Raury was, in many ways, a sugar daddy–although he knew that if he so much as touched his young roommate, there would be hell to pay. No, Raury paid the rent, the utilities, the bills, the food–and in exchange, Jared had sex with as many men as he wanted, and gave Raury the occasional privilege of watching them fuck. It wasn’t easy–in this new life, Raury was no longer a high level executive, but just some middle manager with a greatly reduced salary, but if Jared demanded, then he found himself helpless–he’d pay anything to make him happy, even though it wounded him to know that he should be the one making Jared scream–but that was a different life now, and he had a feeling he’d never have the opportunity to get back.
Still, he sought out Aarin, tried to apologize, but the gypsy lover had since moved on to some other city, and hadn’t bothered to leave a forwarding address. Still, it would have been…manageable, he supposed, if it weren’t for his other job, the one in his dreams. At first, the time with the beasts was a welcome respite from his new life, and he’d often look forward to his nights spent in the wood with them, finding some small measure of comfort in how much the animals adored him, how they’d use him as a vessel for their pleasure, but where before he had still felt somewhat removed from them, after that final ceremony with Aarin and Jared, the link between them had intensified somehow. At first it was small changes, barely noticeable, but in time, he found himself losing his grip on reality in ways he could barely explain.
The woods simple seemed so much more real to him, after that ceremony. Even in the dark, the colors were more vibrant in the bonfirelight, the sounds clearer in the silence of the trees, the sensation of the beasts’ flesh against him more pressing than anything he’d felt with a human–well, perhaps anyone other than Jared. Every dream he could recall in immaculate detail, but his time in the waking world began to fade. He struggled to recall conversations and events from a week prior, and soon he was struggling to even feel present in the moment. The real world felt like the dream–without reason or logic, without pleasure. The only moments where he felt the world push back was when he was watching Jared get fucked–but even then, it only felt real because of the great pain they caused him still.
In the dreams, his body continued to change–it wasn’t long before he was cresting six or seven hundred pounds, reeking of manure and livestock, hair coating his entire body, feeling more and more like a beast himself. His waking form continued to disgust him, but now it was because he wasn’t as extreme as he desired, but no matter how much he tried to change himself–no matter how much he binged and drank and refused to shower–he no longer seemed to change at all. No, it was only when he was sleeping that he ever felt like himself–that he felt like he belonged.
His work started to suffer, and he was written up several times for falling asleep at his desk. He knew it should worry him, but the world no longer bore any real consequence for him. He didn’t exist here, in this office, in this city–not truly. No, his life, his reality was elsewhere now. This was now just a shadow, or a ghost, or a placeholder left over from some other world. It didn’t help matters when he noticed that the beasts were beginning to force themselves into his waking life as well. At first it was just the occasional sound, or the strong scent of musk, but soon satyrs would appear beside him at work, urging him to sleep, to come play with them, to let them serve their Bacchus. No one else could see them, but for Raury, they were fully real–so real that even when he sampled their cocks, on his knees in his cubicle, it tasted like he was there, and he’d quickly nod off for a quick fuck in the clearing.
Still, like all dreams, it didn’t seem possible that it might ever end. The constant days spent in the office melded together into a timeless mash. The men streaming into Jared’s room were endless instances of some faceless horde. How had he allowed himself to become trapped in such a nightmare? Why couldn’t he figure out how to stay home in the forest, in his real body, with his real servants, in his real life? He’d become so convinced that nothing would ever change, that when his boss finally called him into his office to tell Raury that he was being let go, it took the man three repetitions before Raury finally grasped what he was saying.
“You mean…I can go? I don’t have to come here anymore?” He grinned, “Oh god, I thought I was going to have to keep coming here forever!”
His boss just stared at him. “If you were so unhappy, then why didn’t you just quit?”
“I…I guess it just didn’t occur to me that I could do that,” Raury said, a bit bewildered himself. There was some reason he needed to have a job, right? He was certain there was something to that, but he was so happy he wouldn’t have to come back here again, that he decided to worry about that later. Instead, he cleaned out his desk in an hour, and hurried home–eager for a nice long nap–but when he arrived early and saw Jared, he realized why the job had mattered–how was he going to pay for Jared, if he didn’t have a job?
Bracken's Corner 