Ares
Outside Pav’s house, I’m the kind of person who needs to be persuaded.
I don’t fall into the first touch. I don’t fall into the second touch. It’s going to take more than that. You’re going to have to convince me, and I’m going to be mad about it.
Inside Pav’s house, I’m easy. One touch is all it takes. There’s nothing I can do about it.
Pav hooks his fingers gently into the ring at the front of my collar, but he doesn’t use it to pull me up.
He doesn’t have to.
I didn’t come here to throw a tantrum. Not about getting to my feet, anyway. So when his fingers just barely curl around the metal ring, I stand up.
Not only that, but I’m light on my feet. He can’t actually lift me by the ring on the collar. That would be some impossible shit, and it would hurt my neck, but it feels very possible in the moment.
He’s taller than I am.
I know that just from how his face feels in the dark ahead of me.
From how he breathes. Not much taller, I don’t think, but enough that I don’t feel like a bull in a china shop.
I feel like a normal-sized human who has normal human abilities and nothing murderous and dangerous lurking under the surface.
I feel like a man who’s safe—for the moment—with another man.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that Pav’s a little older than I am, but maybe that’s just the aura of self-control.
Once I’m standing, I want to fall. Just a little. I want to tilt, really. Tilt into Pav to see if he could hold me up. To convince myself, even if I don’t need to be convinced.
I don’t do that, just like I didn’t cause a scene on the freeway. I don’t tilt or wobble or crumble.
He hasn’t told me to do any of those things, so I don’t.
Pav leans close, his fingers still light on the ring. He leans so close that if I was pathetic, if I was in love with him, I could convince myself he kissed my forehead.
I’m not that far gone yet.
He’ll never be that far gone. That’s not his thing.
I wait for another long heartbeat. He says the same thing every time, and I’m so frantic to hear it that I could pass out.
“That’s right,” Pav says, finally, finally. “Come along.”
Pav uses the slightest pressure on the ring to invite me across the threshold. It’s really not pressure at all. Nothing I could pull against if I wanted to, which I don’t.
I want to go with him.
I wanted to be in this room more than anything, and I want to be through the door a thousand times as much.
So I step across the threshold, every inch of me raw from the flight and the drive and sensitive enough to feel the change in the air.
The door shuts behind me. Now there are two doors between me and the world, and Pav, so whatever’s out there only exists in my head. The clawing, angry, skin’s-too-tight feeling I’ve dragged along doesn’t go away, but it does become…
Manageable. It’s a size I can picture, like the size of my lungs or my stomach. The war drum is just my heartbeat, and it’s only so loud because of that feeling, and it’s made of me. It’s in my body instead of everywhere in the world.
And if it’s in my body, then Pav can get it out. He can get me out of my head.
And he will.
He will.
So I don’t have to rip the walls down. I can let him guide me down what feels like a hall and up what’s definitely a flight of stairs.
The air gets slightly closer for a few steps, and then we’re on another floor.
Feels like it has high ceilings, but I’ve never tried to check.
Cool tile under my feet, then warmer hardwood, then another flight of stairs.
Carpeting. Soft. Plush. All that shit.
A turn. A threshold. A smaller space, but not a closet or anything. A real space. His bedroom, maybe. His office. It’s less wide open than the lower floor. More stuff in here, or more carpeting. Soundproofing, if it’s a playroom, but I don’t think it is.
The whole place smells like Pav. Like his cologne, but not just his cologne. His clothes and his skin and him.
That’s what makes me think he lives here, or at least owns the house.
Then my hips come up against the edge of a desk, and I stop thinking about the house. Pav puts his fingertips between my shoulder blades. He doesn’t have to push, just like he didn’t have to pull me up from the floor. I bend over the desk like I’ve practiced this a hundred times.
Because if I haven’t practiced this a hundred times, then the times I have practiced have left their mark.
Pav gives me a short, affectionate pat on the back, then curls his fingers into the waistband of my briefs and tugs them down to just below my ass. He pauses only to ask me if I remember my safe word, which I obviously do.
There’s no scene-setting with us. We don’t come up with roles. Pav doesn’t pretend to be a doctor or a headmaster or a cop. I don’t pretend to be a patient or a student or a thief. He could be playing a part, but I’m sure as hell not. I’m just me, and I’ve come here to get this from him.
I hope—in some secret part of my brain I’m never going to let see the light of day—that he’s just himself.
I really fucking hope that.
Pav gives the curve of my ass a couple cursory pats, and I reach for the other side of the desk out of habit. It’s exactly as far away as I left it.
