Chapter Twelve Atherton
Piper took the first flight to Atherton that morning. His mind was racing.
Joan, I’d like to speak with your manager. I am making fucking terrible decisions.
No solutions presenting themselves in his brain. What he did know was that he just had the best night of his life and now he was about to do a job he wasn’t proud of, but a job that had afforded him his career.
The car pulled up to the first set of gates at Jayson’s sprawling mansion in Atherton.
Atherton was home to the elite of the tech industry and had that the-apocalypse-was-designed-here sort of tranquility.
Piper rolled down the window in the back seat. “Hey.”
“Sup, Piper,” the guard said.
“Sup, Leon.” Piper nodded as the gate opened to a long driveway.
Once at the door, Piper let himself into the house using a retinal scan that all guests were required to utilize. Security had multiple layers because Jayson was one of the highest profile tech billionaires on earth.
Piper walked down the large entry hallway that felt like entering the depths of hell to Piper.
A stale monochromatic design, more akin to Barbra Streisand’s signature style than a tech billionaire.
Bobby Womack’s If You Think You’re Lonely Now played softly through the room. Always Jayson’s choice, the music curated the way everything in his orbit was and he loved the classics.
Behind him, ice clicked against the crystal.
“You should come more often,” Jayson said.
“I have a season to win, Jayson.”
“Yes. That’s why you come when I ask, and not when you choose. I would eventually like you to live here full time.”
Piper rested his hands against the glass.“My team is in Los Angeles and I like it that way.”
“I know where your team is.”
“Quarterbacks don’t move that often and they will keep me as long as I keep helping them win.”
“Nothing moves,” Jayson said, “until it does. Given the right pressure.” Piper turned. Jayson was watching him, not the window. It was sometimes how the most direct conversations happened.
“You’re not asking me to move?”
“I rarely ask.”
Jayson lifted his glass. “Your career will be long if you continue as you’ve started. Successful. Those things compound.”
“Success depends on the team.”
“Success depends on leverage. You control variables. You train longer than anyone else. You protect your image. Those aren’t habits. They’re calculations.”
Piper turned back to the window.
“When you first called me after your injury,” Jayson continued, “you said you would do whatever it took to stay on the field.”
“I remember.”
“I appreciated that. Specialists most athletes never see. Facilities most players never train in. Selected personally.” He paused. “You worked for it. I’m not suggesting otherwise.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“Nothing complicated.”
Jayson set his glass down. “I enjoy reminding you how exceptional your position is. And how it came to be. I feel like you are ungrateful at times.”
Piper sat with that statement for a moment before saying something he would regret or get punished for.
“You’re saying I owe you.”
“I’m saying we have an arrangement.”
“We’ve had it for nine years.”
“Trust and loyalty,” Jayson said. He stepped closer.
“My parents signed as my managers,” Piper said. It came out more levelly than he felt it.
“They did.”
“I was twenty-one. They didn’t explain what I was signing.”
“No,” Jayson agreed. “They were enthusiastic. They liked being on the paperwork. They liked the perks of being called a manager. Your mother sure liked the personal shopper at Chanel. The revised agreements came later. After the accident with your father. You signed those yourself.”
“I was grieving.”
“Yes. I managed the estate paperwork during that period as well. I remember you were grateful at the time. Those days are gone apparently,” Jayson replied.
The last of the light was gone from the lawn. The pool glowed faintly, underwater lamps on a timer.
“I was grateful, I mean I am grateful,” Piper said.
Jayson reached for his belt. The sound of leather through metal filled Piper's ears.
Jayson rested a hand lightly on the back of Piper’s neck, applying pressure.
Piper lowered himself slowly to his knees. The floor was cold, that was the first thing he noticed, the cold working through his jeans.
The song had switched to Love T.K.O by Teddy Pendergrass.
Jayson’s hand was warm. The scotch glass sat on the table, the ice almost entirely melted, a ring of condensation spreading slowly across the polished wood. Piper obeyed as he was taught to do.
This never felt like agreement, but it was acknowledgment.
The door from the hallway opened.
Piper stayed facing forward. He heard two sets of footsteps. Italian leather on the wood. He heard a glass being picked up and another one being set down. He didn’t have to turn around. He had heard this same configuration in this same house many times before.
Jayson said, without looking up, “You know Preston. I believe you met Richard in New York last spring.”
Piper said nothing. Jayson had never required greetings.
Two men whose faces he had been introduced to at foundation dinners, photographed next to at fundraisers, shaken hands with in green rooms. Two men whose names the trust board listed on the donor wall. Their faces now in this room in Atherton in configurations Piper hadn’t been asked about.
He didn’t have to be told. He knew the choreography.
Jayson unzipped his pants. Piper opened his mouth without being told.
Jayson slid in and held the back of Piper’s head, not tight.
Jayson was thick. Piper breathed through his nose to loosen his throat to take a cock this size.
He took what he was given, the weight of it pushing the back of his throat open, spit already starting to run down his chin because Jayson did not bother to slow for the gag.
Piper did not gag. He had trained the gag out of his body years ago.
