“Immensely.”
“The spanking?”
“All of it turns me on, dominating a sub, tormenting them and inflicting pain, owning someone and caring for them.”
“Do you have a sub right now?”
“No, but I do have a sweet and precocious boy I’m taking care of.” I nudge his ribs.
“I’m not your boy in this way,” he says with a hint of regret, almost as if…
“No, you’re not. Do these pictures arouse you, Giovanni?”
He pulls back the book to show me his tented pants, then pulls down the waistband along with his underwear to expose himself to me. He squeezes his prick roughly so that a bit of jeweled precum beads at the tip of his tidy mushroom head.
“If you were my sub, I wouldn’t let you touch yourself like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because all of your orgasms would belong to me.”
He stares at his thumb, slowly tracing the glossy liquid over the ridge of his head. “You would let me come sometimes though, right?”
“Only when you’re very, very good.”
“I’d be good for you,” he assures me, his sincerity shining through.
I touch the soft wave of hair at his temple. “I’m sure you would.”
Giovanni hums in appreciation and turns the page, his other hand still holding his cock, and I wonder if I might be the masochist in this relationship.
3
His suicide attempt comes out of nowhere. I’m at my office in Manhattan when I get the call from Rico telling me there’s an emergency and I need to come home.
“He’s okay, Boss,” Rico assures me as I’m racing down to the car and then ordering my driver to step on it. “The doctor got here in time, but Jesus Christ it was close. The kid scared the shit out of me.”
I make it from my office in midtown Manhattan to my penthouse in Brooklyn in record time. Giovanni is in bed with his arm bandaged, hooked up intravenously to bags of saline and blood. His coloring is peaked and there are dark bruises under his eyes, but he appears to be resting comfortably with whatever sedative Dr. Greyson has given him. As for my bedroom, it looks like a murder took place, with a trail of blood across the white carpet and much more of it splattered against the marble tile of the bathroom.
“Porco Guida!What the hell happened?” I ask Rico while trying not to take out my panic and adrenaline on him.
“He nicked a knife from the kitchen without me looking. I found him in the closet and chased him into the bathroom. He locked the door. I broke it down. Jesus Christ, Boss, I’m so goddamned sorry.”
First thing tomorrow, all the locks on the doors are getting removed and the knives will be kept in a padlocked drawer to be used only with supervision. I lay a hand on Rico’s shoulder, but it’s more for myself. “You couldn’t have seen it coming.” I sure as hell didn’t. The doctor is waiting to give me his diagnosis and I say to him, “What the fuck am I doing?” I am not a man who is prone to fits of emotion, but this boy is testing me truly.
“He needs therapy,” Dr. Greyson says, “and maybe medication. He might do better in an institutional setting.”
I imagine Giovanni surrounded by strangers, being over-medicated and largely ignored. His grandfather tried putting him in rehab, but it didn’t stick, and he only seemed worse for wear afterward. Besides that, I promised not to send him away.
“What can be done here? I can hire nurses, a full-time therapist. Money is not an issue. I just want him to be well.” It would mean some major changes to my security protocol, but I’d make it work.
Dr. Greyson says, “For starters, you need a place to put him when he’s not stable. A safe place with no sharp objects or tools he can use to hurt himself.”
“What, like a cage?”
“Yeah, but a nice one.” He glances outside to the balcony that spans the length of the apartment. “And you need to do something about that. You keep your gun locked up, right?”
I sleep with my gun under my pillow as I have since I was fifteen years old. “No.”
