Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 17:26:16 -0700
From: A R <avunculous@gmail.com>
Subject: A Number Of Nights: Chapter 5

This is a work of erotic fiction. All participants are fictional, and are
over eighteen years of age. If reading erotic fiction about adult male
participants that involves sex, sexual servitude, bondage, and pain is
illegal wherever you are, don't read any further. If possible, go back in
time and don't click on the link that led to this file; that's probably
illegal too. I welcome your feedback, and hope you enjoy the story.

A Number of Nights
Chapter 05

The Tale Of The Persistent Slave

You have to keep in mind that this all happened back in the early eighties.
The way things are now, there are people all over the internet, all over the
world, communicating about what it means to be kinky, how to be masters, how
to be slaves, what it all means, how to do it right. Back in the time I was
a young man, though, there wasn't any of that. If you were gay, if you were
kinky, if you were kinky and gay, you had to find yourself a scene and get
to be a part of it. There was lore, back in those days, there was the Old
Guard, old even at the time, and there were leather bars, and books that
were spoken of with respect.

It was hidden, though, buried behind stereotypes of gay men in chaps and the
Village people; it was hidden behind a fog of growing AIDS hysteria, a
social distaste for anything gay in general, and a sense that all of that
had died when the seventies were over. So, if you were, say, coming into
manhood as a sheltered young nerd, more at home at libraries than at bars,
more excited over your Timex Sinclair computer than about motorcycles, there
wasn't much of a way to find out about that world.

Even if you had all of those desires buried deep within you.

I'd been fantasizing about bondage and domination, Master/slave relations,
kink of all sorts, since I'd hit puberty; I just had no idea what they were
called, or what it all meant. I'd been playing with ways to tie myself up,
finding ways to play bondage games with my friends which never got anywhere
beyond an excruciating level of sexual tension, and generally wondering what
the hell was wrong with me. Imagine being thirteen and having fantasies
about tying up your male friends and torturing them back then; no context,
no way to make sense of any of it.

I thought I was a monster. I thought that I was destined to be some sort of
serial killer. It didn't make much sense; outside of my fantasies, I was a
pretty good kid, no tendencies towards hurting people or animals or
anything. But, as so many adolescents do, I had found myself a doom and
latched on to it hard. I struggled against what I felt was the evil inside
me, knowing all the while that I would someday turn feral, and have to be
hunted down and killed for what I couldn't even imagine doing.

Kids don't make sense; no news there. But I was pretty bent by then, and the
public perception of gay people in general as an evil presence in society,
trying to corrupt the youth of America, didn't help much. By the time I hit
seventeen, I was a barely-contained wreck. A wreck with good grades, a
reputation for being smart and helpful, an interest in folklore and legend,
but a wreck nonetheless.

And I met Brian. He wasn't much like me; he was a year younger, a basketball
player, a good-looking jock boy with an affinity for wood shop, half-Irish,
half-Hispanic, dark hair and dark eyes, and he seemed, for some reason, to
like me. I'd kept my orientation a secret; back then coming out was
synonymous was a death wish, so a lot of guys did. I also had no gaydar
whatsoever; that's one thing I've kept consistent even up to now. I had no
idea he was hitting on me up until, one night at a party he'd invited me to
for no apparent reason, because I hated parties and I was just uncomfortable
and didn't really talk to anyone, he kissed me.

It was a teenage romance there for a while, complete with the movies, the
junk food, the makeout sessions in the back of my car, the stolen fleeting
moments in one or the other of our bedrooms when the parents were out. Oh,
and the terrible sex, of course, not that we either knew or cared; it was
clumsy, and awkward, and awesome. It began with an agreement that we were
just fooling around, as we both asserted that we were really into girls, and
we were just doing this because girls were so uptight... and we kept up that
pretense for nearly a week.

Falling in love is an apt way to put it, but you have to consider that there
are many different types of falling. There's the drop from the Space
Shuttle, incinerating gloriously in the atmosphere; there's the plunge from
the clifftop into the hard and bracing ocean. There's the out of control
slide down a mountainside, caroming off of trees and rocks and scrub as you
go down, there's the unexpected tumble off the back porch and the night in
the ER. For me, for us as I later found out, it was like stepping off a curb
we hadn't expected to be there. Going along, nothing the matter, then that
sudden weightless panic inside for a moment, and then it's "Oh. Well. Here
we are."

