Chapter 34
Brendon
I’m so tired my bones hurt. Not just the normal “I stayed up grading until stupid o’clock” tired, but that deep, wrung-out exhaustion that settles in my muscles, behind my eyes, and under my skin.
Every part of me aches in a way that has nothing to do with the shitty faculty chair I’m sitting on, and everything to do with the fact that last night, I was in the middle of a forest, half-wild with adrenaline, riding Dominic like I was trying to climb inside him.
I shift in my seat and instantly regret it; my thighs protest, my lower back throbs, and there’s a dull, insistent ache deep inside that makes my ears go hot.
My brain supplies helpful flashbacks: running from him, his hand around my throat, my voice cracking on ‘please, Daddy’, and then later, when he lay back in the dirt and dragged me on top of him, his mouth at my ear, telling me to take what I wanted.
I’m sore, exhausted, and so stupidly in love with him it’s sick.
Which is why I’m also pissed off.
“I’m an idiot,” I mutter to the empty room, even as my body gives a traitorous, low throb at the memory. “A sore, exhausted, pathetic idiot.”
I glare at the stack of essays in front of me like they personally wronged me. They blur around the edges; the words might as well be in Russian for all my brain is doing with them right now.
I press my fingers to my temples and breathe out slowly.
I should go home, feed Jericho, shower properly instead of the half-assed rinse I did this morning, sleep for twelve hours.
Then tomorrow, pretend that I’m just another TA—one who did not spend last night getting choked and fucked in the woods by the star quarterback.
I’m mad at him. I am.
I keep telling myself that, anyway. He pushed hard last night, harder than usual: the breath play, the chase, the knife, the way he made me bounce on his cock while he watched my face, cataloguing every reaction for later.
I said yes. I asked for it. I begged for it, if we’re being honest. I can still hear myself in my head, and want to sink through the floor.
I should never be allowed to speak unsupervised again.
My lower back throbs in agreement with that thought. My throat feels rough, too. I press my fingers against it absently, feeling the faint soreness under the skin from where his hand tightened and released; careful even when he wasn’t being careful at all.
I finish the last essay at 3pm, scribble a note in the margin, and lean back, stretching until my spine cracks. I’m going to pack up, go home, and eat something that isn’t Dominic’s cum before I fall over.
I’ve just reached for my bag, when the door flies open.
I jump, heart hammering, immediately thinking Dominic, because of course I do. But it’s not Dominic filling the doorway. It’s my father.
For a split second, my brain can’t process it, since they live eight hours away; it’s like seeing a lion in the campus library.
He’s still in his pastor uniform: crisp shirt, dark slacks, tie loosened, like he’s come straight from church or a meeting, phone clenched in his hand.
His mouth is a hard line, the one he wears when he’s about to scold a congregation for backsliding.
My mother stands just behind him, one hand wrapped around the strap of her handbag. Her eyes are already shiny, red around the rims and mascara smudged at the corners. She looks like she’s been crying for hours.
My stomach drops so fast I sway.
“Dad…?” My voice comes out thin and confused. “What are you… What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t answer. He just steps fully into the office, crowding the small space, and shuts the door behind them both with a soft click that sounds a lot more ominous than the slam from a second ago.
The air seems to shrink; the little room feels about half its normal size with the two of them in it.
My mother’s gaze lands on me, and she flinches. “Oh, baby,” she whispers, and somehow the softness in her voice is worse than the anger in my father’s eyes. “How could you?”
The words hit me like a slap, even though I don’t know what I’m being hit for yet. My brain latches onto the most obvious explanation. “Is it… Did something happen? Is it Eli? Or Grandma? Did someone—”
“Don’t,” my father cuts in, voice vicious enough to slice. “Do not stand there and act ignorant, Brendon.”
My mouth shuts with an audible click. My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat now. Anger is radiating off him—that cold, righteous kind that never ends well for anyone on the receiving end.
“I… don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, because I genuinely don’t. “I’ve been here all afternoon.”
My father laughs, short and humorless. “You have the gall to lie to my face after what I’ve seen.”
“John,” my mother murmurs, putting a hand on his arm. But he shakes her off.
