Arnie raised an eyebrow at me, and I felt my face heat up with a hot blush. But that was dumb, because it wasn’t like he could know that he’d just interrupted a totally NSFW daydream involving Gage telling me to take care of his cock for him like the good little slave I was, right?
I bit back a happy sigh and gave in to the temptation to shift in my (way too hard, like, seriously, who designed these things?) seat, just to feel the way it made my ass ache again. The feeling was almost as amazing as having Gage tell me how good I was being for him… even though, sadly, my butt wasn’t even red anymore. I knew, because I’d checked in the bathroom mirror this morning. But on these totally uncushioned, hard-as-stone lecture hall seats? I could definitely still tell I’d been spanked a few days ago… sort of.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason my butt ached today. For the last two mornings, my master had told me I now had an extra class to attend, right there in the dorms. One that involved some lube and his fingers and—
Oops.Notthe time to pop wood.
Arnie bumped my elbow. I fumbled my pencil but recovered it before I dropped it completely.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“No problem,” I said, since it was the opposite of. It had definitely jolted me out of thinking too hard about my morning “class” with Gage, at least.
I rubbed the eraser-end of my pencil against my lips, trying not to smile too wide in case the professor noticed and asked me if the reason I was grinning was because I wasn’t fully an ass-virgin anymore. I mean, professors were smart, right? So it could happen.
But wait, did fingers even count as devirginizing me?
And when was Gage actually going to fuck me for real?
And, holy shit, he actuallywantedto fuck me?
Some days—okay, most of them lately—I seriously wanted to pinch myself just to make sure that everything that had happened since poker night wasn’t just some weird fever dream, because didn’t they say if something was too good to be true, it probably was?
Although I couldn’t have a fever dream if I didn’t have a fever, right?
But… but what if I did, and I just didn’t know it? Like, what if those nasty eggs my parents had made me eat when they’d taken me out to breakfast to ruin my life had gone bad, and right now at this very moment, I wasn’t biding my time until the professor finished droning on about the totally yawn-worthy supply-and-demand-system slides he was showing, daydreaming about having things in my butt while wearing a slave collar for my best friend… my best friend who now let me call him Daddy and smelled my hair and made me suck his cock on demand, but instead, at thisvery moment, I was actually writhing in pain in some hospital bed with a horrible egg-born bacterial infection, or… or a parasite in my brain, or an incurable virus or something, all because my parents still didn’t understand how much I hated runny egg yolks?
Omigod. What if thiswasall just a hot, delusional, fever-borne fantasy right now?
I sucked in a sharp breath, earning some side-eye from the girl sitting in front of me, but I didn’t have any extra brain power to devote to worrying about whether I’d broken her focus, possibly ruined her academic standing, and set her on a path that would lead to the end of all her hopes and dreams, because the horrifying this-stuff-with-Gage-might-not-be-real-after-all thought had sent an icicle right through the middle of my heart, and it was suddenly making it hard to breathe.
Oh God. If the egg-theory was true, it would… it would suck so hard I would probably cry.
Oh shit, oh no,wasI going to cry? Right here in class?
“Noah,” Arnie whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
“I’m okay,” I lied, my knee bouncing so hard it hit the bottom of the attached desk thing on these stupid lecture hall seats. “Ow.”
I rubbed my knee, then took a breath, since Gage was always telling me to do that when my brain ran away from me and I started to freak out about horrible scenarios that may or may not actually be panic-worthy.
And… and okay. Before I crumbled into utter despair, I should look at the facts, right? For example, my asswasstill sore, and since I was pretty sure—well, technically, I wasn’t sure at all, but Ihoped, at least—that bacterial parasite viruses found in undercooked eggs didn’t typically crawl up your butt and make it feel like it had just been used for your master’s pleasure, all of the amazing things that had been happening with me and Gagehadto be real, right?
Plus—I suddenly grinned, then bit down hard on my pencil’s eraser to hide it as my momentary mini freak-out disappeared like magic—I had the collar to prove it.
I reached up to touch it.
Yep, still there, and did it get any realer than that?
Wait, was realer even a word?
I tipped my head back and squinted at the weird design that the ceiling tiles made, trying to figure it out. “Realer” didn’t sound quite right, actually, but a lot of English words were like that, weren’t they? And everyone knew that sometimes your brain just hiccupped and perfectly normal words likebundleorformulaorsatellitesuddenly sounded wrong... or looked wrong... or were just spelled weird... or were actually foreign words that we’d turned into American ones because of the whole melting pot thing.
Or maybe due to Colonialism?
Shit, that reminded me, there was a test in my history class this week that I still hadn’t studied for, and—
“Noah,” Arnie suddenly hissed, shoulder-bumping me hard. “Can I see your notes, or not?”
