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I shook my head. “No, you’re always the rockstar. I kept thinking it was like you were some Hollywood star pretending to be normal. I feel like I should be upset that you weren’t honest, but you’re right that you didn’t lie, and it isn’t like you waited days to tell me, so…” I shrugged. “Honesty’s important to me. Please try to be more upfront in the future?”

* * * *

Will

Little Davy might be submissive, but he wasn’t a doormat, and I respected that more than I was willing to consider in the middle of an important conversation.

“Honesty is important to me, too, and I’m sorry you feel I’ve damaged even a tiny bit of trust. I hope you understand why I wanted to get to know you a little more before I told you.” I didn’t want him to feel obligated to agree or not, so I quickly changed the subject. “I like that you picked up on that song, more than my others. I mean, almost all of them come from my soul, but that one’s kind of like my life mantra. Life isn’t fair, and you deal with shit as it comes to you. Yeah?”

He nodded. “Yes. I grew up kind of in the middle of nowhere, so when I went to the big city I was an easy mark. I wasn’t even smart enough to know I was an easy mark.”

“I feel like you’re leading into your big secret?”

He nodded. “I think it needs some background, but I get the feeling it’s okay to take a while getting to the secret?”

It felt like he bit back calling me Sir, but I didn’t comment on it. We hadn’t negotiated power exchange. We were talking as equals, and that was how this particular conversation needed to happen.

“Whatever you feel I need to know about you,” I assured him.

“In the foster system where I grew up, you get kicked out when you’re eighteen. If you haven’t graduated high school and you haven’t been a discipline problem, you can sometimes get an extension up to ninety days, but then that’s it. I got kicked out the day after I got out of school, a week before the graduation ceremony. I left with a suitcase with, like, two pairs of jeans and a half-dozen shirts, and my toothbrush and comb. I’d worked in high school, so I had about a thousand dollars, and I’d applied to work on cruise ships, since they house you while you work. I got myself to Miami, and I worked for seven months without a break, seven days a week, fourteen-hour days. The pay isn’t great, but you don’t have any expenses. They feed you and house you, so everything I made went into savings. I took two months off and lived in a cheap by-the-week place, and then after that, I worked four months on and one month off. I met my first Master during that month off, at a gay bar in Miami. He was rich, and he took control of me and taught me how to be his slave. I loved it.”

“Until?”

He gave a single nod. “Right, until I figured out what he did for a living, and what he was going to expect me to do in order to pay my way. He brought drugs into the country and distributed them for…” he shrugged. “Can’t tell you too much, right? Anyway, he expected me to transport drugs all over the country. Once a month, he’d load up my trunk and I’d drop them off in Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville, and points north, and then drive home with a shitload of cash. Sometimes I’d go to Birmingham, Memphis, and north from there. I didn’t want to do it, but he’d fixed it so I lost my cruise ship job, and he took all my money. Also, he’d lock a chastity device on me before I left, and I had to come home to get it off. It was a steel ring around my waist that dipped down and held the device on, with a hollow plug inside my cock, and sharp tips inside the cage, so I’d bleed if I got hard with it on. When I got arrested, they had to get someone to saw the damned thing off me. They thought I’d roll on whoever put it on me, but I thought I loved him, you know?”

“You weren’t afraid of what he’d do to you?”

“Well, yeah, there was that, too, but mostly I cared too much about him to get him in trouble. Five years of prison for me, which got reduced to about half that because the attorney Master paid for gave me something from Master that I could plea bargain a little with. Thankfully, I only had one delivery left when I was pulled over, but Master would’ve gone to jail alotlonger if I’d rolled on him. They knew it was him, but they couldn’t prove it since I wouldn’t talk, so they put me in prison.”

“And that’s why your second Master used quiet methods to punish you? No belts in prison?”

“It was a minimum-security prison. He’d been in max, but he was close to getting out and had been transitioned to this one. He taught me a lot. Turns out, I didn’t need to find the biggest guy and offer myself to him in a minimum-security facility, but he didn’t tell me that until the night before he was released. Still, I learned a lot about not being gullible from him.”

In my job, the songs should be the product, but all too often it feels as if I’m the product, and I have to consider how the public will view certain aspects of my life. The thing about being a rockstar is that dating a felon can be seen as badass. I never thought I’d do so, but in this case, it felt okay. Still, I was hoping he wasn’t actually a felon. I mean, I have some guns in my house, and I had no idea of how the law around that might work. I seemed to remember something about misdemeanors being less than a year in jail, but it was possible I was wrong.

“Five years, down to half? So, that’s a felony?”

He nodded. “I only ended up in jail for a little over two years, like, two years and five weeks, because you have to do eighty-five percent of your sentence when it’s federal. The judge told me I could apply to have it pushed down to a misdemeanor after I got out, and if he heard good things from the warden, he’d consider it. I did, and the judge granted it. I guess they had to play hardass as long as possible to try to get me to roll, but at the end of my trial when I hadn’t rolled yet, I guess the judge took pity on me for that, at least. So, I’m legally not considered a felon, which means I can vote and buy guns. I’ve done the former, but not the other.”

“Good for you.”

“You didn’t tell me your favorite songs. What do you listen to? I’m assuming you don’t just listen to your own music.”

I smiled. Boy had a point. “I listen to everything — pop, hip-hop, a little rap, even some country, though not a whole lot of that one. Once a month, I listen to the top one hundred while I work out because I figure it’s part of my job to know what’s popular. I also enjoy some classical — Rachmaninoff, Bach. Not so much Mozart, though a few of his pieces work for me. I’m negotiating to purchase the rights to do a remake of Sinatra’sMy Way, and I should’ve had you sign an NDA before telling you that, but if I can’t trust you with my secrets, what’s the point, right? Sometimes I listen to stuff from a hundred or more years ago while I run or work out. I’m kind of all over the place because I never want my own work to get stuck in a rut.”

“I won’t tell. Thanks for trusting me.”

“You’re welcome. Trust is important for me, too, and I regret that you feel I was iffy with my honesty at first. I need to know what happened when you got out of prison. How did you end up here?”

“I learned how to do upholstery in prison, and I made my way here for a job.” He looked extremely uncomfortable, and he sat back in the booth. “Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t really explain how I ended up here. I mean, there are some secrets that aren’t just mine, you know? I need to check in with the other person and get their okay, first.”

Logic told me he was in prison with one of the local bikers, and whoever it was isn’t out of the closet. I needed to know the story, but it could wait. “I appreciate your integrity. Let’s skip how you ended up with the bikers, and tell me your conversation with your first Master when you were released from prison.”

“He sent someone to collect me when I got out, which was a huge relief, but then less than a week later, he expected me to run drugs for him again, and when I refused, he didn’t even punish me — he just had someone drop me off in downtown Miami with two hundred dollars and instructions I wasn’t welcome back.”

“Why two hundred dollars?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I had nearly five thousand dollars in the bank when I met him, and he took it all once he became my Master, and I’m sure I’d have been paid thousands for running drugs if he hadn’t owned me. He bought me nice things, and I lived in a mansion on the ocean with him, so it isn’t like I didn’t get anything out of the deal. Also, he paid for fancy lawyers for me, and put money in my commissary account while I was inside, so maybe he had some kind of tally in his head?” He shrugged. “I loved my time with him, at first. I thought I loved him, but in hindsight…” He shook his head, as if tossing everything back into the past once again. “The money was enough to get a train ticket to Atlanta and then a bus ticket here, and enough food I didn’t starve on the way.”