We came to trust each other; he told me about his alcoholic mother, and his
father's long-standing suffering; he told me about the delicious torment he
went through in the locker rooms until it became a joke between us. He had
dreams of being a pilot, of being a veterinarian, of somehow merging the
two. I told him about my mother's death, what I could remember of it; I told
him what it was like growing up in a house with just the me and my father,
and the density of the quiet that had developed between us as I'd discovered
who I was, and that I couldn't tell my father anything anymore without
giving myself away. I didn't tell him of my dreams, though; I didn't have
any that didn't involve eventually becoming a monster.

And then one night we had a night to ourselves at my house; my father was
away somewhere, and we had gotten a six-pack of beers, and rented a VCR from
the new video store downtown. We hadn't watched anything, though; we'd spent
hours wandering between having sex, talking, playing with each others'
bodies, talking, laughing, and having sex again. We stayed in my room, your
room now, and just explored each other. Somewhere in there, I realized that
I wanted Brian to know everything about me; he deserved to know what kind of
monster I really was. I loved him enough to warn him to get away from me,
enough to lose him forever for his own good.

So, eyes closed, trying not to cry, I told him what I fantasized about;
about tying up guys and tormenting them. I told him about being turned on by
interrogation scenes in movies, about wanting to have guys at my mercy and
begging. I told him about the experiments I'd done with tying myself up, and
about how it made me feel, and through all of it he was silent. I came, not
to any conclusion, but to a stop, and he let me get ahold of myself a
moment. And then he started getting up, and I felt what it would be like to
lose him, for just a fraction of a second. But he hadn't left the bed; I
opened my eyes, and there he was, kneeling beside me, his wrists together,
held out towards me.

"Tie me up," he said.

It didn't happen that night; right then, all I could manage to say was,
"What?" Gradually, he convinced me that he'd had similar fantasies; maybe
not as strongly as I had, and maybe they hadn't done quite as much damage,
but he was determined, if you will, to be bound. The rest of that night was
spent talking, comparing fantasies, wondering about where this tendency had
come from in both of us. He theorized that it was time he'd spent in a cast
when he was little, after falling off a roof. On my part, I might have
watched a few too many war movies with my dad that featured hot
interrogation scenes.

Whatever the case, within a couple of days, we got some time alone again,
and I was ready. I had a few lengths of rope, a bandanna, and some Vaseline.
Brian spent the afternoon tied down to the bed, with me alternating between
making him suck on my cock, and me playing with his until he was begging to
cum. When he finally blasted, he was yelling incomprehensibly, and it took
him a long time to wind down after that; I untied him and held him as he
shook in my arms, his face buried in my neck, and I thought for sure that
I'd hurt him, that it was over between us, that the monster inside me had
just cost me my love. I had a whole dramatic exit scene planned out for when
he stopped needing me to hold him, and if I'm not mistaken I had an
elaborate suicide attempt in mind for later that night.

And then he started talking again. "That was amazing," he said. "How in the
hell did you do that?"

It took me a while to comprehend, and a little while longer to believe him,
but that night he taught me that the monster that I'd thought would bring me
nothing but misery and doom could, used correctly, bring ecstasy to someone
I loved. It had become, and I apologize for the cliche, a gift.

He spent a lot of time tied up after that. His basement, whenever his family
was out, became our favorite place; we experimented with suspension bondage,
with chains, with whips... I'm sure you get the picture. Two horny, gay
teenage boys, both into the kinkier end of things, set loose on their own
with a world of improvised props available to them.

There were a couple of times I screwed up and hurt him; he had one scar on
his arm from where I drew a rope out from under it way too fast; he was
gagged, and I couldn't tell that he was in real pain. I cut off the
circulation to his hands while hanging him from the ceiling the first time;
it took a while for the feeling to come back, and we were halfway to the ER
by then, trying to come up with a story that would explain it to our
parents. We did some role-playing games; the advanced versions of cops and
robbers, cowboys and indians, war. It was during the war one that I got a
little too carried away one day with an interrogation, and scared him pretty
badly with a heat gun my dad had been using to peel wallpaper; he freaked
out pretty hard.

