Chapter 1
Summer
The summer Viktor Volkov entered Dominic Caruso's life began the way most summers in Harlan Creek, Tennessee began: slowly, with a heat that descended over the small town in June and didn't exit until late September. The town didn't have a stoplight, a chain restaurant, or any reason for existing beyond the fact that it always had. Population two thousand, give or take whoever had left since the last census. Dominic had tried to leave twice and had failed both times, the second time, the events of this story, more permanently than the first.
He was twenty-four years old, six feet even, with a physique that came from real work. Not the carved symmetry of endless hours in the gym but brawn built from hauling, lifting, and crawling under things forcing them to cooperate. His unapologetically hairy forearms were roped with muscle that flexed visibly when he opened a jar. His shoulders had the rounded mass of a man who had been using them since he was fifteen. His torso was a trunk from which two solid pecs and arms emerged. Dark, curly hair, Italian-dark, falling across his forehead with careless ease. A jaw that carried three days of stubble by default, not groomed, not trimmed, simply there. And the hair on his body was the same: chest, forearms, a trail from navel downward, dark and dense and entirely natural, the kind that exists on men like Dominic who have never considered removing it because it has never occurred to them that it needed removing. He was, without knowing it or performing it, erotic in the way of men who are completely unselfconscious about their physical selves.
He had grown up in Harlan Creek, where usefulness was valued more than appearance. The things that mattered to him were the cracked manifold on the Silverado out back, the water heater that needed replacing in unit six, and the never-ending reality of whether this week's jobs would cover the site fees at the Pineview Mobile Estates.
The trailer was single-wide, which meant the walls were close enough that arguments were impossible to escape. No room to pace, no room to create distance, just two people and a son in a space that was never meant to contain this much unhappiness. Dominic had been in it for five years. He had been unhappy in it for four and a half.
Brianna Caruso, née Decker, was twenty-three and she had bagged her high school crush just as planned. She'd promised she was protected, and, like so many others, ended up pregnant at 16. She was not cruel exactly but found it easy to blame someone else for her life's shortcomings. Dominic was that someone else. Her mother, Tammy Decker, who lived three trailers down and whose rust-colored Impala was visible from the kitchen window, provided daily reinforcement of this position. Tammy was forty-one and made it her life's work to make sure her daughter didn't end up in the same miserable circumstance she had. She was failing. She appeared at the door of the single-wide with the regularity of bad weather, always with the contempt of mothers-in-law who have decided their daughter married poorly.
The one thing in Dominic's life that was entirely uncomplicated was Dom Jr. Seven years old, gap-toothed, already showing the dark hair and bone structure that would make him either a very attractive or very trouble-prone young man, possibly both. Dominic loved him with the protective ferocity of a man who has decided that at least one thing in his life is going to be good.
The vintage cars were the other thing. They were scattered through Pineview Mobile Estates like debris accumulates in a slow-moving river, a '68 Camaro with a blown head gasket that had been blown since 2019, a '71 Chevelle in the common area, a '57 Ford pickup behind unit eleven that Dominic had been quietly nursing back to health for two years, trading labor for the privilege of working on it. He knew engines the way some people know language, not as learned knowledge but as instinct, the ability to listen to a thing and understand what it was telling him.
It was the Ford pickup that brought him to Randy Pruitt's attention.
Randy ran a general contracting outfit on Route 7 that employed six men and stayed solvent through decent work and the fact that he'd been in business long enough that people called him first. He was thirty, six years older than Dominic. He remembered Dominic at seventeen, tearing up the field for Harlan Creek High on Friday nights, before either of them had a reason to know each other by name. Randy had hired him the week he left high school and the two of them had settled into something that had stopped being employer and employee a long time ago without either of them being able to say exactly when it happened. If you'd asked Randy why he kept a kid on his crew longer than the work required, he'd have said loyalty, work ethic, the fact that Dominic never needed telling twice. He believed that. Mostly.
