Dangerously Happy (36 page)

“
She said, ’I’d mount that horse and go for a good, hard gallop.’ I said, ’Would you, now?’ She asked if I knew you. I said yes. She asked if you had a girlfriend. I said no.” Sweet, mischievous grin. I had a perfect image of how he must have looked at that moment, in the middle of that churning crowd, getting ready to offer me to her. “She said something about maybe trying to lure you out to her car for a joy ride—really, I don’t think one sentence came out of her mouth that wasn’t a figure of speech. And all I did was tell her that if she was serious, she was welcome to use my bed. She looked at me like I was trying to exploit the seductive effects of your performance for my own salacious purposes—which, at some remove is actually fair—until I pointed upstairs. I thought she’d back out the second the possibility got real, but her suspicious smile turned flirtatious, and she asked if I was angling for a threesome. I told her that I’m not into women, but that you absolutely are, and I seasoned the offer by telling her how much you’d enjoyed the view from our table below the stage that night at The Mint. And that sealed the deal.”

“
Why didn’t you join us?” I asked, trying not to let the question sound as heavy as it felt.

“
I thought you might enjoy a little hetero holiday. Did you?”

I don't know why, but I felt guilty. Like I'd squandered a carefully selected gift bought at great personal cost.

“
You didn't turn her down, did you?” Dario asked, his mirth starting to dissolve.

I just looked at him, steady and serious.

“
Why?” he asked.

“
Because these last couple weeks, I've been wanting to feel closer to you. As close as we used to feel. And being up there with her felt like us drifting further apart.”

I was afraid he'd be hurt that I'd refused a gesture obviously meant to make me happy, maybe the only kind of gesture he could make, the only kind he was ready for. But he gave me a warm smile, held me for a moment in his tender gaze, then put his arms around me. “I'm sorry,” he whispered.

“
Why are you sorry?”

“
I'm sorry I used her to try to put a patch on our problems. My problem. I just feel so lost right now. And I'm terrified that when I find myself again, you'll be gone.”

I backed out of our embrace so I could look into his eyes. I cradled his face in my hands and said, “I know you're lost. I know you're scared. But I'm with you. I've got you. I'm not going to let go. I promise.”

For days I'd been thinking about it.

There were moments, hours when I was almost sure it was a beautiful idea. Dangerous, frightening, yes. But beautiful.

Other times I'd think about it, and it seemed reckless. Ugly. Cruel.

For almost a week, I was obsessed, distracted from everything else as I ran through every conversation Dario and I had ever had about bondage, about the taking and yielding of control, about what he'd gotten out of his encounters with that first lover who'd made Dario tie him down. How Jared had taken Dario across that other threshold, how Dario had talked about the two of them hacking away at that rotting tree of fear and pain. And Xavier. Xavier tearing Dario down right in front of me with reprimands and blows and a cold, brutal fuck until Dario'd been a weeping, quivering bundle on Xavier's floor, and how Dario had told me after that he felt better than he had in weeks.

I was afraid. Terrified of doing more harm than good. But I was desperate. Determined to efface the scars that had almost healed before that malignant presence had intruded into our happy world and opened Dario's old wounds.

I left the restraints and the blindfold on the floor just a few feet in from the front door so he'd see them as soon as he got home. Next to them, I left a note telling Dario to text me, yes or no. If the answer was yes, I would come fifteen minutes after he texted. Meanwhile, he was to strip to the waist, put on the blindfold and the restraints and to sit on the red couch and wait for me.

From upstairs I heard him open the door, step inside, close the door and bolt it. Heard him take three steps. Heard the scrape of the chain as he lifted the restraints from the floor. If the paper I'd written on made a sound when he picked it up, I didn't hear it.

Now there was just silence. A minute. Two minutes. I was staring at my phone, waiting for the display to light up with his answer.

The sound of him walking again. Moving away, possibly toward his arm chair. But I didn't hear it's characteristic creak, so maybe he was standing by the window.

Another few minutes slowly evaporated. Then my phone lit up. When I got his text (just three letters instantly promising strict obedience), my heart started hammering. Honestly, I wasn't sure I'd be able to go through with it. Not the way I'd planned it.

The adrenaline load in my bloodstream rising moment by moment, I waited. When fifteen minutes had passed, I crept silently to the railing and peered down from the nest. As instructed, Dario was sitting on the red sofa, the black swath of cloth covering his eyes, his wrists cuffed together in his lap. Carefully, quietly, I crept down the stairs, only letting him hear my footfalls as I got closer, wanting to dissociate my presence from the familiar household sounds. Noting that he'd turned his head slightly, tracking the sound of my approach, I let him hear my breathing, slightly heavy with my anxious excitement, before I bent and took hold of the cuffs, and wordlessly coaxed him to his feet.

It started almost playfully, Dario grinning his vaguely bemused approval, yielding to everything calmly, a bit mirthfully, even. I was dead sure he’d never been that way with Xavier. Like the whole thing was just a bit of diversion. I wasn’t angry or jealous. I just knew that, with Xavier, Dario really yielded himself. I mean, with Xavier, Dario didn’t have to give away control because Xavier just took it. But with me, he was playing along.

But when I hooked his bound wrists into the carabiner and hoisted them overhead, the rope snaked through the eye bolt I’d mounted in the beam a few days earlier while Dario was out, when I stepped away, picked up the speaker remote, and slowly, slowly turned up the volume, the sounds of leaves rustling in a breeze, the intermittent chatter of birds gradually filling the loft, everything changed. His playful grin faded. He went still. Tense. And when I started slowly stripping his clothes from his body, not saying a word, he began to tremble.

