Palm Springs
In the days following Viktor's confession, Domnic had a quality Viktor hadn't encountered before: he was present, but not entirely there. He went to the garage. He worked on the Charger. He ate the meals Viktor prepared and slept in Viktor's bed and had the conversations they had, about the cars, about the property, about nothing in particular, and underneath all of it, running constantly, was the accounting he couldn't finish.
Dom Jr. thought he'd been abandoned. That was the fact he kept returning to. Everything else, Randy's betrayal, Brianna's situation, even Viktor and what they'd become to each other, he had a place for each of them in his brain, however imperfect. But Dom Jr. at seven years old receiving a letter that said his father had chosen to leave, and believing it, and growing up with that belief, was something that sat in Dominic's chest like a stone that hadn't moved since the morning Viktor told him.
He didn't say this. He carried it. He had always been better at carrying things than saying them.
Viktor watched him patiently, without being overbearing, with the clear understanding that what Dominic needed right now was not to be managed. He didn't push. He didn't offer solutions. He cooked dinner and worked in the garage and made love to him and said, one evening in the kitchen: "I want to suggest something. You don't have to say yes."
Dominic looked at him. "A friend in Palm Springs is selling his collection. Fourteen cars, most of them significant. He needs someone who actually knows what they're doing to assess them and continue the restoration work." Viktor picked up his wine. "I have a house there. I spend my winters in Palm Springs. We could go, take on the collection, and you could have the space to think clearly without Franklin pressing down on you."
Dominic looked at the table. He thought about the dungeon one floor below him and the shackles that had been off for months but were never entirely absent and the gate that required a code and the camera that required your face.
"I'd still be…" He paused.
"You'd still be with me," Viktor said. "Yes. But Palm Springs is different. We'd be in a different environment. And the cars would give you something to do with your hands and your head while the rest of it settles."
Dominic looked at him. He didn't have a better idea. He didn't have any idea at all.
"All right," he said.
* * *
Viktor could have chartered a plane. Dominic had assumed he would. Instead, he booked two seats on a commercial flight out of Nashville, which he explained simply: "Private jets get noticed. I prefer not to be noticed." What didn't surprise him, once he understood how Viktor operated, was that commercial meant first class.
Dominic had been on a plane only once before, a flight to Chicago at sixteen, just before he got Brianna pregnant, to visit a cousin. It was a middle seat on a carrier whose name he'd forgotten, three hours of recycled air, a seat that hadn't reclined and a bag of pretzels that cost four dollars.
This was not that.
His seat was wide enough to actually sit in. Someone brought him a drink before they took off. Viktor ordered for both of them, having done this so many times it had stopped registering, and the food that arrived was real food and felt, not for the first time since Labor Day, the disorientation of a life that bore no resemblance to the one he'd been living before it.
He was flying first class to Palm Springs with a Russian millionaire. They were lovers. He was wearing clothes that fit.
He looked out the window and said nothing and let the distance accumulate beneath him.
Palm Springs arrived from the air as a grid of green against the desert floor, the San Jacinto Mountains rising behind it with the abruptness of something that had been placed there. Viktor had said it was different from Franklin. He hadn't specified how.
The house answered that question.
When they arrived, Viktor described it as “mid-century”, which meant it looked like someone had understood exactly what a house was supposed to do and had built it without hesitation. Single story, expansive, walls of glass facing the mountains, a pool that ran the length of the south side of the property. The desert light came into every room at an angle that had no equivalent in Tennessee, and the air outside was dry and warm in November in a way that felt like a different category of weather entirely.
"This is yours," Dominic said. He wasn't asking. He was absorbing.
"Since 2009," Viktor said. It gave Viktor joy to watch Dominic take it in with the same expression he always had when he encountered something new for the first time. Attentive. Pleased.
"It's not what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
Dominic looked at the pool, the mountains, the light. "I don't know. Something that looked more like Franklin."
"Franklin is my home. This is where I relax," Viktor said. He picked up Dominic's bag. "Come see the garage."
The garage was a separate structure, four bays, and it was currently empty clearly waiting for something. Viktor walked him through it knowing what was going to fill it and was simply giving the space time to agree.
"The collection arrives Thursday," Viktor said. "Fourteen cars. I've seen photographs. You haven't. I want your first impression. Just you and the cars.”
Dominic looked at the empty bays. He felt, for the first time since the morning of Viktor's confession, pulled toward something important.
"Thursday," he said.
"Thursday," Viktor confirmed.
They went inside. Viktor showed him the house, distinctly proud and visibly pleased that he would now be sharing it with Dominic. The kitchen. The living area with its view of the mountains. The study. And at the end of a short hallway, a door that Dominic recognized just as Viktor opened it.
