Deliver Us (46 page)

“I’m going to talk to Micah, and if he doesn’t seem to get what went wrong today, he’s gone. But if he’s sincerely remorseful and willing to learn from this, I’m just going to suspend him. Sound fair to you?”

He’s got his arms crossed over his chest, and though his tone is clipped, it’s the warmest Ben has ever been to Darrek. He’s treating him as an equal instead of Gabriel’s plaything, and Darrek notices the difference.

“I... yeah. That sounds fair. But I don’t think it even matters. Gabriel’s made up his mind. He’s not coming back to work. He’s reached his limit. He, he was doing better. You know? He was working through this stuff with Harry and these issues he has, and now.... Now this has all set him back so far. And it makes me so
mad
, I can’t even...” Darrek growls, and unconsciously clenches his fists and grinds his teeth. The anger he expresses is tainted by an evident twinge of something else as he shifts his stance and shoves his hands back into his jeans pockets.

Ben sighs, seeing the discomfort immediately, “Let me tell you something, as someone who’s known Gabriel for a long time, and has seen him go through bad shit before. He’s good. Considering what I’m assuming happened in the dungeon today, before he met you, Darrek, if something like this had happened to him, he would have gone off the deep end. I’m talking no speaking to anyone, and hiding away in that room in Trace’s place for fucking weeks at a time. You’re good for him. He’s a lot more stable than I even hoped for. That’s all you, man. So whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. You’re right, he’s getting better. And Micah picked the wrong guy to screw with today, but... I know him, too. In fact, I’ve known Micah for a few years now. Professionally. He’s not an evil guy. He just gets intense. Gabriel doesn’t do intense very well. Now Kyle,
Kyle
does intense. Kyle can out-manipulate even a scary guy like Micah.”

Darrek feels his lips tease up at the ends in a smile. “Is that why you were okay with him submitting to Micah for training?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I need to tell you this, since I’m pretty sure you know this better than anyone, but Kyle’s vulnerable spots are nowhere someone like Micah would ever think to look. And the rest of him? Tough as nails.”

“But you... it’s not weird for you to let him be with someone else? To see him being touched like that? Or even just know that he was getting off with some other guy?”

Ben locks eyes with Darrek, and understands why he’s asking. It’s a hard question to answer.

“Hmm. Well, I see it this way. If I know about it beforehand and give my permission, then no. It doesn’t bother me. Because I know it’s just stimulation. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t change how we feel about each other. But even if it does bother me a little, I remind myself that I trust him, and if something that stupid can mess things up between us, then it wasn’t meant to be in the first place.”

“Okay,” Darrek nods, thinking it through. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I see what you’re sayin’.”

“The way Gabriel looks at you, I’ve never seen that in him. He’s happy; even on days like today, when he’s freaking out, he’s happy because he’s got you here with him. If he got off on submitting to Micah... so what? It happens. Doesn’t change anything unless you let it.”

Sierra comes running up to them with a stick in her mouth. She looks excitedly between them before Darrek wrestles the stick from her, throws it, and sends her running back into the yard to fetch it.

“She’s not trying to chase you off anymore,” Darrek smiles. “Guess she’s startin’ to like you.”

“Guess so,” Ben nods, fishing in his own pocket for something he knows is there. He finds it, closing his fingers around the thin metal of the paperclip. After exhaling a long breath filled with resignation, Ben turns to Darrek. Stepping up to him so that he’s facing him and they are shoulder to shoulder, he says quietly near Darrek’s ear, “I can pick a lock pretty quickly. And those tiny padlocks are the easiest to pop.”

Darrek goes still, and blinks out at the yard.

“I agree that Gabe’s in a weird frame of mind at the moment. You wanna wait ’til he’s sleeping and get the key from him then, or do you want me to get this thing off of you now? Count to five and it’ll be done.”

His face turned away, toward Sierra, Darrek’s throat works as he lets his body make the choice for him. With a curt nod, it’s decided.

