Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3) (17 page)

I made a mental note to ask Miles if I was a real sub or not.

Ryan stepped up to the edge of the tub. “You look like you’re concentrating really hard on something.”

“I’m trying to feel submissive.”

He laughed. “Oh. That’s so cute.”

“Shut up! Be full of darkness and cruelty.”

“Okay. Uh . . .” He took his dick out and aimed it at me. Gave me a look that was actually pretty dark and cruel. “Are you ready for me to own you?”

I got shivers. “Ooh, yeah.”

That seemed to give him more confidence. “Are you ready to take all of my piss?”

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “That’s good. You’re good.”

“Don’t move,” he ordered, and I got a little hard.

He started to pee. It hit my chest first, then slid down. It was warm and smelled not so great, and really, I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it was, like, gross as fuck. “Ew! Okay, no, stop. This is awful. Stop!”

“I can’t just—” He stopped for a couple of seconds, but then it started trickling again.

“Quit!”

“I’m trying!” He aimed down so it hit the tub, but it still kept splattering me.

I pressed against the wall, holding my hands out like I was gonna fend off the piss stream. “Ewww! Safeword! Safeword!”

“There’s a lot in there, and it really wants to come out. Also, your safeword is not safeword!”

“I can’t remember what my safeword is because I’m covered in urine!”

“It’s not even on you anymore! I’m angling away.”

“I’m still sharing a bathtub with it!”

“Well, stand up or something! Get away from the drain.”

I hunched as far from the piss stream as possible until it stopped. “Gro-o-oss,” I moaned, knocking my head lightly against the wall.

“Oh my God. You are
such
a baby.”

“You
peed
on me.”

“Are you actually upset, or are you just being a drama queen?”

I tried not to snicker.

“You little . . .” He leaned forward, laughing. Gave my shoulder a super dainty slap.

“Wash me now,” I ordered.

He turned on the water. On cold.

“Owww! Abuse!”

He grabbed my hair and tugged it gently. “You want me to show you abuse?”

I splashed him with pee water, so then he had to strip and get in the tub with me. We stood and pulled up the shower thingie.

The water warmed up, and he rinsed the bottom of the tub before putting the showerhead back. He started lathering me up. I crouched so he could reach.

“Will you be nice to me all night now?” I asked.

“You were the one who told me to piss on you.” He rubbed shampoo vigorously into my scalp.

“I know, but now I’m traumatized. Can we order wings?”

He shook his head, clearly trying not to smile. He scrubbed my shoulders with his fingernails. “Yes. We can order wings because I peed on you.”

Game. Set. Point. Match.

“His
head
,” I repeated for about the seventh time. “It’s so big he keeps falling forw— Look at this. Ry.
Look
at this!”

Collingsworth had started walking toward me, his massive head dragging closer and closer to the floor, until finally he basically face-planted on the hardwood and lay there with his legs sticking out, rasping away in a puddle of his own drool.

Ryan, who was making dinner, glanced over. “They should stop breeding bulldogs. And all brachycephalic breeds. It’s cruel.”

“But then Collingsworth wouldn’t
exist
.”

“He can’t breathe. And he can barely move.”

“But he’s a freaking dog butler.”

“Yes, as long as you go to the fridge yourself, take out a beer, and set it on the floor, then go back to wherever you were sitting, he will bring it to you in his disgusting mouth.”

I gasped softly, rubbing Collingsworth’s wrinkled head. “Your mouth’s not disgusting. No. No, it’s not. You’re a good boy. They should keep making brachiosaurus breeds so there will be more dogs like you.”

“You and he are startlingly similar.”

I stood and walked over to him. “Hey. Just because I drool and bring you beer . . .”

“And snore, and would probably make friends with a serial killer if he came into our hou—”

I shut him up by grabbing him and slobbering all over his mouth.

For the next three days, Collingsworth and I chilled together whenever I wasn’t at work. We watched TV, ate sandwiches, and went for walks—except we couldn’t make it more than like a block before his head weight became too much and he face-planted. Which was fine, because it was freaking hot. I took him over to Miles’s house one day to meet Zac, and that kid and that dog were seriously calendar material. Collingsworth even listened to me work on “Snow Wanderer” each day after sandwich time.

I ended up thinking about Hal a lot. Like, where he’d be right now in life, I guess. Would he have a dog? A boyfriend? An apartment that wasn’t a total shithole?

Probably not a dog, because he’d sucked at being responsible. He’d spend days crashing on someone’s couch for no apparent reason, just saying he “didn’t feel like” going home. So a dog, not so much.

And maybe not a new apartment, because whenever anyone had suggested he try living somewhere that wasn’t, like, horror movie levels of cockroach-infested, he’d said he loved his place. So, I mean, kinda not making a lot of sense. Loved his place but never felt like going home?

Now I wondered why I hadn’t questioned that more. He was one of my best friends. I should have been like,
Dude, what’s wrong? Why don’t you like going home?

Sometimes it might have seemed like my friends and I used to be closer, more supportive of one another when we were younger. Because everything was new to all of us back then, and because now we bickered like idiots and assumed we knew better than one another. But actually, for all our dumb spats now, we were way closer than we ever were. We knew each other so freaking well.

