Page 30 of Tell Me Lies: Manlove Edition

Just when I was worried he’d rub my ass and shaft raw, he pulls out. I hear the shuffle of his boots, the ragged exhale, the snap of a condom. I stay down, overwhelmed by the force of my orgasm, dripping and weak in the knees. He grunts and his cum splatters on my back.

I’m not certain I like this. Like the faceless bottom in a porno. Not a person.

“Good job, slut, I had fun, I guess.” He slaps my ass one last time.

I definitely don’t like the sound that escapes me—a little too prissy, too close to a sob.

“Everything you expected?”

“Nothing I expected.” I twist the release on the handcuffs and free my hands.

He’s zipped up and by the time I ease my broken ass into a sitting position, he’s across the room and buttoning his coat. I stare at him, his close-cut hair choppy from sweat, his face a burning red above the thick beard. He’s the first man to fuck me since … to fuck me that brutally ever, and I hadn’t seen any more of him than I had the week before. And even sitting in a puddle of cum and ice water, I’m desperate for more.

“Would you think less of me if—”

“Probably,” Laur said. “But, yeah. I’ll come back and fuck you again.”

Not what I was going to ask.

Wasn’t it?

“Next Tuesday?”

“Naw. I don’t think so.” He walks over again and crouches down to look me in the face. It’s a feral movement, like a big cat or a demon. He grins. “Oh, I’ll be here Tuesday. I always come in for my whiskey sour and cheesesteak on Tuesdays. But this … I’ll hold off on a while.”

He runs his left thumb over my lip.

Please kiss me.

I need a kiss, wanted just enough affection to not feel…

“I like a desperate whore.”

Chapter Five

Late fall turns into a chilly, dark winter. Laur has no other coat besides the green one, but it gets puffier sometime in December. There’s no Christmas gift exchange between us, but I buy some leashes and more restraints for him to play with, and he comes to the bar early one day without his laptop and has a conversation with me before he disappears for two weeks before the New Year. That’s the most intimate we’d gotten after four months of once-a-week and fairly brutal fucking where I never see him naked.

“Jeremy, you’re experiencing shame about something you’re not sharing with me,” Dr. Rooks, my psychiatrist, likes to pause and see if I’ll rush in and fill in the gaps. She’d classify Laur as risky behavior simply because her idea of kinky sex was kissing without asking for permission.

“Have you asked anyone in your support network to help you navigate it?”

My support network is Jude, Paul, and my mother. And I realize with a muffled hum, I had not.

“And why not?”

Because you don’t tell you mother about the kinds of things Laur does to a man. And you don’t tell your boss that her best friend has made you his bitch, because if he wasn’t telling her, I wasn’t going to.

I’d kept it from Paul—I hadn’t really. He’d just misunderstood. I’d wanted his advice on how to move things forward, but somehow he got the idea Laur was stalking me.

He’d reached under the bar for the pamphlets Jude kept there to give to people in an abusive situation. “Jesus Christ, man, every fucking freak in Galway City finds you and you don’t do a damn thing to protect yourself.”

“No, no. It’s not like that.” He’d been totally unfair. If anything, I was the one trying to stalk Laur, but no one could tell me anything about the guy. “I know the difference between Laur and those guys. I mean, he’s intense, but—”

“Laur? You mean … the finger guy?” Paul imitated the way I had wiggled my fingers.

Remembering I’d started that gesture made me squeamish. “Yeah, him.”

Paul blinked with confusion. “Really? He’s the guy who comes in for cheesesteaks on Tuesday?”

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