Randy had a son too. Jake, seven years old, rambunctious and currently inseparable from Dom Jr. in the way that small-town kids bond when their fathers are close, the two of them turning up at each other's trailers on Saturday mornings without calling ahead, spending entire days between the two households without anyone tracking whose kid was where.
Randy had stopped by Pineview to drop off a check and found Dominic under the hood in the July heat, shirt off, forearms dark with grease, doing something precise and focused to the carburetor. Randy looked at the engine and then at Dominic and said without preamble: "I got somebody you should meet."
"I'm kind of in the middle of something," Dominic said, without looking up.
"There's a man in Franklin. Has twelve vintage cars and more money than he knows what to do with. Keeps hiring restoration people and none of them work out." Randy paused. "You'd work out."
"Franklin," Dominic said.
"Hour away. Spectacular house. Not exactly sure what he needs, but I told him about you and he said 'send him over'. He pays well."
Dominic looked back at the carburetor. He thought about the site fees. He thought about Dom Jr.'s school supplies. He thought about the water heater. "Set it up," he said.
*****
Viktor Volkov's property sat at the end of a private road in Franklin, Tennessee, behind a gate that required a code and a camera that required your face. The house was stone and glass, twelve thousand square feet, set back from the tree line looking unlike anything Dominic had witnessed, in person or on TV. The grounds were immaculate. It had a quiet that seemed almost manufactured.
The gate was raised and Viktor met him in the drive.
He was forty-three years old and looked it in the best possible sense, a man in his prime who had paid a lot of attention to his body. Average height, lean but dense with it, the kind of physique that looked like, however he got there, it was intentional. Dominic had never come across anyone quite like him; he kept himself the way a man keeps himself when he has reasons that are private: disciplined, well dressed, but in a way that had no place to live in Dominic's admittedly sheltered brain. His hair was dark, shot through with gray at the temples in a way that was either distinguished or simply accurate. His eyes were a shade of pale gray-green that seemed, in certain light, to penetrate Dominic's. His accent was slight, the edges of his vowels still carried something Eastern European, worn smooth by twenty years of American English but present if you listened for it. His handshake was brief and entirely confident, the grip of a man who doesn't need to impress a stranger with a firm handshake.
He was the kind of man you noticed without being able to say exactly why. He was also wearing a cologne that Dominic noticed immediately and couldn't quite place, something dark and resinous, cedar and something else underneath it, the kind of fragrance that came from somewhere that wasn't a drugstore.
What Viktor saw when Dominic stepped out of his truck was something that Randy Pruitt's description had, if anything, undersold. The dark hair. The forearms. The chest visible where the top two buttons of his shirt were open, dark hair curling at the collar. The way the tired denim sat on his hips as if it'd been there for years. The jaw that carried three days of genuine, untrimmed stubble. The sheer physicality of him stepping out of that truck, a body that had been built by work and didn't know it. A man who had no idea what he was, which was, to Viktor, the most compelling thing about him. Viktor had been with men who spent hours in gyms producing what this man had simply accumulated through living, and there was no comparison. He kept his expression entirely neutral and extended his hand.
"Mr. Caruso, Randy speaks well of you."
"Dominic," Dominic said. "Nobody calls me Mr. Caruso."
Something shifted in Viktor's expression, not quite a smile, but the thing adjacent to it. "Dominic," he said, noting a vague European accent.
Viktor repeated in generalities what Randy had already shared with him. A wide range of tasks that needed to be done, some more urgent than others, and none as yet completed to Viktor's satisfaction. And, finally, the cars, promising they'd get to those too.
He walked him through the house first. A leaking copper pipe behind the butler's pantry, the hardwood floors in the east wing, a stone fireplace in the study, outdoor lighting along the north terrace. Real work, all of it, the kind that required someone who could get it all done, not a dozen different workmen.
Dominic moved through each problem with genuine attentiveness. He asked questions. He gave honest assessments without padding them, which Viktor noted.
Then Viktor opened the door to the garage.
