Saddled, chapter 25 (Patreon)

Standing outside the building Noah used for pony training, John wasn’t sure how he felt. As much as he was relieved for any excuse to get away from his family, he wasn’t sure he was ready to get back into the saddle. Four days had convinced him that he didn’t like most of his family, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about his work.

John didn’t blame Elena or Clive, but there was a gut-deep unease coming here. Part of him wanted to run away and join a monastery. However, he needed the money. More than that, he refused to let Robinson have one ounce of control over his emotions. Maybe he was confused as shit, but he owned his own feelings.

He rang the bell and waited. After a minute, Noah opened the door.

“Morning,” Noah said before he led John into the main room.

“No Rebecca today?” John asked. When Elena had called and asked him to practice his walking, John had assumed the girl would be here as well. He had liked the idea of modeling strength for her.

Noah gave him a confused look. “Rebecca?”

“The girl with the pushy client boyfriend.”

“Oh, you mean Rachel.” Noah leaned against the reception desk. “ She could never get over the fear that she looked stupid in her gear, so when the client wanted to attend a dressage event, she suggested they not.” From Noah’s grimace, John assumed it had gone beyond a simple disagreement.

“Is she okay?”

“They had quite the fight, and she ended up back here looking for protection. I called Elena, who was very happy to take out her bad temper on the client. He and Rachel have gone their own ways, and I believe the client is back to hiring Elena’s horses.”

At least she got out from under the asshole, but John still hated that she’d been put in such a difficult position. “Elena should give me a shot at teaching him manners,” John said. “If I were in his harness, I’d teach him to respect a pony.”

“Do you mean that?” Noah asked. “Would you want to sub for someone like Rachel’s ex?”

A full body shudder went through John’s frame at the thought of actually being tied up around that asshole. “Hell no. But if he ever asks for a contract where sex is off limits and a horse tries to kick him to death, I’d be all over that.”

Noah grinned. “I’ll let Elena know.” Noah headed for the office where he kept the gear, and John followed him, unbuttoning his shirt as he walked. “So, you’re back for walking practice.”

“Yep.” John put his shirt on a hook and sat to untie his boots. The concierge had outdone himself by getting John four pairs of work boots in three different colors. John was never going to have to buy another pair. Hopefully that bill would purge a little of Elena’s guilt and she would stop trying to buy John’s forgiveness. As long as she ruined Robinson, he was happy, and the last time he’d talked to Elena, she had promised to make him suffer.

Noah came out with John’s harness. “Are you going to be okay with getting tied up?”

John pulled his boots off and set them aside. “Of course I am. What are you talking about?”

“You went through something pretty traumatic.”

John snorted. “I know the difference between you or Clive tying me up and a psychopath with a gun. I’m not stupid.” Of all the tangled knots in John’s brain, that wasn’t one he worried about. Much.

Noah sat on the wooden bench next to John. “And servicemen and women aren’t stupid, but when firecrackers go off, they can panic because their bodies react to the sound. It’s not stupidity.” His voice was oddly lacking any emotion, but John could still feel the sympathy.

“You think I have PTSD.” John took a deep breath before he lost his temper and told Noah to shove his pity where the sun didn’t shine.

“I know you had a trauma and we’re post trauma. I don’t know about the rest, which is why I’m asking how you feel about being tied up.” Noah had been staring off into the distance, but now he looked at John.

“I’m fine with it, although I’m starting to get annoyed with you,” John said in a terse voice. “Is this Clive’s idea? Is he trying to fucking mother me? Because I’m a big boy and I will tell you if I have an issue.” Right now the only problem John had was with busybodies trying to micromanage his life. If his mother made one more veiled comment about being supportive of gay rights, John might disown her. 

“I honestly don’t know if Clive or Elena scheduled this time. Elena tends to push any of the ponies my way if there’s a question of whether they’re ready for work.”

“So this is a workplace evaluation?” John had no idea what to even say. He hadn’t been hurt at work. And even if he had been, his body had been abused by fishing for years. A few more bumps and bruises weren’t going to matter. “Is this like a cop having to get cleared after a shooting?”

Noah shrugged. “Sort of. You’ve gone out with Elena when she needed someone to play the heavy, so you know that sometimes the assistants get hurt and sometimes Elena has to deal with the assholes who hurt them. Did you think she let the assistants sit home and drink while she’s out kicking ass?” 

John hadn’t given it much thought. It wasn’t like Elena made a habit out of intimidating clients, but now that he thought about it, he imagined she would go out of her way to give assistants time to heal. “You’re talking like I was raped or at least assaulted. I wasn’t.”

“No, you were terrorized, tortured, and threatened.”

John would never describe it that way. He countered with, “I was tied up and shoved in a closet.”

“And the tying up part has me concerned,” Noah said without arguing John’s point. “But I get that you don’t want my concern, so let’s practice the walking and if you have any issues, let me know.”

