Spring
February became March the way seasons change in the desert, not dramatically, but in the light shifting until one morning you notice the mountains have a different glow and understand that something has turned.
The Friday nights continued.
Every week, without discussion or scheduling, the dungeon became their ritual. Not with Soren, the Dungeon Master had completed his work, and the two of them had found that they knew enough to go alone. Viktor knew Dominic’s body and Dominic knew Viktor’s expectations, and what happened between them on Friday nights in the Palm Springs dungeon had become, simply, theirs. The guidance Viktor had given him in the week before Soren’s arrival, about surrender, about the dynamic, about pain and pleasure as the same signal, had become lived knowledge rather than theory, and Dominic brought himself to those Fridays with a completeness that he could feel growing week by week.
Viktor noticed. He said so, directly, without embellishment. One Saturday morning they talked about the previous night. “You’re all here now,” Viktor said.
“Hard to miss,” Dominic replied.
“What changed?”
Dominic thought about it. “I stopped being afraid of what it means about me,” he said. “It means what it means. I’m done arguing with it.”
Viktor looked at him with the pale eyes. “Good,” he said. Simply.
The Friday nights became the spine of the week. Not in a way that Dominic spent the other days anticipating or dreading, more in the way that a reliable thing becomes a fixed point around which the rest of the time organized itself. Monday through Friday were the garage and the cars and the dinners and the easy domestic rhythm they had found. Friday night was something else. Saturday mornings were the hot tub and the coffee and the terrace. Two settled people who have been through something and have returned for more.
He had never felt more consistently himself.
* * *
If Friday nights belonged to the dungeon, Saturday nights belonged to the world outside Viktor’s Palm Springs home.
Viktor introduced the distinction without announcing it. It simply emerged over March and April the way most things between them emerged, organically, each week adding a layer to something that was becoming its own structure. The dungeon was private, theirs alone, the room where the dynamic between them was expressed at its most raw and unmediated.
Saturday nights were where others could see it.
Being seen, observed, it turned out, mattered to both of them. Neither had anticipated that.
It started with the leather bar. Viktor mentioned it one evening shortly after the first Friday night in the dungeon. “There’s a bar I’m taking you to Saturday,” he said. “The Chain. There’s a group that goes Saturday nights. I want them to meet you.”
“What do people wear,” Dominic said.
“Depends on the person,” Viktor said. “For you, I have something in mind.”
The something in mind was laid out on the bed when Dominic came in from the garage Saturday afternoon. The cutoff denim shorts, the same pair from Franklin, or an identical replacement, which was entirely possible and entirely Viktor. Hung low on the waist, frayed at the hem and cut short in the way that had never been about modesty.
He picked up the jock strap next. Cotton, minimal, the knowledge that the waistband and ass-straps would be visible underneath the shorts was almost unbearably erotic, adding its own heat to the prospect of wearing the shorts in public.
He dressed. He stood in front of the mirror.
No shirt.
Leather boots.
And the collar.
Dominic stood at the foot of the bed and looked at it. Black leather, fitted, a single steel ring at the front throat. He picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, real leather, real hardware, not a costume. He turned it over in his hands.
Viktor appeared in the doorway.
“The collar,” Dominic said.
“Yes.”
“What does it mean. At the bar.”
Viktor looked at him with the pale eyes. “It means you’re with me,” he said. Simply. “It means you’re mine.”
Dominic stood in the bedroom holding the collar and felt something move through him that he recognized from the dungeon, the raw hunger of being claimed which he had spent twenty-four years in Harlan Creek having no context for and which had become, over these past months, something he would not have traded. He put the collar on. He felt the authority of it settle at his throat.
The man looking back at him was not the man who had stood in the Franklin guest room in a white Speedo in August and looked away from his own reflection. That man had been surprised by what he saw. This man was not. He had been living in this body for months now, in the gym and the garage and the dungeon and the hot tub, and he understood what he was.
The shorts sat low on his hips the way they always had, the Bike jockstrap logo visibly readable across the waistband, the denim frayed high on his thighs. The fabric had been broken in over a summer of wear, softened, shaped, the denim at the front worn pale where it had surrendered to the weight of his massive manhood. The fabric pulled taut across the front, leaving nothing to the imagination and making no apology for it.
The collar rested at his throat. His chest and stomach were what they were, the torso of a man who had been hauling and lifting and crawling under things since he was fifteen, the dark, unruly hair across his pecs, down his stomach, disappearing into the front of his shorts, the forearms roped with the muscle of real work. The kind of body that could only be earned.
Viktor appeared behind him in the reflection and looked at him. He couldn’t believe the man in the mirror was his.
“Yes,” Viktor said. That was all.
* * *
The Chain was on a side street off Palm Canyon Drive, unmarked from the outside.
Viktor held the door and they walked in and the room turned.
Not dramatically, not the movie version of a room going quiet when someone enters. But there was a shift, a reorientation of attention, the way a room adjusts when something worth looking at arrives. Dominic felt it before he could see it, the same sensation he had first encountered at the Franklin pool and which he had spent months learning not to retreat from.
