Labor Day
In early August, shortly after the white Speedo episode, Dominic met his three closest buddies at Rusty's for their weekly Friday night ritual. Dominic met with Danny Ferris, Carl Whitmore, and TJ Garrett, for the kind of evening that didn't require planning because it had happened enough times to plan itself. Four guys, a booth in the back, whatever was on tap, the week unwinding the way it only unwound in the company of men who didn't need anything from you.
Danny was twenty-eight and Randy's cousin, which was how Dominic had come to know him. He was funny in the way that got laughs before anyone had decided if the joke was appropriate, and he knew it, and he used it.
Carl was twenty-six and had been Dominic's friend the longest, since middle school, since before either of them had anything worth talking about.
TJ was twenty-two and lived two trailers down from Dominic at Pineview and did handyman work without Dominic's range or his rates. He looked up to Dominic in the way of younger men who haven't yet figured out what they're going to be good at.
They were two beers in when Dominic's job came up.
It came up the way most things came up at Rusty's, sideways, through something else. TJ asked Dominic if he was still doing the odd jobs out in Franklin, and Dominic said yes, and Danny said Franklin as though the word itself had a taste to it and went on to ask who he was working for.
"Guy named Viktor Volkov," Dominic said. "Has a place on the end of Caldwell Road. Vintage cars, big money, huge property."
The table went quiet for about two seconds, which at a table with Danny Ferris was a long time.
"Volkov," Danny said.
"You know him?"
"I don't know him," Danny said. "I know of him." He picked up his beer and leaned back in the booth with the expression of a man about to enjoy himself. "Dom. Brother. You know what they say about that guy?"
"What do they say?" Dominic didn't like where this was headed.
"They say he's connected." Danny said it with the emphasis of a man who has been waiting to use the word. "Like, connected connected. Russian mob type connected. And..." he paused for effect, which with Danny was never long... "they say he's a raging faggot."
Nobody blinked. It was a word they'd all been saying since middle school, the way you say words you pick up before you're old enough to know what they mean, and by the time you are old enough, it had stopped meaning anything at all. But this time he said it as if he really meant something.
TJ laughed first, loudly, the way he laughed at Danny's jokes.
Carl said nothing but the corner of his mouth moved.
Dominic picked up his beer.
"I heard that too," TJ said, settling down. "Somebody at the co-op was talking about him. Said he has these guys coming and going at that property at all hours. Said the whole operation gives him the creeps." He shook his head. "No offense Dom, but I wouldn't go near that place."
"It's good money," Dominic said.
"How good?" Carl asked.
Dominic told him. Carl raised his eyebrows in the specific way of a man recalibrating.
"Okay," Carl said. "That's good money."
"Still," Danny said, warming up again, "I'd want to know what I was getting paid for, you know? Like, what exactly is the arrangement." He grinned at Dominic across the table. "He put his hands on you yet?"
"Fuck you, Danny," Dominic responded, starting to get pissed.
"I'm just saying. Rich older dude, big property, no wife, pays way over market rate to have a good-looking guy around all day..." He spread his hands like the math was self-evident. "I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm asking if you've checked under the hood on this one."
TJ was already laughing again.
"The cars," Dominic said. "I'm there for the cars. Twelve vintage cars, one of the best collections in the country, all of them need work. That's the job."
"Right, right," Danny said, nodding with great seriousness. "The cars. Got it. He just wants you there for the cars." He picked up his beer. "Boy does love his stick shift."
TJ nearly choked. Even Carl laughed this time, a short quiet one.
Dominic laughed too. It came out easily, the way laughing comes out when you've been doing it with the same people for years and the alternative is explaining something you don't have the words for. He laughed and signaled the bartender for another round and let Danny move on to the next subject, which he did within thirty seconds because Danny always had a next subject.
The conversation moved on. The evening moved on. By ten o'clock they were talking about the Titans' preseason and a roof job Danny had bid on and whether TJ's neighbor's dog had actually bitten the meter reader or just scared him, a dispute that had apparently been ongoing since June. Normal things. Easy things.
