Chapter 18 Elias
EIGHTEEN
Elias
It’s almost midnight when I’m riding the subway back from the Bronx.
Before I started working for Andre, I had already committed to this single-night pet sitting visit.
The timing was set based on my old schedule.
I forgot to update the owner about it and didn’t feel like I could cancel at the last minute.
I’d actually forgotten about it entirely until my old phone, with its battery nearly dead and its prepaid plan almost up, dinged with a reminder.
I’m kind of glad, actually, that I had something to do tonight. With Andre calling off our day of work, I’ve been so bored. Not just bored. Lonely.
That’s something I’m coming to understand. It’s pretty obvious, I guess, but I didn’t really realize it until today. I’m so damn lonely. I have been for a long time. Forever maybe.
The only friend I ever really had was our cook Rose, and she’s dead. And she was more like a mother anyway. At least, I think so. I guess I wouldn’t know. Mine died soon after I was born, which is why my father hated me.
My mother didn’t like having a baby. She didn’t want me, so she took all those pills.
At least, that’s what my cousin Ernesto would always say.
He was eight years older than me and came to live with us after his parents had been killed, when I was five and he was thirteen.
My father took revenge, of course. That was the first time I saw dead bodies.
As much as my father hated what had happened to his sister, Ernesto’s mother, he was glad, I think, to replace me with Ernesto, who was tough and mean and impossible to overlook. Unlike me.
I vaguely remember wanting to be friends with Ernesto, but there was never any chance of that.
My father hated me, so Ernesto did too. Ernesto used to call me “the ghost.” He would walk straight into me sometimes like he hadn’t noticed me.
I used to stand in his way and make him do it because even if it hurt, at least it was something to feel.
Rose always told me I shouldn’t do that. She would give me hugs and make me hot chocolate. She would let me play with her cat.
She was all I had. Even if I hadn’t been so awkward and shy, I doubt I would’ve been allowed to have other friends. Friends my age, I mean. Mafia families are pretty closed.
After Rose helped me escape and I created a new identity, I didn’t suddenly develop the skills to make friends. And hookups were always so disappointing. I guess I gave up. I accepted being alone and half dead. At least … until I submitted that fantasy to ForbiddenX.
Then, for the first time in my life, I felt fully alive. I felt like I had something. Something that was mine. Something important.
Now I’m addicted to it. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Without … him.
My stalker.
My tormentor and savior.
I need him. I think I would die without him. I would just … stop existing. Because now I know what it feels like to really exist. To be alive. To be seen. To matter.
I am aware, of course I’m fucking aware, that this is something I’m paying for. But that doesn’t matter. It’s still something I need. And, real or not, he makes me believe that he needs it too.
Riding the subway back to Manhattan from the Bronx, I wake up my phone to read, again, our last text exchange, where I wrote, He wouldn’t have fucked me. He’s not like you.
My stalker replied, What does that mean?
I tried to distract him, but it didn’t work. He demanded, Answer my question. What did you mean, he’s not like me?
Then, again, Answer me.
I never replied to him, and it’s now been over 24 hours. Is he punishing my silence with his?
I felt like I was being followed from The Axis to the subway in SoHo, but I’m sure that was wishful thinking. For one thing, he can’t possibly be outside the hotel all the time. I rarely leave and never at night, so he would’ve had no reason to anticipate it.
Besides, he’s upset with me. I can feel it in his dragged-out silence. It’s fucked up. I’m the one who should be upset with him for what he did to me in Andre’s bathroom.
Of course, I could’ve used my safe word.
I didn’t because …
The truth is, it was strangely, disturbingly exciting to come like that, with Andre so close. I was terrified that he might discover me. I was so embarrassed after. But I get hard every time I think about it. I’m hard right now.
I want to get home and get in bed so I can imagine a new scenario in Andre’s bathroom.
After what happened in the lobby today, I can now picture him with that vicious, predatory look in his eyes.
In my head, I’m going to make him fuck me with that expression, in that bathroom, in front of the mirror so I can watch him.
I’m so distracted by the idea that I miss my stop. I get off at the next one, but I now have ten blocks to walk. I’m four blocks in when the hair lifts on the back of my neck. I look behind me, but I don’t see anyone.
After two more blocks, my heart is pounding. Someone is definitely following me. I keep hearing footsteps when there’s a lull in the traffic noise, then I look back and no one’s there. If it were simply another pedestrian, I would see them. They wouldn’t be moving through the shadows, out of sight.
It can’t possibly be my stalker. How could he know where I am? I was on the subway. I got off at the wrong stop. It doesn’t make sense.
I huddle into my jacket. I’m just being paranoid. The sidewalks aren’t packed, but they’re not empty either. It’s Friday night. Plenty of people are out. I can see a group of women across the street, and a guy just walked into a building.
But I can’t shake my paranoia. When I reach a cross street that runs all the way to the harbor, I duck around the corner. I just want to watch a few people go by. I want to be sure.
I wait for several minutes and see nothing suspicious. Everything is fine. Of course it is. Idiot.
I step out—and run straight into a big solid figure in black. A skull mask looks down at me.
I gasp. I stumble back. Adrenaline floods my system.
The thing about fear is that it doesn’t matter that it’s irrational. It’s powerful and it’s pure and it overwrites everything else.
So it doesn’t matter that it’s him.
Or maybe it does matter. I know exactly how strong he is and how fast he is—and I know that he’s angry with me.
I felt it in his silence and I feel it now. And though he may have seen me many times since he fucked me in the woods, I haven’t seen him—and it’s that, our last encounter, that my body remembers.
