Games Boys Play (16 page)

From behind came the sound of handcuffs ratcheting. With a glance over his shoulder, he saw a braid of rope come out, then another and another and more still, all coded to length by the color of the tape wrapped around the ends. There was tape in the bag too, both duct tape and vet wrap, which stuck to itself instead of skin. Padlocks, all keyed alike. Combination locks, a couple chains, a bag of cable ties, two rope ratchets, a handful of solid metal rings from Home Depot. A cheap blindfold, complimentary from one overseas flight or another they’d been on, useless unless you wrapped vet tape around it after you put it on; otherwise it was too easy to just hitch a shoulder up and shift it out of place.

Thumb cuffs, two pairs.

A homemade ring gag using one of the Home Depot rings and two lengths of rope.

A few dress socks he used to make his ice releases.

Latex gloves.

Plastic clothespins.

Superglue.

Canvas straps.

A folding knife.

He let his bare feet slip down from the door. With bent knees, he hung from the rope, arms stretched taut, hands fucking useless, his forehead bumping against the door. The contents of the duffel kept reeling through his head: a wooden dowel with eye hooks drilled into it, two car muffler clamps, two small wrenches—for applying and removing the muffler clamps—clothespins, carabiners…

He bit down hard on the foam ball so he could swallow past the lump in his throat.

It was like being discovered for the first time all over again. Only worse somehow, like he could hear the voice in Dylan’s head going,
Superglue? What the fuck?

He banged his head against the door.

He could sense Dylan walking toward him, his footsteps soft across the rug, quiet against the hard floor.

He put his feet under him and pushed, his forehead sliding up the door.

Dylan’s fingers touched his bare back.

He didn’t want to turn around.

Dylan’s hand clasped his shoulder.

He hit the door with his elbows, his breaths sounding loud to his ears as they hit the duct tape below his nose.

When Dylan pulled at his shoulder, he turned, putting his back against the door, his head tipped back, his eyes closed. He tried to slow down his breathing, but all he could see behind his eyelids was all the shit in his duffel bag, and the leather-gloved hands sifting through it, picking stuff up. Dylan looking at it, wondering what he was using it for. Muffler clamps, cheap drugstore latex gloves…

“Do you have that name for me yet?”

Without opening his eyes, he jerked his head side to side. There was no point in giving the name up now: there wasn’t anything worse he could imagine Dylan doing to him than exposing him like that.

“Are you sure?”

He bit down and swallowed and then gave a single nod.

“Okay.”

Gloved fingers brushed his chest again, pulled at one of his nipples, making it stand up.

He clutched the rope coming down from the top of the door, expecting Dylan to twist his nipple again—and realized what Dylan was up to within a breath of Dylan letting go of the plastic clothespin. He cried out against the gag, his fists clenching around the rope. The pain traveled from his nipple down through the core of him, reaching all the way to the balls of his feet like a fishing line yanked tight.

Just as it started to fade to a bearable level, Dylan started playing with his other nipple, flicking it with his finger.

He moaned deeply, which he hadn’t meant to do, not like that.

Dylan tugged, and Brian moaned again, harder—a moan that rose in pitch as a second plastic clothespin pressed against his chest and then slowly, cruelly clamped down.

He thumped against the door, breathing hard through his nose. His own fucking clothespins.

A gloved finger touched his face, his eyelid, forced his eyelid up. He glared at his intruder through that eye, huffing short breaths from his nose.

“Name?” The intruder’s voice was thick, low.

His answer—“Fuck you”—was incomprehensible through the foam packed in his mouth.

The intruder shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He flicked one of the clothespins. Short little sounds came through Brian’s nose—short little sounds in time with the throbbing between the plastic pinchers.

In time with the throbbing in his cock.

The intruder went back to the bed and returned Brian’s gear to the bag, scooping it up a handful at a time and dropping it in.

Through heavy-lidded eyes, Brian watched him carry the bag back to the closet, then move to Brian’s dresser drawers.

