Dirty Laundry: A Tucker Springs Novel #3

Adam looked dazed, stunned, and thrilled. His glasses were askew as well, making him even sexier. “I totally came. Hands tied behind my back, you fucking my mouth—I came .”
    He said it like he’d climbed Mt. Everest, which Denver supposed for Adam to let go like that probably felt like the same thing. He beamed down at his lover and kissed him before adjusting his glasses for him. “You did good, baby. Good boy.”
    “Good boyfriend,” Adam murmured back, sounding proud.
    Denver was proud too. And as he watched Adam basking in his triumphs, so many that night, Denver made himself a vow that he too would face his fears, no matter what shame came with them, because if Adam could conquer this, certainly Denver could handle a stupid little test.

Adam loved the release that came from playing with Denver, and in the month since Denver had given him his first weights lesson, they’d played almost every day. In Denver’s playroom mostly, which was good because it was November now and starting to get damn cold outside. But there was a lot of playing. A lot of playing.
    They took a lot of pictures too. Adam and Denver both had a regular porno library on their phones, every last one of the pictures featuring Adam in some kind of bondage or with something shoved up or in him. While Adam kept a lot of them on his computer, he couldn’t bear to delete them from his phone, so Denver got him a better one, one on which he could lock pictures up behind a password. As a little something special, he ordered a case with a picture of hawk moths on it.
    “How in the world did you get this?” Adam cried, turning the phone over and over in his hand.
    “Special order. There’s a company that will put anything you want on your phone case.”
    Adam had kissed him, hard, and then led Denver into the back room of Lights Out and blown him with enthusiasm. It had been a pretty good gift for them both in the end, that phone. Adam loved it.
    What Adam had started to love more, though, even more than the pictures, was the release that came with playing with Denver, both the times when pain and restraint were for fun and the sessions that came with punishment. The latter especially moved him in ways he hadn’t been prepared for, and on occasion he found himself almost, but not quite, looking forward to Denver’s corrections.
    Sometimes he would lie in bed thinking about it, shutting his eyes and remembering how it had felt to bear something unpleasant because he had done wrong— and then be forgiven. He did get off on the pain of a spanking a little, but it wasn’t anything compared to that feeling of release. It wasn’t the same, either, when it was simply playing. It also couldn’t be a made-up punishment. It had to be a real infraction. A mistake, an error.
    Adam made a lot of errors every damn day. There was no shortage of things he could be punished for. The problem was he’d only given permission for those punishments to be for being a bad boyfriend, a limit he sorely wished he hadn’t insisted on, not anymore. Intellectually he knew he could tell Denver he wanted to change the rules, but still he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
    He couldn’t work out why he couldn’t ask, either, and that only made him feel more shameful. Sometimes he wanted what he and Denver did so badly he figured it had to be wrong. Certainly the few times he’d skirted the issue with his therapist she’d not seemed pleased. Maybe she was right. Maybe this wasn’t healthy, not for someone like him. That made a lot of sense inside Adam’s head, so he never asked Denver to change their arrangement, no matter how much he wanted to.
    Except one day it got to Adam so much that he cracked.
    It was a bad morning: class was tough, he had to deal with frustrated students failing to pass a key exam in the course he TAed, and Brad had done nothing but glare at him in the lab. Adam was short-tempered with students and professors, and as always he was so confused about his conversation with Brad that he couldn’t tell whether he’d screwed up or not. It was a day Denver had arranged to pick Adam up when his classes were over, and when Adam slammed the truck door, his head rang with all his mistakes, all the times he’d said the wrong thing or acted the wrong way, all the times he’d let things go in directions they shouldn’t have or let his fear keep him from acting at all.
    Picking up on his turmoil, Denver put a hand on Adam’s shoulder,