Boy (The Training House #2) (2 page)

There’s a long silence before she says, “Because we all have our secrets.”

Hmm. Yeah. Maybe so. I think about my mother. About the things I did when I was younger. About how I turned out to be exactly like her for a while. How much I fucking hate that fact.

“Well, I’ll tell you this. When I’m not here? When I decide I need to take off for a while and get my head on straight again? I go to the clubs in San Francisco, and L.A. and sometimes Phoenix, San Antonio—wherever—and I am no one’s bottom boy.
That’s
when I lose myself.”

“But here? The Training House?”

I know exactly what she’s asking. It’s the question they would all ask me, if they could.

“It’s why the Master calls me by name. Because I need to stay in the moment. I need to feel every stroke of the whip, every moment of the worst goddamn humiliation, or I can just surf through it. I can make it so it doesn’t affect me at all. But that’s what we’re all doing here, right? We
need
it to affect us, or there’s no point. So he makes me be me. It’s the worst mind-fuck of all, and the best, you know? But of course you do. We all understand this shit about each other.”

“I do understand,” she says, her voice soft with recognition and that meeting of minds only the hardest-core slaves can have.

We are the real weirdos of the world. Creatures of a strange mindset. And what most people don’t know is that we’re the some of the most intelligent of the kinky people. There’s something about having a high IQ that makes us dissect the innermost workings of our own minds, and it kind of drives us crazy. It makes us seek out the most extreme forms of stimulation, because it’s nearly impossible to meet that need any other way. I know this sounds egotistical, but it’s really nothing more than a discovery I’ve made over the years that helps me explain it to myself. It makes a lot of fucking sense. And this Girl—she’s as smart as I am, I can feel it. She’s as much a weirdo as I am, if not as much a monster.

While I’ve been caught in the mad spinning of my own brain she’s started to sniff again.

“Hey. Are you crying again?” Why does this hurt me? Something about this Girl… “Tell me your name.”

“Does it even matter? It doesn’t in The Training House.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

“Why?”

I reach out with my chained foot, and after a moment I come into contact with silky skin, an even row of bare toes. I hear her gasp, but she doesn’t pull away.

“I don’t know. Maybe so that us talking matters, you know?”

Another silence. She’s been trained not to talk. It’s the same with all of them. All of them but me. I can talk easily enough, which gets me into trouble. But then, I like trouble.

“It’s Aimée.”

“Pretty. Like you.”

I feel her toes curl against my foot.

“And you’re Christopher?” she asks.

I laugh. “This all seems so polite, like we’re at some fucking tea dance. Absurd, given the circumstances.”

“I…I’m sorry. I don’t mean to—”

“Hey. It’s all right. It’s just a weird sort of contrast, you know? Us here in our blackout hoods, chained in the back of a van on our way to the Primal Ranch, and we’re graciously exchanging names and backgrounds, like we’re on a first date. But I guess for people like us, this is a first date.” I laugh at how ludicrous this situation is.

“Primal Ranch?” she asks, her voice trembling.

Ah, I love to hear that, her voice shaking, and to feel the shivering in her smooth, flexing toes. If I could get out of the damn chains, I could really do something about it. Like throw her down on the hard metal floor of the van and choke her and fuck her until she’s too damn dizzy and coming too hard to be afraid of anything but me. But like I said, I’m an animal and I know it. Which is why the Ranch is perfect for me.

“Yeah. It’s where he always sends me, and some of the others. They all use the place—the Masters and Mistresses who run in this circle. It’s pretty fucking spectacular in its own way.”

“But what will happen to me there?”

“Are you sure you really want to know?” I ask her.

There’s a long moment of silence, then she sighs. “Maybe not.”

