Chapter 4: Chapter 4
And part of him, the part that needed to survive, was learning, terribly, how to breathe underwater.
He ate his portion of roast later, alone at the table after Matt had gone to watch TV. The meat tasted of nothing, just texture and warmth. He washed the dishes in scalding water, scrubbing his hands raw, but the phantom scent of sweat and violation lingered in his nostrils, a ghost in the sinuses. He went through the motions of the evening, a silent satellite orbiting Matt’s presence in the living room.
That night, in the dark, sleep pulled him under like a stone.
IN MY MIND, IT WAS THE BEST DREAM EVER. MATT WAS COVERING ME WITH KISSES. BUT IT WASN'T A DREAM. MY HUSBAND REALLY WAS COVERING ME WITH KISSES. HE TOLD ME I HAD BEEN TALKING IN MY SLEEP, THANKING HIM FOR 'DOMESTICATING' ME, BEGGING HIM TO 'TAME ME WITH YOUR BIG DICK' AND TELLING HIM THAT FROM NOW ON, I ONLY WANTED TO OBEY HIM. THAT HE WAS PRIMAL AND SMELLY AND I JUST WANTED HIM TO FUCK ME AS HARD AS HE COULD FROM NOW ON.
Nick jerked awake, a muffled cry strangled in his throat. Matt’s lips were on his neck, his shoulder, his stubbled cheek rough against Nick’s skin. The room was pitch, the only light a sliver of moon at the window’s edge.
“Shhh, easy,” Matt murmured, his voice thick with sleep and a dark, pleased amusement. “You’re so loud, baby. Even in your sleep.”
Nick lay frozen. The words from the dream—no, from his own sleeping mouth—echoed in the silent room, more real than the mattress beneath him. Domesticating. Tame me. Primal and smelly. A hot wave of nausea, worse than the taste of boot leather, flooded him.
“I… I didn’t,” Nick whispered.
“You did.” Matt propped himself up on an elbow, a solid shadow in the dark. Nick could feel his smile. “Clear as a bell. ‘Thank you for domesticating me.’ My, my.” He traced a finger down Nick’s sternum. “All that fuss today. And here your little subconscious is throwing a parade for me. Writing poetry even.”
“It was a dream,” Nick said, the defense feeble, pathetic.
“Dreams are truth, Nicky. Truth without all the… attitude.” Matt’s hand settled on his hip, possessive, knowing. “You finally said the quiet part out loud. Admitted what you really want. What you really need.”
Nick wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. But his body, traitorously, was stirring under Matt’s touch, a humiliating pulse of arousal syncing with his pounding heart. The horror and the shame twisted together, inseparable.
Matt leaned down, his breath warm against Nick’s ear. “So let’s obey that, huh? Right now.”
It was different this time. There was no anger in it, no corrective punishment. It was a celebration, a victory lap. Matt moved with a confident, grinding patience, as if unpacking a gift Nick himself had wrapped. Every touch, every kiss, was underscored by those whispered, sleeping words. Primal and smelly. Nick turned his face into the pillow, biting the cotton, as his body responded, betraying him utterly, culminating in a shuddering release that felt less like pleasure and more like a seizure of surrender.
Afterward, Matt held him close, nuzzling into his hair. “See?” he sighed, contentment radiating from him like heat. “No more fighting. It’s easier this way. You said it yourself.”
Nick didn’t sleep again. He stared at the ceiling, listening to Matt’s breathing deepen into snores. The ice in his core, the observing part, was back. It sifted through the wreckage of the night—the kitchen table, the sleep-talking confession, the willing body that now curled against his captor.
It wasn’t acceptance. The ice didn’t do that.
It calculated.
The words he’d spoken in his sleep were a key, turned in a lock he didn’t know existed. Matt now had proof, Nick’s own proof, of his deepest compliance. Fighting that reality would be insanity. The notebook was gone. The music was silent. His own mouth had testified against him.
As the first grey light of Friday seeped into the room, the ice formed a new, clear shape. A plan. It was not a plan of escape. That was a fairy tale. This was a plan of navigation. If he was underwater, he would stop fighting the current. He would learn its patterns. He would use it.
When the alarm blared, Matt smacked it quiet and stretched. He rolled over and kissed Nick’s shoulder, a casual, proprietary smack of the lips. “Morning, wife.”
Nick turned his head on the pillow. He made his eyes soft, his voice a sleepy murmur. He manufactured a faint, shameful smile.
