The dinner was delicious, and probably far better than anything Paul Sadler might have whipped up on his own. The steaks were cooked in a batter heavy in onions and spices that made my mouth water almost painfully — but it was a wonderful pain. The buttered rolls almost dissolved on the tongue, and the salad had a dressing that I couldn't quite identify, but I wanted to find out what it was. Maxwell hovered around the table ready to bring anything that was needed.
The conversation in the dining room was less comfortable than the food. Early on, Kelly grumbled, "Why do we need to sit through a long dinner together?" I suspected he was more accustomed to fending for himself in the kitchen; I had often done the same while growing up. I had to admit though, Kelly must be eating a sensible balance of foods somehow, given his perfect proportions and luxurious fur.
Mr. Sadler sighed. "Your brother hasn't been here for three years, Kelly."
Kelly muttered, "Don't see why that has to turn everything upside down."
Maverick contributed a sigh of his own to the collection. Evidently deciding there would never be an ideal time, he plunged in at last. "Kelly, I'm going to be hanged in a few months!" I could see him trying to maintain a breezy tone. He looked as nervous as I had ever seen him.
Kelly shrugged and reached for his glass of cola., looking only briefly at Maverick. "That's kind of the point of being at the Academy, isn't it?"
Maverick winced, and his jaw took on that set again. "I hope you can be there. I want you to be there."
Kelly gave him a skeptical look. "You want me to be there?"
Maverick bit back his first irritated response, and said calmly, "Every boy wants his family to see him hang. It's a special time."
Kelly gave a look that said everything had been clarified. "Ah. Every boy does." I realized Maverick had picked the wrong thing to say, turning the invitation into pure form-following. Kelly had now decided that Maverick didn't literally want Kelly specifically. He was just doing what the other boys do. It all made sense now.
Maverick hadn't heard anything to satisfy him yet. "So will you come?"
Kelly shrugged. "I've seen you hang before." He took another bite of steak.
Maverick was working harder to force calmness on himself, to keep it light. "In practice, not for real. You haven't seen me die before. I only do that once."
"We all do." Before Maverick could summon up a response, Kelly turned to his father. "Dad, Hunter wants me to sleep over. He said to come by after dinner. Can I?"
Mr. Sadler looked hesitant, as if trying to keep score of what was happening between his two sons. At last he asked, "Is your room cleaned up?"
Kelly nodded eagerly. When Mr. Sadler nodded in return, he grinned and said, "Great!" He looked down at his half-filled plate. "May I be excused?"
Mr. Sadler looked exasperated. "Kelly, Maxwell worked hard on this."
Kelly looked chastened, for the first time. "I'm sorry, Maxwell." He cut off another forkful of steak.
Maverick looked helplessly at me. I mouthed back, "Patience," and Maverick sighed and resumed eating, mechanically, probably more to avoid insulting Maxwell than from a need to put anything in his stomach.
Later in the Evening
My eyes grew wide, my heart pounding. This is the room! It should be a shrine, with red velvet rope across the doorway, people paying admission to look in while listening to a tour guide. Whatever awe those people might feel, it couldn't top the awe I felt right now, in this den off the living room.
A noose, the rope looking new — Maverick said he had changed it fairly often — hung from the ceiling. There was an exercise machine in the corner, a chinning apparatus, a low wooden box for step aerobics, a stationary bike as well as a normal bicycle, a treadmill for those days when the weather prevented outdoor running. On a shelf sat a device that looked like a posture collar, the one Maverick had used to hang and continue breathing while he worked out those amazing sexual hanging moves that all of the boys at the Academy now learned as standard techniques.
And, in another corner, two platforms for hanging practice. One was non-mechanical, simply a box for Maverick to stand on, step carefully off of and then kick away, trusting his coach to put it back under his feet at the appropriate time. This was the one that Maverick had used in the early years of his training. The other was a rising/falling platform with a lever, modeled after the ones used by Hanging Boys.
In a hushed voice, I asked, "How much time did you spend in here?"
