The Trainer (29 page)

Joan shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no,
Chris, I shall never do that!”

Chris seemed to start nodding, his head
moving down as if to glance at his own notes, and suddenly he
leaned over, his face within inches of Joan’s, so fast that Michael
jumped in his chair. The senior trainer barked, “Then what will you
do when confronted with your sloppy manners by someone who knows
much better than you, missy?”

While Mike’s heart pounded, Joan only dipped
her own head in a gesture of humility and submission and said,
softly, “It is entirely my fault, Chris, and I will strive to
better myself; thank you for your correction.”

Chris leaned back and shrugged. “Not bad.
But you must watch the habit of automatically apologizing all the
time. It can become cloying. And, there will be times when you are
not at fault and it will be important to make that clear. But that
should be rare—your owners are fairly well used to managing their
staff, and your housekeeper, Mrs. Harrison, is a very reasonable
woman.”

“How do you know that?” Michael asked
without thinking.

Chris looked over to him and cocked his
head. “I made enquiries,” he said rationally. “I interviewed Mrs.
Harrison before Joan got here.”

Of course he did, Michael thought morosely.
Interviewing the staff where a client was going to work, well, of
course he did that. As Chris directed his attention back to Joan,
Michael lost himself in his bitter thoughts. It just wasn’t fair,
no matter what Anderson thought about fairness. Not only was
Michael learning from the man who did everything right and never
screwed up, but Chris was always just on that edge of patient
humor—when he wasn’t being sarcastic and cutting.

But it didn’t stop him. He kept asking
questions, and kept taking the damn notes. It was hardly the first
time he felt so humiliated. After all, the resolution of the Karen
affair was just about as painful, and dragged on for much longer
than one would have thought.

Michael had returned to Geoff’s place with
only one goal in mind—to forget that Karen ever existed. He had
told Geoff and the other trainers there that he had a girlfriend he
was visiting, thus explaining his weekend absences. But he never
made mention of the kinds of things he was doing with her. It
wasn’t common to have what the other trainers often maliciously
called a “vanilla” lover on the side—in fact, it was almost unheard
of, unless some sort of parental subterfuge was going on. It was
conventional wisdom that said Marketplace people should date each
other—better to not have this secret looming over a potentially
intimate relationship.

Michael had finally realized why this was
conventional wisdom. He was in a rotten mood, nervous and snappy,
and was called to Geoff’s large, airy office to explain why.

“I—I broke up with my girlfriend,” he
stammered, twisting his hands together and finding the colors of
Geoff’s pseudo-Impressionist paintings utterly fascinating, much
better to look at than Geoff’s fatherly eyes. “It was a rough
weekend. It was—real bad.”

“
I’m so
sorry to hear that,” Geoff said immediately, wrapping one arm
around Michael’s shoulder. “It’s always tough to lose a lover. Why
don’t you take a day or two off? You’re much too tense to manage
the clients. Breakups can leave a person with a lot of negative
energy, and you might fall into some bad reactive behaviors without
even knowing it. Go over to my beach house, or to your uncle’s for
a few days, until you cool down. If you feel like it, maybe you can
call her and get back together. If not, maybe a few days of rest
and quiet meditation will help stabilize you. We need you here,
Mike. We care about you. Help yourself; take some time to
heal.”

Michael tried at first to fight it, but in
the end he took Geoff’s advice. He couldn’t actually go to the
man’s own beach house—that would have been pushing it. He did go
back to Uncle Niall’s, and abused Ethan for about two days, much to
Niall’s amusement and titillation. “When you live this way,” he
said to Michael one night down by the beach, “you sometimes forget
to get, well, elaborate with the boys. It’s good to see Ethan get a
workout like that. Geoff must be teaching you right, boyo!”

But Michael remained in a hard, gloomy funk
for both days. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he took Ethan up to
the guest room and had him suck his toes, a guaranteed way to get
him off. It was something he had never even thought to teach Karen
to do—it was firmly associated with men, and Ethan had been the
first one to do it to him. It took him a long time to get fully
erect, and a long time to shoot, but he kept himself on the edge of
orgasm for as long as possible, wanting that temporary agony, that
stretch of timeless thoughtlessness. Finally, he shot off, adorning
Ethan’s hairless chest with his ejaculate, and collapsed back on a
pile of pillows. Ethan was never allowed on the bed. He squirmed on
the floor like a good boy, his cock hard and his body tense. His
hands were tied behind his back.