Viktor and he stood in the doorway of The Chain and let the room look.
The clientele ranged from men in full leather gear to men in variations of what Dominic was wearing. He was not the least dressed and he was not trying to be the most looked at, which was perhaps why he was. There was a difference between a body assembled in a gym for the purpose of display and a body like Dominic’s, a man who had never done a bicep curl in his life. The dark Italian hair across his chest and forearms. The jaw carrying its default three days of stubble. The collar at his throat catching the bar’s low light.
Viktor’s hand came to the small of his back. His thumb grazed the collar as it settled, one brief, deliberate contact. A gesture so small that only Dominic felt it and so clear in its meaning that the whole room understood it anyway.
They moved through the bar.
His friends, who he referred to with dry affection as the Chain Gang, were already at their usual spot near the back, Rafael and Philippe, who Dominic knew from earlier, relatively tame dinner parties, and five others he was introduced to over the next twenty minutes. Each in their own combination of bare skin, leather, denim, the group had been gathering in this bar on Saturday nights for years and they welcomed Dominic the way the Chain Gang received any new guest, except that the attention lingered longer than usual and landed squarely below the belt.
Rafael, who’d met Dominic previously, but not like this, embraced Viktor and then turned to Dominic and looked at him with frank appreciation. “Viktor,” he said, without looking away from Dominic, “you’ve been holding out on us.”
“I’ve been careful with him,” Viktor said.
“I can see that,” Rafael said. He extended his hand to Dominic. “The collar is new.”
“First time,” Dominic said.
“It suits you,” Rafael said. He said it the way he said everything, no flattery, just observation. “Viktor has good taste. In cars and apparently in everything else.”
Philippe, beside him, said something in French to Viktor that produced a look from Viktor that might have been the closest Viktor came to embarrassed. Dominic decided not to ask for the translation.
The drinks came, the conversation flowed easily, and Dominic stood among them shirtless, cutoff shorts and the collar and the boots and felt, for the first time in his adult life, like he was in the right room. Not the room he had grown up expecting to be in. The room he actually belonged in.
* * *
There was a back room at The Chain.
On the first Saturday, Viktor walked him past the entrance to it without stopping, just long enough for Dominic to understand it existed and what it was for, the sounds and the nature of the light from behind the curtained doorway communicating everything that needed communicating.
“Not tonight,” Viktor said, without being asked.
“I know,” Dominic said. He meant it.
On a subsequent Saturday, Viktor walked him through the curtain.
The room was smaller than the bar, lower-lit. Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see everything. The equipment was recognizable to Dominic in a way it wouldn’t have been nine months earlier. The room was full but not crowded. All nearly nude, mostly pairs, some clusters of three or four, a few men alone along the walls watching, knowing their invitation was coming.
On his knees in the center of the room, a man was taking his partner’s cock to the root as if he were performing an act of worship, oblivious to or energized by the eyes on him, it was impossible to tell which and probably didn’t matter. Against the far wall, a man was bent over the fuck bench with his hands gripping the legs and his back arched and the sounds he was making were not sounds he was trying to contain. A sling in the corner, occupied, its chains moving with a slow, deliberate rhythm. Leather everywhere, on bodies, on walls, on the equipment that Dominic now recognized now that he had spent Friday nights learning exactly what each piece was for.
Nobody was monitoring how they looked to others. Nobody was performing for the room or checking whether they were being watched approvingly. That was the thing that struck him. And the room itself, meaning the people in it, treated everything happening as completely normal, because for them it was.
Viktor’s hand was at his collar. “When you’re ready,” he said, as if answering Dominic’s thoughts. It was not pressure. It was information.
The third Saturday, Viktor walked him through the curtain without explanation.
Dominic’s arrival hit the room the same way it had hit the bar on their first visit, full attention, unhurried but total. He was aware of it differently this time. The first visits he had been an observer, anonymous, taking the room in. Tonight the room was taking him in, and the collar at his throat and the shorts that had surrendered to the weight of him and the body that work had built over twenty-four years were doing what they always did when they entered a space, making the space adjust. He gave off an energy that conveyed, 'I’m one of you tonight’.
He stood beside Viktor and felt the eyes and did not look away from them.
Viktor turned to him. He said nothing. He glanced down to the button of Dominic’s shorts.
Dominic understood. He unbuttoned them himself and stepped out of them slowly, which surprised him. Some instinct he didn’t know he had, the room watching, the moment worth drawing out, had slowed his hands without his deciding to. He wasn’t performing, but he was owning every moment of his exhibition. He handed the shorts to Viktor, who folded them and held them at his side. Dominic stood in the back room of The Chain in his leather boots, collar and jock strap, and the room that had been doing other things paused to take that in.
He felt every eye in the room and felt the collar at his throat and felt Viktor beside him and felt, underneath all of it, his own body’s response to the combination, the jock strap already inadequate for the purpose of concealment, the cotton pulled taut in a way that left the tip of his cock peeking out from the waistband.
