So Ben, now described as an exciting up-and-coming writer/director in the media, dates. Ramona sets him up, of course. He goes out with ingénues, starlets, celebutantes. She has a new one for him almost every night, now that Ben is acquiescent to whatever methods she wants to use for his career. But it takes four dates in seven days before he realizes something: he’s single. He’s a single guy; Xander has dumped him. And he used to fuck girls, and these girls are willing.
So, why not sleep with them? he thinks. Why not?
Because you aren’t ready, and it would be taking advantage, and you’re not a complete jerk. Only a moderate jerk.
I am a male with a working penis. I’m ready. More than ready.
Just keep it in your pants, Ballard. Wait a few weeks at least.
And so he dates, casually, but he still can’t bring himself to sleep with them. And he hopes, every time the paparazzi photograph him with a new It Girl, that Xander sees the pictures and wonders. Ben hopes he sees them and feels the same buckling pain inside that Ben feels at seeing photographs of Xander with his twinky co-star, Harris Devlin, a sexy blond with cheekbones like razor blades.
Just Xander’s type.
Blood Bond ends. By then, Ben’s enjoyment of the play has completely dissolved, although he tries to keep up the pretense for his cast. But he skips the last few appearances on stage; no more buckets of blood for him. He tells Ramona Jones he’s taking a sabbatical once the play is done. The day after closing, he rents a Porsche and drives straight to Mexico without telling anyone, stopping only a few times for a brief nap, until he hits Puerto Vallarta.
He buys several bottles of tequila, rents a villa, and calls Katy the next day. She screams at him about his recklessness for a good five minutes before telling him he’s a stupid son of a bitch to take a solo drive down in a car like that, and then spends another ten telling him how concerned she is over how he’s handling things.
“Katy, just butt out,” he snaps eventually. “I’m not your kid brother anymore.”
“You’re always going to be my kid brother, Ben, because I’m always going to be older and wiser than you. And I love you. I’m worried about you. Promise me you’ll go to see someone when you get back. A counselor, or a therapist.”
“I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed!”
“I’m not talking about psychoanalysis, I’m talking about going to see someone and getting things off your chest.”
“I. Am. Fine.”
“You are not fine, and that’s my professional opinion, actually. You’re struggling, and I think you need to talk to someone.”
“You, I suppose?”
“No, not me. That would be a breach of ethics. But you need someone.”
Ben has never been more aware that half his family are mental health professionals. And never more annoyed by the fact.
“You’re going,” Katy says. “Or else I’m going to bug the hell out of you until you do, and you know I will.”
He sighs. “Fine. Whatever.”
“I’m making you an appointment.”
“Whatever, Katy. I gotta go. I’m tired.”
“You better take care of my baby brother while you’re down there, okay? And get a plane back, for God’s sake.”
“Okay, okay.”
While he’s down there, Ben finds it hard to stop thinking about the dates he’s had, or rather, about the not-sex he’s had. He decides he’s going to test himself and see if it was just because of the initial break-up shock—since he’s totally over Xander now, that’s for fucking sure. Because he’s always appreciated women, and he hopes that hasn’t changed.
And if it’s not that, he thinks, perhaps it’s the kind of sex.
So he searches online and finds Annika. Annika describes herself as a Dominatrix, and promises discretion and fun. She will not fuck you, but she will make you feel good.
Ben remembers, all of a sudden, the sensations. The pain turning into pleasure. A wave of longing hits him, and he decides it’s probably a sign. She won’t fuck him, but at least he can see if the pain still feels good.
The only thing that’s stopping him is the possibility of being sold out to the press. He still has that stupid hang-up that Xander instilled in him; that their kinks are something to keep quiet about. Like Ben should be ashamed of who he is. He calls Annika after a few tequila shots for courage, and explains his situation.
“I wouldn’t be in business very long if I sold out every Hollywood player that walked through my door,” Annika says, amused. “But I’m more than happy to sign any confidentiality agreements you’d like to have your lawyers or agent draw up. I like to make sure my clients feel protected.”