Dominic drove home at eleven with the windows down and the radio on, and somewhere on the dark road between Rusty's and Pineview he turned the radio off.
Danny's voice in his head. "Boy does love his stick shift."
*****
It was the dog days of summer in Tennessee, the heat unchanged but the light beginning to shift, something in the angle of it that signaled the season turning even when the temperature didn't. Dominic had been working at the Franklin property for nearly three months. The house projects were long finished. He had restored the Shelby's carburetor to factory specification, rebuilt the ignition timing on the Camaro, and was halfway through a full brake system overhaul on the '70 'Cuda.
The summer had produced its own rhythm between them. Viktor in the garage, always, asking questions, genuinely interested in the restoration progress and talking with Dom about new acquisitions for them to work on together as if they were a team. The occasional appearance of the men with the out-of-state plates, whom Viktor continued to describe as business associates with the same ambiguous deflection he'd used in June. Dominic had stopped asking.
Dom had stopped pretending to himself that the summer had been uncomplicated. It hadn't been. There had been the shorts and the pool, and there had been the twenty or thirty smaller moments across three months, Viktor standing closer than necessary to examine something under a hood, the way his hand had briefly contacted Dominic's shoulder one afternoon when they were both leaning into the Shelby's engine bay, the conversations about the cars that somehow seemed more personal than car conversations should.
And then there was the night at Rusty's. Thankfully, no one pursued it and the topic was quickly abandoned, but Viktor seemed to have a reputation. A reputation that, despite what Dom was feeling, he couldn't be associated with.
Viktor made his offer on a Friday afternoon two weeks before Labor Day weekend. They were in the garage. Dominic had his hands in the 'Cuda's brake system and Viktor was on the stool near the workbench, and Viktor brought it up as if Dom would accept it on the spot.
Full-time employment. A salary that represented more money than Dominic had made in the previous two years combined. Benefits. A clear scope of work: the cars, the property, whatever came up. His own workspace in the garage. An arrangement that would, Viktor said, be indefinite in the best sense of the word.
Dominic set down his tools. He wiped his hands on the rag. He thought about the site fees and Dom Jr.'s school supplies and the water heater that still hadn't been replaced and the fact that this offer would solve every financial problem he had and most of the ones he could see coming.
He thought about the time he'd spent in the deep end a few weeks earlier long past when the work was already done. He thought about the way Viktor had looked at him climbing out of the water. He thought about the shorts and the thirty-odd small moments of a summer that had left him more confused about himself than he had been since he was seventeen.
He thought about what the pale eyes did when they looked at him, the partnership he appeared to have achieved with Viktor, the pride with which he was introduced to his friends.
The money was compelling. The cars were compelling. The alternative, more odd jobs, more site fees, more arithmetic about school supplies, was not.
But something in him understood that saying yes was not just saying yes to the employment arrangement. That Viktor had been building toward something over the summer, and that the offer was the next step in that building, and that he was not certain what came after it.
And then he thought about the conversation at Rusty's. Faggot. Stick shift. Would he be cast with them as well? Did he deserve to be?
That uncertainty was what decided him.
"I appreciate it," Dominic said. "I need to think about it."
Viktor looked at him. The pause before he responded was the briefest he had ever produced, which was itself information. "Of course," he said. "Take your time. The offer stands."
*****
Dominic called Randy the following day and told him he was declining. Randy said that was his business and asked if he was sure. Dominic said he was.
Randy relayed this to Viktor.
Viktor did not receive it as information about what was going to happen. He received it as information about what was going to require a different approach. Plan B.
That evening he made two calls. The first was back to Randy. He told him he was moving forward with his backup plan, and Randy, reluctantly, gave him the information he'd promised to if it came to this. The night Dom would be out with his buddies at Rusty's, what time they'd leave, and what he drove. Randy consoled himself with two things. First, the money from this arrangement would allow him to upgrade from the trailer park to a real home. That wasn't insignificant. The second was the knowledge that Dom Jr. would be looked after.