Maverick answered, "Hours, most days. I'd work on my school lessons in my room in the mornings and meet with my tutor at the kitchen table. Then I'd spend most of the afternoon in here, usually exercising, and then go out jogging, or biking. My coach would come over late in the afternoon, several times a week, and we'd spend about an hour, sometimes ninety minutes, practicing hanging and working out different moves."
"Did Kelly ever watch you hanging?"
"He'd look in sometimes, but he never seemed that curious. When I'd start a session he was still at school, and when he came home I'd usually still be at it, but he'd be with his playmates in the yard, or at their houses down the street. He'd usually watch TV in the evenings, here or at a friend's house. I'd come out and watch sometimes, but usually I'd be in my room reading."
"You... well, I guess you didn't play with him, right? He seemed pretty stunned when you asked to play cards with him today."
Maverick gave me a sheepish smile. "You could tell, huh? I should have, I know that. But I was..."
I put my arms around him from behind, rubbing my chin on his shoulder. "You were you. You were the Maverick I met when we first got to the Academy."
Maverick gave a short laugh and rubbed my head with the back of his own. "That about says it all, I guess."
I heard another laugh from the living room. Maxwell was on the sofa with Maverick's father, watching television, while in the kitchen the dishwasher rumbled, and a load of laundry went round in the dryer. Maxwell was sitting with his legs curled up on the seat cushion, his body turned toward his master, his left arm pinned behind him against the back cushion, his right hand idly rubbing Paul's chest, his head on Paul's shoulder as they both watched the screen. Occasionally one of them would point at some event on the screen and they would share a laugh. Even now, each time Paul spoke to Maxwell, the slave responded with "Yes, sir," along with any other sign of respect that seemed called for.
I had seen a variety of master/slave relationships, but I hadn't seen one exactly like this before.
I suddenly noticed the single non-utilitarian decoration in Maverick's training room, a framed color photograph on the back wall. I walked over to it; it showed a young jackal and small cub, the older jackal seated in an overstuffed chair, the cub curled up in his lap, staring at the pages of the book he was holding. The older jackal was beautiful with reddish brown headfur. He was smiling as he read from the book. The child was light blonde, adorable, completely enthralled, wide-eyed.
Maverick had come up behind me. I asked quietly, "Is this Kelly with your dad?" But I frowned as I said it. The jackal looked way too young. When Kelly was this age, his dad would have been in his thirties.
I could hear the smile in Maverick's voice. "That's not Kelly, doofus, it's me. And it's not my dad either. Take another guess."
I paused, puzzled, then suddenly gasped. "It's your Uncle Seymour??"
Maverick, his voice suddenly husky, said, "Yeah. This is the only picture, as far as I know, of him and me together. My mom took it. She thought it looked really cute. I was about... four years old, I think. Seymour was still in high school, and he lived really close. He'd come over after school, several times a week, and have dinner here, and after dinner, before I'd go to bed, he'd read to me. It was really hard for me when he went off to the Academy, and I didn't see him for... probably a couple of years, I guess. Eventually he started being able to come by again, and he was here a few times, up until his hanging. But my life went on without him, I started school, I got interested in other stuff. It's funny, I never had much of a feeling for what the Hanging Academy was, or what he was doing when he was there. I just knew nothing about it. Until that day, that day. The day they hanged him. And everything changed. Everything came in focus. I knew what my life was going to be all about."
I turned to look at Maverick, and saw the passion flame in his eyes to a degree I'd hardly seen before. "Wynn, I want that so badly for Kelly! I'm never going to say to him, Kelly, I want you to think about being a Hanging Boy. You can't make somebody decide to do that. It's something you discover inside yourself, not from somebody telling you to do it.
"I want him to be what he wants to be, I want him to do what makes him happy. But if it's anything other than hanging, I get worried that he'll never know the... completion, the pure bouyancy and joy I feel when I'm up in the air. I know you feel it too, you know exactly what I'm talking about." I nodded, and Maverick went on, "Nobody else in the world but a Hanging Boy knows that feeling. Seymour knew the feeling, and he brought the feeling out of me, he let me find it inside myself. I want, so much, to be able to do that for Kelly."
