Puppy on a Leash (Plumas Universe #5)

1. Jaime

Sergio was going to skin me alive.

Well, he wouldn’t—but he would if he had his priorities straight.

The knowledge didn’t stop me from pressing on the buzzer by the thick wooden door. Over and over. Sure, there was a chance Tony wasn’t even home, but it wasn’t as if he had a huge social circle. No, it wasn’t a nice thing to say—or think.

“Who the fuck—” Tony stopped mid-sentence after his eyes roamed down and up my body. “What are you doing here?”

Aw, he recognized me .

Most of the time he saw me while I wore a rubber suit and a yellow puppy hood. It had been a legitimate concern, but I wasn’t like Eli, who only ever showed up in full gear. I also went to more munches than they did, but Tony didn’t go to those. Well, I think he came to one, a couple of weeks ago? No idea. I’d been with Sergio, which meant keeping our distance.

Anyway.

Back to the reason I was here.

“Read this bullshit.”

I’d been carrying my laptop out of my backpack—it wasn’t raining for once—and I already had the window open, so I just opened the laptop and shoved it in his face.

Sure, not very classy, but I was fuming , okay? I had an excuse.

“Uh…”

Fuck.

Yeah, this was anticlimactic now. Of course the stupid laptop wanted my password or fingerprint or whatever first.

Ugh.

I rolled my eyes while pressing my finger to the keypad and then turned it back to him. This time, I checked that the screen was showing the stupid email I’d gotten.

“Why…” Tony’s eyebrows furrowed as he frowned. I really didn’t understand why he wasn’t fuming already. “You… came all the way here to show me a university email?”

I clicked my tongue.

“More like a stupid email from a stupid professor that you’re going to help me answer.” I huffed. I didn’t think it was so complicated. “And can you let me in? My laptop is fully charged, but standing here is kinda awkward. Just saying.”

Tony’s eyes widened before his perpetual frown settled back in place. “How did you even know where I live?”

“Cece.” I rolled my eyes. In my head, this had gone more smoothly. He let me in the second he saw me, he shared my contempt for my moronic professor, and by now, he was typing the perfect response for me while hunched over the coffee table in his living room because he didn’t have the time to trek to the office upstairs. Not that I knew what the distribution of his house looked like from the inside. I’d fantasized about it, though. Maybe. “Y’know, pup at the club, she/they pronouns, pretty hair? They came to help you set up some Wi-Fi thingy.”

Tony pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers before he shook his head and stepped aside. “Right. Come in, then. And explain yourself, for real this time.”

“What do you mean?” I swallowed. That came out higher pitched than I’d planned. “I already explained. My professor is an asshole who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, and he has it out for me. But I don’t know how to respond all fancy, so you’re going to help me with that.”

After returning the laptop back to me—without reading the entire email thread, mind you—Tony crossed his arms over his chest. If the professors at my college had his physique, I’d be ten times more motivated to not skip as many classes as I did.

“Claims of whether or not a professor has it out for you aside… Why would I do that?”

“Because I’m right, and you care about academic integrity?”

Yeah, this had gone way more smoothly in my head.

“Do I?” Tony cocked his perfectly shaved head to the side.

“Yes?”

Fuck. What was it with the high-pitched questions today?

Ugh.

Maybe I should’ve waited to have Cece with me. They were good at mellowing me out or whatever.

Tony just sighed. Then he looked up as if he was praying for patience or some shit I knew wouldn’t make any sense. He was atheist—like all of us at Plumas, really, not that it was a requirement.

“Sit your ass on the couch and start from the beginning. Lose the sass, too.”

I frowned. I opened my mouth, about to argue, because what the fuck did losing the sass even mean? It wasn’t my fault that?—

You know what, fine . I could sit on the couch and behave. For a fleeting second, Tony got that look he used to get before setting Marga or Jen on his lap for a spanking.

I enjoyed a spanking, too, but he made them look intimidating as fuck. No, thanks.

So I let go of my backpack, threw myself on the corner of his big ass couch, and placed the laptop on the coffee table. I knew he’d have one of those glass ones that didn’t look sturdy at all. There were books at the bottom. History about the conflicts in SWANA, from what I could read.

