The Thorns Upon the Roses Ch. 05

Chapter 5

*** Author's Note ***

Thank you for the EXTREMELY high numbers of reads for the first volume of chapters! Equally, thank you for EACH comment or critique! This was an idea had a while ago, and the world as a larger idea was something I had played around with once or twice, but sitting down to flesh it out is hard, and sometimes I miss completely obvious points or comments that you all bring up. PLEASE CONTINUE TO CRITIQUE THIS!!! I cannot express how much I have loved each comment, even the ones I may disagree with!

With each new chapter I publish, please continue to spout off what you hate about it, or gush about what you like! I don't shy away from it at all! Further, feel free to write about what you would like to see coming up! I have plenty of ideas, but this can be something spanning a LOT of chapters, or if you want me to try my hand at something different, but in a similar erotic wheelhouse, let me know!

Cheers,

Sarah

*** End of Author's Note ***

There's a memory in my mind that has been always poking and prodding me, laughing at me, as if it were something to behold within my own brain, yet in the span of my life, it never led to anything or changed any aspects of my life. In my heart, it has utterly destroyed me during every quiet moment that allows this memory to sneak back in.

It has replayed hundreds of times since the night on the lake.

I'm younger, maybe 11 at the oldest, and I'm at my neighborhood pool. A dozen or so kids all play some sort of water tag game, and it never ends. We play all day, no matter how painful the heat got. The youngest kid, Ryan, is getting mad that he keeps getting picked to be it. Ryan is making a huge scene anytime he gets tagged, and he says he is too slow to catch any of us. At some point I get tagged, and I dive into the water with my hand stretched out into the foam of chlorine and sunscreen. My eyes don't open as I feel the skin touch my hand. I come up cheering as I rub the water out of my face and long hair. Ryan is crying that he got tagged again...

Suddenly I'm in the car with my father. He is yelling at me as we drive the two blocks back to our house. I wasn't allowed to walk back that day, as the lifeguard that kicked me out and called my father had said, "I want him to know how much of a bully you were to that poor kid..."

My father's face is red, and I'm crying. The air is crawling with sharp nails, in and out of my lungs so fast that I can feel the air slicing me as it comes and goes. Then he says the words that have sat with me for years, but by dinnertime, he probably wouldn't remember saying them:

"I couldn't be more humiliated to call YOU, 'my son.'"

---

I left Abby at some point in the night when I woke up feeling the vomit jumping around inside me. I held it in long enough to clothe myself, and I started the hike back to the mansion before I spewed my insides into a bush. I had no idea what time it was, but it was black outside, and the cold chill of the mountain air seemed to run its grimy fingers along my legs, feeling me as I fought forward into the night.

The mansion wasn't quiet, but nothing mattered. I needed to throw up again.

Not from the alcohol. I could still feel the warm discharge from Abby coating my throat.

The toilet tried to keep up, but with every successful vomit, I would shove my finger back again, and again, and again...

---

Morning came, and I had no idea it was.

My door hissed open, and I heard the word, "Breakfast!" while I laid in my shower naked.

The water was off now, but for nearly an hour I had sat with the head spewing out scalding hot water onto my body. The pain was my penance. Now I shivered in the cold.

The words of my father had followed me up the mountain, and they stood over the toilet with me, and now they dripped out of the showerhead, breaking upon my toes with each drop, drop, drop.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled out every once in a while. Sometimes it was a hushed, "What the fuck..." or a soft, "Why would I..."

It wasn't just the blowjob... I couldn't even think about the phrase without mildly gagging. I was locked in a cage, and I wouldn't see my family again for almost two years, but by then, what would they think of me...? I felt the walls of shock and disbelief come crashing down as I sat in the shower, and reality began to assault me. This wasn't a dream, or a nightmare. I was really at this mansion in the middle of the Appalachia, and nobody knew I was missing. Nobody would come looking for me. Nobody knew me anymore.

My melancholy-whispered monologues continued well into the morning.

Eventually, it became too cold to stay in the shower tub. I was pruned beyond doubt with the cycles of boiling water and tundra climates. I got out, and I trudged to my bed, and I plunged under the blankets.

Sleep came and went in spouts. I heard voices down the hall between blacking out and rolling over again. My clock face would greet me with digital numbers, and then it would caress my eyelids down as I fell back to sleep.

I woke up to find it noon back in my mansion of solitude. I sat up and spotted two treys by the door atop my desk. I didn't have to squint to see the bright yellow hours-old and cold, scrambled eggs sitting in their chilled trey. Next to it was a trey of something brown.