"You have one here too," Dominic said.
"Yes."
Dominic stood in the doorway and looked into the dungeon. Smaller than the one in Franklin. Different equipment on the walls, some of it unfamiliar, some of it recognizable from his months as its unwilling occupant. Clean, ordered, waiting.
“Can I ask you a question?” Dominic stopped, changing the direction of the conversation.
“Of course”, Viktor replied, wondering where this was gong.
"You never used it on me," Dominic said. "The one in Franklin. You had all of it and you never used it."
Viktor was quiet for a moment. He was standing just behind Dominic's shoulder and his voice, when it came, was the low, honest one. "I fell in love with you," he said. "I couldn’t bear to frighten you away."
Dominic stood in the doorway and looked at the room and felt something shift.
"I wish you had,” he said quietly. He said it only once. But he meant it, and Viktor heard it.
Viktor stepped up to him, face-to-face and replied, “I’m glad to know that. I wondered, but you’ve been through so much”, and then pulling him into a hug added looking into the room, “I’ll make sure we make up for lost time.”
Dominic looked directly back into his eyes, and replied with a half-smile, “I’m sure you will….Sir.”
Viktor touched his shoulder, briefly, and led him back to the kitchen.
* * *
The first week in Palm Springs introduced Dominic to a world that was both strikingly familiar and completely alien.
He absorbed the house quickly and moved through comfortably within days. The collection arrived Thursday on two flatbed trucks and occupied his full attention from the moment the first car came off the transport. The collection was extraordinary, fourteen vehicles in various states of preservation, the centerpiece a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona in Citron Yella that had been sitting under a cover for eleven years and was, under the dust and the cosmetic neglect, almost entirely original. Dominic walked around it three times without speaking.
"Well," Viktor said, from behind him.
"Give me a minute," Dominic said.
He stood in front of the Daytona and felt like he was in the presence of something that mattered, the feeling the cars had always given him, but free of everything that had complicated it since Labor Day. No shackles on his ankles. No gate requiring a code. Just him and a vintage car that needed work, the resources to do it right, and the desert sun on the hood when he put his hand on it.
"I know what's wrong with all of them just from looking," he said.
"I know you do," Viktor said.
Dominic looked at him over his shoulder. "This is going to take the whole winter."
"Yes," Viktor said. "I hope so."
He started Monday. The work gave his days a shape, the same shape the Franklin garage had given them, tools, oil, problems with solutions. And underneath it, without him having to force it, the other things began to settle. The processing Viktor had promised Palm Springs would allow was happening on its own, the way things do when your hands are busy and your mind is finally quiet.
The collections provided the comfort of the familiar.
What Palm Springs also provided, which Franklin had not, was the world outside the gate.
Viktor's social life in Palm Springs was real and extensive and nothing like his Franklin existence. The men who came to the house were professionals and artists and collectors and people of various kinds, and they moved through Viktor's world as people who had been there long enough that nothing required explanation. They were also, the majority of them, visibly and comfortably gay in a way that Dominic had never previously been in the room with.
"Palm Springs is a gay enclave," Viktor said, one evening after the third dinner party Dominic had attended in two weeks. They were on the terrace, the mountains dark against the sky, the air still warm at ten in the evening. "It has been for decades. It's one of the reason I come here."
Viktor looked at him across the terrace with the expression that was the real one. "You should know," he said, "that you've made an impression."
"On who," Dominic said.
"Everyone. Every dinner. Every introduction." He picked up his drink. “Rafael pulled aside last Tuesday and asked where I'd been hiding you. Luca said something considerably less subtle that I'll spare you." He paused. "They're not wrong to notice. You walk into a room and the room adjusts."
Dominic looked at him. "You're proud of that."
"I'm proud of you," Viktor said. Simply. "I've been coming to Palm Springs for fifteen years. I've never brought anyone like you. I didn't know what I was missing." He looked at the mountains. "Now I do."
Dominic sat with that. Being seen by Viktor he had gotten used to. Being seen by Viktor's world, on Viktor's arm, as something Viktor had chosen to bring into this life, that was newer, and it landed differently, and he wasn't entirely sure what to do with it yet.
He picked up his drink. "What did Luca say," he said.
"I'll tell you when you're older," Viktor said.
Dominic smiled and looked at the sky. He had been absorbing this gradually since the first week. The couples at dinner. Men with men, hands on shoulders, arms around waists, the body language of people who had stopped monitoring themselves. He watched it carefully, from a slight distance, filing it.
"Palm Springs is the first place," Viktor said, "where I have never had to be careful."
