Again
He woke up and didn’t know where he was.
That lasted about three seconds. Then the room came back, the low light, the stone walls beyond the bedroom’s warmth, the weight of an arm across his chest, and he knew exactly where he was and who the arm belonged to and the three seconds of not knowing felt, in retrospect, like a gift.
Viktor was awake. He didn’t announce it. He just laid there, still, the slow rhythm of his breathing unchanged. Dominic lay in the dark and felt the arm across his chest and reflected on his current status: this is where I am. This is what happened. He thought through it all the way he’d run it every morning in the dungeon, except that the dungeon inventory had been shackles, chains, cock ring, darkness. This morning was different.
He lay in Viktor’s bed. Viktor’s arm was across him. He had slept better than he had since Labor Day. If he was honest with himself, really honest about the situation he was actually in rather than the one he wished for, he was not unhappy. He lay with that for a moment.
Viktor said, without moving: “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Dominic replied, without emotion.
Neither of them moved. The room held its quiet.
“You’re my kidnapper,” Dominic said in the way he’d been saying it for two months, not as an accusation, not with heat, just as a fact that needed to stay true, that he needed to keep saying out loud so it didn’t dissolve entirely into the warmth of the room and the arm across his chest.
Viktor was quiet for a moment. “I prefer the word host,” he said.
“I didn’t accept an invitation.”
“No,” Viktor agreed. “You didn’t.” The arm across Dominic’s chest didn’t move. “How do you feel?”
Dominic looked at the ceiling. He thought about how to answer that honestly. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel,” he said finally. “Like I felt something last night that I don’t have a way to explain. Like I’m lying in my kidnapper’s bed and I’m not miserable and I don’t know what that means about me.”
Viktor turned his head and looked at him. The pale eyes in the low light of the room, the real expression. “It means you’re honest,” he said. “Which is something I’ve always known about you.”
Dominic looked at the ceiling again. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t make it okay.”
“I’m not,” Viktor said. “It isn’t okay. I know what I’ve done. I’m not asking you to forgive it or call it something it isn’t.” He paused. “I’m asking you to lie here for a few more minutes and not run from what’s true. Feel my warmth.”
Dominic lay there. The arm across his chest was warm and heavy and he didn’t move. He had woken up to that arm and had not, in the first confused seconds of consciousness, wanted it to move. That was the truth he wasn’t running from. That a man’s arm across his chest in the dark felt like the safest he had ever been.
“What’s true,” Dominic said, “is that last night was…” He stopped. He didn’t have the language for it and he wasn’t going to pretend he did.
“I know,” Viktor said.
“You can’t know,” Dominic said. “You’ve done that before. I haven’t.”
Viktor was quiet for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “I can’t know what it was for you. Tell me.”
Dominic lay in the dark and tried to find the words for what the previous night had been and found only plain ones: the most real thing that had ever happened to him. He didn’t say that. He gently squeezed Viktor’s arm and said: “I didn’t know it could be like that.”
Viktor’s arm tightened around him, squeezing back just enough to register.
“Neither did I,” he said. And the way he said it made clear he wasn’t speaking technically.
Viktor rolled on his side, facing Dominic and gently caressed his chest. “My beautiful, beautiful boy,” he repeated.
Dominic laid there, disbelieving that anyone could feel about him the way Viktor did. The emotional impact alone was staggering. The expression of that emotion, last night, and what might unfold in the coming moments, took it beyond his imagination.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Viktor said with unexpected authority. “We’re going to brush our teeth and shower, both inside and out….do you know what I mean by that?” he asked.
“I’m pretty sure I do,” Dominic responded with a half-smile.
“Good boy, let’s go”, and Viktor jumped out of bed and started the shower making sure it was hot and steamy for Dominic.
“Get in here, boy,” he called with a smile.
