The road stretched on behind me, lost in the snowstorm...but I knew it was out there. A wailing beast, gargantuan and hungry, gnashing its way through the winter winds as its red-blue eyes flashed in the white, searching...
A curt, heavy knock pulled me out of the dream, the same dream I'd been having for months. I opened my eyes to sunlit walls, cream and yellow, faint stains at right angles where my old posters had once been hanging. The familiar tug of panic fluttered deep inside...but I remembered where I was now, because there was only one person who ever knocked on my door like that.
"Michael...?" my mother called through the wood. "It's ten in the morning. You need to get up."
"Got it," I replied, blinking myself awake. I was in my old bed, in my parents' house, hundreds of miles north of campus. The walls and my desk and everything else had long since been stripped bare...but I knew the musty old smell of the carpet, the way the sunlight crept across the faded navy blankets like rivers of liquid gold.
The doorknob jiggled slightly. "Oh, Michael. Open up please."
I sat up and reached across the nightstand, unlocked the door. The blankets slid off me, but there was nothing to hide. I slept in t-shirts and pajama bottoms and socks these days, boots waiting on the floor, a metal baseball bat propped against the wall next to my head.
The door cracked open, and she leaned into the room. Her black hair had much more gray in it these days, but her eyes were just as sharp and cold as they ever were. She was studying me, calculating, but her voice was warm enough. "Just wanted to talk to you face-to-face, before you left again. It's been a busy week, hasn't it?"
I settled back into the pillows and pulled the blanket up to my chest, feeling old for some reason. "No worries, mom. Everybody's got a lot on their plate. I needed the rest, anyway."
"I'm sure you did." If she'd blinked yet, I hadn't seen it. "Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I'm going up to the church to help them set up for the potluck tonight. I really wish you'd make an appearance, at least. A lot of the ladies have been asking about you..."
If I hadn't been groggy from sleep, I might have rolled my eyes. "Nah - I really need to get on the road if I'm gonna make it up there by nightfall. Thanks, though. I'll have more time at Thanksgiving, okay?"
She nodded. "That's fine, sweetie." If she was disappointed, it didn't show. Nothing ever showed with her, at least not when she was talking to me. "Well...there's bacon in the microwave, and plenty of eggs in the fridge, so help yourself. Call me when you get there - or just text me at least, so I know you made it. Alright?"
"Alright, mom."
She nodded again, and started to close the door...then paused, pretending she'd just remembered something important. "Oh, and your father wants to see you before you leave. He's up at the school, doing what he does. Maybe just drop by and talk to him on your way out; he feels bad about not seeing much of you this week. Deal?"
"Deal," I replied, and flashed a beaming grin. It made her smile, made her believe everything was fine, because she wanted to believe it. "Tell everyone at church I said hello."
"Bye, sweetie." She shut the door softly. "And get out of bed!" she chided from the hallway. Her feet made careful, measured thumps down the creaky stairs, out the door, gone. She spent most of her free time helping the people at the church set up for potlucks, or weddings, or Sunday school. It had been that way for years, ever since it became apparent I had no interest in attending any longer. To her credit, she had never forced me to go...but no one would ever accuse us of being close. At least she was gone now, and the house was silent...
I shook my head, bit my cheek. I was already sinking back down into the bottomless haze that routinely trapped me in my own bed. If I didn't get up now, I'd sleep well into the afternoon...so I pretended my body was a machine, my brain the pilot's cabin. I forced my limbs to drag my body to its feet, where I did a set of jumping jacks, then push ups, then sit ups...jumping jacks, push ups, sit ups, again and again...until I was sweaty and awake, burning and alive, whether I wanted to be or not.
I was still panting when I cracked the blinds and peered out the window into the front yard. Same as I did every day, every night. My mother's car was indeed gone, and my old sedan was still parked on the street...but most importantly, there was no sign of an idling police cruiser anywhere. I hadn't actually seen him once since the night at the dorm, when I'd finally threatened him the way I'd needed to threaten him - hadn't even gotten a text - but I wasn't stupid enough to let my guard down. He'd always be out there.
I really wanted to take a long, punishing run through the neighborhood, but I was already low on time. I took a shower instead, and caught a good look at myself in the bathroom mirror as I undressed. My body was back to peak condition these days, especially after the last few weeks of nothing but rest and exercise. Every hard line of it was ready to explode, pumped with youthful energy so raw it was almost violent. The sight made my dick harden up, bobbing between my hips as I stepped into the steaming water, fogging up my brain. It should have been easy enough to ignore...but I hadn't had sex in nearly five months. Ever since that night at the rest stop, when I'd let those men...
I was touching myself within seconds, running my hands over the round slabs of my ass, the tender slope of my belly, trying to ignore the hard cock throbbing below. I was basking in the memory of everything those hungry men had done to the body in my hands...until the images of dirty tile and filthy drains bled into something much different, something I hadn't been able to get out of my head since I'd seen it, no matter how hard I tried to forget...
The images flooded my mind, filling my cock with blood; exaggerated and extreme, as all memories are, but not by much. The video had been slightly grainy with vaguely muted colors, just like all the others, but more than clear enough. The first few shots jerked and blurred as the Chief adjusted the camera, until it was perfectly trained on the desk in his study, and the restrained figure splayed across it.
The young, redheaded jock was completely naked on his back, bound with the same blue climbing rope the Chief had used on me, but his position was even more compromised than mine had been. He'd been tied to the desk itself with several constricting knots. His meaty legs were up in the air, bent at the knees and open wide for the camera, pulled firmly apart by two lengths of taut, knotted blue rope. His ass was suspended in the air at the center, the edge of the desk digging into the small of his back. His arms had been pulled tight above and behind his head, wrists tied off somewhere near the floor on the other side, elbows bent upwards like some crude parody of a centerfold model. This kept his spine arched against the desk, stretching the furry, toned musculature of his torso in a lewd way that made me painfully hard the instant I'd seen it. His was a vision of conquered flesh, his pale skin rubbed pink and raw wherever the rope dug into it, crisscrossing his prone body under the pecs, ribcage, jaw...
He'd been made as vulnerable as a person could be, exposed and ready for the taking...but he'd obviously been taken many times before that moment. The bruises and bitemarks from the first night were still plainly visible across the length of his body, along with plenty of new ones. His nipples were swollen, inflamed, almost purple, and it actually hurt to look at them. His poor hole was obscenely puffy between his welted ass cheeks, red and loose and glistening with lingering wetness, thoroughly deflowered in all sorts of unimaginable ways. His genitals were just as bruised as the rest of him, uncut cock shriveled and limp above the straining lump of his ballsack, which had been gathered up in a noose even crueler than the one used on me. In addition to the constricting band of leather around the base of his scrotum, which kept his balls pulled away from his groin, a third band had been snapped tight between them - top to bottom - bluntly separating those tender orbs in a way that couldn't have been remotely pleasurable...but he wasn't complaining.