Someone nearby said something low to his companion. He distinctly heard the words, “massive cock”, “good boy” and “fuck that hole”, all of which made him even harder.
Viktor put his hand on Dominic’s shoulder. Pressed once, with the authority that needed no translation.
Dominic dropped to his knees, grateful for the opportunity to worship Viktor in front of witnesses.
The stone floor was cold and hard against his knees, but like the dungeon, the bite of it intensified the experience. He was eye level with Viktor’s belt and as he reached for it with hands that were steady, he noted the absence of the trembling that had characterized his first weeks in the Franklin dungeon. He opened it and freed Viktor’s cock and held it in both hands for a moment before taking it into his mouth. He did it with pride and reverence, knowing he was the luckiest man in the room. He swallowed him fully, making sure the length of his cock reached the back of his throat. He had become experienced enough not to gag, and held him there, tight against his tonsils. He used his tongue to flick the bottom of the shaft, knowing that was how Viktor liked it.
The sound Viktor made was the sound he always made at that first contact, an involuntary exhale signaling he was receiving exactly what he brought Dominic here for, and Dominic felt it travel from his mouth through the rest of him and understood, not for the first time but more completely than before, what it meant to give someone that. To be the cause of that sound in a man like Viktor.
He worked slowly. He had learned, over months of Friday nights and Saturday mornings and every variation between, exactly what Viktor responded to, and he applied that knowledge now. Viktor’s hands grabbed his hair, pushed himself even deeper, and held Dominic there. Barely able to breathe, he wouldn’t give in. He heard Viktor quietly say, “Take it, boy. Show them who you are.”
The room watched.
He was aware of it continuously, the peripheral awareness of eyes on him, on Viktor, on the two of them, and found that it did not make him want to stop. It sharpened him. Made him more present, more deliberate, more attentive to every signal Viktor gave. He was performing no more than anyone else in the room was performing, which was to say he was simply doing what he was there to do, and the room was simply witnessing it, and that was what the room was for.
Viktor’s breath was changing. Dominic knew every stage of it by now, the pattern of Viktor losing composure, which happened incrementally and which Dominic had come to regard as one of the more satisfying things available to him in this life. He was causing this. He was, on his knees in the back room of The Chain with the collar at his throat and the jock strap straining and the room watching, taking Viktor Volkov apart. There was no other way to describe it.
He heard a voice from somewhere to his left. Male, unhurried, carrying the easy observation of a man who said what he saw without embarrassment: “He’s about to lose his jock strap.”
Low laughter. Agreement from somewhere else in the room.
Dominic did not look up, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. He was aware of it acutely, the jock strap that had been inadequate since they walked through the curtain, his cock becoming increasingly engorged since Viktor’s hand on his shoulder, the cotton now doing nothing but soaking up Dominic’s dripping pre-cum. He didn’t touch it. He kept his attention on Viktor.
Viktor’s hands tightened in his hair even more. Not a direction. A signal.
Dominic felt him arrive at the edge, knew the exact moment, had learned it the way he learned everything about Viktor, through months of close and total dedication, and held him in the back of his throat for several seconds, which produced a howl from Viktor that traveled the full length of the room.
Then he let go.
Viktor released with the intensity that matched Dominic’s hunger. Dominic took it completely, swallowed every wave of it having had decided this was what he was going to do and was doing it completely, and stayed where he was until Viktor was finished, until the hands in his hair had stilled and the sounds had receded and the room had gone briefly quiet with a collective exhale.
The half-heard murmurs from the spectators continued: “Fuck me…” “The slut swallowed every drop.” “Me next…”
Dominic ignored it and sat back on his heels. He looked up at Viktor.
Viktor looked down at him with the expression that Dominic would later describe as the most unguarded he had ever seen Viktor. He reached down and put his hand on Dominic’s face, palm against jaw, the gesture that had been there since the Franklin dungeon and held it there for a moment.
Someone in the room started to applaud. Slowly at first. Then others joined.
Dominic felt the heat of it, not embarrassment, the other thing, the thing he had been discovering since August, the warmth of being seen doing something well by people who understood what good looked like. He stood. Viktor handed him his shorts. He stepped into them and pulled them up over the damp, throbbing jock strap making the denim doing what it always did, bulge lewdly, and making no apology for it.
Viktor fastened his own belt. He put his hand at Dominic’s collar, the brief, deliberate contact that said everything it needed to say, and he guided them back through the curtain into the bar.
The Chain Gang was where they’d left them. Rafael looked at Viktor and then at Dominic and then back at Viktor assembling a picture from available evidence.
“Well,” Rafael said.
“Drink,” Viktor said.
Rafael handed Dominic a glass. He looked at him over the rim with a warm, direct assessment, “You good?” he said.
Dominic picked up the drink. He thought about the room and the floor and Viktor’s hands in his hair and the sound Viktor had made and the applause and the sticky, damp shorts he was currently occupying, and the collar at his throat and all of it.