Ben envisions having that conversation with Ramona, and feels nauseated. “I’ll see,” he says. “I’ll see how I feel. When can I book in?”
“There’s a wait, I’m afraid.” She names a date two weeks away.
“That’s fine.”
“And what name should I put it under?”
“Benjamin,” he says. “No! Wait. Sorry. Ben, just Ben.”
After he gets back from Mexico, he sees the therapist Katy set him up with, but it’s hard. He doesn’t want to mention the things that he did with Xander. He doesn’t want to talk about the things he’s planning to do with Annika. So he spends most of his time making up problems and pretending he’s conflicted about his career. He can tell the therapist thinks he’s lying, or not being open enough, or whatever, but he doesn’t care. He’s starting to think he’s been put off therapy for life.
And although it doesn’t help much, he keeps going, because Katy will kill him if he doesn’t.
He arrives, full of nerves and without any confidentiality agreements, for a one-hour afternoon session with Annika. She is as described: beautiful, buxom, blonde. She’s asked him to come fifteen minutes early to discuss what he might like to do: “I prefer face-to-face negotiations. The phone is too impersonal.”
And so they talk. “What are your limits?” she asks him, and Ben has to think hard.
“I don’t really know,” he admits eventually.
“Everyone has limits,” she laughs.
“My last—the last person…I never quite found a limit.” He stumbles over his words, and from the way Annika looks at him he’s pretty sure his expression is giving everything away. And she knows who he is. And exactly who his ex is. “I mean, I safe-worded when I needed to, but that was usually just to give me some time to come to terms with something.”
“What are your safe words?”
He hesitates.
“Everything you say in here is confidential, Ben. I understand why you need to be careful, but I can assure you—”
“If I need to slow down, I say it’s too drastic. If I need to stop, I say…Odyssey. My stop word is Odyssey.”
“Maybe we can start easy today. You say you enjoy pain. Some kind of corporal punishment?”
“Not a cane,” he says quickly.
“So you do have limits.”
It’s not a limit, it just reminds him too much of Xander. But he nods, agrees.
“And it’s just pain today, right? Rather than submission?”
He hesitates. “Just the pain, right now. That’s all I’m looking for.” A thought strikes him again, and he swallows, tries to sound casual. “And by the way—I have a mark on my ass, a sharpie mark. Just ignore it. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Annika suggests a flogging. Xander never really flogged Ben, not often, because it didn’t make Ben scream the way Xander liked to hear.
But he’s not with Xander anymore, so Ben decides to do whatever he likes.
He doesn’t like the flogging. It’s not painful, not the way he likes it. The suede tongues of Annika’s flogger do nothing more than slap at him lightly. It’s like a tingling massage more than anything else.
“I need something more,” he says. “More painful.”
“I have a paddle,” Annika suggests. He nods; they try it.
“Still no good,” he says, frowning.
“A riding crop?”
He hesitates. It’s getting a little too close. But he’s always liked the riding crop. “Yeah. Let’s try that.”
It’s as good as he’s going to get, he decides, although Annika is hesitant to use the kind of force he asks for behind each blow. Eventually he persuades her to give it her all, and at the crest of each wave of agony, he can pretend for a split second that he is not paying someone to do this to him, and particularly that he is not paying a blonde woman in a PVC catsuit to do this to him.
A few times he sees the precipice before him, and he wants to jump into it, go flying, but his feet are too anchored to the earth. At the end of the session, he’s physically aroused, but feels empty inside.
“You’re pretty hardcore,” Annika tells him. “Most of my clients prefer the domination side to the pain. This has been educational for me. Thank you. I think this experience will help me shape better sessions in the future.”
Ben never expected to hear something like that, not from a pro. “But you’ve been doing this a long time?”
“Sure. But we never stop learning, right?” She smiles, and he automatically curves his mouth in a fake smile back at her. “I thought you might go into subspace there a few times. That doesn’t usually happen the first session with most of my clients.”
