CHAPTER SEVEN
Rodney's alarm went off at six-thirty and he hit snooze three times before remembering he had a job.
He sat up in bed and immediately regretted it.
His body ached in places he didn't know could ache, deep muscular soreness in his thighs and core, the kind of thing you got after doing something physically intense for hours, which he supposed he had.
His neck was tender when he turned his head.
His wrists had a faint pink memory of leather.
His ass was sore in a way that made him blush alone in his own apartment.
He stumbled to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
The bite marks were almost gone. Shifter healing had done its work overnight, turning what had been vivid red welts into faint pinkish smudges that would disappear completely by noon.
His wrists were the same, the lines already more suggestion than mark.
By the time he got to work, there would be no visible evidence that anything had happened to him.
He wasn't sure how he felt about that. Part of him was relieved, he didn't need Dean asking questions about his neck.
But another part, a part that surprised him, was almost disappointed.
He'd liked those marks. He'd liked knowing they were there, liked the small secret pain of them.
They'd been proof that the previous night had actually happened and wasn't just the most vivid dream of his life.
He turned the shower on. The water was scalding for the first thirty seconds, his building's plumbing was as reliable as ever, and then it settled into a tolerable warmth.
He stood under the spray and let it run over his sore muscles and tried to organize what he was feeling into something that made sense.
He'd had sex with a stranger. A stranger who'd paid a lot of money for him. A stranger whose face he'd never seen, whose body he'd only felt, whose voice was the thing he'd held onto while everything else went dark and strange and overwhelming.
That should have felt bad. Transactional. Degrading, maybe. Some fundamental part of Rodney's self-preservation instinct kept trying to frame it that way, kept trying to file last night under "things that happened to me" rather than "things I chose."
But he had chosen it. Every step. He'd texted Lady Leo. He'd walked into the building. He'd put the blindfold on himself. He'd said I want all of it and he'd meant it.
And it had been—
He pressed his forehead against the cool tile of the shower wall and let himself think the word he'd been circling.
It had been good.
Not just physically, though physically it had been unlike anything he'd experienced.
David and Terrence had been fine. Pleasant.
The sexual equivalent of a competent meal at a chain restaurant, satisfying enough, quickly forgotten.
What Mordechai had done to him was a different category entirely.
It wasn't just that Mordechai was more skilled, though he clearly was.
It was that Mordechai had paid attention.
Had listened to Rodney's body like it was telling him something worth hearing.
Had found the places that made Rodney gasp and then had gone back to them, deliberately, like a musician returning to a melody.
But the physical part wasn't what kept surfacing in Rodney's mind as the water went from warm to lukewarm to the ominous chill that meant he had about sixty seconds before it turned to ice.
It was the other stuff. The conversation. The feeding. Mordechai's hand in his hair. You matter here. The way Mordechai had said good boy and Rodney's whole body had gone quiet, like a signal locking into a frequency he'd been scanning for his entire life.
He turned off the water before the ice hit and stood dripping in the tiny bathroom, staring at the fogged mirror, and thought: I liked submitting.
Not liked in the past tense. Liked in the present.
Liked in the ongoing, inconvenient, possibly life-altering sense of the word.
He'd liked kneeling. He'd liked being told what to do.
He'd liked the structure of it, the rules, the parameters, the clear and explicit framework in which all he had to do was listen and obey and trust. For a man who'd spent his entire life drifting, the containment of submission had felt like coming home.
He got dressed. Made coffee. Ate a bowl of cereal standing at the counter because he didn't own a kitchen table.
The cereal tasted like nothing. The coffee tasted like nothing.
Everything in his apartment felt flat and gray and small compared to the dark warm room where Mordechai's voice had been the whole world.
At the bus stop, he sat on the bench and scrolled through his phone. No new messages. He didn't have Mordechai's number, hadn't thought to ask for it, and Mordechai hadn't offered. The only connection between them was Kinky Kritters. If Rodney wanted to see him again, he had to go back.
The bus came. He got on. He went to work.
***
The call center was exactly as he'd left it.
The same fluorescent lights. The same beige cubicles.
The same headset that pinched behind his right ear.
He logged in, put his headset on, and started taking calls, and for the first hour he was on autopilot, the scripts were so deeply embedded in his brain that he could recite them while thinking about something else entirely.
And he was thinking about something else entirely.
He was thinking about the blindfold. About the way the darkness had stripped everything unnecessary away, his self-consciousness, his anxiety, his endless mental catalogue of every flaw and failure, and left nothing but sensation.
Nothing but Mordechai's voice telling him what to do and Mordechai's hands showing him what his body was capable of and Mordechai's teeth marking him as something that mattered enough to mark.
"Sir? Sir, are you there?" The angry customer on the phone was getting angrier.
"I'm sorry, yes. I'm here. Let me pull up your account." Rodney blinked and refocused. He'd been staring at his computer screen without seeing it, the cursor blinking patiently in the search bar while his mind replayed the feeling of Mordechai's finger crooked inside him, the white-hot shock of—
"Your account number, please?" He said it louder than necessary, mostly to drown out his own thoughts.
At lunch, Dean sat across from him in the break room and talked about a new restaurant his girlfriend wanted to try. Rodney nodded and made appropriate noises and ate his vending machine sandwich and did not say any of the things that were stacked up behind his teeth.
"You okay?" Dean asked, mid-sentence about appetizer prices. "You look different today."
Rodney's hand went to his neck, where the marks had been. "I'm fine. Didn't sleep great."
"You look like you slept great, actually. You look more relaxed than I've ever seen you." Dean squinted at him. "Did you get laid?"
"Dean."
"You did! You totally did. Your whole face just went red. Who was it?"
Rodney took a very large bite of his sandwich to end the conversation. Dean grinned at him like he'd confirmed something and went back to talking about appetizers.
The afternoon crawled. Rodney took calls and answered questions and apologized for things and thought about the choice he was making.
Because that was what it was—a choice. His debt was paid.
The auction had covered it. Whatever he owed Lady Leo was between them, and Mordechai had made it clear that the two things were separate.
If Rodney went back tonight, it wasn't because he had to.
It was because he wanted to.
That was the terrifying part. Not the blindfold, not the restraints, not the vulnerability of being naked in front of strangers.
The terrifying part was that he wanted it.
That some door inside him had been opened that he hadn't known existed, and behind it was a room full of things he'd never let himself want: touch, attention, surrender, the specific and devastating relief of being told good boy by someone whose approval felt like sunlight.
He wanted to go back. He wanted to see Mordechai.
He wanted to know what his face looked like, whether the voice matched the image he'd been building in his mind all day.
He wanted to kneel on the pillow again and feel Mordechai's hand in his hair and hear him say good boy and let the two words settle the restless, anxious, endlessly self-critical noise in his head into something like quiet.
At five o'clock, he clocked out. Dean waved goodbye. Rodney waved back.
He went home. Stood in front of his closet, pulled on a dark gray t-shirt and clean jeans, spent three minutes trying to make his hair cooperate, and gave up.
It didn't matter. Not the way it had mattered yesterday, when he'd agonized over his grandmother's green shirt and the top button and looking like a person who had his life together.
Tonight, he wasn't trying to look like anything. He was just going back.
He locked his apartment. Took the bus. Got off at the stop nearest the financial district and walked the four blocks to the glass building that didn't look like much from the outside.
He went in.
Bethany looked up from her desk. If she was surprised to see him, she didn't show it. But the slight lift at the corner of her mouth suggested she'd been expecting him.
"Welcome back," she said.