“Very,” he said.
Rafael smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I can see that.”
* * *
On the Saturdays they didn’t go to The Chain, the Chain came to them.
Viktor’s dinner parties for the Chain Gang were different from the dinner parties he hosted for his broader Palm Springs circle. Less formal. More wine. Someone always produced a pre-roll, usually Rafael, who treated this as his standing contribution to any gathering. These were people whose conversations picked up exactly where they’d left off the last time they were together. The same jokes, the same innuendo, the same increasingly raunchy comments as the evening went on. They moved like a precision drill team from dinner to the terrace to the hot tub nearly always with the same gloriously messy results.
Dominic hosted alongside Viktor in a way he hadn’t expected to. He managed the bar, always shirtless. He sat at the table in whatever Viktor had put him in that evening, the shorts, or linen pants, never a shirt, and once, memorably, just the collar and a towel when he’d moved straight from the pool to dinner without anyone suggesting he shouldn’t. He held his own in conversations he would not have been able to hold nine months earlier, about food and wine, gay life, and the arcane politics of the Palm Springs social world.
The Chain Gang loved him. This was apparent as spring marched on and became more apparent each subsequent Saturday night. They loved him because he was genuinely good at being in their world without having been born to it, but especially because they saw what it had done to Viktor. He’d never seemed more alive, more unguarded, more complete than when he was with Dominic.
Neither Viktor nor Dominic had anticipated what these Saturday nights would give them.
For Dominic, the Saturday nights were recognition of a kind he had never received in twenty-four years of being Dominic Caruso from Harlan Creek, Tennessee. Not recognition of his usefulness, he had always been useful in the limited way that competent men are appreciated in small towns. This was different. This was a room full of people looking at him and seeing not what he could fix but what he was. The body that had been built by work and not the gym. The collar at his throat that said someone had chosen him completely, publicly. The ease with which he moved through Viktor’s world, which surprised everyone including himself. He was, in these rooms, on these Saturday nights, seen. Fully. As the man he had become rather than the man he had been.
For Viktor, the Saturday nights were something he had been waiting for longer than he knew. He had been coming to Palm Springs for fifteen years, to The Chain for twelve, to the dinner parties and the gatherings of his circle for all of it, and he had often come alone. Not for lack of trying, he had brought men before, briefly, but never with the outcome he was looking for. What he wanted was not simply company, not simply a sub to dominate in the dungeon when they went home. It was someone the room would look at the way the room looked at Dominic Caruso when he walked through the door of The Chain in his cutoff shorts and his collar and his three days of stubble, with Viktor’s hand at the small of his back.
He had that now. He had known it in the dungeon since February. He had known it in the garage since June of the previous year. But knowing it in a room full of people who could see it, that was the part he hadn’t known he needed until he had it.
The collar at Dominic’s throat said: this man is mine.
The way the room looked at Dominic said: you are a lucky man, Viktor Volkov. Viktor knew it. He had never been more certain of anything.
* * *
On the last Saturday before they left to return to Franklin, Dominic felt it before Viktor had even said the words, “Tonight, The Chain”. His tone had a charge that was not the usual Saturday charge, something more concentrated, more final. Viktor had been quieter than usual at dinner. Not withdrawn, just contained, the way he got when something mattered, but he wasn’t ready to talk about it.
At the bar, The Chain Gang felt it too. Rafael had caught Dominic’s eye across the table twice trying to read a situation he couldn’t quite make out.
Around the high top, Viktor’s hand stayed at Dominic’s collar longer than usual. Not the brief, deliberate contact of their usual Saturday nights but something more sustained, Viktor’s fingers resting at the ring and staying there while he talked to Philippe, as though he needed the physical reminder of what he had.
Dominic understood that this was the last Saturday in Palm Springs, that Franklin was coming and this, The Chain, the back room, the winter that had made him into whoever he now was, was winding down.
He stood in the dim light of the bar and felt Viktor’s fingers at his collar and thought, then let it end right.
Viktor leaned close. “Come with me,” he said.
It was not a question. It had never been a question. But tonight it carried a weight the previous visits to the back room hadn’t.
The back room knew them by now.
The room that watched them enter, Viktor and his boy, the one in the cutoff shorts and the collar, the one the room had unanimously decided was the finest thing that had walked through that curtain in recent memory. Tonight the recognition was immediate, heads turning, and with them the temperature of the room climbing, the charged elevation that Dominic’s presence had produced every time he walked through that curtain. Viktor stopped in the center of the room. He turned to Dominic and the pale eyes were the same but the expression behind them was rawer than usual, almost feral, his composed authority replaced by something primal, unleashed. He had stopped managing what he felt. The room felt it immediately.
“Everything,” Viktor said. “Collar and boots stay. Everything else comes off.”
Dominic held his gaze. He reached for the shorts.