It was a separate structure, purpose-built, climate-controlled, with twelve bays and lighting that treated the cars like what they were: objects of serious consequence. A 1967 Shelby GT500 in Brittany Blue. A 1969 Camaro Z/28 in Hugger Orange. A 1970 Plymouth 'Cuda in Plum Crazy Purple. A 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air restored to a standard that bordered on reverence. Eight more, each one a chapter in the history of American muscle.
"Christ," Dominic said. Quietly, to himself, the way you say something when you forget anyone else is in the room.
"You know them." Not a question.
Dominic was already moving toward the Shelby. He stopped just short of touching it, which was the right instinct and Viktor noted it. "The 500 had the 428 Police Interceptor," Dominic said. "Carroll Shelby basically dropped a truck engine into a Mustang and called it a sports car. It shouldn't work." He looked at it. "But it did."
"The previous restoration is compromised," Viktor said. "The carburetor has been rebuilt incorrectly. The timing is off. She runs but not as she should."
"I can fix that," Dominic said. He hadn't planned to say it. He said it before he knew he said it because it was true.
"I know," Viktor said.
They spent two hours in the garage. Dominic forgot about the site fees and the water heater and Brianna's constant complaining. He talked about cars with fluency and confidence well above his level of formal education, on this topic or any other. Viktor listened, asked precise questions, not fully realizing his attention was shifting away from the cars and more toward the man standing next to him.
Viktor watched Dominic move through the garage and felt a pull that was impossible to ignore. The shirt that fit across the shoulders without trying. The veins and hair on his forearms when he reached into an engine bay were unlike anything he'd seen at his expensive gym. The genuine love for the automobiles, a love he'd had little occasion to share with anyone before this moment. The desire to keep talking, keep sharing, keep.....he didn't know what but the desire was there. Viktor had learned, over many years and in many contexts, to want things without showing that he wanted them. He'd never had to work harder to not show it than this moment.
Dominic felt something as well. Not clearly, not in a way he could have named, but as a tension, a charge in the air between them when Viktor stood close to point at something under a hood. For the first time in his life, he was being seen, heard, respected by a man in an authoritative position. He didn't know what to do with the feeling. He set it aside, moved past it and convinced himself to ignore it.
At the end of the afternoon, Viktor made an offer: a flexible arrangement, odd jobs around the property on an as-needed basis, starting as soon as Dominic was available. Three days a week commitment with pay that exceeded a full week of 40 hours a day now. Dominic tried to play it cool but lost. He smiled and immediately said yes.
He drove home through the June heat with the windows down. Two feelings fought for his attention. First the pure joy of being paid well to do handyman work that was second nature to him and help restore vintage cars with a man who loved them as much as he did. But the other, the one that made him uneasy. There was something about Viktor Volkov that Dominic couldn't name, not threatening exactly, but present in an uneasy way. And underneath that, something else. The tension from the garage, still there on the drive home, still doing something to him he had no intention of poking at. But the work he'd be doing and the hefty paycheck easily overshadowed any of the unnamed uneasiness he may have felt.
*****
He started the following Monday.
The house projects took the first two weeks. The copper pipe behind the butler's pantry was a morning's work. The hardwood floors in the east wing took longer — four days on his knees, pulling and laying and finishing — and Viktor found reasons to appear in the doorway with a glass of water he didn't need, watching. Dominic fixed all of it.
Viktor paid him at the end of each week in cash, in an envelope, not bothering to ask or explain that the payment was in cash. The implications of cash payment was unspoken and obvious to both of them. Each week Viktor tipped generously on top of the agreed upon fee, pointing it out to Dominic, as if he were seeking gratitude. Dominic had seen this before and knew his role was to thank his employer profusely, which he did genuinely and convincingly.