Leaning down to peer through them was probably not the best thing to do right now. I wanted to, but I didn’t get the feeling that I’d given a great first impression.

“Just read through the emails first,” I grumbled while pointing to the still-on screen. I knew it wasn’t great for battery life, but I’d set it up so it only turned off if it was in low power mode. “Please?”

Tony watched me with that frown of his for a second. I scowled, but he grabbed my laptop and started scrolling, so it worked.

There were at least a dozen emails full of lengthy paragraphs, so I tried to make myself comfortable. And I studied his face. After he reached the first email, he pulled a pair of black, thick-rimmed glasses out of the case he must’ve kept on the arm of the couch, put them on, and started reading. The screen glared against the glasses as his eyes darted from side to side. His lips pulled down from time to time, his eyebrows pinched. I was very curious and wanted to ask why he scrunched up his nose and all but snarled in disgust while reading a certain paragraph.

I didn’t.

I tried to brace myself. If I was honest with myself, I shouldn’t have come here. Tony wasn’t supposed to be trustworthy. He had said shitty stuff in the past. For all I knew, he’d agree with my professor—who really did have it out for me ever since I’d called him out for spouting transphobic shit my freshman year. But I acknowledged I could be impulsive. I’d seen red when I’d read through the last email he’d sent me, and I’d acted out. Acting out meant coming here.

I started lifting my legs to the couch. Sometimes, after all the adrenaline left my body, I just wanted to curl myself into a ball and hide from the world.

“It’s bad enough you didn’t take your shoes off. You are not putting them on the couch.” Tony’s voice cut through the voices in my head.

Fuck.

“I wasn’t going—” I cut myself off before my temper proved whatever idea he had of me. In my defense, I didn’t notice. Only Erika and Kara had a rule to leave shoes at the entrance, and I didn’t crash at their place often. Erika wasn’t into having lots of guests over, and Kara shared a house with two ER doctors, so it just wasn’t a thing. “Sorry.”

I rushed out of the living room before he could give me that quirked eyebrow look all Domms had perfected.

Sure enough, there was a low shoe rack by the door, next to where I’d dropped off my backpack, really. I toed off my loafers and stacked them neatly next to it. At least I was wearing socks. The skin on my toes was supersensitive, and I always ended up with blisters if I didn’t wear anything.

But they were the low-cut ones that kind of looked like flats on their own. It didn’t help the buzzing settling underneath my skin.

Whatever.

I scrubbed my hands down my face and breathed in. Breathing exercises were important. They didn’t make a big difference, but Cece—my best friend and kink sibling—always made me do them, and they were way more put together than I was.

Ugh.

This really had gone way better in my head.

Too late to do anything about it, though.

So I dragged myself back to the couch and brought my knees to my chest.

“Better?”

I’d say I did a good job of keeping my chin up, my tone challenging enough I wouldn’t look as small as I was beginning to feel.

It sucked.

“Easy, boy.”

I ground my teeth. This wasn’t the moment to read into that boy —if it was mocking or something else completely.

No, it wasn’t. I still had the taunts from the stupid professor in my head. The condescension in his emails I could quote without any prep.

“Are you going to help me or not?”

Tony gave me another once-over. It had been fine before, not something I cared about. Now, with the disgust of eight out of ten professors fresh in my head, it made me want to curl up on myself more.

“I am not going to go to war with a random professor I’ve never even heard of.” Tony spoke as if it was obvious. I was about to splutter something, maybe grumble, but he stood up and headed toward one of the bookshelves framing the large TV screen. “That’s only one step above having a parent come to your office because their kid is the next Pulitzer, and I hate those.”

Of course he did.

“But you are not—” I groaned, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. It would be nice if I learned to speak as fast as I thought. Would save me a lot of fumbling. “He’s shitting all over your field. You have to care about that.”

Tony had built a reputation over the years, and not just as a strict Dom. He had opinions about everything and everyone.

His back was still to me when he cranked his neck and rolled his shoulders back. It shouldn’t be distracting. I blamed my low-dose T on why it was, and not the fact that I was very easily distracted and very easy to turn on.