“I couldn’t get there,” he says. “Not quite.” It’s frustrating.
“Would you like to book a second session?”
“I don’t think so. Thank you, though. You were great.”
Chapter Fifteen
For his next tests, Ben signs up on every fetish dating site he can find as M seeking M. He writes two vague profiles, detailing the things that he likes—one as a Dom and one as a sub. He considered filling just one out as a switch, but he figures he’ll get more traffic with separate entries, and besides, if he’s going to dominate someone, he doesn’t want the distraction of the other person watching him for signs of weakness. If they believe him to be dominant, he will be dominant.
The only problem he has is maybe being recognized, but this is LA, he argues to himself. It’s not like writers or exes-of-celebrities are a rare breed. He’s weighed up the pros and cons and decided that his career is not as important as finding peace. Finding a place.
He’s become reclusive, he knows, but he doesn’t want to see anyone. He won’t return calls, even from Ramona these days. He wants to be left alone. Having the people he knows look at him, look through him, like life has blown a hole right through his middle, makes everything feel worse. So that night when someone knocks on his door, he’s inclined to ignore it. But last time he did that, it was Katy, and he’d forgotten that he was supposed to be seeing her for dinner, and she was so worried that she used her spare key to get in and cried when he was sitting there in the dark living room.
And then she went ballistic.
So he’s promised her he’ll always answer the door if he’s at home. Knowing Katy, she’s testing him.
But it’s not Katy.
“Elijah? What are you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you.” It’s the stupidest thing possible to say—of course Ben wasn’t expecting him.
Elijah smiles, broad and open. “No, I guess you weren’t. Can I come in?”
Ben hesitates, but then says, “Sure,” and moves back to let him come in. Elijah has never been in his apartment before. “Do you want a coffee or something? A drink?”
“Just a chat.”
Ben waves his hand towards the sofa, and tries to pretend it’s perfectly normal to have dirty dishes and old take-out containers stacked everywhere. Elijah sits. They look at each other, and then Elijah, unexpectedly, grins.
“I thought we had a deal, man?”
“Sorry?”
“You were going to give us a heads-up.”
“Oh.” He shifts in the seat. “Well. I didn’t get a chance. I’m sure he spoke to you, though.” Ben can’t even say his name.
“You know,” Elijah says, sitting back comfortably, like he’s been visiting Ben for years, “I didn’t ask that stuff just for Xander’s sake. I wanted to make sure you’d be doing okay too. So how are you doing, buddy?”
I’m not your buddy. “I’m fine.”
There’s a silence between them, and Ben tries to make it as frosty as possible, but it’s hard to resist Elijah’s good-natured face and warm eyes.
“Okay, I’m not fine. But I’m surviving.”
“That’s no way to be,” Elijah says softly. “You can’t patch things up somehow? I know Xander can be—”
“No.”
“Okay. I’ll keep my mouth shut on that topic, for a few minutes anyway. Hey, do you like bowling?”
“Um. Not really?”
“Indoor rock climbing?”
“What?”
“Thought we could do something together. And really, truly, I promise—I’m not hitting on you.” He grins.
“I don’t think he’d like it, would he? You hanging out with me.”
“Well, lucky for me I’m a free agent. Xander doesn’t own me.” Ben winces. Elijah doesn’t notice, or pretends not to, and keeps talking. “And, I don’t know, Ballard, I guess this is a really bad attempt to stick my nose in and find out what went wrong. See if I can fix it up, maybe. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Way over the line. But screw it, I’m an honest guy, and you’re better off knowing my ulterior motive up front.”
Ben gives him an icy glare, but it has no effect. “There’s nothing you can do. He made it pretty fucking clear, we’re done. And he was a total asshole about it, too, so—”
“Hang on,” Elijah says carefully.
“He was an asshole, and I’m not going to pretend—”
“No, not that. I agree. Xander has the power to go from placid to complete asshole in less than three seconds. But what do you mean, he made it pretty clear?”
