Chapter 5 Troye
FIVE
TROYE
Not unless you ask me.
Those words had been a knife through my soul. I imagined him overpowering me, not like it would take much, to be honest. Strength and stamina weren’t my strong suits. But I sort of imagined him just… taking. Like he’d get fed up enough and then put me over his knee and…
Not unless you ask me.
Ugh. Who said that kind of thing to someone?
Who would fucking ask for a spanking? I mean…
It sounded humiliating. The idea of being put over his knee.
Would he take my pants down first? Would he…
oh, fuck. If I got hard—like I was getting now—would he be able to tell? Shit. He would. What if he got hard?
I think you don’t know what you need.
Well, he had me pegged with that one. I had no argument, not even to myself. I certainly had nothing to say to Matthew, who sat stoically typing away on his laptop as if he hadn’t offered to spank me.
Not unless you ask me.
Fuck my whole entire life. I was not curious enough to ask for a spanking.
Instead, I pulled out my phone and climbed under the covers and scrolled through social media for a while.
I commented on a few things on my gamer accounts, tossed out an update to my followers that I was stuck in an airport hotel for the night.
Conveniently leaving out the fact that I wasn’t alone.
When that got boring, I closed social media and went to one of my cozy games.
I had no idea how much time passed, but suddenly Matthew closed his laptop again.
He tidied up the empty food containers—oops—and then climbed in under the covers.
When he clicked the lamp off, the only remaining light in the room was my phone and the light from the bathroom that had been left on.
It didn’t seem to bother Matthew so I wasn’t about to get up and turn it off.
Matthew lay on his side, facing away from me, and for some reason I hated that. It felt like a rejection. Like I wasn’t good enough to talk to all of the sudden. I let my phone screen go dark, and then I set it on the nightstand. I told myself that I’d go to sleep too.
Only that didn’t work. My left side wasn’t comfortable, so I rolled onto my right side.
But lying there, facing the back of Matthew's head kind of pissed me off. I didn’t even want to look at him, so I rolled onto my back.
That was kind of better, but my legs felt jittery, like I needed to move them.
Keeping them still was agony so I shifted around a lot, trying to get the sensation to go away.
It happened sometimes when I was too worked up about something.
“Will you stay still?” Matthew said instead of goodnight. Or hey, are you okay? Or literally anything else he could’ve said.
“No,” I told him, matter of fact. “I can’t.”
To prove my point, I shifted my legs more. My motions fluffed the covers, and I could hear the way my skin sounded sliding around on the sheets.
Matthew let out a hefty sigh. And that pissed me off too. How dare he sigh at me. Well, not at me, because he wasn’t even looking at me.
I shimmied my legs around again, this time trying to be as irritating as possible. I turned my head to look at the dark blob that was Matthew. He was as still as a stone, and I was the river raging all around him. He was just existing, unaffected.
“Maybe you should go for a walk if you’re restless.”
“Okay.” I practically sprang up out of bed.
Matthew’s next sigh wasn’t as loaded. He probably thought that I’d put some shoes on and wander down to the lobby. Maybe find a bar and have a nice drink. Or find some guy to spank—no. What? To suck me. Yes. That's what I’d been thinking about.
And as tempting as that was, I didn’t want to leave the room. So I started pacing. Back and forth through the room. Matthew sighed again.
“Troye, for the love of everything, will you just sit down?”
“Not sure I want to. Maybe I don’t know what I want,” I shot his words back at him, thinking they’d give me some kind of power by flinging them at him, but all they did was expose me.
I swore I felt the moment they landed, and he went still.
Then he shifted in bed, letting me know I finally had his attention.
“Troye… is there something you’d like to ask me?”
I scoffed. Fuck no.
He waited for an answer and when he didn’t get one, he rolled back onto his side. “Goodnight, Troye.”
I finally got an acknowledgement, and it sucked.
It was another dismissal. I didn’t want him to dismiss me.
I wanted—something. I wanted his attention.
I’d always been like that. Some people called me an attention whore.
I just didn’t like feeling invisible. That’s why I spent so much time with my online community.
If I had a thousand people watching me, I wasn’t invisible.
If I had a hundred people in my chat, it was like being at a party where everyone wanted to talk to me.
And yet I wanted Matthew to talk to me. To look at me.
To see me. It was his attention I burned for.
I tried not to think about his lap, and how it had felt when I’d plopped myself down in it, but I couldn’t help it.
He’d been solid. Firm. Warm. Even when he’d shoved me off his lap, I’d felt the heat of his hands through my shirt.
My pacing had resumed, but not because I was trying to be annoying. All these things I was thinking had built up inside me, and I couldn’t get myself to settle down. Back home, I had a permanent path worn into the floor.
“Troye, will you please, please, sit the fuck down?”
Matthew’s voice had an edge to it. He was irritated with me. And how dare he be when he was the cause of my distress? My irritation.
