Bad Things (14 page)

Xavier waited for Carson’s panting and trembling to subside. And there it was. The landslide of humiliation.
Pobre
.

Puta idiota
. How could he have forgotten?

When he stood, Xavier was halted dead by the sudden change in Carson’s expression, from embarrassment to fear. Because his eyes had locked on Xavier’s epic hard-on. Xavier made a not absolutely necessary adjustment, just to enjoy the extra flare of terror in Carson’s eyes as he curved his hand over his hard girth and shifted it into a more comfortable position. Then he continued his trajectory toward the shelf and grabbed the camera.

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner. Oh well, we’ll have lots more chances.”

Lens cap off. Camera on.

“No, no. Keep your hand wrapped around the base of your dick. Look into the camera. Fuck, that’s perfect.”

Carson, frozen in that three inch rectangle, glazed in come. Xavier put the camera away and turned to face him, enjoying how Carson glanced down at his bulging erection again, then turned away, as if not looking at his hard dick would save him from it. When Xavier walked toward him Carson started breathing harder, and a muffled sound leaked out from behind the ball gag when Xavier took hold of his wrist and secured it in the restraint.

Xavier let his hostage savor his absolute helplessness under the looming threat of his hard-on for a moment. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back. Promise.”

Leaving him alone with that vow and the memory of Xavier’s hard cock bulging in his pants was as cruel as almost anything he could do to Carson, physically. When Xavier came back, he drank down Carson’s trembling dread, then his surprise as his eyes locked on the laptop tucked under Xavier’s arm. No sign of his fear abating, though, as Xavier rooted through the camera bag and found the card reader he’d hoped would be there.

“Rex is going to go fucking berserk over that picture of you spattered with your come.”

Realizing that would mean Brian and maybe Max would see him glazed in semen—fuck, Brian seemed so tickled by the idea of Xavier having his way with Carson, he’d probably show it to the rest of the bouncers, maybe even the girls—Carson gave him a hurt, reproachful look. Did he really not get it? How fucking good those sad looks of his made Xavier feel?

When he had the photos downloaded on the dummy laptop, Xavier sent his old friend a quick email. A picture’s worth a thousand words. No need to be chatty.

“
Now, time for another episode of your friends’ masterpiece theater.”

He got the other laptop set up on the chair again, and it only took one stern look to convince Carson to confront the images on the screen.

“I don’t know about you, but this one’s much harder for me to watch. Even though it’s only one guy raping her. It’s because she’s not numb, yet. In this one, you can still see how scared she is. It’s heartbreaking, the way she cries. The way she begs, the way he just does everything, anyway. As if he can’t see the pain in her face. As if he can’t hear her screams.”

But Carson heard them. Saw her pain. It was twisting his face. Making him shake.

Juxtaposed against the suffering of the girl, Xavier wondered if Carson’s own fear and humiliation felt trivial. Or deserved. Or if he even made a connection between the two.

When the man got angry at the girl for not doing as she’d been ordered, when he lit a cigarette, pinned her foot down against the mattress, and burned her between her toes, Carson started crying. Sobbing, actually. The encounter went on for another twenty-eight minutes. He burned her three more times.

When the scene finished, Xavier paused the video and closed the laptop. Squatting down in front of Carson, he cupped his face in his hands and peered into his swollen, bloodshot eyes. Fuck, he looked wounded. Xavier combed the sweat-damp hair back from Carson’s pallid face.

“
It’s a sad paradox, isn’t it? It genuinely hurts you, watching that girl suffer. But you helped them do that to other girls just like her.”

A flinch of horror.

“You did know that, right?”

The horror lingering in those shattered shards of blue, the surprise leaked away.

“Maybe you never met her. Maybe they never let you see any of them. But you knew. You knew, and you ran their errands. You took their money. You cozied up to me so you could tell them if I was dangerous. They were the ones paying you, so you’ve been protecting them, rescuing them. When she’s the one who needs rescuing.”

He fed him. He let him brush his teeth and use the toilet. And then Xavier left Carson there for the night to think about it.

