"I'm very sorry, beloved." The words swam up at Neil out of a black sea of unconsciousness, a deep void of dark water that lapped away at the shores of his mind as he passed in and out of awareness. On the other side of oblivion he remembered his boyfriend making him a romantic dinner as a gesture of apology for worrying him--Neil understood that dating an investigative journalist sometimes meant mysterious absences and troubling silences, but Forrest had never been gone for five straight days without even a text before, and Neil couldn't help being upset when he came back as if nothing had happened. The dinner was supposed to be a way of making it up to him.
But the flavors... the balance was all wrong, the spices overwhelming and the marinade heavy on vinegar to the point of drowning out the underlying taste of the meat. And Forrest didn't even taste his portion, he just sat there watching Neil try to choke it down with a wide, unnervingly devoted smile on his face. Neil knew something was wrong, but he didn't figure out what it was until he started getting woozy. And by then it was too late to do anything more than stumble a half-step out of his chair and collapse onto the kitchen floor. "I'm so, so sorry," Forrest's voice came back, shaking Neil out of a doze he didn't even realize he'd lapsed back into, "but I swear you'll understand soon."
Neil tried to open his eyes, but his muscles still felt loose and lazy and he couldn't muster up the energy to move just yet. He wondered what Forrest had dosed him with--it felt like a tranquilizer of some sort, maybe something in the benzodiazepine family, but the deep and total lack of consciousness and the speed with which it worked suggested ketamine. Neil didn't know where his boyfriend could have gotten any of that stuff, but it might have had something to do with those five missing days he was so evasive about. Or the big Mob story he thought he was doing such a good job of keeping from Neil. Not that Neil snooped, but they'd been living together for two years now and it was hard not to notice the little details that gave away at least the general thrust of his boyfriend's latest investigations.
Neil only realized he was drifting off into another bout of woolgathering when he felt Forrest's hands tug him into a loosely slumping seated position on the mattress and he tuned in midway through his lover's sentence. "...wanted to know what you know, but I--I told him there was only one way to be sure. I, I'm very sorry. I don't know why I said that to him. It's just, it feels so good to be owned like this." Neil heard a strangely beatific quality in his boyfriend's voice, an adoring tone that sounded somehow sinister in its intensity. "It feels so good to enfold yourself in him and know that you're wanted, to sink into those wine-dark seas and feel his power towering over you. You, you'll see. You'll see what it's like, I promise, I...."
Forrest broke off abruptly. "Did, did I do the right thing?" he asked, the eerie devotion trickling out of his voice to be replaced by childlike confusion. "I. I'm sorry, it's just... my thoughts have been all muzzy, sweetheart. It's so easy to sink back into the memory of his eyes. H-here, let me, let me make you more comfortable." Neil felt Forrest's fingers fumbling at his wrists, untying the ropes that Neil only just now noticed digging into his flesh. His hands swung limply to his sides the second he was loose; he still couldn't even make himself sit all the way up without support, let alone make a break for it.
"I--I shouldn't have done that. He--he's coming soon, and he'll want you to be ready for him, I shouldn't have untied you." God, was Forrest drugged too? Was he on something? He kept wavering back and forth between the creepy cultist voice and his own personality, almost as if he was at war with himself. He mentioned something about eyes--did someone hypnotize him or something? Was he fighting some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion that made him drug his own boyfriend? That seemed impossible, the stuff of 70s paranoid conspiracy thrillers, but Neil didn't know much about psychology. He was a nurse practitioner, not a psychiatrist.
A distant thud made Neil finally flutter his eyes open, and he recognized his own bedroom; he was naked, his alabaster skin practically glowing in the moonlight, and his blond hair hung down in front of his face. He didn't dare try to move it out of the way, not with his body still so unsteady; moving felt like a one-way ticket to falling over onto the mattress and possibly from there to the floor. Forrest stood by the side of the bed, nude as well and with his slender penis fully erect; there was a tiny moment when Neil thought this might just be some kind of bizarre sex game, but he knew that Forrest respected Neil's pharmaceutical knowledge far too much to drug him without permission just for kinky funsies.
Forrest looked over at the door. "He's coming," he said, his voice hushed and urgent. "He'll be here any second. Please, just--please, don't try to fight it. I drugged you so it would be easier for you, you're still weak and groggy and he'll have an easier time taking your... your will, oh, f-fuck...." Neil watched in bewildered astonishment as his lover's cock visibly twitched, dumping a slick torrent of precum onto the rug by the side of the bed. What the absolute hell was going on with Neil's boyfriend?
And then the door opened, revealing a tall man wearing a charcoal gray suit that practically reeked of money. He had wavy dark hair and russet brown eyes set into a delicate, almost androgynous face. "Sorry I'm a little late," he said, his casually apologetic tone so incongruous that Neil very nearly laughed despite the bizarre and terrifying circumstances. "The Lincoln Tunnel was fucking murder, and then there was a goddamn fender bender in the Garment District backing up traffic for--"
The stranger stopped. "What are we all naked for, exactly? You told me you wanted me to give him the look and see what he knows. This is a little, uh...." He scratched his head. "I mean, don't get me wrong, kid, I've been around the block a few times and I'm not shy or nothing, but I dropped by on a business trip, you know what I mean?"
