The Reward
Thursday - Atlanta
Thursday morning, day two of the Atlanta board meeting. Jake, already an overachiever, had knocked it out of the park at his presentation Wednesday. This morning he’d be presenting again with Lynn, his peer and leader of HR. He’d had intense, life-changing sex with Adrian both nights this week but not allowed to orgasm either time. Adrian was proving his theory there was a relationship between the protocol and Jake’s stellar performance. Today would be the test.
Jake woke up in Adrian’s room before the alarm, Adrian’s arm around him, and laid there in the dark assessing his situation realizing he no longer had the energy to deceive himself. He was more alert than he’d been in years. His mind had a quality of sharpness that felt almost pharmacological, every detail landing with more precision than usual, every connection between ideas arriving faster. He’d noticed it Wednesday after Tuesday night’s denial, and had said nothing.
Wednesday night had been more intense. The rope, the collar again, the flogger used with a confidence that the first night had only suggested. Jake had worn the collar like it belonged there. He’d held his wrists out to be bound without being asked. He’d learned to count the strokes. And at the end, when Adrian was balls deep inside him and Jake had been closer than he’d ever been to losing control, he’d held. He’d held because Adrian had told him to, and because pleasing Adrian had become, in the space of three days, the organizing principle of his nervous system.
He hurried, unnoticed, to his own room where he showered, dressed, and was in the conference room twenty minutes early.
Whatever was happening to him, it was working.
* * *
The HR strategy presentation was Lynn Romano’s show. She’d asked Jake to co-present because he’d helped her shape her plan, and he’d said yes because he believed in the work and she had been a great HR partner to him. Lynn was meticulous, prepared, and had the that easy kind of competence that made people underestimate her. Jake liked her enormously.
She opened the presentation cleanly. Jake sat beside her at the front of the room, watched the board settle in and felt the room’s temperature. Warm enough. Engaged. Waiting to see their reaction.
Twenty minutes in, Margaret Chu, four Fortune 100 boards, notoriously surgical, asked a question about the compensation benchmarking methodology that had a trap in it. A compliance trap, specifically, one that would have been invisible to anyone without a working knowledge of recent NLRB guidance on pay transparency disclosure. Lynn paused, seemingly at a loss for the answer.
Jake leaned forward slightly.
“The benchmarking was structured to stay on the right side of the recent NLRB guidance,” he said. “Specifically, the October update on comparator disclosure. We used aggregate banding rather than individual anchors, which addresses the transparency concern without creating the liability.” He looked at Lynn. “Lynn’s team was very precise about this, it was one of the things I thought was particularly well-handled when she walked me through the methodology.”
Lynn picked it up seamlessly. The trap was gone. Chu nodded once indicating the answer had been answered satisfactorily.
The presentation ran another forty minutes. Jake answered two more questions that Lynn had the substance for but not quite the context and color, and each time he passed the credit back to her before the board could settle it elsewhere. He was very careful. He knew the difference between helping a colleague and upstaging one, and he stayed precisely on the right side of it.
What he couldn’t explain to himself was the quality of his thinking. He felt it, the way his mind was moving, the connections arriving before he’d consciously formed the questions that produced them. It was the same thing he’d felt Wednesday morning, the same elevated frequency, the same sense of operating above his usual ceiling. He noticed it. He did not examine it. He answered Whitmore’s follow-up on talent retention with a precision that made Whitmore sit back slightly, and he caught Darius at the head of the table watching him with an expression that was purely proprietary: that could be my replacement someday.
And then, from the board side of the table, he felt Adrian’s gaze. Not a glance. A steady, unhurried attention that he felt on his skin. He didn’t look. He answered the question, passed the room back to Lynn, and did not look.
He felt Adrian’s satisfaction anyway. It moved through him like heat.
* * *
The board and ELT had separate dinners on the final night, the board at a private room upstairs, the ELT at a steakhouse two blocks from the hotel. Jake sat at his end of the table and ate and talked and performed the easy collegial warmth of a successful board week and watched his phone.