“Morning,” he said. Then, pushing the word out on a breath, testing its weight: “Husband.”
Matt’s eyebrows rose. A slow, sunrise grin spread across his face. It was the most genuinely happy Nick had seen him in weeks. “Yeah?” he rumbled, pulling Nick closer. “Say it again.”
Nick buried his face in Matt’s chest, inhaling the familiar, now-accepted scent. He let a moment of perfect stillness hang in the air.
“Coffee’s on, husband,” he said, and slipped out from under the arm to go make it. His movements were not those of a broken marionette. They were smooth. Purposeful. He walked to the kitchen, and for the first time, he did not look at the table leg where he usually knelt.
He looked at the drawer where the sharp knives were kept. Then he opened the one above it, and took out the coffee filters. The action was simple. Clean.
The ice had a direction.
And part of him, the part that needed to survive, was learning, terribly, how to breathe underwater. He chewed the pot roast, its richness now ash on his tongue, and swallowed each bite under the weight of Matt’s approving gaze. The smell, his smell, was a taste in the back of his throat.
He cleaned the kitchen after, the motions automatic. The hot water scalded his hands as he scrubbed the roasting pan. He did not look at the table. He felt raw, a wound loosely stitched, and every movement threatened to tear the seams. When Matt clicked on the television, the blare of a sports highlight reel felt like an assault from another planet.
Nick waited for the commercial. “I need to go into town tomorrow,” he said, his voice surprisingly even. “We’re out of yeast. And the good coffee.”
Matt muted the TV, turning his head slowly on the recliner. His eyes were calm, placid. The beast was fed. “The stuff from the gas station isn’t good enough?”
“It’s bitter. You said so yourself last week.” Nick kept his hands in the dishwater, still. “I’ll get the Ethiopian beans you like. It’ll take twenty minutes.”
A long, considering silence stretched, filled only with the silent gesticulations of the sportscaster on the screen. Matt’s scrutiny was a physical touch. “Fine,” he grunted finally. “But you go straight to Miller’s Market and back. No detours. No dawdling.”
“Of course.”
“And take my truck. The clutch in your car is slipping. I don’t want you stranded.”
It was a control, presented as care. Nick nodded. “Thank you.”
The next morning, the sky was a hard, cloudless blue. Matt left early, planting a rough kiss on Nick’s forehead that made his skin crawl. “Be good,” he said, the words a casual command.
When the dust from Matt’s work truck had settled on the county road, Nick moved. He took the keys from the hook by the door. The weight of them was unfamiliar. He drove Matt’s F-250, a massive, rumbling thing that made him feel like a child playing dress-up. The vinyl seat was cold through his jeans, a lingering soreness whispering beneath.
He did not go to Miller’s Market.
He parked two blocks over, on a side street lined with maples, their leaves just starting to hint at gold. His heart was a frantic bird in his ribs. He walked quickly, head down, his long hair a curtain. The white clapboard church with its modest steeple looked less like a sanctuary and more like a mouth.
The side door was unlocked. The air inside was cool, stale, smelling of old hymnals and lemon polish. Light fell in colored shafts through stained glass, painting the empty pews in fragments of ruby and sapphire.
“Hello?” His voice echoed in the hollow space.
A door at the front, near the pulpit, opened. Pastor Michaels emerged, a man in his sixties with kind eyes and a perpetually stooped posture, as if from a lifetime of listening. He blinked, adjusting his glasses. “Nick? Matt’s… Nick? Is everything alright?”
“I need to confess something.” The words tumbled out, dry and sharp as stones.
The pastor’s expression softened into pastoral concern. “Well, the Lord always listens. My office is—”
“No. Here.” Nick didn’t move from the aisle. The emptiness felt necessary. If he sat in a cozy office, he would lie. He needed the vaulted ceiling, the silent, judging rows. “I need to say it out loud. To someone who isn’t him.”
“Alright.” Pastor Michaels remained near the pulpit, his hands folded. He waited.
Nick looked at a patch of light on the floor, a perfect diamond of red. He opened his mouth. The first words were rust, scraping his throat. “I went to the preacher in town to confess.” He swallowed. “I was baiting my husband. Trying to make him mad.”
The pastor stayed silent, a shadow in the colored light.