He took his time. The room was watching and he knew how to work a room now, had learned it over the Saturday nights in this space, and he undressed deliberately slowly, fully aware that the moment was worth drawing out for everyone in it, including himself. The shorts first, he stepped out of them and kicked to the corner. Then the jock strap. When it came off, the room got its first unobstructed view of Dominic Caruso, which turned out to exceed everything the previous Saturdays had promised. They’d seen him shirtless before, but what they saw now, what the jock strap had been inadequately containing for weeks was, by any measure, spectacular. They had practically memorized the treasure trail of unruly dark hair disappear behind his waistband, now they witnessed its destination. A beautifully thick, cut cock, semi-hard, resting on a pair of balls that looked they had been built exclusively to support the weight of his shaft. Dominic stood in the back room of The Chain in nothing but the leather collar and the boots and the body that work had built, and he stood in it fully, proud of what he was, proud of what it had taken to get here, that this body, this man, belonged to Viktor Volkov and that the room could see that in the collar at his throat.
The room was silent.
Someone said, low and reverent: “Christ.”
Viktor did not look at the room. He looked only at Dominic. He had known for a long time that he had something exceptional and, in this moment, he allowed himself to feel the full weight of that knowledge.
He looked at the sling. Then at Dominic. Back and forth until it was understood by everyone where Dominic was destined for.
Viktor opened his pants, dropped them to the floor and stepped out. Not as massive as Dominic’s but his cock was every bit as impressive. Long, veiny, and threateningly erect.
“Get me ready,” he said. “Hands behind your back,” he added, expressing further dominance.
Knowing exactly what he was being told to do, Dominic dropped to his knees on the cold stone floor, barer than he’d ever been in this room, and felt the bite of it more completely for it. He took Viktor into his mouth knowing the significance of this moment demanded his focused, unhurried attention. It wasn’t a task, or even a sexual act of affection. It was its own form of devotion.
This time was different in its purpose. Not the performance of the third Saturday, not the building toward Viktor’s release, this was preparation, deliberate and thorough, Viktor needing to be ready for what came next and Dominic understood his role in making him so. He worked with that knowledge, coating Viktor completely, taking his time, using his tongue, producing more saliva than seemed natural in order to ensure Viktor would be ready. Viktor stood above him with his hands in Dominic’s hair and his eyes on the sling in the corner and let it happen.
The room had filled.
Word moved through the bar the way gossip moves through a party, quickly, without announcement. Viktor and his boy were owning the back room. Men had appeared at the curtained doorway and moved in and arranged themselves along the walls, all slowly stroking their own cock or the one next to them.
The Chain Gang was among them. Dominic saw Rafael and Philippe in his peripheral vision, along with the others from the Chain Gang, and felt something surge through him that had everything to do with pride. They were watching. The men who knew Viktor best, who had seen him alone for fifteen years, were watching Dominic kneel for him in the back room of The Chain, and it felt like recognition, of what Dominic was, of what Viktor had found, of what the two of them had become together. He wanted them to see it. He wanted the whole room to see it. He was on his knees on cold stone doing what he was there to do, and Viktor was above him, and the Chain Gang was watching, and there was not a single part of him that wanted any of it to stop.
Viktor looked down at him. “Enough,” he said. The urgency in his voice conveyed he was close to his own limit and needed to stop. “On your feet.”
Dominic stood.
Viktor walked him to the sling with his hand at the back of his neck, not the small of his back, the back of his neck, which was different. This was more direct, more authoritarian, with an edge he’d never shown. It was an intentional grip to convey that Dominic belonged to him completely, and the room was going to witness it.
The room parted for them without being asked.
Tonight Viktor’s dominance had a dramatically different quality from their Friday nights in the dungeon. The Friday nights were intimate, thorough, the authority expressed through patience and precision. Tonight it was something more urgent, Viktor wanting, Viktor taking, Viktor making it unambiguous to everyone in the room and to Dominic himself that what was happening was happening because Viktor had decided it would. Dominic felt the difference in the grip on his neck and in the way Viktor positioned him at the sling without consultation and went hard instantly. Viktor, rough and unrestrained, did something to him that Viktor, patient and deliberate, did not. He knew that about himself now. He was done pretending otherwise.
He settled into the leather sling and Viktor secured the restraints with uncharacteristic urgency, wrists, then ankles, never asking if he was comfortable. It didn’t matter; Viktor knew what he wanted and wasn’t going to let anything get in his way. He took a moment to step back to look at him. Dominic naked in the sling in nothing but collar and boots, his massively erect cock visibly leaking onto his stomach, hole enticingly exposed to the room, entirely Viktor’s.
“Look at him,” Viktor said. To the room. Simply. A statement of fact.
The room looked.
Viktor moved to the head of the sling. He stood at Dominic’s shoulder, wrapped one hand around his face and let his cock graze the closer cheek. Dominic instinctively turned his head to take Viktor’s cock in his mouth, but Viktor pulled away, “Not yet,” he said abruptly.
Viktor then looked at the room and announced: “His hole needs to be made ready. Sloppy wet for me. I need three men.”
