Oh, perfect. I pressed the sixth button. I couldn’t not. One slow breath filled the air, followed by a second and a third, mocking his own breathing.
“What the fuck!” Shay fought against his restraints and turned halfway around, his ass still glued to the floor. “Is that the best you’ve got? Fuckers!”
I cocked my head at him. He was getting defensive, which could only mean one thing. The fatigue was taking its toll. Everything River was doing to him was working.
The sounds of labored breathing and gasping reached their crescendo before they faded, one breath after another.
Shay sat still in the center of the floor. About three or four feet away from a shower drain.
All alone.
His breathing evened out, and he pulled up his knee to rest his forehead on it. His profile was hauntingly beautiful. Without making a sound, I retrieved my phone and took a picture of him.
“You don’t scare me,” he mumbled, rubbing his forehead against his knee. I bet the burlap sack was itchy. He flexed his fingers again too. “I’m not scared.”
I cast a glance at the ceiling. Aside from the fixed shower heads, there were several hooks attached to the ceiling for suspensions, and Shay would get a taste of that soon enough.
But not today.
* * *
The slow torture continued.
In the span of approximately ten minutes, I wore Shay down further by repeatedly pressing my thumb on two of the tracks. Ten seconds of Rammstein, ten seconds of silence, rinse and repeat until his shock morphed into anger—until he’d learned the pattern and stopped twitching whenever the track exploded in the echoing chamber. Then I let the silence stretch for a bit.
Shay waited. I could see how tense his body was as he braced himself.
Ten seconds became twenty and thirty and forty…and just as he let out a breath and thought the assault was over, I pushed play on the recorded laughter.
“Oh, come on!” he shouted over the cacophony of cackling.
I grinned, flooded with a sense of childish fucking glee.
Shay growled furiously and stomped his foot where he sat.
His transformation was incredible to witness. I wished the sack over his head wouldn’t shield his facial expressions, but his body spoke volumes anyway. He could be visibly angry and tense one second, only to deflate and come off as pitiful and weak the next.
I could only imagine his thought process, how he tried to make sense of everything, and how he struggled to prepare for the unknown.
Once the laughter had ended, he drew a long breath and rolled his shoulders. His arms being restrained that way had to hurt by now. He’d been cuffed for over an hour at this point.
And still, this was just the beginning.
* * *
The third hour was when things got really interesting.
Shay was exhausted, in pain, and had said that he needed to go to the bathroom.
Using the iPad, I sent River a message.
He’s getting upset. Should I do my pain session with him now or later?
Originally, I was going to do it after River’s interrogation, but sensing that Shay was nearing the brink of tears…
River’s reply popped up.
Unlike you, I at least try to stick to my plans. How’s he holding up otherwise?
Figures.
I responded.
The fatigue is getting to him. He needs to go to the bathroom. He’s hungry. If I could just give him a session with a whip or a flogger, I think it would stabilize him a bit. He’d get some form of release so you can continue for longer.
I shouldn’t have typed that. Before River’s answer appeared, I already knew what he was going to tell me.
You’re worried. Either you’ve become emotionally invested, or I’ve missed something and should be there to check in on him. Which is it?
I suppressed a sigh and pinched the bridge of my nose.
River hadn’t missed a thing, and he knew it. Despite our experience, we tailored each scene and treated a new partner for what he was—new. New to us. New to our dynamic. But as co-Sadists, River and I had perfected our way of communicating with each other, and if there was anything about Shay that River needed to know, he could count on me to convey it.
Knowing full well that it was impossible to evade the answer for very long, I opted for a cop-out reply for the moment.
See you in 30 minutes for your shift.
* * *
This was Shay’s fault. It was he who made me fret and bite my thumbnail as if I were a nervous preteen. For the love of Christ, no matter how much I’d always preferred physical sadism over mental, watching and assisting River with his scenes had never failed to excite me. Until now.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. A young man who denied having Little tendencies—and to be fair, he wasn’t a Little in any obvious, outward way whatsoever—and yet, he drew out the Daddy Dom in me with a force I hadn’t anticipated. Because those glimpses of vulnerability he revealed were unlike anything else. I watched him sit there on the floor, rocking back and forth, whimpering, pleading to go to the bathroom, hands cuffed, bag over his head, and all I wanted to do was run over to him and tell him Daddy was here.
I checked my watch.
Seven minutes until River was due.
He was sticking to the plan, which meant he was about to mindfuck Shay pretty hard.
To the boy, it would feel like River was running a sharp blade across his body. In reality, it was a glass pin—similar to the kind Ivy used for knitting—dipped in a bucket of ice. The cold combined with the thin needle had fooled plenty of subs.
Ivy liked to call it the “mindfucky wand.”
I usually found it funny.
Eight
Shay Acton
I sniffled and gnashed my teeth harder.
…forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine…
Sweat and tears burned in my eyes, and my face itched like crazy. I couldn’t shake it. I kept rubbing my face against