“I’d rather cut off an arm.”

“Yes, I had rather suspected,” Noah said with a sigh.  “I swear, if I were your handler, I would lock you in a chastity device until you learned how to ask for help.”

“Good thing you aren’t,” John said. He had never agreed to a chastity device in any contract. Two different men had wanted a virgin pony and John had chosen Clive because his contract, while far more extreme, didn’t include a chastity device. John wondered what would have happened if he had chosen the other contract. Robinson would still be out there plotting against Clive.

John turned to allow Noah to buckle the harness on both sides. When one hand was secure, John gave it a hard pull, but everything held. For a second, he waited to see if panic would creep in, but even though John had relatively little experience with pony play, this felt familiar.

“Thank you for coming during that whole Robinson disaster,” John said as Noah finished.

“I would have come even if Elena hadn’t paid me.”

“You aren’t who I was expecting her to bring as backup.” John sat as Noah pulled out the heavy horse boots.

“I think I’m offended.”

“I’m just wondering what sort of secret powers you have that Elena called you.”

Noah grunted as he got one boot on and started fastening it. “Elena might be centered here, but most of her business is in LA, New York and DC. She doesn’t have many choices for backup here in town. I was handy, and I think she wanted to minimize the number of people who saw you. None of us knew what to expect.”

“You thought he would rape me, and you’re her go-to for mentally fucked up ponies,” John guessed. He thought it was a reasonable guess given what Noah had said today. He never wanted anyone to see him as wounded or weak. Hell, the only reason he got into the pony play was because he got to turn loose all the anger and strength he needed to control the rest of the time. He couldn’t curse out some rich kid Elena wanted him to scare straight and screaming at the ocean wasn’t exactly mentally healthy.

Noah stopped in the middle of putting the second boot on. “Elena thought it was a possibility. Robinson saw you as belonging to Clive. He treated you like a possession, so some variation on vandalism was a reasonable fear.”

“One of his guys told me I was cute tied up and asked to hire me after it was all over.” A cold shiver washed over John.

“Fuck. Tell Elena that and she’ll have fun ruining someone else’s life.” Noah shook his head. “You really would think that people would stop screwing with her. It never ends well for them.” Noah got the second boot on and then held John’s arm to make sure he caught his balance after standing.

The boots made John taller, and he always felt off balance for the first few minutes, but Noah started slow, walking next to John and holding his arm instead of going straight to the hot walker. “Do you know what happened with Helene?” John asked. “Or how she hooked up with Robinson?”

“I’m not sure. Apparently Robinson knew Clive liked to use Briarwood, so he started poking around looking for someone to blackmail or bribe. Elena banned three assistants and one client from any Briarwood projects, so it sounds like he worked their way up the food chain and found Helene at the center of Elena’s empire handing all the logistics. There are more people who should have known better than to fuck with Elena.” Noah hooked John up to the hot walker and then headed over to the desk where he had a quirt.

“Did Helene handle all the logistics, nationally?”

“Internationally,” Noah said. “Elena only had two in-house employees—one guy handles computers and Helene handled paperwork and bookkeeping.”

“So when Robinson flipped Helene, he got the whole agency.” That was a horrifying thought. John believed in an adult’s right to indulge in their own kinks, and he’d worked for a lot of nice people. He couldn’t imagine how humiliated they would be if Robinson had gotten ahold of their details or if Robinson had outed Elena’s organization to the police. 

All their clients had been at risk. 

John thought about the first client he’d had sex with. Marla and Bob would have killed themselves—John knew that. Bob loved to be humiliated, forced to watch Marla have sex with a much larger man. But in outside the bedroom, he was a powerful man who would lose everything if people lost respect. And Marla would die of guilt if her kink for rape fantasies ruined her husband.

“Luckily Elena is paranoid,” Noah said. “She had a kill switch that she could use if one of those two turned, so she has most of it back under lock and key.”

John nodded. That’s why she had taken hours to find him. He was actually relieved to know that she had taken care of the business first. If she went to jail or clients died because of John’s kidnapping, he’d feel horrible.

“Knees!” Noah slapped John’s ass hard enough to sting, and John lifted his knees higher. “I don’t think she’s going to have the same problem with her new manager.” Noah sounded almost amused.

“Who did she hire?”

“Lauren.”

“The pony girl from my rescue?”

Noah stopped, and had to jog to catch up. “How did you know she’s into pony play?”

John rolled his eyes. “She walks like a pony, and if you ever make me practice enough that I look like that, I’m going to kick your ass.”

“You have issues,” Noah said. “Knees!” 

“Yes, I do.” John watched his legs, focusing on getting his knees up. “Now, why isn’t she going to have a problem with Lauren?”

“She has an interesting background, which is none of your business. But the long and short is that she is a 24/7 slave. She’s been overseas working the dressage scene, which is larger than you might think. However, she’s getting older and her and her owner agreed that she needed something else. Elena is her new full-time owner and retirement plan.”

