2. Dominic
Dominic
It turned out that Onyx was a very restless sleeper, and his constant twitching and moving kept Dominic from settling too deeply into sleep. A few times, Onyx tried to pull away from him, but Dominic kept him carefully caged within his arms. Onyx was going to adjust to his presence and his touch.
He’d allowed the boy to keep distance between them, and that seemed to be making things more difficult as Onyx strove to keep him at arm’s length. Dominic was not going to allow that distance to stand, so perhaps it was better never to allow it to form at all.
The Rayne witch had proven that it would be impossible for him to bend in the ways that Dominic had desired, and even when Dominic had stepped back from his hubris to evaluate the damage that had been done, he had underestimated the depths of some of the fissures in Onyx’s psyche.
Worse, he was playing catch-up in identifying precisely where the cracks had begun to form.
He was going to have to force the issue by placing Onyx into weakened states and applying pressure — and relief — to break down Onyx’s defenses quickly, before those fissures spread in unpredictable ways.
It would test them both, and the risk of failure was higher than Dominic was satisfied with, but Onyx’s actions had taken the choice out of his hands. Dominic would not allow him to self-destruct that way. Either the Rayne witch would become wholly his, or Dominic would shatter him.
Onyx shifted again in his sleep, and Dominic soothed him with feather-light touches and murmured words until he settled again.
Dominic’s body — quite predictably — responded in the ways that one would expect with the warm body pressed against him, and a restless one at that.
By the time a reasonable hour was coming around and Onyx started to stir, he was hard.
It was a normal bodily reaction that he had no plans to do anything about; Onyx was certainly not ready to be fucked and wouldn’t be for some time.
If he thought Onyx wouldn’t respond terribly, he’d have been tempted to try to convince him.
But Onyx would not take it well.
When Onyx stiffened in his arms, he didn’t have a hard time guessing what might be first on the boy’s mind.
“I’m not going to fuck you,” Dominic said sleepily.
“Yeah,” Onyx replied, his voice equally as tired. “Let go of me.”
“Mmm,” Dominic grumbled into Onyx’s ear. “Not yet.”
He kept his face buried in Onyx’s hair, just breathing in the scent of him.
His hand made slow, abstract movements, tracing over the skin of Onyx’s chest. Not to arouse, just to touch.
His hand passed over Onyx’s abdomen and Dominic lightly squeezed his hip before reaching back up to unbuckle the wrist and thumb cuffs to release Onyx’s hands.
“Go shower,” Dominic told him. “I’ve removed anything from the bathroom that you might be able to hurt yourself with, and all of the glass has been rendered unbreakable.
” Releasing Onyx, Dominic rolled onto his back to run his hands over his face and stretch as the younger witch bolted into the bathroom.
Dominic got out of bed and pulled underwear, loose pants, and an undershirt on.
Fortunately, he’d made arrangements the prior day so that nothing terribly important had been interrupted when Shane called him, but there had been some disturbance, and he sat down at his desk with his laptop to start sorting things out.
He ordered breakfast, and when it arrived, Dominic realized that Onyx was still in the bathroom.
He’d heard the water turn on, and he knew there wasn’t anything in the room that Onyx could hurt himself with. He’d even set up extra sentinel wards that would alert him if Onyx tried to do something like drown himself, so that was unlikely to be happening.
Going to the bathroom door, he knocked on it. The water wasn’t running anymore, but Onyx still hadn’t come out. “Onyx? Breakfast is ready, and it's time to come out.”
There was a pause, then the door opened slowly.
Onyx shuffled out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
Dominic’s gaze checked over the Rayne witch thoroughly, looking for any indications of new damage or distress.
Onyx’s lips were pinched at the corners, and he wouldn’t meet Dominic’s eyes, but it didn’t seem like he’d tried to do anything to hurt himself again.
Dominic nodded. “Get dressed and then come eat.”
Unlike previous occasions, the breakfast plate wasn’t waiting next to Onyx’s side of the bed. It sat instead on Dominic’s desk, where an additional chair had been placed beside his own.
He was still deciding how specifically to address everything that had happened the prior day, but nothing was going to be said before they both had had something to eat. He watched as Onyx dressed, pulling on underwear, shorts, and even a t-shirt before joining Dominic at his desk.
Dominic took a few bites of food, and then sat back in his chair and sipped from his coffee while Onyx ate his breakfast.
