Room at the Top

by Jane Davitt

  Austin grimaced, looking like he understood. “I’m the office manager for two doctors, and it was the same for me when I started. Trial by paper cuts.”

  Jay led Austin to the mercifully empty checkout desk and reluctantly put the counter between them. Checking books out was easy, just a matter of letting the computer read the library card, then scanning the bar code on the back of each book. Because he loved books, he always glanced at the title as he checked a book out, though he’d soon learned not to start up a conversation. That always led to a long line of impatient library patrons and, once, a scolding from an embarrassed elderly lady checking out three steamy romances sandwiched between books on quilting.

  It wasn’t nosy to look at Austin’s information on the screen, though. Jay was supposed to do that, to make sure the card wasn’t out of date. They were renewed each year. Austin still had plenty of time left on his, but Jay couldn’t help seeing his full name—Austin James Fisher—and noticing Austin lived only a mile or two away from him.

  He gave Austin a sheepish look and found Austin smiling at him, an amused glint in his eyes as if he’d known what Jay was doing and didn’t mind.

  Ducking his head, Jay concentrated on checking out Austin’s books, wishing he knew the right words to propose a date. He wasn’t good with strangers, though once he got to know someone, he opened up. Austin felt like a potential friend, but that could just be his hopes misleading him.

  The books went through, scanning without trouble, giving Jay no time to organize the words in his head into a coherent sentence. He reached for the last one, scanned, and flipped it automatically. The book was large and heavy, and he felt it slip through his fingers. He looked down at it and felt a jolt, similar to the one he’d experienced shaking Austin’s hand, a sizzle running through him, excitement and anticipation combined. The book was one he owned, the familiar cover blurring as he stared at it.

  “Is this for your sister too?” His voice sounded weird, as if it was coming from far away.

  Austin didn’t back down or make a joke of it. “Screw the Roses? No, that’s for me.”

  Jay swallowed, dragging his gaze away from the picture of the bound woman, blindfolded and cuffed and meeting Austin’s eyes. “I’ve read it. I own it,” he said, and it turned out that was all he needed to say.

  * * *

  Austin had been the one to propose their first date, which was coffee on the weekend followed by dinner the following night, and they’d hardly been apart since. In some ways, they were exactly the same, and in others they were almost complete opposites—Jay’s messiness and Austin’s neat streak came to mind—but those two elements combined made them just about perfect partners.

  The only thing they lacked now was what Patrick had given them.

  Jay was just finishing his lunch when his cell phone started to play the theme song from Indiana Jones. He fumbled the phone from his pocket and answered the call. “Hey there, boyfriend.”

  “Hi, boyfriend.” Austin sounded distant, which probably meant he was still thinking about the night before. Being Austin, though, he wouldn’t let it affect his ability to work. He’d just keep plugging away. “How’s your day?”

  “Okay. How’s yours?” Jay licked his thumb and rubbed the corner of his mouth.

  “Long. And we’ve had four no-shows, which always puts Chelle in a shitty mood.” If Austin was swearing it meant he’d either left the office or was in the supply room out back. “Let’s do something tonight.”

  It was Friday. Friday used to mean they met up with Patrick. Not every Friday—he was an antique dealer, and that meant driving out to estate sales sometimes hundreds of miles away—but most of them. The arrangement with Patrick had only lasted a year, but it felt like longer, like they’d always had him in their lives.

  Still mourning the death of his partner six months earlier, Patrick hadn’t been interested in a romantic relationship, something that had suited Austin and Jay just fine. They’d been given his number by a domme called Laura. She ran a monthly meeting in a local bar for people into the scene, hiring the back room for the night. Jay and Austin had gone there not knowing what to expect and found a group of people remarkable for being unremarkable, their ages ranging from midtwenties, like them, to over sixty. They hadn’t been the only gay couple at the meetings, but they’d been the only pairing of two submissives.

  “How does it work with you two?” Laura had asked them bluntly after the third meeting. “Is it difficult involving someone else?”

