Ben grins and sits down. “My lips are sealed.” It’s a tiny restaurant with discreetly dim lighting and overly-expensive, overly-small portions of food. But Ben and Xander like it because it’s rarely busy and rarely scouted by photographers.
Elijah, his hands flying around with enthusiasm, tells Ben what he’s been doing with Dean and their newly-official production company, for which Xander is a backer, and Ben nods and eats, letting the flow of chatter wash over him. Maybe that’s one reason he likes Elijah so much; it’s easy to be with someone who does the conversational heavy-lifting.
Eventually, though, Elijah winds down, and gives Ben a sheepish look. “So, dude. I’m sorry if I had anything to do with what went down between you and Xander.”
Ben furrows his brow in confusion. “How do you mean?”
“I opened my mouth that one time about something Xander said, and you two had a fight about it. And then I kept my mouth shut after I saw you were in bad shape, even though I really thought I should have said something to Xander. I don’t even know what to do anymore.” He grins, but Ben can see he’s worried.
“Water under the bridge.”
“But if I’d just told Xander how tough everything was on you after you guys broke up—”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” But looking at Elijah is like looking in a mirror. Ben can see guilt all over his face, and he knows how consuming it can feel.
Ben has been wrapping himself up in blame over and over again, like a suffocating blanket. Every time he thinks about That Night, when he tried to push Xander into breathplay, when everything was wrong between them, he feels another smothering layer added, and he’s not sure if he can stand much more. He’s tried to talk to Suzanne about it, but he gets too overwhelmed to do more than say, I feel bad because of what I did. The one time she pressed him to expand, he had to leave the session early, too agitated, too upset, his stomach threatening to unload itself right there in her office.
He sees Xander watching him sometimes, looking sympathetic, and wants to talk to him about it but he can’t, not yet, his voice deserting him just like it does with Suzanne. And it wouldn’t be fair, anyway, dumping it on Xander. Xander was the wounded party in that mess, after all.
“So you’re telling me I’m not the Yoko Ono here?” Elijah is asking. He’s joking, but Ben can feel the undercurrents still.
“Look, we had to break up. It was going to happen sooner or later, because we weren’t in a good place, but it definitely wasn’t you. And I asked you not to tell Xander about how I was doing, so that’s not your fault either. Xander and I fucked it up on our own, but things are getting back on track. We’re working it out, making things good again.”
Elijah looks so relieved that it makes Ben smile. “Damn, I feel a lot better now,” he says. He pushes back in his chair and starts looking wicked again. “In fact, I’m kind of like the savior of your relationship, right? Because keeping my mouth shut drove Xander crazy, and then he dragged his sorry ass back to you, and then you guys talked it out, and—”
“Elijah,” Ben says. “No.”
Elijah laughs.
In Ben’s heart of hearts, he’s still not entirely sure that things are okay even now. The sex is good—great, even—but slow, sweet, devoid of pain. Xander holds him down, but it’s just playful, not intense. And his bites are too gentle now—nibbles more than anything else. It’s confusing, and Ben wishes it were different, but he’s not pushing Xander into something he’s uncomfortable with, not again. He’s decided to wait it out for as long as it takes.
He deliberately puts the thought aside and tunes back in to what Elijah is saying.
“…and Xander was about to nominate you for sainthood by the time he got back to New York. Dean and I had to suffer through numerous renditions of Why Ben Ballard is the Best Human Being Ever. Seriously, I started to hate on you a bit.”
Ben starts chuckling at that. “And yet here you are, having lunch with me.”
“Well, you said you’d pay. And you know me, Ballard. Any time I get a chance to gaze into your baby blues, I’m there.”
“Xander, I’ve been wondering.” Ben turns over in Xander’s lap to look up at him. They’re on the couch in Xander’s lounge room.
“Hm?”
“Put down the book.”
“But I’m just at the good part.” Xander puts it down, though, and only sighs a little.
