Chapter 3 Santos
THREE
santos
Exhaustion didn’t begin to describe how heavy every single muscle in my body felt as I finally spotted my duffel bag on the conveyor belt.
From there, the exit was close. Some of the energy came back to me as I crossed the arch that separated the two areas of the small airport.
Ever had texted to assure that he’d be picking me up.
I hadn’t seen him in years, and he’d been quite cryptic, but…
Fuck.
I couldn’t wait to have him near. I didn’t fully agree with his parents’ obsession with giving him a security detail, but if we were being honest, I was going to spend most of the time following him around like a puppy. This just made it less embarrassing for me.
Not as embarrassing as how I froze, gaping at my fucking best friend once I spotted him.
It wasn’t hard. Everyone was stealing glances at him, a mixture of lewd and disgusted glances that threatened to stir a sleeping monster in me, a fucking growl rising up to my throat.
It was animalistic, and primal, and Neanderthal of me, and not the best fucking thing to do when everyone saw the Air Force hoodie I had on and already felt wary about the military.
It was that Neanderthal need to protect that had me almost dropping my bag with the hurry to get to him and shield him from it all.
“What the fuck?” I said it to myself as he chewed on his lip before I was dragging him to me.
Ever had never gotten a diagnosis, but he’d always been more prone to get nervous and overthink things.
Fuck.
I’d always been protective of him, and this—the skirt that felt mid-thigh but looked devilishly short, the top with frilly lace around the sleeves, the hair he’d let grow longer than usual, the sheer stockings—wasn’t helping.
I was supposed to try to keep a distance, or an appearance of it.
I’d convinced myself of it the entire flight here.
Ever had been dodging all the bodyguards his family had given him because he didn’t like to feel suffocated.
I knew we had agreed I was his bodyguard in name only, but it felt like the cautious thing to do when everything else was in shambles.
“Uh, hey. Hi.” Ever pulled back slightly where I’d crushed him against my chest—already fucking up the whole not suffocating him thing. “How was your flight?”
“How was my flight?” I repeated. I couldn’t help it.
I was still processing. Last time I’d seen him, Ever was trying out lip glosses and things like that.
It was nothing like the full get-up he had on right now.
I didn’t even know if the way I was thinking about it was right, or if I was being incredibly offensive somehow. “What the fuck? You look…”
Nope. Words failed me. I had no idea what I was supposed to say.
“You don’t…” Ever fidgeted. Double fuck. I never wanted to be the reason he doubted himself. “It’s a new thing, but I…I…”
“You look amazing, Ever,” I whispered. The longer I kept him close, the longer I kept my hands around him, the more interest we were gathering.
I didn’t give a fuck about that. I only cared about the light dimming in his dark eyes and getting it back there.
“I’ve never seen you this fucking pretty. ”
Ever chuckled. The light was back in his eyes, so all was good.
“You’re still the only one who calls me that.”
I huffed. “Good.”
And it was; a good thing that had all my caveman instincts puffing up my chest. He’d told me about how his new group of friends called him Ev, but I liked Ever.
It had started out because of an anime we’d been watching while our parents thought we were sleeping in different rooms, and it had stuck.
Anything that didn’t remind him of his mother and the pressure she put on him from the moment he was born was good.
“Uh, I thought we could get takeout from a Vietnamese restaurant that opened last year, it’s on the way, and we can eat at home, and like, catch up.”
“Sounds good.”
I’d been talking for ages about how much I missed Vietnamese food, and Ever was a people pleaser. It wasn’t a shock that he would’ve remembered.
“So, tell me more about the wardrobe change,” I mumbled between bites of pho.
The place had smelled so good I’d almost convinced him to just grab a table there, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know he’d wanted the privacy.
He’d sent pictures of himself with his new friends at cafés and shit like that, but I had never seen him sitting down in a place when he could just take it to go.
“It’s just…a thing. It makes sense.” He shrugged.
I noted how he hadn’t changed clothes, even though it was the first thing he’d always done when we met up at his place.
I’d teased him back then because it had been such an old person thing to do.
Now I wondered how much I’d missed. “It feels right, you know? Like, it makes me feel good, and confident, and more stuff, but… Yeah. I went to a store the other day with some of the friends from the club I told you about? They were super supportive. It was nice.”
“I’m glad,” I rumbled. I meant it. I didn’t want to get into a fight less than 24 hours after I landed here, but if someone had been hurting him? Odds were not in my favor. “So is it… Do I use other pronouns for you or something? You know you could’ve told me, any time.”
I cringed.
Fuck, I was going to need a lot of catching up and figuring out what was offensive and what wasn’t.
“No. No, I mean, I use he/him. Well, unless it’s a kink thing, but that’s…different. Obviously.”
I didn’t know if it was obvious. I knew it had my cock stirring to attention, and that it was a good thing I’d grabbed a tray from the barely used kitchen when I convinced him to eat on his bed because it might be childish, but it was one of those small comforts I’d missed more than anything.
Was I stupid to think that I would’ve gotten rid of all feelings for him just because I hadn’t seen him in person in forever?
We could argue it was just habit.
Yeah, habit. Nothing more.
“Right.” I cleared my throat.
What the fuck was I supposed to say to that?
Thankfully, his phone buzzing gave me the out I needed to not have the answer figured out.
“Uh, do you mind if I go to the bathroom real quick?”
I frowned. He looked antsier than usual, too, almost vibrating as he placed his own tray of rolls on the bed, eyes darting between the phone and me.
“You’re okay?”
He didn’t need to ask me for permission to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t a thing we did, but I didn’t know if pointing it out would be the wrong thing to do when he already looked on edge.
“Yeah, it’s just…” He ran a hand through his honey colored hair. “I’ll explain. I swear.”