So when he says, with the demonic rasp of the voice modulator, “Run,” I do.
I scramble.
I spin.
I fucking run.
He must give me a head start because I know he’s faster than I am. He’s proven that already. I know he can catch me. I know that he will. But I still run as fast as I can.
I make it to the harbor road and run several blocks along it. I start to think maybe I’ve lost him or maybe he just wanted to scare me. I think maybe this is my punishment, to be abandoned in the middle of my fear.
Could he be that cruel?
But even in thinking that, I can’t overwrite my flight response. I keep running. I dart into an alley, trying to cut back to my route so I can make it to the hotel—but that’s just what he was waiting for.
I don’t make it halfway along the alley before he grabs my jacket. I flail and almost fall, but he latches onto me and skids us to a stop. I thrash and shout, but he clamps a hand over my mouth. He wheels and pins me to a brick wall. He’s like a second wall at my back. He’s like a cage.
His one hand stays clamped on my mouth while his other works at my fly.
He gets my pants open and shoves them down.
I cry out against his hand as my stiff cock is pulled down then springs up.
I squeeze my eyes shut as his fingers go to my hole.
There’s no lube and I’m tight, but he doesn’t push in.
He prods a little like he’s checking something.
Whatever he finds has him leaning into me harder, relaxing ever so slightly. I can’t feel his breath because of the mask, but I hear it raking through the modulator.
“Where have you been?” he demands, but he’s still covering my mouth. His other hand moves from my ass to my dick. I let out a muffled cry when he grips it then reaches underneath to feel my balls. “These are full. You haven’t come. Where have you been?”
The hand on my mouth slides down to rest on my throat, but I still can’t speak, not with him cupping my balls like that. His thumb is stroking them. It feels so good. It feels … possessive. Like what’s inside them belongs to him. Like my cum belongs to him. My orgasm.
He thought I was with someone else. That’s what he was checking.
I could tell him that I wasn’t. I should tell him that. But his anger and jealousy feel so fucking good that I don’t.
I don’t speak at all.
His hand leaves my swollen, aching balls.
He draws back a little, though he’s still lightly gripping my throat.
I hear his zipper and a rustle of cloth.
My heart hammers. My dick twitches. Then I hear a cap popping open and the sound of something—lube—being squeezed from a bottle.
He’s working one handed, so he drops the bottle when he has what he needs.
I shudder at the filthy sound of him slicking his cock. I moan when his sloppy fingers prod my hole. This time, he pushes in. This time, I open for him.
I rest my forehead on the brick wall as he stretches me. I don’t fight him. I don’t want to. I just want him inside me. I moan when he strokes my prostate.
“I need you to understand something, Elias. If I’d found another man’s cum in here”—he strokes my prostate again, torturing me, rewarding me—“I would’ve done something very bad.”
I shudder in pleasure.
“I think you don’t believe me”—I whine when his fingers withdraw then cry out at the press of his cockhead, biting my lip as he pushes into me—“but you need to understand that I can play the monster with you because that’s what I am.”
I moan long and loud as his cock pushes deeper and deeper into me. He takes his time, makes me feel every inch of penetration. My thoughts fracture. All I do is feel and listen as he starts to fuck me.
It’s so dirty. His cock plunges with sloppy, squelching sounds. I moan and whimper to the rhythm of his fucking. I’m so relieved by it, so turned on by the stiffness of him inside me, by the jealous need of him to fuck me like this in a dark alley.
He still has one hand on my throat, like my breath, my speech, my very life belongs to him. His other, slick with lube, returns to my cock. He doesn’t stroke, just grips me. His fingers curl into my balls.
My body seizes. I buck in his grip as I come. I clench on his cock as mine spurts in his hand. My balls are drawing hard under his fingers. My throat is straining against his palm. He’s in full ownership of my orgasm.
As the aftershocks roll through my body, as I clench and spasm on his dick, he buries his face—his mask—against my shoulder. He grunts. He’s holding back his own orgasm.
When I relax in his grip, on his cock, he takes a deep breath. My head falls back against him. I can’t think. My mind is shattered. My thoughts are a hundred scattered pieces.
One piece, though, pushes into my awareness: monster.
Monster, he said.
His thumb starts brushing my jaw.
I don’t know how long that goes on, long enough that I harden again, long enough that I moan.
“Good boy,” my monster says as he starts fucking me again. “What a good boy.”
Good boy.
Both of them have called me that.
I moan as he repositions me, bends me over. His hand moves from my throat to my shoulder for a better grip as he thrusts. I know he needs to come, that I should try to last, but I can’t. It feels too good, and part of me thinks, part of me knows—
I cry out hard as I come again. I buck and thrash because I don’t have to control myself with him, and he, finally, loses control with me.
“Hnn!” he strains as his hips jack forward. “Fuck—hnn!”
I’m seized by both my orgasm and his. His cock kicks inside me, spilling hotly as my cum hits the alley wall.
God, he comes hard. It’s so fucking powerful that it milks me of every drop, leaves me quivering in his grip as he strains against me.
He’s still spasming when he pulls out of me. I cry out at the sudden, awful emptiness as my hole clenches on nothing.
And that’s when he shows me how cruel he really is. He lets me collapse against the wall where I came. He leaves me.
I don’t believe it at first. It can’t be. He asked me a question that I never answered. But then … I didn’t answer his last question either.
Is this my punishment?
I turn, clumsy with my pants around my thighs, unsteady with my body still shuddering from my orgasm. He’s gone.
He’s fucking gone.