I awake in a room I don't recognize and can't remember where I am, or even, for a moment, who I am.
Slowly the numbness abates and like a distant horn piercing through the fog, becoming more insistent as it grows more persistent, I feel the pain, like a vibrating string, being threaded through the pierced hole of each nipple.
I know without touching them that tiny silver barbells now pierce my nipples.
My cock is hard but I do not wish to touch it. I carry its hardness as a tributary offering in the hardness of my belly.
I am slower in everything than I usually am. I am awake but in a trance. I savor each sensation more, the more unbearable it is.
The sun is coming through the large windows. There is a city street outside. I see it as I stand naked but for a pair of snug black boxer brief I have on. I hear the song of city sparrows and I yawn.
In the shower, right off my room, I piss into the drain, scrub my skin mercilessly until it glows, twisting the pins in my nipples until i gasp. I am surprised and delighted at the hairless smoothness of my chest. Shampooing my hair, I feel how it has been cut just long enough to make it look good when gelled.
Everything is good. Everything is as it should be. I am where I should be. I am as I should be. I am what I should be. I have never felt better.
The man stands by the car. A handsome man. A man glowing with fire. A natural master of everything. A man born to possess other men as his property. There are such men, no matter how furiously or plaintively justice cries it ought not be. When I touch him he consumes me. I burn when he touches me.
His face is like the moon, shining impenetrable in a limitless heaven. To touch his lips is like touching a rock with yours and scratching them against it.
I sit beside him. The day is hot. I am only wearing a bathing suit, no top.
I want everyone to see your pierced nipples and know that I own you.
My breath bubbles up with pleasure, from all the way down.
He holds his palm out. I lick on it eagerly, gratefully.
You like being my dog to play with?
Woof! I barked.
Then I nip at his palm before he can retract it, and I sting him.
The lake shimmers in the sun as we stretch out on the rocks. I dive in where I know it is deep and swim until I can swim no more.
He dives in and tackles me and kisses me in the water before I can catch my breath as he cups my balls in his palm and fingers my ass.
Do you want me to drown you?
Oh yes, I say feeling only the desire to melt into him.
He knows it and shakes me off him and dunks me.
No, he seems to be saying, I won't, but, in fact, he is overwhelming me, swallowing me, immobilizing me with this display of his power over me.
I follow him onto the shore lined with boulders and gaze at him with awe.
He sends me to buy cold bottled water.
The men look at me as I make my way naked through the belt of woods. When I reach the periphery, which opens to a grassy field, I unclench my fist and slip into the speedo I was clasping. Men and women both look at me as I walk to the restaurant stand, head high but eyes down. I bask in the adulation and think of it as a tribute to my master.
He is leaning against a cliff side when I get back, speaking to a lean, muscular boy of perhaps nineteen, like me. He beckons me to him.
I take the boy in my embrace when he introduces us and kiss him hungrily and thrill with swelling when he returns my kisses with as much ardor.
I feel my body as his and his as mine. I am interchangeable with him.
I feel my hardness as his and his as mine and we crouch on the stone and circle around each other until we freeze unmoving, the lips of each around the hardened shafts of the other, pulsing with inhibition.
Master finishes taking pictures and we slowly lose our nectar and drink each other in unending threads and ribbons of pleasure twisting for ever like luminously immaterial moebus strips.
My new brother accompanies me on the way home in the trunk of the car where Master has stashed us like leftovers from a summer's day's picnic. A man my master's age who says we have met but I cannot recall it is sitting in the seat beside him in which I had sat earlier in the day when Master allowed me to eat out of his hand and when I bit him.
The trunk lid is lifted and we crawl out and stretch our nearly naked bodies on the street.
We are in front of a nineteenth-century Brownstone off St. Luke's Square.
You kids get Nick's bags, master says and take them to the third floor guest room; the last addressed to me.
Yes, sir, I say.
Then turning to my new friend, come on, come with me, I say with a crick of the head and a curl of my finger.
And then present yourselves in my study, Master adds as we are withdrawing.
Yes, sir.
Bret was everything a boy could want in a brother and he felt exactly the same about me. In consequence it was impossible for us to keep our hands off each other or to stop laughing.
So when I showed him Nick's room, opening the door to a large room whose south and west walls each framed large windows that gave out onto the garden and the alley, it was not really odd that we wound up on the great unmade bed across from the windows.
We wound up on the bed wound up in each other. He smelled like the ocean in summer time and when he kissed me I swooned inside of him as if I were being washed away upside down by a wave spun round by the tide.
I will control you, he said, pushing himself down through the very depths into my darkest center.
Strip me. Strip me of everything until I am nothing but you, I cried as he broke inside me like the great waves of ocean.
He held me long afterwards.
Are you happy here? he whispered.
Yes, I said. I've never been happier.
But you are a slave.
Yes, I said. Finally!
Finally?
Yes, finally. If you knew for how long I have waited for, hoped for, sought someone to whom I could surrender, someone to whom I could relinquish control, then you would not echo what I say in such scandalized surprise.
Are you angry?
No, I said as I gently bit his nipple.
But we don't want to be too late. And the maid has to make the bed.
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