Maybe I should have taught her this, Michael
thought. The moment of orgasm had not even taken Karen off the
forefront of his mind. He sighed, and when his breathing was back
to normal, sat up. He pressed his foot over Ethan’s cock and balls,
and listened to the answering groan.

“How did you find out about the Marketplace,
Eth’?”

“Sir—ah!” It was fun to torture a slave
while they had to answer questions. Michael twisted his foot a
little and smiled when Ethan’s face scrunched up in pain. Then he
stopped, and rested his heel on Ethan’s thigh. He wanted some real
answers here—it was no time for fun and games.

“Thank you, sir,” Ethan gasped. “I heard
about it from my spotter, Claudio. He told me after about four
months of testing me.”

Four months! Michael had worked on Karen for
five! But then, he had only seen her on weekends, and not every
weekend at that. But—maybe it wasn’t a matter of timing. Maybe it
was the way he broke it her? “What did you think when he told you?
Did you believe him? Did you think he was nuts?”

“Oh, no sir!” Ethan raised his head, his
eyes wide at the thought. “I thought he was bringing me the word of
God, sir! You wouldn’t believe how happy I was. I was ready to
leave that minute.”

“You were?” Michael jabbed Ethan’s balls
with his toe, making the slave wince. “Come on, tell the truth. You
had to be skeptical at first.”

“Sir—I would have been, I guess. But
Claudio—he prepared me for it. It was like I always knew he had
this secret, that he was somehow different than the guys I usually
hung with, you know?” Ethan bit his lip and closed his eyes in
humiliation. “Please sir, forgive me for speaking without thinking,
I’ll try to control my words—”

“No, no, get up, I want to hear this.”
Michael kicked Ethan’s thigh and pushed himself back on the bed,
pulling one leg up. He watched Ethan roll onto his side and up onto
his knees—it was sometimes a hard move to do gracefully. But there
were more important things than criticizing the boy on his
movements. “Tell me in your own words what happened. I’ll forgive
lapses in formality.”

“Thank you, sir.” Ethan shook his head to
get some wisps of hair out of his eyes. “Claudio picked me up in a
gay bar in San Antonio,” he began. “I was at the University there,
and just coming out into leather. But I always had the fantasy, you
know? Even back in Oklahoma, I always used to dream about the man
who would one day come and take me away to be his slave. I left
home because I realized that he wasn’t ever coming to Mill Creek.
I’d done some leather stuff, played around with some SM—wore a
black hanky in my back pocket, looked for Daddies and truck
drivers—it was okay. But never more than okay. It just seemed that
everything was just sex—not that it was bad! Just—limited. Then, I
met Claudio.”

His eyes shone with the memory, and Michael
fought back a scowl.

“He was a real topman, an old fashioned kind
of guy—and a loner, too. I have to admit, I was scared of him at
first. I heard he played heavy. But he never brought any of his
boys to the bars. He wasn’t a member of any of the clubs. He would
just come around, you know? Then one night, when I was looking for
a new Daddy, he was sitting at the end of the bar and I decided to
make the first move. I figured the worst that could happen was that
I’d take a hell of a beating. But I could have been into
it—sometimes, that was enough. But instead, he bought me a drink
and let me talk to him. I mean—all night. I must have told him my
whole life story that night.”

Like I got Karen to tell me hers, Michael
thought.

“It was very slow, sir. He didn’t take me
home and tie me up, not at first. But he would come and visit me,
have a few beers, and we’d talk some more. Every once in a while,
he would ask me for something—not tell me to do it, but ask me—to
run a little errand, or to help him with some chore. And it just
seemed natural to help—and then one day I realized that he’d
stopped asking. He was just telling me to do things, and I was
doing them just as naturally as if he was asking me politely, as a
pal. One night, I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was
seeing if I had what it took to be a slave.”

Michael began to feel warm, despite his
nakedness. He nodded impatiently. “Yeah? And then what?”