What was harder not to notice was the operation that ran alongside the house, largely invisible but not entirely. Two men appeared sporadically, always at odd hours, always dressed in a way that conveyed function over appearance, dark clothing, nothing that identified them, the kind of men who moved through spaces without wanting to be remembered. They arrived in vehicles with out-of-state plates and departed the same way. They were never introduced. They used a side entrance to the main house that Dominic had no reason to approach.
One afternoon in late June, Dominic saw two of them through a door to what appeared to be another garage, adjacent to the twelve-car garage that housed the vintage vehicles. He hadn't noticed this second structure before. But looking closer, he noticed the lack of windows and other residential features, which made him wonder what it housed.
He mentioned it to Viktor that evening, with the bluntness that came naturally to him. "You've got people coming and going I haven't met, it looked like they were going into another garage, next to the big one," he said.
Viktor looked at him pleasantly. "Business associates," he said. "I have several ventures. Some require a certain amount of discretion." He held Dominic's gaze for a moment. The pale eyes doing their thing. "You understand discretion."
It wasn't a question. Dominic said yes. He didn't ask further, which was the right answer and Viktor noted it.
The answer didn't sit right, but he let it go. There was something in the way Viktor had said "certain amount of discretion" that Dominic recognized without being able to say where from. He knew that tone. He didn't go looking for what was behind it.
The cars were the other world entirely. In the garage, Viktor was a different person or perhaps more completely himself, genuinely curious, the authority that characterized everything else about him replaced by something that looked more like partnership. He knew his cars. He respected Dominic's mechanical knowledge, which gave Dominic a sense of pride he'd never experienced before. Their conversations in the garage were the best conversations Dominic had with anyone in maybe ever, and if he was honest, were the best part of his week.
The scent of the cologne was always there. That dark cedar-and-resin fragrance that Dominic had no context for and couldn't stop noticing. In the garage it competed with the smell of oil and metal and it lost, but it was always present underneath. It became, over the course of the summer, something that was simply there.
The garage incident happened in early July.
The climate control had been struggling for a week, something wrong with the compressor, which Dominic had flagged and Viktor had said he'd have a technician look at. The technician hadn't appeared, which meant the garage in July was the garage in July: a sweltering structure with twelve cars in it and the Tennessee sun on the roof for ten hours a day. By nine in the morning it was already uncomfortable. By eleven it was the kind of heat that made sustained work a decision.
Dominic had his shirt off by nine-thirty. By eleven he was sweating through his jeans and considering whether the work could wait.
Viktor appeared in the garage doorway with a glass of water and a folded pair of shorts. "You'll be more comfortable in these," he said. He set the water on the workbench and held out the shorts.
Dominic looked at them. They were denim, cutoffs, frayed at the edge, and short in the way of things that have been cut from longer pants without particular concern for decorum. He looked at Viktor.
"Where did those come from?"
"I had them laying around, looked like they may fit you," Viktor said simply. "The heat is going to get worse before it gets better. You can't work in those heavy jeans all day."
Dominic took the shorts. He changed in the small bathroom off the garage and came back out wearing only the shorts and his work boots. They fit, barely, the kind of fit that left little to interpretation. He was aware of this in the way you are aware of something that can't be un-noticed and went back to the Shelby's carburetor without comment.
Viktor sat on a stool near the workbench and watched him work.
This was not unusual, Viktor often came to the garage while Dominic worked, asking questions, observing, the two of them talking about the cars sharing a genuine language. But today he was aware of it in a way that didn't entirely make him want to move away. Viktor's eyes moved over him the way you look at something when you think you're not being caught looking. Dominic caught him twice, both times in the periphery, and both times Viktor shifted his gaze to the engine without apology for where his attention had gone.
Dominic said nothing. He worked on the carburetor. He was aware of the July heat on his skin and the frayed denim that reached his crotch and the pale eyes that kept returning. He kept his eyes on the carburetor and told himself the warmth he felt had everything to do with the July heat.
He drove home that evening thinking about nothing but the shorts. The way he felt in them, low on his hips, bulge protruding, how they stretched across his ass. The way Viktor watched him. He kept trying to concentrate on the mechanics of the day, but his mind wouldn't budge.