The first text arrived during the appetizer.
Adrian:
Lynn was solid. But everyone knows you nailed the NLRB issue.
Jake:
It was her work. I just knew the specific guidance.
Adrian:
Modesty will serve you well at Darius's level. Less convincing at mine. You were extraordinary. Again.
Jake:
I felt sharp. Not sure why.
A pause. Then:
Adrian:
Yes you do.
Jake set the phone face-down on the table for a moment. He picked up his bourbon. He put the phone face-up again.
Jake:
You have a theory.
Adrian:
Yes, and the evidence supports it. Frustrated energy redirects itself. The body finds other uses for what it's been denied. Your body; other uses.
Jake:
That's not a thing.
Adrian:
You answered a compliance question most Board members didn't know the answer to. Two knockouts in a row. Tell me that's not a thing.
Jake looked at the ceiling briefly. The COO was telling a story at the other end of the table. Nobody was watching him.
Jake:
It's a coincidence.
Adrian:
Of course it is. How's dinner?
Jake almost smiled. He typed back:
Jake:
The steak is good. The company adequate.
Adrian:
I'll try not to take that personally given that I'm not there.
Adrian paused again.
Adrian:
Last night. The collar. How are you feeling about it today?
Jake shifted in his chair. He was aware of his body like never before. The collar was gone, obviously, but he could still feel its weight at his throat.
Jake:
I keep thinking about it.
Adrian:
Good thoughts or complicated ones.
Jake: Good.
Adrian:
The rope?
He was definitely not going to answer this at a dinner table with six colleagues within arm’s reach. He answered it anyway.
Jake:
Fine.
Adrian: Fine is not the word you used last night.
Jake:
What word did I use last night?
Adrian:
Several. None of them were fine. The flogger?
Jake picked up his bourbon and took a long sip and set it down.
Jake:
Not what I expected.
Adrian:
Meaning?
Jake:
I didn't expect to want more of it.
Adrian:
Most men don't the first time. You counted every stroke without being asked twice. That's not nothing.
Jake stared at that for a moment. He was aware of a warmth that had nothing to do with the bourbon.
Jake:
Sitting at the table with my colleagues. Erection for last ten minutes. Just so you know.
Adrian:
I know. I'm counting on it.
The dinner table erupted briefly in laughter at something the General Counsel had said. Jake looked up, smiled on cue, looked back down at his phone.
Adrian:
You've been exceptional this week. Everything. I want tonight to reflect that.
Jake:
What does tonight look like?
Adrian: Like a reward. The protocol no longer applies.
Jake read it twice. Something moved through him that was equal parts relief and want, two nights of carefully managed restraint releasing all at once into a single word: reward. His hand wasn't entirely steady when he set the phone down.
Tonight, he thought. All of it. Tonight.
Jake:
Thank you, sir. Thank you.
Adrian:
Good boy.
A pause long enough that Jake checked to make sure the message had sent. Then:
Adrian:
Room 1614. Face down, black jockstrap. Blindfold on the nightstand. I’ll be there by 10. Bringing a surprise.
Jake read it.
His cock swelled so fiercely he prayed they wouldn’t finish the dinner until he could stand again.
Thankfully, dinner continued. The table around carried on their easy end-of-week warmth, someone refilling wine, the familiar machinery of a successful board week winding down. Jake sat inside it and felt none of it. He was somewhere else entirely: face down, blindfolded, waiting for a door to open. He’d been that man for the last three days without knowing it, and now he had explicit instructions, and a surprise he couldn’t account for. His entire body was conducting electricity.
A surprise. He contemplated the word. Adrian didn’t do things without intention. A surprise was not a casual addition. Somehow he knew it was a person, not a thing. He thought about who Adrian knew in Atlanta. Adrian had shared that he’d met Cole and he’d pieced together they were close, like brothers. Jake shared that he trusted Cole completely. He thought about Cole, across the city somewhere, and found that the thought just felt right. He didn’t dare put words to it, it was out of the question. But he found it intriguing and not unwelcome.
