by Sidney Bell
“You don’t sound mad that he’s blackmailing you,” Caty said slowly.
“Oh, I’m mad.” He paused. “I was mad.” He peeled off another string of cheese and considered it thoughtfully. “I’m still mad if I think about it for too long, but it’s hard to be mad about it all the time because it’s sort of stupid. I mean, they might arrest me, but even if the apartment complex pressed charges for breaking and entering, what am I really going to get?”
“I’m not even sure they can file charges on behalf of a resident, especially if he hasn’t been determined to be missing yet. Hmm. I’d have to check. Either way, if you didn’t steal or vandalize anything, I’d say you’re fine,” Lisbeth said. “Slap on the wrist at most.”
“Exactly. And it might be neat to get arrested once. To see what it’s like, you know?”
“You’re so weird,” Caty said.
“Honestly, if it weren’t for how Raina would react, I’d say fuck it and see what he does.”
“Raina would shit a brick, wouldn’t she?” Caty asked.
“Yeah.” Sullivan slumped in his chair. “There’s the rub, as they say. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I had to continue my training at another firm, but it’d eat up a lot of time, and I’m not ready to be on my own yet. Getting arrested would be more of a pain in the ass than anything else, but getting fired would cut.”
“So you’re letting him help,” Caty prompted, eyeballing him over her glass.
“Yeah, I’m letting him help. He’s not entirely useless, at least.”
“Uh-huh.”
Propping one hip against the counter and taking a sip of her wine, Lisbeth said, “Considering what the case means to you, sleeping with him does seem self-destructive.”
“That’s lawyer speak for stupid,” Caty said helpfully. “And it figures that after a year of non-boners, you’re getting actual boners for people you shouldn’t be getting boners for.”
“Boner? Really? What are you, fourteen?” Sullivan said.
“Boner, boner, boner.”
He swallowed the last bite of string cheese and threw the wrapper away. “How big a deal would you say un-negotiated kink with a newbie is, ethics-wise?”
Caty lifted a slow eyebrow. “My, my, my. I’d say it depends. Is he psychologically vulnerable in a way that’ll make it hard for him to interrupt play? Was he upset afterward? Was the consent explicit even if the kink was sort of wandery and play-it-by-ear?”
Sullivan blinked. “No? Yes? I’m not—that was a lot of questions. Wandery?”
“Wandering. Wanders. To wander.” Caty stared at him balefully. “Prick.”
“How did his cues read?” Lisbeth asked.
“Green. And afterward he said it was good.”
Both women studied him for a minute. Lisbeth finally said, “Why are you asking? You know as well as either of us that play should be safe, sane, and consensual, and that’s what it sounds like you orchestrated. Where’s the problem?”
Sullivan didn’t know how to describe the flinching sensation in his gut. It’d started once Tobias got up to go to the bathroom, and it had grown fast, tempered by Tobias’s reassurances that the sex had been good, but the flinch was still there, squatting inside him, waiting for the blow.
“Nick really fucked you up,” Caty said, more gently than she’d ever said anything to him in the years he’d known her, and it was awful. “He’s got you questioning everything, and maybe some of that is okay because that’s how you stay a good person, but there’s nothing wrong with the way you like to fuck. I wish you’d stop acting like you’re trying to cage a beast or something. It was cruel of him to imply that.”
“He wasn’t being cruel,” Sullivan replied wearily, though he wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t going to change her mind at this point. “I scared him. He couldn’t give me what I wanted. There’s no fault in that.”
To Nick, Sullivan’s desires were a corruption, a betrayal of years of friendship filled with bicycles and baseball and private detective movies and grape popsicles and homework sessions and bad prom photos with girls whose names they could barely remember. By the time they’d been old enough and brave enough to exchange confessions about their adult sexualities—Sullivan bisexual, Nick gay—the nature of their bond had been well defined. Sullivan had violated their unspoken contract. He’d changed the rules. He’d stumbled through an excruciating confession that’d felt so much like the others they’d made, up until the moment Nick had yanked his hand out of Sullivan’s and stared at him like he was a predator.