“What happened yesterday won’t be repeated,” he said only after Onyx had finished eating and his plate was empty. “You will be monitored any time I am not with you to ensure that you don’t try something like that again.”
“Okay,” Onyx said simply.
Dominic nodded slightly, noting the lack of protest. “Shane, of course, will be punished.” He considered Onyx for a moment. Onyx would undoubtedly be angry with Shane for stopping him, but just how far did that anger go?
“Punish him then." Onyx's voice was flat.
Dominic knew that Shane cared far more for the witch than he wanted to let on.
It was something that he’d suspected before but had become more apparent in the last few weeks.
Did Onyx feel the same way? It would be vexing to have to find someone new to fill the position of Onyx’s trainer and who could be trusted to keep his eyes on the witch without bonding too closely with him.
“Replacing him would be inconvenient,” Dominic murmured, his eyes lingering on Onyx as he weighed his distant expression.
“So… don’t?” Onyx shrugged like it didn’t matter, but Dominic suspected it mattered a great deal to him.
Dominic hummed thoughtfully as he took another drink of coffee. “Do you want me to replace him?”
“Does it matter—” Onyx bit his lip. “I don’t know."
Dominic nodded slightly to those sullen words.
“Technically, what you did didn’t break the letter of our agreement, though it certainly broke the spirit of it.
And given the nature of it, it’s also not something that I could exactly warn you about the consequences of before you do it.
Which leaves me trying to decide them in the aftermath.
” He took another sip of his coffee, studying Onyx. “What do you think I should do?”
Onyx shrugged after a long moment of silence, squirming in his chair.
“I don’t know. You’re already doing everything you can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
You added that condition to our agreement.
You’re making sure I don’t get to make it stop.
” He took in another deep, shaky breath. “That’s bad enough.”
Dominic sighed. “Onyx, that doesn’t have to be bad. You can make it not be bad at all.”
“You keep saying that,” Onyx retorted. “But I know what you want. You want everything. You’re gonna pretend that you’re giving me everything, but you’re just taking what you want. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.” His smile was brittle. “But someday.”
It was inevitable, if unfortunate, that Onyx had put that much together. But Dominic had known that Onyx was certainly not unintelligent. Uneducated, but not unintelligent. Dominic still wanted to teach him chess and see how he would do with the strategy of it.
But the fact that he had recognized the long game meant that it couldn’t stay the same. Dominic couldn’t keep guiding Onyx along the path he wanted while hoping the boy didn’t see the threads tightening around him when he already knew that the trap was there.
Dominic nodded. “Someday,” he agreed. “And you can choose how you get there. It doesn’t have to be this struggle and this despair. Pick the gilded cage instead of the iron one, Onyx. Pick the one that will let the embers inside of you burn brightly again.”
“Getting there means I lose,” Onyx said, standing up abruptly. “It means I lose myself. How can you expect me to just… be okay with that?”
Dominic didn’t react when Onyx stood, but he tipped his head slightly at the words. “Why would you have to lose? Onyx, I have said it time and again: I don’t want you broken. I don’t want you an empty shell. If I wanted that, I could do it, but that’s not the fire that draws me.”
Onyx stared at Dominic. “You want me to let you fuck me,” he said abruptly, his voice harsh. “You probably think you can even make me want it. I’m not like you. I don’t want men. If you want me to lie down and take it, guess what, Dominic? You lose who I am.”
Dominic shook his head. “Homophobia is learned, Onyx. It’s not innate.
It’s not something that you just wake up one day to knowing that you hate men who take pleasure in one another.
You don’t have to lose yourself to unlearn learned behaviors and ideas.
And if you’re not attracted to men, what of it?
That doesn’t stop the pleasure that I can bring to you, and you know it.
Accepting that also doesn’t lose who you are.
You are not lost because your body enjoys the things that I do to it. ”
Onyx hugged his arms against his chest. “And in return? I get anything I want?” he demanded. “You want my body; you want some stupid fucking spark. And I get everything. Right?”
“Anything that I can reasonably provide, yes,” Dominic said. “There will be things that will need to be worked up to, since I will need to know that I can trust you, but if there are things that I cannot give you yet, that doesn’t mean that I never can.”
Onyx closed his eyes against the words briefly, then narrowed them at Dominic. “I’m not sucking your cock. Not now, not ever.”
Dominic studied Onyx for a moment, taking in his stance and the tension in his body and expression. Standing, he picked up the plates off the desk and moved to take them to a side table. “Lower your pants and bend over the desk, like you did in my office before.”