“I’m not going to tell you fucking word for word,” Ben snaps, the pain shooting through him again. He wonders why Elijah looks so astonished. He’s the world’s most unrepentant busybody, but surely even he can’t think that Ben is going to perform an autopsy on a private break up for him?
“Ben,” Elijah says. “I think I owe you an apology. We thought—Dean and I—we thought it was you.”
“What was me?”
“The breaker-upper to Xander’s breaker-upee. We thought you broke up with him, not the other way around.”
Ben stares at him, and feels a welcome surge of righteous anger rolling over him. He shuffles forward in his chair aggressively. “If he’s going around telling people—”
“No, it’s not like that,” Elijah says quickly. “He didn’t say anything. He just let us think whatever we liked. And because in the past it always happened that way, we assumed…Sorry, man.” He looks apologetic, and then mystified. “But why would he—oh. Sorry. You don’t want to talk about it.”
Ben looks at Elijah and thinks about talking it out. Shakes his head. “No. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Do you want to know how Xander’s doing?”
Ben does, from the very depths of his soul. He wants to hear that Xander is suffering, that he’s a walking zombie who can’t sleep and can’t eat, that he’s dead inside. But he’s afraid beyond reason that Elijah will say Xander’s doing A-OK.
“No. I don’t want to know how he’s doing. I don’t care.”
“Okay. Then you wanna go grab a drink?”
“I think…thanks for coming round, but I just need some time alone right now.”
“Well, hey, man, fuck you too,” Elijah laughs—and Ben laughs with him, just a little. First real laugh since that night, though. Elijah stands up to leave. “So—”
Ben whacks him with the heel of his hand, right in the forehead. Elijah looks stunned. “Sacred head slap, right?” Ben says. “Don’t tell him anything about this. Me.”
Elijah snorts. “Fuck me, little Ben Ballard all grown up
and taking advantage. Fine. Whatever. Sneaky bastard.” He talks the entire time out the door and down the corridor. “Okay, I’ll let you mope. But I’m in town, so call me. You have my number, right? Good. Seriously, call me. I’m not hitting on you. We can do something completely non-romantic. I’ll see you, Ballard. Stop being so ridiculously good-looking.”
Ben shuts the door, shaking his head at Elijah, but he can’t stop the small upturn of his mouth.
When he checks his emails later, he has fifty-four responses from the kinky dating sites he’s joined. One for each week of the year, if he felt like it, and a couple of spares.
Fuck you, Romano. I’m in demand.
Ben stops going to therapy. He tells Katy he’s all talked out and, although she clearly doesn’t believe him, she lets it go, satisfied with his efforts at least.
And he commences his tests. Most of the responses arrive with photographs of a hard cock, and after sorting through them, Ben is beginning to wonder whether it’s possible to overdose on dick.
But then he finds Byron. Byron describes himself as a romantic at heart, who loves poetry and is an experienced sub. He’s young, but Ben doesn’t think that’s a problem, and at least they’ll have poetry in common. And if he’s as experienced as he says—well, at least one of them will be.
He goes over to Byron’s that very night. In the flesh, Byron is beautiful in a sensual way, with full red lips and olive-green eyes. He’s olive-skinned and reminds Ben entirely too much of a Greek god. But when he sees the nervousness in Byron’s green eyes, it makes Ben feel better. Feel charitable.
“Hi, I’m Ben.” He watches the green eyes go wide, the recognition, omigod Xander Romano’s Ex, and for a second wonders if this was a big mistake. But the kid holds it together.
“Byron. Come in.”
He’s dressed in low-slung jeans and nothing else that Ben can see. The house is opulent; in a good part of town although not the best.
It strikes Ben suddenly that Byron still lives at home with his parents.
“You want a drink?” Byron offers over his shoulder, as he walks Ben through the house.
Break the Rules (Rough Love Book 7) Page 11
