Safe in His Arms (21 page)

“But what if I scare him?”

Mick smiled. “Then you stop what you were doing, wait for him to calm down, and then you talk it over.”

“I don’t want to remind him of what happened to him.”

“I can’t guarantee that, Lon. None of us can. We never know what’s going to set someone off until it happens. I have an assault patient who has a panic attack when she smells petrol. In every other aspect of her life, including physical intimacy, she’s coping. But she can’t stop the association of petrol with her attack.”

“So, what do I do?”

Mick never lost his smile. He simply gazed at Lon and said, “How about we ask Casey? He’s been really patient in all of this, listening while we discussed him. But I think he knows what he can handle. So ask him, Lon.”

It was awkward with Mick looking on congenially, but Lon managed to turn to Casey and ask, “What do you want, Casey-love?”

Casey was ready with his answer. “I want you to fuck me. Full sex, I mean. It won’t scare me. It won’t hurt me. I’ve done it before, and it doesn’t trigger any reaction to what happened to me.”

Lon was frowning, making Casey want to kiss him better. For a moment he remembered the fantasy of sucking Lon off while Mick watched, but he shoved it down. This was infinitely important. It was not just a bump in the road for them. It was a fucking big mountain they had to scale.

Lon flicked his eyes to Mick, trying to judge if he thought there was a problem with Casey’s answer. He couldn’t understand how a therapist would be urging a man like him to have sex with someone like Casey.

“But—”

“No,” Casey interrupted. “I want it. I want it badly. Don’t you want to do it with me? If there’s something wrong with me and you don’t want to, then that’s different.”

Lon’s eyes grew big. “How can you think I don’t want you, Casey-love?”

“Because I’m damaged. I wouldn’t want me.”

“No, you’re not damaged, love. You’re strong. I can’t believe that you didn’t curl up in a ball and die after what that arsehole did to you. I’ve never wanted to kill someone so much as I do that man.”

“Why?” Casey asked, perplexed. “He’s not even a man, but a huge coward who’s not worth thinking about. His shadow used to follow me around, haunting me daily, until I met you. When I’m with you, it’s like he never existed. You’re so much more than he is. Your presence pushes him out. Don’t waste your emotion on him, Lon.”

“But he deserves to be punished.”

“And he will be,” Casey said softly. “I have to believe that somehow, somewhere, that
thing
that sired me will get his comeuppance. But if I let it fester in me, then I’ll end up no better off than him. He tried to break me. Well, he didn’t. I survived and I will go on surviving. And what’s more, I’ll be happy and I’ll not dwell on the pain he tried to inflict. And do you know what makes me happy? You, Lon. And what’s more, I’m sure that you can strip me naked and make me ecstatic.”

Lon breathed deeply.

Mick took the opportunity to step in then. “Casey, how about you tell Lon one or two things that you
don’t
want to do. Tell him something that you think will spook you, and perhaps Lon can work with that.”

Casey stopped and looked at the ceiling, sighing noisily. That was rather a hard question when you wanted to do
everything
with the guy who was your world. But he had to be realistic. Yes, there were a couple of things he didn’t want to do. Maybe by telling Lon, he could ease Lon’s mind in other directions. “Masturbation,” he finally said. “You told me once that you wanted to watch me masturbate. I can’t do it. I’ve thought about it for a long time, but I just can’t do it at the moment. Maybe later. Maybe after a couple of years of counseling, but not now.”

Mick’s voice was almost a whisper as he urged Casey to continue to speak. “That’s great, Casey. Now tell Lon why, so he can understand. Don’t be afraid. Remember it was done
to
you, not
by
you. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Casey swallowed and scratched at his neck for something to do as he thought of where to start. “My dad…. He was a perv, Lon. His choice of perversion? Girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. There are Internet sites out there—guys who share their pedophilia photos. But you have to have some to share, or you’re not let into their sick little group. I was young when he started taking photos of me. It wasn’t sexual to him, just a form of payment. It was like him saying, ‘Here, have some photos of my boy and give me some photos of your girls.’ But he had to up the ante after a while. Nudie pics of me in the shower weren’t enough. So he had me… masturbate for video.”