It’s been four days since lunch with Elijah, and Ben has decided it’s time to try to throw off his shroud of regret. He’s decided to come at it sideways, to try for some of the details before the big picture. “That night, the night when I tried to get you to…you know.”
“Asphyxiate you?” Xander sounds calm, but it’s so hard to tell sometimes, and especially now that he’s done so much therapy and he’s calmer in general about everything. He was pretty damn centered anyway before things got difficult between them, but it was a more tightly-wound control than the easy, flowing-like-water effect he has going on now.
“Yeah.”
“What about it?” If he gets any more neutral in tone, Ben thinks, he’ll have to check Xander’s pulse just to make sure he’s still human.
“You said I should snap my fingers, because I couldn’t safe-word.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem…I mean, what if I’d passed out without you noticing? Or if I panicked? Or if I went into subspace? I couldn’t have snapped my fingers at you then.”
“You wouldn’t have gone into subspace that night,” Xander says softly, but then grins. “You think I wasn’t being safe?” He bounces his knee a few times, and Ben’s head rebounds.
“No. You’re always safe, as safe as you can be. Risk-aware, certainly. But I just wondered.”
“But you know it’s never safe, that kind of thing. It comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.”
“You said you could make it safer.”
“Safer is not safe. And I was still terrified, anyway.” The words hang in the air between them, and Xander looks almost surprised that they’ve come out, but he curls his fingers into Ben’s hair and smiles, relaxed.
Ben starts to feel the familiar guilt rolling over him like a tidal wave, but he tries to ignore it, hold it back just a while longer. “Terrified like Shadow terrified?”
“No. Terrified that I would kill you. But I mean, I’m always scared of that.” Xander shifts, uncomfortable now, and Ben sits up.
“Kill me? Like—lose control, go all Jasper Crane on me? Oh. No. You don’t mean that.”
Xander looks like he’s trying to decide whether to laugh or be offended, but ends up at accepting. “After all the work I’ve done in therapy, I actually trust myself more now. So, no. I meant literally kill you, by accident. Some of the things we’ve done in the past have been really risky, but asphyxiation is one of the most dangerous things I can think of, without involving broken bones. It’s too easy to make a mistake, or just—too easy for accidents to happen.”
Ben stands up and walks a few paces around the room, aimless. The guilt is rushing in, seeping around the temporary wall of rationality he built up to be able to have this conversation. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I usually just think about how those things affect me. I forget sometimes how much responsibility you have to take on. Is that why we haven’t done anything intense so far since we got back together?”
“I haven’t wanted to push you. You seem on edge sometimes. I don’t want to bring back any bad memories for you.”
Ben tips his head to the side, watching him closely. “So…that night, you were frightened, but you did it anyway.”
“That night—” Xander pauses, and he looks momentarily afraid again, but he keeps speaking. “I would have done anything you wanted that night, Benjamin, but that wasn’t a good thing. That was a selfish thing. I just wanted you back. And I should have said no, but I didn’t, and I’m sorry about that, because it’s caused you so much grief.”
Ben returns to
the couch and sits down, feeling sick and cold and lost and guilty, and it comes rushing out of him before he can stop it. “I can’t forgive myself for making you do that. I just can’t. And I know I have to, but I can’t.”
Xander slides his hand over Ben’s, clasps it tight. “You will, eventually.” When Ben doesn’t respond, he says, “So here’s an idea. Do you want to see how I would’ve done it?”
Ben looks up, somber. “Yeah?”
“It would’ve been like this. Can I?” Ben nods. Xander puts his hand over Ben’s mouth and nose and suddenly his breath is gone. He stares into Xander’s calm brown eyes and fights the instinct to pull away. Xander lets his hand drop after a few seconds.
“I still don’t—”
And he does it again, covers up Ben’s face so he can’t get any air, and it’s far more confronting and scary than Ben ever thought it would be, but at the same time he’s rapidly getting hard. When Xander lets go this time, Ben croaks, “One more.”