“Change of subject, then?” I suggest, as if I am capable of some real sympathy. But it’s all a sham, isn’t it? Has to be. Except with her…

There’s something about her, something about that first moment I saw her, that made my insides feel like glass shattering. It wasn’t a bad thing, although in retrospect I realize it hurt a little in some way I’m not used to. Some part of me just kind of came apart. And like glass, I saw myself reflected in the pieces lying on the floor. I put myself back together afterward, but just like broken glass, seams remained. I feel like I’ll never be the same again, from seeing her that once. Her face has haunted me, her inherent innocence maybe even more. And of course I know damn well she’s not innocent. No one who is truly innocent is ever brought to the Training House. They’re very careful. It’s more in the way she carries herself, in the freshness of her skin. Babyskin. In some piece of herself she holds apart from the things we do in this life of taboo secrets and forbidden shadows. Maybe it’s the same piece I hold apart, except that hers is clean, while mine is black with soot and guilt and sins that can never be forgiven. We are the same, yet utterly different. And sometimes I think too goddamn much.

“Yes, please,” she says, and I have to take a moment to remember what the question was. Change of subject. Right. I ask her to tell me about coming to the Training House.

“It’s been a few weeks,” she says. “A month? No, less than that. I seem to have lost track. My last Master—Master Graham—sent me there because I needed more, which I feel terrible about. I feel as if I couldn’t make him happy, because I was always craving something he couldn’t quite give me. I have to ask myself…am I a bad slave? Did I fail him? Did I fail the dynamic of Master and slave? But I couldn’t help it. And coming here…well,
there
, to the Training House… I had no idea what I was missing. I had no idea how much more thoroughly my needs could be met, how much more I could lose myself. How badly I needed what they have to offer me there.” She stops and I can almost hear her thinking, then she says very quietly, “No one has ever hurt me like that. Or degraded me to that extent. I feel as if I’ve truly discovered myself for the first time. And now I’m being sent away. I can’t stand it.”

“But you will. That’s the beauty in all this. You will be hurt and humiliated where they’re taking us. And if I play this right, it could be
me
who gets to do some of that, lovely little Aimée.”

“Oh!”

I stretch my leg out, caress her foot with mine, then her delicate ankle, bare skin against bare skin, which makes me hard as hell, the blood leaving my brain in a mad rush.

“Does that turn you on?” I ask. “The idea of me hurting you? Using you? Because there will be such an opportunity. And I plan to make the most of it. Do you like that idea?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Excellent. Oh, you have no idea how good that’ll be. I can hear that you have more questions for me, but you should rest now. Can you do that? Lay your head down and think about what lies ahead.”

“I don’t know what to think,” she admits. “Not really. Except that I’m still in shock, and it’s all so abstract to me.”

“That’s the idea, little Aimée. But lay your head down. I’ll be right here.”

There’s the muffled sound of movement, of her shifting, and it brings her scent to my nostrils. I inhale deeply. Female skin. Excitement. Fear. If someone could make a perfume of it, they’d make a fucking fortune. But right now it’s all for me. Fucking beautiful. I settle into my own hard spot on the van floor and close my eyes, thinking of her, my foot against hers. Warm flesh to warm flesh. And my cock aches for her. But so does some part of my dark, cold heart.

For once the trip has gone by too fast, and soon the van is crunching over the long gravel drive to the ranch that’s secreted away between the hills a few miles inland from the small coastal town of Carmel. I can’t help the rush of excitement that makes my muscles tighten in anticipation, made all the more acute by the quiet presence of Aimée in the van with me. I haven’t slept at all—I’m too painfully hard, too aware of her luscious body so close to mine. I’ve spent the last few hours imagining if they’d left me loose in the van, with her chained and hooded. How I would have used the weight of my body to hold her down while I fucked her senseless. How I would have lifted the edge of the hood and forced her to suck my ever-hard dick until she choked on it, tears pouring down her cheeks, the salt of them mixing with my come all over her lovely face.

Jesus. And now, again, I have the hard-on of a lifetime. Even
my
lifetime, which is saying a lot.

The Masters and Mistresses and handlers at the Ranch will fucking love me arriving with a raging erection. It’s probably a good thing my hands are cuffed behind my back or I would have jacked off a half dozen times by now, if I hadn’t been able to get my hands on her. But they know what they’re doing. I get it. Because there are times when I am one of them.