When he was naked, I stepped away. Stayed quiet. I wanted him to get lost in those forest sounds. In his isolation. His vulnerability.

God, he was still. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing, he was so still. I realized he was listening. That his whole body, whole consciousness was silently honed and awaiting the faintest sound—a footstep, a breath, a movement that would cause my sleeve to chafe and rustle against my chest or my pant legs—so that he’d know where I was. So he’d know I was coming when I started to approach.

But I stayed still.

I was still, breathing very evenly so he wouldn’t hear it. And his body started to quiver. Even before his breathing changed, there was that startling, delicious trembling that I saw first in his thighs, as if his legs were starting to buckle under his weight, but then that faint but undeniable quivering rose up from his thighs to his belly—Jesus Christ, so beautiful, elongated and taut with his arms stretched overhead—his chest, rising and falling, rising and falling in escalating rhythm, his arms, muscles flexing because he was testing the restraints, and I was almost sure that just then, right as he proved to himself that he was really caught, that he really couldn’t pull or twist his hands free, that’s when his fingers curled in and his hands balled into two clenched fists and his breathing changed. Not the sped-up panting of arousal I’d heard before, quick and shallow, but the erratic, labored respiration of a trapped or wounded animal.

All along I’d planned to wait. Or, more accurately, to make him wait. To make him wonder. But now I was the one, wondering if I’d gone too far. Too far already, and I hadn’t even touched him. Hadn’t said a word to him. Wondering if really, he was just playing. Or playing it up. Not faking it, exactly, but getting into character. The person under my control. Yielding himself, his power to me.

Despite all our recent problems, despite weeks of worry our incredible, intense sex life was over because he'd hardly been able to get an erection, that night, to my surprise, his cock had been half hard as I’d bound him, already shirtless. As I’d gotten him out of his pants and slid his boxer briefs off his hips, down his legs, I’d been tempted to forget about waiting, about making him wait, and start touching him right away because the sight of his cock swelling and rising made it almost impossible to resist caressing him. Kissing him. But now he was soft.

He was soft. He was trembling. He was breathing the erratic, panicked, shallow breaths of an animal in a snare, of a man waiting to be beaten, to be shot.

I was standing there, still being quiet. No, being absolutely silent. Perfectly still. Asking myself if I’d already gone too far, leaving him tied, blindfolded, suspended from that rope, in the silence. Leaving him alone with his uncertainty. His memories. Little by little his breathing was getting more erratic. I could see that he was trying to be still, trying to be quiet, but those shallow, gasping little breaths kept rasping from his throat, constricting his belly over and over.

I’d meant to wait longer, but couldn’t take it anymore and I said, “I’m not going to hurt you.” My voice sounded strange. I’d practiced it, talking very softly, constricting my throat in a way that altered the pitch, made my voice deeper. But now that I was really doing it, talking to Dario, it surprised me how completely I sounded like someone else. “I know you’re scared. I know how vulnerable you feel right now. But everything’s going to be alright. I just want to enjoy you for a little while. Then I’ll let you go.”

He went perfectly still again, not even breathing. Maybe it was just him playing. Playing his part perfectly. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like he was genuinely scared. Of me. But I thought that was kind of the point. The thing that aroused him. The catharsis he'd told me he needed.

“
Can you be calm for me?” I asked.

If anything, his breathing got worse. Panicked panting. But he nodded.

“
That’s good,” I said, and I came closer, watched his bound body go taut, rigid at the sound of my footsteps. I went right up close to him, until I knew he could feel my breath on his face. I could smell the delicious scent of his skin, which—this surprised me—suddenly made my cock start to swell and rise, in spite of the fact that tying him and stripping him hadn’t gotten me hard because I’d been so nervous, in spite of my worry about how afraid he seemed to be. Then I went dead still, dead silent again, and then waited, watching, listening to him trying to make his shallow, erratic breaths more even, watching him lose that struggle, because the longer I stood there, without moving, without speaking, my breath touching his damp skin, the more frightened he seemed to get.

“
You’re so beautiful,” I said, and again he froze and stopped breathing, until finally he gasped and started panting again.

“
I thought you were going to stay calm for me,” I said in my soft stranger’s voice. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I want it to be nice. For both of us.” Such a delicious, strange new thrill, the way just speaking could make me hard. Make me ache. “I know this is sudden, for you. But I’ve been waiting for almost a year. Ever since I first saw you kissing that boy in the woods in Austin.”

I watched all the color drain out of his face, and after a moment, I realized that even the warmth coming off his skin had cooled.

“
Such a strange afternoon,” I said, scared I was making him suffer too much, but forcing myself not to rush, trying to trust that the payoff was going to be worth it. “Those woods. I go there to sketch, sometimes. I almost never see another soul. But that day was a day of fateful encounters. Do you know there were three men, not so far from where I saw you, torturing animals? I took a video of them with my phone and told them to leave, or I’d have them arrested. Guess I was lucky they didn’t just take my phone and beat me up. But they got in their truck and drove off,” I said, changing his story. “And then I saw you, kissing that boy. I watched you for at least an hour. Followed you all the way back to your place in town.”

It took some time, a few minutes, but little by little the color returned to Dario’s face. He was still shaking, though. Still breathing erratically.

“
You were so beautiful. The two of you. You and that boy you were kissing. What’s his name?”