“Okay…”
He all but jumped off the bed the second he got that okay. I kept an ear out to see if I needed to walk in because he was puking his brains out or something, but no sound came. The walls and doors around here were fucking thick, though, so maybe…
It must’ve been only a few seconds when he appeared by the doorframe again, which meant not enough time to throw up or to have an upset stomach, either. I only stared at him with way too many questions.
“Do you promise not to make it weird?”
I frowned. “Make what weird?”
Had I ever made anything weird between us? Memory was a funny thing, not to be trusted, but I’d say the history of us consisted of me going with the flow of whatever it was that kept or would keep Ever happy.
If I had been more rational about it, we probably wouldn’t be where we are right now. I would’ve bidden my time, not put us in a position to be discovered, not…
I shook it off.
Today wasn’t about that.
“So, you know how I mentioned kink earlier?”
“Yeah.”
He’d also mentioned the club he was a member of was a BDSM club, and I’d just laughed and said I’d love to see him wearing a collar because it was the only thing I could think of at the time to not make it weird or push him away while my brain was blown with the information.
“So, I have an online Dom, and it’s a new thing too, but we’re doing chastity, and that means he’ll ask me at random times of the day to do a check in.”
“A…check in.”
“Yeah.” He fidgeted some more. He hadn’t made it back to the bed yet, or changed out of that fucking skirt. It was distracting, and I hated myself for finding it so. “I basically have to take a picture of, you know, the cage, and send it to him. Fast.”
I swallowed. The dryness in my mouth had nothing to do with a need for water, although a glass wouldn’t be amiss. “What happens if you don’t?”
“Uh?”
The words felt like tiny razors passing down my throat. “If you don’t send a picture right away, or you don’t have it on.”
Was that too intimate to ask, too out there? TMI had never been a thing between the two of us, but it was becoming obvious that too many things had changed in the years I was gone. It made sense, of course.
“Oh.” Whatever he thought about me asking, it made him take a step closer. “It depends. He gives me tasks and makes me buy toys and things, and sometimes those are meant as punishments.”
“What would that look like?” I pushed through the knot in my throat.
I didn’t know what was taking over me—it went beyond our usual TMI policy—but I needed to know.
“I’m a good sub,” he scowled, “I don’t go around looking for punishments, asshole.”
I snorted. “So he’s never doled out one?”
Ever dragged his bottom lip between his teeth. “Uh, maybe once. Or twice.”
That made more sense. Ever confused people by looking shy and all well-behaved, but when he felt more confident, he could be a bit bratty, too.
Not the kind that made it into porn and the erotica audiobooks I secretly listened to.
But when he felt really, really, comfortable, he rambled more than he’d ever acknowledge, and he didn’t always think how deep he was digging a hole for himself until it was too late.
I grinned at him. I kind of wanted to move my tray away and pat my thigh, but was being on my lap something we’d go back to doing when he had a…Dom, online or not? I didn’t know.
“What did he do, Ever?”
The question wasn’t born out of jealousy. I just needed him to keep talking. I needed to make sense of the picture in front of me, of the best friend who looked almost like a completely different person.
I needed to prove that this all hadn’t been a mistake.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Tell me.”
Did my tone go more authoritative? Maybe. I didn’t take it back.
Ever swallowed. He took another step. This room was stupidly large, and two steps didn’t mean he was within reach, but I waited him out. Crowding him was a big no.
“He made me do lines, and, uh, read them out loud.”
That was it?
I raised an eyebrow.
There had to be more, right? Writing lines—or reading them out loud—wouldn’t have him this squeamish. Right?
“What did the lines say?”
“Santos.” Ever breathed my name in a way I’d almost forgotten. A way that had me moving the tray away and going against my word of not crowding him. “Please.”
“Please, what?” His hair was softer than I remembered as I tucked a stray strand behind his ear. “We tell each other everything, don’t we?”
Ever swallowed. “I do. You don’t.”
The words were barely a whisper. They hit like a fucking punch to the gut, though. I was taking a step back before gaining consciousness of it.
“What haven’t I told you?”
“Like…” Ever wrapped his arms around his waist. “You never talk about kink. My friends asked about it, actually. When I told them about you coming here last week? They asked if I had a crush on you, and then they asked if you were kinky, and when I said I didn’t know, they said I had to find out?”
The more he spoke, the more he deflated. Oddly enough, it was comforting. The familiarity of it. The cadence of his voice, even when the words he was saying had me wanting to yank out my hair.
“All I know about kink is because of you,” I admitted. It was vulnerable, but vulnerable was my default setting when he was around. “You started talking about it, so I started reading about it, and stuff. That’s it.”
Ever frowned. “That’s it?”
I scrubbed one hand down my face. What the fuck was I supposed to say? My head throbbed, replaying the thing about having a crush on me, the gutted look in his face when he accused me of holding shit in. I didn’t know how to cope with all of it.
“Pretty much.”
Maybe this had been a bad idea. Everyone back at headquarters had said I needed to slot some time in to adjust to civilian life, to adjust to a world that had kept spinning while I’d been sheltered by routine and discipline and trainings and the occasional aid relief mission. I’d thought it would be fine.
Ever and I, against the world. That had been our whole motto.
I clenched my fists, once, twice. The psychiatrist who had cleared me, even though I’d never really been in any traumatic scenario, had said grounding exercises would help.
“Santos?”
“Stop.” I didn’t know how I managed to get the word out. The world was spinning, and everything was unfocused, and I could only keep my gaze pinned to the stupidly expensive hardwood floor. “I think I overestimated how long I can run without sleep. I’m going to crash.”
“Oh. Okay.”
None of this was okay.
“Yeah.”
Look at that, me fucking up my very first day of freedom. Stuart would be real proud.