“Second, no more alcohol tonight. You don’t drink and play.”
“But I’m not playing tonight,” Xander said, but he put his half-empty drink back on the bar anyway, and pushed it away. “No one will play with me,” he added, and sounded like a lost little boy even to his own ears.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you continue being good tonight, I’ll let you play with some of my toys next week. They’re tough enough for you. Also, I’m going to call you X.”
“Why?” Xander asked, as she dragged him by the hand back to her collection of male flesh and muscles.
“Because it sounds cool,” she shrugged. “And so they’ll know to obey you like they obey me.”
“Okay.” He didn’t know what else to do, so he went along with it. She introduced him to her harem, but he couldn’t keep their names straight. He didn’t have to; all of them kneeled in front of him, just like they knelt for her, compliant and willing.
And Zee kept her word. The next week, she invited Xander to a private room in the back of the warehouse, and had all her toys kneel in front of him again.
“What would you like to do to them?” she asked after a while, watching Xander watch them.
But the words stuck in his throat.
“If you can’t say it, you can’t do it, X. What would you like to do to them?”
“I want to make them scream,” Xander snarled, and Zee smiled.
She was right. Her toys were tough enough for him, and that night he let it all go, let it out. There were enough of them that when one called for a stop, there was another waiting, and another, and another. When he was finally finished, he collapsed, gasping and laughing. He looked at Zee, and she nodded. “You see? It’s okay.”
Afterwards, just before the dawn started to make itself known, she took Xander out for coffee, and started telling him what he did wrong and what he did right. How to give good aftercare. How to avoid permanent injuries. How to be better at causing pain and fear. How to control himself.
“And you’d better come to my private parties,” she said at last. “Learn about blood sports and the riskier things.”
“I know about blood sports,” Xander had said stubbornly, but she quelled him with a look. “Okay. And…thank you.”
She inclined her head in gracious acceptance.
Chapter Twelve
It’s getting late by now, but Ben’s eyes are wide open, and he’s hanging on every word. He’s only shifted positions from his back to his side so he can stare more closely at Xander. “Damn,” he says at last, and chuckles.
“Yeah. You thought I was bad when we got together? You actually got the new and improved model,” Xander tells him.
Ben shuffles over to snuggle into him. “Aw. You weren’t that bad. You just had a few sharp edges.”
“And are they filed down to your satisfaction?” Xander asks. He tries to sound light. Jokey.
But Benjamin knows him too well. He pulls Xander in for a kiss. “I like you sharp,” he murmurs against Xander’s lips. “What happened next? She trained you?”
Xander kisses him back again. “Yes. But that’s another story, and it’s Benjamin’s bedtime.”
Going to sleep with, and waking up next to Benjamin Ballard, are two of Xander’s favorite times of the day. He doesn’t always sleep well now that he’s flying back and forth from coast to coast, swapping time zones, so if he wakes up in the night, it’s a comfort to hear Ben snuffling away next to him.
This time, though, when Xander opens his eyes and lies there with them open for a while, he’s distracted by his phone, which lights up and buzzes with an incoming message. Trying not to wake Ben, he reaches over for it and checks it.
He always likes to keep it on in case Ben needs him when he’s away. But this message is from a blocked number, although the words are clear enough:
I’m going to tell the whole world about you.
It’s difficult to tell Ben about the text, but Xander is committed to the Honesty Policy. He genuinely forgot about Adam’s email after Ben moved in; for Xander, it was such a joyful time he could have lost his job on The Hunter and not cared at all.
But now it seems like things are escalating, as much as Xander doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it. So he sits Ben down and shows him the text the next morning during breakfast.
Benjamin, predictably, goes off like a Jack-in-the-box.
“That’s fucking it, I’m gonna find Adam and help him swallow his teeth!” Ben rages.
Xander tries to hide his smile, but fails.
“You think this is funny?” Ben demands, his voice rising to a squeak. “It’s not fucking funny. This is blackmail, Xander.”
“It’s not funny. At all. I was just trying to picture you doing what you said, about the teeth. Listen, baby, I’ll talk to my agent and publicist about it; we’ll get some legal advice. This is weird, though. There’s no actual demand for money.”
Ben shoves back his chair and gets up from the breakfast table, leaving his Eggs Benedict half-finished, and the hollandaise Xander made this morning was superlative, even if he does say so himself. “It’s like you don’t want it to be Adam,” he says, and Xander picks up on the faint accusatory tone in Ben’s voice.
He stands and goes over to take Ben’s shoulders. Noah is following them, first in case they drop any food, and then because he can sense something is wrong. He gives a small whine.
“I hope it is,” Xander says. “Honestly, I hope it is, because he’s easy enough to deal with. I just throw something his way and he fucks off for another year.”
Ben gives him a horrified look. “Are you saying he’s done this before?”
Xander could kick himself. But then he thinks about that damn Honesty Policy. “Yes,” he tells Ben. “Yes, Adam has done this before. He wears me down. And I feel bad still about the way things went down between us, so I give in. This time is different, and I’m done managing his bullshit. But the thing is, Ballard…”
Ben waits, his face stormy.
