Page 30 of Drag Me Up

The man in question shuffles into the room like a kid who got caught sneaking out for a snack after bedtime. Toe-ing the floor with his colorful canvas high tops, he glances at me through his curls to give a small smile.

“Hi, Professor Barnes,” he says shyly. “Are you going to be Eric’s Daddy? He needs a Daddy. I don’t mindloaning out Spencer, but he deserves one of his own and I want my Daddy to have more Daddy friends.”

I’m sure my face is doing a pretty fair imitation of a goldfish at this point. I mean, Eli and Jackson told me the house was nicknamed Kink Manor, and Clarence works at a BDSM club. But I never really let those facts sink in for what it meant for their relationships and those that live in the house.

Eric collapses into my side with laughter. Spencer is coughing in an attempt to cover his own mirth. Lucas looks confused, glancing between all of us. When his bottom lip starts to tremble, the laughter cuts off abruptly, and the two other men in my living room converge on him to reassure him.

“It’s alright, Little One,” Spencer says as he pulls the smaller man into his arms, lifting him onto his hip like he’s carrying a child. “We aren’t laughing at you. Matt just looks really funny with his fishy impersonation.”

Eric nods emphatically and runs the hand that had not been down my pants through Lucas’s curls. “Your professor isn’t my Daddy. He’s my Mattie. To me, that’s so much better than some random Daddy.”

“Daddy isn’t random,” the smaller man pouts. “He’s my super special Daddy made just for me.”

“You’re right, Lucky,” Eric says before giving a kiss to the forehead of his friend. “Spencer is a very special person… for a lot of people.”

The look between my cutie and Spencer speaks of some secret. I don’t know what happened there, but whatever holds these two men together is a bondforged in adamantium or some other unbreakable material.

“The others are on the way over,” Spencer tells us as he sits on the other end of the futon, Lucas in his lap. “But I wanted to give you a bit more of a crash course in everyone since we’ll probably have a bit of regression and falling into safety spaces with this meeting.”

Eric washes his hands in my kitchen sink and comes back to sit on my lap. It feels nice to have someone there. Grabbing another sandwich from the abandoned pile on my coffee table, he waves to indicate that he expects his friend will continue speaking.

“Thanks for the blessing, your majesty,” he chuckles while the man on his lap giggles around the thumb now in his mouth. I’m so confused.

“How much do you know about BDSM, specifically the softer sides and dynamics?”

I hold up my hand in the pinching gesture. I know what I’ve read in my mother’s romance books, but not enough to truly understand it. Spencer spends the next twenty minutes giving me a crash course on kink and dynamics, including how it manifests with everyone from the house.

By the time my rudimentary kink education is complete, my living room is packed with all the guys from the house plus my new neighbors Ash, Clarence, Theo, Steve, and Avery – who works as a reporter for a local news station.

“Has everyone read the article?” Eli asks the room. Every head nods while my boy tenses in my lap. I’m surehe is in factmybratty boy at this point. I might actually be a Daddy by nature, but I like how Eric put it. I’m his Mattie.

Avery shifts on the stool she perched herself on at my breakfast bar. “The quote was supposed to redact Eric’s name,” she tells us. “The Mendleton’s attorney has been cracking out cease and desist notices since it went to print this morning, but there’s nothing to be done now that the name is out. It’s a nightmare for the district attorney’s office as well for allowing a victim’s name to become public record.”

Lucky, as I’ve come to discover Lucas prefers to be called, pops his thumb out of his mouth to say, “I hope the meanie from the trial lost his job for that. He didn’t have to be such a … such a… DOODY HEAD!”

It was hard not to at least smile at the outrage from the little, although I’m a bit lost as to what they’re talking about.

“Are you talking about the Carlisle trial mentioned in the article?”

Lucky nods hard enough he almost tumbles off Spencer’s lap, but Spencer is the one to answer.

“Eric was called to testify to prove that Sabrina had made a habit of her little scheme. Lucky wasn’t her first target in the college sector. Eric was the first that they could actually trace to her. But…”

“But the asshats she bribed to target me didn’t follow her rules, so she moved on to easier targets for a couple years before trying the college thing again with Lucky.”

Eric interrupts whatever Spencer had been about tosay, and the man next to me looks relieved he didn’t have to say whatever he was going to say.

“But what do we do about this?” Jay yawns from his perch on the floor under the window. “We don’t need the press showing up at the house or Mister Drag to harass him further. There’s already so much hate in the comments from those dumbass people victim blaming.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Scott mumbles from his place next to where Jace sits with a very well loved teddy bear in his lap. “I’ve called in some favors to take care of monitoring the comments and tracking the most vitriolic ones to determine if additional steps need to be taken.”

Spencer and Jay both roll their eyes with exaggerated sighs, but Eli looks hungry at that idea. Some others snicker, but almost everyone in the room is smiling… some looking downright sinister.

“What am I missing?” I ask Eric in a whisper.

Leaning back to whisper back in my ear, he tells me, “Scott is a genius with computers. He’s a professional video game beta tester, but he claims he used to be part of some hacker network or something. He doesn’t do it anymore, or so he says, but his connections have reportedly forced a few early retirements if you know what I’m saying.”

I feel my eyebrows go up and look at the unassuming man. He’s the consummate geek. His outfit consists of ripped jeans, basic canvas shoes, a hoodie with some video game reference that I don’t understand. His messy short blond hair and huge black plastic rimmed glasses make him look like ninety percent of the computerengineering students I see on campus every day. Somehow, I thought assuming he worked with computers would be stereotyping.

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