Dominic looked at him. He understood what he meant. He was also beginning to understand something sitting on that terrace: that hiding who he was hadn't been necessary. It had just been what everyone around him did, and he had done it too, for so long it became the only viable option. It wasn't. It was just a habit. And unlike the facts of his situation, habits could be broken.
He set his drink down.
"Tell me more about these friends of yours," he said. “Specifics”, he added with a smile.
* * *
Dominic didn’t know his desire to know more about Viktor’s friends was fortuitous, as Viktor had already invited three of them over for an afternoon by the pool and dinner the coming Saturday. The other thing Dominic didn’t know was that it was the same three men from the white Speedo incident, months ago.
“I’m having some friends over Saturday. You’ll join us, of course. Pool and drinks for the afternoon. Dinner. Then…” he trailed off.
He went on to disclose that it was the same three who’d had lunch at his Franklin home the day Dominic cleaned the pool.
Dominic’s heart jumped into his throat. The same three, but now the shackles were off, both literally and figuratively. He could be who he was becoming with this group of men.
Up to this point, Dominic’s interactions with Viktor’s Palm Springs crowd had been flirty, suggestive, but never hands-on. Something about the way Viktor told him about Saturday suggested this was about to change. Dominic would no longer be an observer, now he’d be a player.
Viktor had his private chef prepare the dinner and leave it for the men to grill and plate. He didn’t want an audience for what he knew would unfold. That morning, Dominic was still working in the garage when Viktor finally pulled him out of there and ordered him to get ready for the afternoon. As they walked back to the house, Viktor reminded him who their guests would be, and added, “They were pleased to hear you’d be joining us. Very pleased.”
Trying to act nonchalant, Dominic thought to himself, I’m sure they were. But secretly, he was as well. This would be the first time he’d been openly…gay. The word stopped him. After tonight, there would be no going back.
But more importantly, he wanted them to know he belonged to Viktor. Devoted to him. He wanted them to imagine Viktor fucking him. Him moaning, begging for more.
The last time they were together, he was the Viktor’s plaything.
Now, he was Viktor’s partner.
And whatever they had in mind for the evening, Viktor came first.
“Oh, I’ve left something on the bed for you,” Viktor added casually as they entered the house.
Dominic didn’t need to be told. There it was, just like the last time, the white Speedo, daring him to wear it. But this time not only didn’t he object, but he was eager to get cleaned up and get it on.
Dominic hurried through the shower, scrubbed the grime of the garage off him, even used the special hose, just in case. Once dried, he tried on Speedo, but with an entirely different reaction this time. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror and realized, for one of the first times ever, what a stud he was. Big, round shoulders, massive hair-covered pecs mounted on his chiseled torso like they’d been carved there, and a treasure trove of dark hair disappearing under the scandalously low-cut suit. Most notably, Dominic still wore the cock ring that had been used as a deterrent, so his bulge protruded under the sheer suit even more than it did the first time he wore it.
Dominic had not addressed the ongoing presence of the cock ring with Viktor, probably for two reasons. First, it would have forced them to confront the issue of his imprisonment. Dominic didn’t want to leave, but he didn’t want to press the issue either. The second reason was even more embarrassing. It looked and felt sexy. Like before, it lifted his balls into a shelf that his thick cock rested on, as if it were on display, creating a massive bulge. The previous time he wore this suit, that feature was a source of embarrassment. This time, he wore it as a badge of honor. He wanted to show off for Viktor, his man. He walked into the kitchen and modeled for him.
Viktor looked him up and down and said with a sinister smile, “My colleagues are going to like that…a lot,” and pulled him in for a warm kiss.
Just then the doorbell rang and Dominic jumped away. Viktor laughed and said, “At least throw a shirt on. We don’t want them to attack you the minute they arrive.”
Viktor left to answer the door while Dominic found a loose-fitting button-down shirt, which he intentionally left unbuttoned.
Viktor guided his friends in and Dominic remembered them instantly. The looks on their faces when they ogled him in Franklin had been etched in his mind.
Viktor re-introduced them, curious to see their reactions, given the prior encounter.
Marco Reyes was thirty-eight, compact and dark, a Cuban American architect from New York who wintered in Palm Springs for the midcentury modern houses; he claimed you couldn't understand the style until you'd stood inside one in person. "We've met," Marco said pleasantly and added, "briefly. You were otherwise occupied at the time."
Dominic understood the reference immediately. "I remember," he said.
Eduardo Vance was forty-one, the tallest of the three, with the kind of jawline that looked designed rather than inherited. He ran a private equity firm in San Francisco and behaved like the pack leader. He took Dominic's hand and held it a moment longer than a handshake required.
"Viktor has told us a great deal about you," he said.
"I’m curious what he told you,” Dominic said, unapologetically.
Eduardo smiled. “All good. In fact, if half what he’s told us it true, he’s a very lucky man.”