Upstairs, Xavier thought about it, too. Carson’s guilt. How his shame had strong, undulating tendrils wrapping around and around Carson’s connection to Max. How it threaded through his furtive attraction to Xavier, before the restraints, and to the way he’d succumbed so easily to the torment Xavier had just inflicted on him.

In the shower, Xavier fed on the memory of Carson’s eyes wide and bright with fear, Xavier getting hard on just the vision of Carson’s hand sliding over his cock. Xavier took his time getting off, leisurely sampling the varied flavors of a dozen possible scenarios, imagining Carson’s soft cries, muffled by the gag, then unobstructed and pure.

Xavier’s cock was half hard before he was even at the landing. A new, powerful aphrodisiac, this certainty of total power, without the wrenching hate he’d felt for the Loft Stalker. But even more than that, that soft, half-formed something he’d sensed at the center of his hostage had his imagination and his body humming. A dark want attached to Carson’s fear, like a parasitic twin. He rode in on that feeling, letting his cock stiffen slightly, not knowing where his imagination would carry him once he was in the room with his prisoner.

Fuck, what a sight to come down to, first thing in the morning. Carson, crusty with streaks of his own dried come, obediently displaying his cock and balls and hole between his wide-spread thighs. Nostrils flaring above the ball gag, eyes full of fear. That confluence of rousing stimuli hit Xavier with sudden, brutal want.

He grabbed the bottle of urine from Carson’s side, and a deep plastic bowl off the shelf—fuck, all the useless crap that accumulated over the years—went into the bathroom, dumped the piss and filled the bowl with warm water, sudsing up with a couple squirts of hand soap, and threw a wash cloth into the bowl.

Coming back and kneeling down beside Carson, Xavier savored the sight of him, sweaty and streaked with his dried ejaculate. A gorgeous, nasty vision exacerbated by the way his jaw was still pried open by the ball gag.

“Would you like to have this out for a while?”

Carson nodded.

“Promise to be good?” Saying those words drove a fresh rush of heat through him, and Xavier’s cock twitched in his pants.

Another apprehensive nod.

Xavier removed the gag and set it aside, then got the wet washcloth and rung out the excess water.

“
Let’s clean you up, dirty boy.”

When Xavier brought the damp cloth to Carson’s face, Carson flinched away. Almost instantly, there was a flare of regret in his eyes. Xavier watched as Carson willed himself to calm. To comply. Already learning his place.

Gently, Xavier drew the cloth across Carson’s brow, down his nose, over his temples, cheeks and jaw. Washed away the saliva that had dried around his lips. Sitting close, Xavier could hear Carson’s tense, shallow breaths. Worried, of course, about what was going to happen next. But he was behaving. Staying quiet, even though Xavier could almost see him trying to concoct some magical phrase that he could utter before being silenced, a few words so charmed that Xavier would relent and listen. A story that would get him out of those cuffs, out of that basement.

It struck Xavier as strange that he hadn’t been particularly attracted to Carson when they’d first met, or those few weeks they’d been working together at the club, despite how pretty he was. A little too self-conscious. Too much of a pleaser. Not in the alluring, obedient way he was learning to be a pleaser, now. And now that a very somber uncertainty had swelled up in him and displaced that chafing eagerness that a decade of customer service had probably cultivated in him, Carson looked absolutely fucking delicious. Good enough to eat, without question.

Xavier submerged the cloth and wrung it out again, washing Carson’s neck, being very gentle as he went over his throat, feeling the contours of his Adam’s apple, vocal chords, the muscles and tendons sloping down to his shoulders, wide and rounded with muscle. Perfect arms, just the right bulk and definition. Fucking gorgeous back, hard to reach because of how his arms were restrained, but he managed to get every inch of him, patiently working around the obstacles.

Then his chest. Xavier wiped up the long strand of desiccated semen extending from his collar bone, across his pec and almost to his navel. Another glob under his left nipple.

Cock hard, thrumming almost angrily like a wounded appendage, touching that fucking perfectly molded torso was torture.