Dominic staggered into the already steamy bathroom and found Viktor in the shower preparing the extra hose. “I’m sorry we introduced you to this in such an unpleasant way. I want us both to get clean — you’ll see why.” He began the procedure. Unlike the first time, there was plenty of lube to help facilitate it and Viktor accomplished his with ease. “Your turn,” he said, turning to Dominic.
Dominic allowed Viktor to gently help him do it, and it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as the first time. Once completed, they took a leisurely, erotic shower together. Viktor scrubbed Dominic with his luffa brush making sure every inch of skin was covered. He actually knelt in front of him almost reverently as the water poured over them and massaged his hardening cock with the brush. He soaped up his hands and massaged his taint and soaped up his crack, gently pressing his finger up his hole saying with a smile, “Clean, inside and out.” Dominic was too timid to do the same to Viktor, so he scrubbed himself, they dried each other off and brushed their teeth.
Clean, and more than ready for round two, Viktor gazed at Dominic, “I realize how lucky I am, you know that don’t you?” he said.
“I don’t know anything right now”, he smiled, happy to follow Viktor wherever the morning would lead them.
He pulled Dominic into a loving embrace and picked up exactly where they left off the night before. Hands groping, tongues dueling, going from 0-60 in seconds. Viktor led Dominic to the bed, laid him on his back and climbed on top of him, pinning his arms over his head. Looking deep into his eyes, he said, “You want this, I know you do. Don’t deny it.”
Dominic paused. He was being asked to acknowledge his new reality. Knowing it was one thing. Saying it was something else altogether. He finally acquiesced. “Yes, Daddy, I do,” he heard himself say.
Still holding him down, Viktor lowered himself and gently kissed every inch of Dominic’s face. His forehead, his closed eyes, his cheeks, his nose, and finally, his mouth. Dominic was in another world altogether and found himself thrusting his groin up to meet Viktor’s.
He felt their cocks, both hard as steel, dueling for dominance. Once again, he had no frame of reference for what this type of sex was supposed to look or feel like, so all he could do was follow his instincts. And his instincts told him grinding his cock against Viktor’s felt good.
“You feel so fucking good,” Viktor uttered as their cocks found each other’s. “You like this?” he asked, seemingly always checking in to make sure Dominic was ok.
Again, a pause, but the truth emerged more easily this time, “Oh, fuck Daddy. More than ok. WAY more”, he sighed.
Still holding his arms to the bed, Viktor moved down his body with more kisses. His neck, his chest, each nipple, his stomach, his hips, his pubic area, where he stopped.
“Should I keep going?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“YES”, Dominic begged.
Viktor slid his hands down under Dominic’s ass to lift it to meet his mouth. He stared at his taint, balls, and cock, deciding where to start and intentionally drawing out the moment. Unable to control himself, Dominic thrust his cock toward Viktor’s face and whimpered, “Please Daddy, please…”
Viktor leaned in and slowly began to lick the length of Dominic’s massive shaft, turning Dominic into a moaning idiot. Up and down his shaft, paying special attention to his slit with the tip of his tongue. Every time he did that, Dominic shuddered.
“More Daddy, more..” Dominic begged again.
Viktor lifted his legs, leaned in, and took a long swipe of his taint with his tongue. “Oh, fuck Daddy,” Dominic whimpered uncontrollably. “Please Daddy”, he repeated, not even knowing what he was begging for.
Dominic, for the umpteenth time since his captivity began over two months was experiencing physical sensations and deep emotional connection that didn’t remotely seem possible. He never considered, or certainly expected, anything he was experiencing now. It was genuinely life-changing.
Viktor moved to his balls. He sucked on the right one. He sucked on the left one. He took both in his mouth.
“Oh..my…fucking…god…” Dominic repeated.
Viktor pushed Dominic’s legs up over his shoulders, leaned down and devoured his hole. He licked it every imaginable way reducing Dominic to nothing but moans, groans, and near tears. He grasped the sheets turning his knuckles white. He made sounds that he’d never before heard, from himself or anyone else.