The third was James Whitfield, thirty-six, a Londoner who had a unique combination of British understatement and desert-acquired ease that made everything he said sound both casual and deliberate. He had the body of a man who had played rugby in his twenties and hadn't entirely stopped.
He didn't say anything immediately. He took his time. His eyes moved over Dominic from the unbuttoned shirt to the white Speedo and back up, entirely without apology, acknowledging that concealing his interest would be dishonest.
"Well," he said finally. Just the one word. But the way he said it covered considerable ground.
Dominic held his gaze. Six months ago he would have looked away. He didn't look away.
James smiled, slow, deliberate, the smile of a man who has just received useful information. He turned to Viktor. "You've been keeping him to yourself," he said. It wasn't quite an accusation. It wasn't quite not one either.
"I have," Viktor said pleasantly.
James looked back at Dominic. "We'll see how the afternoon goes," he said.
Dominic's heart swelled with pride and felt his cock engorge. He picked up his drink and said nothing and let James's assessment settle on him like an extended hand.
Viktor said "pool" in the tone that ended conversations, and the five of them moved through the glass doors to the terrace.
The three men had done this before and disappeared without being told into the guest room to change, while Viktor and Dominic set up the poolside bar. Viktor was already in his suit, dark, European, and nearly as tiny as Dominic’s. Just as they’d finished pouring their drinks, he heard the glass door slide open.
Marco came out first, then Eduardo, then James. All three in Speedos, Marco's a deep red, Eduardo's black, James's navy, all three with the bodies of men who had not let the years be careless with them. They moved to the pool with a complete lack of self-consciousness, clearly having been guests at Viktor’s pool before.
Marco set his drink on the pool's edge and looked at Dominic. "Last time we saw you," he said, "you stayed in the deep end for a very long time."
"The liner needed extra attention," Dominic said with a knowing smile.
Marco looked at him for a moment. Then he returned the smile and stepped off the edge into the water.
The afternoon dissolved into pieces, sunlight scattering off the water, the clink of bottles being passed hand to hand, someone's laugh cutting through the heat like it belonged there. Drinks kept coming, and with them came a certain looseness: a hand lingering on a shoulder a beat too long, fingers hooking under a waistband in passing, someone yelping as a suit was snapped and let go with a laugh that didn't quite cover the look underneath it. James caught Dominic's wrist once, just to steady him, and didn't let go as fast as he should have. Nobody commented on it. Nobody had to.
By the time the sun began to slant across the pool deck, the horseplay had a rhythm to it, grabbing, grazing, retaliating, each pass a little bolder, a little slower to pull back. It read as nothing, the kind of thing friends did when the alcohol loosened everyone's hands. Later, pulling himself out of the water, James put his hand on Dominic's shoulder and left it there while he said something to Viktor, and Viktor caught Dominic's eye across the terrace and said nothing, and the look he gave him said: your call.
Dominic had never been a big drinker, so he didn’t have the clearest of minds as the pleasures and surprises of the afternoon wore on. But he knew he could be headed for unpredictable territory, so he wisely declined the next few rounds of drinks. Viktor was watching him connect with his friends with great pride, but Dominic’s first, and only, loyalty was to Viktor.
They ate on the terrace, the mountains going purple in the last of the light, the private chef's food laid out on the table and Viktor playing host with unhurried generosity. The wine Eduardo had brought turned out to be extraordinary, which Eduardo mentioned only once and with complete modesty, which was noted by all.
“I have to say," Marco said, settling back in his chair and looking around the table, "this is different from your usual dinners, Viktor."
"How so," Viktor said, though his expression suggested he knew exactly how so.
"Warmer," Marco said. He glanced at Dominic. "Better company."
Dominic and Viktor exchanged glances across the table. Dominic looked quietly proud and Viktor responded with undisguised warmth. "Dominic has a way of changing the temperature of a room," he said. "I noticed when we met last summer. I've been benefiting from it since."
“Last summer…” James said. He had barely taken his eyes off Dominic since they sat down, which Dominic had noticed and which he was, surprisingly, entirely comfortable with. "That's when we met you at the other pool, isn't it."
"It is," Viktor said.
"I think about that afternoon more than is probably appropriate," James said pleasantly. He picked up his wine. "No offense intended."
"None taken," Dominic said. And meant it.
Eduardo looked between them as if he were tracking something. "You've changed," he said to Dominic. Not unkindly. Directly.
"I've been told," Dominic said.
"In Franklin you looked like a man trying to disappear into the water," Eduardo said. "Tonight you look like a man who owns the pool."
"Viktor owns the pool," Dominic said.
"Details," Marco said.