I kept that in mind while I worked on “Snow Wanderer.” Like, tried to imagine this boy who
didn’t
have friends, and how fucked up and lonely that would be. I played what I had for Ryan each night, and honestly, I was proud of how it was going. He really seemed to like it too.

“It’s dark,” he said. “Weird and dark. You’re using awesome images.”

He’d been spending a lot of time over the past few days with his laptop and the digital sketchpad for his art program. He got on another kick about Seattle. Then about Austin, because he said the music scene there was perfect for me, and plus it was dog-friendly, so if we got our own dog, we’d be able to take it everywhere. Except now he was thinking we should get a cat instead, because they were less work. I just kinda tried to nod along when he said stuff like that. I really hated to think about moving. I tried to make myself interested in it. But the truth was, moving sounded like the getting-pissed-on of vanilla life.

“What do you think about that?” I asked Collingsworth one morning after Ryan had left for work. “Would
you
ever want to leave this city?”

He just panted and drooled on the floor.

I gave him my toast crusts and stood to get the guitar.

Got restless as soon as I started playing.

So I put the guitar down and practiced kneeling instead. Practiced spreading my legs and pretended I was waiting for Ryan to give me orders. Then I started thinking it was weird to practice
feeling
submissive, so I stood up and cleaned the kitchen and tried to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. Even at work that evening, I felt weird. Like it suddenly occurred to me how many years I’d been doing the same exact thing at the Green Kitchen: Chop vegetables. Chop meat. Break down displays. Talk to Hannah about where to set up stations. Joke around with everyone—same jokes we’d been making forever.

Why
was
I so content with ordinary shit unless I was with Ryan? That night, when I got up for some midnight Fruit Roll-Ups, I looked across the kitchen and into the front hall at the well-dressed hare painting. Imagined it hanging in a different house, someday. In Seattle or Austin. Or else in a storage unit while Ryan and I went off and, like, Peace Corps-ed or something.

I thought about how my dad had lived in this city his whole life before his separation from Mom, and then he went to Oregon and made a new home. People changed—houses, careers, friends . . .

Changing from jeans to a dress for a few hours felt amazing. Moving from my little studio into an apartment with Ryan had been awesome. Getting a dog would be the shit. Everything else was hard for me.

“Fuck it,” I whispered to the well-dressed hare. “If I have all these things, and they’re the things I want, then why do I feel weird?”

The hare didn’t answer. Probs because he was never gonna change. He was always gonna be well dressed and smug as fuck about it.

I punched out a piece of Fruit Roll-Up and fed it to Collingsworth. Ate the rest and reached into the box for a new one, but it was empty.

Weird wasn’t bad.
Different
wasn’t bad. Not always.

I made up my mind that the next opportunity I got to do something totally crazy, something that didn’t seem “like me” at all, I was gonna do it. Like if I saw a brochure for skydiving, or that kind of paintball that’s based on the Hunger Games, or even for fucking knitting, I was gonna be all over that shit.

“Get ready for the new me,” I told the hare. I tried to dramatically spike the Fruit Roll-Up box into the trash can, but it hit the edge and fell on the floor. So I picked it up and put it in nicely, and then Collingsworth and I went back to bed.

“Let’s go to Riddle,” I said to Ryan Friday night while we were making out on the bed. I only had a halfway boner, which was surprising, since normally I got hard if Ryan so much as fist-bumped me. I figured we could break out any of our costumes and props and get a party raging, but I was in the mood to go out.

He wrinkled his nose. “Now?”

I kissed his disgusted wrinkles. “Yeah.”

“Bleh.”

“Why? You loved it when we went a few months ago.”

“I mean, it was fine. I just don’t like clubs much.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re loud and crowded. And guys don’t play with dudes who look like me. Or they assume I’m a sub.”

“Aww. Then carry, like, a quiver of crops and canes on your back, and if anyone thinks you’re a sub, pull out a crop and beat them.”

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. He glanced over at it.

I grabbed his wrists, laughing. “Uh-uh. You love me more than texts. Say you love me more than texts!”

He grinned at me. “It’s not a text. It’s this real estate alert thing I signed up for.”

“Real estate?”

“Yeah, it just lets me know when there’s new apartment listings in certain cities.”

“Dude.” I let go of his wrists. “You do realize we have almost a year before we can go anywhere.
If
we even go anywhere.”

“I know.” He was still breathing hard from the making out. He arched his back. “Relax. I’m not signing any leases. I just like to look. My dad looks at cars online all the time, and it’s not like he buys them.”

I still felt a little strange about the whole thing, but I took his wrists again, trying to smile. “So, Riddle?”

“If you really want to go, I’ll go.”

“We could try the sex sling,” I reminded him. “That’d be fun, right?”

Really, I was kinda lonely, which made no sense because I had Ryan and my friends and my coworkers. But sometimes I needed
different
people. People were just . . . I got why they sucked, but they were so fucking awesome too. You had to figure, when you chilled with someone you barely knew, you learned about their life, you both told stories or talked about some TV show or whatever, and you
connected
. And, like, that was fucking
cool
that you could go from being just two people out of seven billion to having changed each other’s lives for a hot minute. I kissed Ryan again and humped him a tiny bit.

He gazed up at me, breathing hard. “Will you wear panties?”

“Uhhh, are people gonna see them?”

He squirmed under me. “Uh-huh.”