“…The thing is, I’ve done a lot of stupid shit in my time, and this might be Adam, but it might be any one of a number of—”
“Hang on,” Ben says, his face going red. “Just hang on. How many people exactly are blackmailing you? Like, ballpark figure?”
This conversation is getting out of hand. “No one is blackmailing me. I mean, Adam aside. But what I’m saying is, you’re fixated on thinking it’s Adam, but this isn’t his style. Usually there’s more of a sob story attached. Like, his car broke down and he needs some quick cash to fix it. Or he can’t make rent, or something.”
Ben is only getting more furious, and Noah shuffles uneasily. Thankfully, Ben notices this, looking down at the sad dog trying to squeeze in between their feet to comfort them both.
“I’m sorry my past keeps coming up like this,” Xander says, rubbing Ben’s arms up and down. “If I’d known how much better things were going to be for me in the future…”
Under his fingers, Xander can feel when Ben’s muscles start to relax. “It’s not your fault,” Ben says. And then he rallies to make a joke and try to lift the mood: “I can hardly blame all those guys for wanting to be with the fantastic, the amazing, the incredible Dom X!” He says it like he’s a wrestling announcer, and Xander has to smile.
“It was another life,” he says. “And I can’t regret it, exactly, but I do regret the way it’s infringing on us, right here and now.”
But Ben isn’t really listening; he’s frowning again, though not in anger. “If it’s not Adam,” he says slowly, “then who is it? And why has it started just recently? And what, exactly, is this person planning to tell the world about you?”
Every single stupid mistake and possible fuck up that Xander has ever made begins to crowd into his mind. “Perhaps I should just come clean in the press,” he says, thinking out loud. “Maybe I should give an interview or…”
Ben is looking at him like he’s crazy. “No one needs to hear about our pri
vate sex life,” he says bluntly. “What you said before was right. We should get legal advice.”
Benjamin is correct. There’s a difference between owning your sexuality and going into the intimate details, and Xander knows this, but he’s not always sure what’s appropriate. It’s one of the reasons he’s grateful for Ben, who always seems to understand the nuances like that.
“Alright,” Xander says. “First off, I’ll get a new phone number. Then I’ll talk to my people. You’d better give Ramona a heads up, too. And…” God, is this something he really wants to suggest? “And maybe we should speak to Adam. Together.”
Ben gives him a startled look. “Speaking to the Evil Ex with your current squeeze? You really think that’s going to end well?”
Xander kisses him, softly, next to his mouth. “You are so much more than my current squeeze, baby. You know that. And fuck it, if it is him and he sees we’re a united front, maybe he’ll stop trying to divide and conquer.”
Between them, Noah whines again, still uncertain.
Xander knows exactly how he feels.
Xander has been called back to New York for another few days, so he schedules time with his therapist Paul to see him face to face. Analysis is all very well over the phone, but their energies mesh much better when they’re face to face.
He’s been told to take a printed-out photograph of himself, and so he does.
Paul greets him and leads him into the usual room. They settle, and then Xander pulls out a black and white print of a paparazzi photograph of himself walking down the street, intent on his iPhone.
He can’t remember the day or place, although it looks like New York. He can’t remember whether he noticed the photographer or not; whether he cared if he did; what his reaction was at the time.
“Interesting choice,” Paul says. “Why this, and not a private picture?”
Xander taps his forefinger on the sofa arm rapidly while he thinks. “It honestly didn’t occur to me,” he says finally. “That suggests an awful lot of stuff, doesn’t it? That I feel like I’m only living my life in public, maybe? Or that I don’t consider my private life to be my real life? That would be a problem.”
Paul doesn’t reply, just removes a pack of crayons from the drawer in his side of the coffee table, and places it on top of the picture.
“Seriously? I mean, I’ve tried age regression therapy before, you know. Didn’t work.” Xander smiles, but Paul regards him with his usual stoic expression, until Xander gives up. “Fine. I’ll color the damn thing.”
“Actually, I don’t want you to just color it. I’d also like you to write some words around your image there that you think describe you, as you are now, or as you’ve seen yourself in the past.”
“This is so—”
“Stupid, sure. Indulge me, as your long-suffering analyst?”
Xander wants to protest that analysts aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing, but he’s too busy laughing. “Fine, sure, whatever. I’m going to color this in and you’re going to watch me like some creepy kindergarten teacher?”
“No. While you write and color, we are going to talk about how your week has gone.”
“That’s a lot of stuff to do at the same time.”
“Shall we save some grief here and agree that you’ll pull out, oh, four excuses as to why you shouldn’t do this, and I’ll shoot every one of them down? We can go through the motions if you prefer. It’s your money that you’re wasting. If you want to spend fifteen minutes arguing instead of cooperating, it’s your call.”
Paul really has his number, Xander has to admit.
“You’re such a dick, seriously,” Xander chuckles, and slides down to sit cross-legged on the ground in front of the coffee table. He opens the crayons and pulls out the purple. He might as well color in the stripes on his hoodie first. “My week was fine. I’ve been busy shooting, and they want to keep me on for the next season, but I’m not sure.” He pulls out the red next, starts outlining the street. Fuck realism.