L
ON
WAS
sick to his stomach. He couldn’t understand how Casey wasn’t furious and angry with his father. He struggled to comprehend what Casey wanted him to do. Letting go of the anger he felt toward Casey’s father would be hard, but taking Casey home and fucking him? Pff! That would be easy. Just a matter of doing what he’d been wanting to do for ages.

Listening to Casey recount his appalling experience in that emotionless voice cut Lon deeply inside. It was sickening and he wanted so badly to thump something. Hard. He made to get up and flee the room, but Casey held him tight, clinging desperately to his hands and almost crawling into his lap to stop him. Mick rose to his feet too, and placed a warm hand on Lon’s shoulder. “Stay, Lon. Let Casey tell you about it and purge the wound. Let us get it all out there in the open, and then you can both heal.”

He settled onto the couch, but couldn’t bear to see the sadness in Casey’s eyes. He used one big hand to cup that adorable face. “Okay, Casey-love. You tell me it all. You can tell me whatever you need to, and then we can put it away.”

Casey nodded, sniffed slightly, and then continued in a wavering voice. “I wanted to run away from him, but he had visitation rights and he told me that my mother would go to jail if I didn’t fulfill the court order. So he’d beat me black and blue until I agreed to make another video. Then one day when I was fourteen, he tied me to the bed and raped me in front of the camera for payment on another video.”

“Fuck,” Lon breathed.

But Casey wasn’t finished. “He was addicted to his little porn videos and so he had to do more and more dangerous things to keep them coming. One day he brought a man home and allowed that man to use me. Then two weeks later it was another. The third time he tried, I bit the man, so my father severely beat me. Using his golf club. He bashed me unconscious, then left me locked in my room. When I woke up, I knew I had to get away or he would kill me. There was no way in the world I was ever going to do anything more for that camera. It was the middle of the night, and I threw myself through the bedroom window to get out. Dad came running and started hitting me again as I crawled across the front lawn to escape. The cops were called, and when they had a look in his house, they found his sick perversion.”

Lon was used to hauling Casey around, pulling him onto his lap or setting him on the table so they could kiss and make love. But this time he needed Casey’s closeness for his own comfort. He wrapped his muscular arms around him and dragged him onto his huge thigh, where he could bury his face in his wheat-blond hair. “Jesus.”

“So there are only three things I can think of that would remind me of him. Masturbation, tying me to the bed, or trying to share me with your friends.”

Lon suddenly remembered Casey’s freak-out the night he met Paul. Paul had said something teasingly about taking Casey home with him, and Casey had jumped up and shouted in his face. Lon completely understood now. “Do you remember, Casey-love? When Paul offered to take you off my hands? I told him that I would break both of his kneecaps if he tried. Paul’s my best friend, and yet I would do that to him for simply
trying
. I’m never planning to share you, love. I couldn’t do it.”

Casey snuck his thin arms around Lon’s neck and burrowed into him. “I think I know that, Lon. It’s that trust issue that I was telling you about. My instincts tell me there’s nothing to fear from you.”

They sat together in silence, wrapped up in each other and completely ignoring the third man in the room as he updated his notes. It was Lon who broke the spell first, lifting his head from Casey’s shoulder and blinking in the bright light. Mick was behind his desk, scribbling in a notebook and completely ignoring the two of them. “Shit, Casey,” he whispered. “Do you have to pay this guy for this session? Because I think we just spent half of it cuddling on the lounge.”

Casey snorted. “Totally worth it, though. But I can think of somewhere else we need to be, so we should take off.”

“And where is that?”

“Bed.”

