“I’m in East City, like I said,” he tells me. “I’m still with my parents. They love me, and it’s great, but I want to get out into the world, know what I mean? Find my independence. Be on my own and start my life. Are you from here? From Mayville?”
“Grayson Point, originally. My parents are off traveling the world, enjoying ‘retirement’, I guess. The two of them deserve it, after the tough time they’ve had getting to where they’re at.”
“They had a tough time?”
I snort. “You kidding? The two might’ve been high school sweethearts, but my nonna wanted my pops to marry some nice Italian girl. Of course, my parents fell in love anyway, resisted the pressure for them to break up, and my mama won them over in the end with her strength and devotion to my pops … and her home cookin’.” I chuckle. “Fast-forward three children later—that’s my two older sisters followed by me—and you got my whole family. Guess nothing does the trick like a spread of good food.”
“Two sisters? Wow. I wish I had siblings.”
“Everyone says that … ‘til they have them. Just kidding,” I quickly add with a laugh. “My sisters are cool as fuck. So tell me something else about yourself. Besides living at home. You in school?”
“I’m taking a few online courses, but I’d love to attend college when I can actually afford it. I guess I’d need a job first … steady income.”
“You know, if you continue to be comfortable with my releasing the photos we take, you just might have something here with your modeling.”
“You think?”
“Ooh yeah.”
He smiles dreamily under the hot and steamy spray of water. “If I can wake up someone else the way your wrestler woke me up … and make them feel less alone in this world full of … confusing sexuality, desires, needs, fantasies … then it’s more important than anything I’ve ever done.”
Anything he’s ever done … “Really? Boy, you’re just nineteen. You’ve only just started doing things.”
Tye throws me a challenging look. “Sounds like you’ve already planned our next fetish shoot.”
“Planned and booked, you bet your ass.”
He smiles, then reaffirms his statement: “It’d be my honor for you to use my photos on your site.” Then he bites his lip again and adds: “And maybe also a bigger honor to someday taste your mom’s home cookin’ … maybe …?”
I kiss him right there under the showerhead. In the steam, we get lost once more to whatever our bodies are telling us—every whim, every urge, every whispering impulse.
And when we lie on my bed afterwards, clean and fresh and naked as fuck, we don’t even make it a thing when we start to doze off, him tucked away in my arms like a precious thing. It’s like he knew already he’d be staying here, clung to me, yearning to belong, to be here, to be accompanied …
To be mine.
[ THE BROKEN CHAIN ]
Another week has passed. Dante has managed—even while shooting his regular clients—to engage in no less than seven different shoots with Tye, filling their world with glorified scenes of beautiful agony, sexual longing, and intimacy. Of course, a number of the planned photo shoots turn into dates. Or adventures. Or … something else entirely …
17
“Uh … is this safe?”
“Yeah,” I assure him, securing the shackles to his ankles myself. “And it’s going to make you feel very helpless and at my total mercy, so—”
“I’m already hard. Can you stop talking?”
I chuckle to myself and shake my head.
We’re in a back room of Manic Men that Jaime generously offered me to use after seeing my latest shoot of Tye on my site. Jaime was so taken by the photos that he seems to have forgotten the way we left things between each other, turning into mush before both of us and nearly demanding that we use his best room to schedule a shoot. “You can use any and all the toys and gear and racks and shackles I’ve got. All of them. Any of them!” he insisted. “But, y’know, give me credit as the location when you publish your photos, will you? Manic Men? We need to steal back some business from Club Spades, who now not only features Fetish Friday, but also Tied-Up Tuesdays apparently, greedy fuckers.”
It’s good to have the whole room to ourselves, since admittedly, Jaime has some very creative devices in here—from medieval-style stocks to rope swings to body-shaped cages. He even has a purple pommel horse with a dildo built onto it.
But it’s none of those things to which I subject the eager-hearted Tye to. Instead, I opt for a device more photogenic: a giant, standing iron wheel with shackles attached to it for ankles and hands, to which I am binding Tye, spread-eagle.
“Figured out the fun thing about this wheel?” I ask Tye with a playful smirk.