“Why?” Nick’s voice cracked, rising. It wasn’t a question to the pastor, but to the building, to himself. The truth, finally named, was a monstrous thing crawling into the light. “I wanted him to beat my ass and fuck me like there was no tomorrow. I wanted to lose to him and be defeated. I wanted him to be a big strong hairy beast because if he took charge, nothing was my fault.”
He was trembling now, the admission tearing out of him in a savage, whispered rush. “I was his and if he couldn’t control me, that was on him.” He finally looked at the pastor, his green eyes wide, desolate. “I wanted him to control me.”
The silence in the wake of his words was absolute. The pastor’s face had gone carefully still, a mask of neutral comprehension. There was no gasp, no condemnation, just a profound, weary sadness.
“I see,” Pastor Michaels said quietly, after a century had passed. “That is… a heavy burden.”
Nick let out a shuddering breath. The holiness of the place did not absolve him; it spotlighted the ugliness. He felt no cleaner. He felt seen. “What do I do?”
“Do you feel unsafe, Nick?”
It was the wrong question. Safety wasn’t the point. The point was the terrible, welcome prison. “No,” he said, and it was mostly true.
The pastor nodded slowly, choosing his words with visible difficulty. “The… dynamics you describe are not of love. They are of predation. And complicity.” He took a step forward, his shoes quiet on the carpet. “My door is always open. There are resources—”
“I have to go,” Nick interrupted, suddenly desperate for the blinding sun outside. “Matt expects me back.”
He turned and walked quickly down the aisle, away from the understanding in the old man’s eyes. The confession hadn’t been for forgiveness. It had been a diagnosis. A naming of the sickness. He was the one leaving the notebook out. He was the one burning the eggs. He was the one pointing out the smell, needing to be forced under its weight.
He got into the massive truck, the leather seat now hot from the sun. He sat there, gripping the wheel, watching the dappled light through the maples. The truth settled in his gut, cold and solid and undeniable.
He had wanted the beast. He had crafted his own cage, bar by bar, with every muttered rebellion. The relief he felt after the punishment wasn’t just survival; it was the satisfaction of a blueprint followed exactly.
He started the engine. The roar was a familiar violence. He drove to Miller’s Market, bought the yeast and the expensive coffee beans. He did not dawdle.
On the drive back, the two-lane highway unwinding before him, he rolled down the window. The wind tore at his hair. He replayed the confession in his head, each awful syllable. I wanted him to control me.
A strange calm began to seep into the spaces the truth had scoured out. If this was his design, his secret, sick desire, then he was not just a victim. He was a collaborator. The knowledge was a key, twisted and black. It didn’t unlock the cage door.
It locked him inside, with a clarity that was almost peaceful. He knew what he was now. He knew what he would do tonight, and tomorrow. He would bait. He would break. He would lose. And in that loss, in that terrible, familiar defeat, he would find the only thing he’d ever really wanted: to be utterly, finally, and completely owned.
He turned onto the gravel road home, a plume of dust rising behind him like a signal.
And part of him, the part that needed to survive, was learning, terribly, how to breathe underwater.
The days began to fold into one another, seamless and quiet. Nick woke, he cooked, he cleaned. He no longer stared out the window at the cardinal for too long. He learned the exact consistency of scrambled eggs Matt preferred—dry, almost granular, never shiny—and produced them without thought. The pot roast was always tender, the floors gleamed, and the laundry smelled of crisp, sun-dried cotton. He moved through the rooms of the farmhouse like a careful ghost, leaving no trace of himself, only evidence of his labor.
He stopped thinking in paragraphs. Thoughts came in single, functional images. Dust on the baseboard. Thread count. Preheat to 375.
One evening, Matt came home and tossed his boots toward the mat by the door. One landed upright, the other on its side, a small scatter of gravel escaping its tread. Nick, who was setting the table, didn’t sigh. He didn’t even pause. He simply finished laying out the cutlery, walked to the door, and righted the fallen boot. He lined them up neatly, toes facing the wall.
He fetched the polish kit from under the stairs before Matt could ask.
“Gonna do those after supper?” Matt asked, shrugging out of his jacket. His voice was normal, pleasant.
“Yes,” Nick said. He didn’t say he’d already done them that morning, that this was a fresh layer of dirt. It didn’t matter. The ritual was the point.
“Good girl,” Matt said, passing him to wash up. The word hung in the air. It didn’t strike Nick like a slap anymore. It felt like a key clicking in a lock, a mechanism settling into place.