Viktor refilled glasses without being asked. “Dominic does own it," he said, to the table. Watch him in the garage sometime. When Dominic decides something is worth his attention, it becomes his. Completely. The car doesn't have a choice." He looked at Dominic. "Neither, I've found, does anything else.”
"I've seen the Daytona," Marco said. "That car was a ruin six weeks ago."
"It wasn't a ruin," Dominic said. "It was neglected. There's a difference. A ruin you walk away from. Neglect you can fix."
A brief silence settled over the table. Something had just been said about more than a car, and everyone knew it.
James broke it. "I find myself wondering," he said, choosing his words so they’d land exactly where he aimed them, "what the rest of the evening holds." He looked at Viktor. "You sent the chef home."
"I did," Viktor said.
"No staff. Private terrace. Hot tub running." He looked at Dominic. "Five men who have had an exceptionally good afternoon and an even better dinner." He set down his wine. "I'm merely observing."
"You're always merely observing," Eduardo said.
"And yet things always happen," James said.
Marco looked at Dominic with the warm, slightly wicked smile that was his default. "How are you with hot tubs?" he asked. "Given that it's your first Palm Springs winter."
Dominic looked at him. Then at James. Then at Viktor, who was watching him with the pale eyes and the expression that again said: your call.
"I've developed an appreciation," Dominic said.
James picked up his wine. "Good," he said. Simply. As though that settled something.
Viktor stood to clear the first course and Dominic stood to help him, and as they passed each other at the end of the table Viktor put his hand briefly on the back of Dominic's neck, the gesture private in a room full of people, and said quietly: "You were extraordinary tonight."
Dominic looked at him. "I learned from someone," he said.
Viktor smiled. The real one. The one very few people ever got.
They cleared the table. The mountains had gone entirely dark. The hot tub steamed at the far end of the terrace, already running, the water lit from underneath, waiting.
Nobody moved immediately after dinner. The wine had done what wine does over three hours at a terrace table, and the afternoon in the pool had left a charge among them that the dinner conversation had amplified rather than resolved. The mountains were entirely dark now. The hot tub glowed at the far end of the terrace, patient.
Marco produced a pre-roll from somewhere. "Look what I brought” and lit it without ceremony and passed it to Eduardo, who passed it to Viktor, who took it with the ease of a man who had done this before and passed it to Dominic.
Dominic took it. He had smoked exactly twice in his life, both times in Randy Pruitt's truck after a job, and both times it had made him laugh at things that weren't particularly funny. He took a pull and passed it to James and felt the warmth of it settle into the warmth already in his chest from the wine and the afternoon and the dinner and all of it.
They migrated naturally to the edge of the hot tub, suits still on, feet in the water, the five of them arranged around the rim with the pre-roll making its second circuit. Viktor sat on one side of Dominic and James had managed the transition to sit on the other. Dominic found himself, with no objection whatsoever, between Viktor on his left and James on his right, the heat of the tub rising around them, the desert night enormous overhead.
Dominic was aware of both of them. He was aware that everyone at the tub's edge understood the seating arrangement and nobody was pretending otherwise. The pot and the wine had dissolved the last of the evening's social niceties and what remained was five men in tiny swimsuits on the edge of a hot tub at ten o'clock in the Palm Springs dark, with the sexual tension that had been building since Marco snapped Eduardo's suit in the pool six hours ago.
Viktor's hand rested on Dominic's knee. James's thigh was warm against his.
It was James who said it, eventually, with the British understatement he applied to everything: "Seems a shame to get in with the suits on." He looked around the tub's edge. "Given that we're all adults."
Marco looked at Eduardo. Eduardo looked at Viktor. Viktor looked at Dominic.
"Your call," Viktor said. For the second time that evening.
Dominic reached for the waistband of his Speedo, dropping quickly into the water to obscure his quickly swelling member.
"I thought you'd never ask," James said.
They got in. The tub was generous but not generous enough for five men of their collective size, which was, Dominic suspected, exactly the point. The water was very hot and the night was very dark and the skin-on-skin contact that the dimensions of the tub produced was immediate and total and entirely unavoidable.
Nobody tried to avoid it.
The wine, and particularly the pot, had reduced Dominic to a puddle of need. He was in a hot tub with four nude men, skin-on-skin, legs and arms tangled under the water, all radiating sex. The afternoon had been flirty, the dinner even more so, and here they were, a little drunk, definitely stoned, and done waiting.
They were all submerged and Viktor was on Dominic’s left, with his arm on the hot tub’s ledge, over Dominic. Pressing against him from the right was James, whose intentions had been made abundantly clear. Dominic and nuzzled his head into Viktor’s shoulders. Viktor responded by pulling him in tight and whispered, “There’s my boy…”
But James would not be ignored. Something passed between him and Viktor, wordless and immediate, and then both men moved at once, Viktor grabbed one of Dominic's hands, James the other, and wrapped his fingers around two thick, straining cocks in the same breath, squeezing until he got the message.