Things were moving faster than Viktor had planned, but the moment taking him with it. He reached for the lube, used it on himself and Dominic, looked him in eye and said, “You know what’s coming.”
“Please Daddy, give it to me. I want your cock so bad Daddy.” “That’s my good boy,” Viktor answered as he slid into his captive, waiting hole.
He went in slowly, letting them both experience every centimeter of depth. Viktor’s cock wasn’t exceptionally thick, but it was veiny and very, very long.
It didn’t take long at all before he was, for the second time in twelve hours, balls deep. But somehow today he was deeper than last night. Dominic, exalting in the fullness and the slow, succulent friction of Viktor’s cock sliding in and out, felt it reaching a point it hadn’t the previous night. Each time Viktor reached it, the pain lessened, until finally it slid past something Dominic felt was different. Better. Ever more erotic.
Viktor stopped immediately too. “Feel that?” he asked
“Yes, Daddy, what is that?”
“That’s your second hole, boy. Some men never get to experience it. You’ve reached it already.” He smiled and said rather cheekily, “You were meant for this.”
Not fully understanding the implications of the event, Dominic simply responded, “Just fuck me Daddy. Fuck your boy…”
The pleasure of the second hole had taken them both to the edge. “Cum with my boy, now”, he said as he grabbed Dominic’s cock, starting pumping, and continued pounding him.
It didn’t take long. Dominic came first and volleys of cum shot up over his head, covering his hair, face, and torso. As he did, he clamped down on Viktor’s cock, taking him to orgasm as well. Dominic felt, for the second time in his life, the bliss of hot jizz being pumped into him. He didn’t know why, but he felt immense satisfaction and pride from knowing that he’d driven Viktor to this end.
The spasms continued until both men were dry. Without thinking about it, Viktor scooped up a fingerful of Dominic’s jizz and fed it to him saying, “Taste yourself. You’ve tasted mine, now you get to compare.”
Dominic sucked his finger like he was a ravenous wolf and said, “More Daddy”, leading Viktor to feed him as much as he could scoop up with his hand.
After Dominic had licked every finger dry, Viktor reluctantly pulled out, leaving Dominic feeling satisfied, but empty. Viktor laid on his back and before he knew it, Dominic nuzzled into him and uttered two simple words: “Hold me.”
Viktor pulled him into himself so tight he wondered if Dominic could even breathe but knew he’d protest if that were the case. They laid there for what felt like eternity, with Viktor gently caressing Dominic’s shoulders, head and back.
Viktor thought he felt a tear drop from Dominic’s cheek onto his shoulder. He said nothing. He just held on tighter.
Dominic said quietly, “I’ve never been held.”
* * *
He lay in the aftermath, nestled into Viktor’s chest, and let the evidence accumulate.
Twice now. The same result both times. His body had been pointing in this direction since a garage in June and he had spent months arguing with it and this morning the argument was over. His body was not confused. His body had never been confused. His body had known since the cutoff shorts on a workbench stool, since the Speedo and the loin cloth and the shower and the hot tub and every morning in the gym. He had been arguing with it for months, and as of last night and this morning the argument was now over.
He was what they’d said at Rusty’s. Or something like it. He didn’t know the exact word for what he was and he didn’t particularly want to find it right now, in Viktor Volkov’s bed, with Viktor’s hand resting on his stomach. What he knew was that what he’d felt the last twelve hours was not a mistake and not a performance and not something that fear or isolation or circumstance had manufactured out of nothing. It was real. It had always been real. He had simply been the last to know.
That was a difficult thing to sit with. He sat with it anyway.
He thought about that night at Rusty’s. The f-word that had landed like an explosion. The whole table laughing, including him. He thought about what that word meant now, applied to himself, and found that the meaning had shifted in a way he couldn’t fully account for. It still landed. It still carried the weight of every context in which he’d heard it. But underneath the weight was something else: the intimacy he had found in this room with this man was more than anything the word could diminish.