Then, since he has the red crayon out, it seems fitting to write ‘sadist’ in thick lettering next to the hand holding the iPhone, and then it makes sense to color his hands in red, too, for blood. Red face to match, and then he needs black for his hair, while he talks about feeling bad the other day for messing up in rehearsals, and writes ‘STUPID’ in capital letters next to his head, because this exercise is stupid, and he wants Paul to know it.
Before he knows it, he’s telling Paul about a dream he had the other night about Adam, and writing in a stylistic, curlicued ‘V’ for vampire, before he remembers it’s supposed to be stuff he thinks about himself, not stuff other people have called him.
For a moment he considers vain, vapid, even vacuous, but that doesn’t really fit. Well, maybe vain. But he’s already gone as far as ‘Vampi’ now and he doesn’t want to scribble it out, so Vampire it is. He can always explain later. Right now, he’s too busy describing how a different dream he had about breathplay made him feel, and then Paul asks for details and—Xander stops.
“What is it?” Paul asks.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing: you’re not ready to talk about it, or nothing: you don’t want to talk about it?”
Xander had to make a promise, when he came crawling back to Paul for help after the Blood Bond incident, that he would always be honest about things. An Honesty Policy between the two of them, and Xander still wishes he’d never told Paul about that with Benjamin.
Or agreed to be totally honest in therapy.
He adds ‘coward’ to his picture and shrugs. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Is this something to do with Adam, or something to do with Benjamin? Or someone else?”
Sometimes Paul sounds like Xander’s mother, gently and patiently asking simple questions until they get to the bottom of things. It’s invasive and irritating, and he’s actually paying for the honor these days. Xander scowls and throws his crayon down.
“I don’t know,” he says after a moment, and, ashamed, picks the crayon back up to put it in the box. “I really don’t want to talk about it. You’re going to make me though, aren’t you?”
“Come on, Xander. You know better than that. I cannot make you do anything. We are building something together here—”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Xander sighs. Sometimes when Paul talks, he hears how he must sound to Ben when he goes on about Jungian theory. Karmic justice, he supposes.
“We’ve talked about Adam several times,” Paul muses. “But we’ve never talked through exactly what happened before him. Why you left the scene.”
Xander shifts position to stretch out his legs and abandons his coloring-in. “Well, it makes me feel like shit, Paul, so yeah. I prefer to just acknowledge my stupidity and ignorance, and do better in future.”
“Shame is one of the hardest emotions to work through,” Paul says, and then he just waits, and damn him, it’s way too effective.
Xander’s horror at himself started with the breathplay incident that went wrong. He thinks about Benjamin’s guilt and shame after their own breathplay-that-went-wrong, in a very different way to Xander’s experience, but no less life-changing. And if Benjamin was brave enough to work through it, Xander needs to be, too.
He owes it to their lives together.
“I had an accident one night, at a private party that Zee was giving.”
The words come slowly, but as they leave Xander’s lips, he feels a strange freedom from the past that he’s never felt before.
Chapter Thirteen
Xander has no specific idea how Adam has always managed to get his number or his email over the years, but he assumes it’s through mutual friends. Their mutual friends never knew the whole story—or at least, Xander has never gone into it, and he suspects Adam hasn’t either—so they don’t understand quite what they’re doing when they give out Xander’s contact details.
So it doesn’t take too long to track back the other way, find o
ut Adam’s number, and contact him. Xander just calls; he’s not going to give Adam a chance to weasel out of it or think of excuses like he could via text. Besides, Xander wants to hear Adam’s voice when he calls, so he can make his own judgement.
He does it on speaker phone with Benjamin, who is under strict instructions to stay quiet. But the call goes through to voicemail, and Xander, frustrated, just tells Adam he wants to meet. There’s a surprisingly short amount of time before Xander’s phone pings with a text: it’s Adam, telling him a time and place.
“That’s the place I ran into him last,” Ben says, looking at the name of the diner. “When we were…you know…”
“When I was being a jackass and you were in a black depression?”
“That’d be it,” Ben says.
Xander hates the pain that flashes in Ben’s eyes when they talk about those days. That was the worst thing Xander has ever done, as far as he’s concerned: made those assumptions about the play, said those hateful words, cut off contact…and then when he came back, he agreed to take away Ben’s oxygen, even though he knew—who better?—how dangerous that kind of play can be.
But he’s worked hard with Paul to forgive himself, and worked even harder on his relationship with Ben to build it up stronger than it was before.
It’s that thought that makes him calm when they head out to meet Adam in the afternoon: Xander and Ben together are a force to be reckoned with. They’re solid.
The weather is still unsettled in LA; there’s another storm brewing as they make their way to the diner. Adam is already there when they arrive, as golden and sleepy as Xander has ever seen him. There was a time when that stoned-surfer attitude got Xander’s sadistic side revved up; he always wanted to see exactly what would break Adam’s sunny exterior. If only he’d realized sooner what he’d dredged up with his play.
If only, if only. Xander shoves the thoughts aside. He has one focus now, one purpose: Benjamin is being affected by his past.
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