“We should go back in,” he decided.
He was right, we should, and yet I didn’t want to move from that spot just yet. “A few more minutes?”
Arin took my hand. “Sure.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Resan
I EXPECTED to see Arin again at some point after his first appointment. We were in the same building after all. But I hadn’t expected to see him directly after. His hair was still wet from his shower, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock when he came to my open door. He didn’t say anything, just came in and lay across my couch while I was in a nearby chair reading the news on my holoscreen.
“How was it?” I asked him.
He shrugged and began eating my chocolates. “It was fine. I guess. I’m not much of a top, but he seemed happy enough. Maybe you should do him. He’d probably like that.”
I quickly shook my head. “Not a chance. I like being on this side of things, thank you very much.” He threw a wrapper at me. “You seem to be okay, though, all things considered. I’m glad.”
“Maybe I won’t be when I’m under someone again. That’s actually what I came to talk to you about.”
I put the holoscreen aside and gave him my full attention. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” He chewed on his bottom lip while looking over at me. “Could we pretend to have sex? Just to make sure I’m going to be okay for when the next guy doesn’t want me to be the one screwing him?”
I tapped the button on the wall to close my door so that we could have a bit of privacy. “We’ve had actual sex, and you were fine,” I reminded him. “You could be just fine with someone else too.”
“Maybe. But there are some big differences between what we do and what other people expect to be able to do with me. I had years to adjust and get over someone squashing me and using me. I didn’t mind getting my head pushed down or anything anymore. Now it’s all fresh and new again, and I don’t have time to process everything and get back to where I was before Bowman got me back again. And with you I haven’t been able to have you on top of me, and you’ve barely been allowed to touch me. Monroe said I could have some extra time if I wanted it, but he won’t give me years to come back to how I was. I need to be better now, not sometime in the future. And you’re the only one I can trust to do this for me.”
Everything he was saying was making sense to me, and I cared about him enough that I wanted to help him. I also felt guilty because I knew that the problems he was having now were largely because of me.
“Okay. With your pants on or off?”
He started to get off the couch, then hesitated. “Off probably, since I won’t have that option later on today. Assuming I can get through this with you. I’m such a mess.”
I got up and walked over to him. “You’re really not. Is here okay for this?”
Arin nodded and lay down over the couch. Having him here instead of in my bed made me think this would somehow be less intimate, but as I pulled my shirt over my head, then pushed my pants down my hips, I almost wished I could have him in a bed. And also that we could be together like he would be with someone else later today.
I grabbed the waist of his pants and pulled them down his thighs. I’d seen him naked plenty of times, but he’d never looked quite as helpless as when I had him lying naked under me right then. I put my hand on his hip, and I felt him tremble. I moved him into position so that he was on his knees instead, and then I came in close behind him. He was tense, and the lines of his back stood out, but he said nothing, and he didn’t try to stop me as I rubbed my cock between his cheeks. It wasn’t anything close to the sex he would likely be having, but maybe it was enough to get him okay with being with someone else in a few hours.
When he was fine with me doing that, I pressed myself up against his hole. I didn’t do anything more than that.
“Tell me I don’t have a choice. That you could fuck me right here if you wanted to, and there’s nothing anyone could do to stop you,” he whispered brokenly.
I pulled away from him and let him lie on his side as I came over and knelt beside him. “No.” I rubbed his shoulder. “I could never say anything like that to you.”
He gave me a weak smile and wiped at his eyes. I hadn’t known he’d been crying. “A lot of people like to make us feel powerless when they’re with us. I know I’ll hear something like that sooner rather than later. I tell it to myself to try to get used to hearing the words, but they don’t hurt coming from me. They just sound like I’m talking to myself.”
I leaned forward and kissed him. I moved my hand to the back of his head where his hair was longest. “You don’t have a choice in this. You’re mine, and I can do whatever I want with you,” I whispered back to him.
“You didn’t say it right.” He sniffled.
I’d done the best I could. I kissed his wet cheek and leaned back. “You’ll always have a choice in this. Always. If you ever feel unsafe or someone is making you do something you don’t want to do, then you push that button on the headboard, and either Em, or I, or both of us even, will come running, and we will kick that guy’s ass. Whatever they say to you, however they try to make you feel small and powerless, it’s all just talk. He’s bluffing. Having us around means that you don’t have to worry about anyone ever hurting you ever again.”
Arin took my hand and laced his fingers in with mine. “Even if they are just words, they can hurt a lot.”
I nodded. “I’m sure they can. But you have words too. You can say no. You can yell for help. You can tell him that you’re friends with a peacekeeper and a bounty hunter and neither one of them hesitate to shoot when someone they care about is in trouble. We’re seconds away, no matter what.”
“You’re not, though. Not always. Not when you leave with Em. Then it’s just Corbin and Monroe.”
I instantly saw his point, and I knew I couldn’t stay here with him forever to make sure he was safe. “What if we took you with us when we left? Just until you’re feeling safer?”
“Em wouldn’t agree to that.”