  “It’s really difficult,” Austin had told her. “We’ve had a few offers from people here, but we don’t want to commit to anything long-term, and without that buildup of trust, it’s just…it doesn’t work very well.”

  “Complicated,” Laura had said thoughtfully. “You want to get to know a dom, without him feeling that he’s part of your day-to-day life, and you won’t split up for scenes.”

  “Absolutely not,” Jay had said. “We’re in this together. It’s the way we want it.”

  “There’s someone you haven’t met here. He was never really into all this socializing.” Laura had gestured at the room filled with people talking about everything from pets to vacations as the meeting wound down. “I can vouch for him, though. He lost his partner last year. Car accident. Very sad. Knowing Patrick, he’s missing having someone to play with, though he might not be willing to admit it even to himself. If you want a no-strings spanking from someone who knows his way around and isn’t interested in a relationship or sex, you three might just click.”

  Which they had, and with a lot less effort than Jay had thought possible. It had worked out so well. They’d all gotten what they needed from the relationship, and Patrick hadn’t expected anything from them. Once, following a particularly intense session, with Patrick visibly aroused, Jay and Austin had shared a look and then gone down on their knees and offered to blow him. Patrick told them it wasn’t necessary, but the longing and loneliness in his voice gave a different answer. They took care of him, their mouths on him, warm and eager, the way he’d looked after them. It wasn’t how every session ended, but it was never something they were unwilling to do. In the long run, though, Patrick had decided to move, and they’d had to figure out how they’d manage without him. They were still trying. Jay wasn’t surprised it was an adjustment, but he was surprised by how difficult it was turning out to be.

  “So what do you want to do tonight?”

  Austin sighed. “I don’t know. I just feel like we should go out and do something that will be, you know, what we expect it to be.”

  “Then maybe we should go see the movie with the worst reviews,” Jay suggested. “It would have a good chance of being the kind of bad we’d be expecting.”

  “I don’t know if I’m in the right mood for that. Could we go shopping? At the mall?”

  Jay was easy. “Sure, if you want.”

  “I think I want to pretend we’re like everyone else,” Austin said.

  “We are like everyone else,” Jay told him gently.

  “If we were like everyone else, I’d be able to tell my mom why my porn of choice features leather, whips, and chains.”

  Jay winced. “Austin, it’s your mom. She doesn’t want to hear about her baby boy looking at any kind of porn.”

  He tried to picture his parents’ reaction if they’d discovered that along with an obsession with Middle-earth, he’d always fantasized about being tied up and spanked. It wouldn’t have gone down well. Luckily for him, after they’d divorced when he was at college, they’d both moved out of state with new partners and that particular discussion had never taken place. He visited them now and then, but the gaps between visits were getting longer. He didn’t fit in their new lives. No surprise since he’d never really felt like he belonged in their old ones. It could’ve been worse. They’d been unsurprised and vaguely supportive when he told them he was gay, they sent him generous checks for his birthday, and they were nice people who’d just fallen out of l
ove with each other, but they’d never cracked a book for pleasure. He’d spent most of his childhood waiting to be told he was adopted.

  “True.” Austin chuckled, the soft sound tickling Jay’s ear. “She found Tim’s stash last month, did I tell you? She was going to quietly shove it back under the mattress, but April went into this long rant about the exploitation of women and threw it into the recycling. Then Mom freaked out in case the neighbors saw it, and it all went south from there.”

  As an only child, Jay viewed Austin’s large family with a mixture of envy at how close they all were and the conviction he’d have gone quietly insane living with them for more than a week. The noise level inside their crowded home was off the scale. Music, TV, raised voices, and barking dogs…

  Three younger brothers, one hellion of a sister, just turning eighteen, and a father who’d died when Sarah Fisher was pregnant with April, had forced Austin to step up to the plate when he’d been barely into his teenage years.

  Jay sometimes wondered how much of Austin’s love of submission could be explained by the responsibilities he’d been forced to shoulder. It had to feel good to let someone else call the shots, if only for a few hours a week.