He got home and headed straight to the shower. He let the cool water refresh him, but it did nothing to stop the intensity of his growing erection. He rarely jerked off with his wife in the next room, but he was unable to contain the arousal. The sensation of the too-short shorts, the work boots, the sweat, and being overtly judged for his appearance was overwhelming. His hand moved to his now fully erect cock and gripped it. He'd jerked off in the shower countless times, but his cock had never felt more full, more rigid. He savored what he held in his hand, the firm shaft, the swollen head, he even fingered his piss slit. He added his wife's conditioner to his hand and slowly stroked himself, picturing himself as Viktor would have seen him. Sweaty, grease stained, muscles strained, the shorts creeping up his ass, stretching across his groin. The more he pictured it, the more ferociously he stroked. He felt his balls pull up into his body and he did something he'd never done before. With his free hand he reached up and pinched his nipple. Hard. Doing that had never crossed his mind before, now he was pinching, hard, with one hand and beating his massively erect cock with the other. Trying not to scream from the eruption, a rope of jizz exploded from the base of his cock and shot across the shower, landing on the tile wall. Another followed. Another. Another. He stopped counting at 10. He didn't know what happened; he'd never experienced an orgasm of that intensity. Eventually, he brought his breathing under control, finished showering, and returned to his single-wide, wife, and life.
The summer wore on, the Tennessee heat intensified, and Dominic continued his variety of jobs, which now included outdoor labor. Viktor made sure that Dominic's jean shorts were washed every evening and ready for him to wear on the job, making the shorts and work boots his summer uniform. Viktor found more and more reasons to watch his young handyman work, and to his surprise, Dominic didn't seem to mind Viktor's eyes on him.
The other thing that became routine that summer was Dominic's showers upon returning home. In the past he'd relax with a beer or two before his shower. Now he'd charge to the bathroom immediately upon returning, strip, and let the water and his right hand relieve him of the day's tensions.
*****
The pool incident happened on a Friday in August.
Dominic arrived at eight AM to find Viktor already up and efficiently moving through the house. He was a man on a mission. He handed Dominic a coffee and told him the pool company had canceled, family emergency, couldn't reschedule for weeks, and asked if Dominic knew how to handle pool maintenance. Dominic said he did. Viktor nodded like he already knew that and walked him through what needed doing: the routine weekly tasks plus the annual liner scrub, which meant getting in the water and working the walls from the inside with a brush.
"Take care of the terrace lights first," Viktor said. "The pool around noon."
Dominic spent the morning on the lighting. Around eleven-thirty Viktor appeared on the terrace and mentioned, in the same tone he used for everything, that he was hosting a few business associates for a casual poolside lunch. Three men. They'd be arriving around noon.
Dominic looked at him. "You want me doing the pool while you're having lunch out here?"
"The liner won't clean itself," Viktor said pleasantly. "They're colleagues, not guests. Nobody will be bothered." He paused. "You'll have to do it from inside the pool so I left a bathing suit for you in the guest room. Go change."
Dominic went to the guest room.
On the bed, laid out flat like it had been put there deliberately, which it had, was a white Speedo. Not board shorts. Not a modest athletic suit of any kind. A white Speedo, the European kind, low waist and high cut legs, the kind Dominic had seen exactly nowhere in Harlan Creek in his entire life.
He picked it up and walked back to the hall. "I can't wear this. There are going to be people out here."
Viktor was straightening something on the terrace table and didn't look up. "This is what Europeans wear, they're used to it," Viktor said, implying his guests were European, and with a slight edge that implied the conversation was becoming tiresome. "It's a bathing suit. You're cleaning a pool, not attending a formal event." He finally looked at Dominic. "Or you can do it without the suit, if that's more comfortable for you."
He said it with complete composure and turned back to the table.
Dominic stood in the hallway holding the Speedo and heard the gate buzzer sound, which meant the first car was coming through. He went back to the guest room and closed the door.