He had never felt anything like this with Brianna. He had never felt anything like this with anyone. The word from Rusty’s couldn’t touch what the last twelve hours had brought.
He lay in Viktor’s bed and thought: all right. And meant it. And felt the guilt of meaning it and held both things at once, the way he’d been holding both things since the morning after the Speedo.
Viktor was watching him. Dominic could feel it without looking.
“Say whatever you’re thinking,” Viktor said.
“I’m thinking that I owe Danny Ferris an apology,” Dominic said. “For laughing at a joke that turned out to be about me.”
Viktor didn’t know the story. Dominic explained, including the word itself.
A pause. Then Viktor said, with the dry precision that was one of his most recognizable qualities: "I wouldn't start there," Viktor said. "There's a longer list. Work your way up to it."
Dominic almost laughed. He didn’t, but it was close.
“I’m thinking,” Dominic said, more honestly, “that I’ve spent twenty-four years being someone I wasn’t. And I don’t know what to do with that.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it today,” Viktor said.
“I know.” He looked at the ceiling. “That almost makes it harder.”
Viktor said nothing. He knew when to let a silence be a silence.
* * *
Viktor made breakfast.
He produced two robes from the closet, silk, short, the kind of thing that existed in Viktor’s life the way everything in Viktor’s life existed, chosen, deliberate, entirely without apology. He held one out to Dominic. Dominic put it on. They walked to the kitchen.
A small thing, the robe. It didn't feel small. It sat high on his thighs and left little to guess at, and for the first time all morning he was aware of himself the way he'd been aware of himself in the Speedo: like something on display and not minding it.
The breakfast was real: eggs, toast, fruit, coffee that was better than any coffee Dominic had ever had in a kitchen of his own. Viktor moved efficiently, just like he did in the garage and the gym, and Dominic sat at the kitchen island on a stool and watched him: the silk robe, the good coffee, the man across the counter who had kidnapped him and taught him who he was and was making him breakfast and couldn’t make any of it resolve into something simple.
Viktor set a plate in front of him. He sat across from him with his own coffee and looked at Dominic with the pale eyes.
Dominic looked at the plate. He looked at Viktor. He picked up his fork.
“This is insane,” he said.
“Yes,” Viktor agreed.
“I’m wearing a silk robe. You made me eggs. I’m wearing a cock ring under the silk robe.”
“Also true.”
“I slept better than I have in months.”
“I know.”
Dominic ate a piece of toast. “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. Not distress exactly. More like confusion, and something close to frustration at how little of it he could pin down.
“You’re having breakfast,” Viktor said. “After a good night. In a house where you are cared for and valued. By a man who is very glad you’re here.” He picked up his coffee. “That’s what’s happening to you.”
Dominic looked at him across the counter.
He thought: he kidnapped me.
He thought: the eggs are good.
He thought: I am running out of ways to use those two facts to cancel each other out.
He ate his breakfast. He drank his coffee. Somewhere in the middle of it, between the eggs and the second cup, he felt something happen in his chest that he hadn’t felt since he couldn’t remember when: a quiet, settling happiness. Not dramatic. Not earned. Just there, the way warmth is there when you didn’t know you were cold.
He felt it and felt guilty for feeling it and felt it anyway.
He set down his cup. He looked at Viktor.
“I need you to tell me everything,” he said.
* * *
Viktor looked at him.
“Everything,” Dominic said. “How this happened. Who knew. What’s been arranged. Dom Jr., Brianna, all of it. I’ve let things sit for over two months because I was afraid to demand answers. I’m asking now.”
Viktor was quiet for a moment. He set down his coffee. He looked at Dominic with the expression that was the honest one, the one that didn’t manage anything.
“All right,” he said.