He put the phone in his pocket. He finished his dinner. He was entirely unreachable for the rest of the meal.
* * *
Adrian set his phone down on the white tablecloth of the private dining room, poured himself a second glass of the Burgundy, and let the Board conversation move around him while he composed what came next.
He’d been watching Jake for three days. The quality of what he’d seen, the submission, which had been more complete and more natural than he’d anticipated. But the interior of it as well, the way Jake melted into Adrian’s dominant role, the expression on his face when Adrian said ‘good boy’ and meant it, had told him what he needed to know. Nashville and Atlanta weren’t an anomaly. Jake Sullivan had found something he’d been missing his entire life. Jake had landed where Adrian had wanted faster than he could’ve imagined. But Cole had thrown an unanticipated complication into his plan; he didn’t anticipate Cole waiting for Jake on the other side. But Adrian was magnanimous. Even gracious. Cole would play a role.
He picked up his phone.
Adrian:
Ramirez. Question.
Cole:
Go ahead.
Adrian:
He trusts you completely. More than anyone.
Cole:
I know that.
Adrian:
I've been thinking about what you said. About knowing him better than I do.
Cole:
It's true.
Adrian:
Also true. Which is why I think what I'm considering makes sense.
Cole:
What are you considering.
A pause. Then:
Adrian:
What are you doing later tonight?
Cole read the text. He read it again. He set his phone down on the kitchen counter and stood in his apartment and looked at the downtown Atlanta skyline, thinking about Jake in a hotel room somewhere in there, putting on a collar because someone had offered him the choice and he’d chosen to trust.
He picked up his phone.
Cole:
Nothing I can't move.
He stared at what he’d just typed. He hit send.
The response came back in under a minute.
Adrian:
Jake performed brilliantly this week. He deserves a reward. You’re the right person to help deliver it. Room 1614, Hyatt Regency. He’ll be face down, blindfolded. I arrive at 10. You arrive at 10:30. He won’t know it’s you until I decide he should.
Cole read it twice. He thought about Jake, face down in the dark, waiting. He thought about the patience he’d exercised for eighteen months, pushing the feeling away, getting on with it, being the friend and the colleague and the person who showed up every morning at 5 AM and said te quiero, cabrón and meant it in all the ways that didn’t get said.
He thought about tonight.
Cole:
10:30. I'll be there.
He set the phone down. He looked at himself in the kitchen window, the dark glass giving him back a version of himself that was harder to read than usual. He thought, I hope this isn’t the worst decision of my life.
Then he thought: he trusts you completely.
He went to his room to change.
***
Jake let himself into Room 1614 at 9 o'clock, which gave him an hour. Adrian had texted earlier: arrive at nine, I won't be there yet, get ready. The room was dim and quiet, the Nashville skyline replaced now by Atlanta spread out below in amber and shadow. He stood for a moment in the stillness of it and contemplated the room, the expectation it held, the things that had happened here, the things that were about to.
He showered and cleaned himself in Adrian's bathroom, unhurried, thorough, with the full realization that even this preparation was a form of submission, one that told him, more clearly than anything else could, exactly what he was tonight. He was here to be used. He knew it, had known it since Adrian's text landed at the dinner table, and the knowledge didn't produce anxiety or hesitation. It produced the opposite. A deep, settled willingness that ran through him like a sound wave. He toweled off and stood at the bathroom mirror for a moment, looking at himself with the clear-eyed attention he’d been bringing to his reflection for months now, the muscle Cole had built with him, the definition that had surprised him every time until it stopped surprising him, the body that had become, over the past three days, a source of something he hadn’t known he had. Pride of a different kind. The pride of being wanted.