Fair skin. Almost creamy. The sheen of the water before it evaporated, the way the narrow line of dark hair between his pecs matted down under the cloth. The way his nipples firmed, then rose.

Anxiety etching a gradually deepening furrow between Carson’s brows.

“
Look at me.”

Xavier could see that he didn’t want to, but Carson obeyed. And there, darkening his stunning blue eyes, all the dread Xavier’s hard-on and aroused breathing were sustaining. Worsening minute by minute.

And something else. His discomfort at Xavier’s tenderness. At sitting there immobile, naked, while Xavier slowly slid his hand over every inch of his body, with just a thin cloth separating Xavier’s hand from Carson’s warm, damp skin.

He mopped up the puddle of come that had pooled and dried just at the border between smooth abdomen and groomed pubic thatch, and rinsed the cloth before going over his belly. Lean and firm. Hips smooth, hairless, slightly paler than the flesh above and below, but if he’d had tan lines, they’d faded.

When he brought the wet cloth to Carson’s cock, he drank in the sound of a sharp intake of breath.

“
Look at me, Carson.”

Poor baby. So angry. So scared. And so…fuck, yes.

Xavier smiled. A cock slowly hardening in his hand was one thing. But that brightness playing over those fractal facets of blue was something else. Something far more exciting and infinitely more useful.

“
It doesn’t mean anything. You getting hard while I’m doing this to you.” Gently, carefully, he washed his balls. “That’s just nerves, and stimulus.”

He took the cloth away and looked.

“Mmm. You really are the whole package, aren’t you? That face. That body. That cock. No wonder a troll like Brian hates you.”

A faint tremor of a thought. But Carson had learned his lesson, and he stayed quiet. Didn’t even open his mouth.

Xavier dunked the cloth in the warm, soapy water, gave Carson a grin, then reached under the knee further from him, lifted and drew it toward him, forcing Carson to roll onto his hip. Even though it had gotten him hard, much more so than when he’d washed his cock, the fear in Carson’s eyes flared when he slid the cloth over his hip and circled his splayed hand over one firm, muscular cheek, then the other, taking his time, enjoying the exploration of that luscious flesh, before he slid the cloth over the first hint of valley just below his lower back, and slowly worked the cloth down, between his cheeks.

Carson made a grunting noise and flexed his ass, arresting Xavier’s hand.

“Carson. Remember what I told you. I take good care of my things. I keep my things clean. I’m careful and gentle with my things.” He peered into Carson’s panicked eyes. “You want me to be gentle with this, don’t you?”

Carson’s jaw contracted and his lips compressed into a thin line. Probably doing his damnedest to keep his mouth shut. Finally his ass cheeks unclenched.

Xavier pressed two fingertips deep into Carson’s cleft, and gently rubbed him down the length of his crack, lingering and lightly rubbing back and forth over his asshole, drinking in a delicious grunt of protest from behind Carson’s clenched jaw, the way he tried again to evade his eyes, the way he turned red when Xavier demanded once more that he look at him.

He drew the cloth forward again. Rinsed it out in the bowl, then took his time washing each leg, enjoying the feel of every sinew, every muscle. Then, as carefully as he’d washed his chest, his cock, his ass, Xavier washed Carson’s feet, enjoying his hostage’s perplexed expression at such seemingly paradoxical servitude, then took the bowl back to the bathroom, dumped the dirty water, and rinsed out the washcloth.

“More water before I put the gag back in your mouth?”

Carson opened his mouth, looked for a moment like he was going to speak, but didn’t.

Xavier squatted down in front of him and took a good look into those big blues.

“
Do you have something important you want to say?”

Carson nodded.

“You’re not just going to beg me to uncuff you? Or leave the gag off? Or let you go?”

A hopeful spark lit up in his eyes, and he shook his head.