Ben goes to his knees in front of him, pulling the short wire from his pocket and undoing Darrek’s pants before he’s even aware of Ben touching him. Then he feels pressure as Ben lifts the contraption closed around his genitals and fiddles with the lock.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

It pops open and Ben frees him of the cage. The metal rings have left angry, dark red abrasions along the length of Darrek’s penis. Ben stands as Darrek carefully tucks himself away and zips back up. Handing over the cage, Ben sees Darrek puff out a breath and close his eyes in relief.

“Oh my god,” he moans. “I
hate
that thing. I owe you, man.”

“If he asks, you picked the lock on your own,” Ben tells him.

“Yeah. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Consider it repayment for what you did for Gabe today.”

“I’m gonna... um...” Darrek mutters, nodding to the garage.

Ben smirks knowingly at him, and heads back inside alone.

Later that night, Darrek and Gabriel are curled up in bed together. Weariness and alcohol are taking effect, but Darrek struggles to stay awake as he senses Gabriel’s wakefulness. They’d changed into pajamas after ordering in some Japanese food for dinner and seeing Kyle and Ben off. Gabriel has not mentioned the cock cage, and seeing Darrek naked without it before he’d slipped on loose boxers apparently wasn’t enough to spark the memory that he’d been wearing it all day long.

The wind buffets the house as a small storm passes overhead. The timbers of the roof creak, and the windowpane rattles. Gabriel pulls Darrek’s thickly muscled forearm against his chest and stares wide-eyed into the dark.

“So, I have to ask,” Darrek whispers gruffly.

“Mmm?”

“What in the world did you and Kyle talk about while Ben grilled me for all of your secrets?”

“Oh, um. He was kind of great, actually. Was telling me about how letting people call you on your weak spots, even if they aren’t right, lets you confront things and makes you a stronger person. Looking the devil in the eye. And he... he gave me a card. He’s got this friend who’s a shrink. Thinks she could help me. She specializes in child abuse cases. He said she’s easy to talk to.”

“Wow,” Darrek says in surprise. “That’s great. Are you gonna do it? You gonna talk to this woman?”

“Sophia,” Gabriel supplies. “Yeah. I think I am.”

He leaves it there, and for a long time Darrek just listens to Gabriel’s breathing underlain with the crickets’ song from outside, audible under the occasional whistling gusts. Once in awhile, Gabriel will clutch Darrek’s arm and trail his fingers up to Darrek’s shoulder and then back down again. He is almost lulled to sleep by it when Gabriel says, low and gravelly, like his voice is strained, “I saw you, you know. I saw you with Ben.”

Darrek’s heart sinks like a stone into his belly and he winces. Trying to adjust their positions so that he can see Gabriel’s face, he says, “Let me explain....”

“No.”

“Gabriel, please,” he asks, saying the words as quickly as he can.

“
No!
”

Darrek’s breath puffs out through his nose in quick little exhales of air as he tries to will his racing heart to calm down.

Gabriel tells him, “I was taking my empty over to the sink, and I put that card from Kyle by the phone so that I wouldn’t lose it. I saw him taking the cage off of you. And I saw that you were
hurt
.”

His voice cracks on the last word, and Gabriel sucks in a breath, holding it until he’s more in control of his emotions. Then, though he had been purposefully preventing Darrek from turning and looking at him by clutching at his arms, Gabriel lets go. He sits up and pulls away despite Darrek’s futile efforts to stop him.

“Let me see! I need to see what I did to you.”

His face is wrecked; his eyes red and tired. While he pulls at the elastic of Darrek’s pants, Darrek grabs hold of his hands and tries to tug him back down into his arms.

“Dare! No, I need to... I need to
SEE
! I forgot about you! And you were hurting and you couldn’t even tell me because I’m so fucked up in the head. I don’t blame you for not telling me, because I probably would have gotten weird about it anyway, and felt guilty for forgetting. But you had to ask Ben!
Ben
of all people! To get you out of the stupid contraption that
I
put you in and
locked
....”