Several men took a step forward and Viktor picked the three most hung. Pointing to the floor between Dominic’s spread legs, he instructed them, “On your knees. One at a time. Spit. Tongue. Whatever it takes. Get him ready.”
The first knelt, the other two stood behind him waiting their turn. The room was silent but for the sound the kneeling man working up a mouthful and delivering it precisely into the target, Dominic’s hole. He lunged into it as if he were being judged, competing to win first prize. As he dived in, Dominic felt Viktor’s shaft graze against his chin again. He turned his head up to Viktor as if to ask permission. Viktor nodded and slid it in Dominic’s waiting mouth.
“Fuck…” came a gasp from someone at the wall.
As the first man aggressively rimmed Viktor, he responded by trying to suck the jizz right out of Viktor. “Go slow, boy.” Viktor patted his cheek. “You know how this will end, and it’s not in your mouth.”
Dominic smiled at that but continued.
Meanwhile, hung man #1’s jaw began to ache so he turned it over to hung man #2 who tried to out-spit his predecessor and even more aggressively attack Dominic’s hole.
Dominic was so wrecked from both ends he had to pull off Viktor for a moment. Hung man #2 was fucking him with his tongue and Dominic was completely overwhelmed.
This continued until hung man #3, apparently impatient to join the action, pushed #2 aside and took position. He spread Dominic’s cheeks with his thumbs, made a loud, slightly disgusting throat sound and lobbed a big one into his hole.
Somewhat disconcerted with what was happening below, Dominic took refuge in Viktor’s cock; he leaned over and tried his best to swallow it whole. Viktor took Dominic by the hair, deep throated him a few times, and then dramatically pulled back.
“We’re done”, he announced. Looking at the three men, he added, “I trust you men have done your job?”
“Yes, sir,” they responded.
Viktor walked between Dominic’s outstretched legs and took position.
Dominic had a near outer-worldly moment, as if he had left his body and was watching from the ceiling. There he was, nude but for a leather collar and boots, strapped into a sling, with Viktor, also nude now, standing between his legs, poised to fuck him in front of an audience of sweating, nearly-nude men, stroking themselves.
His spirit reentered his body when he felt Viktor’s cock lined up at his hole. He just held it there, teasing Dominic. He knew Dominic could feel it, he knew Dominic wanted it, badly. He would make him work for it.
“What does my boy want?” he asked, somewhat sarcastically
“You, Daddy”, Dominic answered, breathing hard.
“I know that,” Viktor responded. “But what specifically?”
“I want you to fuck me Daddy. Please!”
“Ask me nicely boy.”
“Please Daddy, please fuck your boy. Your boy needs you. Your boy needs your cock. Please, I’m begging you.”
“That’s more like it”, Viktor sighed.
And then, without warning, he plunged his cock as deep into Dominic as his biology would allow.
“FUCK!” Dominic screamed in apparent shock from the force.
Viktor knew the pain was from the force of the entry, that there’d been no damage, so he let his cock rest buried deep inside him, unmoving, allowing the pain to subside. He wanted Dominic to enjoy this as much as he was.
After several moments, Viktor slowly pulled out making Dominic groan in response.
Then he slowly pushed back in, all the way. He did this several times and every time he reached full depth, Dominic made the sound the room was waiting for. Low and total and completely submissive.
“Feel that,” Viktor said. To Dominic, not the room. Though the room heard it.
He moved with the authority that the evening had been building toward, not the patient, instructive authority of the Friday nights but something more primal. This was the last step in officially claiming Dominic. He wanted an audience to witness the claiming. To witness his authority, Dominic’s submission, and their mutual agreement to this contract.
Dominic gripped the sling’s chains. He thrust his hips up to meet each movement. He had stopped monitoring the room entirely, it was there, he was aware of it, but it had become simply the context rather than the content, the frame around what was actually happening, which was Viktor and Dominic in the last Palm Springs Saturday, saying what needed to be said in the only language that had ever been fully adequate.
He heard Rafael’s voice from somewhere close, “Dio mio”, and then Philippe saying something in French that required no translation, and he caught Viktor’s eyes and Viktor’s mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile but contained one, and Dominic felt the warmth of it run through everything else that was running through him and returned it with a half-smile of his own.
The room was entirely theirs.
Viktor accelerated. The chains moved. Dominic’s sounds lost their words entirely. He reached down and found his own cock and Viktor’s hand arrived at the same moment, both of them, and the combined grip of it finished what the evening had been building toward since Rafael’s look across the dinner table.
Viktor came first, with a sound that the back room of The Chain would not forget quickly. Dominic followed, his release covering his chest and throat and the underside of his jaw, the chains rattling with the force of it, the room erupting around them. They knew they had witnessed something genuine and responded accordingly.
The noise continued while they breathed. Viktor continued to pulse inside Dominic until every drop had been drained.
Viktor reached for the jock strap on the floor beside the sling. He used it with efficient tenderness, cleaning Dominic first, then himself, and then held it out.