He started at the beginning. Not the abduction, Dominic knew that part, but before it. The summer. Randy Pruitt’s description of a twenty-four-year-old handyman from Harlan Creek with a gift for vintage cars and nothing in his life that matched what he was capable of. What he had felt the first afternoon in the drive when Dominic stepped out of the truck. The offer at the end of the summer and the cold certainty when Dominic declined it that losing him was not something Viktor was willing to accept.
“I made a plan,” Viktor said. “I make plans. When something matters to me, I find a way to it. That’s simply how I operate.”
“I know,” Dominic said. “I’ve known that for months. What I didn’t know was who helped you.”
Viktor paused. Said nothing. Then looked at him. “Randy Pruitt,” he said.
The name landed.
Dominic sat very still. He had known that someone had to have given Viktor the information needed to arrange the abduction. He had not let himself name who. He had not let himself look at the most obvious answer. He was looking at it now.
“Randy,” he said.
“Yes.”
“My Randy. The man I trust more than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Yes.”
Dominic set down his fork. He looked at the plate. To his surprise, he didn’t feel rage. That would take too much energy and Randy didn’t deserve it. He felt grief of a man who has just lost something he thought was permanent.
“What did you give him,” he said. His voice was flat.
Viktor was direct about it, the way he was direct about everything. A sum of money that Dominic could not have imagined Randy having access to any other way. Enough to buy a real house, not a trailer, a house, with plenty of room and yard for two boys. Enough to fund college for both Dom Jr. and Jake when the time came. And Randy’s commitment, alongside the money, to raise Dom Jr. the way Dominic would have raised him.
Dominic listened. He held the information.
“He gave you the night,” Dominic said. “What time I’d leave, what I drove.”
“Yes.”
“He knew what you were going to do.”
“He knew the broad strokes. He told himself he didn’t know the details.”
“But he knew enough.”
Viktor looked at him evenly. “He knew enough.”
Dominic sat in the silk robe at Viktor’s kitchen counter. He tried to resolve Randy’s betrayal against years of being brothers and couldn’t find a way to do it. Randy had sold him. Randy had looked at what Viktor was offering and had done the arithmetic and had decided that Dominic’s freedom was worth less than a house and a college fund and the peace of mind of knowing Dom Jr. would be taken care of.
There was also the part he didn’t want to think about: Randy had done for Dom Jr. what Dominic had always wanted to do and never could. Got him out of Pineview. Put him in a real house. Secured his future. The means were unforgivable. The result was what Dominic had lain awake wishing for.
He pushed that away. He would deal with it later. He had things he needed to know first.
“Dom Jr.,” he said. “Tell me exactly.”
Viktor’s expression shifted slightly. This was the part he had prepared. “I receive weekly reports,” he said. “He is doing well. He is in school. He is living with Randy and Jake and the three of them have settled into a routine.” He paused. “He is, by all accounts, a happy seven-year-old who misses his father and is being loved by people who knew that father and know what he would have wanted.”
Dominic looked at the counter. He felt the ache of it, the one thing in all of this that hadn’t become complicated.
“What does he think happened to me,” he said.
“A letter was delivered,” Viktor said. “On Labor Day weekend. In your name. It said you were leaving, that circumstances had made it impossible to stay, that you had made arrangements for him and that he was to stay with Randy and Jake. It told him you loved him very much.” He watched Dominic’s face carefully. “Brianna received a separate letter and a separate arrangement.”
“He thinks I left him,” Dominic said. The words came out very quiet.
“He thinks you chose a different life,” Viktor said. “I know you didn’t choose how you got here. But the life you’re living now is real. That part isn’t a lie.”
Dominic sat with that. It was the worst thing he’d heard. It was also, in the brutal arithmetic of the situation, better than Dom Jr. knowing his father had been taken against his will by a man Dom Jr. would never understand and could never be protected from.
He held both of those things.
“Brianna,” he said.