Have you always been like this? Have you been wanting to hurt me all these years? What kind of monster gets off on hurting the people he claims he loves?
Losing his boyfriend of several months over a fundamental difference in sexual interests hadn’t been pleasant, but losing his best friend had been another kind of pain altogether.
Lisbeth pulled a colander from a cabinet. “Are you going to see the college boy again?”
“It’s a complicated situation.”
“No, it is not.” Caty kicked him in the ankle hard, laughing when he yelped.
“I do what I want,” Sullivan snapped, rubbing his ankle.
“Read my lips, loser. He. Is. Blackmailing. You.”
“Ineffectually.” He swallowed hard. “I know. But...”
“But?”
Sullivan remembered the small jerks of Tobias’s body, the eager way he’d sucked Sullivan deep, the way his eyes had gone dark and desperate. The way he’d laid his head on Sullivan’s lap after, letting Sullivan play with his hair as he swam up from that altered headspace, vulnerable and trusting and sweet. The way he’d taken it so in stride, as if the part of Sullivan that Nick had been so disgusted by were something to be craved. It was like the universe had conspired to give him one perfect moment. For the first time since Nick left, all his pieces had been in harmony, all the planets aligned.
Sullivan pretended his voice wasn’t hoarse when he said, “It was really good.”
“Of course it was really good, but it’s not because of him. His dick isn’t magic.” Caty shook her head so hard her hair bounced all over. “It’s because you haven’t boned anyone in over a year! Plus, he’s blackmailing you, which is exactly the sort of weird, interesting shit that you’re attracted to in a person. Of course it was good!”
“I don’t like being blackmailed,” Sullivan corrected. “It pisses me off. There are better ways to not be bored. I’m just still all postcoital, so it’s hard to keep my energy up for bitching about it. There’s this bonding hormone called oxytocin. It floods your system after orgasm, and it’s been shown in studies to facilitate monogamy in men. Well, straight men. Don’t think any bi or gay men were in the study. I should look that up. It’s also been found in women as they breastfeed their children, which is less applicable here, but—”
“Sullivan,” Lisbeth said.
“—it’s—What?”
“You’re monologuing.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Sorry. But you get my point.”
“Oxytocin makes you forget you’re being blackmailed,” Caty said, flatly doubtful.
“It doesn’t make me forget anything. I just like the people I’m sleeping with more than I did before I slept with them. That’s a perfectly normal thing. I like them a normal amount. And it’s not like he’ll let me get all twisted up over him. He wants something casual. So no big.”
“Silverware, Caty, please.” Lisbeth pulled a block of parmesan out of the fridge.
“You can’t keep boning the college guy.” Caty rose and opened the silverware drawer. “You’re in a vulnerable place right now. You’re back on the market for the first time post-fuckface, and you’re so hard up that the boning will be amazing and then he’ll leave because he doesn’t want something serious and you’ll be left lying around in a pool of oxytocin hormones.
”
“I’m aware of that,” he snapped. “And stop saying bone. It doesn’t even sound like a word anymore.”
“God, you’re going to keep boning him and you’ll fall in love and he’ll trash you,” Caty moaned.
“Plates, Caty, please,” Lisbeth said, in a tone that meant she was exhausted with their drama.
Caty dragged herself to the cabinet with the petulance of a teenager, calling back over her shoulder, “There are other attractive, kink-minded people in the world, Sullivan. You can always role-play blackmail scenes.”
Sullivan groaned.
* * *
Sullivan woke up the next morning to his phone buzzing with a text message. Tobias.
Are you alive?
Sullivan sent back: no leave me alone.
The reply was prompt: Are you home?
Sullivan ran the heel of one hand over his eyes and tried to clear the fog from his brain. He sent back: no.
A split second later, he got: Your car is here. I’m going into your backyard. Please come and let me in.