Sometimes I think that’s why the Master is so fascinated by me. Could it be called love? Who the hell knows? But it doesn’t matter. Or, it does but I don’t like to let it matter. Especially not now, when I hear the first creak of the doors being opened, then feel the rush of cool morning air hitting my skin as I blink in the relative darkness of the black hood over my head. Still, I can tell the sun is coming up. I can hear it in the rustling of leaves in the big oak trees as the birds and the squirrels start their morning routine. I can smell the morning, sunshine on dew. Yeah, I notice this stuff. I notice everything. I hear Aimée’s small gasp, the rattling of her chains, which is hot as fuck to me—to imagine what she looks like in chains. I’m a poet and a perv this morning, which makes me grin. But then, when am I not? The Master tells me I am “a spectacular dichotomy”. I kinda like that title.

Rough hands pull me from the van, but I’m too tuned in to
her,
to her quickening breath, to fight it much, and I know damn well she’s as turned on by the manhandling as I am. I bet her juices are running down her sleek little thighs, making me want to lick them clean.

Fuck.

When I finally do get to have her, I’m gonna come in three seconds flat, like some eight-year-old with his dick in his hand for the first time. Or maybe that was just me?

“We heard you were being sent back to us, Christopher.”

I recognize the voice—it’s Jonathon, one of the handlers here, and not one I like. But liking them is not the point. No one gives a shit if I like the handlers. Not even me.

Another hand wraps around the back of my neck, and I’m forced to my knees. I know right away from the way he’s handling me that it’s Victor. Oh, I like Victor. Huge guy. Huge dick. And he knows what to do with it, knows how to fuck like a demon, knows how to handle the slaves. Knows how to put me in my place, which I will tell you is no easy thing.

There is something really beautiful in being a slave, and being handed over to someone who knows exactly what to do with you. It’s fucking exhilarating, and in my case, it also pisses me off a little. I mean, I can’t get away with too much shit with Victor. Even less than I can with the Master, because while Master Damon loves me, Victor is maybe no more than amused—and it’s all at my expense. He is a true sadist. Jolly as hell about it, no regrets, never gets attached, and so his treatment of the slaves is completely remorseless. Which makes him a very dangerous animal—and I do mean animal. This is the Primal Ranch, and all the handlers identify as primals, the same as I do. They all have that animalistic attitude, the desire to bite, to scratch, to wrestle you to the ground, and Victor is the one man who can take me down every time.

I fucking love it.

There’s a hard slap on my dick, and shit, it hurts! Victor’s hand, no doubt. He does it again, laughing at me.

“Are you blushing under there, Christopher?” he asks.
Demands
.

I growl in reply.

“Playing hard to get, are we? The only problem—for you, anyway—is that I can get you any time I want.” He gives my aching cock another hard slap, and I feel the reverberation of pain all the way into my balls. In my belly. “Don’t you forget it. I don’t plan to let you, you know.”

He shoves me to the ground and presses on the back of my neck with one booted foot, yanking the hood from my head, leaving me blinking hard in the misty morning light. He angles the foot to press my face against the hard ground, into the gravel, which bites into my cheek. And I love it and hate it—and him—at the same time. My life is full of these contradictions. But my cock is never confused.

Victor leans down and murmurs, “What if I jack you off right here? Make you come into the dirt? That’s where your come belongs—in the dirt, Christopher. Because you are one dirty, dirty boy. And you will be
my
boy if I want you to be, won’t you?”

I only growl again, a small rage burning in my throat, clawing to get out.

He grinds his booted foot against my cheek. I clench my jaw and refuse to howl.

“
Won’t
.
You
?” he repeats.

“Yeah, sure. Whatever you want,
Victor
, as long as you’ll fuck me good and hard after.”

His hand dives into my short Mohawk and he drags me to my feet so fast I lose my footing, and between my hair and my wrists chained behind my back, he’s yanking me around, laughing, and I catch a small glimpse of his dark, polished skin, his beautifully sharp white teeth. I fucking love it—I love it all. This little show of his superiority. The humiliation, which isn’t really humiliation, since I enjoy the hell out of it. I’m sure I’ll pay for it later. I hope I will.

“Little bastard,” he says. “I’ll fuck you with a broom handle if I want.”

“Promises, promises,” I mutter.

He slaps me hard across the face, leaving his big handprint burning on my cheek. I grin.