  He’d never bothered to work out why he felt the way he did about being a sub. He just did. It was like asking him why he liked purple better than red or melon but not kiwi fruit. They didn’t go to many of the meetings now, though they’d kept in touch with a few of the people they’d met there. At the meetings, when the topic came up—and it did, frequently—he’d heard people talk about pivotal moments, childhood spankings or lack of them, and he had nothing to contribute. Sometimes he wondered if the answer did lie buried deeply in his head, but not enough to go digging for it.

  “I’m really glad you moved in with me. I don’t tell you that enough.”

  “Are you kidding me? It saved my sanity.” Austin sighed, the faint sound carrying down the phone. “I miss seeing them every day, and I feel guilty about bailing, but my brothers are old enough not to need me, and April… We’re better off with some distance between us right now.”

  “She’d be the same with anyone she saw as an authority figure.” Jay was hesitant to suggest it even though he was convinced it was true, mostly because he wasn’t sure how Austin would take it.

  “Maybe. She sure as hell doesn’t show Mom much respect, but Mom’s got all kinds of weird guilt issues where her ‘baby girl’ is concerned.”

  This conversation was starting to freak Jay out. Not in a bad way, but they hadn’t talked about Austin’s family’s dynamic much. Any discussion they had usually ended up sounding more like the dialogue from a sitcom—lighthearted and slightly sarcastic. Jay had always known Austin had a lot going on under the surface, but it had been water he’d done no more than dip his toes into. “It’s got to be hard, being the youngest and the only girl.”

  “She’s had it too easy,” Austin said. “Four older brothers taking care of her and a mom who wasn’t around enough to keep her in line.”

  “If she had been around, there wouldn’t have been much food on the table,” Jay pointed out. Austin’s mom had worked long hours until her kids had grown up and started taking care of her. Thanks to Austin’s example, his brothers seemed to accept that necessity without resenting it. Sean and Timothy, now in their early twenties, were getting restless and wanting places of their own, like Chad and Austin, but Jay couldn’t imagine them leaving their mother to fend for herself even if they did move out. Part of Austin’s paycheck went directly into his mother’s bank account and always would.

  “Yeah. I guess it was me as much as Mom who let her get away with murder. I wasn’t sure how to handle a girl, so I figured Mom would take care of all that female stuff, you know?” Austin was quiet for a few long moments, then said, “Wow, heavy conversation for a lunch break. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I like that you can talk to me, you know? I just wish you were right here instead of over there.”

  The library and the surgery weren’t a long way from each other, but it would take Jay twenty minutes to get there and with an hour for lunch, a round trip of forty minutes, maybe more, just wasn’t practical. They sometimes met in the middle at a small café, but even that involved so many phone calls and texts as meetings and emergencies got in the way that it wasn’t really worth it, especially now that they were living together.

  “Me too. And now I’ve got to go. Sorry.” The reluctance in Austin’s voice was like a kiss.

  Jay smiled. “I’m going to buy you something tonight,” he said and put every ounce of seductive promise into the words he could. “Something special.”

  It came out sounding as if he had a sore throat, but his intention must’ve been clear enough because Austin, after a choked snort of laughter, sounded gratifyingly hoarse himself. “What kind of special?”

  Jay smiled at an old man walking his dog past the tulips, not caring that all he got in return was a suspicious glare. “Nothing we can get at the mall, so I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

  “We can skip the mall.”

  Jay shook his head, even if Austin couldn’t see it. “No, I need some paint, and I’m out of moss to go around the troll’s bridge.”

  Austin groaned. “You get twenty minutes in the model shop, okay? Twenty. And if you go over, I’m dragging you right past the bookstore.”

  “You’d never do that.” Jay frowned down at the path in front of his bench, watching some industrious ants bustle around a tumbled heap of rocks, a miniature landscape just like the ones he built in the loft space above their apartment. “You wouldn’t? Austin?”

  “If you’re out of the most boring store in the world in less than twenty minutes, I won’t have to.”