Dominic froze for exactly one second. Then he didn't. Two men, two cocks, one in each fist, and he gripped them both like he'd been doing it his whole life.
Viktor whispered to Dominic again, “You good, little man?”
Dominic took that as his cue to begin stroking, and answered, “Fucking good, Daddy. So. Fucking. Good.”
The conversation around him kept going, easy, unbothered, like nothing unusual was happening at all, while Dominic worked both cocks in his fists, half listening, half lost in the sheer disbelief of it. This is really happening. Every stroke made it feel more real and less real at the same time, and he couldn't decide if he wanted to laugh or beg for more.
He leaned his head back and stared into the starlit sky and let the night unfold. Submerged in a bubbling hot tub, a cock in each hand, giving Viktor and James unspeakable pleasure. As he stroked their cocks, Viktor and James couldn't contain themselves, which Eduardo and Marco found impossible to ignore. Once again, Dominic half-observed, half-sensed an unspoken conversation between Viktor and the other two men, and instinctively looked at Viktor wondering what was next. Viktor made a slight nod to them and asked Dominic with his eyes, “Them too?” Dominic nodded back “Yes”.
Viktor caught their eyes across the water and the look said everything. A moment later Eduardo and Marco were on him.
Eduardo dropped to his knees between Dominic's spread legs and hauled his ass up out of the water, and swallowed his cock whole before Dominic even registered what was happening. In the same breath Marco climbed out and straddled his face, knees pinning his head in place, and shoved his cock down Dominic's throat without asking.
Dominic was drowning in it, and he loved every second of it. Until now, man-on-man sex had meant Viktor and Viktor alone — which had already rewired something in him permanently. Now he was stoned in a hot tub with a thick cock in each fist, another one buried down his throat, and someone's mouth working his own cock just above the waterline, and he couldn't hold a single thought long enough to finish it. The cock in his mouth. The cocks in his hands. His own cock, seconds from blowing.
He was close, too close, and some animal part of him fought it, wanted this to last, wanted more hands and more mouths before it ended. Eduardo pulled off him just long enough to growl something in Spanish that Dominic didn't understand and didn't need to, the tone alone made his hips buck. James waded closer, watching the whole thing with his own cock in his fist, stroking himself to the sight of Dominic being used from every direction. Viktor hadn't moved from the edge of the tub. He was watching too, pale eyes half-lidded, in no hurry at all, like a man who owned every second of this and intended to spend all of them.
Without warning, Viktor said, “Let's do this.”
Dominic jerked the two cocks harder, faster, like he was racing the clock. He deep-throated Marco like it was the only thing he'd ever wanted to do with his mouth. Eduardo had his face buried in Dominic's pubes, inhaling his cock the same way he'd inhaled that pre-roll, like he couldn't get enough fast enough.
Moans. Grunts. A chorus of "fuck" cut loose into the steam. Water slapping against the sides of the tub. Then it broke.
Marco went first, "I'm cumming!", and unloaded straight down Dominic's throat, and Dominic swallowed almost every drop like he'd been born knowing how. Viktor and James came next, nearly in the same breath, both of them surging up out of the water at the last second to paint Dominic's face instead, and Dominic tipped his head back for it, groaning, loving it more than he had any right to. Hot ropes of cum striping his cheeks, his lips, his tongue, it hit something primal in him, something that felt filthy and perfect at once.
Then it was his turn. Right before he went off, Eduardo nodded Viktor in to finish him, Viktor dropped his mouth over Dominic's cock and took every pulse of it, while Eduardo rose up out of the water to unload across his face, same as the others had. Dominic stared straight up into it, mouth open, catching what he could and wearing the rest, his face striped in four men's cum, dripping off his chin into the water.
Then quiet. Just the water lapping and five men breathing hard. The other four crowded in around him, checking on him with their hands and their eyes, making sure he'd survived what they'd just done to him.
Viktor broke the silence. Stroking Dominic’s face and hair, he asked, “You OK there, sexy man?”
Domnic, now with a half-smile replied, “I’ll let you know in an hour.”
They remained quiet for the next few minutes until Viktor once again took charge, and said, “Let’s get our boy cleaned up and to bed.”
They gently pulled him out of the water, dried him off and walked him to the shower in Viktor’s ensuite where Viktor was waiting with a steaming shower. Dominic sat on the bench and let Viktor scrub the night’s events off of him. The others left one-by-one to their respective suites.