Xander ignores him. “It was going to be like that, with breaks in between so you could get some oxygen. Not one sustained gesture where I stopped you breathing until you passed out. That would be beyond any risk I’m prepared to take. I could never do that. And it’s better, anyway, if you manage to get breaths in.”
“Better?”
“Better for both of us. It adds to the scene for you, wondering when I’ll let you breathe and when I won’t. And I like hearing you gasping for air.” Ben gives an involuntary shiver and keeps listening as Xander lists the ways he could make it safer. Not safe, but safer. “But obviously, it’s just not safe to do something like that,” Xander finishes up. “I mean, you knew that, right?”
Ben pulls at Xander until they’re lying tangled up in each other, draped across the sofa, and stares at the ceiling for a while, thinking. “I guess. Yes, I knew.” It’s difficult to get the words out. “That’s why I wanted you to do it that night, because I knew you didn’t want to.” It’s getting too much, so he changes tack, tries a new angle. “So the finger-snapping thing—that was more for me to feel safer? But I could have safe-worded in between, when you took your hand off.”
“Maybe. You would have been concentrating on breathing, not speaking. But I would have done my best to watch out for you.”
Ben thinks about the time he forgot his safe words, and Xander deliberately supplied them, and believes him.
Xander is heavy on top of him, but Ben savors the feeling. It’s little things like Xander’s weight holding him down, or the way he bounces on his feet when he’s excited, or how he wraps his fingers lightly and unconsciously around Ben’s wrist when they sleep, that Ben swears he’s going to catalogue and remember and never take for granted again.
Like subspace. If that ever comes back again, he’ll always be grateful for it, every time. Because he hasn’t been able to get there, not for a long time and no matter how much he tries. He knows why, at least: because he doesn’t feel like he deserves it.
“It’s a lot of work, isn’t it? What you do, I mean—the set-up and the preparation and research and everything. To make sure the magic happens.”
Xander makes a noise of agreement. His breathing has started to get deeper and longer, and Ben wonders if he’s going to fall asleep. That would be okay. Ben feels like he could nap too, under his blanket of Xander.
“Don’t you ever feel like it’s too much work?” Ben keeps his voice quiet, just in case Xander is already beyond answering.
“Never for you.” Xander mumbles the words and then snuggles further down into Ben’s neck, yawns. “It’s always worth it.”
“It really is like a magic trick, isn’t it? Like, an illusion. You have to think it out and set everything up carefully, and still keep me distracted from the mechanics of it, because if I knew how it was done it wouldn’t be the same.”
“Yeah, it’s like a magic trick. I am the David Copperfield of domination. Only with less fake tan.” He’s amused, less sleepy now.
“It could be worse. You could be Criss Angel.”
Xander chuckles.
“Do you ever feel…” Ben sighs. He’s not sure how to phrase it. “All that work, and then the drop afterwards—”
“We don’t drop every time.”
“Not every time, no, but then some times are worse than others. Don’t you ever start thinking that maybe it’s too much?”
Xander is quiet for a long time, until Ben starts wondering if he’s fallen asleep, but then he replies. “No. Sometimes it’s more intense than other times, and that can be tiring, but the payoff for me is always worth the effort, and the drop. Some people stop playing because they don’t feel like the outcome is worth the input anymore, but I don’t think I’ll ever feel that way. But if you do—if you ever start to feel that way, tomorrow or next week or years down the track, that’s okay, and we can work something out together.”
Ben wants to say No, I don’t think I’ll ever feel that way either, but he’s so struck by the longevity Xander sees in their relationship that he’s left with his mouth hanging open.
“Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Xander’s voice is tender and calm, but Ben can feel his heartbeat accelerating, hammering through his own ribs and into Ben’s chest. “Because that’s okay. We can work something out, I promise.”
