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“I – well – yes, sir.” Carter releases a shaky breath, eyes firmly on the pile of bubbles now in his hands. “Are you going to let them have sex with me?”
“My men?” Carter nods. Nathan’s chest goes tight. “No. Not anal sex, at least. You will perform oral on them when I deem it appropriate.”
“D-do I have to?”
Somehow – he has no fucking ideahow, but somehow – Nathan manages to make his voice cold and angry when he answers. “Yes, you have to. I own you. You’ll do as I say. Isn’t that a rule?”
“Yes, sir,” Carter whispers, sinking further down in the water. “Sorry for asking, sir.”
“Don’t ask if you have to do something again, understood? I do not enjoy you questioning my judgement.”
“Yes, sir.”
The tension in the room is overwhelming. Nathan can feel it building in his chest, threatening to crush him. He leans back and rests his head on the edge of the tub, closing his eyes, pretending to be relaxed and uncaring despite being anything but. “Tell me about yourself, sweetheart.”
There’s a drawn-out silence. Then, “Like what, sir?”
“You’re a college student, correct?”
“I… was, sir.”
The grief in the words is nearly enough to choke Nathan. He wishes he could tell Carter that he will be again, if he wants to be. He wants to grab Carter’s face and look him in the eyes, promising that he’ll have a future when this is all over. Carter can’t give up hope. He can’t forget about what he wanted before. “Tell me about that.”
“About… college, sir?”
“Yes.”
Carter laughs incredulously, drawing Nathan’s attention to him. He looks over to find the boy glaring down at the bubbles, his fingers curling around them like he’s trying to strangle the suds. “Well, I was a Global Studies major with a Human Rights minor, so, ya know… that fucking blew up in my face.”
Nathan’s eyebrows raise. Before he has time to comment, Carter is backtracking in a panic. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t – that was rude. I’m sorry. Really. So sorry, sir.”
“Stop,” Nathan says quietly, looking Carter in the eye. “You’re right. It’s fucking ironic that you studied things like that, and are now a human slave. I can appreciate the sick humor.”
“I was still really disrespectful, sir…”
“Do you want me to punish you?”
“No, sir.”
“Then drop it.” Nathan relaxes against the tub, eyes closing again. He thinks Carter might feel more comfortable with him in that position, and Nathan would do anything to keep Carter talking. Even if the conversation is upsetting him. Maybeespeciallybecause it’s upsetting him. This kind of upset is healthy for Carter. It keeps him human. Keeps him from breaking. Nathan has to stoke that fire inside of him – carefully, of course – until Carter gets his freedom back. He can’t allow that light to go out.
“Tell me more, sweetheart. Mind your tone this time.”
There’s the soft sound of water sloshing as Carter shifts in the tub, followed by a tense silence. Nathan opens his eyes to find the boy staring out the window that makes up the tub’s backdrop. The glass isn’t frosted, something Nathan is surprised he hadn’t noticed. He’ll need to be more careful in the future. Anyone could have seen him kissing Carter. Coddling him. Even taking a goddamn bath with him like this, doing nothing sexual during it.
A panic in Nathan’s chest has him itching to frost the glass immediately, but then he catches sight of the way Carter is looking at the night sky outside. There’s so much longing in his gaze. A somber grief. It’ll be a cold day in hell before Nathan takes something so simple away from the poor boy. He can look all he wants right now.
Enough time passes that Nathan believes the conversation has been dropped. He’s just starting to consider if he should scold Carter for it when the boy surprises him by speaking. “It’s a pretty intense major and minor combination. There’s a lot that goes into it.”
“How so?”
“Well, they have you pick a concentration and a region. There’s so much that can be done under that umbrella of global studies and human rights. It’d be impossible to be useful at all in the real world if you don’t narrow it down.”
“And what concentration and region did you choose?”
“I was studying Global Peace and Conflict within the European and Russian region.”
Surprised by this, Nathan asks, “Why choose those?”
