Page 48 of On Your Knees

He’s on his side on the floor.

“What really happened that night?”

“I was fifteen. How would I know?”

I slide the pictures back into the folder and stand from the bench, nauseated by my throbbing cock.

“I think you do know,” Jensen says, not bothering to reach for the envelope, confirming my suspicion that he has digital files. “I think a lot of people know.”

“Then talk to them. Don’t contact me again.”

I walk off, ignoring Jensen as he calls after me. He has the sense at least not to follow.

I check the car’s location on my phone and head toward it. I think about having Patrick take me to my house outside the city. Images are flashing in my mind, and I need to get them out of myself. My studio is the safest place for that.

The problem is, that’s not where I want to be.

FIFTEEN

Levi

Ethan told me to read, but I’m having trouble focusing on my book. I can’t relax without him here. The penthouse is too quiet, and it’s making my thoughts loud.

Where is he?

What is his life outside of this space?

I don’t like that I’m in a compartment that he’s exited. I know that’s unreasonable. I would never, ever admit to thinking that, but I do feel it. Yesterday felt so good, and I don’t like that today is different.

When I can’t stand sitting any longer, I get up and go to look out the window. The city looks so different from up here, so clean and bright and peaceful. Bored, I turn away and walk into the dark space that transitions from the living room to the playroom.

I explored this space a little bit yesterday when I was looking for Ethan, but I take more time with it now. The statues hiding in the shadows are fragments of human form. None are complete. Yesterday, I felt a hip and the curve of an ass. Then I found a shoulder and arm with part of a hand. What’s eerie is that the forms are perfect where they exist, but they end roughly in unfinished stone, making them simultaneously grotesque and beautiful.

I could go get my phone and use the flashlight to look more closely, but the darkness is the point, and I don’t want to spoil it.

I find a statue that I missed yesterday. My fingers trace a notched abdomen down to a hard, jutting cock. My breath catches as my hand maps the smooth, cool protrusion. It’s very realistic, with a faint tracery of marble veins, a ridge on the underside, and a fat, flared head. I imagine it inside me, hard and brutal and unyielding. I shudder and rock on my feet as blood rushes to my groin. I slide my hand to the base of the marble cock and feel the balls snugged up underneath. But when I explore lower, I find rough stone and nothingness.

Aroused and unsettled, I leave the statues and walk into the playroom. I go straight to the curtain, this time noticing that there’s a button on the wall beside it. I push the button, and the curtain splits in the middle, each half moving along a track in the ceiling to gather against opposite walls.

Yesterday, I was distracted by Ethan and didn’t really absorb the details of the room, but today I’m alone. And today, I understand. Not everything, certainly, but enough to know that bindings are for freedom and that taking away one sense is to give more power to another.

I kneel on the various benches to see where my limbs would go, how my cock would hang, where my ass would be. I look at the whips and dildos and other toys. I go back to the chair where Ethan fucked me yesterday.

I close my eyes and remember. My body shudders. My cock presses against the front of my sweats. I grip myself through the material. I can’t get over having my body react like this. On the one hand, I feel like this can’t be me. But on the other hand, I feel like I’m present in my own skin for the first time. Like I wasn’t really here before. Like I was dead.

I walk back to the lounge area and open the coffin. I step inside and pull the door shut, closing myself into utter blackness.

When I was young, I used to imagine myself being dead. I would lie in my bed at night, utterly still, and imagine that I was nothing but a body. I would imagine that I couldn’t feel anything, inside or out. I would imagine that I couldn’t hear my mother throwing up in the bathroom.

But I can’t find that state of deadness now, even here in the pitch black. My body is alive. I can hear myself breathing. I want to touch my dick. And the presence of the shackles inside the coffin means that it’s not for dead things.

I open the coffin lid and step out. I don’t want to be in there without Ethan to make it feel right. Where is he? Why has he been gone so long?

I guess I could text him, but what could I say except, Where are you?

Can I do that? Is it allowed?

Maybe not.