Chapter Twenty-Nine Atherton
The staff were clearing the plates when Jayson stood as the other men dispersed to freshen up. He set his napkin on the table. He looked at Piper and nodded. Piper understood that the evening had moved from one part of itself to the event, and that he was meant to follow.
They left the terrace and walked through a long corridor. The floors were the same pale stone as the rest of the house.
Jayson continued to the end of the hall and opened a door.
The room was large and sparsely decorated.
Dim lighting, a low ceiling, a single leather chair and a California King Bed with no pillows and what looked like a leather mattress protector.
A bar with glasses and a decanter. A window that looked out to darkness.
Music was playing, Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and the Shondells. The opening verse haunted the room.
Jayson closed the door behind them.
Piper heard the latch click.
“Sit,” Jayson said.
Jayson walked to the bar and poured two glasses of Fonseca Vintage Port. He brought one of them over. Piper took it. Jayson sat across from him on a chair.
“Do you know why you are here?”
Piper said, “Yes.”
Jayson nodded slightly. He set his glass on the floor beside the chair.
Piper knew where the door was, and he knew it hadn’t locked, and he knew from knowing Jayson, that if he stood up right now and walked out of the room, he had no idea what Jayson or any of these men were capable of, because Piper had never left a room, but the seed had been planted.
I could leave, but could I? Piper thought.
Jayson was watching him think.
Piper didn’t stand.
He would tell himself several things about why he was not leaving. That it was strategic, that the punishment was not worth the escape.
Jayson looked at him for another moment. Then Jayson smiled, almost softly, and said, “Good.”
The door behind Piper opened.
Piper kept his back to the room. He had heard, across the dinner, the voices of the men who had been talking past him for hours, and he heard now, in the corridor beyond the door, the same voices arriving for what they really came for that night, Piper.
Preston walked in first.
Piper watched Jayson watch him.
Jayson didn’t stand, he just sat there.
The invitation had named Piper the way an invoice named an inventory item. He was one of the inventory items, albeit an extremely famous one, which made him more valuable to these powerful men.
Piper didn’t stand. He closed his eyes.
He opened them when Preston put a hand against Piper’s back and pushed him down on the large bed. He could feel Preston’s wedding ring pressing cold against his back.
He undid his own belt with one hand while the other kept Piper pinned at his collarbone.
Piper clocked the room the way a quarterback clocked a field.
Four men now, counting Jayson. Pressing in back of him.
Another man Piper didn’t know the name of was in front of him now, his hand applying pressure to the top of Piper's head.
A third man, the actor, stood near the bar with his glass of port, not approaching yet.
Jayson on the leather bench across the room, continued to watch.
The man behind him tilted Piper’s head back and fed his cock into Piper’s mouth.
Piper opened his mouth and did what it had been trained to do.
The man pushed until Piper’s nose was against the man’s stomach and held, waiting for Piper to gag, but he didn’t gag.
The man made a small approving sound and started to move Piper’s head up and down against his cock.
Preston lubricated his cock minimally from a small bottle, and pressed his cock into Piper’s ass unannounced.
Preston pushed in deeper, one aggressive stroke after another.
Piper felt his body take it the way his body usually took it, which was with a clench.
Piper made no sound, he was not in the mood for performative sex tonight.
Preston made no noise as well, like the entire experience was in his inside voice.
They rotated Piper.
Preston finished first, hand braced against Piper’s shoulder, cum pulsing deep inside him.
The third man, the actor by the bar, set down his glass and walked over.
The man in Piper’s mouth pulled out for a second, and Piper felt the wet mess at the corners of his mouth lingering, and then the actor took Preston’s position.
Piper noticed that his cock was much larger than Preston’s as he began to pound Piper’s ass at a faster pace.
The actor was rougher. He fucked Piper with his hand wrapped around the front of Piper’s throat, the pressure calibrated just above comfortable and just below alarm. Piper’s cock didn’t get hard. That was also a thing the room was noticing.
Piper had known early on that his body was going to take this the way his body had always taken this, but he usually was able to get hard, and something had changed in his body tonight.
The actor came inside Piper. Then the man whose cock was in Piper’s mouth came, and the cum hit the back of Piper’s throat, and he swallowed because swallowing was cleaner than the alternative.
The door opened again, and four additional men entered to participate in the event.
Jayson stood up from the chair and walked over to Piper, holding still on all fours.
Jayson didn’t touch Piper. He stood in front of him, and looked at the top of Piper’s head.
“You are doing so well.” And then said, “But I need you to get hard for us, can you do that? The guests want to make sure you are enjoying this as well,” Jayson whispered into Piper’s ear.
The sentence was a test, and Jayson knew Piper’s mind and body were not in it like usual.
The men took their turn fucking Piper.
Piper closed his eyes, his mind traveled to elementary school, his head down in class, staring at the thing he loved most, his Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.
***
Piper woke at six.
He got up, ran the shower, and stood under it for a while, trying to erase the night before from his memory. He washed and got out and wrapped a towel around his waist.
The mirror was fogged and he wiped it with his hand.
The face in the mirror was the face he had seen in the mirror every day for thirty years. He stood there, looking at it, waiting for the difference to be visible.
He looked at the bruise on his ribs that no man had cared to mention the night before, because the bruise was an imperfection on the apparatus that was Piper.
He looked at himself the way he would have looked at film of himself, searching for something. He could not find anything.
He got dressed.
Piper had breakfast in the kitchen and decided not to join the other men in the main dining room.
Jayson entered the kitchen. “Good morning, is there a reason why you are eating in here?”
His voice seemed annoyed.
“I am invisible to your friends, so I decided to be invisible,” Piper replied.
Jayson stared into Piper’s eyes, not sure where the comment had come from and decided to ignore it.
He said the weather would be clear for the flight back home. He said the car would take Piper to the airport at one and then left the kitchen.
Something had happened the night before and he knew it had. His body had rejected the lie it had spent nine years believing.
He didn’t cry. He would never cry. He chose this life; he signed the fucking contract. Noah was a variable that was changing everything. He needed to end it before this all turned to scorched earth.