“No.”
“Our relationship is not defined by the contents of my playroom, nor is it contained in there. This is where I will put your play collaron.”
He had a face splitting grin as henodded.
“I’m going to sit down, and I want you to bring me your collar andtag.”
I sat down on the couch and waited for him to appear in front of me. He held the collar in one hand and his tag in the other. I attached his tag to the collar before I buckled the collar around hisneck.
“There,” I said. With my hand on his collar, I tugged him closer and kissed him hard on thelips.
During lunch, I asked him to tell me about his dream. Somehow, I managed to finish eating as he told me about his cruel mother and his nightmare. I believed that Ryan was numb to the fact that his mother affected him as much as she had. He realized what she’d done, of course, but failed to see that he was still giving her power. And that bothered me immensely, but it’s a very fine line to walk with him. I tried to keep my personal opinion toned down as much as possible regarding his mother when in his presence. Nick would receive the full effect of thatrant.
“I should send her something for her place. It’s really drab in her room at the retirementplace.”
Dammit,Ryan.
“Ryan, you have nothing to feel guilty over regarding your mother,” Iinsisted.
“I just want it to be a nice place. Chad and I ripped her out of her home and stuck herthere.”
My initial thought was to ask why he gives a fuck, but I refrained. But if he was going to open this conversation up, then I was going to voice some harsh realities forhim.
“What are you hoping for,Ryan?”
He shrugged as he tried to be noncommittal, but he quickly fessed up. Like many other things, this was heartbreaking aswell.
“I know it sounds stupid, but I keep hoping that maybe someday she’ll say that she’s sorry and that she loves me. Or that I wasn’t bad and she really doesn’t hate me.” He sniffled and looked down. “Of course, at this point, if she just recognized me, I’d takethat.”
I hated seeing him cling to false hope. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to feel the things he felt, but I didn’t want him to hold out hope for something that simply wasn’t going to happen. He had a heart and soul of gold, she’s not going to cage himanymore.
“Ryan, I’m going to be very honest with you. You’re grasping at an invisible rope,” I said as gently as possible. “Even if she didn’t have dementia, Ryan, the fact of the matter is that you won’t hear those things fromher.”
The look on his face gutted me. He nodded, looked away from me and tried to recover from that hard-hitting, truthfulblow.
“I know, you’re right. She’s harmless now. It was my dad who was theworst.”
“Really? I have a slightly different vantage point, Ryan.” I stood from the table. “Followme.”
I took him to my room and instructed him to undress, get on the bed, and pull his ass cheeks apart. When he did, I pulled my cell phone out and took a few quickpictures.
“Sit up,” I said and sat down next tohim.
I put the picture on my screen that showed all of the scars that lined the crack of his ass. I hated doing that to him, but he needed to see that her damage was just as bad. As the shock settled in, I deleted them from myphone.
“Your mother wasn’t an innocent bystander who chose to take a blind eye to what went on. She participated in it, and she orchestratedit.”
“You…you have to look atthat?”
“I love all of you, Ryan. Every time you contact her, you give her the power to hurtyou.”
The past twenty-four hours had been emotional for Ryan. He had gone from feeling inadequate and not good enough, to being nervous about me staying over and being in bed next to him, to being hurt in a nightmare and embarrassed over his bedding and then flung into a come to Jesus talk about his mother. Mixed in between all of that, was a lot of positive touch. So, I expected that by the time he got into his SUV to go home, he would already have droppedsome.
After I removed his collar, I placed my hands around his neck and lightly moved them up and down. The idea was to infuse warmth and to think of his collar as an extension of myhands.
We had just pulled apart from our kiss when I heard his phone notify him of a text. I prayed that it wouldn’t be his brother. He pulled the phone out and frowned when he read the screen. Then he turned it around for me to see. In front of me was a text from a very bold and disrespectful switch.Leonard.
Leonard: Hi Ryan, I have a few days off this week and wanted to see if you’d be interested in doinglunch.