He changed. He had to. He told himself that.
What he hadn't told himself, and wasn't prepared for, was how the suit would feel. He pulled it on and stood in the guest room and became aware of something he didn't know what to do with: he felt sexy. The suit fit him the way clothes fit men whose bodies were built for them, and his body was built for this whether he'd known it or not. It accentuated his thighs and ass. It cupped him in a way that left nothing to the imagination, his shaft and balls fighting for limited space, the dark curl of his untrimmed pubic hair visible above the waistband, the kind of sight that would stop a room. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the back of the door and looked away and then looked back. He hadn't expected that. He hadn't expected any of it, and the word that came to him without invitation: desirable. He stood there another moment longer than he needed to, equal parts confusion and something else he couldn't name, and realized that his body was already reaching its own conclusion.
He was standing in the guest room of Viktor Volkov's house in Franklin, Tennessee, in a white Speedo, with three men arriving outside, getting hard. He pushed himself down into the suit and told himself to get it together and went out to the pool.
The three men were already on the terrace. Dominic took them in with the peripheral awareness he'd developed over the summer for everything that happened at this property: thirties and forties, all of them, the kind of men who wore linen shirts to a casual lunch without looking like they'd tried. Money was obvious, the way it's obvious when it's been there forever. They were talking with Viktor near the table when Dominic came through the pool gate and lowered himself down the ladder into the water without looking in their direction.
He felt them look anyway.
The liner work was methodical, brush moving in slow overlapping sections, shallow end to deep, nothing complicated about it. Dominic knew how to do this and tried not to think about the four men eating lunch fifteen feet away. He could hear their conversation without making out words, noticing them lowering their voice periodically not to be overheard. He heard the clink of glasses. He heard, once, a brief exchange followed by quiet laughter, and he had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that the laughter had something to do with the pool, which meant him.
He kept working.
He felt it the whole time. Not constant, they had their lunch, their conversation, whatever business they were covering, but it returned, regularly, the way attention returns to something worth looking at. Dominic knew this feeling, he'd felt it all summer from Viktor. This was four versions of it at once.
What he didn't expect was that he was unable to control the only part of his body that now needed to be concealed. He was nearly done with the task and couldn't get out of the pool.
He was in a pool in a white Speedo being looked at by four men and his body kept doing something he'd been pushing back down since the guest room and the suit and the mirror. He stayed in the deep end of the pool, found reasons to work the far wall. He took his time.
Once he couldn't stall any longer and he sensed he was at least minimally deflated, he emerged from the water to skim the surface, which meant standing at the pool's edge with the long-handled net, working the water, fully visible, nowhere to submerge. He did it. He moved around the perimeter with the net and felt the terrace behind him and kept his eyes on the water.
Now out of the pool, the watching intensified. He could feel it on his back, his shoulders, the backs of his thighs. The white suit, wet now, concealing even less than it had been doing dry. He knew this without looking down. He kept moving.
He heard Viktor's voice behind him. "Dominic."
He turned. Viktor was standing at the edge of the terrace, the three men arranged at the table behind him, all of them looking.
"Come meet my colleagues."
It was not a request. Dominic set the net against the fence and walked over, aware of every step. Viktor made the introductions, entirely comfortable with the situation he had arranged, ignoring Dominic's discomfort. He made the introductions and then, unprompted, began talking about his cars. The Shelby restoration. The brake overhaul on the 'Cuda. His knowledge of vintage American muscle, which Viktor described like a proud father who had discovered something exceptional in his son and wanted others to know and appreciate it as well.
The three men looked at Dominic politely, being careful to avoid revealing what was really going through their minds. One of them asked a question about the Shelby. Dominic answered it. His voice came out steadier than he felt.
The whole thing lasted maybe four minutes. Viktor released him with a nod and Dominic went back to the pool equipment, coiled the skimmer hose, checked the chemical levels, did the things that needed doing. By the time he'd finished and changed back into his work clothes in the guest room, the lunch was winding down and the men were moving toward the gate.
