What went wrong?” I asked.
He looked some more, and I could see him trying to decide whether it was worth pretending he didn't know what I was talking about. “I fucked it up,” he finally said. “I was stupid. Is that what you wanted to hear me say?”
“If it's the truth. I want to hear the truth.”
“The truth.” He laughed the kind of laugh that's really just a snort. “It was a suspended bondage scene. I was hanging from my wrists like so.” He put his arms over his head. “I could tell there was something wrong, but I didn't safeword.”
“So that's how you got hurt.”
“Rotator cuff,” he said. “Didn't even need the surgery. The physical therapy did the trick. But Brayden... that was it for him. He couldn't trust me anymore.”
“I'm sorry.”
He shrugged.
“Did you make up the Fight Club rumors?”
He laughed. “No, the kids dreamed that up themselves.” By “kids,” we both knew he meant, “students.” “Those rumors were already flying about Bray. I'm not sure where they got started, but it was to his advantage to let 'em keep flying. You know. To distract from what he was really involved in. When I got injured, it was a logical assumption for people to make, that I was in a fight.”
“You liked those kinds of rumors, though.”
“Sure. Wouldn't anybody?” His smile was unembarrassed. “It doesn't exactly harm my image at this fine institution of higher learning.”
“Did you...?” I wasn't sure how much I could ask. Did you ever try to get him back? That seemed too invasive. I went with, “Did you ever try to apologize?”
“Sure, but not too much of an apology, if that makes sense.” He shrugged. “I didn't want to get in a big old argument about it. Bray and I didn't work, that was the long and the short of it. He's a serious guy. He takes all this stuff seriously. For me, it's like it was just something fun to do and it wasn't all that big a deal. You know, people get injured in any sport. Even if your sport is walking, you can twist your ankle. It's not all this deep philosophy about trust he thinks it is. It's a place where people go to play kinky games. That's it. That's all.”
Royal Anders had been a tourist in Brayden Brent's town.
Maybe that's all I was too. A fucking tourist. I told myself I wanted to test my limits. I wanted to see how strong I really was.
Then, given the chance of a lifetime, I weaseled out of it.
Shit.
Brayden Brent respected safewords. He respected safety.
He respected me.
He could never come back to me once I'd safeworded him away.
I could only go back to him.
“I fucked up,” I said. “I fucked everything up.”
“It happens,” Anders said. “There'll be other guys.”
“I don't want the other guys.”
He studied me for a long moment. “What do you want from me, Nic? What do you think I can do for you?”
“You know where...”
He was already shaking his head. “That's a no. If he wanted you to know where it was, you'd know.”
We were no longer teacher and student. We were two guys who'd been involved with the same guy. We both walked away, but only one of us was sorry about it. There had to be a way to make him understand.
“You were together, what, a couple, three years? You know what makes him tick. You know what I should say to get him back.”
He laughed, but it wasn't a superior laugh this time. If a laugh can be sad, it was a sad, sorry little laugh. “You knew more about what makes him tick after one night than I ever did.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way he smiled. And then the way he didn't smile after you two broke up. I saw him smile more those few weeks you were an item than I ever saw him smile in two years with me.”
“You talked about me?” I found that hard to believe.
“No, but I can read Bray better than he thinks I can. We didn't work as a couple, but it isn't because I couldn't read him.”
Had we broken up? Had we ever been together? All I knew was I had this gaping hole inside of me. A hole the size of a grizzly. A hole the size of Brayden Brent.
“There's a place he plays sometimes.”
For a scary moment, I thought by “play” Anders meant “does domination scenes,” but then I realized he meant, “play music.” Of course. I'd never heard Brayden play, and yet it was at the center of his professional life. A strange thought. Had I tried to know him at all, or had I been too centered on the rich kid me-me-me?
I'd have to do better this time. I'd have to think about, you know, actually learning how to understand and please my dom, not just myself.
Anders said a name I recognized as the name of the bar where we'd had the fight in the parking lot. “Rough place,” I said.
“Yeah. The rougher the place, the more sentimental the music. A lot of country music there.”
“Doesn't seem like Brayden's kind of music.”
“It isn't. He plays under a different name.”
Oh. Another test. Another way to push himself out of his comfort zone. Brayden's whole life was about testing himself. About pushing himself. About taking things to the next level. In that, he was a lot like me.
“What's the most embarrassing sentimental piece of crap music he plays?” I asked.
Roy's laugh changed again. “There are so many possibilities,” he said. “‘Always.’ ‘Do I Ever Cross Your Mind.’ ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.’”
“Oh, man,” I said. “I don't even know. Can't there be, like, a love song to a truck or something in there? What happened to the songs about Mama and prison?”
“How bad do you want him back?”
“Evidently, pretty damn bad if I'm going to listen to that shit.”
> Chapter Seventeen
Talk about pushing a guy out of his comfort zone. For a guy brought up in New Mexico, I like country music about as much as I like kale. There was no possible circumstance where I was going to feel comfortable going alone to this shitty place. I sure the fuck wasn't going to make the car mistake again.
James shook his head as he pulled over on the sidewalk a half block down. “If you get killed, don't haunt me. I'm telling you not to do this.”
“It's all on me if I get killed,” I said. “But I'm not going to get killed.”
“Oh, man. This does not look like a crowd that's gonna be enthusiastic about the gay.” He pointed his chin at a couple of puffed-hair bottle blondes in their early forties. The way they were standing around flirting with guys coming out of the bar suggested they were open for business.
“I'm just going to stay chilly and blend in.” I pulled a black leather ten-gallon cowboy hat low on my forehead. It cost six hundred dollars, but I was hoping they'd think I picked it up for twenty-five at the flea market. I also wore a silver bolo tie I'd inherited from my grandfather. Sleeping Beauty Turquoise was the stone. Expensive as fuck but totally out of style. Maybe they'd think it was dyed plastic.
“I don't know,” James said. “It doesn't feel right, leaving you here like this.”
“I'll be fine. Chilly like the polar bear. Chilly like the ice cube bath. I know how to do chilly.”
“I still don't know what was so bad about testing yourself with ice bath. I thought we were making real progress with getting to a higher state of mental toughness. This, this is crazy. Fuck my life, that's a real MC gang over there. Look at all those, what are those? Are those hogs? They call those hogs, don't they?”
I got out and made a slow, sarcastic, “Hello, Kitty” wave at him. Only, in this case, it was more of a “Goodbye, Kitty.”
“Bye, James. I'll call you later if I need a pickup.”
He drove off still shaking his head.
Club Page 9