“I’m not boning you,” Sullivan muttered, and started the long, unpleasant process of dragging himself out of bed. Only once he’d staggered downstairs did he think to check the time, and then he let out a groan of disbelief.
Tobias knocked on the back door and Sullivan yelled, “It’s 9:45, you ass! On a Sunday!”
There was a long silence. Then a more respectful knock.
Sullivan decided to ignore him.
He made coffee and a bowl of cereal, chewing while standing over the sink, ignoring the knocks that came with increasing frequency and volume as the minutes passed. His phone buzzed several more times, but he ignored that, too. It wasn’t until he saw Tobias’s irritated face appear in one of the windows at the side of the house that he realized he was going to end up with a broken pane of glass if he didn’t let the guy in. He went outside and stuck his head around the corner of the house.
“I thought you had manners,” he said, watching Tobias struggle back out of the bushes.
“I do,” Tobias replied, sounding offended.
“You’re a peeping Tom who doesn’t respect the sanctity of sleeping in on Sundays.” Sullivan went back inside, leaving the door open behind him.
“I wasn’t peeping.” Tobias brushed dirt off his well-fitting khakis—which Sullivan was pointedly not noticing—before following. “I was making sure you hadn’t gone back to sleep.”
“You weren’t trying to catch me in my frilly nightie?”
Tobias’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
Despite himself, Sullivan laughed. “You sure? I think I look pretty good in it.” Which was sort of flirtatious, and probably not helpful to the whole not-boning plan, but it was worth it for the way Tobias’s cheeks went deeply red.
With stiff dignity, Tobias said, “What’s the plan for today?”
Sullivan shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“Well, get started.” Tobias gave him an admonishing frown. “Every minute that we hesitate is a minute of progress we lose.”
“This isn’t charming,” Sullivan pointed out. “This bossy micromanaging thing? It’s not cute at all. Also, it’s ten a.m. on a Sunday. You’re lucky I’m forming complete sentences and not killing you. Why are you dressed up?”
“I was at Mass.”
“Oh.” Sullivan looked at him askance, then decided he didn’t care. “Better you than me.”
“Fine.” Tobias sat at the table and folded his hands together like a well-behaved fourth grader. “I can wait, but out of curiosity, do you think you’ll be much longer with whatever it is you’re doing?”
Sullivan rolled his eyes and opened his laptop. “Christ. All right. You want to help? Let’s see if you can track down a possible source at one of those trafficking sites. Someone based here in Denver who could talk to us about what the girls usually do after they get away.”
“You want to know where Mama would’ve gone after she left.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Because she has Nathalie with her.”
Sullivan gave him a dirty look. “I’m going to take a shower. Don’t peep.”
Tobias’s blush went all the way to his ears this time.
Chapter Thirteen
Over the next eight hours, they migrated from the hard-backed dining room chairs to the living room. Sullivan sprawled on the sofa, his long arms and legs akimbo, laptop balanced on his thighs, and Tobias sat in the overstuffed chair and tried not to watch him.
It took more effort than he liked.
He kept thinking of the day before. Sullivan looming over him, eyes blown dark, his mouth half-open, his grip verging on painful as he guided Tobias’s mouth over his cock. He thought about them lying on the floor together, Tobias long past self-consciousness, his heart pounding like it could burst out of his chest, his face buried in Sullivan’s throat, the taste of salt on his lips where he couldn’t help nuzzling as Sullivan’s hand took him apart. And he thought of Sullivan’s voice somehow soft and firm at the same time as he said take what you need, sweetheart.
If Tobias had the nerve, he’d ask how Sullivan could act so normally after everything that’d happened yesterday. He seemed resigned to Tobias’s presence finally—or at least there hadn’t been a return to the obvious anger of the days before—but it’d been replaced by a conversational tone. Like he’d missed the way the whole world had turned on its side yesterday.
But then, for Sullivan it hadn’t been a big deal. Sullivan hadn’t needed to be held for half an hour on the couch afterward. He probably did this all the time. It was only Tobias who was affected, clearly.