He said goodbye to Viktor at the side entrance. Viktor thanked him for the pool. His expression was pleasant and entirely unrevealing, which by now Dominic understood was simply how Viktor looked when he'd gotten exactly what he wanted.
Dominic drove home.
He got about a mile before he pulled over.
Not because anything was wrong with the truck. Because something was wrong with him and he needed a minute before he pulled into the trailer park.
He sat with the engine running and tried to work out what had happened.
The Speedo. That was the start of it. He'd put on a white Speedo in a stranger's guest room and looked in a mirror and felt something he didn't have a name for. Something good. Something that had no business being good given the situation. He turned that over and couldn't make it make sense.
Then the pool. Being watched while he worked. Four men at a lunch table and their attention moving to him and back and to him again, and him knowing it, and his body's biological reaction to him knowing it. Staying in the deep end. But once settled, taking his time with the skimming, giving them their money's worth. That felt good as well.
The introduction was the worst part, or the strangest part, or both. Standing there in that transparent suit while Viktor talked about him like he was something worth talking about. The men looking at him. His voice coming out steady. The four minutes of it feeling both too long, but somehow not long enough.
He didn't know what any of it meant. He didn't know why Viktor watching him clean a pool felt different from Randy Pruitt watching him fix a water heater, and he definitely didn't know why different felt like something he'd been looking for without knowing he was looking.
What he knew was that the summer had been adding up to something he didn't know how to explain to himself and today had moved it even further in that direction.
When he reached home, he charged into the trailer, barely greeting Brianna and Dom Jr., and headed straight to the shower.
Now back in his safe space, he let the hot water sluice over and through him. He slid one hand down to cup his balls and the other to stroke his shaft. He went slow, reliving how he felt when he looked in the guest room mirror, the thrill of being introduced to Viktor's colleagues wearing nothing but a transparent Speedo. Then he did something he'd never imagined doing; he soaped up a middle finger and slid it up his ass. He had no idea why he did it, it was pure animal instinct. It burned, but he let it sit, letting the discomfort subside. And once it did, he resumed the long, languid strokes and, as if by instinct, found his prostate with his inserted finger. He was so pent up, his balls so full of cum from the afternoon, that he exploded almost the same moment he found it. Even more than other evenings, he exploded across the shower, cum covered the shower fixtures and slid down the tile. He crumbled onto the base of the tub, reluctantly having to withdraw his finger.
He let the water cascade over him while he experienced a moment of post-orgasm clarity. What the fuck was going on? Why did the Speedo turn him on so intensely? How could he let himself be ogled by Viktor's colleagues? What did that make him? And why the fuck did he stick his finger up his ass?
He didn't have an answer for any of it. What he had, instead, was next Monday, and the knowledge that he'd be back in that garage by eight, working alongside a man who left him more unsettled than anyone had a right to, and that some restless part of him had already decided this wasn't going to be the last time he let Viktor Volkov push him somewhere he hadn't asked to go. He shut off the water and stood dripping in the small bathroom of a life that no longer felt entirely his, and told himself, the way he'd been telling himself all summer, that he had it under control.
He didn't. And he had no way of knowing yet that by the time Labor Day came, the question of what he wanted from Viktor Volkov, or what Viktor wanted from him, would stop being a question he had any say in answering.
-To be continued-
Author's Note: If you've read my previous stories, you know I tend to spend more time on character than most readers come to GayDemon expecting. This one's no exception, if anything, it leans further into that than anything I've written before. Consider this fair warning, and also an invitation: stick with it.
Claimed is intense, explicit, romantic, and, I hope, genuinely surprising. It took thirteen chapters to tell it right, with more turns than anything I've posted before, so settle in. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I enjoyed building it.
As always, I'd love to hear from you. Comments, reactions, arguments with where the story goes all welcome in the Comments section at the end of this chapter or [email protected].
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