As Viktor tenderly dried him off for bed, he said, “Are you ok with tonight? How it went? I wanted to show you a good time but I didn’t mean for it to get so…intense.”
Dominic shocked Viktor. He pulled him into a kiss, deep and unhurried, and when he broke it he said, "I loved it." He meant it completely. Then he went quiet, searching Viktor's face like he was memorizing it, and added, "And I love you."
It was the first time he'd said it out loud.
Viktor came undone in a way Dominic had never seen, not in the garage, not in the dungeon, not anywhere. Twenty pounds lighter or not, he lifted Dominic like something precious and carried him to bed, climbed in beside him, and pressed his mouth to Dominic's ear.
"I love you too, Dominic." A pause, his hand finding Dominic's chest, right over his heart. "I have for longer than I ever let myself say."
Neither of them spoke after that. They didn't need to. Whatever they were, captor and captive, or something that had grown past both those words, they were it together now, and the water still dripping from Dominic's hair onto the pillow was the only sound in the room.
***
Dominic woke up the next morning and lay still for a long time before opening his eyes.
He had to hold the night carefully, afraid it might not survive if he examined it too closely. The hot tub. The five of them. The raw, unapologetic abandon of men who'd been driving toward this all day and had finally arrived. Viktor's hand closing around his, guiding it to a stranger's cock. James doing the same a heartbeat later, until he had one in each fist. Marco's cock filling his mouth while Eduardo worshiped his from below, and then all of it breaking at once, Marco first, down his throat; Viktor and James surging up out of the water to finish on his face; his own release into Viktor's mouth while Eduardo painted what was left of him. Four men's cum drying on his skin while the water went still around them.
In his past life he would've been horrified. This morning he was delighted, even proud.
But none of that was the part he kept circling back to.
It was the kiss after. The way he'd pulled Viktor in without deciding to, and the words that had come out of him before he'd finished thinking them: I love you. Three months ago he wouldn't have believed a version of himself existed that could say that, to this man, and mean it the way he'd meant it. He turned the memory over now in the morning light, the surprise on Viktor's face, the way Viktor had said it back like a man finally allowed to stop holding something in, and understood that whatever had happened in that water was already fading into just a good story. The other thing wasn't fading. The other thing had just started.
He lay in the morning light and thought: I love him.
Then he thought: Dom Jr. is seven years old and growing up without his father because of this man.
He held both of those things. He had gotten better at holding both of those things. He wasn’t sure whether getting better at it was a sign of growth or something else that was decidedly more sinister.
He thought about the hot tub. Marco's laugh. Eduardo's precision. James, who had been exactly what James had promised to be from the moment he proclaimed "Well," in the driveway, seeing Dominic for the first time in months. He thought about Viktor watching from across the water with the expression that said: I see you. I am glad you are here.
He thought: this is my life now.
And then, with the reliability of something that had been doing this since November: but at what cost.
***
Viktor made breakfast for five the next morning, which was its own quiet statement. The men appeared from their respective rooms in various states of the previous evening, Marco bright-eyed in a way that seemed cosmically unfair, Eduardo precise even in a borrowed robe, James with the satisfaction of a man who had gotten exactly what he'd come for but was too well-bred to say so.
They ate on the terrace in the morning light, the mountains sharp against a cloudless sky, the conversation simply picking up from the night before.
Marco was the first to leave. He embraced Viktor, then turned to Dominic and took his face in both hands, a gesture Dominic was learning was simply how Marco operated, and said: "You are extraordinary. Viktor knows it. Now you do too. Don't lose that." He kissed him on both cheeks, European-style, and walked to his car.
Eduardo shook Viktor's hand and then Dominic's, holding it a moment longer than a handshake required, which was becoming a habit. "The Daytona," he said. "When it's finished. I want to see it." It was, Dominic understood, about considerably more than the car.
James was last. He stood at the door with his bag and looked at Dominic, assessing him like he had since the driveway. "Viktor," he said, without looking away from Dominic, "you've been keeping him to yourself all winter."
"I have," Viktor said pleasantly.
"Stop that," James said. He extended his hand to Dominic. When Dominic took it, James covered it with his other hand and said, quietly enough that only Dominic could hear: "You were magnificent. Every bit of it."
Dominic held his gaze. "So were you," he said.
James smiled, the slow, deliberate one, and picked up his bag and walked to his car. Viktor closed the door.
The house was quiet. Dominic stood in the hallway feeling like something significant had happened, and what remains is simply what it meant.
Viktor appeared beside him. "Coffee, handsome?" he said.
"Yes," Dominic said.
They went to the kitchen.
* * *
The week that followed had a different quality from any week that had preceded it. More significant. Intimate.