In short, we were exploring the world of B&D as if we were the first people
there. We had no guidance but our fantasies, and nothing but our trust of
each other keeping us safe. It's a wonder that we survived. But we did, and
we learned, and we got better at things. And we stayed together, through
high school graduation, for both of us. I don't know if we would have been
together for life, but... I think we would have. I like to think so.

Brian's last year in high school, I was enrolled in a local college, living
at home to save money. Dad was an architect, which at the time was a
respectable profession, and he made decent money, but we weren't rich by any
means. He built this house himself, or did the plans and supervised, back
when he was with my mother. It was October, I'd barely had a chance to get
used to what college was like, and Dad had the first heart attack of what
turned out to be a series that would leave him in the hospital off and on
for two months, and then kill him.

I quit school when it first happened, and did what I could to take care of
him. He hated it, too. He was one of those classic guys they made back in
the 40s, the tough-as-nails self-made man, and he hated what I had to do for
him to get him through the day. But I was there for him, and Brian was there
for me. He helped me as much as he could with Dad, and kept me together and
functional too. I think by the end, Dad knew that Brian and I weren't just
friends, but he never said anything. Those kind of men never did.

My Dad died just before Christmas. I was a mess; Brian kept me together
through the funeral and the will, he got me through the nights after that;
the winter in my memory is a blur, with one fixed and solid figure standing
strong in a maelstrom.

Dad left me the house and his retirement savings; not a huge amount, but
enough to get me through to where I could start working again, and put a
little away. Toward spring, I got myself a job in a print shop which would
take care of the bills, and asked the family accountant to take care of the
rest.

Oh, and Brian had moved in. I'm not sure if we ever talked about it; he was
just there more and more, until he was there all the time. I couldn't
imagine it otherwise. We were 'roommates,' in that amusing 1980s way.
Partners, they call it now.

Brian went to school; somewhere in there he discovered that my dad had a few
old woodworking tools set up in the garage, and started building toys. The
St. Andrew's cross was first, followed by the rack; he considered that his
masterpiece. The master bedroom had always seemed much too large, so
eventually we cut it in half, and made the dungeon; the slave bedroom, as
Brian called it. He loved building new toys, loved spending time on them; I
loved tormenting him on them.

He died on the rack. It was a brain embolism; once the panic and the chaos
and the threats and accusations were done, the doctor told me there was
nothing I could have done. Eventually, I believed him.

Imagine, if you will, the paramedics showing up to me, 23 years old, in
tears; leading them into the bedroom, then a dungeon, to find a lifeless
body on a rack. Whip marks. Manacle marks on his wrists. I was arrested, of
course. Spent the night in jail, and bailed myself out the next day. I
forced myself to go home, to sleep; word hadn't gotten out somehow, maybe
because that's just not the sort of thing people talked about back then. I'm
not going to describe how I felt for those two days; if you know me at all,
if you've listened to this story, you know.

When the autopsy came back, and I began to understand that it wasn't all my
fault, I visited his parents. They'd gone a few rounds with Brian when they
figured out that we were lovers, but they'd really stopped talking about it
much. I really expected them to blame me, but his mother's mother had died
of the same thing; hereditary, as it turns out. They'd always known it was
possible. And back then, you know, nothing could be done.

I hadn't gone back into the dungeon since it happened. I didn't know if I
ever could; anything to do with sex seemed totally alien to me just then.
All I wanted was to sleep until I stopped hurting; to stop missing him.

It had been less than a week when I heard him. He made this noise when I was
playing with him hard; not a scream, not a growl, something akin to both of
those. I awoke from a dream of him, and that's what I heard, coming from the
bookcase that conceals the entrance to the room.

I should have been too terrified to move; maybe I was still half-asleep. But
I missed him so much. I crossed the room, opened the door, walked into the
darkness, and turned on the light. There he was, on the rack, like I had
last seen him, but now, he was alive; he was thrashing, like he did when I
left him alone in his bonds for too long. He was blindfolded.