Today was Sunday. Perhaps it was a tragic comedy that my first day off from this nightmare was slated for me to have a breakdown of manic depression. Perhaps it was just an excuse for me to sleep more. I didn't think about it too much more because sleep yelled louder than the depression.

---

"Joshua, I promise this will be hilarious," said Meghan McMackie, or as the guys called her, Mmm, because that was all you could say when you looked at her, and one distant rumor echoed that finished in bed with one long mmm... Freshman year RA, curves that never stopped being perfect, and the laugh that was so genuine you had to believe it was the first time she had laughed.

"Like, so funny, but it's the rules, so you have to!" Despite these old college tales, Meghan was now with me and a few friends at a house down the road from the bar we had drank dry. She had grown close with me over my first year, and now we were neighbors in a cul-de-sac of crappy homes. The hours were late, but our minds were buzzed. The tequila had turned to Malibu, which had turned back to Hornitos, before we were down to a barrage of barely-any-left bottles of whatever we could find. Naturally, truth or dare had been suggested, and after the amateur questions were done, the faithful game had turned into a sexual frenzy. We were splattered around the living room on whatever furniture we could drunkenly balance on shouting dares and avoiding truths for hopes of seeing Meghan make-out with her friend again. After the fourth time, Meghan said we should pick on someone else, which is when she locked eyes with me.

"Dude, just go for it," he said sitting next to me. I honestly had forgotten his name after all these years, but I had taken to calling him Dude, as that was how I remembered every sentence of his starting. "Dude, I won't bite you."

Meghan said it again, "Joshua, I dare you to put your hand in Dude's pants, and hold Dude's dick until you are dared to stop, OR it gets hard."

I laughed with disbelief, but I was drunk, and whatever excuse was needed to justify me not confronting something within me. "I'm not gonna grab Dude's dick!"

Some stoner across the living room said something, but I didn't hear it.

"Them's the rules, Joshua." Meghan said and raised her drink and started a chant. "Grab that cock! Grab that cock!"

The room quickly and slurringly followed, with most of the letters getting messed up along the way.

"Grab that cock!"

I took a swig of my drink, and I'll always remember myself in hindsight unsure of what the swig was for: Out of fear? Out of excitement? Out of showmanship?

The crowd cheered as my drink came up, and my other hand went down. Dude's warm cock became one with my hand, and I could feel the hair tickling my hand as I held it.

A voice said, "Finish him off!"

A lot of people laughed. A couple guys flinched in a disgusted show of manliness away from us. A few girls giggled as they bit their lips or sipped through straws with their eyes wide. Meghan looked at me only, and she winked at me as her tongue played with her top lip. Then I felt his dick pulse in my hand, and I looked over at Dude. His eyes looked at every other person instead of looking at me once.

A few years later, I ran into Dude at a bar a few states away from our college. I sat at the bar waiting for a date to get out of the bathroom, and Dude showed up with some small guy under his arm. I nodded to Dude, and he returned it with a gleam of embarrassment. He turned around and left the bar, and the guy with him shoved his hand into Dude's back pocket as they left. I looked back at my drink.

---

I had no idea what time it was, but I had laid on my side for what felt like hours. Sleep was no longer an option for my too-well-rested body. My breath stank, and I could feel the prickles on my face of a new day's stubble. I was still naked under my bedding. My fingers gingerly went down between my legs, and I felt the metal poking out quietly. For a while, I traced it with my fingers, and soon I knew every metal bar as if they were veins on my body. I had been locked up for 3 days now, and I had begun to realize, this would be a long 18 months.

The days had been packed, but in the quiet hours, I had begun to realize what this cage meant. It meant that in the middle of the night, a random boner would awake me with pain as my body screamed out in a restricted agony. It meant that bathroom breaks required diligent wiping, as urine would piddle out of my cage, and I would start to smell like pee if I wasn't careful. It meant that a few times a day, my skin would get pinched as it pulled at a strange angle.

My fingers continued to trace it, and I could feel the head of my cock getting excited, so I stopped, and I forced myself to think about other things.

Soon I would have to leave this room, and I was terrified of what awaited me. There was no chance of some violent escape. Whether it was some fight, or some stealth escape, The Doctor had her ways of stopping me, and eleven of them sat in each clip of Kripke's handgun. A moot point.