Once I’ve got my grip, Pav rests his fingertips on my lower back and swings.
Pav eases into it, but not much. I don’t like for him to ease into it too much. I don’t need coddling. I just need the sensation.
And he gives it to me, each strike building on the last in a steady rhythm. Every so often, he says good or hmm or that’s right.
My ass is hot—on the edge of burning—from the neat, precise strokes of his hand before he asks any questions. Pav waits, actually, until I let out an involuntary grunt.
“Where have you been?” His next two spanks land like a question mark.
“Told you,” I say between strokes. “Germany.”
Pav lets out a silent ha. “Try again.”
“I was—” Germany seems extremely far away right now. It seems like a fairy-tale nightmare. “In Bavaria. In—a castle.”
“Hmm. Why?”
I wait through eight more strokes. Maybe ten. Just…breathing under them, until it gets a little harder and I have to focus on getting the air in and out and in.
“Had to go,” I manage. “Because my brother was…sick.”
Blood on a hospital gown. His blue eyes wild. I won’t go with them this time.
“How sick?” Pav asks.
“Very—very sick. Really sick.”
“And he hasn’t recovered?”
“No, he’s f—” Another stroke, right in the middle of a word. An oh comes out of me without permission. “Fine. He’s fine.”
“Really? Then why are you so tense?”
“I’m not.”
“You’re fighting me, and you know it.” Pav delivers six strokes in a row, each one with the same force as the one before, and now it’s a bright, sparkling pain that works itself deeper and deeper every second.
Seven.
Eight.
“Ah, fuck, fine. I am. I am.”
“Stop fighting.”
I can’t stop.
That’s the thing. I can’t give up. I can’t give in. I can’t relax. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve practiced. It doesn’t matter how much I want to.
I’ve never been the type of person who can just let it all go. I can get there through a shortcut or two, like a firm spanking on the ass, apparently, but I can’t go the easy way.
Pav knows that about me.
I know that about me.
Doesn’t make it any easier.
He lets me have it for another ten or twelve or fifteen strikes. My ass burns all over. My chest gets slick against the surface of the desk.
Pav keeps going. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t coo at me. He doesn’t tell me some bullshit about how well I’m doing.
He just keeps bringing his hand down, steady, steady, while I wrestle with the frustration and the guilt and the rage and everything else that’s fighting for attention. It settles between my shoulder blades and bleeds out to my fingertips.
I try to chase it down. Try to put the tension into my knuckles instead of my ass. Into my knees instead of my ass. Into my shoulders instead of my ass.
None of it works.
I keep trying anyway.
I just need to crush it down to a size that’s small enough to ignore. Or to spit out. Something.
Doesn’t work. It’s all useless. It’s always useless.
“Ah.” Couldn’t keep that one in. “Ah.”
Pav finally does stop, then. He puts his wide hand on the curve of my ass, over tender skin, and rubs. It doesn’t soothe the burn. It’s not meant to.
I can hear myself breathing.
I hate that. I don’t want to hear myself breathing. I want to be aware of Pav and nothing else.
It hurts, how much I want that.
He lets us hang there in that silence for a minute.
“What do you need, Ares?”
There have been times when I’ve fucked around with this question. Refused to answer. Lied. Made up random shit in hopes it would turn out to be true.
But the flight was long, and the month before it was even longer. Today started all over when I landed at Dulles. By evening, my family will be back on this continent with me. My brother will be back. And I’ll have to look at him and live with what I did, and what I didn’t manage to do.
And live with it.
And live with it.
And live with it.
So I move my face an inch to a cooler spot on the desk.
“I want you to tie me up.” Gives me guilty heartburn just to say it, especially when I have to say it so clearly. If I fumble it, Pav will make me say it again. “Need you to tie me up.”
He waits.
“Please.”
“Mmm.” His hand flexes on my ass. “You’re aware of the conditions?”
“Yeah.”
He waits.
“Yes. I’m aware.”
Pav lifts his hands away, but he doesn’t lose contact with me. I can feel his pants on the side of my thigh. They’re not made of sandpaper. The sensation is that intense anyway. A drawer opens, then shuts.
Then he’s even closer. Pav taps both of my hands, and I stretch my arms out, then fold them behind my back.
Then there’s the rope.
It’s soft, but it’s sturdy. Some give. Not a lot. Strong enough for the task. Pav doesn’t tie some gift-wrap-ass bow around my wrists.
He ties me up.
He takes his time.
He loops the rope up and down my arms and checks the tension twice. When he’s done, my arms are balanced in a lattice, and I don’t want out.