Then he made a second call, to a man he used when certain problems required solutions that didn't appear in any professional directory. He explained what he needed. He passed along all the information Randy had given him. Date, time, vehicle. "No screw ups," he ordered.
The man on the phone said it would be handled.
Viktor said good and ended the call and poured himself a Scotch and stood at the window of the stone house at the end of the private road in Franklin, Tennessee, looking out at the property in the late August evening light.
He had wanted things before and found ways to have them. He had learned that patience, applied correctly, was not passive. It was preparation.
He had been patient all summer.
*****
Labor Day fell on the first Monday of September, and Dominic Caruso had loved it since he was a kid for reasons he had never fully understood but that had always been true.
He thought of Labor Day the way other people thought of New Year's Eve, as a genuine turning point, the moment when the year pivoted and the half that mattered began. The summer was appetite and distraction and heat. The fall was the real thing: work and clarity and the sense that time was moving with purpose. He had felt this since he was eight years old.
Friday night of Labor Day weekend he was going out with his crew, Danny, Carl, and TJ. They had agreed on Rusty's, the only bar in Harlan Creek worth the name, and on getting drunk enough to not think about going back to work on Tuesday.
Brianna had objections. She had objections every Friday when Dominic met his posse, which had long since ceased to surprise him. The money. The irresponsibility. Her bitching had become wallpaper.
"I'll be back by two," he said.
"You better," Brianna said.
He kissed Dom Jr. on the top of his dark head. The boy was watching something on an iPad, already in pajamas, the gap-toothed face turned up briefly to receive the kiss and then turned back. Seven years old and the most uncomplicated relationship in Dominic's life.
He drove to Rusty's. He drank beer and played pool and listened to Danny describe in elaborate detail a roofing dispute ongoing since spring. Carl told a story about a septic tank that was either true or wasn't. The bar filled and then emptied the way bars in small towns empty on holiday weekends. By midnight it was down to the core. They closed the place at two.
He didn't mention Viktor's offer or declining it. Viktor was a topic better left undiscussed.
In the parking lot, engines started and headlights came on and the crew dispersed. Danny waved from his truck window. Carl honked. TJ nodded. Dominic hung back to use the bathroom one more time and went back inside while the lot cleared.
When he came out, the parking lot was empty and quiet and the night was still and close, with the sound of insects in the trees at the edge of the lot. He walked to his aging F-150 and tried the ignition.
Nothing.
Not a weak crank, nothing. No dash lights, no electrical response of any kind. He got out and popped the hood and used his phone flashlight methodically. The positive battery cable had been cut. Not corroded through, not frayed from age, cut. A clean diagonal cut close to the terminal, recent enough that the copper was still bright.
He stood in the parking lot at two-fifteen in the morning and looked at the cut cable and felt an unease he could not account for. By all appearances, it was intentional. But he naively thought, who would have any reason to sabotage his truck? He settled on the fact it was a malicious prank gone wrong.
He lowered the hood. It was too late to call anyone. He had two miles to walk.
The road was dark, the kind that exists in towns without streetlights on roads without shoulders. His phone had forty percent battery. He walked with his hands in his pockets and the warm night around him.
He had covered maybe half a mile when the car pulled up.
Black, large, a Suburban, he thought. It slowed to his pace, the window coming down, and a voice said something he didn't process because in the same moment the doors opened and the men were out before he had fully registered the vehicle stopping.
Three of them. Dressed in black, moving with the efficiency of people who had done this before. The last coherent observation Dominic made before the rag came over his face.
The smell hit first, sharp, chemical, it had to have been chloroform, his lungs refusing it and his body fighting back and his brain already losing the argument between consciousness and the darkness crowding in from the edges.
He heard himself make a sound.
Then he didn't hear anything.
*****
To say he "woke up" would be a gross mischaracterization. His return to consciousness happened so slowly he barely realized it was happening at all.
Darkness first. Complete, total, intentional darkness.