I wrapped my arms around Maverick, and stood silent awhile, breathing in the atmosphere of this special room. Finally I said, "I wish Kelly had any idea how much you love him."
In a voice even more choked than before, Maverick said, "I can't tell him that either."
The bed, besides being narrow, was barely long enough. Maverick could just manage to stretch out full length, with his ankles at the very foot. I rested atop him, the sweat from our lovemaking gluing our bodies together. My legs were spread apart, my knees resting on the surface of the bed outside Maverick's, my thigh resting on his now flaccid penis, my head resting just below his chin, cradled on his upper chest. I murmured, "I love sleeping like this. We should do it this way more often."
"Mmm-hm." Maverick sounded far away.
I reached up and stroked Maverick's hair gently, then closed my eyes, feeling utterly content.
After about fifteen minutes, Maverick whispered, "Wynn, you asleep?"
"Not yet," I whispered back.
Maverick was silent for a moment, then said, "I'm not going to be able to get to sleep."
I thought back to my own bouts of sleeplessness. "Does your dad keep any snacks in the house? Cookies, whatever?"
"He kind of likes brownies. There might be some."
I got up, pulling Maverick upward after me. "Come on." We threw on shirts and shorts without underwear, and walked as quietly as we could to the kitchen.
Maverick grunted and nodded when I found a foil-wrapped pan of brownies in the refrigerator. Obviously home cooked, not store-bought. Another Maxwell contribution, no doubt.
Maverick sat at the table used earlier for the card game, staring into space and nibbling at a brownie.
I jumped slightly at the sound of another bedroom door opening. It's okay, I reminded myself. We've got a perfect right to be here.
Moments later, Maxwell appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. He was wearing nothing but his silver chain collar. Two steps into the room, he saw us, stopped with a sudden gasp, and then smiled.
I expected the boy to try to cover himself, but he made no such move. The only thing I read in him was, he was startled by entering a room he'd believed unoccupied and discovering it wasn't. There was no hint of embarrassment that Maverick, whom he barely knew, had seen him coming naked out of Mr. Sadler's bedroom. Maxwell clearly assumed that Maverick would immediately understand that Maxwell's bedroom duties were simply part of his job as Paul Sadler's slave.
"Hi, Mr. Maverick, Mr. Wynn. Can I help you find anything, Mr. Maverick? I know you haven't lived here for awhile."
Maverick, taking another bite, said, "No, we're good." He shoved the pan slightly forward. "Brownie?"
Maxwell shook his head. "No, thank you. Mr. Sadler was having some trouble sleeping. Sometimes a cup of hot chocolate helps." He walked across the kitchen, opened a cupboard for a mug, filled it with water, tore open a packet of instant chocolate and poured it into the mug, stirred it with a spoon, opened the microwave and deposited the mug, closed the door and pressed the buttons to start it — all of this seeming to be a single, smooth motion resulting from frequent practice.
I reflected on the notorious difficulty of finding really perfect slaves, and Mr. Sadler's luck in having found one. I'd been impressed all day with Maxwell's cheerfulness, with his competence, his amazing bonding with Kelly, who was at such a difficult age... and now with his body, not as trim as a Hanging Boy's but with a flat belly, strong chest, perfectly toned legs, and ideally rounded butt.
Maverick started, "Maxwell..." and stopped.
The boy turned. "Yes, Mr. Maverick?"
Maverick, his brows knitted, chin resting on his left hand as he held the brownie in his right, asked, "Does Kelly have... anything he's really especially interested in? I mean, what he wants to be, when he's grown?"
Maxwell, came over to the table, leaving the microwave to take care of itself. He tore off a paper towel from a dispenser mounted just above the table, spread it on the seat nearest him, and sat. "Well, you know, he's twelve. He gets interested in things, but it's something different every week."