“I’ve reached the limit of my skills on this.” Sullivan dumped his laptop on the steamer trunk coffee table with a thunk and stretched his arms over his head, revealing a strip of firm belly where his T-shirt rode up.
Tobias quickly looked at his own notes. The search for a contact had not gone well. Part of it was that it was Sunday and people weren’t at work, but part of it was that the folks most likely to have the kind of inside information they needed weren’t going to be promoting themselves on a website. He’d sent some emails, but he wasn’t holding his breath. The first task that Sullivan had given him, and he’d made zero progress.
“Okay.” Tobias pushed his notebook away with nervous fingers. “And, um. What do we do until then?”
He glanced up and found Sullivan watching him, his eyes shadowed in the late-afternoon light creeping through the dirty windows. “That depends,” Sullivan said slowly.
“On?” Tobias’s stomach filled with butterflies.
The air seemed to thicken during the long pause that followed. Tobias’s skin felt oversensitive and he knew exactly what he wanted to happen, but he wasn’t sure how to ask for it. He thought of Sullivan’s hand in his hair the day before, thought of Sullivan’s cock in his mouth, and started to get hard. He was—
“Why are you looking for Ghost?”
Tobias jolted. “What? I mean, he’s my friend, and he’s in trouble, so...”
“I mean why are you looking for Ghost.” Sullivan didn’t sound angry so much as curious, but his eyes were eagle-sharp on Tobias’s face. “Why couldn’t you pay me like everyone else does and go home and do your homework like a normal college student whose best friend is a missing prostitute?”
“Ha-ha.” Tobias chewed on his lip. “You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Maybe. But right now I’m thinking that you have something underhanded going on, so stupid is probably an improvement.”
His stomach was tight now for a whole other reason. “I told you, I’m not in love with him, and I’m not some jealous boyfriend. He doesn’t owe me money or anything.”
“Then what is it?”
God, this was hard to say. “You know how I said y
esterday that I have some abandonment issues? Ghost abandons people.” Instantly he shook his head and clarified, “That’s unfair. I mean that he takes off. It’s not abandonment. Still, there’s only so much of it I can take.” Hushed, like a confession, he added, “I don’t think I can take much more. It’s one thing if he ran because he’s in trouble, but...”
“But it’s something else if he took off because he doesn’t give a shit.”
Tobias dragged a hand over his mouth, suddenly tired. “Yeah. And this search...it’s so many things at once. If he did drop me, I don’t want to be someone who stays put where I get left, if that makes sense. I need to see for myself. So I’ll know if I should—should get over it or not.”
“Why haven’t you kicked him loose already? This is all...” Sullivan pursed his lips, searching for words, maybe. “It seems very effortful.”
Tobias hesitated. “You remember I said I’d been in a residential treatment facility?”
“Yeah.”
“I was... Everything in my life was sort of crushing me. Up until then, I’d had this idea that if I could just make it through high school, things would be different. I’d be different. And then one day my guidance counselor made me fill out this little card about what my eventual career field was going to be and I realized I was going to have to write medicine, and I couldn’t. It was too much. It was the whole rest of my life smothering me and I didn’t see a way out and I—I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
Quietly, Sullivan asked, “But you hurt yourself?”
“Yeah.” He paused, wondering why it was so easy to tell Sullivan what was so difficult to tell anyone else, and decided it had something to do with the nature of casual. He didn’t need to impress Sullivan, didn’t need to wonder about how it would affect things. He could say whatever he wanted. There was power in that. “The next day I was in Woodbury.”
“Where Ghost comes in.”
“Yeah.” Tobias tilted his head back against the seat. “My parents picked it because it was classified as a behavioral treatment place as much as a mental health one. I guess they figured it would look better if we could say that I’d just gone to too many parties as a teenager instead of that I’d had a nervous breakdown and spent some time on depression meds. I knew within hours that I’d been stupid to let them put me in there. I don’t know what I’d pictured, but the guys there were... I was in way over my head. I was...”
