Ben started walking again.

“Hey... can I get your help for a second?” Ben jerked to a stop at the sound of Javier’s voice, his heart pounding. He was cracking up. Fucking losing it. He knew that. Knew the man was dead because he’d watched Mateo blow his brains all over the place but he heard him now. He was wide fucking awake and he heard Javier.

“You can watch him get fucked. Watch him bleed and know you’re too much of a fuckin’ pussy to save him.”

Was it coming from inside his head or outside? His body got jittery. He felt like he was going to explode, implode, he didn’t know which. Ben moved faster, trying to escape what had to be inside his head. Finally, he made it home.

He was going fucking crazy. Had this been what Bonnie felt like? Was he like her?

For a second, Ben considered going into the kitchen. Getting a knife. Touching it to his skin. Watching himself bleed but instead, he ran for the shower. Turned the water on as hot as he could take it before stripping out of his clothes and getting in.

The water made his skin burn. He waited for it to help, for the pain on his skin to take the place of that inside him but it didn’t work.

Ben jerked backward, out from under the spray of his large showerhead. He soaped his hand and wrapped it around his cock, stroking, begging the damn thing to get hard, but it didn’t.

He rinsed, turned the water off, didn’t bother with a towel before walking into the living room. Ben grabbed a glass, filled it with bourbon before walking over to the window and looking out at the city below.

He downed the whole glass. Waited for his body to relax but of course that feeling never came. He filled another, and another.

Ben didn’t know how much later it was as he sat in the same chair he always did in his living room. Still naked. There were no lights except what shined in from the city outside his window. The bourbon was gone. His phone sat beside him on the table.

This was when he would have called Tristan before. Joked and laughed as though he didn’t feel empty inside. He would have made it out to be about Tristan.

He wanted to call him now. He almost had eight times. Instead he flipped Dante’s business card over and over between his fingers.

And then he picked up the phone, and dialed. Every time it rang he wondered what in the hell he was doing. Why in the hell he was calling, yet Ben didn’t hang up.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” Ben replied.

There was a pause and then, “How did you get my number?” Dante asked.

“You had a business card on your table. I took it.”

Again, Dante didn’t reply right away. Finally, “Why are you calling, Ben?”

I don’t know. He wondered the same thing. Wondered why he felt a connection and what it meant. Why Dante taking control over him the other night had helped. He couldn’t ask that, though. He couldn’t say any of it. “Why do you have them? Nightmares. You said you have them, too.”

“Everyone does.”

“Don’t evade the question. You know what I mean. You saw me...” He closed his eyes as though that would change anything. “I was completely raw that night. You saw me as no one ever has.” Broken, soul-bared in a way. “Give me this.”

He heard Dante breathing on the other end of the line. Other than that, they were both silent. Ben waited. He would win this. He would wait Dante out. He needed Dante to give him this.

“Like you, I have something I can’t forget.”

He knew that. Maybe it wasn’t much information but to Ben it was something. He’d sensed it from the beginning, maybe the same way Dante took one look at Ben and recognized that he hated himself.

“Going to the clubs, fucking and teetering on the edge, it was all I had left. It used to help me to forget.”

“But it didn’t last?” Dante asked.

“You know it didn’t. You could tell I wasn’t enjoying myself the first night you saw me. I could see it. And now you know I struggle to even keep a hard on.” Ben reached for the bottle of bourbon before remembering it was empty.

“You don’t have the look in your eyes. Someone who likes to whip, who likes control, you can see it in their movements. You can tell by the way they speak or how they swing their arm. It’s in everything they do. You don’t have that. You want it, but there is a difference between want and need.”

Ben wished to be able to tell Dante he was wrong but he didn’t feel like he knew anything anymore. “Let me guess, you need it?”

Dante sighed. “Yes and no. My lifestyle choices aren’t like most. I’m not a typical dom. I don’t live the lifestyle the way most people involved in BDSM do. But I’m not strictly vanilla either.”