BRIAN’S POV

It’s a cruel, hellish feeling to wake up later than you’re supposed to on Friday morning only to realize that you’re still down in the dungeon and that you have two flights of stairs to climb to get back to your bedroom to shower and dress for work. And it’s even crueler that the temperature in the outer basement feels about twenty below and the man you love gets to sleep through all of that. You don’t even have time to fuck him.

Damnit.

Sure, it’s your company, and you can come and go as you please, but trying to reel in three big clients in one week requires your presence. Back in your bedroom, you ponder how many balls you have up in the air as you tighten your tie and survey your still-broken marital bed. You have to wake Justin before you leave so he doesn’t sleep through the furniture delivery.

He's lying on your pillow when you re-enter the dungeon; you shake an exposed shoulder and whisper, “Justin.”

He doesn’t even open his eyes, “No, no, no,” he protests. “I told you not to go to work.”

“I have to. I have—“

“And you didn’t even fuck me this morning.”

“I woke up late. I didn’t hear my phone.” (You wonder if he turned it down…)

“Blah, blah, blah,” he says, covering his head with the comforter.

“Look, I’m running late as it is. You need to wake your ass up because the furniture could come as early as eight thirty.”

“It’s your job to wake my ass up, Mr. Kinney.”

You yank the covers back after that comment and he cries out, “Hello?! It’s fucking freezing!”

“Roll over,” you tell him, nudging him on his stomach so you can see the marks you fear from the night before.

He looks back at you over his shoulder, “It’s bad, isn’t it?” There’s a reddish-purpley bruise for every clothespin you used.

“It hurts,” you ask, “Bad?”

“It hurts when I touch it.”

“Well, stop touching yourself and try to spend the day on your stomach,” you suggest.

“A process made much easier if you’d just stay home,” he tries.

You lean down to kiss him good-bye and slap his hand because you know damn well he’s going to try to fuck up your hair.

JUSTIN’S POV

You sit down to pee after Brian leaves and immediately regret it. You examine your ass in the bathroom mirror and try to decide if the pattern of specific bruises could represent a constellation on your full moon. When you wander back into the dungeon bedroom, you see what you hadn't noticed before: your clothes from the car folded nicely in Brian’s chair. Your phone is on top of them and Brian’s turned it back on. Your shoes are parked perfectly on the floor. It's eight fifteen a.m. and the furniture could come anywhere between eight thirty a.m. and five p.m., so you get dressed and exit the dungeon.

The truck is annoyingly early a mere ten minutes later while you're still battling with Brian's turbo-charged, personalized coffee maker, however, the men sent to unload and assemble your new bedroom suite make that much less of a bother. Ordinarily you don’t toil and fret over manual laborers, but these guys are always smiling at you, even when they initially survey the IKEA disaster in your bedroom. “You want all of this out of here, right?” they ask.

“The bed frame yes, the mattress and everything else just need to be moved into a spare room down the hall.”

“Will do,” the older one says, “Just sign right here that you’re giving us permission to take this bed frame.”

You sign happily and then sound like an idiot with a school-boy crush, “I mean, who would want it. It’s so broken.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” the guy says, “I could fix this up and sell it for a hundred bucks.”

“Then go right ahead,” you say, feeling like you’re talking with your hands way too much. You adjourn to your studio and begin a session of paranoid wondering…Are they smiling at me like that because they know I got spanked in their store yesterday? Did they watch it on the security cameras? Am I the subject of blue collar gossip?

You don’t have long to ponder, though, because a few minutes later, the taller guy is standing in your doorway with a clipboard in his hand, “Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

“You need me?” you ask.

“Well…it’s just that we can’t disassemble the bed frame because there’s some sort of apparatus attached to it.”

You follow him back to your bedroom because you don’t know what he means, but halfway down the hall, you remember: there’s a restraint system attached to it. The younger guy is standing over your encumbered bed frame, staring at it with a befuddled look on his face. “Maybe, uh, this is what broke it?” he says.

You feel your face flushing as you apologize and begin unhooking it from all for corners, the metal rings and hardware practically making music as each piece tumbles to the floor. You gather the whole thing-a ball of leather and paracord--and take it back to your studio with you. They don’t bother you again for another twenty minutes or so, but eventually, Tall Dark and Blue Collar is back. “Um, sir?” he asks, “We have the new frame put together. Do you, um, need to put that thing back on while we get the new mattress?”

You nod and pick up the black bundle and go back to your bedroom, extremely grateful that they aren’t going to watch you reassemble it—especially because you’re not as fast at this as Brian is. You always start with the wrong corner and have to readjust the whole fucking thing. And it isn't until the men are long gone and you're knee deep into a domestic nesting phase-breaking out clean sheets, swapping out the comforters, switching the shams, filling Brian's new dressers with the contents of the old--that you find another reason to be annoyed.

Well, less annoyed and more angry.

The reason, a once innocent piece of paper, a receipt actually, discovered as you went to file the paperwork for the new furniture, stares back at you from its accordion-like demeanor (having found it by accident when you realized that something was stuck in the back of the file drawer). You only read it because you were want to figure where to file it; Brian prefers a strict order to paperwork and the like...

And you want to please him...even after re-reading the receipt.

......

You text Brian with an unrelated question...

May I go ahead and shave myself?

The reply takes about eight minutes to arrive, time you spend sitting naked on your heated bathroom floor, ignoring the pain in your posterior.

Sorry, just saw this, in mtg. Sure, go ahead.

Ty

Thx 4 asking. How's your pain?

No higher than 7.

Advil?

Yeah, I will.

You start the shower, make it a little hotter than usual; Brian would fuss at you for drying out your skin but you don't care. You lean against the wall as the water pulsates on your chest and think about what you saw on that piece of paper...

Release, Inc.

Introduction to Rope Work, 3 hrs. $350

Impact, Level 3, $150

... dated a few days before your slave experience.

You look down to see that you've finished shaving yourself for him and don't even remember doing it.