Because I was taking ownership.
Doing some serious adulting.
Being proactive.
My knee started bouncing. Actually, I really wasn’t good at any of those things. And it wasn’t as if Ilikedfailing my classes, but I just… just hadn’t really prioritized them enough earlier in the year.
Or ever.
Ugh,school.
A muffled thump sounded from the other side of the wall, and then some annoying Ska music came on because apparently that’s what our neighbor was into now.
Itdidhave kind of a catchy beat, though…
I sighed, then picked up my phone again so I could fiddle with the white-noise settings—another trick Gage had found online for helping me stay on task, and one that really did help drown out the background noise of living in a dorm with a billion other freshman on a campus teaming with a hundred million things going on at all times—but then I put my phone downagainsince I was awesome like that and needed to get refocused on the task at hand. (And also because there were still no new message notifications.)
Right, so… homework.
Gage was counting on me.
Iwas counting on me.
Myparentswere count—
Well, okay. That last one wasn’t really true. My parents had already written me off, obviously, but since they were always doing that the minute I messed up, I pushed them out of my mind for the moment. I’d get in touch with them after we accomplished Phase One. I mean, afterIaccomplished it. Gage could and did do a ton of stuff to help me stay on track with it, but I was the one who had to actually do the work.
Which I was going to do.
Right… about…now.
I clicked the space bar on my laptop to wake it back up and then looked over the next step in the “chunking my goals into manageable bits” game plan that Gage had helped me make for the current assignment.
The chunking thing was yet another ADHD-friendly how-to-focus tip he’d dredged up off the internet… which, again,alsoseemed to be helping, actually, because of course it did. Gage was really good at things like research and figuring out plans and staying organized, because he wasamazing.
It wasn’t like the two of us had never looked up tips on how to help me stay focused before, but he was seriously cracking down on it this time and it made me feel… God. It made me feelspecial, as in, special to Gage. I mean, obviously I already knew I meant a lot to him, just like he did to me—we were best friends and we’d always been inseparable—but now that he was my… um, whatever we were. Now that we had this… thisthingthat we were doing now. This collar-less thing where he said he didn’t want girls but didn’t actually say he was gay and where he made me come a bazillion times per day but never kissed me because… because what?
Was kissing too gay for him?
He had gay friends.
Gay friends who weren’t me, I mean.
And Gage had never acted squigged out about it or anything, and he obviously really liked fooling around with me… coming down my throat… jerking me off… oh God, lettingmejerkhimoff and all that kinky-ish stuff where he just… just rubbed off on me, all over me, using any body part of mine that he decided he wanted, which was kind of weird but also so,sohot that I always—
Okay. Okay okay okay. I took a breath and made myself take my hand off my dick and refocus, because that was what I did now. Ifocused. Also, I didn’t jerk off without permission, because that was a thing now, too, since my master had claimed ownership over my dick. A really, reallyhotthing. But, right. Back to focusing. Gage was my… something, obviously. I mean, he was myeverything(also obviously), and he was moving heaven and earth to get me to do all the things that would keep me here at school with him, so—obviously—he wanted our… our something-status to continue just as much as I did.
I nibbled on my lip. That was all great. Better than great.Supergreat.
It was just that now that I wasn’t wearing the collar for him anymore, there was no way for anyone outside this room to even know that we were anything other than what we’d always been. And of course wewerestill that—what we’d always been, I mean—but now we were… were something more, too.
Right?
I mean, yes.
Right.
Obviously.