“Put it on,” he said, demonstrating a final act of dominance.
Dominic put it on. Dampness, Discomfort. Humiliation. Viktor handed him the shorts. He put those on too. Viktor fastened his own belt. He put his hand at the collar ring, pressed once, and they walked out of the back room together.
The Chain Gang was back at the bar. They had apparently been there for some time, drinks in hand, deciding how they were going to discuss what they’d just witnessed.
Rafael handed Viktor a drink without being asked. He handed Dominic one and looked at him with warm, deep affection.
“Last Saturday?” he said.
“Last Saturday,” Viktor confirmed.
Rafael raised his glass. The others did the same. No speech. No elaboration. The gesture said what it needed to say about what the winter had been and what it had produced and what these men thought of the two people standing in front of them.
They stayed another hour. Then they drove home.
* * *
The collection had been transformed by April.
Twelve of the fourteen cars were complete or substantially complete, the restorations ranging from the Daytona’s near-factory perfection to a 1966 Mustang fastback that Dominic had argued back from a cosmetic disaster into something that was going to make the right collector very happy. The remaining two, a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda and a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro COPO, were in progress, the Barracuda waiting on a carburetor kit that had been backordered since February and the Camaro in the careful middle stages of a numbers-matching restoration that required patience above all else.
Viktor sold the Daytona in March.
He had arranged a private showing for a collector in Scottsdale, James Whitfield, as it happened, who had expressed interest after the pool party and whose enthusiasm for the car had turned out to be entirely genuine. The price Viktor named was a number that Dominic, hearing it, had to sit with for a moment before it resolved into something real.
“That’s…” Dominic said.
“Yes,” Viktor said.
“For a car that was under a cover for eleven years.”
“For a car that you restored,” Viktor said. “There’s a difference. The market pays for provenance and condition. You provided the condition. Considerably more of it than existed before you touched it.”
James, taking delivery in Scottsdale on a Thursday afternoon, had shaken Dominic’s hand and said: “I’ve bought twenty-three cars in my life. This is the finest restoration work I’ve seen.” He said it without performance, the way James said everything, simply, directly, as a fact he saw no reason to embellish.
Dominic drove back to Palm Springs with Viktor and said very little and felt the clean satisfaction of a thing done well being recognized as a thing done well. He had grown up in a world where usefulness was the currency and excellence was expected and neither was particularly remarked upon. Viktor’s world measured differently.
“The Mustang next,” Viktor said, on the drive.
“The Mustang next,” Dominic agreed.
The Mustang sold in April to a collector in San Francisco, Eduardo, as it turned out, who had been quietly following its progress, intending to own it from the moment he’d seen Dominic begin the work in January. The price was lower than the Daytona but still a number that required sitting with, and Eduardo had said, when the sale was concluded: “Viktor, wherever you found him, don’t let him go.”
Viktor had looked at Dominic when he said it. Dominic had looked back. Neither of them said anything.
* * *
By May the life they were living had become something Dominic no longer described to himself in the terms he had used in September and October. He had stopped saying captive in his own head. He had stopped saying kidnapper. Not because those things had become untrue, they were as true as they had ever been, and he knew it, and Viktor had never asked him to forget it. But they had become… historical. True in the way that things that happened in the past are true, without governing the present with the same authority they once had.
What governed the present was considerably simpler: he was in love with Viktor Volkov. He was doing work he was born to do with exceptional results. He was living in a house in the desert where the mountains changed color three times a day and the pool was warm in February and Friday nights were their own world. He had found, in the most improbable circumstances available, who he was.
The quiet between him and Viktor was the kind that comes from having been through something difficult together and arrived somewhere neither expected.
Viktor still had the authority he had always had, it was not a performance and it did not diminish, but the authority between them had become mutual in a way that Dominic hadn’t anticipated. Viktor deferred to him on the cars without ceremony. He asked Dominic’s opinion about the property, about decisions, about things he had previously decided alone. The dynamic was not equality exactly, they were not the same kind of people and the dungeon made that clear every Friday, but it was partnership, genuine and earned by both of them.
“You’re different from anyone I’ve been with,” Viktor said one evening on the terrace. He said it the way he said things he had been thinking for a while. “Others wanted the arrangement. The dynamic. The scene.” He was quiet for a moment. “You wanted none of it and arrived at all of it anyway. That’s not something I can manufacture. I didn’t know that until I had it.”
Dominic sat with that. “Is that supposed to be romantic?” he said.
“Yes,” Viktor said.
“It is,” Dominic said. “God help me, it is.”
* * *
But the other thing was always there, every bit as present.
He thought about Dom Jr. every day. This had not changed. It was not going to change. What had changed was what he was thinking, less raw than it had been in the early months, the wound not fresh but not gone, the way old injuries settle into something you carry rather than something that stops you.
