AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Please, Travis.” He looks at Travis, giving him a wobbly smile. “Please. Drop it. It was a weird moment for us. It shouldn’t have happened. I mean, we were in the fucking hallway. I was being inappropriate and I didn’t listen and - and our rules don’t matter enough to you for you to care about any of it, which is fine. I get it. We weren’t officially playing and-”
“My rules matter,” Travis says firmly, cutting the boy off. This is getting out of hand. For fuck’s sake, he just wanted to keep everyone mentally safe. Who knew it was such a crime to not get his cock sucked? “Carter-”
“Stop. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“But-”
“Red.” The word snatches the air from Travis’s lungs. He tries to inhale, but it seems all of the oxygen in the hallways has vanished as well. Carter steps back, and Travis wants to grab him, wants to stop him, but he can’t. He’s not allowed. Fuck, what are the rules here? What do you do when a sub safe words? His mind is frantic, flipping through all the information he’s taken in on the issue. Carter speaks again, not giving him a chance to catch up. “If you don’t want to go to the barbeque anymore, I understand. But the conversation we’re having needs to stop. I’m serious. Drop it.”
Listen to him. That’s Travis’s gut decision. If he’s safe wording, he’s extremely serious about how he feels. He wants this conversation dropped.
So, “Consider it dropped.”
“I still want to go to the barbeque, but we don’t have to.”
“No. No, we should go. Let’s go.”
“Great.” Carter straightens his sweater and starts to walk away. “Let’s go.”
They don’t speak the entire ride, Carter blasting the radio so loud Travis’s head is fucking pounding by the time they get to Hunter’s house. Hunter answers the door with Wells and his pet Jax in tow. They all say hello, agreeing it’s great to see each other again. Then Travis and Carter are led further into the house, into the kitchen where they meet a man named Booker and a man named Liam, Booker slicing tomatoes while Liam relaxes with a beer. Travis pegs them both as doms, something about the air around them and the way they hold themselves, but he knows looks can be deceiving. Either way, he nods at them in respect.
“Hey, tell Carlos to get his little ass in here before I spank it in front of everyone,” Liam yells when Hunter opens the sliding door out to the porch. It’s a message for Hunter to deliver, but he waited until the door was open, so Travis has a feeling it was meant for Carlos to hear too. Sure enough, Travis enters the backyard to find a young man with bright red cheeks doing a death-walk to the door. Hunter doesn’t even say anything to him about going inside, just ruffles his hair as they pass and says, “I’d start on your knees and with a very nice apology, little one.”
“Thanks, sir,” Carlos mutters before heading inside.
Hunter sees Travis’s raised brow of curiosity before he manages to smooth it out. He starts to say it’s none of his business, but Hunter waves him off. “Carlos doesn’t belong to a dom, but he’s a little and struggles with certain things, especially without guidance. We all chip in here, even the doms that are taken - except for Judd, who is standing at the grill over there. His sub, Ethan there in the green shirt, didn’t feel comfortable about it when they started things out, and we all respected the hell out of that, so Judd stopped participating.”
“What’d he do to get punished?” Carter asks, and there’s something in his voice, something in the way it wavers when he says punished, that reminds Travis that they’re still not okay. “If it’s okay to ask?”
“He did it in front of everyone, so I feel comfortable sharing. When Liam came outside to ask who wanted steak, Carlos made a comment about him being a good little dom in the kitchen.” Travis whistles low, shaking his head. Hunter nods. “Yeah. And then when Liam made it clear he needed to come inside to have a little talk, Liam went inside and Carlos didn’t follow. And then you guys arrived. And now you’re all caught up.”
“Will it be sexual?” Carter asks. Travis looks over to find the boy blushing. “The punishment?”
“If it is, it’ll be in a room. We all agreed no public play in front of the two of you tonight. We’re respectful when we play around people we don’t know. Everyone has to be consenting when you play in front of others, right?”
Carter frowns. “Right…”
“We had a moment of that earlier tonight,” Travis says carefully. He keeps his eyes on Carter, studying his reaction. “Carter got a little too excited in the hall of a house with other people in it. I think he was disappointed when I didn’t let him go where he wanted to go.”
“That’s your dom’s job,” Hunter tells Carter. “He was a good dom by doing that.”
Something warm settles in Travis’s chest. Relief, maybe. Or validation. “Thank you,” he says quietly, his voice embarrassingly thick.
“I didn’t think of things that way,” Carter says quietly. “I wasn’t thinking at all, I guess.”
“That happens,” Hunter says with a chuckle. “Subs lose their minds often. It’s one of the best parts, from what I gather - letting go and not having to think. That’s why Travis here needs to have control. And it sounds like he did exactly what he needed to.”
“So… I wasn’t bad?”
Hunter turns to Travis, raising an eyebrow, but then looks back at Carter. “That’s not up to me to decide, but you wouldn’t be for me, no.”
“You weren’t for me either,” Travis says quickly.
“But after, when you said stop, I didn’t listen.”
“Carter, sweetheart-”
“Never mind. I said I don’t want to talk about it, remember?” He gives Travis a dirty look that borders on a glare. It’s been… a while since he’s been on the receiving end of one of those from this boy. It hurts. Badly. “You shouldn’t have brought it up.”
