For Real (Spires #3)

by Alexis Hall

“It’s like,” he went on tormentedly, “you’re not allowed to be a dom until you’re forty and six feet tall and own your bespoke bondage dungeon. But I’m probably not going to get any taller, and forty is forever away, so what the hell am I supposed to do now?”

God. What would it be like to have someone trust you and want you that much? To put aside fear and pride and shame and inhibition. All the stuff that’s supposed to be so important. Parts of ourselves we’re supposed to protect and care about. I sometimes wonder what it means that I want someone to do that for me. But then I think it doesn’t matter, and that it’s just a thing I want. And either everything we want is weird, or nothing is.

“No. I’m kind of so totally turned on by the idea of you doing something you hate for me, but I want it to be something I really want, not something I don’t care about.”

“The disparities between us. It’s an abuse of pow—Ow.” He’d kicked me sharply in the ankle. “What was that for?” “Because you’re insulting me, right to my fucking face. Do you think because I’m poor and little and nineteen, I don’t know what I want?”

“Do you think if I felt abused or exploited or taken advantage of, I’d be with you? Do you think I can’t tell the difference? Do you think I don’t know what love feels like?”

He’s indulging me a bit, and even though we only do kinky stuff in a sex context—honestly, it’s the only context I want to do kinky stuff in, the rest of the time I want a boyfriend—I think we’re sort of flirting around the edges of it right now. I’m pretty sure it’s as far as we’re ever going to take it, but it’s kind of obvious to both of us we’re each getting our own thrill out of it. I like choosing for him, and he likes being chosen for.

“Are you going to have your own restaurant some day?” and what I say is, “Yes.” And then I’m completely terrified. Because once you’ve thought something like that, or said it, all you’ve done is given yourself something to fail at. Or have taken away.

If I’d said the words—if I hadn’t taken it for granted that he must have known I loved him—would he be with me now? Safe in my arms and I safe in his? If he had truly understood how I felt about him, if he had known he had dominion over my heart as well as body, he could never have feared I would think less of him for…anything. But I had never given him reason to trust me. And everything I had given had been too little, offered too late, at a time when the world had already stripped him of too much.

The truth was, the years between us mattered. Not—as I had thought—because of how other people would judge, but because while some of the bridges between us were instinctive and effortless, love and sex and faith, others had to be carefully built. And I’d failed not just to build them, but to notice they were needed.

Some actions were worth their consequences, whatever those consequences might be. And of everything that had ever been spoken or written about love, I couldn’t remember a single occasion on which it had been described as sensible.

There. Everything I’ve been scared of. And actually, it’s not so bad. All that’s happening is I’m losing a shitty job. And Laurie’s right. I can get another one. Or…I can try to get a different job. One that isn’t shitty. Or I can be Laurie’s live-in cabana boy. Or whatever. The point is…the point is…the future is terrifying because it’s full of stuff, not because it’s empty.1

I’m starting to think you should always push your luck. No, you can deal with. Don’t know is the most frightening thing of all.