He pulled on the black jockstrap and was hard before he had it fully on. He looked at himself once more and felt no impulse to look away. The mirror gave him back broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the carved torso Cole had built with him over two years of 5 AM sessions, the deep cut of his obliques leading the eye downward to where the black waistband of his jockstrap sat low on his hips, his cock thick and insistent against the pouch, a dark wet spot already forming at the tip. His body had been many things in his life, an athlete's, an executive's, a performer's; tonight it would be, unambiguously, an offering.
The blindfold was on the nightstand where Adrian had told him it would be. He picked it up and sat on the edge of the bed. The clock on the nightstand read 9:31.
He lay face down, settled himself against the pillows, and reached back to position the blindfold over his eyes.
The room went dark.
In the absence of sight, everything else sharpened. The weight of the comforter against his chest. The give of the mattress under his hips. The faint hum of the hotel, the city far below, the silence of a room waiting for something to happen in it. He was aware of his own breathing and tried to slow it and couldn’t entirely. He was aware of his own body in the way he’d been aware of it for three days, with an acute, almost clinical attention, every nerve catalogued and present. And he was aware, with the insistent and inconvenient specificity of a man who had been denied for two consecutive nights and told tonight would be different. He found himself pressing his manhood into the mattress, the fabric of the jockstrap doing very little to contain it.
He waited.
Time in the dark seemed endless. He lay and wanted and waited, its own suspended intensity, and he understood why Adrian had given him an hour. And yet, somewhere underneath the urgency, he didn't want it to end, this moment, face down in the dark, his body longing and aching, knowing that somewhere in this hotel one, maybe two men who desired him were making their way toward this room. He had never in his life been the object of that kind of want, had never let himself be, and the knowledge of it, that they were coming for him, that tonight he was the destination, washed over him all at once, a desire so physical it was almost unbearable, and underneath it, threading through every part of it, something tender, that had Adrian's face in it, and perhaps, if he allowed himself to follow it all the way down, Cole's as well.
At some point he turned his head and lifted the edge of the blindfold just enough to find the clock on the nightstand. 10:02. He let the blindfold fall back and pressed his face into the pillow. Two minutes past. Which meant any moment, or five minutes from now, or ten. He realized not-knowing was the point, it was Adrian’s calculated torture. Not-knowing, he was discovering, was its own kind of fuel, the suspense pooling in him alongside everything else until he wasn't sure how much longer his body could hold all of it without somewhere to put it.
He counted his breaths. He thought about the dinner table, the phone in his hand, Adrian's texts arriving one after another like a slow escalation of heat. The protocol no longer applies. He thought about the word ‘reward’ and what it meant and felt a pulse of anticipation that moved from his stomach downward. He thought about the word ‘surprise’ and arrived, again, at the same place he’d arrived at the dinner table, a possibility that he didn’t think about too hard because, if he did, it might not happen, and he wanted it to happen with a clarity that still surprised him, even now.
He lay in the dark, feral with hunger, every minute of the wait both excruciating and exactly right, and understood, in a way he couldn't have articulated an hour ago, precisely why Adrian had made him wait.
* * *
He heard the door.
The quiet mechanical click of the keycard, the gentle swing of it, the soft compression of air as the room changed. He didn’t move. He kept his breathing even and his hands flat against the mattress and his face turned sideways into the pillow and he listened.
Footsteps across carpet. The unhurried quality of Adrian’s movement, he’d learned it over three days, always assured, never hurried. The sound of a jacket being removed, a hanger finding the closet rod. Then the bathroom, water running, briefly, the sounds of a man taking his time. The unhurried scrape of a belt through loops. The quiet fall of fabric.
Jake’s hands tightened slightly against the mattress and he made himself release them.
The room was silent for a moment that lasted longer than it should have. Then he felt the weight shift at the foot of the bed, just the mattress registering a presence, nothing more, and then fingertips, smooth and warm, moved against the back of his calf.
He exhaled.
