Page 21 of His Dad Will Do
He tucks the Allen wrench into the front pocket of my jeans and I stand there for a minute, shifting from foot to foot, testing the feel of being upright with a metal plug in my ass and a metal cage enclosing my junk.
It’s strange, but not uncomfortable. I look at Logan, who’s standing at the end of the couch, watching me. Then he crosses the living room, around the fireplace divider, and heads into the dining room. “Wait,” I say. “Aren’t we going to…?”
“Come here, sweetheart.”
The weight of both plug and cage makes me feel like I’m about to melt into a puddle, but I force my legs to move. With every step, my ass clenches around the plug and lightning flares up my spine.
When I reach the dining room, Logan pulls a chair out for me and I sit. It’s easy to just do what he says. More than easy.
I could really get used to this. Even though I know I shouldn’t.
Logan takes the seat to my left, at the head of the table. He clicks the remote control to the gas fireplace and the flames whoosh on. Then he settles his glasses on his face and peers at the half-finished jigsaw puzzle spread out on the table.
“Really?” I ask. “Now?”
Logan always has a jigsaw puzzle going. He likes the really complicated kind, with a thousand pieces and complicated artwork, but he sometimes does smaller and simpler ones too. I think it started when Lance was a kid, as something they could do together that wasn’t video games. But Lance gets bored easily and quit doing puzzles with his dad long before we met.
I love jigsaw puzzles, though. The first weekend Lance brought me here to get to know his dad, Logan had a puzzle going that looked like a vintage advertisement for some sort of Belgian beer. Logan and Lance were arguing over what movie we should watch and I sort of drifted over to the puzzle table. The border was almost complete, only the right side missing one piece to join it all up. The edge pieces were this dark brown color that shaded to a deep purple and I saw that a few of the pieces were connected to adjoining pieces that looked like they fit but didn’t quite. I swapped a few pieces around, then snapped the edge together, completing the puzzle’s frame.
Then Lance called my name, and I looked over, suddenly feeling guilty for having rearranged pieces of Logan’s puzzle without asking.
“Uh, sorry. What’d you say?”
Logan crossed the room and looked from me to the puzzle and back again. “I’ve been trying to finish that edge for days,” he said. “Well done.” Then he smiled at me, this quiet, private smile that excluded Lance and made me feel like I’d done something to make him proud.
It was stupid—all I’d done was notice that the colors of the misaligned pieces didn’t quite match—but I think now it was the start of things with Logan. I’ve been craving that approving smile ever since.
In the two years I dated Lance, I spent a lot of evenings working on a puzzle with Logan while Lance watched sports on the wide-screen TV bolted to the wall above the fireplace.
I’ve never done a puzzle with a cock cage on my dick and a plug in my ass, though.
I settle gingerly on the upholstered chair and take the puzzle’s lid to look at the picture. It’s a seaside scene of a coastal town in Maine. There’s a red-and-white-striped lighthouse in the top right corner and the light keeper’s squat house nestled at the foot of the lighthouse. There’s a pile of red lobsters, white clams, and bluish oysters in the middle of the picture, on a wooden dock that stretches across blue water, and a windswept rocky coastline with waves crashing over dark boulders in the bottom right corner. In the bottom left, there are blueberry bushes and foliage in a mix of greens and golds. The sky in the top portion of the picture is streaked with pink and purple, like the sun has just dropped below the horizon.
Logan’s got most of the edge pieces in place and a good start on the lighthouse. I start picking through the pieces in the box, looking for bits of red lobster, white clams, and the blueberries.
Logan told me once that he does puzzles to let his mind wander and think about things. He’s figured out solutions to his clients’ legal issues while puzzling and when he’s stressed at work, he sometimes stays up late working on a puzzle rather than working late at the office.
There’s something calming about sorting through the pieces, dividing them up by color and figuring out which piece goes where. Plus, there’s the satisfaction of snapping a piece into the right place and watching the art take shape before your eyes. I don’t forget about the plug or the cage, but the urgency of wanting Logan to fuck me gradually recedes to the back of my mind.
Out of the blue, Logan asks, “Do you have the book for your musical and any of the songs on your phone? Or saved in the cloud that you can access from here?”
Logan’s voice is deep and it’s got this warm quality to it, like melted chocolate. I could listen to him read a shopping list, so it takes a minute for his question to register. “What?”
“Do you?”
“Um, yeah. Why?”
“Send them to me,” Logan says.
“Now? Why?” I feel a little like a broken record.
“Because I’m asking you to.” Logan looks implacable. His lips are in a firm line and his eyes aren’t showing the crinkles at the corners that he gets when he smiles. It’s his professional face—the one I’ve seen dozens of times when I’ve spied on him while he’s working. Like he’s questioning a witness on the stand and waiting to hear whether they’ll tell the truth or not.
“Okay.” I shrug. I did agree to do what he tells me to do this weekend. I’ve got no idea what he wants with my musical, but I do trust him. Even with my creative work.
Logan finds my phone and hands it to me. Shit, there are fifteen unread texts and two missed calls. From Chloe, mostly, and she did say that if I didn’t call her in the morning, she’d track my location and find me. She would, too. She’s paranoid about safety.
I mean, I guess you can’t call it paranoid to be concerned about safety when you engage in the kind of kinky shit she does. And she knows that I don’t go home with random dudes. Logan’s not a random dude, but I didn’t tell her who I was with last night, just that I was safe. Crap, I hope she believed me.
