Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3)
Read Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3) Online
Authors: J.A. Rock
Riptide Publishing
PO Box 6652
Hillsborough, NJ 08844
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.
Manties in a Twist
Copyright © 2016 by J.A. Rock
Cover art: Kanaxa,
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Editor: Delphine Dryden,
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Layout: L.C. Chase,
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ISBN: 978-1-62649-347-6
First edition
April, 2016
Also available in paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-62649-348-3
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Look, I’ll never stop missing Hal, but this Subs Club my friends started to review suck-ass doms isn’t gonna bring him back or give him justice. For me, it’s just another chance to hang out with my friends, even if they think I’m too dumb to understand the important work we’re supposedly doing.
But maybe I’m not as dumb as they think—at least I know when I’ve got a good thing going. Which is why I just moved in with my dom. Ryan’s awesome possum. He’s really short, never makes me feel stupid, and is up for anything. One word: costumes. Two more words: women’s underwear. We’re all about the lace, no leather.
Except when we do pony play. We first tried it as a joke, but turns out I’m ballin’ at it. Now PetPlayFest is coming up, and I wanna take down the Subs Club’s archrival, Cinnamon the ponygirl, in the horse show.
My friends think I’m spending too much time with Ryan and ignoring my obligations to the group. But since when is friendship an obligation? Ryan’s my first serious relationship, and I want to take it . . . seriously. At some point I need to think about my future, not my past.
—Kamen
For Cleveland
“Behold.” Amanda stepped back from the wall where she’d just hung Ryan’s and my newest amazerbeam piece of art.
Ryan and me, we couldn’t even talk for a minute, that’s how glorious this painting was.
It was of a hare dressed in a black and gold shirt with puffy sleeves, like from Shakespeare times, and a floppy cap and striped pants. The hare had a gold watch in his pocket and a serious look, and was just a generally very regal and well-dressed rabbit. The background was a sky blue that really made the brown fur pop.
“You’re so talented.” Ryan had this voice that was sort of like Boots, the monkey from
Dora the Explorer
. It was, I mean, a
little
deeper than that, but not much. He was super short—almost legit midget short, and I got that maybe midget wasn’t the right word anymore, but you know what I mean. He spoke really aggressively though, so you still took him seriously even though he sounded like a cartoon. “It goes perfectly with the walls.”
Amanda frowned at the painting. “It took forever to get the eyes right.”
Amanda was one of Ryan’s friends from high school. Ryan actually had tons of friends from way back, which was cool. Because I was, like,
intensely
close with my friends Miles, Gould, and Dave, and I liked having a boyfriend who understood the concept of friends you go way back with.
“It’s huhhhh-mazing.” I admired the detail work on the well-dressed hare’s puffy sleeves. “The guys are gonna shit when they see it.” Okay, Dave would think it was cool. Miles would think it was dumb. And Gould probably wouldn’t say anything, but he’d give me that look, the one that was like a thumbs-up with his eyes.
Ryan turned to me. “We should figure out when we’re doing the housewarming party.”
“Let’s do it Saturday.”
He put his hands on his hips, which for some reason made him look even shorter. “We don’t have curtains yet.”
“So we’ll hit up Triple B later.” I was always down for Bed Bath & Beyond.
He smiled. Dave thought Ryan’s smile was demonic, but I thought it was cute: his lips pulled back a little bit, and the edges of his top and bottom teeth met, and I could see where he kind of looked like a doll that had come to life. But why did a doll coming to life have to be a bad thing?
“You really wanna go again?” he asked.
“Always.” I high-fived him. This guy and I, we’d been making Bed Bath & Beyond our bitch. We’d gotten like four gift cards from his parents and three from mine, and had blown through almost all of them. We’d bought a vegetable spiralizer, organic shams for the sofa, a Pasta Boat, and a Mighty Blaster garden hose nozzle that Ryan rigged so it would go on our shower. He was really handy, as long as he had a step stool.
We kissed. I squeezed him and lifted him off the floor, and we went at it until Amanda cleared her throat. “Um, so can I do my laundry now?”
I set him down.
Ryan stepped back. “Of course. I’ll show you the laundry room.”
We had a laundry room.
We had basically a house. I mean, it was an apartment, but it was the whole second floor of a house. We were on the opposite side of town from Dave and Gould, which kinda sucked—my old place had been really close to them. But it was closer to the Green Kitchen, where I worked. Maybe now that I had more space, I could get the guys to come over instead of always going to them.
Ryan and Amanda headed to the back of the house. That was the deal: she’d paint us a picture of a well-dressed hare, and in exchange, she could do her laundry for free at our apartment whenever she wanted. I glanced at the hare again. We’d wanted a unique painting, and had been trying to decide between a hare and a megalodon, which were my and Ryan’s favorite animals, respectively. I was glad we’d gone with the hare, because you could make a hare look classy, but that was harder to do with a megalodon.
I went to the kitchen and got, like, weirdly, nonsexually excited by the contact paper in the silverware drawer when I opened it to get a spoon. We’d done that. We’d scrubbed and decorated this whole place, with some help from our friends. Like, I’m talking painted the bathroom, set fire to a pile of dead earwigs we found behind the fridge—which almost did not go well, so if you’re thinking of trying it, maybe do it outside—and put knobs on the closet doors and picked out bedding that complemented the walls.
I wasn’t a master of introspection, but I figured my happiness was about more than contact paper or the square footage or even the well-dressed hare.
I finally felt like a grown-up.
My friends considered me the least mature member of the circle—probably on the basis of the number of fart jokes per hangout session. And because I did stuff like trying to put Dawn in the dishwasher when I ran out of actual dish detergent. I know, forgive me for thinking something called dish soap could be put in something called the
dishwasher
. But now I was living with a guy I loved, and I knew how to do stuff like wash windows with vinegar and newspapers and clean the baseboards. I was a fucking
adult
.
