11 #4
We stay like that until the last vestiges of my orgasm are done, and then he gets up and sits down next to me on the couch. He unzips and he’s hard, and he starts casually stroking himself, and I watch as his foreskin slips up and down over the head of him.
I’ve never been up close and personal with any penis except his, but I like that he’s not circumcised. Of course, I like everything about him. I’m kind of badly smitten for him, I have to realize.
He leans back on the couch and he says, “I fantasize about stuff like that a lot. I have this pet fantasy, one I use a lot, where I’m in this room and I’m naked, and this woman is walking around me and inspecting me, and I get hard, and she can see, and she makes fun of me for getting aroused—”
“She makes fun of you?” I’m curious. My voice is soft. This is very interesting to me.
“Yeah,” he says. “She tells me I’m pathetic and that my dick is way too small—”
“It’s not,” I say.
He laughs. “It’s not an alpha cock.”
“It’s perfect,” I breathe.
He kisses me, still stroking himself. When he breaks away, we’re nose-to-nose. His breath comes in little gasps.
I whisper, “Do you want me to do that to you? Make fun of you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He’s whispering, too.
I don’t think I can. He’s this specimen of male perfection. I couldn’t think of one thing to complain about with him.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I don’t want to do that to you, either. That’s why, like, I made it…”
“A fantasy,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Do you want me to make up something pretend about you? Do you want me to say I bring you places and tell everyone you’re my boy toy, not very bright but very pretty, and that I like to make you show your dick off to my friends?”
He makes a guttural noise and spills all over his hand.
That makes something else clench in me, a strange bit of power and satisfaction, and I gasp.
He’s laughing. “Well, that came out of nowhere.”
I giggle, loose and happy. “Mine, too.”
He grabs tissues from the side table and wipes himself clean. He pulls me in against his chest, and we lay, loose-limbed and relaxed on the couch, snuggling close, and my head feels clear. I shut my eyes and rest my cheek against his t-shirt.
It’s quiet for a long time.
He says, “What do you usually think about when you masturbate? Or do you look at porn or something? I sometimes use things to look at, but I mostly like to fantasize. I don’t know if that’s like most guys.
I think maybe it’s because I’m an omega or something.
I hear women usually have more elaborate sexual fantasies than men, but mine are, uh, pretty elaborate. ”
“Mine aren’t,” I say. “I don’t even think about sex.”
“No?” he says, and I can hear his voice rumble in his chest. He’s very interested. “So what do you think about?”
“Um.” I should feel embarrassed. I don’t. But I giggle again. “Vampires.”
“Vampires, really?” He sounds intrigued.
“There’s not a lot to it. I get somewhere, and a really hot vampire is there. It’s usually someone from a TV show, but it’s not the actor, it’s the character they play, you know what I mean?”
“Sure,” he says.
“And they order me to be their blood donor and tell me what to do, and then they put their fangs in me, and they like it, and I’m just, um, there, and then…
it usually doesn’t take me all that long.
If it does, it goes on for them to, like, keep me around in their weird lair and only find me when they want blood and otherwise, um, ignore me.
” I giggle again. “It’s actually remarkably similar to that fantasy you made up for me.
Yours was better than mine, though.” I sigh.
“We can be Dracula and his helpless victim for Halloween,” he says.
We’ll be together then? Halloween is months away. I find myself wondering about a future with Ellis, what that would really be like.
“Unless you don’t want,” he says. “I’ve never been able to do couple costumes with someone, and I think it might be nice, but if you don’t like the matching thing—”
“I like it,” I say.
“Callie hates shit like that. She wants to turn heads all on her own, no one stealing her limelight.”
Calliope again.
“Sorry,” he says. “Should I not…?”
“You have to be able to talk about her,” I say. “It’s all right.”
But then he changes the subject. “I think it’s because sex is embarrassing.
Why the humiliation stuff turns me on? I think it’s because when you have sex, you have to take off your clothes and the other person has to see you naked, and you have all these reactions you have no control over and it’s really hard to seem cool and in charge when your body is doing things you can’t stop. ”
“I can see that,” I say. “But wouldn’t you want someone to accept you and make you feel good about it, instead of make fun of you about it?”
“You’d think,” he says, chuckling. “But maybe it’s like, you take that part of yourself and you put it somewhere else.
You make someone else make fun of you, and then you have space to feel good.
It’s not that I really want a partner to be mean to me, but that aspect of myself goes into a different person in my fantasies. ”
Hmm. That’s really interesting. “Why am I so turned on by people ignoring me, though? Do I ignore myself? Am I trying to put that part of me into someone else?”
“Some part of you thinks you’re not worthy of being allowed to have pleasure, maybe?” he says. “So, if you can disassociate from it, you get permission?”
“Maybe,” I say quietly. “That seems like something I should work through in therapy.”
“I fucking hate therapy,” he says.
I snort. “That is definitely something you would say.”
“I feel like it intensifies everything. Like, we spend so much time digging into everything, and that’s supposed to make me not think about it?
But it only makes me think about it more, all the time?
It makes the problems even bigger and the more we try to fix them, the more they seem impossible to fix.
Sometimes I feel like if I just ignored the issues and didn’t dig into them for hours in therapy, they’d just be blips that faded out.
I stopped going, because I felt like it was making me worse. ”
I don’t say anything to that. I’m not going to be able to convince him he needs therapy, I don’t think. “When were you in therapy?”
“Gatlin and Kane talked me into it,” he says.
“Those were your alphas.” I realize he’s never referred to them by name before.
“Yeah,” he says. “But it didn’t work.”
I wonder about that. He has bite marks, a bond with both of these men. He can have left them, as in, not be sharing the same physical space with them, but he can’t ever really leave them, not if they have bitten him. “Do you ever feel them through the bond?”
“Yeah.” His voice cracks.
I lift up to look at him, resting my hand on his chest. I search his gaze, and I start to wonder if I am a stop on a journey for him, a journey that leads back to the men he’s meant to be with, the alphas who have claimed him.
Maybe he’s trying to figure out how to be with them, and whatever he’s doing with me, it’s in service of that.
That will hurt.
But maybe it’s all right, because maybe I’m only with him as a stop on my own journey, a journey that is going to lead me to finding someone who I can be with. Maybe it’s like my dad said, and I’ve been surveying the pool, and this, with Ellis, it’s me learning to swim.
I’d love it if we were together all the way until Halloween, and I know I would. But if we’re not, I’ll be okay.
I lay my head back down. “I think you’ve been through way too much, Ellis,” I whisper. “I think maybe you can’t expect a few therapy sessions to make it better. Maybe it gets worse because you haven’t scratched the surface of how bad it all was.”
His arms come around me. “No, it’s not that bad, Hannah, really. I got off the compound. I’m one of the lucky ones.”
Yeah, maybe. But just because there are people out there who have it worse than you, it doesn’t mean things have been easy for you. I don’t say this, though.
Anyway, we have a very good weekend.
The next week continues just like the week before. I am starting to get used to coming home to him, to spending all my nights at his house, just using my place as a glorified closet, where I come to change my clothes and pack up bags.
We go out to buy makeup together. He gets me concealer.
We go out to dinner three or four times.
We have a lot of sex.
He makes me come again with his finger and his little secretary fantasy.
Everything is really good, in other words.
And then, when I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, the storm hits.