“No, definitely not. That’s not what I’m trying to tell you. I just wondered what it was like from your perspective. The payoff is still worth it for me, every time. Well, except when I…That night. The breathplay thing. That wasn’t good.”
“That wasn’t,” Xander confirms. His heartbeat is dropping back to normal.
“I’m sorry,” Ben whispers, his throat closing up even as he says the words. “I shouldn’t have tried to make you do that. I’m sorry.”
“Baby, I forgave you a long time ago. I wish you could forgive yourself,” Xander says. He sounds sad and caring at the same time, and it’s far more than anything Ben feels he merits.
Ben pushes gently at him and sits up, trying to force down the lump in his throat, get his words out around it. “I’ll never do that again,” he says at last, his voice hoarse. “I’ll never mess around with your limits like that again.”
“I know,” Xander says again. He sounds completely confident. “It was a mistake. You were upset. I was being an asshole, and—”
But Ben can’t listen to it, not right now. The remorse and shame are overwhelming him again, and he’s disgusted at himself. “I have to go,” he says, slides out of Xander’s embrace and stands up. He manages to resist the temptation to put his hands over his ears. “I should go.”
“Baby, I know you find it hard to discuss, but it seems like things are getting worse for you instead of better. When we talked my problem over, you gave me that awesome rubber band theory, so do you want to try talking it over again, what happened that night? Maybe we could think about—”
“Not now. I have to go. I’m sorry.”
Chapter Thirty
Suzanne seems disappointed with him, although it might be Ben’s imagination. “I know I’m a coward,” he says eventually. “But I just can’t talk it out with him, not yet.”
She sits back in her chair, regarding him, until he can’t take the silence anymore.
“I’m trying,” he insists.
“Here’s the thing, Ben. What you’re doing is punishing yourself.”
“I know that.”
“I wonder if you’ve considered it fully.”
Ben spreads his arms. Please, enlighten me.
Suzanne asks, “Do you think it’s possible that you’re getting a sense of gratification out of this?”
Ben glares at her, and right now, it’s anger that he feels instead of guilt. “That’s total bullshit. Gratification? This is because I like pain, right?”
But Suzanne just looks at him, looks at the clock, and suggests he think about it for next time.
Screw that, though, he’s not going back, not after that. All this time he�
��s thought Suzanne has been fine with who he is, and then she throws that in his face? He’s so mad about it, he complains at length to Xander that night at his place, a half-hour litany of how unprofessional it is and how ludicrous her suggestion was and how he’s done with seeing her and he’ll find someone else if she has such a problem with it.
“Ballard,” Xander says eventually, his voice sharp. “Please. Zip it, just for a minute or two. You’ve been carrying on about this since you got here.”
Ben glares at him then, and is half-inclined to bitch him out as well, but then his anger management training suddenly kicks in and he takes a deep breath, counts to five. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m just pissed.”
“I don’t know why,” Xander says, all equanimity again. “It’s not like she was putting you down. And honestly, you are getting kind of martyr-like over the whole thing.”
“Excuse me?”
Xander sighs, and gives a small smile. “I’m just saying, maybe you should think about what she said. She might have a point, you know? You’re holding on to that night like it’s doing something for you.”
“Just because I’m a masochist doesn’t mean I enjoy torturing myself emotionally,” Ben snarls.
“You’re getting all comfy with that word,” Xander notes with approval. “Masochist! Good for you. Suzanne’s working!”
Ben thinks of everything he could say, but all those words seem overwrought and defensive in the face of Xander’s clear support for Suzanne. There doesn’t seem much point in arguing about it, and besides, sex seems like it would be a more constructive use of his time right now, so he just agrees. “Sure, I guess. Yeah, she’s working. Hey, do you wanna play for a while? I need to get out of my head.”
“So you’ll go back to Suzanne?”
“If you’ll come and use the riding crop on me for a while, I’ll go back. I’ll even think about what she said.”
“Well, then. I believe we have a deal.”
Break the Rules (Rough Love Book 7) Page 23