Not dramatically different. Not the difference between before and after a storm. More like the difference between a room before and after someone opens a window, the same room, the same furniture, but something moving through it now that hadn't been there before.
They had said the words. Both of them. And the words, once said, changed the texture of everything they did without changing what they actually did. Viktor made dinner and Dominic ate it and they talked about the Daytona's final detailing, same as always, except that it wasn't the same as always and both of them knew it and neither of them made it a conversation because the conversation had already happened. First in a Palm Springs bathroom while Viktor dried him off and then again last night when Dominic pulled him into a kiss and said the thing.
In the garage, Viktor appeared on the stool near the workbench at the same hour he always appeared, with coffee, and watched Dominic work with the same attentiveness he had always brought to it, except that now when Dominic looked up and caught the pale eyes on him, neither of them looked away. No management of the moment. No performance of casualness. Just two men in a garage in the desert who had said what they meant to each other and were living in the fact of it.
The nights were different in the most direct sense. Not louder or more elaborate than before, but more present somehow. Their lovemaking was slower, more deliberate, more intimate, more personal. Before they fucked. Now they lingered over each other’s bodies. They explored, worshipped, surrendered.
He thought about Dom Jr. every day. That hadn't changed. It wasn't going to change. It was simply the thing that lived alongside everything else, the permanent counterweight to the life he was living, and he had made a kind of peace with its permanence without making peace with what it meant.
He was happy. He was guilty about being happy. He was happy anyway.
The week moved at the pace of good weeks, faster than it should, the days full enough that their passing was only noticed in retrospect. By Friday evening they were on the terrace with the mountains going dark, an open bottle of wine between them, and a comfortable silence. Dominic set down his glass and said, without planning to:
"Tell me about the dungeon."
Viktor looked at him over his wine glass.
"Not what it is," Dominic said. "I know what it is. Tell me what you intended it for. What you would have done in Franklin if things had gone differently."
Viktor was quiet for a moment, choosing his words carefully with full realization of the importance of the moment. "It's an extension of what you already know," he said. "The dynamic between us. The surrender you've been moving toward. The dungeon makes it formal. Removes the ambiguity."
"You never used the one in Franklin on me," Dominic said.
"No."
"You told me why. Tell me again.”
"I was falling in love with you," Viktor said. "I didn't want to scare you away."
Dominic looked at the mountains. He thought about the shackles on Labor Day weekend and what they had meant then, pure terror, pure survival, and what they meant now, which was something else entirely, something he was still finding the edges of. He thought about the dungeon at the end of the hall here in Palm Springs, clean and waiting, and the way he had stood in the doorway the first day and felt not fear but something closer to curiosity. Something closer to desire.
"Falling in love…the dungeon. Those two things can co-exist,” Dominic replied.
Viktor looked at him and said nothing.
Dominic spoke again, "Being in love with someone, and taking them to the dungeon." He paused. "I'm not saying they're the same thing. I'm saying one doesn't have to prevent the other."
Viktor was very still. "No," he said carefully. "It doesn't."
"I've been thinking about it," Dominic said, not admitting he’d been thinking about it for some time. "What we have. The way it works between us." He looked at his wine glass. "My surrender didn't start in a dungeon. It started in a strange room in Franklin with shackles and a cock ring and two men I didn't even know. Somewhere along the way, I don't know exactly when, it stopped being something you did to me and started being something I wanted." He looked at Viktor. "The dungeon feels like the next version of that. A version I’m choosing. I want to try it.”
Viktor looked at him for a long time. The pale eyes reading the full depth of what was being said rather than just the surface of it.
"We'll go slowly," Viktor said.
"I know," Dominic said.
"And you can stop it at any point."
"I know that too."
Viktor nodded. He picked up his wine. He looked at the mountains. And Dominic could see that this was a moment Viktor had been patient for since the first afternoon in the drive when Dominic had stepped out of his truck in Franklin and Viktor had kept his expression entirely neutral and extended his hand.
They sat on the terrace in the Palm Springs evening and the dungeon waited at the end of the hall.
Dominic felt, simultaneously and without resolution, the pull of what was ahead of him and the weight of what he had left behind.
Dom Jr. was two thousand miles away, growing up without his father, believing his father had chosen to leave.
Dominic was on a terrace in the desert, in love, agreeing to walk into a dungeon of his own accord.
He picked up his drink.
He held both things.
He was still holding them.
-To be continued-
Author’s Note: Dominic sees a new version of himself starting to take shape. But there's a question that's been sitting quietly since the beginning of the story: Why are there fully built dungeons in Franklin and Palm Springs as yet unused? Next chapter, you (and Dominic) will get the answer. I've been sitting on this one for a while, and I think it's worth the wait. As always: [email protected]
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