“What you’ve seen?” I echo, the edge of panic starting to seep into each word. “Dad, I swear, I don’t…”
He steps closer, into my space behind the desk, and suddenly I feel twelve years old again, standing in the kitchen while he holds a report card and tells me how I’ve ‘fallen short of what God expects’. He lifts his phone, screen lit, jaw clenched so hard the muscles jump.
“Explain this,” he says.
He turns the phone around, and hits play. I don’t want to look, but I do.
I have no idea what I’m seeing. It’s dark, grainy footage—branches in the foreground, leaves, a weird tilt to the angle. Then, the shapes resolve, and my blood goes cold.
We’re in the clearing; the same one from last night.
The camera is hidden somewhere off to the side, pointed through the trees; it’s as if whoever took this knew exactly where we’d end up.
The lighting is poor, but not bad enough to save me…
Because it shows my face, while Dominic is blurred out right to his tattoos.
I’m on top of him; back arched, head tipping back, hands on his chest. His hands are on my hips, guiding, bruising, meeting me thrust for thrust. There’s a completely blissed out expression on my face, and I can see my mouth moving, but there’s no audio.
It cuts out abruptly, then the clip loops back to the beginning.
I don’t realize I’ve grabbed the edge of the desk until I feel the bite of wood on my palms. My knuckles are white. My face is on fire. Cold sweat breaks out along my spine.
My father lets the video play again, then jabs his thumb to pause it. The still frame freezes on my face—head thrown back, mouth open, eyes glazed. It’s like some obscene icon, lit by the glow of the screen.
“Care to explain?” he asks, voice quiet in a way that’s much worse than if he’d shouted.
I drag my eyes away from the phone and stare at him. I open my mouth, and nothing coherent comes out.
“How—” I manage finally, the word catching, my throat gone dry. “Where did you—”
“That’s what you want to know?” he says, incredulous. “Not how God must feel, seeing you sin so openly. Not how your mother felt, when she received this at 4am, not knowing she’d be watching her son defile himself. You want to know where I got it.”
My mind is spinning. The angle. The zoom. The fact that we were in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with no one around. That’s what I keep snagging on under the panic; someone filmed us. Someone was there—watching, recording—and sent it to my father.
I feel nauseous.
My father’s jaw tightens further. “This is filth. This is sodomy!” His voice cracks on the last word, fury bleeding into disgust. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Yes,” I snap. “I was there.”
He slams his palm down on the desk so hard a pen jumps. “Do not get smart with me.”
“I’m twenty-three, Dad,” I say, before I can stop myself. “I’m not sixteen. You don’t get to barge into my office, and talk to me like I’m some delinquent who stole a bottle from the communion cupboard.”
“Oh, you think this is about rebellion?” he asks, voice dripping with contempt.
“You think this is about you staying out too late, or missing curfew? This is about your soul, Brendon. This is about watching my son, on his knees in the dirt, defiling himself where anyone could see. This is about watching you throw away everything we raised you to be.”
My heart hammers so hard I feel it in my teeth. “You raised me to lie,” I say quietly. “You raised me to pretend I didn’t feel what I feel. You raised me to smile and nod and say ‘yes, sir,’ while I slowly suffocated. I’m done doing that.”
“We raised you in the Word,” my mother says, her voice trembling. “We raised you to fear the Lord. We raised you to walk in purity. You promised us you were staying pure. You promised us you were staying away from temptation here. You promised, Brendon!”
The word pure makes me want to scream. I think about the first time Dominic put his cuff on my wrist, about the way he said ‘I’m going to keep you,’ about how, for the first time in my life, I felt honest and filthy and whole, all at once.
My mother chokes on a sob, stepping forward, hand reaching out like she wants to touch me and can’t quite bring herself to. “How long? How long has this been going on with him? With… men?”
The way she says men like it’s a disease makes my stomach lurch.
I could lie. I could say it was a mistake. One time. I was drunk or confused. I could throw Dominic under the bus and say he pressured me. I see the loopholes being offered, and I can’t take a single one. Even if it would make this easier in the short term, it would kill me.
“A while,” I say quietly. “Not just… not just last night.”
My father laughs, and it’s a sound with no humor. “A while,” he repeats. “How long is ‘a while,’ exactly? Since you came here? Since before then? Have you been lying to us that long?”
“Yes,” I say, because there’s no point pretending now. “I lied. I’m sorry.”
The admission does nothing to soften him. If anything, it seems to harden his posture.