“You let me worry about what my best friend would, or would not, agree to.” I kissed him again, and he started to sit up. Even though we were still naked together, I sat on the couch next to him and put my arm around his side. “You’ll be just fine.” I kissed the top of his head. “You have nothing at all to worry about. If anyone tries anything with you, I’ll come into your room, and I’ll neutralize them.”
“Thank you.” His voice was still shaky, but he sounded stronger at least.
“Anytime.”
ARIN WENT back to his room a few minutes later, and I went in search of Em. I found him in the office sitting next to Corbin, which was good since, as the person running Asiq now for the most part, I would need to talk to him about this too.
“Hey,” Corbin said as I entered his office. “Sorry I’ve been too busy to say hi lately. How was the market?”
“Warm. Colorful.” I took a seat across from them, and they put aside the holoscreen they’d been looking at, to be able to give attention to me. “Arin isn’t doing well. He can handle some things but not others. I believe he could have used more time to separate his most recent experiences with Bowman from what he does here and the men here who treat him in some of the ways Bowman did.”
Corbin frowned and shook his head. Em took his hand. “Do you want to take him off-world again? Give him more space and time to adjust?” Em asked me.
I wished that was the answer. “He wants to be better faster than that, but he doesn’t feel safe without me around. We’ve become friends in our months together. I want to know if we can bring him with us when we go track down criminals. Not forever, just until he’s feeling strong enough to be on his own again.”
Em glared at me. “You want to take a civilian on a bounty hunting mission? One who can’t protect himself even? No. It’ll put him in too much danger. Absolutely not.”
Corbin rolled his eyes. “Or… he could just stay on the ship and you cou
ld stop thinking you and Resan are the only two people in this universe who know how to use a neutralizer.”
I was pretty sure I’d stumbled into an argument of theirs. “What’s going on with you two?”
“He won’t let me carry a neutralizer,” Corbin replied instantly.
“He doesn’t need one when we’re here,” Em spoke up right after.
As much as I didn’t want to get in the middle of this, and I really didn’t, I could hear Arin’s voice in my head. “We’re not always here, though, Em. It might be good for him to have one in case he needs to protect himself or one of the aspasians. It could—”
“Traitor,” Em grumbled, cutting me off. Corbin was grinning as Em got up, then kissed him on his cheek. “We’ll talk about it some more.” Corbin lost his smile. “But I’m not saying no.”
Em went to get another holoscreen from where it was sitting on a side table. It was his own this time, and he brought it over for me to see. “This is our next target.”
I took the holoscreen from him and read the information over quickly. “Are we going after slavers now?”
Em just shrugged and took the holoscreen back. “We can’t change slavery, but I don’t like what Arin went through, and I know you don’t either. Maybe frightening some of these people, and if we have to—killing them—will do the world some good. Their slave information and marriages are all on record, so I was going to start with those who had some of the youngest slaves and move out from there. At least until something bigger came along. It’s been slow in the sector lately. We aren’t technically going after them, but we can legally check up on them.”
Slow was good news for Corbin, since it meant he could have Em around more, but I saw how anxious Em was to be off doing something. “Get him a neutralizer, and say Arin can come, and I’m in.”
Em gave me a tight smile. “Fine,” he grumbled, but there was no malice in it.
“Good.”
I got up and headed toward the door.
“Thank you, Resan,” Corbin called to me. He sounded happy. “We Sythes have to stick together on these things where our men are concerned.”
I hesitated at the door. “First of all, you know I’m only half Sythe.” He shrugged as if that little detail was of no real concern to him. “And, also, I don’t have a man. If you mean Arin, he’s not mine. He’s a friend, but that’s all.”
“Okay,” Corbin said with another little shrug.
I didn’t like how easily he had dismissed what I was saying, as if he didn’t believe a word of it, but I wanted to go talk to Arin and let him know that he would be coming with us more than I wanted to argue with Corbin any longer. Especially when Corbin had already turned all of his attention back to Em, and I no longer existed in their world at all.
I went to go find Arin, but he was heading toward his room with two men following him along. They both looked eager as their gazes roamed over him as if they had any right to look at him like that. I was instantly worried for him.
“Hey,” I called to him. I was ready to step in and tell them both to go find another aspasian if he needed my help.
He smiled at me, though. “See you later.”
I nodded and hung out near his door as the two of them followed him into his room. I listened for the sounds of his distress, anything that would have told me he was in trouble and needed my help. But the soundproofing in the rooms must have been better than I expected because I heard nothing. Still, I waited beside his door.
After nearly an hour, the two men came out. They were smiling and looking happy. I used the thumb scan to get into Arin’s room. Since both Em and I were there to protect them, and we needed access to all of the rooms in Asiq to be able to do that, there was nowhere that was off-limits to us.
Arin was stripping the bed when I came in. He snorted and shook his head at me. “You look like you were worried about me.”
“I was.” I kept back and let him work, but I made sure to look him over in the meantime. He was free of any bruises or welts, but he did have a few bite marks on his chest and shoulders. “Are you okay?”