Dom Jr. would finish first grade in May. Dominic knew this because he was to start first grade the Tuesday after Labor Day, the weekend he was abducted. He did not know how the year had gone. Whether the gap-toothed face had new teeth in it yet. Whether Jake Pruitt was still his best friend or whether the landscape of a seven-year-old’s social world had shifted. Whether he had said, at any point in the nine months since Labor Day, a sentence that contained the word dad.
He didn’t ask Viktor for reports anymore. He had asked twice in the fall and Viktor had given him what he had, but the information had always arrived slightly out of date and slightly incomplete and had produced in Dominic a kind of anguish that was worse than not knowing. He had decided that not knowing was better, and had stopped asking, and had lived with it since.
What he had not been able to entirely live with was Randy.
He had tried to assign Randy’s betrayal a motive he could understand, the way you try to understand a mechanical failure by working backward from the symptom. The money was the obvious answer, Viktor had paid him enough to leave the trailer park and buy a real house, which was not a small thing and Dominic understood why it wasn’t a small thing. He had wanted that for Randy. He had wanted it for Dom Jr. The money made sense as a motive.
But it didn’t entirely account for Randy.
Randy Pruitt was not a man who needed money badly enough to sell his best friend for it. He was doing well enough, the contracting outfit, the network, the standing in the county that he had built one honest job at a time. He had not been desperate. He had been… what? Opportunistic? Persuaded? Had Viktor made him an argument rather than simply an offer? Had Randy told himself a story about Dom Jr. being better off, about Dominic’s unhappiness in the single-wide, about this being the right thing in the wrong form?
Or was there something else. A relationship with Viktor that predated the introduction. A side arrangement that Dominic didn’t know about. Something that made Randy not a man who had been bought but a man who had been recruited.
He turned this over on the long drives he sometimes took alone in the desert, the rental car and the open road and the mountains at every angle, and he could not arrive at an answer that satisfied him. He needed to be in the same room as Randy Pruitt and ask him directly, the way he asked everything directly, and get an answer he could look at.
That would require going back to Harlan Creek.
The other thing he kept putting away and taking back out was the question of what Viktor actually did.
He knew the surface of it: investments, collections, properties in Franklin and Palm Springs and apparently elsewhere that Viktor referred to occasionally without elaborating. He knew the men with the out-of-state plates, whom he had been told were business associates and had accepted that characterization because the alternative required asking questions that Viktor had made clear, without saying so directly, were not questions that would be answered.
He knew the cash payments. The silence around certain subjects, the shift in Viktor’s composure when certain topics approached, the composure of a man who has practiced being unrevealing about particular things for a very long time.
He knew the word that Danny Ferris had used to describe Viktor at Rusty’s Bar, faggot, back when Danny’s opinions about Viktor had felt relevant to Dominic’s decisions. Russian mob type connected.
He had not looked at it directly since.
He looked at it now, occasionally, in the desert, on the long drives. He looked at it and thought about what it meant to be in love with a man whose income he couldn’t account for and whose associates arrived in vehicles with out-of-state plates and whose second garage in Franklin had no windows. He thought about what it meant that those questions had been present since June and he had consistently chosen not to pursue them, and whether that choice was wisdom or something he would have to answer for eventually.
He put it away again.
But it was still there, and it was going to keep being there.
And the answer was in Franklin. It had been there since June, behind the door of a garage with no windows, and he had been choosing not to open it for a year.
* * *
They packed on a Friday in the last week of May.
The Palm Springs house was closed down with the same efficiency Viktor brought to everything, the cars covered, the pool winterized, the kitchen emptied, the rooms left in the way that expects to be returned to. Dominic packed his own things, which were considerably more than what he’d arrived with in November.
He stood at the glass doors that faced the mountains one last time. The San Jacinto range in the late May light, the desert below it, the pool catching the hot afternoon sun.
He had arrived here in November carrying the weight of the confession, Randy, Dom Jr., Brianna, all of it, and the Palm Springs winter had given him the dungeon and the leather bar and the Daytona and the Friday nights and Viktor’s arms in a preheated tub and the moment in the center of the dungeon when the iron ring came off his cock and he said “I’m staying.”
He was not the man who had arrived.
He was not sure, entirely, who the man was who was leaving. He was still finding that out.
“Ready,” Viktor said, from behind him.
Dominic looked at the mountains one more time. He thought about Dom Jr. finishing first grade in Harlan Creek, Tennessee. He thought about Randy Pruitt in a real house with Jake and Dom Jr. across the yard. He thought about the second garage with no windows.
“Ready,” he said.
They drove to the airport. They flew east.
Franklin was waiting.
-End of Chapter 11-
Author’s Note:
One chapter left.
Does Dominic get Dom Jr. back? Does Randy pay for what he did, or does something more complicated happen between them? Does Viktor stay exactly who he's been this whole book, or does he have his own reckoning coming? I'm not telling you, but I will say every one of those questions gets answered, and probably not in the way you're expecting.
I've genuinely loved writing this story, and loved hearing from so many of you along the way. Thank you for reading this far. See you at the end.
As always: [email protected].
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
