Chapter 7 Andre
SEVEN
Andre
I lie in the dark woods with Elias for a long time, long after he’s passed out. My body is curled possessively around his. My semi-hard cock is still inside him.
I’m shaking and I can’t stop. I don’t know why.
God, he broke so beautifully.
He opened more, shattered more completely, with every orgasm. I felt every one of them. It was strange, almost like I was experiencing his releases, like they were happening to me despite being outside of me. And when I came, I felt his vulnerability as my own.
Maybe that’s why I’m shaking. Maybe I’m curled around him not simply in possession but also in protection. Of him, yes, but also of myself.
I didn’t expect to feel that much. I don’t know if I like it. It cut through the boundary of my role, cut deep into me, and something is bleeding out from that deep, buried place.
It’s a good thing that Elias is unconscious. If he were to see me like this, with something bleeding into my role that shouldn’t be there, I don’t know what I’d do.
I don’t trust myself right now.
I pull out of him. My cock is still semi-hard and way too sensitive. Something ugly moves through me at the almost-arousal, so I block my dick from my mind.
It helps. It makes me feel better that I’m able to do it. I find a little of my control.
I get myself tucked away, get my pants fixed. I check my mask. Feeling the cold, hard edges of it helps me find the edges of my role again.
Except … my part was to stalk Elias, chase him, scare him. My part was to make him not want what he’d asked for—and to break through his resistance, to fuck him into submission. But that was the end of what he asked for.
What comes next?
I use my knife to cut away the shreds of Elias’s torn briefs. I stuff them in my pocket along with the plug. I had no idea he had that inside him. It didn’t show in his walk or his run. He’d gotten used to it, or had learned to hide it.
Why did he have it in? I study his beautiful, refined face in the moonlight where it falls between the branches. Some people would see innocence, but I don’t. I see how comfortable he is lying here, broken in the darkness.
His jeans are tangled around his feet. His bare legs are slim but toned. They’re open. His spent cock lies across his hip. His cum is in the dirt, but on his shirt too, a little on his throat. Mine is inside him.
I love how filthy he is.
He murmurs as I get his pants pulled up. I carefully tuck his cock away. My hand lingers on it inside his pants. It’s beautiful to touch even when he’s not aroused. There’s a fragility to it, a tenderness. His softness tells me that he got what he needed. I rumble in satisfaction.
I scoop him up and carry him along the trail. I don’t yet know where I’m going to take him. This part hasn’t been written. I’m off script.
I’ll just walk and see what happens, see where we end up.
But I don’t get that chance—because I’m not the only one who realizes that I can’t be trusted right now.
Wes emerges from the shadows when I reach the edge of the woods with Elias in my arms. I halt. I snarl.
“I’ll take him,” Wes says.
Wes is a big guy, almost as tall as my 6’2”, almost as heavy. He’s wearing black tactical pants and boots, a tactical jacket. I know from the scar through his left eyebrow, from the way he walks, from the way he watches rooms, that he’s been in plenty of fights.
I don’t fucking care. He’s not taking Elias from me.
I don’t even bother to say it. Wes needs to open his fucking eyes and see it.
He sighs irritably. “Bring him to the van then,” he says and starts walking.
I don’t, in fact, have a great alternative. My car is probably two miles away, and it’s better to not let my vehicle be seen outside Elias’s building. But … I’m not sure that’s where I was going to take him.
That’s why Wes is here—and it means he understands me better than I thought.
I don’t like that.
I do, however, follow him. His presence is pulling me out of my role, reminding me of everything that exists outside it, reminding me that none of this was real. It was just an act, even when I lost myself in it. Even that, letting that happen, was the point. That was Elias’s fantasy.
But it’s over now.
The van is parked at the garden’s entrance. Wes goes to the back and opens the double doors. He doesn’t object when I get in with Elias, sitting on one of the side benches. He just closes the doors behind us.
It’s a short ride to Elias’s building, and that’s where I get stuck. Wes gets out and gets the back doors open. I can’t see much of his face in the darkness, but I’m sure his expression is careful, watchful. It usually is. I should have known he was stalking me as I was stalking Elias.
I manage to get out of the van and carry Elias to the building door. I follow Wes up the stairs to the ninth floor. He pulls a lockpick set from his pocket and expertly opens Elias’s door.
Fresh anger flares inside me. Has Wes been here before? Did he put a camera in Elias’s apartment? Has he been watching all along?
Did he watch me fuck Elias in the woods?
If I were more fully in one role or another, I would ask. But I’m in a weird, in-between state. I’m still wearing my skull mask, but Wes knows who I am, one version of me at least, so I don’t know how to interact with him right now.
And really, I don’t want to interact with him at all, or anyone. I just want … fuck, I don’t know.
I refocus when I see the awful little apartment.
I knew it would be awful because of the awful building and the glimpse I got in the background of Elias’s submitted picture, but it’s hard to look at the full reality of the cramped, dingy space revealed by the weak light spilling in from the hallway.
I don’t want to leave Elias in this shitty place.
He doesn’t belong here. He belongs where I was going to take him.
I’ve been telling myself “maybe” and “I don’t know,” but seeing this, I do know. I would never have brought Elias here.
But some part of me must know that Wes is right and that I do actually need him right now because as much as I hate that he’s here, I’m doing what he says.
I lay Elias in the bed. He murmurs but doesn’t wake. I take off his shoes. I want to do more than that, but I don’t know what.
He didn’t ask for anything else.
Besides, he might wake up, and I can’t be here when he does.
But I just keep standing here staring down at him. The hallway light falls grayly over his dirty, ripped jeans. The rest of him is lost in my shadow.
This isn’t right. Elias’s fantasy isn’t right. It’s incomplete.
But what comes next? Was I really going to take him home, lock him up, wear this mask forever?
“Come on, Andre. Let’s go.”
It jars me to hear my name. It feels like Wes is talking to someone other than me. And yet I turn at the sound of it. I pull the anal plug from my pocket and set it on the nightstand. I leave Elias in his bed.
Wes closes the door as I step out into the grimy hallway. If he can see me shaking he doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t say another word until we get outside.
Then, as we reach the sidewalk, he asks, “Would you have stopped if he’d used his safe word?”
“So you were watching.” It’s the first I’ve spoken to Wes, and the artificial sound of the voice modulator surprises me. I had forgotten about it.
“I had to. For his safety.”
That might be true, but I’m not going to let Wes excuse himself with it.
“You run a dark sex fantasy service,” I remind him. “Is that your kink, watching? Did you like how I fucked him? Did it make you hard?”
A muscle bulges in Wes’s jaw, but his eyes stay locked on me. We’re so close to fighting. Either of us could trigger it so easily.
“Answer the question, Andre. Would you have stopped if Elias had used his safe word?”
“I knew he wouldn’t.”
“But if he had—”
“There was no chance of it.”
“Then say it had been someone else,” Wes presses. “Would you have stopped? I need to know.”
“Someone else wouldn’t have been Elias.”
Wes is frustrated. He doesn’t understand that this role I’m still half in was made for Elias. It’s not relevant to anyone else. I couldn’t be this for anyone else, with anyone else.
I’m not going to explain all of that to Wes, however, and I’m done talking. I walk off.
He lets me, but he still doesn’t trust me. That’s why I see his headlights occasionally as I walk back to my car. There, finally, I take off my mask.
Getting in my sporty, expensive Jag is even more jarring than hearing my name was. The car is a set piece for another role.
But it’s one I’ve been playing for a long time, and I start to remember it as I shift through the gears and drive back to Manhattan.