“Go ahead. Don’t squander my generosity.” Xavier leaned in close, mouthed his ear, riding the thrill of the pitch and lurch of Carson’s whimper at that touch, then whispered, “There’s only one thing I want to hear come out of your mouth. Information. Names. Addresses. Dates. If you say one word that I can’t use, one single useless syllable about being sorry, or saying you’re not part of their sick circus, I’m going to gag you again before you get another fucking word out. And don’t be too sure I’ll be using this to shut you up.” He held the gag up in front of Carson’s face.

Hoarsely, Carson blurted, “The guy in the suit,” as if he was desperate to prove he didn’t need gagging, with the ball gag, or anything else Xavier might have in mind.

Well. That was a promising start. “Yes?”

“
I met with him.”

Xavier cocked an eyebrow. “You know I already know that.”

“No. Another time. Three other times, actually.”

“
Knock off the strip tease. Show me what you’ve got, or I’m putting the gag back in and leaving for work.”

“
Brian sent me to him with a package.”

“
All right.” Xavier reached for the gag.

Hurrying to get the words out, Carson said, “I don’t know what was in the package. It was just an envelope. A big, thick envelope. Padded, but plain. Brian told me not to look inside, so I didn’t. It was something small. Light.”

“What’s his name? Gray suit guy?”

“
Brian just calls him Max. He never said a last name.”

Max Ulianenko. Well, Carson wasn’t saying much, but he wasn’t lying. Not about the name, at least.

“What else?”

“
Nothing. I’m sorry. He just took the package, said thank you, and I left.”

“
So. His name’s Max, and he’s polite. Can you tell me anything else?”

“
I don’t know anything else. I’m sorry.”

“
Okay. If that’s all you know, from now on I can leave the gag in.”

“
He was at a hotel. Every time. The Fairmont Miramar. He had a big suite. Always the same one. But it didn’t look like he was living there. Or staying for long. I don’t know if he was there the whole time, or if he just rents that same suite once in a while, to have meetings. Like me dropping off the envelope from Brian. Maybe he just uses hotels so people don’t have an address for him?”

“
Was that before or after I saw you coming out of Brian’s office when Max was there?”

“
Before.”

“
And what did the three of you talk about that night in Brian’s office?”

Carson swallowed. Probably afraid to say it. “You.”

“Tell me. Word for fucking word.”

“
Brian got me from the bar, took me into his office.” Carson was speaking slowly. Closed his eyes for a couple seconds, like he was trying to remember. “Max was already in there. He never sat down. I had the feeling he didn’t want to let anything in Brian’s office touch him. Since he stood there the whole time, Brian didn’t sit down, either. Brian’s scared of the guy. I mean, really fucking scared of the guy. He almost looked like a different person, with Max in the room.”

Another nervous swallow.

“Max asked me about you. How many times I’d talked to you. What we’d talked about. He asked me…”

“
You finally have my attention. Don’t leave me with blue balls now.”

“
He asked if you’d tried anything with me. I said no. He asked if you’d been giving me any…signals.”

“
Signals?”

“
Hitting on me.”

Xavier laughed. “And what did you say to that?”

“I said no. I mean, if you were, I didn’t know it.”

Xavier laughed again. “Trust me, if I’d given you a signal, you would have known it. What else?”

“He asked if I thought you were…interested. I said I didn’t know. But Brian told him yeah. That your dick was hard for me.” He mumbled all this, dodging Xavier’s eyes.

Amused by Carson’s embarrassment, Xavier told him, “I think Brian’s been jerking off to fantasies of me fucking you since the day he hired me.” Carson didn’t seem to see the humor in it, the way he did. “What else?”

“He told me he wanted me to crash at your place.”

“
Brian?”

“
No. Max. He fed me the whole stupid story about losing my apartment and my car being in the shop. He even said to do the thing of bringing my backpack to work, so you’d see it. To tell you I’d been evicted, but not to ask if I could stay with you. To wait and see if you’d offer.”

“
And what did he tell you to do when you got here?”

“
You know. See if you were a cop, or something.”

“
Why do they think I’m a cop?”

“
Fuck if I know.”

“
They didn’t tell you anything?”

“
The only thing they told me was to do it.”