“Which means no one can get to Elena through her. So she only has to worry about her computer guy.”

“He’s already tied to her pretty closely.”

“Kinky.” John had no idea Elena was into full-time slave contracts.

“Do not say that to Elena,” Noah said firmly. “That boy is like a son to her, and the first person who insults him is going to be picking their teeth out of their intestines. But she’s covered. This won’t happen again. So, how are you feeling?”

John thought about it for a second. The quirt wasn’t hard enough to do more than sting, the bondage was fine, and other than a few sore spots on his feet from the new work boots, he was physically in good shape. “Bored,” he finally said.

Noah smiled. “That’s good.”

“Not really. I hate bored. I have a question, though.  Can you get Elena to do me a favor?”

Noah gave him a suspicious look. “Maybe. What’s the favor?”

“Get her to switch my room to something smaller. She has me in a fucking two-bedroom suite with its own dining room and two sitting rooms. It’s obscene.” John didn’t add that Logan was making enough noise about the room to make John intensely uncomfortable. Logan’s gleeful use of “sugar daddy” was straining a relationship that had always been at its best when there was a full continent between them.

“You will never be a show pony.”

“Hell no. I don’t want to be, either,” John said firmly. He didn’t want people looking at him and judging whether he was pretty enough. John worked for a top-of-the-line prostitution ring, so he knew what beautiful looked like, and he could not complete. At least he had a rugged, dangerous edge. Noah didn’t even have that. “When you were a pony, what were you?”

“Oh, I was the ever unpopular work horse.” Noah chuckled. “My handler had an estate and he was addicted to gardening. I spent a lot of time hauling plants and bags of dirt and dragging a mower. No sex; all work.”

John definitely would have refused that contract. “That sounds terrible.”

“It’s not for everyone. But my handler and I were happy for many years before he had a stroke.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No sympathy needed. We had a lot of good years as handler and pony, but we weren’t close outside the harness.”

“Is it common for people to only relate to each other through the pony play?” Maybe if John knew the rules of the wider pony play community, he would better understand the relationship he had with Clive. The man had texted him several times—links to gossip magazines where an eighteen-year-old girl had accused Robinson of trying to bribe her into getting an abortion or a story about his current project, the one Robinson had tried to steal. It was so stupidly domestic to get texts about some shared interest.

John hadn’t thought that way until Logan had grabbed his phone and proclaimed their text messages sweet in a gossipy, bad-tempered way. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“There’s no one answer to that,” Noah said after a long pause. “Some groups are heavy on couples that are married. Other groups are definitely more about very formalized kink. Some groups consider sex part of the grooming process while others put it in same category as actual bestiality. It’s all relative.”

John focused on his footwork. 

“Can I give you a piece of information—no bias or pressure to act a certain way, but simple facts?”

“And if I say no?” John asked. Generally when people started with a question like that, they weren’t going to take no for an answer, and John was tied too tightly to stop Noah from talking.

Noah ducked his head. “You can already guess it’s about Clive, so if you tell me you have all the information you can handle, I won’t mention it again.”

John walked a full circle, his knees high on each stride before he finally said, “Okay, give me your facts.”

“Clive was clinically panicked over the idea of Robinson having you.”

“Clinically?” John asked.

“Elena made the mistake of texting him when she found Robinson’s location. Maybe she wanted to show that she took the threat against his project seriously. I don’t know. I do know he drove over to Elena’s place right after leaving your brother’s hotel. If he showed up at the hospital with the symptoms I saw, I would have sedated him. He hides his fear well. He puts on a front and plays the bastard, but his pupils were blown, his heart rate was so fast that he was physically flushed, and he kept running out of air when he talked. He was panicked.”

John nodded. That matched. Clive was all about the whip and the bondage, and he knew how to wield both like a master. But at the end of the day, he had always wanted to take care of John. It had been the most annoying and difficult to handle part of the contract.

“He’s more fragile than he lets people see,” Noah said, “and you’ve gotten past his defenses. I don’t know if that’s your compatible kinks or his guilt over you getting hurt or some combination of both, but be careful with him John. You could hurt him badly.”

John stopped and turned to face Noah. “You’re a psychologist.”

“A psychiatrist, actually,” Noah said in an amused tone. “Why do you think Elena trusts me to train ponies to handle difficult clients?” 

John opened his mouth, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He’d never expected a doctor to take up a kink as serious as pony play, but he couldn’t give one reason why not. Before he could mentally recover, Noah slapped the quirt across John’s hip.

“Get moving, knees up,” he ordered. Their conversation was clearly over.

Chapter 26: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20310403 

Chapter 27: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20707456 

Chapter 28: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20726684 

Chapter 29: https://www.patreon.com/posts/saddled-chapter-20848455