The hand moved slowly. Up the back of his leg, unhurried, the way you move when you’re in charge and both people know it. Past the knee. Up the inside of his thigh with a deliberateness that made his hips press down into the mattress of their own accord. The hand withdrew. Traced back down. Up the other leg this time, finding the inner thigh again, staying there a beat longer, and Jake’s legs fell open by an instinct he didn’t direct.
A sound left him that he didn’t plan.
The hand moved up his back now, the full length of his spine, slow and certain, reading him the way Adrian read everything, completely focused. Then the weight on the mattress shifted again and he felt the warmth of a body lower itself onto his, the full length of it, chest against his back, a hardness pressing into the cleft of him, arms coming around him with a deliberateness that equal parts affection and urgency.
They laid together for an eternity. Breath aligned, body-to-body, Adrian’s familiar hard cock nestled into his cleft, but not aggressively wanting more, almost as if he were saving it for someone else. Jake had pushed himself up off the mattress a bit so Adrian could better embrace him from behind. And there they laid. Adrian slowly and gently kissing Jake’s ears, the back of his neck, his hair.
A mouth at his ear. Low. “Good boy,” Adrian said. “Such a good boy this week. You’ve earned everything that’s coming.”
Jake tried to say thank you and got as far as opening his mouth before a single finger pressed gently against his lips. “No,” Adrian said. “You don’t need to thank me. You earned this. All of it.” The finger withdrew.
Jake lay beneath him and said nothing and felt everything.
Adrian began to move back down his body, mouth at the back of his neck, his shoulder, the blade of his shoulder, slow and deliberate, each one placed with intention. Jake’s hips had started moving against the mattress without his awareness and he let them, past caring about composure, his whole nervous system reduced to wherever Adrian’s mouth was. He pressed into the mattress and groaned quietly, and Adrian’s hand found his hip and stilled him with a firmness that was also, somehow, permission to feel everything he was feeling.
* * *
He heard the door a second time.
The same click. The same soft swing. And then Adrian’s mouth stopped.
Jake lay still. He heard nothing for a moment and then heard what he sensed were two people communicating without sound, the language of glances and gestures, a presence acknowledged, a position taken. Then the quiet sounds of someone undressing. Unhurried. Deliberate.
His heart was slamming. He lay perfectly still, face down, hands flat against the mattress, and listened to the silence between the two men and felt the anticipation move through him like a physical thing. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He simply lay there; two men and their intentions and his own body's answer to both, and thought, with the small part of his mind still capable of thought, that nothing, not the collar, not the rope, not the three days of everything that had preceded this moment, had produced anything quite like this. The not-knowing. The waiting. The certainty that something extraordinary was about to happen and the inability to control any part of it. It was, he realized, the most erotic thing he had ever experienced.
Then there were two pairs of hands.
He felt it before he understood it, the doubling of contact, one set of hands at his shoulders and another at his calves, moving toward each other from opposite ends of him with a coordination that meant this had been arranged, that this was the surprise, and that both of them knew exactly what they were doing even if he didn’t. He made a sound that was approximately a moan and approximately his own name being surprised out of him. His face pressed into the pillow.
Two mouths now. Adrian’s, he knew Adrian’s by now, he could have identified it anywhere, moving up his spine. And another, lower, at the back of his thigh, working upward with a patience and a thoroughness that was its own kind of statement.
He noticed the hair first.
Where Adrian was smooth, this one was not. The forearm that moved across his lower back was dense with it. The chest that pressed briefly against his leg as the second person repositioned was unmistakably, thoroughly, extravagantly covered. Jake had felt that chest before, not like this, not with this charge to it, but he’d been in enough post-shower locker rooms, had stood at enough adjacent lockers, had told himself enough times it didn’t mean anything. He’d know that geography anywhere.
The thought arrived and he held it and didn’t move.
Two thoughts arriving simultaneously: 1) that he was face down and blindfolded in a hotel room while Adrian had brought someone else in to touch him, and 2) that this should alarm him, and that it didn’t. That instead what he felt, lying there with two pairs of hands moving over him with complete attention, was something he didn’t have a word for. Not alarm. Not even surprise, not really. Something closer to the feeling of something inevitable arriving on schedule.