He nodded and replaced the sheets on his bed. “I need to get a shower, then I’ll tell you all about what they did to me if you want. It could give you something to think about the next time you’re with just your hand.”
I threw a chocolate at him. He picked it up off the floor, unwrapped it, and then he ate it. “Thanks. I was craving some.” With his bed made, he headed into the bathroom. “I’ll be out in a few minutes if you want to stay and get comfortable or something.”
“Sure. Are you positive you’re okay, though?” He looked completely at ease, but I wasn’t really convinced.
“Perfectly fine,” he assured me. “See you in a few minutes.”
He disappeared into the bathroom, and I listened to the water start up. A few minutes later, though, I heard the sound of him crying over the spray. I got off the couch I’d been sitting on and came in to join him in the bathroom.
“Not really in the mood for shower sex right now, Resan,” he said.
“I’m not in here for that.”
He came to the glass, and I was able to barely make out his outline. “Then what do you want?”
“I heard you crying.”
His sigh was louder than the spray of the water. “Yeah, well, sometimes people cry. It’s not an emergency.”
“Maybe not, but I’d like to know what’s wrong anyway.” And I wasn’t leaving until he told me.
He was silent as he finished showering, and I patiently stood there waiting for him to get done. It didn’t take him that long. When he came out, I handed him a towel, and he wrapped it around his waist as the hot steam drifted around us.
“I thought I could handle it. You helped, and I thought I would be okay. And I was, for an hour, but as soon as they were gone, I started shaking.”
He looked over at me. “If I can’t do this and I can’t be an aspasian, then what hope is there for me? This is all I know how to be.”
I didn’t have a good answer for him. “If you think of something I can do to help you, I will.”
He gave me a weak smile and leaned against the wall. “I know you will. But is it out of guilt for what you did to me or because you care about me?”
“Both.” I wouldn’t lie to him about that and make him think there was more between us than there was. I did care about him, but I also owed him a debt.
“Thank you.”
I nodded. “Would you like to come with Em and me the next time we leave for a mission? It might make you feel better. Or, at the very least, safer.”
He chewed on his bottom lip as he considered my offer. “I don’t really know what I want, except to go back to being the person I was before I was back with Bowman again. If that helps then I’ll go with you. I need to figure out a way to stop feeling like this.”
“Like what?”
“Broken.” He walked past me and went to his closet. I looked away when he dropped his towel and pulled on another pair of black pants. He grabbed a jar of cream and sat down on the bed to apply it to his chest. I hadn’t realized the aspasians had something to diminish the marks clients left on them, but it made sense as soon as I started thinking about it.
“You have one on the back of your shoulder too. Can I help you take care of it?”
He silently offered me the jar of cream, and I sat down behind him to begin smoothing it into his skin. The cream was more like a thick paste, and it took a while to rub it into his pale skin. He didn’t complain, though, as he sat in front of me. He’d long since finished on the bite mark he was taking care of when I was still giving his shoulder attention.
“I don’t know how to get over this. It’s not like it was any different this time with Bowman than it has been in the past. Everything was the exact same.”
“But you were different,” I quietly reminded him. I couldn’t imagine him as a child enduring those horrors, but he’d been free for years. He’d had a l
ife and choices, and then that had all been taken away from him again.
He nodded, and I dropped my hand from his back so that he could lean against me. I held him close and kissed the side of his neck. “I’m going to help you through this.” I expected him to remind me, again, that I was the reason he was suffering right now anyway, but he didn’t. He only sighed and stayed in my arms. “It’ll be okay.” Somehow it would be. We really didn’t have another option here.
“I know,” he quietly said. He sighed deeply.
“Come out with Em and me the next time we go to take someone down. You might like it. Maybe you’ll want to become a peacekeeper after you see what it’s like for yourself.”
He snorted. “Not a chance. Their ways are far too set in stone for me. I need to be able to make my own decisions about a person’s guilt or innocence, and you can’t do that while being a peacekeeper.”
“You sound like Em. Like a bounty hunter. He never did like how strict I was, and I never understood how he could live by his own code and not one that was imposed on him.”
Arin tilted his head back to look at me. “Em decides who he kills?”
I frowned as I realized people here didn’t really understand what either of us actually did at all. “Yes. He takes the jobs he wants to, and he decides who to go after based on his own ideas of guilt and innocence. We both protect people and try to keep the universe a safer place overall, but he has far fewer rules to follow than I do, and so he’s able to make decisions that I would never be able to while being a peacekeeper. All of that would change, though, if I ever decided to join him in going after bounties.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’ve been considering it more and more. What I’ve done recently with you is not the way of a peacekeeper. It might not even be the way of a bounty hunter either. But I am only certain that it is not the peacekeepers’ way. I don’t regret any decision I’ve made recently, except the one that gave you back to Bowman, but that one was the most in line with what a peacekeeper does, so I’m not sure what to think of any of this. The only thing I am certain of is that I’m glad you’re here now, regardless of what had to happen to get you here.”
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