His eyes stayed on the ring of condensation across the polished wood.
The ring was widening in slow motion as Piper worked Jayson’s rock hard cock.
Behind him he heard the second man, Preston undo his belt.
A hand landed flat against his lower back, warm, possessive.
Another hand slid his trousers down to his thighs.
A finger, with minimal lube from a bottle Jayson kept in the drawer of the side table, pressed against him.
Preston pushed his finger in without asking, straight past the second knuckle, and held.
The stretch burned from the cold fingers entering his ass.
His body did what his body had been trained to do over nine years in this house.
His hole opened. His shoulders remained level.
His lips worked around Jayson’s cock in the practiced rhythm Jayson preferred, spit wet at the corners of his mouth, drool running down his chin onto the floor.
He didn’t make a sound. He never made a sound at Atherton.
Objects did not make sounds, so why should he.
Preston pushed his cock into Piper’s ass hole without warning and minimal lube meant he felt every inch of it, the drag of it, the burn of being opened too fast, and his body took it because his body knew how to take it.
The third man, Richard, had moved to the chair near the fire and sat with his drink and watched Piper get pounded from behind.
The spit roasting was nothing new and was a favorite of Jayson’s friends and colleagues.
Richard was watching him from the side, and was hard in his suit pants and Piper would need to address this. This was part of how the room was supposed to work.
They rotated him. Like expensive equipment.
Jayson didn’t participate beyond getting his cock sucked and he sat back in his chair, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, glass in hand, stroking his cock, watching with the same calm certainty with which he watched earnings calls.
Preston used him from behind, hard and steady, hand wrapped around the back of Piper’s neck.
Richard took the other position, slower, watching Piper’s face while he did it.
They switched. One came inside him with a quiet grunt, hot cum filling him up. The other came in his mouth, a warm stream hit the back of his throat and he swallowed as ordered.
The first pulled out, slowly, cum already leaking out of Piper around the withdrawing cock and running down the inside of his thigh, cleaned himself on a towel from the tray, and sat down without a word. The second tapped Piper’s shoulder twice to indicate he was done.
At some point, Piper came. No one offered a towel.
His body did it without asking him. He processed it the way he processed the condensation ring.
A thing happening at a specific moment on a specific surface.
It wasn’t pleasure. It was mechanical. His cock had been hard since the second man had entered him because bodies did what bodies do when prostates were stimulated, and Piper had learned a long time ago that the part of himself that was still a person was not located in his body in this room.
His body spilled thin and unimpressive onto the floor between his knees. Nobody acknowledged it.
When it was over, he stayed on his knees for another minute because Jayson hadn’t told him he could stand. The men spoke quietly about the following week’s flight schedule.
Jayson set down his glass.
“You are doing so well.”
He said it almost tenderly. The tone was, Piper had long since understood, a trained tone, the tone of a man who had learned early in his life that tenderness was a register that reduced resistance.
“You can clean up. Car in twenty,” Jayson said.
Piper stood. His legs held. One of the calibrations.
He walked to the guest bath. He cleaned himself up.
Cum was running out of him still. He wiped it away with a Frette washcloth that matched the hand towels that matched the bath mat.
He redressed. He was doing his best to avoid his reflection in the mirror.
He had stopped looking in the mirror at Atherton nine years ago.
***
In the entryway, Piper pressed his back against the cool plaster wall and breathed. He had spent a decade becoming excellent at a great many things. This, unfortunately, had turned out to be one of them.
***
Seven Years Earlier
The revised papers had come six weeks after the accident, his father gone, his mother already in her second round of rehab, the estate unsettled, grief making everything feel like paperwork to deal with later.
Jayson had managed all of it. Jayson had managed, too, the arrangements for his mother, who by that point had been through one treatment center in Malibu and another in Arizona, neither of which had held.
Real Moms of Pro Football had wrapped its second season.
The studio had let her go after the reunion, on which Donna Ashton, visibly drunk at eleven in the morning, had called her cast mate a cunt on camera, thrown a glass of chardonnay at another cast member, broken the table, and spent the next hour explaining to the producer, in increasing volume, why she would not be fucking apologizing.
The clip had moved faster than the network could pull it.
The studio had announced her exit as a departure for treatment.
She had entered treatment and left treatment eleven days later.
She had entered a different treatment and had left that one too.
Jayson had told Piper, very quietly, that he would handle it.
A facility outside Santa Barbara with a glowing recommendation by one of Jayson’s friends who ran a foundation.
His mother was on her fourth round now. Piper hadn’t seen her in nearly three years, but was reminded of her via withdrawal notices from his bank account for her living expenses in the tens of thousands of dollars.
***
Present Day
Piper walked through the house, his face doing what it had learned to do. Nothing at all.
Outside, the air was cool and dry. A car was waiting at the end of the driveway to take him back to the airport so he wouldn’t miss practice the following day.
The car moved through the gates, then the second set of gates, then out onto the road that ran between the oaks.
Piper watched the motion-sensor lights come on and go off at the edges of properties he couldn’t see.
Focusing on the lights felt right.