He let the thought go and lay in the sensation of it.
* * *
The second presence became the primary one almost as if had been preordained. Adrian moved to the side, his hand still on Jake’s shoulder, present but no longer leading. The other set of hands took over with a confidence that was not tentative, not asking, but taking what they felt were rightfully theirs.
Then the hands slowly slid down the inside of Jake’s legs, sending chills through his body, stopped at the ankles, gripped them firmly spreading his legs. Slowly. There was no mistaking the hands’ intent. The spread of his legs were so far apart his hole was now exposed to fresh air.
And then a mouth found the inside of his thigh.
Jake groaned into the pillow. The mouth worked upward with an unhurried thoroughness, the rasp of stubble against his skin, dense, unmistakable, the five o’clock shadow that arrived by noon, and Jake felt his entire body arc toward it like something seeking light. The mouth moved further, but now the tongue had joined the mouth. Teasing and taunting, the abrasive whiskers like sandpaper, and the tongue like velvet. His breath had gone entirely shallow. He pressed his hips upward, wordlessly begging the mouth and tongue to find his most private, valued offering.
He had succeeded. The mouth found him. Dense, course stubble, hot ragged breath, and the wet hungry tongue attacked it all at once.
The sound that left Jake was not language. It was pure animal, the sound of a man experiencing something his vocabulary hadn’t caught up to yet. He raised his hips further and the hands let him and the mouth stayed with him and he thought: I will do anything. Whatever comes next. Anything. He pushed his ass up into the mouth aggressively. He didn’t care how needy, how slutty, how shameless he seemed. He only knew he needed more.
It went on. It went on until he had lost all sense of time and any remaining sense of himself as a man with a professional life and a career and colleagues downstairs who had eaten dinner with him two hours ago. He was only this: the dark and the warmth and these hands and this mouth and the building, insistent, long-denied urgency of a body that had been patient for three nights and was done being patient.
He heard the click of a bottle cap.
The mouth withdrew. He nearly cried out at the loss of it. Then the weight of a body settled over him from behind, not Adrian’s weight, which he knew now, but heavier, broader, the dense warmth of a torso covered in hair pressing against his back. A cock, thicker than Adrian’s and insistent, slid into the cleft of him and moved there slowly, and Jake pressed back into it with everything he had, his hips rolling, asking without words for what he needed.
A hand came to his hip. Stilling him. Patient. In charge.
The cock moved against him, up and down, slow, deliberate, the tip finding his entrance and resting there for a moment that lasted an eternity, taunting, not pressing into his hole, and Jake’s hands fisted in the sheets and he thought: please, just please.
The cock didn’t move. It stayed motionless for what felt like an eternity. Poised to claim what was always his. Ready to remake him entirely. Destined to change him forever.
The person leaned down. Mouth at his ear. And in a voice that was low and close and unmistakable even after three days of telling himself it wasn’t possible. Three words, three Spanish words he had heard a hundred times across desks and in locker rooms and after late-night sessions when they’d finished something difficult together:
“Te quiero, cabrón.”
Jake stopped breathing.
It was him. It was Cole.
The hair, the weight, the hands he knew from 5AM sessions and two years of standing adjacent to each other, the voice that had said those words to him like punctuation at the end of every hard-won thing they’d done together.
Cole.
Cole was here. Cole had come. Cole was the surprise.
And Jake, who had spent 18 months describing this man as his brother and meaning it in all the ways he thought he meant it, lay face down in the dark and felt the full weight of what those words now meant. Somewhere he had always known. He just hadn’t had the door yet.
Adrian had opened it.
Jake found himself under the man who he now realized was actually the one in control. The one making decisions.
Jake whispered, “Fuck me, please, Cole. Fuck your boy…”
-To be continued-
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