Brian looked down at his chest. The worst of the pain started welling back at the sight of his nipples squeezed in the clamps, rising and falling with each breath he took—but he had a hard time looking away. As he breathed in slowly, his chest muscles pushed against the clamps, and the pain grew. As he breathed out, his chest relaxed and the pain receded—slightly. If he’d been alone, if he’d tied himself up like this and could do whatever he wanted, he would have turned around to face the door, torturing himself with waves of agony as the clothespins bumped the wood—an agony that would be offset by grinding his needy cock between his thigh and the door.

He
would
have to do this sometime. Not with an ice timer—he’d definitely need to be able to get free right after coming, or at least be able to get the clothespins off. Two or three or four hours of this would probably lose him his nipples.

His cock twitched against the thin fabric of his chill pants.

God, he was so going to try this on his own.

The intruder slid the last of the drawers closed and headed for the nightstand. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to Brian, and slid the drawer open.

He didn’t remember everything that was in the drawer, but he doubted there was anything too shameful. The most incriminating would be the Vaseline under the bed, but if Dylan didn’t have something to jerk off with near his own bed, Brian would eat his socks.

When the intruder got up and walked around the bed to poke through the other nightstand, he had something in his hand, a card, maybe, or a photo. He didn’t spend long at that nightstand, but he did pick up Brian’s phone and start poking through it.

Fuck privacy completely, then, Brian thought. He leaned his head against the door, his breaths rasping through his nostrils.

The intruder looked from what he had in his hand—a photo, Brian realized—to the phone’s screen and back. Leaving the screen glowing, he walked over to Brian. He held the photo up first.

Wow, we looked young there. What was that, 2002? 2003?

Slowly, the intruder turned the photo around. Brian’s dad had written on the back:
Dylan & Brian 2003.

In real life, the photo wouldn’t have meant anything, not to a real intruder, but this one had an inside advantage. Brian was willing to play along with it.

Thanks, Dad. Thanks. Now he has the name he was looking for.

The intruder raised the phone in his other hand, the sleeve of his hoodie slipping down to expose an arc of the circle tattooed there. On the phone’s screen was the photo that popped up every time Dylan called, the curl of dark hair falling into his eye, the twist of his mouth into a faint smile. He was looking at Dylan’s contact card: name, phone, e-mail, full physical address because Brian had been dumb enough to fill in all the blanks.

The intruder lowered the phone and the photo.

They watched each other.

Well.
That
was over, at least.

Without a word, the intruder set the phone on the dresser and pushed the photo into the back pocket of his jeans. A mixture of
you can’t take that
and an odd thrill that he
was
taking it tightened Brian’s chest.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” The intruder stepped in front of him and placed a hand on the door alongside his arm. “Could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by just saying the name, but then I guess we wouldn’t have had all this fun, right?” He brushed his palm against the end of a clothespin.

Biting down on the foam, Brian tipped his chin up, trying to keep hold of himself. The hand brushed by again, harder this time, making the clip tug at his nipple.

He moaned and turned his chest, trying uselessly to get away.

“Shh.” The intruder smoothed Brian’s hair back. “Shh. It’s all right. It’ll be over soon.” He took hold of the pin, bringing another groan from Brian’s throat. Just that much of a touch, steady as it was, was enough to send fresh throbs of pain bleating through his oversensitive nerves.

“Shhh. There—” The clip came off, pulling a whine up Brian’s throat and out his nostrils as blood surged back in. His head knocked against the door as the intruder’s palm flattened across his brow. The intruder said, “Shhh. It’ll be okay. See? That one’s done.” He rubbed the sore nipple with the ball of his thumb, making light circles that sent sparks along Brian’s nerves. “You’re halfway there.”

The rubbing stopped, and Brian tensed, though there was no avoiding it: that other clothespin had to come off too.

The intruder took gentle hold of the other clip.

God, it hurt. It hurt like
fuck
. He clenched his teeth in the foam and let loose a sob.

“Shhhhhh. It’s over.” The intruder was stroking Brian’s brow again, sliding his hand down Brian’s cheek, saying, “It’s over. It’s done. You’re fine. You’ll be fine now.”