Viktor paused. It was the first pause of the conversation, suggesting a more complicated answer. “That’s a less straightforward story,” he said.
Dominic looked at him.
“I needed Randy to be able to take custody of Dom Jr. cleanly,” Viktor said. “For that to happen, Brianna’s fitness as a parent needed to be… documented.” He said it with the precision of a man choosing words carefully. “My resources include people who know how these processes work, quickly and efficiently. There was documentation. A hearing. The court ruled in Randy’s favor.”
“You had her declared an unfit mother,” Dominic said.
“The court did. Based on documentation that was… thorough.”
Dominic looked at him for a long moment. Brianna was not a good mother. He had known that. He had watched it for seven years, helpless to be unable to fix it. She was not cruel, just absent in all the ways that mattered, and Tammy had always been there to reinforce the absence. He had worried about Dom Jr. in her care every single day.
He had also never wanted it to go this way.
“Where is she now,” he said.
“Living with her mother. She has visitation with Dom Jr. on a schedule that Randy manages.” He paused. “She is financially taken care of. Both she and Tammy. That was part of the arrangement.”
“Your arrangement.”
“Yes.”
Dominic looked at his coffee cup. The morning had changed entirely. The warmth of the silk robe and the good breakfast and the quiet happiness that had settled over him was still there, underneath everything, and it was now sitting alongside the knowledge of what had been done to produce it. And the two things did not cancel each other out and could not be made to.
He had found the most genuine intimacy of his life with the man who had arranged all of this.
Dom Jr. was safe and cared for and growing up with his best friend, in a house, with a man who loved him, because of the man sitting across from him.
Brianna had lost her son and her marriage and the version of her life she’d thought she was building because of the man sitting across from him.
Randy, who had been his brother, had made a calculation and had chosen money and his own son’s future and had done it by telling himself he was doing the right thing and wasn’t entirely wrong.
All of it was true simultaneously. None of it resolved.
Viktor was watching him. He didn’t try to fill the silence.
Dominic looked up. He looked at Viktor Volkov across the kitchen counter, in the morning light, in the silk robes, with the coffee between them. He knew firsthand everything this man had done and everything he had become to him and couldn’t find the edge of either thing.
“I need to think,” he said.
“I know,” Viktor said.
“I’m not…” He stopped. “I don’t know how to hold all of this at the same time.”
“You don’t have to today,” Viktor said. “You can be angry. You can grieve. You can feel whatever you feel. I’m not asking you to resolve it.”
“What are you asking,” Dominic said.
Viktor looked at him with the pale eyes. The real expression. The one that had been there in the drive on the first afternoon and had never, in all the months since, been anything other than what it was.
“Nothing today,” he said. “Today I’m just asking you to be here. With me.”
Dominic looked at him for a long moment.
He was still wearing the cock ring. He was still in Viktor’s house, at the end of the private road in Franklin, behind the gate that required a code and the camera that required your face. None of what was true about his situation had changed.
He was also, undeniably and despite everything, here. In the most complete sense of the word. More present in this kitchen than he had been in the single-wide in five years.
He picked up his coffee.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
Viktor refilled his cup without being asked.
They sat in the morning light and didn't speak. Everything important had already been said. What was left was just the two of them, in the same room.
Dominic drank his coffee and thought about Dom Jr. on his bike with Jake Pruitt across the yard.
He thought about Randy.
He thought about last night and this morning and the silk robe and the eggs and the pale eyes across the counter.
He thought about the intimacies with Viktor for which there were no words.
He thought about all of it, held it all at once, and couldn’t find the bottom of it.
He was still looking.
-To be continued-
Author’s Note: This chapter was quiet, intimate, a little playful even. I wanted you to have that before things start to shift. Because they are going to shift: the next stretch takes Dominic somewhere I've been building toward since Chapter 1, somewhere with a lot more edge to it. I think you're ready. As always, I'd love to hear from you: [email protected].
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