“I told him that all my life I wanted to be
a slave—and if he wanted to test me further, I would do my best to
prove it to him.”

“And he wasn’t screwing you?”

“No sir, not yet. He made me earn it.”

“How? More errands and chores?”

Ethan shook his head. “No sir, not exactly.
I was expected to serve him in those ways regardless of whether or
not he was using me. That was my function. He would make me earn
sex—and release—by taking beatings, or doing embarrassing things,
like takin’ a piss outside instead of using the bathroom, or
wearing skimpy little outfits.” Ethan actually blushed, and Michael
wondered what those outfits must have been like; the boy was mostly
naked here at Niall’s place.

“One month, he didn’t let me come at all,”
Ethan continued. “It was horrible. I thought my nuts were going to
explode. Then, for one week straight, he had me jerking off almost
every hour. I’d have to stop what I was doing and wank my rod until
I shot, or he’d whup me good. I don’t know what was worse.”

“But how did he know you were ready for the
Marketplace? Did he ask you questions? I mean—what was it that made
him stop at four months and tell you about it?” Michael’s questions
tumbled out, and he was shocked at the bitterness in his voice. It
was highly inappropriate to show such anxiety in front of a slave.
But he needed to know—and there was no one else to ask.

“He gambled me away in a poker game, sir,”
Ethan said with a little smile. “I think that was the final
test.”

“How did that work?”

“He had a few friends who he played poker
with on Monday nights—they usually watched football at the same
time. I was at his place one Monday, cleaning the kitchen, and when
he got home, he called me to the door. I ran over to see what he
wanted, and he said for me to get some clothes on, he’d bet my
services in a poker game and lost, and I belonged to a friend of
his for a few days. And I better not fuck up.”

Michael snorted. “So what? People do that
all the time. It’s no big deal, you go do the guy, it’s a change of
pace. What—was the guy really ugly or something?”

“No, sir. The guy was a lady.”

“Oh.”

“I’d never been with a girl before, sir. I
mean, I never even dated in high school or anything. I’ve known I
was gay since I was a kid. I didn’t know what to do, for a second.
And then I thought, Claudio wouldn’t have me do anything that
wasn’t okay. And I promised Claudio I’d do what he told me if it
would make me a good slave—and even if I personally didn’t like
girls, I mean, women, it wasn’t anything that was against my morals
or anything. And it was his rep on the line, too—he’d done this,
believing that I’d do what he said. I couldn’t let him down.”

“So you went.”

“Yes sir, I dressed and hopped in her
pick-up, and she took me home and ran me ’til I near about fainted.
Women,” Ethan said, a look of serious amazement crossing his face,
“can come a lot of times.”

“Yeah, they can. Did you enjoy it?”

Ethan squirmed a little. “Well—I enjoyed
being useful to Claudio. And I knew that she was enjoying me, and
that made me happy. Sir, in truth, I like men, I love their bodies,
and women just don’t do it for me. But I did the best I could, and
I tried not to let her know how weird I felt. And about a week
later, Claudio told me about the Marketplace.”

“Okay, Ethan get up, you can go now.”
Michael untied the slave’s hands and nodded when Ethan bowed
himself out of the room. He laid himself back on the bed and
sighed. He had done everything wrong! Not that this Claudio had the
only way to spot and pre-train a slave, but it sounded much better
than what Michael had done. Maybe I should have read up on it more,
he thought miserably.

Oh well. There was nothing to be done now.
He would have to find some new way to gain the attention of the
trainer in New York. Nothing had changed his goal—but it looked
like he needed to head in another direction to get there.

He was glad that he hadn’t told anyone about
what he was really doing with Karen. With her gone from his life,
he could just start again. Next time, he’d be better at this. It
was clear that he had just chosen the wrong first candidate, and
she just magnified the perfectly understandable minor mistakes that
he had made himself. When he got back to Geoff’s place, he’d do
some more research on spotting and entry-level training. There had
to be some videos somewhere.

So, somewhat sheepishly, he returned to
Santa Cruz, and Geoff hugged him warmly and sent the newest client
to his room for the night. The shame of his failure vanished in an
evening of acrobatic sexual romps that made Michael feel much, much
better.