He repeatedly opened his eyes, but to no avail. It was as dark with his eyes open as when they were closed. He repeated this until he remembered he had an entire body to worry about.
Then sensation. He was lying on his back on something hard, a thin mattress that communicated the surface beneath rather than padding against it. Air moved across his skin in the way air moves when a fan is overhead, and his skin registered this completely because it had nothing on it.
He tried to sit up. He couldn't move. Something was holding him down. His neck: an iron collar, attached to a chain running to the surface beneath his head. He could turn his head but could not lift it more than a few inches before the chain pulled.
His brain moved to his wrists. He had to think about them because he discovered they were pulled above his head. And like his neck, each wrist was bound in an iron shackle with chains running taut when he pulled. He pulled harder. The chains held with absolute certainty.
His ankles: the same, iron shackles, chain, attached firmly to the base of the platform. Two inches of movement in any direction, no more.
He tested everything and found the same answer everywhere.
"Hey!" he shouted. His voice sounded wrong, too loud in the dark, bouncing off surfaces closer than he'd estimated. Stone. The acoustics were stone.
Nothing.
"Help! Somebody!"
He shouted until his throat hurt. He heard his own voice spending itself against silence and made himself stop. Think. His mind had narrowed to a single point: survival. Who had done this, why, and what did they want. Those were questions for after. Right now the only question was how to remain alive and functional until an opportunity to escape presented itself.
He lay back and breathed.
The fan moved air over his body in slow, even sweeps. Then he realized something else. He was completely nude. He wouldn't have known if not for the ceiling fan overhead. The vulnerability of nudity in a situation where vulnerability was already total.
Then he became aware of the final restraints.
He had felt it but not processed it, another ring at the base of his cock. An iron ring fitted close around his most private parts, and when he became fully aware of them he instinctively lifted his hips and felt the chain pull downward. His most private parts were shackled to the surface as well.
He lay still.
His cock was chained to the platform through the mattress. He could feel how they did it, the ring around the base, the chain running under the mattress to whatever structure supported it, calibrated so that no upward movement was possible without immediate consequence. It was not an improvisation. It had been designed.
He lay in the dark and breathed and tried to think about anything other than what this meant.
Then something else happened that horrified him almost as much as his current predicament. He was becoming hard. It was a frightening eroticism he couldn't have imagined. Not just the cock ring; the overall feeling of vulnerability, being nude, echoes of the summer. He was twenty-four years old and frightened and restrained and naked and his cock was filling against the iron ring from a biological process that did not care about the situation it was in.
He was, against his will and to his considerable shame, aroused.
He lay in the dark and waited. Then, somewhere beyond the stone walls, a door opened. Footsteps, two sets, unhurried, neither of them trying to be quiet. They stopped just outside and he heard voices, low, speaking in a language he didn't recognize. Not arguing. Not urgent. The tone of two men going over a checklist. One of them said something and the other responded and then there was a silence, and then the door opened.
Light hit him for the first time, not much, just enough to confirm the stone ceiling he'd been imagining, the chains above his wrists, the darkness beyond the reach of whatever they'd turned on. Two figures in the doorway. He couldn't make out faces. He could make out size, both of them large, both of them still, looking at him the way you look at something you've been sent to manage.
One of them said something to the other. The other one responded. Still the language he didn't know.
Then the first one spoke to Dominic. The accent was thick, Eastern European, the English underneath it intact but carrying something from somewhere else entirely.
"He's awake," the man said. Not a question. Not unkind. Simply a fact being noted by someone whose job it was to note it.
The door stayed open. Neither of them moved toward him.
Dominic lay in the shackles and said nothing and understood only this: whatever was coming hadn't started yet.
-To be continued-
A quick thank you. The response to Chapter 1 floored me, and I'm grateful for every read, vote, and comment. This one was harder to write than it probably reads. Some of what happens in these pages I sat with for a long time before I felt ready to put it down. Chapter 3 takes you somewhere I don't think you'll see coming, so stick around. And as always, I'd genuinely love to hear from you: [email protected].
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
