Page 82 of The Associate
All the air was sucked from the room. Samuel’s lungs seized. He shook his head again, a more violent, jerky motion.
“None?” Gael’s voice dropped, becoming dangerously soft. Almost curious. “A man of your age and looks?”
The compliment, if it was a compliment, was buried in the interrogation like a hidden blade. It sliced through him. Samuel flinched, his whole body recoiling from the words. “No, Sir.”
“Preferences?”
The word hung in the air between them, toxic and electric. Samuel’s heart was a frantic, trapped bird beating against hisribs. The old scripts, drilled into him until they were part of his marrow, warred with the screaming, fundamental truth in his blood. He opened his mouth. A dry click. No sound emerged.
He was fifteen again, pressed against his bedroom door, listening to his father’s roar of “ABOMINATION!” vibrating through the wood.
“Your face is very expressive. You are very easy to read, Samuel,” Gael murmured, almost to himself. Then he moved. He set the tablet down on the side table with a soft click. He leaned forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees, steepling his fingers. His full, undivided attention was now a tangible weight, a pressure on Samuel’s skin. “Let me rephrase. Have you been intimate with anyone? Man or woman?”
Samuel’s face was on fire. “I’ve… been on dates.” The confession was torn from him.
“Arranged by whom?”
“My mother.”
“With women.” It wasn’t a question. Samuel nodded, a jerky, humiliated motion he was glad Gael couldn’t fully see.
“Did those dates lead to physical intimacy?”
A memory, sharp and unwelcome: the dry, perfunctory press of Liana’s lips against his, the overwhelming floral scent of her perfume, and the yawning, cavernous nothingness he had felt in its wake. The guilt that had followed; guilt for feeling nothing, for the lie of it all.
“A kiss. Once. It was… fine.”
“Fine.” Gael repeated the word, letting it hang in the air. He was silent for a long moment, and Samuel could feel that gaze onhim, taking in the bowed head, the white-knuckled grip on the book, the fine tremor that he knew was visible in his shoulders. “And with men?”
Samuel made a small, wounded animal sound in the back of his throat, entirely beyond his control. He shook his head, violently now, tears of pure, undiluted shame and panic welling hot and insistent behind his eyes, threatening to spill over. He couldn’t speak. The denial was total, a visceral, full-body spasm.
Gael went perfectly still. Samuel, through his blurred vision and the roaring in his ears, could feel the shift in the air. The revelation was dawning on the other man, stark and clear. The extreme reactions, the way Samuel shattered at a mere touch, wept from a single word of praise, trembled like a sapling in a gale, they weren't just the beautiful, natural responses of a submissive. They were the convulsions of a profoundly untouched, unknown man. A virgin in every sense that mattered. A man who had lived not just in chastity, but in a self-imposed sensory desert for more than a decade, and was now perilously close to drowning in the first drop of water offered to him.
The attraction, the hunger, the desperate submission; it was all tangled with a deep, aching starvation that Gael had perhaps only theorized about.
“Look at me, Samuel.”
The command was quiet, but it brooked no disobedience. It took every shred of will Samuel had left to drag his tear-filled eyes up from the page.
Gael’s expression was unreadable, carved from stone in the low light. But his eyes… his eyes were dark with a new, terrifying intensity. A focus that saw past the tears, past the shame,straight down to the raw, trembling core of him. “The next question is the only one that matters. Answer it truthfully.” He paused, letting the absolute weight of the command settle in the marrow of Samuel’s bones. “Do you want to be touched?”
It was the most terrifying question he had ever been asked. It bypassed scripture, morality, past, and identity. It went straight to the raw, screaming, starved thing that lived in the center of his chest. The need that had been punished, locked away, starved, and silenced for so long he’d almost believed it was dead. The truth was a sob, trapped and swelling, threatening to break his ribs.
He couldn’t lie. Not under that gaze. A single, hot tear broke free, tracing a scalding path down his cheek. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. But he gave the smallest, most broken, most honest nod of his life.
Gael held his gaze for a long, silent eternity. He saw it. The depth of the hunger. The architecture of the shame. The years of lonely, aching denial. He saw the field he was about to plough, and it was fallow, and deep, and full of buried stones.
“Good,” he said, and the word was softer than any he’d used all night.
He stood, the movement fluid, breaking the fragile spell. He walked to the kitchen. Samuel heard the clink of glass, the quiet rush of water. He returned and placed a fresh, tall glass on the table beside the book.
“Drink. Then go to bed.” His voice was quiet, but infused with that familiar, unshakeable authority.
Samuel’s hands were shaking so badly he almost fumbled the glass. The water was achingly cold, a shock to his dry, tightthroat. He drank, the simple, physical act grounding him back in his body. He set the glass down with a soft click.
“Good night, Samuel.”
Samuel stood on legs that felt like wet clay. He didn’t dare look at Gael as he passed, keeping his eyes on the floor as he walked to the spare room. He entered and stood in the dark for a moment. The silence here was different; hollow, waiting. He shed his clothes until he was in his underwear, his movements slow and clumsy in the unfamiliar darkness.