Not unless you ask me.
“Maybe you should fucking spank me then.” I threw the words out there, not quite as softly as I’d intended. But they managed to suck the oxygen out of the room, and then I was still. Still as a fucking statue. I didn’t even breathe.
The covers shifted, and I watched Matthew push them back and slowly, so fucking slowly, he got out of bed.
I watched him, brave enough in the dark to openly stare at him while he straightened up, coming to his full height.
The darkness might have given me cover to stare, but it also made him seem bigger, more imposing. My knees turned to water.
“I won’t put a hand on you that you don’t want me to, but I get the feeling that you might want me to.” Matthew took a step closer.
I willed my body to take a step back, to put distance between me and my impending doom, but my body wasn’t listening to me anymore.
“I don’t know what I want, remember?” I wanted to stop fucking talking because I’d worked myself up into one of those states where I said stupid shit.
It happened when I was gaming sometimes, but usually it was because I was frustrated with a level that I couldn’t beat.
And that’s when I’d switch to something softer. Cozier.
Matthew didn’t move or speak, but I heard his voice in my head. Over and over.
Not unless you ask me.
“I’d like to get to sleep sometime this century, Troye.”
I love-hated the way he said my name. Like he had a right to use it. Like the way he said it belonged to him and only him.
“What are you going to do if you don’t? Spank me?”
“If that’s what you want.”
Not unless you ask me.
Funny, because I thought I was. But maybe he needed the words. Maybe he needed assurance that it was something I actually wanted him to do. I supposed when you were going to put your hands on another person, you might want to know for sure that it was consensual.
“Just fucking do it then.” I flung my consent at him like it was a grenade but instead of it landing and me getting an explosive reaction, Matthew sat down on the edge of the bed.
“If you really want one, you’re going to have to ask me nicely.”
My watery knees barely held me up, and yet somehow they found the strength to carry me across the room.
I had no frame of reference for this kind of thing, but I was pretty sure Matthew did.
And I tried not to compare myself to other people he might have spanked.
What if I wasn’t good at taking it? What if I had a weird ass?
It might not be the kind of ass he was used to spanking.
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Leave it to me to find a way to be bad at owning an ass.
My feet shuffled across the carpet, bringing me closer to my destruction. Matthew sat there patiently, like he’d sit there all night if that’s what it took for me to get my shit together.
When I got close enough, he tipped his head up and looked at me. I could almost make out his expression in the dim light.
I opened my mouth and for a second I was terrified that I was about to say something stupid. Something that would be typical of me to say. Some sort of ill-thought insult or some kind of shitty snark.
“Please,” I said instead, shocking myself.
Did I really want one bad enough to ask him nicely?
I hadn’t thought so, but sometimes it was like there were two people living inside me.
The Troye who got wound up and said and did things that weren’t smart, or clever, or nice.
And then there was the Troye who hated the other version of himself, and he tried to be one Troye.
One really good Troye, but that never lasted long.
Matthew didn’t make me wait. Reaching for me, taking my hand, he pulled me closer and then suddenly the world was tipping and my stomach was swooping and then I was in Matthew’s lap.
And my watery knees turned to rocks that shook and trembled as an earthquake of anticipation and fear rippled through me.
Matthew was being kind and gentle, and he arranged me so I was comfortable and then he struck me. Over my soft pajama pants, the hit barely registered. I’d imagined my bare ass. I’d been spanked during sex before, so I knew about the way flesh on flesh stung, and I wanted that. I wanted…
Not unless you ask me.
“I want a real one,” I told him after the third or fourth strike.
“A real one?” Matthew paused.
“I want…I want you to spank me. For real. Like… not over the pants. I was bad and maybe… and maybe…” I couldn’t get my thoughts to leave my brain, but Matthew seemed to understand.
Thankfully for me, he didn’t seem to be interested in doing shit like making me ask nicely.
Or using a specific phrase like how some people were irritating, correcting you when you asked if you could do something instead of if you were allowed to do something.
Not Matthew. He just got straight to business.
The pajama pants I’d borrowed were shoved down to my knees, and he positioned me so my cock wouldn’t get smashed against his lap.
He put a hand down on my lower back, and then that first blow rained down on me.
The sound was like a gunshot obliterating the silence.
The sting was… holy shit. It wasn’t much at first. The shock was the worst to begin with.
But then the sting bloomed into something bright and hot and unavoidable. It was all I could think about.
He hit me a few more times on each cheek, giving me time between the blows to take a breath. It was like he was checking in on me. I definitely hadn’t taken ten total strikes when he stopped.
“Think you had enough?” he asked.
I knew he’d stop if I wanted him to. And I knew I’d die if he did.
“No. Please… I—more.” I said. “Do it. Do it for real.” And then I buried my head in my arms and waited.