  “It’s not—” Jay took a deep breath and abandoned the argument before it began. “I’ll be good.”

  “If you are, I’ll buy you something special,” Austin said. “It’ll be like Christmas. Really late Christmas.”

  “Or really early.” Jay didn’t care either way. He loved Christmas, and the most recent one he’d spent with Austin had been as close to perfect as he could have wished for. They’d had an amazing tree and piles of presents, and Christmas breakfast had consisted of the two of them snuggled on the couch in their almost identical new bathrobes, sipping hot chocolate and eating fresh cinnamon rolls. The apartment had smelled like cinnamon for days. “Too bad there won’t be candy canes.”

  “Yeah, I think those are a seasonal thing. Have a good afternoon, okay?”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you two.”

  “Love you three,” Jay said. If he’d heard anyone else say that, he’d have rolled his eyes at the sap overload, but when it was between them, it felt like a joke only they got.

  He tucked his phone away and left a scatter of bread crumbs for the ants.

  Did they even eat bread? Maybe he’d look it up when he got back to the library. He was going through Dewey numbers in his head as he crossed the road, but he made it to the other side, so he must’ve looked both ways.

  Chapter Three

  Jay paused in front of the hall mirror again and smoothed the front of his new shirt. “You really didn’t have to buy me this.”

  “And miss out on seeing you preen? What a thought.” Austin grinned, propping his feet up on the coffee table so he could rest the laptop on his thighs. “Besides, it looks amazing on you, and you know it.”

  “Really?” Jay fiddled with the top button. “It’s not too much?”

  Austin shook his head. “Just enough.” The deep emerald green of the shirt brought out the tiny flecks of green in Jay’s mostly brown eyes, enhancing the elfin vibe he already had going. “Now get over here.”

  “Okay, okay. Jeez, just order me around, why don’t you.” Jay flopped onto the couch next to him and stretched his legs out beside Austin’s. “How awesome is it that Nicole’s boss is paying for wireless?”

  Nicole lived on the floor beneath them, a ta
ll, thin blonde with enough energy that she could probably have powered the Internet solo if there was some way to plug her into it. Austin liked her—difficult not to—but she was tiring to be around. “Awesome. I’d kiss him if I could.” Austin looked sideways at Jay’s expression, which immediately shifted into one of outrage. “Kidding, kidding! I don’t want to kiss him. He’s probably old. And gross.”

  “So you’d want to kiss him if he was young and hot?”

  “Well…” Austin pretended to reconsider, then yelped when Jay jabbed fingers into his side. “Ack! Okay, no, no, I wouldn’t kiss him! Only you, forever and ever!” He was giggling uncontrollably now even though Jay wasn’t poking him anymore. His ticklishness was the bane of his existence.

  “That’s better.” Jay rescued the laptop from him and started to type. “Let’s try Amazon first.”

  Wheezing, Austin straightened up. “We’re not buying sex toys from Amazon.”

  “They’re probably cheaper,” Jay said reasonably.

  “They’re probably covered with dust from sitting in some huge warehouse somewhere.” Austin rested his head on Jay’s shoulder. “Mm. This is the best kind of shopping.”

  “Yeah. Malls make my head feel like it’s about to explode. Too much noise, too many people.”

  “You’re just sulking because they didn’t have the right kind of moss.”

  “It was too green! Moss shouldn’t be fluorescent.” Jay chewed his lip in thought. “At least, I guess maybe sometimes it is… Hey, would it be cool if I did something on an alien planet just for a change? Everything all the wrong color because the sun was a red giant…”

  Austin had a love/hate relationship with Jay’s creative side. On the one hand, it was part of what made Jay who he was, and there was nothing about Jay that wasn’t lovable. However, if he got involved in a project, he could spend hours in the loft, patiently tweaking tiny scraps of wood and fabric into part of a landscape, forgetting Austin existed. It wasn’t good for Austin’s ego, and it left him feeling resentful of the dioramas, though he genuinely appreciated the skill that went into making them.