“Take this.” He grabbed the book he must’ve been looking for from the shelf and turned to me. I frowned until the thick hardback was on my lap. International Law & Investigative Journalism: Ethical Considerations . “Read it, especially the case on the carceral system, and formulate your response. It’ll be good practice.”

I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I trailed my finger over the leather-bound book. I’d been asking the college librarians to get a copy of this for ages, but they always said it wasn’t possible, and it cost like three hundred bucks, last time I checked. I was sure it was even more expensive now, what with inflation and all.

The cost of academic books was wild.

“When do you want it back?” The rest of what he said registered before he could answer. I scoffed. “Not that it’s going to change anything.”

“Definitely not with that attitude.” Tony rolled his eyes. “But there’s no rush. I have another copy in my office.”

My eyes widened. I’d process the fact that he had two copies of a book that could pay for my food for a month—maybe two—later.

“My attitude?” Well, at least my adrenaline and self-righteous anger were coming back. I was far more comfortable with those than the discomfort and dysphoria, thank you very much. “He’s a transphobic piece of shit who doesn’t go one day without making his displeasure with my existence known, and the problem is my attitude?”

Tony’s face twisted into a grimace. I didn’t care. He could take his three-figure textbook and shove it up his?—

“I’m not defending him, boy.” The fuck he wasn’t. Tony raised his palms before I could say that out loud. “His takes are fallacious at best. Half of the sources he’s quoted have been debunked, and the other half he’s taking out of context. I don’t approve of the tone he uses when talking to a student, either, but I can’t control any of it.”

I gritted my teeth. “And what, you can control me?”

Tony cocked his head to the side. Instead of answering—and now I was thinking how that sounded given all we knew about each other’s… preferences—he sat back on the couch.

“What do you want to do? When you graduate?”

I frowned. The question threw me off, but it had some weird side effect too. It left me deflated. I didn’t like it. “I don’t know.”

I did, and I didn’t. It was strange. But I was feeling too exposed to elaborate on it one way or another.

Tony squinted at me. “You don’t come across as someone who just doesn’t know.”

Yeah, it was official. Today had just gone from bad to worse.

I huffed. I could’ve said that Tony didn’t come across as the type who didn’t know when to leave something alone. I was back to being too tired for a verbal spat—or anything else—though.

“I wanna run a podcast.”

“On what?”

“Politics.” I swallowed. “International politics.”

There were the facts that I was terrible at marketing, knew nothing about launching a business, and podcasts didn’t make that much money, but it was the thing I could see myself doing. The second dream would be international reporter, but no one would hire me for that, given I couldn’t safely travel to a large number of countries. It wasn’t even about the suspects that homonationalists loved to list to defend their racist views. Most of the European countries around us were going far right. Italy had been the only country outside of Eastern Europe that refused to sign an EU bill to guarantee LGBTQ+ rights, only because there was a bit too much focus on the T.

Also, I was self-aware enough to know I wouldn’t last two days at any traditional newspaper the second someone tried to tell me a story wasn’t worth pursuing or a particular angle wasn’t what they were looking for.

So.

“My point stands, then.”

“Huh?” I frowned.

Had he said something while I was deep in my head?

“If you run a podcast on politics, you’re gonna have to learn how to respond to your fair share of trolls.” Tony was now looking at me as if he was wondering if I’d hit my head as a child. I grunted. “It’s good practice.”

“Will it also be good practice when he fails me and I lose my scholarship?”

Trolls were just trolls. A professor was supposed to know better.

“If he fails you, as you put it, that’s when you file a complaint and get a committee to look into it.”

“Right.” I rolled my eyes. “A committee made up of professors from his same department or the departments he goes out to have a glass of wine with after class. I’m sure they’ll be so helpful.”

“You’d be surprised.” Tony snickered to himself. I didn’t know what was so funny, and I didn’t ask. He seemed to catch on quick, his expression sobering once more. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to help me. He won’t listen to me even if I regurgitate this entire book to him, but he can’t just not listen to you.”