The food could be smelled from my bed, and I knew it wasn't just natural vitamins in my food. Or at least, it couldn't be. Surely this Doctor was putting something into my food, and probably the water. But it was a shared community of drinks and snacks, so was everyone getting the same dosage of whatever she was planning? I wondered about the prospects of sealed foods and store-bought snacks, but it wasn't so hard to reseal something in plastic...

I wanted to protest! I wanted to lock myself in this room and whither away and die before seeing the Doctor again, but I knew the endgame of a direct pushback.

Kripke's words came back to me, and I felt some sense of heroism stir within me. Sarcasm. Yeah, what a joke...

---

I flipped to the next page, and I blinked against the disbelief. Page 100!

I was reading Axiom's End, the book Kripke was pushing for her book club. I wondered if anybody else had shown up since Abby and I missed it.

Eventually, I had clothed myself in sweatpants and threw on a t-shirt, grabbed the book out of boredom, and began reading at my desk. I guess I had liked the book.

My door hissed open to my left, and Kripke stood with her arms crossed. Her face was flat with frustration, and nothing about her eyes seemed happy to see me. Was I looking at Avery or Kripke?

"So, you and Abby skipped book club, and left me alone?" Her eyes widened as she saw the book in my hand. "Oh shit! You read it? Some of it?" She walked forward and looked at how far into the book I was, "You read a lot! Good! Book club is on Thursday night this week. Scheduling stuff is tricky when the Doctor's schedule is all, bleh!" Avery waved her hands around as she spoke. It brought her guard down when she spoke, and I felt safe around her. That, and the lack of weapons around her belt when she was off duty. "How was your day with Abby? You like her much?"

I opened my mouth, but I didn't know what to say.

"You don't need to say anything if you don't want to," Avery said looming over me, and then she eyed me over with her hawk sights. "You didn't hear it from me, but the Doctor would not like to see that stubble on your face."

My hand went up and patted the prickles. "It's a Sunday, right? Day off or something like that?"

Avery smiled and said, "Not quite. Sunday is a no schedule day. Honestly, a few girls around here just sleep all day anyway, but they still... maintain themselves."

I was starting to get frustrated. Nobody would have had an issue with me if nobody had barged into my room!

"That's fine, Avery, but I was going to just unwind today. The Doctor won't come knocking anyway. If she does, then that's on me."

"She doesn't have to 'come knocking' to see you."

Avery watched me closely as she said this, but her eyes never moved away. I quickly flicked my eyes to the random things in my room, and I wondered where or what she was referring to.

"And your legs still aren't shaved," Avery said with pursed lips. "Want some advice? I can tell you this much. Tomorrow the real deal starts for you. The others around here... they expect things. Its fine if you want to pushback, but you don't have any other days left to dip your toes into the water. There's still plenty of time left in the day to prepare yourself for tomorrow."

"Prepare myself? What do you mean? Shave my legs and dot the I's?"

Avery looked at my desk, then grabbed a pen and my hand. She began to scrawl out a list of things, but I couldn't read them until she was done.

"Look, Jess," Avery said, "I get that this is a monumental change, but if you are going to stay here, you need to follow certain rules. There's no three strikes and you're out, or there's no second chances. Its like a balancing act. Inch further and further from the center, and suddenly you're sliding off, and there's no coming back. It takes time for everyone, but we want you all to succeed. Work on these for tomorrow. It'll help you get your mind back on track and out of this depression hole. It sorta smells like ass in here."

I laughed as I said, "So you can tell, huh?"

"Yeah, most people usually take their first Sunday off and just cry a lot. The Monday after is usually where I have to... work overtime." She dropped her eyes and looked at the floor. "But not everyone!"

I nodded, and said, "Then I guess I'll see you around."

Avery nodded back and waved as she backed out of the door with it hissing behind her. Then immediately it hissed back to life as she reappeared. "Hey, just one more thing. Abby told me to tell you that she has some of your stuff from your hike. You might pop over and grab it sometime today."

My heart dropped at the thought of seeing Abby again.

"Okay, sure!" I said with pep and excitement.

"Maybe I'll join you guys on the next hike!" Avery waved again and left.

I wondered if Avery was packing heat alongside her gun. She seemed like a natural woman, but so had Abby. But Abby was a woman until... No, she still is!

My throat seemed tight and thick again, and I swallowed back fear as I said to myself, "And I guess I'm a woman too." I wondered if the Doctor smiled as she listened in from some unseen microphone.