His throat tightened. He started blinking, fighting unexpected tears.
What the fuck?
Oh, he was
not
going to fucking cry over this. He was fucking
not
. What the fuck, anyway? He dug his fingernails into his palms to bring himself back to reality. He was in his
bedroom. Look, there’s the dresser. There’s the floor. There’s the framed poster on the wall
, Attack from Space,
the movie we took the band name from.

“Let’s get you down.” Dylan opened the door just enough to slide the knotted end of the rope free. “I can’t just untie you and walk out, though. You know that, right? I need time to get out of here, in case you do something stupid like call the cops.”

Brian’s arms felt like they weighed an extra ten pounds once he was able to lower them.

“Don’t worry. You’ll be able to get yourself out in a while. You all right to walk?”

Why wouldn’t he be all right to walk? He used his hands, still bound at the wrists, to scratch a nonexistent itch on the side of his face. His thumb skated over the duct tape holding the ball in place. He touched the tape with his fingers.

The intruder put an arm on his back. “Come on.” He led Brian to the bed. It didn’t take a lot of convincing to get him to lie on it. Curled on his side, he watched Dylan draw a chain out of his backpack, link by link, the heart tattoo peeking out from the cuff of his hoodie.

The pillow under his head was soft; he could almost close his eyes and drift away. The chain was cool against his ankle, wrapped twice and then locked with the dull click of a padlock. The sound of the lock elicited another thrill deep inside him, muffled a little by exhaustion. He let gravity pull his body forward, his knee propped against the mattress to keep him from rolling onto his face.

The other end of the chain bumped and slid against the wood of his bed frame. Little tugs pulled at his ankle. Another padlock clicked shut. He pushed his hands under the pillow, the weight of his face a little uncomfortable against the ropes around his wrists, but at the moment he didn’t mind a little discomfort. He didn’t mind it too much at all.

“Dirty socks,” the intruder said, sinking to one knee by the head of the bed. Brian pulled open an eye and looked at him, curious. “If you make a noise.”

Brian nodded.

The tape peeled away from his face. His head had to be turned for the gloved fingers to push inside his mouth and pull the foam ball back out. He became aware of the soreness in his jaw again as soon as he was able to close his mouth—the soreness in his jaw and the taste the glove had left behind, sharp and bitter.

“One more thing; then I’m out of here.” Dylan’s knee creaked as he stood.

Brian’s eyelids were too heavy to watch him leave the room or to watch when he came back. Something cold leaned against his forearms. Icy cold. Reluctantly he cracked his eyes open. A bottle half-full of frozen water. Just what he always wanted.

“Key’s inside.”

Great.

His eyelids settled closed again.

He thought maybe he felt the knit mask brush against the side of his head, like a kiss, or maybe it was just a hand. Maybe the intruder had just smoothed his hair back again. He was already being carried off by the aftermath of chemicals the evening had set free in his bloodstream, so he had no idea, really. He reached out with both hands and caught nothing but air. The door closed softly. The ropes felt good around his wrists. He drifted off into darkness and silence.

Chapter Twenty-One

He slept for ten minutes, maybe twenty, before the discomfort of the bottle of ice leaning against his arm roused him. He pushed up to kind-of sitting, awkwardly, his wrists still tied together, and looked around, blinking. Dylan had taken everything with him except what he’d left on Brian.

He yawned and stretched his legs out, then examined the rope around his wrists, determining where to bite the knot to start working it free.

There were two knots to undo, and then he used his mouth to unwind the rope until the coils loosened enough for him to work his hands free. He pushed the rope off the side of the bed.

Next problem: his mouth was parched.

And he had this bottle of future water lying conveniently against his leg.

He unscrewed the cap, then propped himself on an elbow to drink off the sip and a half that had melted so far. He shook his leg, listening to and feeling the length of chain attached to it. He looked down his body. Not enough chain to get to the bathroom sink, not by a long shot. Shit. He’d have to melt the ice faster. He screwed the cap back on and climbed under the blankets, bringing the bottle with him, clamping it between his thighs.

His phone chirped, and he tried to think of where he’d left it, though it sounded awfully close. It chirped again. He turned his head and made out the flat shape of it on his nightstand. Well, fuck. He rolled over and grabbed it.