Chapter 3: Bent, Plugged, and Working
The front door closed with a soft click, and Ender listened to the sound of two sets of footsteps retreating down the hallway. The elevator chimed. The building settled into silence.
He stayed bent over the desk for a long moment, his cheek pressed against the cool wood, his breath fogging the surface in shallow puffs. The welts on his ass throbbed in time with his heartbeat, and he could feel the wet heat of Gene's release cooling on the small of his back, tacky against his skin.
Then he pushed himself upright.
His legs shook. His cock ached, heavy and neglected between his thighs, and the plug—the fucking plug—shifted inside him with every tiny movement, a constant, maddening pressure against his prostate. He reached back to touch it, just to adjust, just to—
"Don't."
Ender froze. The word had come from the doorway, and he turned his head to find Zenix leaning against the frame, arms crossed, a faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
"I thought you left."
"I came back for my phone." Zenix held it up, waggling it between two fingers. "Also, I wanted to see your face when you realized you were actually going to have to work like this."
"You're a monster."
"I'm a monster who's about to leave you alone with your thoughts and a silicone plug. So really, I'm doing you a favor." Zenix pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room. He stopped in front of Ender, close enough that Ender could smell his cologne—something citrusy and bright, a sharp contrast to Gene's warmth. Zenix reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Ender's ear, his touch gentle in a way that made Ender's chest tighten.
"You okay?" Zenix asked, and his voice was different now. Softer. The teasing edge was gone, replaced by something sincere.
Ender nodded. "Yeah. I'm—yeah."
"You sure? Because you were pretty deep in it for a minute there."
"I'm sure." Ender swallowed. "It was good. It was really good."
Zenix studied him for a moment, his dark eyes searching. Whatever he found seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded and stepped back. "Good. Then finish your chair. And remember—six o'clock."
"I remember."
"And don't touch yourself."
"I won't."
"I mean it, Ender. Gene will know. He always knows."
Ender believed that. Gene had an uncanny ability to read him, to see through every deflection and every performance. It was infuriating and intoxicating in equal measure.
"Go," Ender said. "Before I change my mind about behaving."
Zenix grinned. "That's my boy." He kissed Ender's forehead—quick, casual, sweet—and then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him, leaving Ender alone in the humming silence of his office.
The first thing Ender did was look at himself in the reflection of the dark monitor.
His face was flushed. His hair was a disaster, tangled and sweaty from Gene's grip. There were marks on his hips where Zenix's fingers had dug in, faint crescents that would fade by tomorrow. And when he turned slightly, he could see the welts on his ass—red and raised, crisscrossing in a pattern that made his stomach flip.
He looked wrecked. He looked claimed.
He looked exactly like what he was: a brat who had pushed too far and gotten exactly what he deserved.
Ender grabbed his phone from the desk and opened the camera. He took a photo—not for sending, just for himself—of the mess Gene had left on his back, of the red lines on his thighs, of the slightly glazed look in his own eyes.
Then he put the phone down and got to work.
The chair model was a nightmare.
Ender had been working on it for three days, and it still looked like something a toddler might sculpt out of Play-Doh. The client—some boutique furniture company in Portland—wanted a "minimalist statement piece" with "organic curves" and "unexpected materiality." Ender had interpreted this as a license to make a blob. Now he was paying the price.
He clicked and dragged, rotated and resized. His mouse hand moved on autopilot while the rest of him tried very hard not to think about the plug.
It didn't work.
Every time he shifted in his chair, the silicone pressed against something inside him that made his vision blur. He'd been hard since Gene finished with him—achingly, desperately hard—and it hadn't faded. Every keystroke sent a tiny jolt through his body, a reminder of exactly what was inside him and exactly what he was forbidden to do about it.
He lasted forty minutes before he started to squirm.