I approached him, and he seemed to calm down. I touched his face; it was
him, the same smooth, warm skin I had explored for years now, but... it was
as if he was only half-there. Like a solid mirage. At my touch, he relaxed,
and smiled. I lifted his blindfold.

"Where have you been?" he asked.

"I thought you were... I thought you were gone." My heart was racing.

"I'm here for as long as you need me," he said. "For as long as you have
no-one else."

I suppose, technically, it's an advanced form of necrophilia. He feels real,
if a little bit insubstantial. And who can say that they've never been with
someone like that?

He's there, in the dungeon, waiting for me to be with him. We play the same
games we did when he was alive. He's as astonishing as he ever was. I still
love him. He's still dead.

The Tale of Honest John
Part 2

Honest John looked down at his beer bottle, frowned at it for being empty,
and went to get another pair from the fridge. Adam tossed his empty in the
trash, looking befuddled.

"I've been kind of bemused by all the curiosity as to what I did with my
sexual energies, but no one seems to wonder how I can afford to live here
with no apparent source of income," Honest John said, handing Adam a beer.

"Yeah, that's exactly the question I had after hearing that story."

Honest John laughed. "My accountant advised me to stop sitting on my money
back in 1986; he wanted me to put it into stocks. When Microsoft's IPO
happened, I bought a bunch. It's worked out."

"Nice. Advice from beyond the veil?" Adam asked.

"Nope. I just liked DOS," Honest John said.

"He's still twenty, isn't he?" Adam asked.

"Yeah, that's what he looks like," Honest John said.

"Does he... change? Grow? He's been chained in a room for years..." Adam
shook his head. "Isn't he supposed to be moving on somewhere?"

"I still need him." Honest John stared down at his beer.

"I'm not an expert on relationships or anything, but, I've got to tell you,
this seems... well, it seems wrong." Adam was speaking slowly, choosing his
words.

"You mean the necrophilia thing?" John asked, half-joking.

"I mean... he doesn't have a choice, does he?" Adam's voice was gentle.

Honest John paused, drank, and sighed. "I've asked him if he wants wants to
go. 'I'm here as long as you need me.'"

"You've been working hard to keep needing him," Adam said. "He's trapped, as
long as you don't move on."

"Isn't that the same with any relationship? Both people play by the rules,
and they stay together." John hadn't looked at Adam in a while.

"Yeah, but... look, you're trapped too. You're with a guy who can never
change, never grow, never learn anything new, never teach you anything
new..." Adam trailed off, and Honest John picked up where he had left off.

"Never have a day that's better or worse than the day before. Never achieve
anything. Never have new problems, or issues..." Honest John shrugged.
"Don't think I haven't thought about all this. I guess it seems like he's
the perfect lover; never needing anything but companionship, sex, love.
But..."

Adam waited, letting him finish his thought.

"I've been with him for so long," Honest John said. "I don't know what I'd
do without him. I love him so much, but... I know I'm keeping him here. I
just... don't know what I'd do."

"Well, me, to start with," Adam said.

Honest John laughed.

"You'd mourn, you'd hurt, your heart would break and then heal again, like
anyone else." Adam put his beer down, and went over to Honest John, and put
his hand on the man's shoulder. It was shaking.

"You'll be all right," Adam said.

Honest John looked up at him, clasped his hand. "All right."

"So... can I meet him?"

"I... I think so."

They went back through the bedroom, unlatched the hidden door behind the
bookcase, and entered the darkened room. Honest John pulled the chain, and
the light came on. There, in the cage by the far wall, a young man quivered;
his thin hands wrapped around the bars of the cage, his body naked, his eyes
hopeful.

Honest John took a ring of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the cage. The
boy emerged, his head bowed, his hands at his side. He was beautiful; a
long, lean body, hair shaved close, cock half-hard; he seemed to be glowing
from the inside.

"Have you brought someone new to play with, Sir?" The boy asked.

"Brian, this is Adam."

The boy stepped up close to Adam, and looked up; their eyes met. Adam saw a
darkness within the boy's eyes that was infinite, flat black, enormous.
Brian's hand touched his face, and it was insubstantial, and yet he could
feel it; his face where the hand had touched it felt electric, strangely
alive.