Chapter 16

T
HEY
DIDN
’
T
rush it, though. For one thing anticipation is a fantastic aphrodisiac. And it was too damn hot to go back to the caravan and lock themselves away, no matter what the provocation. So they wandered around Fremantle and checked out some of the shops and market stalls while licking ice cream. Lon grabbed fresh vegetables to take home, and Casey bought some new clothes from the seconds clearance stall.

They spent the rest of the day on the beach with a hundred other people, which had the effect of dampening their libido, somewhat. Casey told Lon they should head south toward Rockingham and the nudist beach down there so Lon could indulge in his habit of “clothing optional” that Casey had noticed he preferred. Casey whispered that he would love to join in Lon’s habit and have it all hang out while they swam. Lon groaned and turned onto his stomach to hide his erection.

Casey laughed, so Lon told him that when the weather cooled a bit, he would take him to Broome for a holiday. Casey looked at him in confusion.

“Broome? Why?”

“Cable Beach is over twenty kilometers long,” Lon told him. “It’s the best beach in the world, as far as I’m concerned. There’s the tourist part. Then there’s about fifteen ks of vehicle access only where we can go and camp on the beach.”

Casey smiled. “Sounds good.”

“But the best part?” Lon continued. “It’s a nudist beach. Can you imagine being able to camp for days up there? I could fuck you in the water, on the sand, in the open, in the car, in the tent. Wherever I liked. Fifteen k of pristine beach ought to give us enough privacy from others.”

Then it was Casey’s turn to flush bright red and roll onto his stomach with a groan. “Shit, Lon. When did you say we could go?”

Lon reached over and patted Casey’s fabric-covered butt. “Go where? Go to Broome, or go home so we can finally have full sex?”

Casey pillowed his head against his palms and groaned. “Fuck. Both. But more urgently is the ‘go home’ bit.”

The beach was finally emptying as the clock ticked closer to dinnertime for the kids, but it was still crowded. “As soon as you can get up without embarrassing yourself, we can head home, love. I guess I should start thinking about what we’re having for dinner.” Lon was teasing, and he smiled at the amount of bad words that fell from Casey’s lips at that comment. “Okay. If you feel so strongly about not having dinner, I’m game.”

Casey rested his forehead on his hands and began to recite his list of get-rid-of-my-erection-now things. “Wrinkly old testicles with masses of gray hair. Applying hemorrhoid cream. Rotten eggs broken in the house. Tennis shoes that haven’t been washed for years. Moldy cabbage. Three-day-old roadkill. Toilets that don’t flush properly. Accidentally using sports rub for lubricant.”

Lon burst out laughing. “What? You actually did that?”

“No. But I read it in a book once. I swear my balls crawled up my arse at the thought.”

By 7:00 p.m. they decided that the mosquitos were biting too hard and rushed for the showers. Without saying a thing, they moved to separate stalls and cleaned the sand and salt off their bodies. Showering together would slow things down and besides, hand jobs were not on the agenda.

Lon finished first and called to Casey over the door. “I’m heading back, Case. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes, ’kay?”

Five minutes later Casey entered the annex to find that Lon had moved the fan into the caravan in anticipation. Music was playing to cover any noise they might make, the condoms were on the bedside cabinet next to the photo of them at the beach, and the lubricant was on the pillow.

Lon was naked—what a surprise—and had just finished making a sandwich for each of them. He smiled an almost predatory smile and gestured to Casey’s plate. “Eat up, love. I plan to exhaust you tonight, so you’ll need your energy.”

Casey almost inhaled the sandwich but choked on the last mouthful as Lon moved to the bed, rolled to his back, and began to jack himself. Unfortunately Casey coughed and coughed until his eyes watered and had to find a drink to force that bit of bread down his gullet. Lon watched with a whisper of a grin dancing around his mouth, but never faltered in his rhythm. Finally Casey was ready, and he moved to the bed. Lon beckoned him forward until he straddled Lon’s shoulders and pushed his hard cock between Lon’s waiting lips.