The chair creaked beneath him. Ender bit his lip and focused on the screen. He was adjusting the curvature of the backrest, trying to make it look less like a deflated balloon and more like a piece of high-end furniture. His fingers moved on the keyboard, and his hips shifted without his permission, grinding down against the seat in a way that made him gasp.
Stop it.
He stopped. He forced himself to sit still, to breathe, to focus on the pixels in front of him. The chair wobbled on its axis as he rotated the view, and Ender found himself thinking about the real chair—the one in his office, the one Gene had bent him over, the one where Zenix had sat and watched with that infuriating grin.
The monitor blurred.
Ender blinked, and his eyes were wet. Not crying—not really—but something close. Overwhelmed, maybe. Wrung out and needy and so fucking hard it hurt.
He reached for his coffee cup, hoping the cold espresso would ground him. It didn't. It just tasted like dirty water and regret.
The afternoon crawled.
Ender worked in fits and starts. His mind kept drifting—to the sound of Gene's belt, to the weight of Zenix's stare, to the way they had left him here, dripping and desperate and under strict instructions not to touch. It was humiliating. It was also, or some reason Ender couldn't fully articulate, deeply, profoundly satisfying.
They had left marks on him. They had claimed him. They had entrusted him with an impossible task and then walked away, confident that he would obey.
He didn't want to disobey.
That was the thing that surprised him, whenever his thoughts got quiet enough to notice. Ender pushed boundaries because he craved attention, because he wanted to be seen and wanted and chased. But when Gene and Zenix actually caught him, when they actually gave him what he'd been asking for—he didn't want to run anymore.
He just wanted to be good.
Which was stupid, because he was not good. He was the opposite of good. He sent unsolicited nudes to his boyfriends at work, for fuck's sake.
And yet.
Ender's fingers paused over the keyboard. He stared at the chair on his screen, at its lumpy curves and its weird, formless back. He thought about Gene's hand in his hair, steady and certain. He thought about Zenix's voice, narrating his own humiliation like a nature documentary.
He thought about what they had promised for later.
Tonight. They were going to use him tonight until he forgot his own name. Until the only thing he remembered was how to say thank you, sir.
Ender shivered. A bead of sweat rolled down his spine, and he felt the tackiness of Gene's release still clinging to his skin. He had wanted to clean it off—it was getting dry, and it pulled at his skin in a way that was starting to itch—but Gene hadn't told him to. So he hadn't.
He wondered if that was the right call. Maybe Gene would be pleased. Or maybe he would be annoyed that Ender hadn't taken care of himself.
No. He would be pleased.
Ender knew this the same way he knew that the sky was blue and that Zenix was secretly a softie and that Gene's quietness was not the same as distance. He knew it because he knew them. Because they were his, and he was theirs, and that knowledge was the only thing that made any of this make sense.
At 4:47, Ender saved the chair file for the ninth time and went to the bathroom.
He didn't mean to look at himself in the mirror. It just happened. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection—hair a mess, mouth swollen, a faint red mark on his collarbone where Gene had bitten down—and stopped.
For a long moment, he just stared.
His eyes were still bright. His chest was still flushed. And there was something in his expression, something soft and open and a little bit scared, that made his throat tighten.
They gave him this. They gave him the marks and the orders and the impossible tasks, and in return they gave him something else—something that felt like safety. Like belonging. Like the knowledge that no matter how bratty he got, no matter how many photos he sent or how many boundaries he pushed, they would always come home.
They would always come home and put him back in his place.
Ender smiled at his reflection. It was a wobbly smile, a little rueful, but genuine.
Then he checked the time. 4:52.
The front door wouldn't open for another two hours.
He had a chair to finish, and an evening ahead of him, and a plug that was still pressing against his prostate in a way that made him want to scream. But for now—for just a few more hours—he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
He went back to work.
The chair on the monitor wobbled on its axis. Ender adjusted a curve. The clock ticked. His hips shifted, and the plug shifted with him, and he bit down on his lip and kept going.
Two hours. He could make it two hours.
Probably.