“Gabriel. STOP,” Darrek growls, holding his lover’s hands tightly. He feels bad about having to practically yell at him, but with how far gone Gabriel is, Darrek sees it as his only option.

Gabriel’s face twists with anguish and he asks softly, “Let me see?”

Turning his face away, Darrek rolls onto his back and tugs the underwear down. Gabriel reaches out and lets his fingertips hover over bright red slashes where the skin is nearly rubbed entirely away. He doesn’t touch, though, since Darrek flinches violently away the first time Gabriel gets close. The boxers get tugged back up and Darrek looks Gabriel in the eye.

“Don’t you dare feel bad about this, Gabriel! There’s a
reason
I didn’t tell you. I would never lie to you unless I felt like the alternative would hurt you even more and be counterproductive to everything.”

“But I hurt you.”

“No! You didn’t! And
stop it
! You’ve done things to me during our sessions that hurt way more than that, and I get off on pain. You know that. It’s not a big deal. You had a good reason to forget. And all I... all I want, is for you to stop feeling bad about yourself. I love you... so much, and I... I want you to be okay. You don’t seem okay, and it’s killing me. So please. Please just lay with me and try to sleep.”

Gabriel is curled up on the edge of the bed, away from Darrek, but he relents and lays back down, this time facing him chest to chest. At first he lays there, with closed eyes, intentionally not touching Darrek. But, gradually, he softens. His fingers begin to play over Darrek’s chest, tracing the swell of each muscle.

“Good things happened too, today, you know,” Darrek says encouragingly. “This morning, you were amazing. That’s one of the reasons that damn cage wore on me so bad. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and how you made me feel.”

“I’m gonna bash that thing with a sledgehammer first thing in the morning and turn it into scrap metal. I swear to you, Darrek, that I will
never
put you in one of those again.”

Sighing at that, Darrek wants to argue with him, and to remind him about the spankings that left him unable to sit for the welts on his ass and thighs, the gingerroot that left him burning and in excruciating pain, the tiny clips that sometimes left small tears in his skin, and hell, the time Gabriel fisted him didn’t exactly tickle. But then, Darrek figures that it may be best to not remind Gabriel of all the varied ways he’s caused Darrek pain in their time together. He knows that Gabriel’s guilt is transference of his own reactions to the ways
he’s
been hurt. Gabriel is feeling like he’s turning into the monster that used to torment
him
.

So, Darrek doesn’t argue. He says, “Okay.”

“And it was... shocking, actually. Almost as shocking as how stupid I was to forget about you, to see Ben looking at you like that, and talking to you like that. He looked... like he
wanted
you, like he respected you, beyond the sub thing, beyond what you mean to me. And that’s a big deal.”

“Because Ben hated my guts, and wanted to rip off my dick and nail it to the wall,” Darrek supplies.

“Yeah!” Gabriel exclaims, and they laugh.

“Kyle likes you too. He was really worried about you today. He was doing everything he could to help. I think he feels guilty about his part in the whole thing, like if he’d been there and not you, Micah wouldn’t have... you know.”

They sigh together and Gabriel tucks his head to rest on Darrek’s upper arm, against his chest. Each breath is felt by Darrek as Gabriel’s exhales heat the patch of skin underneath his thin t-shirt.

“Did you go and jerk off after you were out of the cage?”

“Yeah. In the garage. Wasn’t as comfortable as I would have liked, but...” he shrugs.

“I bet Ben wanted to do it for you. Bet he wanted to touch you. Taste you. Suck your aching cock until your knees gave out and you begged for him to stop.”

“Um, I’m a little doubtful of that,” Darrek says with a lopsided smile.

“No, trust me. I totally could see it in his face when he came back inside,” he says. “It’s okay. I don’t blame him. He can dream, but only
I
get to have you.”

“Mm. I like the sound of that,” he hums, kissing Gabriel’s temple.

“’Night, Dare,” he mutters, fingers tangling in his shirt.

“Night,” he whispers in response, adding a hopeful, “Sweet dreams.”