"Has he ever... talked about hanging? I mean, the Academy?"
Maxwell thought for a moment, and shook his head. "Not that I can remember. I mean, of course he's mentioned you being there, Mr. Maverick. But not for himself, no."
An unrelated insight suddenly struck me. The way Maxwell seemed so comfortable right now with his nudity, the way he'd reached for a conveniently-placed paper towel without even looking and swept it onto the seat in one practiced move, at the table where he presumably took all his meals... he rarely wears clothes! He's only been dressed all day for our benefit! Obviously he was usually nude, as he was now, not just at night in his master's bedroom, but during the day when Kelly was in school, or any other time Kelly was out of the house — which seemed, based on the available evidence, to be most of the time. I choked back a giggle of delight — Maxwell really was the perfect slave for a single, middle-aged, work-at-home male. The image of Maxwell and Maverick's father watching TV earlier, Maxwell so intimately snuggled up against him, came back to me, and I knew it would have looked the same had Maverick and I not been in the house — except Maxwell's clothes would have been absent.
The microwave beeped. Maverick, sighing, said, "I guess you need to get that."
Maxwell smiled. "Do you need to know anything else, Mr. Maverick? Mr. Sadler said I was to do anything you needed, including answer questions."
Maverick shook his head glumly. "Thank you, Maxwell."
Maxwell stood up, and did the little bow again for both of us— especially adorable when he was naked — and retrieved the mug of chocolate from the microwave. Reaching up to open an overhead cupboard, he pulled down a bottle of mint liqueur and poured a few teaspoons worth into the mug, put the bottle away, and took the mug with him out of the room, his buttocks seeming to twinkle in the light from overhead.
I smiled. "He's very good."
Maverick shrugged, and then laughed. "I guess."
He was silent a few minutes, continuing to nibble away at the brownie. At last he sighed. "Wynn, I can't leave here without knowing Kelly is coming to my hanging."
I reached out and closed my hand over Maverick's. "I know. Tomorrow."
On the way back to the bedroom with Maverick, I could just hear, through the closed master bedroom door, a rhythmic creaking of bedsprings and a high pitched "Ahh... ahhh... ahhh!..." from Maxwell. Probably getting both pleasures, as I loved to do.
The Next Day
Maxwell was puttering around the kitchen, dressed today in a short-sleeved V-neck sweater along with his jeans and sneakers, when Kelly came breezing in, looking eager. "Hi, Dad. You said something on the phone about going to lunch? Where you taking us?"
"Oh!" His father looked uncomfortable. "I didn't mean going out. Maxwell is making sandwiches we can eat here."
Kelly gave him a surprised look. "I thought... Couldn't we still go somewhere, though?"
Maverick cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. My fault. We can't leave the house unless an Academy limo picks us up. And then the driver would have to stay with us while we were out."
Kelly gave a theatrical sigh and entered the kitchen. "What kind of sandwiches, Maxwell? Oh!! Are there still some green olive slices? I love those!"
Maxwell laughed. "I know, Mr. Kelly. I could put some on yours."
"Yay!" Kelly clapped his hands briefly. He went to his room, returning when Maxwell called out that the sandwiches were ready.
We sat at the dining room table, and Maxwell came out to distribute sandwiches and drinks from a tray, Maverick started uncertainly, "Kelly...?"
Kelly, chewing, looked at him wordlessly, expectantly.
"I was talking yesterday about my hanging..."
"Yeah. Hope that goes well for you."
"I really do want you to be there."
Kelly took a drink from his soda can. "Why?"
Maverick leaned forward. "Because that's really important to me. You're really important to me. And this is something I want to share with the people who are important to me."
Kelly blinked. I found myself nodding. Better, Maverick. Much better.
Maverick pressed on. "Okay?"
Kelly rolled his eyes. "Fine, fine. I'll be there."
Under the table, I found Maverick's hand and gave it a squeeze. And made a mental note. I am going to double check, when the time comes. This fish is not completely hooked yet.