Adam felt Honest John come up behind him, and pull his shirt up over his
head; as it was covering his face, he could feel Brian's hands on his chest,
the tingling of his skin so electric it was almost painful. His head and
arms freed, he leaned forward and kissed Brian, or Brian's ghost. It left
him breathless, gasping, and he fell back into Honest John's arms. He looked
up at the man, then turned and kissed him; the residue of the energy he'd
felt from Brian made the kiss almost as strange. For a time, all three of
them kissed, trading off in pairs, trying to kiss all at once, feeling each
others' bodies, what there was of them.

Honest John and Adam shucked off their clothes hastily somewhere in the
midst of that, rejoining the other two quickly. Adam felt Honest John's
hands lifting one of his arms up in the air, and fastening it into one of
the manacles hanging from the ceiling. He lifted the other himself; soon
after, he felt his ankles being chained down to the stone floor of the
dungeon as well, his legs spread wide. He felt Honest John come up behind
him, felt his cock snake under his ass, felt the head of it tickle the back
of his nuts. Brian was sucking at his nipples; his chest felt like cold
fire.

Honest John backed off, and Adam saw him from the corner of his eye; he was
approaching the rack of whips on the wall. Adam moaned as Brian started
working his way lower and lower on Adam's body, pausing to trace his ribs
with his tongue, to run his tongue down his abs to his navel. Brian was
licking at the valley between Adam's hip and his groin when the first stroke
of the whip landed on Adam's back. He grunted, and felt Brian start licking
his balls as the next stroke of the lash landed.

Brian's mouth was giving him incredible, electric sensations of pleasure on
the verge of being pain; Honest John's whip was causing him pain, just on
the edge of being pleasure. It took three lashes for Adam to start thrashing
in his chains; by that time, Brian had his cock in his mouth. By ten lashes,
he was yelling, he had no idea what, and tears were pouring from his eyes,
he was humping Brain's face, thrusting down his throat as the blows landed.
By twenty lashes, he wasn't sure if he was still conscious, or even still
alive, and he pulled at the restraints that held him up as Brian steadied
his hips with his hands, screaming with the insane sensations coursing
through him.

The twenty-third blow took him over the edge, and he screamed hoarsely as he
came, hard, bucking his hips, every muscle in his wiry body standing out,
eyes clenched tightly shut. He shuddered all over as he came down, and hung
limp in his chains as he felt Brian's mouth slide from his cock.

It took him a while to come to enough to open his eyes. Brian was chained in
a sling, hung from the ceiling, and Honest John was standing over him. As
Adam watched, Honest John slid his cock into the boy's ass, and the boy
threw his head back and laughed. They started fucking, a rhythm that was
obviously completely familiar to the both of them, Honest John's ass cheeks
clenching as he drove himself into the boy, the boy's fists wrapped tight
around the chains that held the sling up. They fucked in a frenzy for a
while, and then slowed down; the light in the room seemed to dim, and Adam
thought he saw the two of them grow brighter. Brian sat up as they moved
back and forth, and pulled himself up to kiss Honest John.

They kissed, then, for a while, still thrusting together, strong and slow;
they held each other close and tried as hard as possible to merge, to become
one. With an enormous sorrow in his eyes, Honest John pulled back, and
looked at his lover.

"I love you, always, Brian." He tried to smile. "Goodbye."

"I love you, John," Brian said. "I'll be waiting for you."

They kissed again, and then John rammed his cock home and started fucking
the boy hard, and then there was a roar. It might have been Honest John
roaring to begin with, a roar of anger and anguish and lust and loss, but
then Brian picked it up, and another sound joined in as well. The whole room
resonated with it, Adam could feel the vibrations in the chains that bound
him still. The glow that was in Brian seemed to brighten, become solid; it
enveloped Honest John, and soon became too bright for Adam to look at; he
closed his eyes tight, and tried to look away as the roar reached a
crescendo that he was somehow screaming along with.

And then it all started to fade; the light, the sound, all dimmed until it
was just the one lightbulb again, and Honest John, kneeling alone in the
middle of the room, crying like a little boy.