Later, Nick knelt on the old rug with the brush and tin. The leather was warm from Matt’s feet. He applied the polish in slow, circular motions, his breathing even. He remembered the grit on his tongue, the taste of soil and diesel. The memory had no heat now. It was just a fact, a step in the process. This was the next step: maintenance. Preservation.
He buffed the boots to a high, military shine. He could see his own blurred reflection in the toe cap.
“Perfect,” Matt said from his armchair, not looking up from his phone. The praise was a soft, warm stone dropped into the quiet pool of Nick’s being. It rippled out, then settled. It felt like completion.
The next morning, a Saturday, Matt was in a expansive mood. He’d landed a new contract, a big one. He made pancakes, something he almost never did, whistling as he flipped them. The kitchen was rich with the smell of browning butter and maple syrup warming in a pan.
“Gonna be a hell of a job,” he said, sliding a stack onto Nick’s plate. “Big addition out on Ridge Road. Lot of detail work. My kind of project.”
“That’s great,” Nick said. He poured more coffee for Matt.
“Might be some long days coming up.” Matt squeezed his shoulder as he sat down. “Gonna need you holding things down here extra tight. You up for that?”
“Of course,” Nick said. The question felt rhetorical. He was always up for it. It was his purpose.
Matt ate with gusto, talking between bites about lumber orders and permits. Nick listened, nodding at the right moments, his own food growing cool. He watched Matt’s hands, the way they gripped the fork, the faint white scars across the knuckles, the dark hair on his forearms. They were capable hands. They built things. They provided. They corrected.
A strange, calm clarity settled over Nick. It was the same ice from before, but it had melted and reformed into something like glass—transparent, sharp, and solid.
After breakfast, Matt went to the living room to watch a game. Nick cleared the plates. He washed them meticulously, the hot water turning his fingers pink. He dried and put them away. He wiped the table, the counters, the stovetop. The kitchen was restored to its pristine, waiting state.
He stood in the center of the quiet room. The only sound was the low murmur of the television from the other room.
He walked to the mudroom, where Matt’s work jacket hung on a peg. It was heavy canvas, smelling of outside, of sawdust and faint, sun-warmed cologne. Nick lifted it from the hook. He didn’t bring it to his face. He simply stood there, holding its weight.
Then, he slipped it on.
The sleeves engulfed his hands, the shoulders sagged past his own. The weight of it was immense, a anchor settling on his slender frame. He was swimming in it. He walked back into the kitchen, the heavy hem brushing his calves.
He went to the sink and ran a glass of water. He drank it slowly, looking out the window at the grey, placid sky. In the reflection, he saw a shape that was not himself—a small figure swallowed by rough, masculine fabric. It looked correct. It looked like things were in their proper places.
He took the glass to the living room doorway. Matt was sprawled on the sofa, eyes on the screen.
“More water?” Nick asked. His voice was soft, almost absorbed by the jacket.
Matt glanced over. His eyes took in the sight: Nick, dwarfed in his jacket, holding a glass of water. A slow, deep smile spread across his face. It wasn’t a smile of triumph, but of profound, satisfied recognition. He saw it. He saw the embrace.
“Yeah, honey,” Matt said, his voice warm and rough. “That’d be good.”
Nick padded forward on bare feet. He refilled the glass from the pitcher on the side table. As he leaned over, the loose collar of the jacket gaped, and the scent of Matt—that specific, musky, essential scent—rose up and enveloped him completely.
This time, he didn’t gag. He didn’t tense.
He inhaled.
He let the smell fill his lungs, his head, the newly ordered spaces of his mind. It was no longer an assault. It was an atmosphere. It was the air of his world. He placed the full glass in Matt’s hand, his fingers brushing Matt’s knuckles.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” Matt said, his eyes already drifting back to the game. His free hand came up and patted Nick’s hip, a casual, possessive gesture. “Good girl.”
Nick didn’t go back to the kitchen. He sank to the floor beside the sofa, his back against it, the bulk of the jacket pooling around him on the rug. He drew his knees up, wrapped in the canvas and the smell. He rested his head against the sofa cushion, near Matt’s leg. He could feel the heat of him through the fabric.
On the screen, men in bright colors ran back and forth to distant, roaring sounds. Nick didn’t watch them. He closed his eyes. The weight on his shoulders was immense, and it was the only thing holding him together. The last sharp edges inside him smoothed away, dissolved in a deep, warm, and absolute surrender.
He was home.